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Thane cocked his head, listening, counting.
Shepard had been pacing up and down past his quarters for thirty-five minutes and thirty seconds Galactic Standard Time. She had paused in her pacing three times, for approximately seven minutes apiece. He chided himself for vagueness – it had been fifteen minutes the first time – seven minutes the second, and twelve the third.
He could not go to her. She must decide to enter and to speak. He recognized anxiety mixed in with his curiosity. What so troubled her?
Analyzing his state of mind, he accepted his anxiety. Had she decided she could not have a relationship with him, whether from his illness or his past? He returned to his meditations and allowed the rhythm to drain away the worry.
The hatch seals popped; moister air hissed past him, the damp brushing his hands before being absorbed by the filters. Shepard hesitated between one step and the next, then continued to where the entry widened and she could see him. The cool air carried her scent, human musk mingled with sharp eucalyptus and the Mindoir flower called dous syèl la.
Silence hung between them, the echo of her boots against the metal decking fading. “If I’m interrupting,” she said, “I can come back later.”
He turned his head. “You are never an interruption. Join me, siha.”
Her hands rasped down her uniform: he remembered the callouses on her fingers and the sides of her palms. She swallowed. Then she crossed into his peripheral vision, paused, then responded to his gesture by taking the chair opposite his. An ashy grey tinged her sepia skin. He held out his hands and she put hers in his; her palms were damp.
“Are you well, siha?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
“You need not worry about me.” So far, the conversation followed their usual path. He cocked his head, his brow furrowing, and then pushed. “Are you certain nothing is troubling you?”
“Will you –” She stopped and caught her breath. “Will you hear my confession, Thane?”
He dipped his head, rubbed his thumb across the back of her wrist, then inhaled, a deep slow breath which tested the air around her and deciphered the clues in her scent. “I will hear whatever you wish to tell me. Do not feel you must tell me anything which makes you uncomfortable.”
“After all we’ve said to each other – If I can’t tell you the truth about myself, who can I tell?” She managed a faint smile, but the lines around her eyes deepened.
“Then it is something you feel hesitant to tell me regarding yourself?” He drew his hands from hers; clasping his hands, resting them on the table, feeling the floor wobble beneath him.
“It’s nothing to do with – us.”
This breath was pure relief. He hoped she didn’t hear it as that. To add another burden to the ones she already carried would be intolerable.
She grimaced. “That is – I need to tell you something about myself.”
He nodded, then coaxed her as he had once coaxed Irikah to confide her concerns. “Siha, there is nothing you could tell me which would change my regard for you.”
“Don’t be so certain.” Her white teeth worried her purple lips a moment.
She must know her own tells – so this is one she hasn’t been able to eradicate.
“When you’re military, you assume your career’s an open book, but that’s not necessarily so. Your subordinates don’t know everything in your career,” a rueful grin twisted her lips for a few seconds, then added, “and sometimes not even your superiors. And those who aren’t military, well…” She shrugged, and took another, deeper breath before sitting back and folding her hands in front of her. “For instance – I have no idea how much you know about my career. I know your sources are well-informed.”
“I know your name, and your rank.” He steepled his fingers, then reeled the facts out of his memory. “You graduated from the N7 program of the Alliance Navy, and most recently were a Lieutenant Commander, assigned to the SSV Normandy as its Executive Officer, and then as its Captain. You are a Spectre for the Citadel Council. After attaining your Spectre status, you stopped another Spectre, Saren Arterius, from destroying the Citadel with an army of geth and a creature rumored to be of great power and possibly a member of a race of equally unfathomable powers. They have been referred to in those rumors as Reapers. Two years and one month ago, in the Terminus, while searching for geth, the Normandy was destroyed over Alchera, presumably by those same geth, and you were killed. You are thirty-one years old, counting the two years you were dead – but, in fact, being resurrected by Cerberus.” He rocked his left hand back and forth on the table. “In addition, during those two missing years, you developed remarkable biotic talents.” He clasped his hands.
Laughter burst out of her throat.
He arched his brow in silent question.
“It’s just – as if you read it from a prompter.”
“I read very quickly,” he said. “And of course, remember what I read exactly.”
Her amusement vanished. She grimaced and grabbed at her right shoulder. She kneaded it, then rotated it, working out the kink, pushing the pain away.
Still not entirely healed. I will need to watch that shoulder for her when she fights.
Veronique inhaled, then nodded – a jerk of her head down then another up. “Did what you read mention I have a nickname to go with the scars and my time prior to the N7 program?”
“No.”
“They call me ‘the butcher of Torfan’, and the words ‘ruthless’ and ‘nothing gets in her way’ usually accompany it.”
His eyes unfocused then refocused. “Torfan. Batarian,” he said. “Moon. A cold grey desert stretches out below a distant blue sun, a flat plain ringed by mountains as sharp as fangs, desolate and forgotten. Recycled air hisses past my ears — cool and dry, the sharpness of steel and the sting of eezo drifting in it. Dust puffs around my feet as I walk. A dead desert, empty as the dark beyond the galaxy.”
Her eyes went wide and her lips parted. She put her hand to her lips but could not could stop the words. “When were you there?”
“Ah.” He clasped his hands together, rested his chin on them, and disappeared into memory for a few more seconds. “Some years ago. I was much younger. I accepted a contract to remove a certain batarian slaver by another. I was –” His full lips twitched in a smile. “Smuggled on and smuggled off. It was a contract I undertook in order to find a third batarian.”
“And you,” Veronique stopped. “You’re here. Of course, you fulfilled your contract.”
“Yes.”
She stood up, abruptly, turning to stare out of the window at the engine churning away below them. “I believe I was on Torfan after that. There were still batarians there. Slavers.”
“Surely you were not alone there, siha.”
“No.” She shook her head, and he saw her shoulders shift in a sigh. “Intel marked Torfan as a central slaver base on the edge of batarian territory. Our orders were to clear the moon. Rescue as many slaves as we could, then wipe out the base.” She frowned. “Retaliation for batarian slaver raids like the one on Mindoir.” A moment of silence sat between them before she said, “I was born on Mindoir,” and continued. “They sent all of 9th Company groundside, with 16th Company’s 99th Platoon sappers and engineers for barriers and shields, and the SS Kondō Nobutake and her fighters as air support if needed. The 9th comprised one hundred twenty good men and women in three platoons: the 107th, the 111th, and the 122nd.”
She turned around and dropped into the chair. “I was second-in-command, my 107th the point of the spear. Call sign Bloody Angels. CO was Fifteen – Major Kyle. AJ Kyle. Andrew Jackson Kyle the Fifteenth. We drove the batarians underground into the depths of their base. I could have broken off when they started bleeding us and pulled out. I could have saved more of my people – I should have saved more of my people!” Her right hand balled into a fist, her knuckles turning pale. “But the batarians kept vanishing into further corridors. We found more and more captives, kept sending the ones that could walk or crawl back behind us, and it seemed as if every corner we turned, we found more foutu batarians scurrying away, hiding behind corners, behind crates thrown in our way. More of them popping out of tunnels to frag us and flank us. We had to keep our helmets on. For all we knew, they’d blow the seals and smother us in vacuum. And I kept losing my people, one by one, every corner we turned, every door we kicked down.”
She coughed. Thane handed her his cup. She took a couple of swallows, then started to hand back the tea. He shook his head, and she managed another second of smile and that sharp nod before her gaze shifted as she retreated into the past.
“They were mining the place as they retreated. My sappers disabled the mines – left them intact, but disabled the detonators. We – I – was half-mad with rage by the time we trapped them.” In a whisper, she added, “The loa was riding me.”
Loa? His translator did not attempt to interpret the word.
“Jammed them into a hole with no way out. Dozens of them, wounded, snarling – stopped. No place to go but through us, and they didn’t know how many of us they faced. If they’d known…” The cup rang against the metal desk. She raked her hands through her hair, caught the left index fingernail in a curl of her thick black hair and tore it free. The nail tore as well; she tugged it loose and sucked at the drop of blood on the cuticle before pressing her right thumb on it. “They started to fire, anyway, and I had adepts in my crew – we threw up barriers, blocked the charges. Their weapons overheated, burned through the last of their heat sinks. And the batarians – dropped their weapons. Surrendered.”
He lifted one hand. “Siha…”
She blinked several times, and moisture on her eyelashes sparkled in the light. “Let me say it. There’s not much of it left.”
He nodded. “As you wish.”
Shepard stared down at her hands. She turned them over and studied her palms. The little finger on her left hand twitched repeatedly.
He took her hands in his; she looked up, the Kahje ocean blue of her eyes bleak and damaged.
“We made them turn, put their hands behind them and kneel. I reminded my people why we were there, what these slavers had done to us. To our colonies. What they’d do again in a heartbeat, without any second thought. That we were there to stop them.” She inhaled. The air shifted around her, still warm and dry, but scented with her own sweat and that curl of sweetness from a flower's perfume. She dropped the words one by one into the iron and musk. “And I told them to fire. And – I fired first.” Her shoulders relaxed. “And they followed me.”
“What were your orders, exactly?”
She tilted her head to the right, frowning at him, as if the question confused her. “Drive the batarians off Torfan. Destroy the base.”
He stroked her forearm. “And did you?”
She shuddered. “We fired until our weapons overheated, and I was still so enraged – I set off the detonators.” She locked her eyes on Thane’s. “The loa was riding me. I backed my Marines up to the junction. My skin was a furnace, and I swung my arm, and the mines – all of them – exploded. The roof dropped on them. I heard the ones still alive screaming. Then I got us out of there. We carried the dead and the wounded with us. I called in the airstrike. Wound up with a thousand-meter deep hole in the moon. It was too much for my CO. Major Kyle.”
He cocked his head to one side and frowned. “What was too much?”
Veronique chewed on her lower lip. “The state the living slaves were in. They weren’t all human. But they were all in bad condition. Physically, psychologically… And the batarians didn’t just shoot my people. When they got the chance, they’d crack a face plate or cut an air hose, or shove a shiv in the spine where the joints were.” She bared her teeth, like a Kahje derhynha rising from deep ocean to strike. “They liked that. We could see them through the scopes, laughing when they did it. We did have our training. But – I killed them. Kyle – was a good soldier. One of the best, by-the-book and fair. A good man.” She thought about it a moment, then added, “A just man. But he’d never seen anything like it.” Veronique swallowed. “And he had no idea I was biotic. And I had no idea I could draw that much power out of myself. And afterwards I was no more biotic than I had been before that.”
Now we come to it. “Did you know you were biotic before that?”
She sat staring down at his supple green fingers interlaced with hers. “I was sixteen when batarian slavers came to Mindoir.”
“I see.”
Veronique locked her eyes on his, her pupils almost swallowing the irises. She ground her teeth together. Both fists clenched, the skin going beige where her nails dug into her palms.
“The Alliance came pretty quickly in answer to our distress call. I found out later they’d been tracking the batarians. And we knew war, my people. There were enough Army and Navy veterans among us. Mom and Dad were two of them – the military was one way out of poverty, and most of our colonists had been poor. We lost about a quarter of our population to the slavers. Say a thousand taken, mostly in the towns. Another two or three thousand dead, and I don’t know how many injured.” She stopped seeing his face, saw instead the burning buildings, the rubble, the bodies mangled among the ruins. “Our farm was some thirty miles from Port-au-Antoine. We saw Alliance ships coming down, but they didn’t reach us right away. I didn’t see all of what had happened until the Alliance brought those of us who survived into the port city. I was the only one left of my family.” She rubbed her right shoulder again, rotated it afterwards.
Thane gentled his voice, spoke softly. “There is something more you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”
She blinked again. Tears slipped out under her lashes. “I had slipped off to the foothills. I had a pet varren I’d raised from a cub. I didn’t want to do my chores. It was such a gorgeous warm day, and I was crazy with the spring weather, and I slipped off because there was a spot where Dulce had scented a rabbit hole, and I thought we’d get a couple of rabbits for dinner. When I heard the guns, I started running back. I don’t know how many times I fell, getting down through the fire-thorn bushes and the green-bark trees. And when I got back to the house, maman was next to the front door, dying, and papi lay dead in the yard. His pistol was under him.”
“Maman said… Call her. Call the loa. And then she said, I love you.” Veronique straightened, stiff as a rifle, her eyes now wide and wild, black pupils swallowing the iris, leaving only a line of blue. “I got the pistol. Then a clot of batarians charged around the corner of the house straight for me. I pointed the pistol and pulled the trigger. The gun was still hot and wouldn’t fire. Dulce went for the leader’s throat. He pulled a knife. Dulce was all I had left. The air bled red in front of me, this wave of heat like a forge, and I felt – I felt the loa ride me. I swept my arm out in front of me, and he spun into the air. He and the – three, no, five of them – came down so hard they bounced. I took the knife and finished what Dulce started.” She shivered. “I’ve never told anyone that before. I didn’t tell the soldiers when they came. I didn’t tell my aunt or my uncle, when the Alliance released me to them. And it never happened again, until –”
She coughed, and kept coughing. Thane offered her the cup again. She drank more of the tea. She swallowed air, over and over again, took another sip, then set the cup down and leaned forward until she could rest her forehead on the heels of her hands.
“Until Cerberus brought you back.”
A nod was all she could manage for a moment. “I think they must have used eezo in the procedure. It emerged again. On Mindoir, I drove it out of my head. Made myself forget the loa, forget what my mother and father taught me. I was to have been initiated that night – it was my birthday. My parents were dead. My brother 'Tienne was gone. I didn’t want to remember.” She straightened, then reached out and wrapped her right hand around his.
“Did you kill the slavers on Torfan because they were batarian?”
“I killed them because they were slavers.” She frowned. After a moment, still frowning, she said, “If they hadn’t been batarian, I might have accepted surrender.”
“You didn’t trust them because they were batarian?”
“I didn’t trust them to hold parole.” She managed a shaky inhale, then finished it. “I did my job.” Then she shook her head and curled her upper lip off her teeth. “No. I tell a lie. I did what I wanted. I killed them. All of them. One less slaver, a thousand less victims.”
“You did what you felt was needed.”
“Yes.”
“And your superiors?”
She looked away, then met his eyes again. “There was talk. A lot of talk. A personal interview with Captain Hackett, as he was at that time, and with Major Anderson. And a staff psychiatrist. More than one staff psychiatrist. Biotic tests, which came to nothing. Then an interview with an Admiral Mountpasse, who went through the records while I sat there. They gave me two weeks’ leave. Then they promoted me and put me into N7 training, with Anderson in charge of my training class.” Veronique closed her eyes, then opened them. “I told my people to fire, and I was the first to pull the trigger.”
“But you don’t regret it.”
“No. I don’t. Maybe I should.” Veronique ground her teeth. “Maybe someone else would regret it. I’d do it again. Give that order and pull that trigger.”
He nodded. “As I would again hunt down and kill Irikah’s murderers.”
“You understand?” Her voice quavered, and she put her fingers to her mouth.
“Understand what?”
“It doesn’t make you feel differently about me? I’ve seen how people look at me, once they find out, even my crew members, but you –” She studied his face.
“Knowing what I have done in my life, does that change how you feel towards me, siha?”
She shook her head. “No. What you said about the soul and the body being two separate things – that’s what I was taught when I was growing up. My maman was a mambo, a priestess. Her loa was Erzulie Dantor, but when a loa followed me, it was Marinette Bras Cheche [1]. I forgot… No. I threw that all away, after Mindoir.”
“What changed?”
“I met you. What you’ve said – what you’ve told me about your faith. I remembered what I was taught.” Poor Talitha, poor child who didn’t get away. “I remember now who I was to be – a mambo. Someone who calls the lightning – Marinette of the dry arms, she frees her people from bondage.” She smiled, then wound her fingers around his. “You gave me back that knowledge.”
Thane kissed her fingers. “My siha,” he said. “There will be time once this mission is done.”
Her alto lightened, with the faintest suggestion of a lilt rounding it. She pulled his hand to her lips and kissed it in turn before resting it against her cheek. “The Gran Karu desert on Mindoir is on the other side of the mountains from where we had our farm. Where the wind scours the stone into sculpture, and if you look at it at the right angle and the right time of day, you might see faces in it. Little grey-green lizards run the desert at night and bury themselves during the day. The succulents glow scarlet at night, and turn crimson during the day. Some of the colonists brought saguaro and planted it – you can cut off a stem and drink the water from it. The lichen reflects the sun, like – like dog tags caught by the light.” Veronique halted. “I’d like you to see that. You can hear voices in the wind at night, and the native succulents we make strong liquor from, something like tequila, they reach for the moon, for the wind.”
“There is still a colony on Mindoir?”
“Yes. They rebuilt, but it was never the same. The Alliance put a base there, and defense turrets and satellite defenses. I still have relatives there. I’ve never been back since I joined the military, but I think after this, I should like to.” A deep scarlet flushed up her face, coloring her warm brown skin. “And you said you’d like to see a desert.”
“I would like,” he said, “to see your desert. And your home.”
“They rebuilt the city, and the towns. More of my kind – Haitian, Dominican, Cuban, Louisiana Creole and Cajun – More of them came in spite of the raids. We got charity money, assistance from the Alliance. They rebuilt what they could. But it wasn’t the same. The slavers never hit us again – but it wasn’t the same.”
“Have you seen it since then? Pictures?”
“No. I sent money to help build a school, and money for a scholarship to the Navy college on Earth, in Vancouver. But I buried everything else there. I get recordings from my aunt and my uncle, and some of my cousins, but -” She motioned to her head, pretending to close a door and turn a key in a lock.
“As I said, a perfect memory can be a burden.”
“My memory’s not perfect.”
“No. But it is exact enough, is it not?”
“Yes.” She sighed, and freed her hand to rub her shoulder again.
He smiled. “What you tell me does not change how I feel about you, siha. Did you think it would?”
“I hoped it wouldn’t. But if – if we were to be involved, then you deserved to know all of what I am.”
“I knew that,” he said, “when you healed an injured salarian and let a mercenary walk away instead of throwing him out a window. And when you looked at a young asari woman wearing an Eclipse uniform and shot her without remorse, knowing she’d made her first kill.”
“She’d made her bones. She’d have gone on killing.”
“And so, you removed a little darkness from the world. Why not kill the other mercenary?”
“He told me what I needed to know. He didn’t – he felt different. He wasn’t willing to die, not really.”
“Interesting. You cleared a way for the workers trapped in the building to escape.”
Veronique shrugged. “They were innocents. They didn’t deserve to be treated like slaves. To be killed because they were inconvenient.”
“And you never told anyone else about Mindoir?”
“You mean –” She flushed again, and her eyes lowered, staring at their clasped hands. “His name was – is – Kaidan Alenko. I’d known him since we met at the depot where we both were assigned to the Normandy. We were together for a little while. I thought I loved him.” In a whisper he strained to hear she added, “And I thought he loved me. I thought he trusted me.” Sharp edges bordered the next words. “No. I never told him. I’ve never talked about it to anyone. Until now.”
“Siha.” He reached out to take her right hand in his left. “You honor me with your confidence.” He smiled. “Perhaps tonight you will sleep.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“To me. And I think – to Professor Solus, to Dr. Chakwas, and Mr. Vakarian.” He smiled. “As well, I do not think anything important slips past Yeoman Chambers or Miss Lawson.”
“I’ve taken up a lot of your time,” she said. “I should go.”
“Siha.”
She cocked her head and sank back into the chair.
“Think of your meeting on Horizon –”
She shifted, her eyes widening again.
“Consider it from his point of view. Cerberus gave neither of you reason to trust them. And in his mind you were dead – and now not dead. Where had you been? Cerberus’ reputation more than precedes them. He does not know what you know. I sense that his loyalty and his love are not given easily – and perhaps he has not had time to consider the many issues involved.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to plead his case, Thane!”
He smiled. Laughter spread through his nerves, and he spread his hands wide with it. “Believe me, it is as much a surprise to me!” He laid one hand on her muscled forearm, the warm brown skin beautiful against his green fingers, its fine black hairs prickling against his fingertips. “I would regret losing you to him. But I felt it unworthy of me not to be fair to him.”
She turned her arm under his and gripped his forearm with her hand. “Ou se solèy ki chofe mwen chak maten [2],” she said.
“I – believe my translator glitched.”
This smile lit her entire face, like a candle inside a lamp. “Someday,” she said, “I will tell you what it means.”
“I will be here. Whatever time I have is yours. Sleep well.”
She stood. “And you. Try to get some sleep yourself.”
“Now that Kolyat and I are reunited, I am content with my life, siha. I await the end of our mission. I sleep as well as anyone aboard, except, perhaps, for Yeoman Chambers.”
Her steps, leaving, sounded lighter.
He wondered, before he returned to his meditations, if anyone on board might know of her religion. Perhaps Dr. Chakwas, who knew so much about so many unusual things…?
[1] Marinette Bras Cheche: Literally "Marinette of the dry arms." This is a petro loa or an evil spirit. Worship of her is not spread all over Haiti but is growing rapidly in southern parts. Her ceremonies are held under a tent and lit with a huge fire in which salt and petrol are thrown.
She is most dreaded; a she-devil; the sworn servant of evil. She is respected by werewolves, who hold services in her honor. She is an agent of the underhand dealings of Kita who is, herself, an outstanding loa sorceress.
The screeching owl is the emblem of Marinette. When she mounts someone they behave as an owl, hooking their fingers, lowering their heads and scratching.
After mounting people, she talks of eating people and confesses hideous crimes. At the end the houngan and the possessed alike jump in the fire and stamp it out. For sacrifice she is offered chickens that have been plucked alive, goats and sows. However, no one can touch these animals while preparing them; they must also be buried. Marinette is the mistress of Petro-e-rouge and wife to Ti-Jean-pied-sec.
She wanders the woods and goes to her secret place where the offerings she shares with no one are left.
Notes: I found the above info while researching Voduon, but have lost the source for the above. Another source, was, of course, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinette_(Vodou)
[2] Ou se solèy ki chofe mwen chak maten: You are the sun that warms me in the morning