XV: AMBITION
SSV Normandy
Under the light of the world, her world, she was stretched out. Bare. A stale chill wafting from the atmo scrubbers, yet the warmth within her refused to retreat.
Tali was gasping as she lay naked on Shepard's bed, her suit scattered all over his floor, the metal insets tenderly gleaming in the soft light, closer to the door. A galaxy of light played in the empty embrace of her visor, which teetered upon the top step of the small staircase. Her hands, splayed out, gripped the crumpled sheets underneath her. Her belly shone with a fine shimmer of sweat, the muscles of her abdomen taut and fit like a dancer's.
Something rolled within her and she groaned, clenched her eyes shut, and made a grimace, but it was not out of pain. A fiery burn that she welcomed and stoked, wanting it to consume her whole, flesh and bone alike.
Opening her eyes again, she stared through the aperture of the cabin upon the ceiling, an unobstructed view of Rannoch presented with startling clarity. Above her—or was it technically below her? Even she could get confused by dimensionality in space, sometimes. But she could not stop staring, even with what was going on in this very room. She wanted to absorb all of the world that was now hers, every miniscule detail, and burn it into her memory so that she would never forget the love and loss it took to win it. The foaming paintbrush swoops of clouds. Dark veins of desert canyons. A jewel-like blue warp of the ocean. The scatter-glow of smoldering frigates burning up in the atmosphere, having been riddled with shipfire hours, if not days, ago.
Hers. All hers.
And here…
She raised her head from the stack of pillows that had been supporting her. Watched where her lover lay on the bed, his head between her legs, her inner thighs over his cheeks, as if she could suffocate him at any moment. His palms were under her hips, just above her buttocks, as if he was offering her up in supplication. She felt his lips press tightly against her, his tongue making a gentle pattern as he licked her. He knew where to caress. Where to kiss. Where to touch. It was as if the marker for her pleasure was a brightly labelled cross on a map, for that was how easy it was for Shepard to make her come this way.
He was good. Keelah, he was good.
The two of them had the entire deck to themselves, so Tali was free to moan and cry out her passion to her heart's content. She squirmed and writhed, as if trying to break free of Shepard's grip, but that was the last thing she wanted right now. Every so often, she would lift up her head and find his eyes staring right back at her, his face below his mouth obstructed by her pelvis. The thought of what he was doing to her seemed so primal… so lustful and erotic… that she would gasp out and throw her head back upon the pillows, as though as she was unable to comprehend the reality that arranged itself before her, with one of many climaxes approaching for the night.
Perhaps no quarian in the whole of history had been so physically loved before. For the umpteenth time, Tali wondered how she had been the one to have gotten so lucky. That there had been someone out there, out beyond the vast emptiness of space, mere collections of atoms that orbited far-away stars in some unseen corner of the galaxy, that would be able to bring her such happiness. Such completion.
And for that person to be this man, of all people. Surely the universe had taken pity on her.
And now here he lay, selflessly prostrating himself before her in yet another of the countless examples of attending to her own enjoyment rather than his own. For it seemed that Shepard was going down on her with a religious fervor, with her as the object of his desire, the symbol of everything he held dear and wished to cling onto.
Truthfully, she had assumed that something like this would have only occurred in her dirtiest fantasies. For quarians, if the correct preparations were not taking, the act of making love could risk the lives of both participants. Due to that biological quirk, experimentation and variation with each sexual encounter did not tend to differ all that much. The traditional positions were implied to be the norm—anything oral was inferred to exponentially increase the risk of contamination, so acting in such a manner was limited. Or so Tali had figured.
She had not been blind to the hedonistic tendencies of the other races, though. As a young girl, she had hacked into some illicit extranet sites on the flotilla and, upon navigating through a series of innocuous searches, had been completely shocked at the sort of debauchery on display. The things that some of the species could get up to! It almost seemed like performative acrobatics, or bizarre showcasing, but Tali had never fully quashed the pang of jealousy she felt at others just having the option of being so free. Free to do anything with their bodies as she wished. In hindsight, she envied them all. Her suit would be her anchor for the rest of her life, a constant reminder that she should at least be grateful to be alive, considering all of the hardships her people had overcome to get to this very point.
Yet, here Shepard was, trying to make up for those lost moments. To make memories better than what her own mind could conjure as substitutes.
Her climax was just as violent as it was sudden. Electricity flaring blue in the corner of her mind. Tali arched her back, mouth open in a rigid scream, yet voiceless, strings of spittle connecting the roof of her mouth to the bottom. Shepard kept at it between her legs, working up an ardor, fighting to bring her all the way home.
By the time she had floated back down, her brow was soaked with sweat. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, a tremble in her breathing, her bare chest shining.
Hours seemed to pass until one of them moved. Shepard crawled up to her on the bed, just as naked as she was. Grinning wildly, Tali threw her arms around the man and kissed him, pressing her skin against his while she let her hands roam. They quickly became tangled in the other, their arms and legs creating a Gordian Knot of sensual hunger as they rolled on their sides, mouths open, basking in the heat of the other. Skin against skin, pale gray against golden tan.
Soon, they were just laying there, hands gently petting the other, unable to keep the smiles from their faces. Tali was unable to stop her fingers from tracing Shepard's features, wanting to feel every inch of the man that she could.
She kissed his nose, a quick peck. "Thank you," she whispered, eyes shining wetly.
Shepard's grin broadened. "For making you come?"
"Among many things," she said after rolling her eyes. She kissed his nose again. "Many things."
The man basked in the attention that the quarian was giving him, but his brow furled ever so slightly. "How'd I do?" he asked, making a point of levelling his gaze down to their lower bodies for a brief moment. "I should've asked if you were liking what I was doing, but—"
This man. Was he being dense on purpose? Surely, he heard the noises that she had been making—they were not sounds of someone not enjoying themselves.
Gently, she took his head into her hands. "John, you don't need to overthink it." She pressed her lips into his, momentarily sliding her tongue into his mouth. "It was better than I could have imagined. You did wonderfully."
They continued to kiss, lying on their sides, just holding each other close. Tali just felt so warm pressed up against Shepard, an intimate heat. His skin smelled like lavender from the shower. There was mint on his breath. Toothpaste. So intoxicating.
They remained the way they were until Tali's own urges could no longer be forestalled. Her greedy hands slowly began to slide down Shepard's chest, occasionally tickling him as she went, if only to hear the vaguest whispers of that deep laugh of his. Shepard didn't move, not until she had found her way down past his abdomen, to where his own excitement registered. And when she took him in her hand, he gave a thin shiver, like someone had dumped ice water down his back. He was warm and quivered with need. A reaction driven by her touch and her presence—she knew that she was the only one who could unearth that vulnerable nature and find him wonderfully pliant with her own caress.
"You're feeling pretty bold," Shepard noted around shallow breaths, a smirk flashing across his face.
"I had a lot of time to imagine this moment," a sweet smile grew upon her.
Slowly, tenderly, she began to move her hand back and forth after wetting her palm. The response in his body was immediate—he began to tense and his hips started a thin countermotion to her hand. She did not need to be told what to do, for it was all instinctual to her. Shepard held onto Tali as she made a soft piston with her arm, grunting into her neck and his fingers digging into her back.
The ferocity that Shepard was clinging to her caused an ache to stir between her legs again. She realized that he had been keeping his emotions just as pent-up as she had been. Only he had been able to hide it better. Until now. When he was literally at the mercy of her bare hands.
All of this just served to hammer it clearly to her that she was someone who was deeply, truly, wanted.
It was not fair that this was a man who gave so much and received so little in return. She needed to even that equation that tonight, or at least balance it out a little.
As she moved her arm, she delicately altered the pressure of her grip with every other stroke. This had the effect of producing a hiss from Shepard, who buried his head between Tali's breasts. Encouraged, she sped up her tempo a bit, feeling her own body grow wetter while she attended to her lover. With her free arm, she cradled his head against her, her cheek resting upon the top of his shorn skull, feeling his powerful breaths tickle her chest, the muscles of his body trembling.
"John…" she whispered, still continuing to stroke him.
He mumbled against her breast. A wordless interrogative.
"You came to Rannoch just for me, didn't you?"
He met her eyes, found just acceptance lodged within that silver flame behind those wide lenses. For there was nothing to forgive. Yet Shepard could not say if, perhaps for the first time, something other than the greater good had motivated him to make such an important choice. Almost as if he was afraid of being punished for such selfishness.
She just kissed his forehead. Deep and loving. A signal that she was going to start moving downward, which she did. This time, she left a trail of kisses upon his body as she slid further and further down, until she was eye-level with the handiwork that her hand had created while they had been laying on the bed together.
Shepard rolled onto his back, the receiver this time. Tali smiled, tongue flicking off her teeth as she took a hold of the man's erection with a warm hand once more. Shepard gave a heavy wince, his knuckles flaring white as he balled his hands into fists, but it was an amorous pang that gripped him.
"Maybe we should—" he started to say.
"John," Tali interrupted him.
"Yes?"
"Please, shut up."
Without giving him any more time to protest, she raised her body up, now on her knees, and took Shepard's erection into her mouth.
The sudden gasp she heard from the human filled her brain with endorphins. It appeared that he had not been expecting this from her. Her whole body was buzzing as she bobbed her head up and down, fully aware of the object that was past her lips. She went slowly, she was new at this, but tried to make it that her lips and tongue created just as excruciatingly intense of a sensation as he had done unto her earlier this night. What to do just came naturally to her and she suddenly understood why Shepard had done so well when he had been in her position earlier.
She heard him curse under his breath. Something that rarely happened around her. Her forehead felt like a wildfire was brimming just behind her fragile boneplate. There was no other way to describe it: this was hot. Making this man squirm and tremble from her own ministrations—why had no one ever told her what a high this could bring?
While her mouth attended to Shepard, Tali was free to bring one of her hands down. Her fingers encircled his scrotum and she swore she heard Shepard murmur, "Christ, that's not fair…" but dismissed it as a trick of her hearing, as a dull and throbbing drumming sound, a dark rumble, had started to crescendo in her ears. She gently drew her fingers across the bristled sac, squeezing with not even an ounce of pressure, and cradled the additional part of his manhood with an extreme and loving care.
Now Shepard was making a series of rising noises, his face contorted in a wonderful agony of its own. Tali grinned around Shepard's erection and doubled her efforts, not caring about the sounds she was making from her duties or from the perceived demeaning posture she had positioned her own body in.
She loved this man with a power that eclipsed her own imagination. This was a fulfillment of every desire she could conceptualize. They were beings that could not help but give, give, give. Give to a cause greater than themselves. To an ideal that might never have come to fruition. They were in service to concepts, untranslatable codes that governed their every move.
They deserved this. They deserved even a singular night for their own joy. It was so much that Tali nearly felt guilty for being so happy, but thoroughly quashed that notion down.
The simple truth could not be denied. She was only ever at her happiest when she was with him.
What else could matter more?
Tali continued to attend to her lover, her concentration deeply focused on creating a sense of rising wonder in the human, when the spell was broken when Shepard touched her cheek. He had sat up, the muscles around his chest taut with exertion, the scars there stark white, new flesh not yet faded into the old.
In his eyes she found the codex to the cipher that had always been between them. Their own private cryptography and the formula to decode it. But something had changed in that time. A new part of the code, written by neither of them, had revealed itself. A mutual addition to the esoteric language that had been implicitly established between them.
They knew what it meant, even if they did not comprehend how it got there.
They were grinning wildly as Shepard pulled her to him, their mouths upon the other once more. Sparing little time, he rolled and she was on her back, head upon the pillows as she was in the beginning. She spread her legs eagerly, wanting his flesh. His skin. To touch his soul to hers.
Inside her.
And, with a gentle push of his hips, he obliged her.
Marseille, Earth
Chateau d'If
The cries of rock gulls razed against the wind, flocks of them floating high, paper-white against the cloudless sky. It was noon and the shadows from the airborne life were so distant from the ground that they were obliterated before they could make definite shapes upon the broken and graveled island.
Tali leaned against an ancient wall, which had been smoothed from elements and the careless caresses of tourists over time. Some fifteen meters below, the waves of the Mediterranean lapped against cracked limestone boulders. Off in the distance, less than a mile away, the city of Marseille shimmered through a haze of sea vapors, the irregular skyline interrupted by low and rocky mountains, along with the occasional bald hill. The sound of watercraft horns drowned out the birdcalls and the steel twinkling of escaping starships from the port roughly to the north seared cometary lines through the day.
The day was young and there were not many people around. The quarian stood out upon the sunbaked rock courtyard, the heat radiating through her suit.
Slowly, in no rush, Tali explored the island, which had been turned into a fortress in the 16th century (locally speaking) before becoming a prison until finally being demilitarized nearly three centuries after its construction. The chateau took up the entirety of the island, which was quite a small one; less than a twentieth of a square kilometer in size.
She walked through the courtyard, which was carpeted with grass and shrubs, with the only paths being dirt trails that had been created from hundreds of thousands of tourists trodding upon common routes. No attempts had been made to restore the island or otherwise spruce it up to a state that was easily maintainable. The buildings on the island were sparse, with a lighthouse taking up the most easterly position, a restaurant and a barracks at the middle, and the fortress itself, which was a square building made out of stone, three stories high, flanked by three towers of the same material.
This place had been on her radar for a while, mostly because of a book she had read while on the Normandy. The book had been one of Shepard's, actually. She had found it during one of the numerous nights in his cabin while she had been shuffling through his media library almost absentmindedly, mainly because she wanted to know what he liked to watch or read in his spare time.
The book she had found was only one of a scant few fiction items in Shepard's library. She had asked him if she could make a copy that she could read. He had obliged her wholeheartedly, although she had to promise him that she would be willing to discuss the book upon her completion. The homework had been assigned and she was thus compelled to finish it.
The book was The Count of Monte Cristo and Tali had been absorbed in the story from the first few chapters alone. It followed the story of a man in France who had been falsely accused of treason by his enemies and sentenced to life in prison. While jailed, he became acquainted with a fellow prisoner, a priest, who helped educate and train the man with all of the knowledge that he knew. The priest had been harboring a secret from his captors: the location of a hidden fortune on an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. But the priest, coming to trust the man like a son, divulged the existence and location of the treasure to the man before he died of illness. Driven to retrieve this unfound fortune and make a better life for himself, the man escaped from the prison and, through a series of trials and tribulations, made it to the island, found the money, and bought himself a new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo, and he returned to his hometown of Marseille to take revenge on those that had wronged him.
While reading, she had to get acquainted with the historical setting of the book, which got a bit dense for her on multiple occasions, but she was able to skim enough notes to get a feel for the political climate at the time. It was not hard to see why Shepard had this particular book in his library—no doubt he saw himself as the protagonist, though with less of a vindictive streak, for Shepard was not driven by revenge, but by his own hopes. The isolation and imprisonment of the protagonist in the book no doubt caused him to feel a kinship with the fictional being, as both of them had undergone circumstances in which they had to restart their lives after being removed from all of society for so long.
The Chateau d'If had been the prison depicted in the book, and now the ground crunched underneath Tali's feet as she approached the fortress. Shepard might not have gotten a chance to visit this place yet, despite him being human and all. Tali navigated the cold corridors and thin staircases, stopping for a moment to look into one of the cells named after the protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo, even though no comparable person had ever lived or occupied a cell under such a name.
The aging escarpments cracked and drifted dust upon the floor and steps of the fortress. What little light the towers let in was fueled only by the pinpricked embrasures that punctuated the sides of the silos. The façade on the outside was crumbling and prone to disrepair, as was everything else upon the island. It was a prison, after all, and perhaps prisons were not meant to be gussied up to fuel some tourist fantasy.
She stood at one of the thin windows for a while, watching the morning grow hotter, thinking of moments long passed by where she thought she would not have to keep any of this for herself.
Tali walked back outside, down the stone trail that bisected a field of knotted limestone where stalks of brown grass emerged from the fissures in the rock. She made her way to the ferry pier and sat on a nearby bench in the shade of the fortress walls, watching the slow undulations of the waves nearby. The nearest ship would come their way in around fifteen minutes. Plenty of time to get her thoughts in order.
The town of Marseille must have seemed like a gleaming mirage to the man in the novel whenever he got glimpses of it through the tiny windows as he was led from his cell to be tortured once a week. The location of his downfall and his ultimate ascendance.
Tali just stared at it from across the water, wondering how she would have adjusted were she the prisoner on this island. Wondering if she could have conjured the strength to keep herself sane and ultimately escape. Perhaps revenge was an ideal worth stoking, but if the price was greater than what she could ultimately bear, then would the worth of her vengeance be fulfilled?
There was always a point in time, a crux that hinged upon her treading down one pathway or another where one offered salvation and the other destruction, but as these things tended to go, she could never be aware of that point until it was already too late.
She was roaming the streets of the city later that night, looking for a place to eat. It was well after dark—she had taken a nap upon returning from the Chateau d'If. She had looked through her messages on her omni-tool, finding that she had received alerts from Garrus, Liara, and Kasumi. She read through them all, but didn't respond to any of them. They were all variations on their support and care being offered as well as the usual sort of courtesies of asking what she was currently up to. She did not feel like talking right now, let alone trying to make up answers to assuage the concern of her friends.
The pangs of hunger had not yet arrived, despite the fact that more than half the day had passed since she last ate. The quarian simply scanned the establishments that she roamed past, trying to see if any of them sold food that was edible to her.
She was walking on a street adjacent to the Rue de la République, when from out of the shadows of a closed bank facade, a lanky humanoid stepped out, almost blocking her way.
"Admiral Tali'Zorah," the person spoke with such conviction that Tali jumped. So much for her disguise. Thankfully, there had been no one else within earshot to have heard the statement, let alone her poorly concealed reaction.
Her wits recovered enough for her to comprehend that the accent that the person had spoken to in was quarian. Her eyes squinted past the glare from the yellowed streetlamps and found that she was indeed standing face-to-face with someone from her own race. Her natural instinct told her that this was a lackey sent by Raan, for who else could have known about her here, but she belayed her judgment for now.
He was taller by about half a head. His gray sehni was baggy around his helmet, unlike the thinner strips of fabric that typically wrenched themselves taut near the curvature at the covering. The glass of his visor was the same hue as the glow from the lamps outside, his eyes distant artifacts through the yellowed fog. Tali also noted that this quarian's helmet had been customized—it had multiple lenses situated around the visor in irregular positions that simmered a deep bloodred, giving him an insectoid appearance. The grip of a strange-looking pistol at the quarian's hip drew her attention and she bit her lip in concern.
"My name is Qual'Lhmarl," the quarian dipped his head.
"How'd you find me?" Tali snapped back, her eyes becoming razor shards of suspicion.
Qual chuckled politely and glanced off to the side for a brief moment. "It's hard for us to be subtle anywhere that's not the fleet or Rannoch. Not many quarians on this world unless they have a good reason to stick around."
"That didn't answer my question."
Nodding, Qual said, "No, it didn't." He waited a beat and then flicked his eyes back over to her. "I know of a place nearby. Dextro. You and I need to talk."
Tali was aware of the presence of her pistol and shotgun exerting their gravity upon her back and hip, respectfully. Her fingers edged toward the butt of her sidearm, nearly brushing it. "What about?"
"Business, unfortunately. Always business. But as it's my intrusion, I'm paying. Why don't you come with?"
Before waiting for an answer, the slender quarian started to slink away, leaving Tali staring at his back, blinking. She almost acted on the inclination to turn in the opposite direction—warring chemicals in her brain—but something stayed that notion. The fear of being offensive coming out to play.
She followed.
They didn't end up walking far. A small café blocks from one of the large cathedrals in the city—it was half full of night owls, who were either hunching over their coffees or deep in conversation with their dates. Qual asked for a corner booth, but Tali insisted on a table in the middle of the establishment, to which Qual did not protest. They sat and ordered drinks. Non-alcoholic. Just staring at the other, cold-steel intensity. Surrounded by the normalcy of a town unconcerned with the two quarians that it hosted.
It was only after they had sat down did Tali realize that Qual was more heavily armored than she had suspected. A carapace-like web of encrusted armor heaved and manipulated upon his abdomen, and his forearms shimmered with heavy clasps of metal surrounding them. None of it was standard-issue—something like that would have cost a fortune. No way would this have been allocated to any regular footsoldier.
Tali kept eying the man, a knot of suspicion refusing to unclench from her throat. "So who do you have the honor of representing? It's obvious the fleet didn't send you."
"What would make it obvious?" Qual asked.
"They wouldn't have brought me to a restaurant."
Qual accepted that with a nod as he leaned forward, bringing his hands together in front of him. "Right, because where would they scrape together the credits for even a casual meal? I just so happen to be outside of the purview of the admirals. My dealings lie in the private sector."
A welter of cold, just behind her heart. Murmuring veins of ice-magma simmering and broiling in her veins.
"SolBanc?"
Qual nodded.
Gripped by adversarial intensity, Tali nearly tore the corners from the table she was sitting at, too stunned to even speak, not even noticing as the waiter came by with their drinks and set them in front of her. She tried to get up to leave, but Qual raised a hand.
"Please, Tali'Zorah. If you call attention to this, there will not be another opportunity to solve this amicably. I promise you, for your own safety, you should sit down."
For your own safety. Tali did not miss the threat. Had she been set up, like a fool? Her eyes scanned the restaurant, examining every corner or hidden alcove where someone could be hiding. Curses rang throughout her head and her breath was savage through her vocabulator.
"You're not here to offer me everything I want," Tali stated. "If you were, you would have opened with that by now."
"Well," Qual shrugged, "I can say that option is still on the table, to borrow a human phrase."
"Still on the table?"
"Yes."
Tali laughed, but just once. Dry. "Why do I get the feeling there's a catch?"
Qual now leaned back and the light fell across the chest of his suit. Tali could see the ribbed armor that wrapped around his torso like a cage. Bulletproof. She looked closer and found that the cowl he wore was a flat gray, like a predawn, made out of a thick and heavy material, probably resistant against knives.
"You were in Nice a few nights ago." Not a question.
He knows. Memories of her own screaming while her fists flailed through the air, bludgeoning those hateful humans until their facial features gradually disfigured, blood geysering in the air. Tali kept mum, willing every muscle strand to remain petrified, curiously aware of her own enraged expression as she stared across at the man.
"Before that, you created quite a stir on all social media sites when you leaked confidential medical information to a third party regarding the costs of Commander Shepard's care."
She almost shook her head in derision. If this Qual was trying to guilt her for her supposedly hasty action in openly displaying the evidence of corporate greed against Shepard, it would take a silver tongue far beyond even Shepard's ability to try and convince her otherwise.
Qual seemed to lose interest and glanced off to the side, almost as if Tali was not worthy of his attention, despite her reputation. "We'll get back to that second part in a bit. Right now, my primary concern has to do with what you had gotten up to in Nice."
"And what do you think I got up to?" Tali hissed.
She didn't need to see Qual's face to know that he was now smiling. "It's not particularly difficult, Tali'Zorah. As much as it would amuse me to try and wrench a straight answer out of you, which you don't seem to be too keen on allowing, I already know that you tore apart an unregistered brothel in the middle of the city and sent nine people to the hospital. One died, as a matter of fact, but that was because he suffered a heart attack on the ambulance ride over. Preexisting condition, from what I read."
"I'm only sorry I wasn't able to hurt more of them," Tali spat, abandoning her initial plan to keep quiet since lying was not going to solve much purpose. She felt strangely like glass, empty and unconcerned at what the other quarian had just rattled off.
"Therein lies the issue," Qual said. "And part of the reason why I'm here. It's not because of what you did to an admittedly disreputable business. It's what you did to someone inside that business."
Tali was now keenly aware that the restaurant seemed to becoming more and more devoid of customers. It was a natural flow, though. Just the waning tide of patrons for the night. But it also served to deepen the hollow that seemed to form around Tali like an enclave.
When Tali did not respond, Qual continued. "One of the men you sent to the hospital was someone not necessarily important, but related to someone who was. François Haas-Mase. Heard the name?"
Tali did not. She shook her head.
"To tell you the truth, the man's an idiot," Qual admitted. He took a quick pull of his drink. Tali left hers alone, which beaded condensation in the humidity. "My opinion on the man has typically been given quite freely, as I am not the only one who shares such a sentiment. But there's a difference between holding someone in ill regard and doing… well, doing what you did. And unfortunately for you, François' father happens to be Hamilton Haas-Mase." Tali also did not react to that and Qual's tone roughened a little bit in irritation. "The man you just assaulted was the son of SolBanc's chief executive."
The engineer briefly unfocused for a second. Somehow, it made a strange sort of sense, if it was not already a cosmic coincidence. But that cavern in her heart refused to close, only clamoring for more stimulation. More carnage. To have the debt that had been incurred against her be repaid in its share of blood.
Wryly, she chuckled. Then she started laughing harder to the point where she had to duck her head. Qual watched her the whole time, one eyebrow raised in a mixture of annoyance and confusion.
When Tali raised her head, tears misted the corners of her eyes. "It's not like he will have any medical expenses to worry about, will it?"
"The benefits of nepotism," Qual leaned back, his knuckles clicking as he clenched his hands tightly.
"How badly did I hurt him?"
"There will be scarring that medi-gel won't be able to eradicate," Qual said.
The volcano in her chest opened up another vein. The corner of her mouth flicked upward for a moment. "Good."
Qual peered off to the side again and Tali tried to pinpoint where he was looking. Was he trying to catch a glance of someone past the window? Or was it merely a reflex reaction, a demonstration of his own perturbation at her constructed defiance. "He was a man who might have deserved what he got, but that's not the problem in play. There are certain people in this galaxy who cannot be hit, or rather, cannot be hit by anyone other than a scant numbered few. And you did not count among that few."
"Add it to my ever-increasing list of problems," came Tali's derisive drawl.
Qual was undeterred. "Men of Mr. Haas-Mase's stature aren't liable to let slights like this go so easily. He's not exactly the forgiving type. You brought his family into this."
"He did the same with mine," Tali shot back. "Don't forget that."
"Grudges go both ways, Tali'Zorah. I know that as well as anyone."
Tali looked at him, trying to find any trace of warmth in the man, but failing. "You think you know what I'm going through?"
"I don't need to. I'm not interested. Besides, there's been a development to part of this whole story. Something that might help provide some influence."
She wondered if she should just draw down now. Hold him at gunpoint so that she could have a safe window to retreat. But what if he called her bluff? What if he was packing reactive omni-armor? He could also be a quicker draw than her—she was out of practice for nearly a year. Too many what ifs ran through her mind, causing her to lock up with indecision.
Slowly, she inhaled. "Go on," she said."
"A police report was filed with the Nice authorities," Qual said. "Don't worry," he raised a hand when he noted Tali's chin start to lift, "I know you didn't do it. It was from the woman you left the building with. The one whom you rescued from François. Sound familiar? You went your separate ways on the street almost immediately after exiting. CCTV footage caught all that."
It was indeed familiar to Tali, but she was still not in a mood to freely offer Qual anything.
He took her silence as an admission. "She didn't file the report anonymously with the police. Not a smart move. She wasn't part of the life, apparently. Just a dumb tourist who took something that François slipped into her drink. It also came to light that François retroactively happened to make my life all the more difficult, you see. He told this girl who he was, probably a last-ditch effort to impress her by saying he was related to a wealthy financier, before he resorted to rape in order to satisfy his urges for the night. But now you understand just the kind of imbecile I have to deal with on a constant basis? Someone who brags about his heritage and his name while he's acting illegally? A pretty cut-and-dried admission, as it turns out. I almost didn't think I would be able to talk the girl out of dropping the charges, but… everyone has their weak points."
Inwardly, Tali gave a shiver. Just the way that this man said it. So casual. This was no ordinary person she was sitting across from, she realized. There was something dangerous about him.
"You talked her out of dropping the charges," she stated, voice rumbling lowly.
Qual twiddled his thumbs and he theatrically appraised the ceiling. "'Talked' is perhaps the wrong word for it. Actually, I went to the liberty of documenting my work. Let me show you."
Before Tali could say anything, Qual had opened his omni-tool and was now scrolling through it with a few practiced flicks of his wrist. He then found an image, blew it up to fullscreen size, and flipped his hand so that Tali could see.
If Tali had been asked to reconstruct a profile of the woman she had saved the other night from memory, she would have not been able to do so. However, when Qual showed her the image he had stored on his tool, her mind recalled fragments of detail that only now registered when confronted with the picture. However, the smashed, bloodied, and distorted mask that Qual showed her on the screen nearly became unrecognizable again. The swollen eyes, cracked lips, caved cheekbones, the bruises discoloring the flesh, and the red-flecked hair matted to the skull all seemed to be a part of a creature that was no longer human, even though she knew otherwise. All Tali registered was the cascading waves of pain trapped in that unfocused and lolling stare, from one hell to another.
Slowly, Tali looked up at Qual, now knowing his amenable tone was nothing but a front. She felt nothing but disgust for this man and the thought of his visor suddenly shattering in on itself brought her a perverse sense of satisfaction. It shocked her just how much she wanted to hurt Qual and that she knew she had the power to do so, if she wished.
But if Qual realized he was in any danger, he certainly did not seem to concern himself with it. "It could have been avoided, Tali'Zorah," he said with a chastising air. "All of this didn't need to happen if you had just… let it all go."
"You really don't know me," Tali seethed. "Do you?"
The other man looked like he was a polished synthetic, for he was sitting so still. "I know enough."
"Then you should already know that, when it comes to J—to Shepard, I won't let anything go."
A disinterested nod and Qual's eyes took on a mercury glaze. "Yes, as evidenced by that little stunt you pulled when you had pictures of his medical bills distributed across every corner of the extranet. If you were trying to solicit change on SolBanc's end, I can say with certainty that you did not endear yourself to anyone of importance."
Tali scowled. Who was this man to dictate what was right or wrong when it came to John?
"What else could I do?" she simply asked. "If I had the choice, I would do it all over again. You saw the pictures that was posted, that Shepard was being charged hundreds of thousands of credits each year just so the hospital staff could keep him alive. SolBanc knowingly put him in so much debt that, even if he wakes, he'll never get away from that debt in his natural lifetime. He will be paying for this for the rest of his days, just because he was trying to live."
The auditor seemed to be unscathed by Tali's plight, but there was no mistaking the cold absorption that he reflected upon her. "It's just business, Tali'Zorah. Business and the hope of making a decent quarterly statement."
A frown narrowed her face. She wondered if Qual could tell. She could not find anything of herself reflected in this person. Quarians were not typically so self-centered. They thought of their crew and their families before focusing on themselves. The collective was always stronger than the individual—that was the mantra that had been honed into her since birth. But this man seemed to spit all that out like he was insulted by the notion. "You're nothing but a capitalist thug. I can't even imagine what drove you to this. Who are you, really?"
"Qual'Lhmarl."
"No. Your name. Qual'Lhmarl vas…?"
The man's eyes lidded upward in a sickening joy. Perhaps he had been waiting for this question all this time. "Qual'Lhmarl vas Nedas."
vas Nedas. Crew of nowhere.
"You're an exile," Tali said, her back straightening. "You were cast out by the fleet."
The man's eyes seemed to be boring holes in her skull. "What can a lowly exile do, if not become a capitalist thug, as you said?"
Memories of her own trial, the four admirals loudly bickering amongst themselves, hardly hesitating to sling their wild accusations at her for her own perceived foolishness. Had Qual gone through the same ordeal?
Now she knew why he seemed to harbor no love for the fleet. "What did you do?"
"You mean, how did I get exiled?"
"Yes."
Qual gave a rasping laugh—an ugly sound—and traced a pattern on the table with a finger. "It depends on your point of view, or at least, what you want to believe. The admirals would say that I was cast out from the fleet because I knowingly endangered it from my actions. From their ruling, I had sold geth technology to black-market merchants with the aim to carve out a profit for myself."
Tali noted the doublespeak. "And from your point of view?"
"The ruling was not without merit," Qual admitted. "I did sell geth technology, but only inert specimens. Pieces of armor. Stray synthetic muscle strands. Never anything with a central processing unit or the capability to act from a rogue intelligence. They were all items that were quadruple-checked by the fleet and posed no danger to anyone." He leaned over, almost conspiratorial. His vocabulator hissed, like smoke was pouring out from it. "I was quite intrigued to learn of your own run-in with the Conclave, Admiral. We nearly shared a similar fate, you and I. Convenient scapegoats meant to propel policies beyond our control."
She nearly recoiled back. The circumstances were similar, yes, but the outcome had been vastly different. And, unlike Qual, she had been innocent of her "crime," except that she had trusted her father to do the right thing for her and her people.
"At least I never tried to make a profit from my situation," she retorted. She now sat sideways in her chair, a hand resting on the table. Trying to find meaning in his senseless eyes. "Why did you feel you needed the credits?"
Qual made a noise, as if the question was so blindingly simple. "Perhaps I was tired of being poor. Perhaps I was tired of being a victim of subsistence. Perhaps I saw myself eventually having a better life elsewhere—and to do that, I needed an income. I needed to find a way out."
"So it all came down to greed?"
"That's the way it happens to be, Tali'Zorah. It was how I bounced from one technomancer gang to the next, jumping ship whenever I found an opportunity to earn more credits than the rate I was currently making. With each new world, each new group, I sold them all out to cover my tracks, earned bounties along the way from my informant activities in the form of lump sums or jobs. It was how I eventually found my way to SolBanc. It was how I became indispensable to an institution that had a shred of legitimacy."
"Less than a shred," Tali growled.
Qual raised his hands an inch off the table in a shrug. "I'm not terribly picky."
"But this isn't about you," Tali softly pounded on the table as she leaned forward, her face tightening. "Nor is this about me. This is about one man who is unable to defend himself. This is about trying to save him from what happens when he wakes up."
Waggling a finger, Qual made a tsking noise. "On the contrary, this has more to do with you than you figure. In a way, you remind me of him. Your father, I mean. I used to work for your father, actually. I served on the same ship he crewed a long while back."
"A lot of people reported to my father," Tali snorted, starting to feel incensed that the conversation had turned back onto her without warning. "He was an admiral. It came with the position." But not mine.
"He was a hypocrite, more to the point."
Tali flared, but she did not retort. For all of his snide confidence, Qual was correct. Rael'Zorah had willfully skirted her people's laws to try to further his own ends of defeating the geth and taking Rannoch back in his own fashion. And his efforts had gotten nothing but his own crew killed, along with himself.
She took another cursory glance around the restaurant. Only a couple of other tables were occupied now. The bartender was wiping down the counter with the help of a cleaning drone. A waitress was slowly extinguishing the lights and the holograms in front of the façade. It was minutes until closing.
"Admiral Rael'Zorah," Qual spoke each syllable slowly, with finality. "He was the one who pushed for my exile in the first place. At my hearing, he spoke quite passionately about me placing the fleet in untold danger by disseminating geth parts to unaffiliated customers from port to port. And then to have him perish in a mistake on his lab ship years later from his own geth experiments, the ultimate irony. My sympathies for your loss, Tali'Zorah, but when I heard that he died because someone was lax enough on his ship to stupidly reactivate intact geth, I could not help but feel somewhat vindicated. He probably wasn't thinking of me when he was killed, but I wish he understood in the end that my crime, such that it was, ended up justifying the means for his own skewed viewpoint."
Sneering behind her visor, Tali had to fight to control her breathing. "I'll be he didn't even think about you at all after you left."
"That is probably the way of it," Qual spread his hands. "He wasn't an easy man to work for. The micromanaging sort. Couldn't help himself from hovering over everyone, from the software engineers, to the decon techs like myself." He took a breath. "Your mother was a decon tech too, you remember?"
After a pause, Tali nodded. Her mother and father had worked on the same ship together once Tali had gotten old enough to not need constant care, which was still rather young. Every evening, her mother would regale of her mundane stories from the cleaning labs where the decontamination techs worked. They deep-cleaned samples brought in from other worlds, copied and scanned geth drives to clear them of viruses, and investigated hostile microbes that might have hitchhiked from some of the samples that had come in from the field.
Qual gave a pensive blink. "Her and I worked in the same lab, actually. I was sorry to hear about her passing. It happened not too long after Rael had sentenced me. A terrible fate, to succumb to a stray bit of bacteria that had passed through the contaminant scanners. A woeful bit of misfortune—shame the decon protocols had not been fully functioning that day. Perhaps she would still be alive if it wasn't for someone's sloppy work."
Something in Qual's tone gave Tali pause. Something left unsaid. She clenched her jaw and ground her back teeth together.
"What are you getting at?"
But the auditor had leaned back in his chair, almost as if he presumed to be an old friend making himself comfortable, and proceeded to ignore her question. "I'm going to be rather frank with you from this point on, Tali'Zorah. I'll be providing you information on SolBanc that, in many perspectives, could be seen as insider knowledge. I'd ask you if you would swear yourself to keeping such information to yourself, but we both know that's a useless endeavor, right?"
Knee-jerk outrage boiled in Tali's gut. "My word holds more weight than yours, bosh'tet."
"We're just going to have to see about that, won't we? Anyway, the reason why your recent social media revelations have caused quite a stir among the SolBanc executives is because the bank is currently in the middle of a merger with one of the largest holding companies in the sector. Your little spat has put the bank in a rather bad light, one that the holding company could choose to take advantage of, or even kill the entire merger, should they choose. To be honest, they are in the process of taking advantage of this sorry business, but that doesn't mean there still aren't cards to play in this game of quasar."
Tali lifted her chin. Defiant and angry. "So SolBanc could end up folding. Good. You deserve it after what you've been doing. And you thought I'd give a damn about your company's future."
Qual's glare turned hard. "No. But the success of the merger decides the financial situation of my employer, as well as my own."
"Again, greed is the factor."
The man slowly brought his hands together. Tali wondered if he was trying to put on a reserved front before lashing at her. Her body still ached behind the suit, but she felt she could take this bastard in a straight-up fight.
He then reached behind him and Tali thought he was going for a weapon, which made her instinctively start to reach for her own pistol, but relaxed when the man brought out a small tablet. He placed the device on the table and slowly slid it towards her. It was a small, rectangular thing. A tile of glass surrounded by a polymer housing. The screen glowed with harsh bluelight.
Tali eyed the tablet before slowly looking up at Qual. "What's this? Another form?" She recalled her own horror as she had been passed a similar tablet in the hospital, the antiseptic smell flooding her olfactory filters, the unsympathetic gazes from the doctors who attempted to sign their liability away.
"A retraction."
"A what?"
Qual tapped the screen twice with a finger irritably. "This is a legal statement that has been drafted by SolBanc's lawyers. It's an official declaration that the copy of the commander's bill that you helped disseminate was, in fact, nothing more than a fabrication."
A terrifying mixture of rage, indignation, and just the tiniest amount of fear all mixed together within Tali. Her eyes dipped to the screen again and she saw the tiny scrawl of printed words on it. The barcode lines of paragraphs, extending far beyond the reach of the screen.
"You really are a—"
"I'm not finished," Qual held up a hand. "I was authorized to get you to sign this retraction by any means necessary. To that end, I made sure to have an incentive added. A reward, if you will, for your cooperation. Something to take the sting out of your wounded pride. If you sign this document, I can promise you that the full amount of medical bills that Commander Shepard has accumulated during his stay in the hospital, as well as any costs that are to come, will be wiped clean. You will have a blank check, to concern yourself only with his care and not of the finances regarding his recovery. You and SolBanc will simply keep each other at arm's length from this point on, both unconcerned at the other's existence. Live and let live, I believe the saying goes. Why bother holding a grudge when you can balance the account right here, right now?" He reached over and extracted a thin stylus from the side of the tablet. He held it out for Tali to take. "This time, you get to walk away with something."
The stylus looked like a metal spear, positioned between Qual's thumb and forefinger. It seemed to gleam in the light of the restaurant.
The sound of a tablet sliding across a metallic desk. Light peeking out through the thin blinds. The small clack of the small metal instrument next to the screen, which featured a small signature line.
"He may not wake up, Miss Zorah."
She had been here before, not long ago. Tali stared at the handheld device that Qual had offered her, a buzzing sensation at her temples.
Slowly, she slid her hands from the table and placed them in her lap. Tearing her eyes away from the device, she lifted her head until her eyes were leveled with Qual's.
"It won't solve my problem," she whispered.
Qual moved his hand closer to her. "I don't think you know what your real problem is."
"I know what it is," she said with defiance. "And no matter how many speeches I listen to, how many forms I sign, it won't change the fact that he won't wake. That he'll still be in that bed, not knowing what his friends and family have gone through." She leaned forward. "If I sign, that only helps you. It doesn't do anything for me at all."
"Tali'Zorah…" Qual's voice dipped half an octave and he tilted his head. "I implore you to think very carefully about your next words."
"Why? I've had months to think about them."
A tender shake now infiltrated Qual's body, but it was only for a split-second. If Tali had blinked, she might not have even known that it happened. But she hadn't, and she noticed.
"This is now coming from me," Qual whispered. "I will not let you be the lynchpin of my downfall. I will not be poor again."
"That's too bad," Tali responded in kind, equal venom spewing from her vocabulator. "I'm not going to be your pawn in this little game of yours. I will not be responsible for the rich getting richer. If you have to fall in the process, so be it. You, and everyone else, are expendable when compared to him."
With finality, she swept her arm across the table and knocked the tablet off of the table. There was a delicate sound of glass cracking as it bounced upon the cold tile once and finally lay still, the screen darkening.
Qual just let out a long, but quiet sigh and slowly set the stylus down on the table, which produced a tiny metallic clack. He tilted his head until the vertebrae of his neck gave a series of cracks, the sound like someone trodding on a bed of hard plastic. The gleam from past his visor was now inscrutable, a blank canvass upon which his entire demeanor had seemed to reset, like he was sinking into a completely different mindset.
"We'll soon see who's expendable," he said. Before she could respond, Qual twisted his head and spoke into his mic. "Execute."
There was a terrific slam at both ends of the restaurant and, in no time at all, columns of dark-blue armored commandos draped in stark and featureless plating barged into the saloon, holding customized assault rifles of matte black steel mixed with chromed accents. Needles of red light swiped through the air from the laser sighting of the weapons and the voice boxes in each of the helmets of the mercenaries gave the sounds of their breathing a sinister warble. They shouted directives to one another, their vocabulators encrypting their words and making it come out as raging gibberish, but as Tali saw the muzzles swing in her direction, she knew they were not here to make a polite request.
The other patrons were screaming before she could even make a move, as if they could react to the sight of the weapons faster than she could. They dove for cover under the tables. Deep-rooted panic could override even the most logical of calculations the brain could make.
On instinct, she pushed off with a foot and she tipped over backward in her chair. A bullet whizzed by where her head had been a second ago and ripped out a corner of the table that had been situated behind her. She fell on her back hard, but quickly rolled out of her chair, drawing her pistol from her holster in the middle of her reaction. At the same time, Qual stood up from his chair and slowly backed away, as if he was nothing but an intrigued spectator.
The first of the armed troopers came into view—SolBanc's personal security, she figured—and she raised the pistol, muscle memory guiding her every move. I've done this before. She pulled the trigger and a satisfying crimson plume burst from the back of the merc's helmet. He dropped, stone-dead.
Now the air was getting filled with the sound of automatic weapons-fire. The tile next to her sprouted sparks as another mercenary bore down on her and let off a raking burst that missed.
She rolled onto her stomach, raised her gun, and shot the man twice in the chest. The armored denizen crumpled with a pain-filled exhalation as the breath emptied from his lungs. Either they did not have shield generators or they were very weak, her Carnifex having enough power to put down a krogan.
Tali was scrambling to her feet, holstering her pistol and switching to her brand-new shotgun at the same time, when a heavy pistol-toting mercenary leveled his weapon at her head. He was clearly under pressure and missed, but Tali felt the ripple of the slug's backwash as it passed inches from her head. She flinched, unused to being shot at once more and the window behind the mercenary shattered into a million pieces quite loudly as she fired her own weapon, but some of the buckshot caught the man in the side and ripped him open, spinning him around once before he fell.
The heat sink had been expended with that one shot and Tali pumped her weapon. The glowing cylinder bounced on the floor, the air warping around it from the heat bleedoff. She whipped around, seeing that the other mercs were trying to find cover, which was not easy to do, out in the open of the restaurant.
The wall crumpled behind her, shaking plumes of dust as bullets smashed into it. She dived for cover into one of the nearby booths—a string of bullets ravaged the wooden divider atop the seats, sending tawny splinters everywhere. She sat up upon the cushioned bench and blindly fired, the shotgun knocking her shoulder back with each report, her visor having difficulty pinpointing her foes through all of the static and the smoke that permeated the room.
Gasping, she stayed her next shot. There was only the quiet shuffling of heavy boots on scuffed floors—her enemies were rearranging themselves into a better position. Tali kicked the table in the booth over so that she could get out of visual line of sight and hunkered down behind it. It would not provide her much protection, but she was still banking on her worth being far greater alive than dead.
A warning icon flashed in the corner of her helmet. Someone was trying to remote hack her suit. She nearly scoffed at the attempt—enviro-suits had some of the best hardening this side of the galaxy. She was able to quash the attempt with a few practiced keystrokes on her omni-tool. She even sent a blowback spike back to the sender's address. The muffled curse somewhere in the distance told her that her own attempt had succeeded. If her spike had done its work completely, the hacker would have to complete a full system reset to fully scrub the damage she just did to their corrupted files.
She reloaded her weapon, slotting heat sinks into the feed port on the underside of the shotgun. She wanted to yell out to Qual, but nothing clever came to mind. She was just too shocked that this—trying to kill her—was part of his plan. He wasn't going to get anything if she was dead, so why go to all this trouble?
Perhaps that was the point. Dead, she could stop being a nuisance to SolBanc and to Qual. It was not the most subtle of solutions, but she had a feeling that subtlety was not a virtue that these guys prized.
Bastard. Qual was not going to back down from this, she came to the glum realization. Hard to tell how many hostiles were in the restaurant. At least ten. No telling how many more were waiting for her outside. Were the police going to come? Doubtful—she imagined that SolBanc had enough funds to make the local authorities look in the other direction at times.
She tried to think how many meters it was to the door from here. Either one. At least eight… or was it more? Damn it, she should have been paying better attention. The issue was that she was going to have to fight her way through, no matter how she tried to spin it. While Qual and her had been talking, SolBanc had been covering all entrances and exits of the restaurant in preparation for such an eventuality. It was a trap and she had walked right into it. She would have cursed herself for her stupidity, but she would save that until after she got out of this.
If she got out of this.
The ammo counter in her HUD showed that she only had a few clips' worth of shots to sustain her. Her omni-tool was showing a full charge and she was connected to the local network, so she had the option of utilizing that in the fight. However, she knew that if she tried to mount a defensive position here, she was just going to be overrun. She needed to make a break for it and seek shelter elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that was going to require charging towards one of the exits—through the mercs. She was going to need to get creative.
Her eyes darted, but she was unable to see much from her position.
"Throw the weapon out," one of the mercs commanded. "Hands in the air."
Tali glanced up and found a glass-encased pictures of a mountain range hanging above her. The glass had been recently polished, which reflected a decent simulacrum of the restaurant in its angled position. Five men between her and the front entrance. Six positioned between her and the rear. Guess she was going out the front, then. She still wasn't able to see Qual though—he had slunk off into the shadows somewhere—and it was what she didn't know about the man that gave her pause. Was he anything like these mercs, or something more?
There were too many for her to be conservative with her shots. She switched to her pistol, which allowed a greater rate of fire. She looked up at the glossy picture again—the security forces were closing.
"Do it now, Tali'Z—!"
Her face twisted and she pushed at the sideways table with a shoulder, which rocketed into the closest merc and knocked him to the floor. His gun went off and riddled the ceiling, shaking the restaurant with noise and light.
Tali slid out from the booth and aimed her pistol towards one of the mercs covering the rear exit. She pulled the trigger twice and her target's body jerked as the slugs drilled precise holes into his chest.
She then rolled onto her back, still on the floor, and whipped her gun up as another armored man started to lean over the fallen table to shoot her at point-blank range. Tali was faster though, and her own bullet popped the top of his helmet up after it entered from just below his chin, causing a spew of brains to stain the ceiling in a macabre fountain.
Now the rest of the mercs were pumping shots towards the table, but Tali quickly got to her feet and sprang out from behind it, hunkered down low, the muzzle of her pistol flaring crisp whitehot bursts as she gave as good as she got. Somewhere, there was the sound of shattering glass. Tali gave grunts as bullets smacked into her, but her shields were holding—a fiery ripple washed over her body wherever she was hit only to dissolve into a mist of bluestatic. However, the sustained fire from the automatic weapons would overwhelm her in a matter of seconds—she initiated a neural switch and a hardlight shield sprang up along her left forearm, about two feet in length. She held the shield up so that half of her head was protected, which absorbed the incoming fire from the left, leaving her free to shoot the mercs on the right.
She kept firing until the targets in her immediate view were no longer standing, but for every one she downed, there was always another to take their place. No time to think. She had to get out of here.
Her overlay traced thin gray lines from her body to all of the mercs in the room. Her tool lacked enough power to deploy intrusive commands to all of them, so with a series of rapid thought impulses, she primed a codecharge to the entirety of the right half of the restaurant and flipped the command lines to crimson, which initiated the burst hack.
Six mercs stopped firing and stuttered in place. Many of them reached out with their hands as they tried to grope their way around the room. Tali's hack had neutralized all of their optical sensors in their helmet, dousing their eyes in total blackness. They would need to remove the coverings to see again, which would take vital time.
Tali swung her weapon back over to the left side, where the security forces were still shooting at her hardlight shield. Now or never. She rushed the closest man and bashed him in the head with her shielded arm—there was a satisfying series of vibrations from her arm hitting the man's helmet and then from his head rebounding within the helmet—and shot the merc behind him.
There was one more SolBanc privateer standing between her and the exit, but her hardlight shield had reached the end of its time limit. It crinkled down into nothingness, leaving her left side exposed. Tali was ready for that, as she had been looking at the timer in the corner of her HUD. Quickly she knelt down and retrieved her boot knife, ducking a shotgun blast from the lone man that guarded the door. She raised her arm and fired her pistol, but at this angle and at such speed she did not have time to properly aim—the bullet hit the man in the thigh and he stumbled with a yell, the scuffed floor slick with blood underneath.
The pistol's slide clacked open in her hand. Empty. She straightened and ran towards the wounded merc, roaring like a lunatic. As she reached him, she plunged the angular wedge of cold steel into the trooper's neck, then his unarmored side, and finally under his armpit, nicking a valve and nearly severing his heart. A flood sprang down the side of the armored man's body, but Tali was not done. She reared back and kicked the man hard in the chest. He was flung backward as if he had been shot from a cannon and went through the picture window of the establishment with a gigantic crash of breaking glass, and toppled head-over-heels to land somewhere out of sight. The jagged panes that still remained in place were now frosted with red, trails of blood tenderly making rivulets down the sharpened shards.
There was nothing inhibiting her egress now. She stepped towards the door, looking to leave, when she spotted someone stepping out from behind the bar area.
As if in a dream, she turned.
Qual had his arm raised, an ancient-looking pistol in his hand. It had a cylindrical housing of some kind and was made from a matte silver steel. Tali was rooted to the spot even as she saw Qual's thumb flick the hammer back before the revolver fired.
Something in her shoulder tore open. Her broken shields had bent and disintegrated from the force of the bullet. A glowing spear of heat seemed to run through her body, sending a sizzling wave of agony coursing throughout her system. Hammerwaves of pain, warmth coursing down her arm. Blood in her suit, sloshing near her fingers.
The impact had driven all breath from her lungs, so screaming was not an option. She spun, the knife sailing from her hand to land in some dust-filled corner, and tripped over the debris in the floor. Tali stumbled backwards and pitched out of the broken window headfirst, and fell unceremoniously upon the man that she had shoved out from the restaurant earlier. She rolled, pressing upon her wounded shoulder, and yelped into her helmet, until she was lying next to the body of the dead merc, broken glass surrounding her, reflecting the shrouded moon above her. She blinked and gazed at the tender night serenely, as if time would stop for her until the pain finally subsided.
When it seemed like the throbbing was not going to go away did she cough out, "Painkiller", and her suit automatically dumped a targeted dose through her miters into her bloodstream.
She glanced at the wound—the suit's autosealant had filled up the hole at her shoulder and the one at the back, having also topically applied medi-gel to begin coagulation. The bullet had gone in and out, tearing skin and muscle in the process. Blood had splotched around the entrance and was already drying, producing a thin shimmer from the warm streetlamps that reflected a ragged trail of her life.
How long had she been exposed to the air? Three seconds at most, she guessed. Would that be enough to get a reaction out of her? Or even kill her? Perhaps she could luck out, but did not dare discount it.
Noises from inside the restaurant. The rest of the mercs coming to finish the job. The painkiller had numbed her shoulder, dying embers smoldering just under her skin. "Immunosuppressant," she remembered and another chill at her neck as the suit depleted the derm. That would stop her allergic reaction from kicking in—she might pay for that later, but there was no other choice.
With a grimace, Tali stumbled to her feet, but not before she reloaded her pistol with two more thermal clips. The fingers of her left arm had also gone numb—reloading the weapon was a slippery process with digits that she had a bad connection upon.
She clacked the slide home and blindly fired in the direction of the restaurant, not caring if she was hitting anything. The cover fire worked though, as she could hear the sounds of the SolBanc mercs scattering to get behind anything within sight in the restaurant.
It was late at night and there was no one on the street. Tali limped across the wet tarmac—the mercs had left their vehicles unattended, illegally parked on the side of the road, which were black luxury SUVs with heavily tinted windows. Tali still had her override program primed—the gray line for the truck turned crimson again and the headlights to the vehicle simmered on. She reached out and touched the door handle, it opened for her without resistance.
The interior of the SUV was exquisite dark leather and unvarnished carbon fiber. Tali dragged herself into the seat, which lanced another spike of pain that now shot to her ribs. Her back spasmed convulsively and she shut her eyes as she breathed hard.
"Move, Tali. Move. Move."
Willing her next breath to feel like icewater in her veins, she shot her eyes open and palmed the control screen. The hacked vehicle flickered to life inside, ready for the commands from its new master.
Tali had not driven many ground vehicles before, but John had given her a rudimentary course with the Mako. But that was years ago. Still, how hard could it be?
In the corner of her eye to the right, she could see the mercs begin to stream from the restaurant. The SUV was already knocking as bullets bounced against it—the vehicle had been bulletproofed, but that did not mean it was indestructible. Trying to favor her good arm as best as possible, Tali swiftly got the SUV into gear and pressed on the accelerator pedal. The large truck lurched forward, nearly bouncing the unrestrained quarian around, but she soon had control over the wheel. The tires spun on the wet pavement and soon the SUV was hurtling down the empty streets, with just the hum of the displaced wind whistling in its wake.
The wheel rumbled in the quarian's good arm. Her shoulder felt like it was bubbling, distorting. She could perceive a slickness with her left fingers. Tali let autopilot route out of the town while she tenderly poked at her shoulder. She prodded the wound too hard at one point and screamed so loudly that she thought the glass of her visor might shatter.
In her review mirror, she did not notice the gleam of headlights from the shadowed vehicle that had pulled out of a side street just seconds ago, keeping a comfortable safe distance as they headed out of the city and towards the highway.
The car pulled away under the deepening night.
A/N: The chapters that show Tali off at her best are always the most fun to write. Yes, I know that's an ironic statement. You can laugh.
Playlist:
Unmasked II
"if you came this way"
Max Richter
Sleep
The Auditor Revealed (Qual's Theme)
"Rite of Passage"
P.T. Adamczyk
Cyberpunk 2077 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Restaurant Ruckus
"Tornado"
Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro
Man of Steel (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)