Chapter Text
“So you were part of the Shanxi war?” The krogan eyed the fragile human woman with a mixture of curiosity and distrust.
“You’ve been to Afterlife again, haven’t you? What did I tell you about that place?”
In the dim light of the hangar, the alarm’s crimson glare lit up her hair and made it seem like flames were licking her scarred face. She concealed a wince with the flurry of her hand shoving a heat sink into the shotgun.
“Coming on, you’re always on my case about that place, but I’m big enough to know better. You know, they say worse things about you than you could ever say about them. Patriarch said...”
She holstered her shotgun, a familiar weight settling into her lower back as the eezo-powered clamps latched onto it. The worst was over now, she could rely on just her pistol. When she stood up, she was almost a head shorter and a hundred years younger than Gam.
“It’s ‘come on’, kiddo. You haven’t been practicing your English, either. And you go listening to Patriarch’s tall fibs.”
Gam lumbered over to her, his finger still on the trigger as he scanned the premises.
“You’re doing that thing I don’t like, the motherment thing.” much to his displeasure, his voice ended on a squeaky note, much higher than an adult krogan’s should. That put a damper on his whole intimidation act.
A dead vorcha lay splayed on top of an air conditioning console, his face fused to the sizzling panel. Between them and the exit were enough crates of red sand to buy Illium whole, each one a potential hiding spot for an engineer’s turret or a hidden mech. She ignored the drugs, they were much harder to move than information and bodies.
His teeth chattered. It was cold enough inside to keep red sand from overbaking and losing its potency. The textured metal walls rose high, thick with insulation to conceal the ungodly noise mass effect drives made on lift-off. Considering there was no central authority on Omega, save for Aria T’Loak, the walls were not made to any real code. Gam thought he heard the rap of a rifle on the other side. He grumbled and turned to give her the all clear signal.
“Gam, on your left!” she stepped between him and an attack drone, taking the full brunt of the explosion on her shield. The room collapsed in on itself and became a pinprick of precision surrounded by a river of gray and white waves as she swam through the air. Her lungs gasped for air when she hit the concrete floor.
“Tala! I said the room was CLEAR! Don’t make me a LIAR!” he screamed and bulled his way to the engineer’s cover, demolishing everything in his path. Crates flew through the air as if they were flimsy cardboard boxes, some spilling their insides as they smashed into walls and other cargo. Red sand formed diffuse clouds, bursting out of its prison and spreading, covering the room in a red film.
She lifted herself on her knees, scrambling for her shotgun and screaming for Gam to take cover. It was no use, not when the bloodrage boiled through him, cursing through his veins and clouding his judgement. He vaulted over another workbench, grabbing and smashing one Eclipse merc’s visor, driving the shards deep into his eyes. Satisfied with his handy work, he caught the engineer between two crates. Bullets chipped off his shield, lodging themselves in his armor or thick hide. He didn’t seem to notice. Tala couldn’t decide which was worse, the man’s screams of agony or the other woman’s head popping like an overripe melon.
The last Eclipse merc threw her rifle down when she ran out of heat sinks and attempted to escape through the emergency door. Tala shot her in the back, downing her shields in one shot and curbing her retreat with another other.
“You weren’t a liar, Gam, but don’t let this happen again. We could’ve been the ones dead this time.” she turned to him, almost cooing to the krogan, petting him on the only exposed part of his neck.
“I hate it when you’re right. Are you hurt?” he panted, reason slowly seeping back into his bewildered eyes.
“You kidding me? I take rockets to the face for breakfast!”
“You humans are weird. And squishy.”
“I was. Not anymore.”
“Huh?”
“Part of the Shanxi wars.”
They walked side-by-side and into the putrid Omega slum. Out here, on the other side of the warehouse, the light was a sickly yellow, licking the corners of dilapidated ghetto apartment blocs, with their caved-in entrances and broken light fixtures. Apartments didn’t have windows, and if they did, they would most likely be smashed in or walled up. What is the purpose of a view if the only thing you see is more grime and filth? They kept walking, each street and back alley bringing them closer to home. Amorphous apartment bloc entrances began to make way for shop fronts, garrish and just as derelict as the shopkeeps themselves, afire in clashing neon colors. Merchants, mercenaries, mobsters and mere mortals sold, traded, bartered and stole goods, going about their day with nary a look to the beggars on their knees or the rotting corpses gutting the sewers. Crematoriums are expensive on Omega, more than letting the garbagemen jettison bodies into orbit. Gam hoped they did airlock the bodies, but with the increasing numbers of vorcha in the garbagemen units, he began doubting it. For some reason, everyone gave a wide berth to him and Tala. Their armor was no more bloodspattered than others’, but it was something about the tiny human that made other people skittish. He wanted to think his lumbering presence helped, but he was not yet bigger than the krogan mercs gathering in Afterlife.
Gam chewed on her words for a while, tasting different answers and questions in the back of his mind. Thinking so hard made him want to punch things, but Tala frowned on that. She walked a half step ahead, giving Gam a potent view of the arsenal strapped to her back. If he wanted to, he could end her life with a simple nudge in the right direction, the equivalent of the force he would use to pet his varren. He shook those thoughts away violently. He was in her krantt of his own free will.
“How many turians did you kill?” he said after a long while. Tala shot back a look that could rot the teeth off a batarian and burst out laughing.
“Keep on asking the important questions, Gam.” she choked and coughed, steadying herself on a precariously insulated heating pipe as she unlocked the compound door. “Come on, let’s clean up and I’ll tell you a story if you want.”
“Will there be bloodshed and bashed-in heads?”
“I’m mildly disturbed by how good your vocabulary is when violence is involved.” she shoved him in the direction of the lockers, helping him with the intricately fastened clasps at the back of his armour. “How you krogans can put your armour on over this hump is a mistery to me.”
“Eh, I just like you helping out. I can do it myself if I wanted to. But then there’s no one to scratch my hump, hee-hee-hee.” he gurgled and Tala forgot for a moment that he was a half-ton killing machine. He was still a kid, barely an adolescent by krogan standards.
Slavoj and Zerkin came onto the intercom, welcoming them back to the compound with a spray of disinfectant. Artificial daylight was creeping in through the airways, a grisly reminder of the daily trudge through Omega. She turned the radio on as she walked towards the showers, fully prepared to ignore the news. The low, hoarse male voice blathered on, rising above the old machine’s static, diffuse like a plume of smoke.
New witness reports are surfacing on the exonet about commander Shepard sightings in different galaxy clusters. While the Systems Alliance dismisses them as fabrications from hopeful fans, it could be the latest move in the human alliance’s ploy to drive up recruitment numbers.
Tala swallowed hard and turned the radio off.
***
The soldier looked on in horror as a pair of alien eyes stared at him from behind a visor. They were keen, reptilian, and attached to a monster about 7 feet high. In fact, the last thing he saw was the creature moving its mandibles and leveling the gun at him. Sadly, the cause of death was actually a heart attack.
All humans and turians probably know this story, but, for a lot of species, the First Contact War, or the Relay 314 Incident, is largely chalked up to both species being a bit too overzealous in using big guns to do the talking. The fact is, no matter how much some would say that the story is proof that humans don’t have a quad, if your entire belief system would turn topsy-turvy in a matter of minutes and you'd find the impossible pulling a gun at you, you'd be having a hard time controlling your heart beats, too. On the other end of the scale, the appearance of humans in galactic space was no more a novelty to most other species than the weekly news of eezo prices rising, regardless of how the history books spin it.
There are many truths in this world, Gam, and none are more important than the ones you don’t want to admit to yourself.
The first truth was that she woke up in pain, sprawled on the ceiling of the escape pod, feeling like each breath was a sisyphean attempt. It was a miracle that she was still alive after debris from the ship’s explosion had damaged the pod’s aeroshell. The ship’s motherboard was reduced to a flurry of sparks and fizzling noises, all of its elegant haptic projections flickering. Two of the chairs lay crumpled inwardly like cheap movie set props, made all the more ghastly by their occupants twisted limbs and vacant expressions.
The second truth is that she would relive this moment in her nightmares for the rest of her life, but, for now, she gently pushed Jaroslav’s contorted body away from her and tried to stand up. Her aching flesh screamed for attention, needles scraping at her insides as the small nanobots in her bloodstream surged through her body, assessing and repairing whatever damages they found. She overcame the urge to fall back down long enough to lean on a wall. Her EVA armour was still intact, the computer ticking away her vitals on the visor’s screen.
“Shepard?” the voice was accompanied by soft pressure on her shoulder that caused jolts of agony. She turned around to look at the other man, her eyes searching for the face beneath the helmet.
“Moore, is that you? I can’t see straight.”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m so glad to see you in one piece, I thought I was the only one.”
It hurt to look up at the tall, barrel-chested man, but the cabin suddenly felt less like a tomb as the suit computer acknowledged his presence and began projecting his vitals on her helmet plate’s grid.
Jonathan Moore, scanning…
Vitals: Steady (HB 95; BP 115/75 mm Hg)
Injuries: Minor
WARNING! Stress levels high!
WARNING! Fatigue level high!
“Are you alright?” she said, instinctively reaching out to touch him as if to ensure that he was not a ghost.
“Twisted some muscles, probably a few upset ribs, nothing major. You?”
“I’m standing, that should be enough for now.” she tried to sound reassuring, but knew it was a useless gesture. Her visor blared like a banshee, neon colors flashing further stress and fatigue diagnostics on the both of them. She silenced them with a flick of her wrist computer's control, pushing them to the back of her mind.
There were no other life signs in the cramped pod, most of the safety harnesses hanging open uselessly. Smith was still in the seat, but the belt had provided her little benefit as it wrapped around her neck.
“Moore, we should…”
“Yeah, not more we can do here, LT. ‘Sides, we don’t know if they tracked us.” his words felt like they’d been dragged through gravel before emerging and registering in her brain.
She raised her hand to point at the weapon locker, the authority of the gesture silencing her grief for a moment. Moore complied instantly. He flung her weapons towards her, then started pounding on the door, to the locking system’s aggravated insistences that they “please stand by to connect to port authority”.
“Broken, the damn thing’s broken!” he muttered under his breath and moved past Shepard, closer to the control panel.
Shepard swung toward the lateral escape hatch and began kicking it. The door gave inch by inch, until their ears were assaulted with the wails of sudden depressurization. As if on cue, both of their hands shot to check their oxygen tanks. The unexpected burst of light blinded them for a couple of seconds, until their visor adjusted its tint automatically.
“Switch your comm to the secure channel and disengage the oxygen tank. It’s breathable.” she broke the silence, tapping the command on her wrist computer without glancing at it.
“Wait! Let me take point on this. If I go down, you might still have a chance to complete the mission.”
She nodded and Moore jumped out of the escape pod. He let out a surprised whimper as he drifted towards the ground, landing on his ass with a soft thud on the ground. It was a rookie mistake to not compensate for the planet’s gravity. Shepard let it slide. As she came down from the slight drift, the earth felt soft beneath her boots, a luxurious sensation she hadn't felt very often throughout her life.
Their landscaping attempt was, regretfully, a complete failure. There was a muddy trail left in the wake of the escape pod, bordered by broken coniferous trees on all sides. The broken branches and various debris didn’t take away from the beauty of the scene: dwarf shrubs surrounded the small clearing, converging together in a wild hedge that stood guard against the immense fir-like trees. Their branches intertwined to form a blue tinged canopy that scarcely let the light filter through. A lacework of what appeared to be moss - or perhaps a parasitic species - cast its tendrils close to the ground, transforming the entire forest into a ghost wood, muffling even the sounds of birds and, most worryingly, of other animals. The terrain was treacherous, thick roots hiding behind a carpet of green-brown needles and rocks jutting upwards in a contest to collect their rightful space on the forest floor.
The trees seemed to be the only witnesses of their arrival. It would have been idyllic, Shepard thought, if not for the heat. It was nothing short of punishing. Droplets of sweat were already forming on both their brows, in spite of their suits' attempt to compensate. Even the ship's exterior shell was burnt to a crisp, the metal cracking as it cooled down.
Shepard looked back inside the pod and shielded her eyes against the terrifying moment when Jaroslav unclasped his safety harness and yelled at her to be still while he pressed his body against hers, squeezing her in a none-too-gentle embrace. Not right now, not right now. She clutched her pistol as if it were the only buoyant device in a stormy ocean, her knuckles turning the color of ash beneath her suit’s glove.
Moore seemed lost in his own private hell as he took a deep breath, his fingers clenched in the hold signal. Slowly, tentatively, he began circling the escape pod. He hadn’t been out of her view for long when Shepard heard a metallic sound, followed by muffled noise coming from behind the pod. Hoarse voices sputtered, clicked and hissed outside of her view, brought by the soft wind that buffeted the pod.
Before she could swerve to take cover behind a sturdier looking rock a blue fog engulfed her, violently yanking her off the ground. The sudden feeling of weightlessness was strangely comforting, so unlike the numbness of zero G, as if time itself had stopped. She reached for the weapon as it drifted from her open palm, throwing herself off balance, but the sense of urgency drifted away imperceptibly. The dizziness steadied when she opened her eyes again to find that she was now staring at the small mound of dirt and rich forest floor rot the escape pod had greedily gathered in its haphazard touchdown. A second later, it was she who made an inelegant landing, shielding her head with her hands as she fell face-forward on the soft earth, rattling the pinecones.
Two strong arms gripped her hands brusquely and twisted them to meet behind her back, renewing the complaints from her harried muscles. The feeling was all wrong, sharp claws digging into the softer fabric of the suit's wrists, three fingers increasing the pressure as she struggled and was hoisted up none too gently. The world was suddenly made of pins and knives competing for purchase of her limbs and she gave in to the dire need to slip into the comfort of darkness.
***
Earlier
Bellator sat leaning leisurely on the compound’s inner wall, hidden between the service trucks. He was inspecting his two-toed mag boots for wear and tear with the professionalism of a fisherman scrutinizing another's prize catch. Satisfied with the left, he took off the right and began looking at the overlay, checking each clip individually first, before he moved on to the sole and started cleaning them.
It had been a long time since he had felt the anxiety of having his feet unshod for the harsh winters of his home planet, or had felt hunger clawing at his gizzard. So much has changed and yet some things never change, he thought part ruefully and part hopefully, glancing at Vakarian as his silhouette transitioned from a mote on the horizon to a silhouette and finally to a fully-grown ugly thorn in his side. His armor sparkled in the intense sunlight of Ostia, the metal alloy of his shoulderpads throwing dazzling glints into Bell’s hyper-sensitive eyes. The young turian was, as usual, stopped by his students on his road to Bellator’s position, dodging them expertly with a smile and some sweet flutterings as he made his way on the training grounds, going right past the trucks and making a beeline for his little ensconcement.
“Can’t a guy have a moment of peace?” he growled to the newcomer, who merely clapped his shoulder and slumped on the wall until he was at his level, stretching his legs and hooking one of his ankle spurs around Bellator’s own.
“Bell, you know how much I miss your beautiful face when you’re not around.” Vakarian’s low voice rumbled in dual tone, slipping a smile to soothe the sting of the barb. As the newcomer unhooked his helmet, Bell got a good look at the freshly retouched blue Vakarian markings that adorned Garrus’ face. Some people were born with too much.
“Last time I checked, I haven’t sprouted boobs and started calling myself Liluva.” he returned with a snort, but did not untangle his leg from the hold.
“Hmm, tempting. Remember when we were little and you dressed up in my mom’s clothes? You were quite dashing - hell, I might’ve bonded to you right then and there if my dad hadn’t stopped our starstruck romance.” Garrus chuckled weakly and let his shoulders sag, unholstering his assault rifle from its back slot and setting it to rest on the ground.
“Hard day today?” Bell turned to his friend and grabbed his forearm, noticing for the first time how sunken and hollow his eyes were.
“My investigation into that bastard hanar slaver was cut off. Suddenly classified, they say. I say they can go shove a krogan’s fist down their cloacas. I know that jelly was luring fresh immigrants with promises of jobs and then farming them out into the Terminus systems. And on the Citadel, too!” he snarled, oblivious to Bell’s expression changing from worried to downright miserable. So much for a quiet day in the sun.
“The Citadel makes people go soft. Good thing they have the illustrious Patrol Officer Garrus Vakarian to help their poor, their innocent and their little hearts.” Bell added wistfully, hoping to get a rise out of his friend. Anything would be better than abject defeat.
Garrus picked up his rifle and used it as support to get up on his feet. He turned to Bellator and lightly kicked his exposed feet, motioning for him to put on his boots.
“C’mon, your little lady needs some cleaning and you promised me you’d speak to Tirnovian for some actual food this time around.”
Bell looked at his rifle and realised, with disgust, that Vakarian was right. Lady was positively filthy with dirt and grime caked into the lubricants. Spirits, but it had felt so good to just lay in the god damned shade and look up at the…
“Gar, what the fuck is that?” he jumped up, a cloud of dust billowing around him, much to Garrus’ displeasure. The joke was too old, but he nonetheless turned around to glower at where Bellator was pointing.
“Spirits, it’s an escape pod! Something must be wrong with it, it’s burning up too fast on re-entry.”
He was suddenly silenced by the sound of a crash, followed by a small quake.
PATROL OFFICER VAKARIAN AND LIEUTENANT SILVA ARE CALLED TO EXIT POINT D6. THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE. ALL PERSONNEL MUST RETURN TO THEIR STATIONS IMMEDIATELY AND AWAIT NEW ORDERS. REPEAT, PATROL OFFICER VAKARIAN AND LIEUTENANT SILVA ARE CALLED TO EXIT POINT D6. THIS IS NOT AN EXERCISE.
Their omnitools pinged simultaneously with mission details, as overhead the speakers blared. Bellator fell back on his ass with lightning speed to clip on his left boot, while Garrus was busy scrambling with the right. The courtyard was quickly emptying, crowds of raw recruits smashing into eachother alongside the more experienced instructors and administrative staff, who rustled, cajoled and yelled them to an orderly retreat.
“Ouch, watch it, asshole. Spurs don’t grow back.”
“Don’t tell me I’m turning you on, sweetie, we have work to do.” he quipped, a glib note finding its way into his terse tone of earlier.
As they both worked on making Bellator presentable, a short turian in full armor exited from the service building next to the wall, panting as she reached them. Her armor had the usual appearance of having been slapped on in haste, a gauntlet hanging by a mere clasp. Garrus shot to attention first as she hurriedly smashed the other two clasps, followed immediately by Bellator.
“Not the time for cuddling, boys, we have work to do. Unidentified escape pod crashlanded in the forrest a leuga from here. We’re the welcoming party. Command says it might be a group of the criminals activating dormant mass relays.” her normally flanged voice was almost mono-tone in her haste. She dashed into a mad sprint and almost barrelled into the driver’s seat of the light armored vehicle two hundred meters ahead, leaving Garrus and Bell to eat her dust quite literally.
Bellator quickly followed and settled into the co-pilot position. His hands began turning on the navigation control and shields, as Garrus hauled himself up to the machine gun nest, securing his sniper rifle close at hand. The base doors groaned and slid away. Soon their little tank trudged past, heading towards their mission coordinates.
“What do we know?” Garrus edged in through the comm after he clicked his helmet in place, cursing as Liluva’s careless driving jolted him up and down and side to side.
“Not more than what I told you. S.S.V. Parsus found an unidentified space shuttle that looked like one of Tirnovian’s cans of the special food attempting to open up the primary relay the next system over. It didn’t respond to hails, so they shot at them, but the damn thing was nimble and led them on an FTL chase near our planet. Parsus barely managed to keep on its tail and bring it down, but not before it spat out about six escape pods, one of which seems to have escaped our flaks.”
Bell let out a shrill hiss that pierced Garrus’ ears
“And they said no more air defenses, we’re just a training facility, not in hostile space they said. What, are you afraid of a few birds?” Bell mocked, imitating the highborn mannerisms of the Executor. Garrus would have liked to interject, but the vehicle’s frantic jerking and lurching on the rough terrain left him with precious little time to protect his pelvic bones.
“Not to say I don’t trust you, Lil, but you only took me and Sharpeyes here to a forest that might be swarming with hostiles? Not that I’m not flattered.” his speech was peppered with grunts as the LAV lurched to the right, just in time to avoid a tree that, to Lil’s opinion, just sprouted fully formed in the middle of the road.
"Silva, I'm absolutely wounded that you'd say that! You mean G over there and I aren't enough for you? You damn whore." she chirped and Garrus thought he had never heard a more beautiful sound. "Relax, ladies, it'll be like a shopping trip to Cipritine, only this time G will finally find some asari red panties to match his striking blue markings. And with less casualties." she added as an afterthought.
“She’s right, Bell, whatever hostiles survived that crash will most likely be dazed, if not damn comatose or dead.”
His hip spurs started digging into the seat rather painfully, each lurch and jump accentuating it. Finally, the tank slowed its speed until he could make out the outline of the damage the escape pod wrecked in its wake. It was a sad, small thing, barely able to contain three turians - maybe four if they were women.
"Target in sight, Lil. I updated the Lav's nav sensors." he grunted, none too happy about the surrounding conditions. In a forest, the element of surprise was always on the part of the defenders.
"Silva, you're with me, fire up the proton ammo. Vakarian, if they're hostile, fire at will but aim for incapacitating rather than killing. Cryo rounds in your rifle, got that? Some idiots think we have a new species on our hand and the docs want first dibs." she barked the orders and jumped from the driver's seat, landing with a practiced swagger. Bellator was hot on her heels, seeking cover in a nearby copse. The two worked in tandem, Bell scouting ahead as Lil primed her amp in preparation for release.
“They cleaned out an entire parking lot with that little can?” Bell whistled appreciatively, taking in the fallen trees and the skid marks that led to the vessel. For a quarter of a leuga, the only thing in its wake was destruction on either side, with a smattering of confused wildlife that chirped and trilled and claxoned urgently. “Only a hanar pilot could’ve done that.” he added with a chuckle, but stopped when he heard Lil grumbling in their comm. Garrus found it sufficiently funny to turn off his microphone for a few seconds, not enough to risk their commander’s ire.
As if on cue, a hatch flew open from the pod, sailing through the air before lodging itself in a cormella bush a couple of meters off. He could see Bellator's muscles seizing before all stiffness escaped him as the stims kicked in. Bell lunged with lightning speed for the northwestern side of the derelict vessel, away from the newly forged exit. Garrus hoisted his rifle and settled it on his shoulder, peering through the scope to get a better look at the pod and its escapee. His line of vision was impacted, so he promptly switched to concussive shots, inserting them in the special slot on his rifle. The heat-seeking tracker would give him a good chance to hit around the corners, enough to at least stun the unfortunate creature in its trajectory.
"Batarians, didn't I tell you? Garrus, try all their comm ranges and see if you can pick up their radio chatter."
"Negative, commander, none of the usual pick up. Wait, I'm picking something up on low frequencies...spirits, these haven't been used in centuries!"
His omnitool sputtered and whirred on his wrist as he manually tuned the frequencies to catch a better reception. All that came was a garbled mess of consonants with no elegance, grating on his nerves. The translator chip nestled in his ear canal hurled barely veiled insults at him, all of them beginning and ending with "unidentified".
"No use, they're probably speaking in code. I'm no linguist, but it doesn't sound like a batarian dialect."
The language, in and of itself, attested to the fact that the speakers had no dual larynges, which always puzzled Garrus in alien species. What if their primary voice box was damaged and they couldn’t call for help otherwise? But it wasn’t that fact that gave him pause: it was the strange way it lilted and burst out in staccato, then lowered again in a hail of plosives that he was pretty sure no turian alive could pronounce. One of the voices was softer in tone, yet more aggressive in reach, which, to his mind, merely meant that it was in charge of whatever was going on.
He lifted his eyes from his omni with renewed interest in the scene ahead of him, just in time to see a silhouette come face to face with Bell, who shrieked in surprise as the newcomer had - quite curiously - managed to pounce on him unawares. The ensuing madness became a blur to him, as his friend trained the rifle on the alien, only to have the creature double up, clutching its chest as it landed face-forward on the ground with a heavy thud. Lil sprinted out of her cover without having fired a shot, as bewildered as Bell by their combined carelessness, only to focus her sights immediately back to the escape pod, where the faint whisper of armor clanking on metal caused her to flare up the amp. Pulsing with biotic energy, she unleashed a singularity directed near the vessel’s corner, which sprung forth from the veil to burst into a mini blackhole when it reached its target. She was rewarded with a small body floating in the newly created gravity well.
Bell approached the shifting black hole with caution, first snagging one of the creature’s hands that hung limply outside of its area of effect, before yanking vigorously on it to tug the body down. Lil soon joined him and gave the all-clear to Garrus, who returned the signal and was rewarded with a motion to come closer and help them restrain the captive.
With no more heat signatures in sight outside of some harmless creatures and a hungry molossi circling them at a wary distance, he directed his steps towards the listless body that had emerged from the pod first, noting with professional curiosity that it no longer breathed.
The smell of burnt meat and fuel overpowered his nostrils, the cloy stench making his gizzard churn even through his suit’s air filters. As he bent down on his haunches, he saw the same nausea reflected in his friends’ wary movements. True, he’d seen worse breaking up bar fights in Chora’s den, but the sight of some poor saps frying alive still brought a tinge of empathy.
Had he been a less observant person, he might’ve thought the strange armor was merely some odd experimental piece from a merc group in the Terminus systems. He narrowed his eyes and took in the way it was constructed: the ceramic and ablative materials, the clean design, the streamlined joints and joinings, spoke to him of a military faction more than a ragtag group of individualists. In a split second, his hand detached itself from his will and found the clips that held the body’s helmet in place, snapping them and taking it off. His breath caught in his throat at the first sign of pink and purple skin, but his hand continued its motion, revealing a strange head that bore no resemblance to anything he had ever seen in his life. He was startled as he heard his own voice yell towards Lil and Bell, in time with him throwing the helmet away. Once again, turian paranoia proved to be right as he thanked the spirits for being forced to stew in the recycled air of his suit.
He heard Lil approach him, momentarily pausing her mission report to base to bark orders at his friend, urging him caution in handling the prisoner. Taking the advice to heart, Bell connected his armored fist to the surviving alien’s helmet in such a way that, had she not been wearing it, her brain would have decorated the lush grass. Nonplussed, he snapped the restraints on her unconscious form, leaned her on a sturdy tree and lightly jogged the rest of the short distance to his friends.
“By the titans, is that...a quarian?” she gasped, but kept a weary distance from it, dragging Garrus farther away at the same time. She spared a frown for Bell’s actions, but they did not stray sufficiently from her orders to deserve a reprimand.
“Impossible, look at the hands and feet. Hey, hey, Bell, stay back!”
“They’re not quarians, or asari, or batarians. Docs might be right, Lil. We should take them back for studying.” he ignored Garrus’ whine and got closer, turning the body around so it now faced upwards. The eyes were still open, a mixture of gray and blue looking to the sky in homecoming. “A few more dead ones in the pod, too. Can we…?”
“Yes, Bell, we can.” she nodded demurely, noting the way Bell’s mandibles clacked together in distress. “They deserve an honest departure.”
She turned towards them both and began speaking, a harsh undertone creeping into the usual sway of her words. Her left hand was flying on her omni’s haptic interface, rows upon rows of the mission report being born one frantic keystroke at a time. She never broke eye contact with either of them.
“Command says to retrieve as much tech and information we can, before the sealing crews get here for decon and further analysis. Garrus, that means you. Once you’re done, use the decon spray in the LAV to clean up. Only the live specimen is to be delivered, although I swear I heard Nomos’ squawks and mewls of indignation in the background. Apparently “quarantine” and “we’re not risking everyone’s lives” weren’t good enough answers for him. Squad Avictus is coming for pick-up with Nomos himself preening and pluming at the forefront. Bell, we’re on wood gathering duty. We need to build a mass pyre before the others come in.”
Garrus kept his eyes trained on the prisoner, who showed no more obvious signs of life than the body in front of them. Her head lolled listlessly to the side, shoulders sagged and droopy in a perfect imitation of the art dummies strewn across his sister’s desk. His curiosity burned and rankled and he would’ve liked to take a look at her, just like a child poking a sleeping pet. At last, the good turian in him won out and he stepped inside the metal contraption that had brought these castaways. He marvelled at how cramped a space it was, and yet held four more bodies. The corpses he could live with, the stupid, soft padding of those chairs, that snagged at his angular protrusions and got stuck in his spurs, he could tolerate, but what got him finally issuing a series of innovative vulgarities was…
“What? What’s wrong?” Lil interjected halfway through his solo.
“Varren shit on a krogan’s headplate, they have base ten mathematics. I hate base ten technology.”
Truth be told, neither of them looked forward to the thorough decontamination they were about to receive.