-20:31:20
…
Applying his dose of medi-gel directly into his leg wound, Lieutenant James Merrick winced and hissed as the injury burned. Silently he shuffled his body over to where the turian Lieutenant Soka Junian was lying, still in a state of unconsciousness.
He didn't want to hit her. He wished there was some other way to deal with her descent into despair, and under any other circumstances he would have happily talked her through it, but the last thing he needed then and there was a turian screaming in a forest that was likely still crawling with Reaper forces. It was this fact alone that necessitated him giving her a solid blow to the head with his Mattock rifle.
Turning on the UV lamp, he waved it over her and carefully he dabbed the bleeding wound he had inflicted to her fringe. He hoped that she would understand his reasoning once she woke up. He would have used his fist, but he just didn't have the strength to do it. It necessitated the use of a rifle.
Shifting in place, he grabbed his Omni-tool, strapping it back on his arm and activating the device. It flickered to life and revealed the small regional topographical map he scavenged off the body of his dead CO, Captain Chen Shao. On it were the locations of all the units that were still active. When he took the device off of Shao's body there were still dozens of units reporting in. One by one they went silent and vanished before his eyes. He tried not to think of the implications. Each dot that vanished represented hundreds of his comrades, who were extinguished by the encroaching Reaper ground forces... and now no dots remained. If there were survivors, then they were scattered, unorganized fighting units that would fall not long from now.
Watching them vanish one by one... it was somehow just as bad as seeing it in front of him. It inspired his absolute hatred and awe for the Reapers. They were facing a foe that had done this for aeons. Sure… they could spit in the face of the Reapers every so often, but the Reapers didn't get mad. It would wipe its face and continue on its endless march without fear or hesitation. What sort of war could be fought against the likes of them?
He glanced back to the turian woman. He could understand her despair… he had lost everyone as well… and he had his weak moments just as she did. But he was alive, and he had found his purpose. He needed to survive. He needed to escape the planet and make sure that Command didn't funnel any more of his brothers and sisters into this meat grinder the Reapers had turned Eden Prime into at minimal force investment to their campaign.
His new purpose following the death of his unit was hampered by the fact that he was all alone. It was what drove him as hard as it did to find the turians. To find them as utterly destroyed as the rest of his company… the entire division most likely, was a devastating turn of events. All that was left was a half-suicidal turian whom he needed to convince that their survival was paramount to the war effort.
When she was awake, he would do just that. To get off this planet, he needed her. She had to understand they would save more lives off-world than staying… which he would soon have to be given as a low flangling groan caught his attention. Closing his map, James looked over and found the turian Soka stirring, her head rolling to one side as her eyelids fluttered. For a moment, the briefest of moments, the turian seemed to be at peace, like she was in between a dream and reality. It would not be long now before she realized what had happened and the sort of hell the two of them were trapped in.
Sure enough, the turian suddenly jerked upwards, her head banging off the top of the small cave shelter they were in. She tripped and fell back onto her ass and looked at the restraints on her wrists and ankles which James had put on her for good measure. She looked up, her glare blazing with justifiable rage.
"Where am I... and what did you do to me?!" she growled at him.
"It's a cave I have been using for a haven while I scouted for your unit," James said gesturing to their surroundings.
Remembering his scavenging while Soka Junian was out cold, he turned away and rustled through the pile of equipment and supplies he had gathered and dropped several unopened boxes of turian MREs in front of her. Grabbing one, he watched as Soka opened with her… beak? As if she was curling her lips. She looked up at him like he had done something disrespectful.
"I took what I could of your fallen," he explained to her carefully with great care to not further upset her. "I know it's disrespectful, but I think they would want you to survive… even if you don't feel the same."
The turian looked like she wanted to say something to him; something that wouldn't be considered very polite. Deciding not to go that route, Soka closed her mouth and raised her wrists to redirect his attention to the bondage he had placed her in for both of their protection.
"I had to knock you out. You were on the verge of having a panic attack, and that was no time to be dealing with it politely. I wish I could have, but I couldn't. Something had to be done fast. I didn't want to do it, but I won't apologize for it either," he explained as he shuffled back over to the silently staring turian. "As for the shackles… yeah… I'm sorry for that one, though. It's just that you have goddamn talons and I did do the aforementioned clubbing you in the back of the head with a rifle, but I'm not inclined in taking a chance of you waking up and attacking me on the spot… so here, let me…"
Activating his omni-tool, he unlocked the shackle's security encryption. Now free, James sat back and waited to see if the turian decided to beat the living hell out of him for what he did to her. He supposed he sort of deserved it. He wasn't going to suggest this was entirely her fault. Getting smacked in the head as he did sort of warranted an ass-kicking he supposed.
But, to her credit, all that the turian did was rub her wrists and crawl away from him until she was resting her back against the opposite cave wall. She hung her head and held her attention solely on her lap. It was almost as though she was ashamed. Of what, he could only hypothesize, but he had a pretty solid idea. He supposed it was the fact that she was still drawing breath. She was still alive.
It was a strange sort of shame for him to see. His father served in the First Contact War, and he held onto his hatred for turians until the day he died; ironically at the hands of Cerberus during their raid on the Citadel. His father wasn't a bad man. He was a man with a sprained soul. He saw the worst the Hierarchy had to offer and could never forgive them. As such he tried to pass on the hate, prejudice and stereotypes he learned from First Contact to his children. Notably, that turians were unthinking, unfeeling creatures of duty to their hierarchy.
While James never really believed that, his suspicions were confirmed by the utterly devastated turian sitting there in front of him in a stupor. Perhaps some of the stereotypes had merit, but unthinking? Unfeeling? That was not what he was seeing in her.
"Do you think me weak?" the turian spoke in a low harmonic tone. Embarrassed by the sounds of it, perhaps she was a little bit worried that the human was judging her.
James shook his head, painfully forming a reassuring half-smile.
"I think you're only human… metaphorically, I mean," he said, and then amended as she tilted her head at him. "You lost your men and there I was trying to get you to see logic before the bodies of your men were even cold."
The turian did not respond to him, so James clamped his mouth close. He decided to grant her a few moments to see if she would make the first move on the subject. It was, after all, her loss. It needed to be dealt with. The last thing he needed was a partner in this venture which was a reckless suicide case. He didn't know if the tried and tested human method of working through grief with words held up to the turian standard, but it was worth a try.
"Do you want to talk about it?" he finally broke their silence.
The turian named Soka narrowed her eyes at him.
"I don't want to talk about it, Lieutenant," she snapped back at him, cutting him off before he could try to help bring some sort of closure that didn't involve her killing herself. "I want to talk about what it is you hope to achieve, and why you are so quick to abandon this world and its inhabitants."
James looked over the turian for a moment. Knowing better than to argue and feeling that it was for the best that the turian at least had something else to focus on in the meantime, James opened his Omni-tool and activated the command and control map.
Realizing what he possessed, Soka pushed herself off the opposite wall and took a seat next to him.
"As you can see, the Reaper ships aren't here. They're gone. They've left. The army is just drones and husks. They can't harvest. They are occupying the planet until the Reapers can direct their attention back to it," he explained his logic slowly and steadily. "Eden Prime has a relatively low population. That means it will be a secondary, probably even tertiary objective world for them to harvest. For now, the colonists are safe, but if we fight… if we resist openly, it will only bring about more needless deaths on the colonists."
Exhaling and rubbing his forehead as he tried not to think about the frightfully horrible thing he was advocating, he directed his full attention to the lieutenant. Soka was already staring at him. She was just as horrified at what he was saying as he was, but there seemed to be some sort of understanding now.
"The fight we need to join is the one where the Reaper fleet is," he pressed on. "The longer we keep the Reaper fleet busy, the longer we keep the civilians alive here. If we cause too much trouble here... if we were to raise an organized underground resistance and fight on, who's to say the Reapers won't send a dozen ships back to finish this colony off for good? Having a Reaper occupation force controlling their movements is an all-around shitty situation, but it is a lesser of the two evils right now."
He fell silent once again, this time his piece was said. Now it was just up to Soka to absorb what he said. Give her time to come to terms with the terrible logic he was advocating. He hated doing this… speaking this sort of evil out loud… but someone had to be the one to do it.
"So…" the turian spoke up, her tone as carefully controlled as his was moments prior. "We leave… we tell the Alliance not to divert forces here… we keep the Reaper's attention on the occupied colony at a minimum…and that will prolong lives here?"
Soka had summed up his logic, but she had not voiced an opinion. For now, the fact that she was no longer calling him out as a coward was a good sign in itself. Perhaps she was starting to come around to what he was saying. She might not have liked what he had to say, but it didn't mean she was about to stick her head in the sand and pretend that what he was saying didn't make any sense.
As he flipped through the security footage on the omni-tool, he felt a little elated by this. It was a small victory he was happy to take.
"There is a civilian freighter in dry dock five kilometres outside of New Esperance…" he said, bringing up the archived footage of a freighter. "We had engineers preparing to turn it into a flying drone Kamikaze… well… we turned the ship into a suicide bomb… fire ship… whatever, but the Reapers left and the ground forces went on a general offensive and we abandoned it. Last I heard it was still intact…"
James' words trailed off as he had to force himself back to reality. The situation on Eden Prime changed by the minute and the last time he saw the freighter it was... well...
"That was 36 hours ago, so we need to go quickly," he quickly admitted to the turian officer. "We'll have to strip the explosives out… otherwise… well, a stray shot and its short trip for us, hey?"
His grim chuckle did not get a shared laugh from the turian, but she did sort of look at him funny. She wanted to, but she had far too much dignity to partake in it. Her beak opened and closed several times as though she had a question on the tip of her tongue that she wanted to ask but dreaded the answer. Thankfully, she seemed to be loosening up.
"What if we run into civilians while going about deactivating the explosives on the ship?" she inquired, keeping her attention focused on the freighter.
That was a question James himself had been battling since he decided to get off Eden Prime. It was probably a harder decision to come to more than leaving millions behind to endure slavery at the brutal hands of the Reapers.
"Nothing," was his quietly spoken answer to Soka Junian's question. "We don't do anything for them. We don't bring them, we don't fight for them. We don't risk a goddamn thing for them."
He looked her way and found the Lieutenant looking at him with an expression of dumbfounded incomprehension at what he proposed. If he were in her position it would have been just as likely he'd feel the same way. Even a day after coming to terms with this, he could not help but feel nauseous at this… but as much of a bastard as it made him seem, it was the right decision…
… It had to be…
"But…James…" she said, surprising him by using his first name out loud, her tone almost pleading. "We can fill that freighter up. It looks like it can comfortably hold 200 people. Quarian ships of that size can carry double that if properly stripped of all luxury…"
"We're not quarians, we don't have the luxury of time to strip the ship, and we certainly are not broadcasting what we are doing to civilians," he reminded her before she could go off on a tangent.
She looked ready to protest. It was only a natural reaction from someone with a conscious. But now the cards were on the table. He couldn't soft-sell this anymore. He reached out and grabbed what he supposed was her wrist.
"I don't think you get the position you and I are in," he breathed to her without any accusation of stupidity in his tone. "There is a very real possibility that we are the highest ranking officers left in the Alliance and Hierarchy task-forces sent to Eden Prime. There may be others, but I don't know for certain. What I do know is that we are here, and our lives are now officially more valuable than anyone else. Our survival is a priority. They… they don't have that luxury. If we run into civilians, and we will… and they figure out what we are doing? How long until the secret gets out? A few dozen people knowing can turn into thousands knowing quicker than we can handle. The next thing you know we're going to be re-enacting Sophie's Choice and that's something I don't want to do."
Clearly from the confusion on Soka's face, she wasn't a connoisseur in classic human film. Running his hand through his hair shook his head as if striking his last comment from the record.
"…And that's not even factoring in the Reapers finding out," he pressed on. "No… the fewer the better and two people knowing what we're doing is as much a risk as we're going to take on this."
Soka remained silent. She was well beyond the point of horrified now, but she knew better than to question what he was saying. His mind was made up, and it appeared as though the turian too had come around to see that this was the only way to go about this.
"What happens if civilians find out on their own?" she decided to ask "Are we going to turn them away on the spot?"
James bit his lip and held his eyes on hers. He wished he could be as open as she was. But civilians presented so many unknown variables. What if some were indoctrinated? What if they decide to tell others? What if they went out in search of family and came back leading Reaper forces to them? No… they couldn't be allowed to be a part of this… they had to be dealt with… perhaps even by them.
Would killing the civilians by their hands be kindness? That was an ethical debate he was nowhere near ready - or drunk enough - to have.
"The Alliance has the freighter protected with automated defences," he informed her as he pressed his back into the cave wall. "When we arrive, our first task is to turn them on and let them sort out any potential civilian interest. Blood will be on our hands when we escape… what is a few dozen more gallons, anyway?"
Soka continued to stare at him. It was not a hard one, or even accusatory as he deserved… it seemed as though she pitied him… or it was empathy. He had trouble with turian expressions. Whatever the case was, it was softer than before. Ike she was coming to understand his position.
"I want to be as angry at you, Merrick," she admitted to him softly. "…but I am forced to admit that I can't find a fault in what you're saying… resistance will only cause more suffering for civilians. It still feels wrong… but I think you're right… sacrificing lives to save more lives…"
Scratching at the dried blood on his ear, James huffed as he nodded.
"It's undeniably shit plan, I know, but it's all I have…" he admitted with a great deal of self-directed malice in every word he spoke. "…but… if it makes you feel better, if it goes to shit, we'll have a second option on the table…"
Soka squinted and tilted her head in confusion.
"Second option?" she inquired, her mandibles pushing out slightly.
James emitted a small humourless laugh.
"Well…yours, of course," he reminded her. "We get surrounded and go down shooting… but we'll do it together… as partners… Is it a deal?"
That elated Soka greatly.
"Deal," she agreed, outstretching her talon hand out to him. He took it and they shook on their virtual suicide pact.
He watched as Soka seemed to smile. She seemed satisfied that her suggestion wasn't entirely off the table. If he was being honest it seemed like of the two, it would be hers that would be the more likely outcome. Still, he wasn't about to give her the satisfaction of an easy death. They would succeed in their objective and they would live, even if it meant dragging her kicking, clawing and screaming off this world.
…well,maaaybe not clawing. If she started swinging her talons around at him, then whatever, he could stay… perhaps… It all depended on if he could pull the old Boy Who Cried Husk trick on her again. If turians were half as gullible as he had been led to believe then perhaps that was a possibility.
"We'll head out in an hour…" Soka's words brought him back to reality. She pushed herself out of her seat next to him and sat down on the ground in front of him and added. "Now, take off that leg plating… I'll properly field dress that wound and I'll see if I can solder on turian plating in place. Won't be a good replacement, but it's better than what you have now… can't be carrying you around, right partner?"
Sighing, James nodded and outstretched his leg and allowed the turian woman to pry off the plating and the half-assed bandaging he did to his charred leg. Silently he hoped turian doctoring was not as painful as he hoped it would not be.
But life isn't fair, now is it?