I found out very quickly that training to become a commando is an…experience.
"Dear god(dess)….help me….." I'd like to think I am acquitting myself as well as can be expected. While I understand the importance of building up stamina, that didn't mean I had to like it.
In fact, I can confidently say I hate it.
I let out a silent cry as my jog slowed to a crawl and I was forced to lean my entire body against some grimy wall. Sure, on one hand, the wall was beyond filthy and filled with all manner of gang tags, on the other my legs felt like they were about to give out. As bad as the walls are on Omega, the floor is way worse.
I know I'm the one who said I wanted to be an uber cool commando, but why does training have to be so intense? I'm pretty sure I just ran more in the past three hours than I had ever done in my (current) life.
Fumbling around at my side, I finally managed to grab the bottle of canteen and drank what little remained of it in a single gulp.
This body was not built for strenuous activity! It was built to lounge in a comfy chair in wonderful air conditioning while I ate snacks and played video games. Now my legs scream out in pain from overuse, and I even think some blisters are forming on my feet.
What kind of people do stuff like this anyway?
"Oh, there you are Aleena," Liselle jogged over to me in a sleeveless shirt and pants combo that showed a great deal of her midriff, not unlike what a jogger would wear on Earth. Unlike little old me, who was barely hanging in there from the course, she looked spry as a foal and ready to go another lap or two.
In addition to the previous seven she ran around me.
"I feel only pain," I whined, wondering who in their right mind thought multi-kilometer long runs were a good idea. I wasn't out of shape, she was just very in shape. "I'm going….to die….here."
"Oh, don't be like that," she offered her own water after seeing me in such a pitiful state. I snatched it and chugged its contents without a second thought. "Sure, it's a little daunting now, but give it a few years, and this sort of thing will be easy. You might even end up doing runs like this just to warm up for the day ahead."
"Not fucking likely…." I managed to get out between mouthfuls of water.
"I get it, this is new so it's a little difficult for you," Liselle laughed at my (overdramatic) attitude. "This is why we're starting slow since I know it would be cruel to just expect you to do everything I can do."
Wait….slow…?
"So give it a few months, and I have no doubt you'll be ready to do some actual running!"
If this was slow, what the hell did she think an actual run was?
Before I could ask her anything, Liselle's omni-tool chimed, "sorry, have to take this. I'm just going to run another lap while I'm at it. Don't worry, I should be back in twenty minutes or so." I watched her wave back to me as she jogged away, talking and laughing loudly to a friend as she turned the corner and ran down the empty Omega corridors.
Is this how I am going to die?
…Again?
Liselle was right about taking it easy then ratcheting it up after a few months.
First she increased the distance, then set a time limit for how long I could take between 'laps', by the end she was making me wear a backpack with weights on it to simulate carrying a full 'kit' of weapons and armor.
As time went on, I did get better, I ran farther, I ran for longer, and I even got used to it.
'Used to' being the key phrase.
I did not enjoy it.
I did not look forward to it.
I simply got used to it.
Nothing will ever erase my love for the comfy fluffiness of my bed and chair.
Soon enough, a couple years on, and when I built myself up a bit, things finally transitioned to more sedentary avenues.
Sadly, they were not the sedentary activities I enjoyed.
"Try again."
Biotics are space magic. No matter how much 'techno-babble' is used to justify it, it's space magic.
If I wasn't an asari, I'd have to go through all sorts of hoops just to use biotics. Drugs to enable the body to produce the necessary biotic neural network reactions, install some device in my skull to regulate biotic activity in my brain, and something called 'Biofeedback Therapy' that I sort of just stopped looking at when I was met with a literal wall of text on the extranet.
But like I said, biotics are space magic.
And all magic, regardless of universe, requires training.
For me, it was a five kilogram weight.
All I had to do was raise and lower it off the ground like doing reps at the gym with weights. Simple enough. Hell, my gaming terminal weighs almost twice as much as this and I can lift it pretty well.
But it had to be done with biotics alone.
And that's…where the issue lies.
I extended my hand and willed it to levitate. It rose off the ground, slowly and shaking like a reed in the wind. My face scrunched up, sweat dripped down my forehead, even my arm was starting to shake from the strain. You'd think I was trying to lift a car and not a little weight.
As pain swelled in the back of my head, I swore as the cube slipped from my hold and bounced onto the floor.
It felt like someone was jabbing an ice pick in my head. Holy shit how does anyone use biotics if it feels like this to use them!?
To emphasize the point, Liselle looked over to a collection of scrap metal and grinned. Flaring her biotics to life, she created what the Mass Effect games would call a 'Pull-Field'. Bits of metal from all over started to levitate and circle the point where the field emanated from. Grinning at my star struck expression, she flicked her wrist and sent all the material in every direction.
"Show off," I grumble, faintly aware she answered back 'I am', as I nursed my migraine.
But like the other things, as time went on, I got better. Not great, but better.
The headaches went from being debilitating to merely painful, especially if I used my biotics too often. But I eventually learned to lift the little cube, along with the ten-kilogram weight that replaced it when I 'mastered' five kilograms. Couldn't do any more than lift it up or down, but it's still something.
By the time I reached twenty-seven, Aria decided I was finally old enough to learn that most Omega pastime: shooting a gun.
And it wouldn't be Liselle teaching me that, but someone I never thought I'd ever interact with. Because when Aria said she called in an 'old man' to tutor me, I didn't really think she'd call in her old arch nemesis!
Patriarch was old. Or at least old enough for his head plate's color to start wearing away. I remember from the games that Wrex, who was over one thousand years old, had scars running the length of his face and head plate, but even that didn't look this old.
While his race can live as long as asari, longer in some cases, the games hardly ever showed a truly 'old' krogan.
This was the man who once ran Omega as his personal fiefdom, a rare breed of krogen who excelled at warfare and diplomacy in keeping the other gangs of his time in line, a warlord in all but name who was only taken down by an even bigger fish then he was.
That's probably why the guy seemingly gives off a vibe of 'zero fucks given' and 'too old for this shit' at any given time.
It made the whole situation so surreal.
"…and so you have to never let your foes get even a moment of rest," Patriarch explained, transitioning from a war story to some 'life lesson' thing.
What started as a lesson on asymmetric warfare got so wrapped up in seven different war stories ranging from the Rachni Wars to the Krogan Rebellions that I don't even know how it relates to anything.
"Be like a ferocious animal," he continued, doing a crazy amount gestures that made it feel like he was also telling the story in sign language when in truth he was just really excited to tell the story. "Hound them day and night to keep them off balance. Nip at your foes heels without pause like a…like…damn it. It was on the tip of my tongue just a moment ago. Hey kid, what's the name of that bird on Thesia with the webbed feet that swims but can't fly?"
"Ducks?" I didn't even know what he was talking about. Do Citadel races even have a word for ducks yet?
"Yes! Ducks," he snapped his fingers, apparently he didn't know much either. "You have to nip at your enemies' heels like a duck. And when they finally show their weakness, go in for the kill." All the arm gestures were kind of irrelevant when the phrase 'attack like a duck' is used by the scary krogan. But he seemed happy with himself. "Now, any questions so far?"
"Um…" okay how do I say this. "Should you really be allowed to tutor me?" I abruptly ended
"What's that supposed to mean?" the krogan gave a halfhearted scoff. "Just because I'm old, I'm suddenly not suitable to teach the young? Hmph! Back on Tuchanka, only the oldest are allowed to teach the young. Who better to teach than someone who lived through several lifetimes worth of experiences."
"No, it's not because you're old, I mean," I glance to the side where one of my 'babysitters' is watching the pair of us with a heavy pistol at the ready. "Don't you hate my father for taking Omega from you?"
"Oh, I get it," he grinned, immediately figuring out what I was trying to say. "You think I'd kill you to get to her, right?"
"..kind of," I rub the back of my neck awkwardly.
The old korgan let out a hearty laugh, "maybe a century or two ago I might have been tempted to kill you to get to her, but not anymore. The bad blood between me and your mother is centuries old at this point."
"Father," I corrected.
"Sure, whatever you say," he shrugged. "Anyway, me killing you won't change anything. In fact, it would make me look weaker than I already am. Think about it. As if I wasn't pitiful enough, losing Omega to your mother, I'd also have to deal with being known as the krogan who was 'only strong enough to kill a child'."
"So, you're really okay with this?
"Sure. Nothing changes if I were to kill you. And like I said, they'd probably get a lot worse for me." He did that krogan smile thing that showed way too many teeth, "but I guess there could be more to it."
"Like what?"
"Oh, I don't know," he shrugged. "I could be bored and you're just noise to help pass the time, or Aria might be forcing me to do it, maybe I might see the smallest smidge of potential in you, or maybe it's the snipers that have shots trained on me."
"Wait there's a sniper?" I looked around. I couldn't see anything and there were no elevated points for anyone to stand on let alone set themselves up with a big ass rifle.
"Four actually," Patriarch shook his head, "they're only here because of you, of course. I'm not important enough anymore to warrant any sniper or any sort of hit these days. Still, I hope at least one of them is a salarian. Force that pyjak to spend half his life looking down the scope of a krogan he can't shoot. Ha!"
Krogan humor seemed to be an... acquired 'taste' I guess. In that last bit, he stared off in a particular direction behind me. I guess thats where one of them was, not that I could see anything out of the ordinary.
Still, metaphorical and literal gun to his head aside, I just had to know. "So…which is it?"
"Which is what?"
"The reason you're doing this."
"How about this, you're free to believe whichever reason that makes you feel more special. Or safer, heheheh," Patriarch did that 'krogan' smile I've read so much about. The one where they seem to bear all their extremely sharp teeth and look more sinister than if they just stayed emotionless.
Patriarch's lessons were a bit of hit and miss.
Some days, he would go into long tyraids about some great battle he took part in, or detail how he overcame some negotiation during his rulership of Omega. The smile he had on his face remembering the 'good old day' was almost infectious.
Almost, since those teethy shark like grins were a tad uncomfortable for me even now.
Still, he spoke with such sincerity, and answered any question I asked him so earnestly, that it was almost enough to forget for a moment that he was actually a brutal warlord who effectively ruled over millions mere centuries ago.
A trend with his stories was that they all had some morality message. But these were krogan morals. So less 'treat others as you wish to be treated' and more 'crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women' sort of thing going on.
Sure, it was good to know the best way to rapidly vent heat from a weapon in the middle of battle, or how to spot someone hiding a weapon on their person, but when am I ever going to need to learn how to scare a mining colony into compliance with the threat of orbital bombardment.
Okay, technically, my mid/end goal here is to replace the Shadow Broker but that hardly means I'm going to turn into some tyrannical maniac with secrets on everyone who runs a shadow empire.
…
I mean, I will have secrets on everyone, and have something of a 'deep state' thing going on with informants across the galaxy, but I won't be tyrannical about it!
Patriarch didn't just act as some sort of weird 'life coach', he also doubled as a firearms trainer.
"Um, should I really be starting with this?" I thought he'd given me some sort of metal stick meant to beat people to death with until I realized it was a shotgun. A shotgun with two blades on it.
Patriarch didn't seem to care that I could barely hold it. Had to lug half the thing atop an appropriately sized container to keep my arms from giving up like jell-o.
"Nonsense, I was lugging guns bigger than that when I was half your age," the krogan shook his head, waving off my concern.
"But I'm an asari! We don't grow as big as you!"
"Not with that attitude you won't," the pat he gave me on the back might have been meant as good natured, but it felt like someone just punched me between my shoulder blades. "And don't worry about breaking it, it's just some mass produced volus crap so it's worth less then your clothes but its not made of glass. Even if its specs are horrible, you can probably bludgeon someone to death with it and it'll still work fine. Not as good as a proper krogan gun of course, but better than whatever crap you asari make."
"Guns aren't supposed to…ugh," You know what, a krogan probably would say guns ought to be useful melee weapons. "Never mind. So, you put like…training rounds in this thing?'
"What's a training round?" The concept made Patriarch chuckle.
"You mean this thing has live rounds in it?" I hadn't even shot a pistol before and he just handed me a fucking loaded shotgun!? I looked over to my batarian guard, but he seemed more interested in whatever was on his omni-tool than me being given a lethal weapon. The man shrugged when he saw I was looking at him.
"Of course, it does," Patriarch continued, nodding to himself. "How else will you learn to fire a gun if you don't actually fire it?"
"I mean, shouldn't I start with something smaller, like a pistol?" The whole thing seemed like a bit of a jump from 'no firearm experience to a krogan looking shotgun.
"Look, stop complaining and just give her a try. You don't need to hit anything in particular out there, just get used to the kick."
"Um, okay," I mean, what could possibly go wrong on a training ground, right?
Pulling the trigger, I don't actually remember the moments between standing and my back hitting the ground. Just the sensation of all the air going out of my lungs as I felt the back of my head swell from hitting the cold metal floor.
"Hmmm, I think you were right," he nodded to himself, picking up the gun but not moving to actually help me of course. "Forgot how scrawny you asari are. Fine, we'll go to pistols, work our way up to submachine guns, then I guess we'll see where to go from there. How you pansies held the line with the salarians against the rachni I'll never know."
Downscaling to a more manageable weapon, turns out I was right!
Pistols were much easier than shotguns. Or maybe it was just the shotgun Patriarch wanted me to use?
Eh, not really important. Beyond that, my firearm training did go pretty smoothly after that.
It had its high points…
"I got it!" I cheered, finally managing to land a hit on a target.
Said 'targets' being one of a large collection of cans and bottles set up on the far end of a junkyard. Sure I learned how to hit them a while ago, and I have hit them before, but never at the current distance I'm at now!
It was a new record for distance!
"Congratulations, you hit the stationary target ten times in as many minutes," the kill joy krogan replied to my outburst. His eyes not even looking onto the field, more interested in whatever he was drinking. Ryncol probably. "Now do it again. But try to take less time than it takes for me to contemplate my life choices and figure out why I'm stuck as some asari's glorified babysitter."
Ass….
And then there were the low points…
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
And just like that, three cans were on the ground. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I feel I've become something of a master (novice) at using handguns. I wasn't getting headshots or anything, but I was able to constantly-
BANG.
"Fuck!"
I nearly jumped out of my skin, dropping my gun, when I heard that sound. Hand slamming down atop my 'ears'. A sharp whizzing sound raced past the side of my head for a moment.
Did someone just try to take a shot at me?
No, this was a private 'range'. Aria's men held the only ways in and out of this place.
That left only three possibilities.
Either A, someone got through them to get to me.
B, someone in Aria's crew went rogue.
Or C….
Frowning, I shot a glare to my side, I saw a too innocent looking Patriarch holding a smoking gun beside my head.
"Why'd you stop?" Patriarch questioned, "You were doing pretty good there."
"You fired a gun into my ear!" My hand clamped over my 'ears' (head holes) as the ringing died down. Fuck, I even felt the bullet fly past my cheek!
"No, I fired a gun by your ear," he 'corrected' himself. "You're still alive aren't you."
"Why the fuck did you fire a gun next to my ear!?" I wonder if it was a testament to our 'relationship' that he didn't take any umbrage at me screaming at him. But since he started laughing, maybe he knows I'm not a threat so just rolled with it.
"Because in a real gunfight you won't be able to just lazily shoot at a target on a nice quiet range," he explained. "While you're firing at them, they'll be firing back at you," his oversized finger jabbed me between my ribcage just to emphzie the point. "So, get used to hearing gunfire all around you in a fight and the feeling of bullets flying around you."
"Fine," I sighed, chalking this lesson up to 'krogan mentality'. Picking up the fallen gun I shot the krogan one final glare, "Just don't do that next to my head again, please."
"of course I won't, you have my word," Patriarch grinned, "it'd be too predictable that way, hehehe."
Yet as the years passed by, all these lessons, the endurance, the biotics, the guns, it was still a rare day when Aria showed up in person to see me.
Usually she was too busy with being a Pirate Queen to really get involved with my day to day stuff. Sparse dinners intermixed between weeks of not seeing her beyond a quick 'hi' and 'bye' as she went in and out of Liselle and mine's apartment. It was a strange occasion when dear old dad decided to show up and see me.
Pretty sure the place I call home has a secret passage somewhere since I see her leave the home a lot, but I rarely see her enter before she leaves. She just shows up, then leaves.
But from time to time, she does descend from her 'throne' in Afterlife to see me in person.
On this day, she did more than just watch, she basically took over for Liselle and told me what I was going to be doing. Or rather, showed me what she wanted done.
Mannequins had been assembled using bits of scrap metal and other junk just lying around the area. Held up by some basic wireframes, they were hardly sturdy frames. Just tough enough to not fall under their own weight.
Aria stood before them, and sent a single blast of biotic power at one of the targets, shredding the thing down to its wireframe. Even causing enough damage to rip the thing off the ground and toss it several meters away.
As impressive as it was to me, I knew for a fact it was the barest fraction of her real power.
She looked back to me and my wide expression. "Now you do it," she told me, giving no further instruction or guidance. All she did was stand there quietly, giving away no emotion of any kind.
I don't even know what power she used to do that. Push? Warp? Something else that I didn't know about?
In the end I just tried a bit of everything.
Two hours ticked by, and Yet try as I could, I could not copy what Aria did. I sent bolt after bolt of biotic powers at it, and each time nothing really happened. I was absolutely hitting them, but nothing was really happening. They didn't even shudder when my powers hit them.
Liselle might have been cheering me on but I could feel Aria's eyes just zeroing in on me. Judging. Watching for any little slip up on my part. While she didn't say a word, the silence she brought with her was loud enough.
When I was finally exhausted, falling to my knees in sweaty panting, at the point of ripping my metaphorical hair out, I threw my arms to my side in frustration as one last flare last biotic swept across the area.
Without warning, the mannequin threw itself into the ground with a loud metal like a slinky, it flew forward and rammed into the ground face first. A few more back and forth wobbles and the flimsy wire finally snapped leaving the thing face down for the last time.
As Liselle clapped and cheered from the sidelines, I looked at the metal mannequin and then down to my hand still pulsing biotic energy.
'I did that?' I was trying to warp it, shred it like Aria did, but that was some sort of Push. Those are two very different things. Or was my Warp that weak that it-
"Enough," Aria spoke for the first time since the beginning of this 'lesson'. "You're done for today."
Without elaborating, she turned and left me alone with Liselle.
"Well I'll be damned, you really impressed father with that," my sister raced over to my side and gave me a quick hug. "Impressed me to, good job."
"Are you sure? She didn't say anything."
"Trust me Alenna. if she wasn't impressed, we'd know," Liselle nodded knowingly.
Liselle was right, apparently.
Dad was impressed, or at least 'not disappointed', which is about the same thing with Aria.
Aria finally said I was finally ready to be enrolled into a commando program.
Well, when I say 'enroll', I mean to say she registered me to 'be examined for my potential to begin commando training from a reputable huntress institution'.
There was a bit more to it then that, but that was the gist of it. And apparently it was my unseen, absentee, mother who was able to forge my documents to get through the background checks.
Probably a good idea, since I feel that using my real name, or advertising I was a T'Loak, would be like some mob boss's kid wanting to join the cops. Then again, Aria was hardly the only person with the last name 'T'Loak' in the galaxy. But an asari with a surname of T'Loak from Omega, who's parental information on her forums was listed as 'TBD'. Oh yeah, that looks pretty sketchy.
Still, this whole thing is hardly a normal sort of recruiting thing.
The way I've read it, the whole process is like a talent show. You go out there like some show horse, get examined by huntresses' with centuries of experience, get rated against every other girl, and if you meet certain requirements, you get scooped up into the commando program. If not, but you still pass most requirements, you get the opportunity to join the regular old asari Guard units.
Where the Guard is effectively the asari 'army' though more akin to national guards in duties, the commando's are the 'marines'.
So that's going to be fun.
The bad news, beyond probably embarrassing myself in front of hundreds if not thousands of people, was the location of this examination.
Nos Astra, Illium. That corporate cyberpunk hellscape that was basically just Omega but somehow both cleaner yet shitter at the same time. A place where people can sign themselves into what amounted to slavery, and where corporations ruled
Well even if I fail to be a commando trainee (I have no doubt I will at least get into the regular guard units) training is still training.
And any training puts me one step closer to becoming the Shadow Broker.
I just hope I don't embarrass myself too much with my peers.
Without knowing anything about her, one could say it was obvious that Kyra Bravillius would want to be a commando.
The thirty-year old's mother had been a commando for half a millennium, while her father was turian military through and through. Given that pedigree, it was no shock to her parents she told them she wanted to be a commando. And naturally, they were very supportive of her decision.
Her mother showed her some of her biotic tricks and skills when Kyra's own biotic potential flared up. Even showed her some cam footage from a couple of her missions.
Her father showed her how to use firearms properly. He took her on a few camping trips in preparation for the trails in addition to going to his family's gun range in Cipritine when she was on holiday break from school. He even let her use his phaston every once and a while to get a feel for assault rifles.
Compared to that sort of background, it was obvious everyone else would come up a little short.
So why was she on Ilium and not on one of the asari core worlds? Simple. Those republican guard units require commandos to sign up for several centuries to compensate for the cost of training and arming them.
That would simply not do for her. She grew up on the Citadel, she didn't really have any connection to the various Republics, nor see a need to lay her life down for them. Nor was her plan to be a 'lifer' for any end goal was to either join C-Sec's Special Response division, like her uncle, or if that wasn't possible, she would settle for a reputable military contractor.
Kyra might have considered joining the Hierarchy's military, seeing as she spent more time on Palavan than any asari world. But their habit of sequestering biotic troops into small cabal units and leaving them to languish doing nothing important all the while having a black mark on her record for any future advancement was not something overly appealing for her.
All that made Nos Astra a very appealing place to train. It's Guard Academies were more flexible with their recruiting and retaining policies. Instead of serving for centuries, she's just had to sign a fifty-year contract, with potential for renewal based on good service.
After that, she was free! The only negative was that the Nos Astra Guard had very high standards for their commandos. Not that it was an issue for her.
To her eyes, she was the best possible recruit here. Oh sure, Kyra could easily pick out a handful of girls that were actually taking all of this seriously. That is hitting their shots, completing their laps, actually using their biotics properly on command.
But the rest?
She eyed a particular girl at the far end of the sports stadium turned recruitment area, running back to her mother with tears in her eyes after a huntress simply raised her voice at the girl when she did something wrong. Probably some rich girl who grew up hearing tales of Justicars and not wanting to submit themselves to that sort of lifestyle, chose the next best thing.
Fragile girl probably better off on some table dancing her maiden years away dancing or stripping for credits then on the battlefield.
Before she could drill down further, she could almost feel as if her parents were reeling her back in by the scruff of her neck.
If they heard what she was thinking, her father would probably tell her to stop being so smug. About how most kids didn't have parents with the kind of background she did and she ought to show a little humility. And mother would remind her that Auntie Juna was one of those asari who 'danced' their maiden years away.
But with only three hundred commando slots open, only a fraction of the several thousand girls here would be in her training cohort. The rest would go into the regular Guard units, if that.
So yeah, Kyra might take certain examples a bit far. She knew that. Yet she could hardly contain her glee at being the best recruit here! That's what the monitors said at least.
Kyra Bravilius – Rank 1.
That's right: The best damn girl here!
Oh! She should take a picture and send it to her parents! Kyra knows they'd be so proud of her!
Angling her omni tool camera, she was about to take the shot with the biggest smile she could muster, when she noticed the screen chimed and updated.
Kyra Bravillius – Rank 2
What…
What the fuck?
She'd only looked away for a moment!
Her eyes glanced upward to the name who took her spot.
Aleena Vesta – Rank 1
Who the hell is-
A loud biotic thum reverberated echoed across the arena.
Snapping her head to the side, she saw the aftermath of a small biotic display as bits and pieces of a training mech dragged across the ground. At the opposing end of the display was a wiry looking asari about her age with biotics flaring across her body.
Those were top of the line praetor mechs, the same ones the turians used in their boot camps. No one just blasts them away with biotics alone. And you're not supposed to! The test that girl was in is all about pushing the mechs over not ripping them apart!
Sadly, no one seemed to have told the girl.
She lifted the remaining mech into the air with one hand and slammed it back into the ground!
Even Kyra had only just managed to push them over because she didn't have the strength to lift them up. Sure, the girl looked a little drained, but she still did it just like that. Circuitry and metal squished and contorted into the ground below.
The girl stood over it like she was examining some brutal display she did. Seemingly oblivious to the surprised and shocked stares she was getting from the overseers, trainers, and just about everyone around her.
Just who the hell was that girl?
AN: Second chapter of Pirate Princess!
Sorry for the slight delay in posting. Thanksgiving really threw me for a loop in terms of posting and other stuff. Should have a more 'normal' posting schedule for the immediate future (until the backlog is cleared I mean)
Aslo, for anyone curious about "where" in the Timeline of this fic (as in when does Canon start?).
By the Gregorian Calendar, Chapter 1 took place in 2044 (Aleena was 23), this chapter ends roughly in 2051 (Aleena is 30), and the events of Mass Effect 1 start in 2183 (when Aleena is 162).
Hope that gives everyone some reference points to figuring out when this is all taking place! Once Aleena figures out when Liara is born, she'll figure out the proper dates herself.
Fun fact, Liara is born in 2077!
[Insert Cyberpunk 2077 joke here].