Chapter Text
The overhead lights flicker as they always do, at least when the data screens are up and running. Shepard should have gotten used to it by now. It stings at her ocular nerves—or something like that, anyway, somewhere along the delicate wires that extend from her eyeballs into her brain—but her focus on the data doesn’t waver. She won’t let it.
“In that case,” she says, squinting against the ache, “what we need is salvage from a relay outside the immediate burst zone. Four jumps away. Five, if possible. There’s no point to any of this if we can’t scrape together a control group.”
She glances back at Elsawy, who so far hasn’t made it more than a meter into the room. The woman nods without looking up from her omni-tool; orange shimmers off her shiny, black hair, giving her the uncomfortable air of a Cerberus operative. It’s not the worst comparison, except that Miranda, wherever she is now, would waste no time letting Shepard know if her logic took a faulty turn somewhere. Elsawy’s just as likely to agree now and write a message detailing all her crap conclusions later.
Leaning her hip against the conference table, Shepard shifts her weight off her left leg, bites down on the sigh that almost manages to slip out. Once in the clear, she grouses, “Where the hell is Meyer? He’s the one that called this meeting.”
As it is, it’s three people in attendance and she’s the only one talking. She could’ve achieved the same results with a voice call from her quarters, where she could elevate her leg in peace and without witnesses. In the dark.
“Lab Two,” answers Elsawy, finally ripping her attention off the omni-screen and gracing Shepard with a second of eye contact. Maybe in another life she could appreciate the effort—Jesus, as if she hasn’t had her fill of lives already. “We’re close to a breakthrough on the initial output patterns. Sorry. He’s been feeding his data to me.”
“Right.” She blinks once, twice, in time with the flickering. It doesn’t help; it never does. “I’ll swing by later, then. Anything else he asked you to relay?”
“Just that, Commander.” The woman is mumbling just enough that her voice has to compete with the drone of the air vents. The translator takes a second to filter out and amplify it. The result is less than perfect: “More salvage—” bzzrt—“bigger picture, you got it.” She narrows her eyes, and Shepard raises an eyebrow. “Left leg or—” bzz!—“left hip?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking on about.”
Elsawy lowers her omni-tool arm. “Commander.”
“It’s nothing relevant,” says Shepard pleasantly, forcing herself to stand up straight again. There’s a brief tremor shaking up her hamstrings; she waves a hand to distract from it. In the frenzy of the lights, the movement looks jerky, nervous. She soldiers on. “Old field injury. Unrelated. Anything can set it off.”
Funny, kind of, since it’s that very leg that ends in the most perfect, cooperative example of a foot she’s ever had the pleasure of treading on. It’s cloned; a replacement. Not the only one either. They should’ve just done away with the whole limb, but she hadn’t been consulted. Same with her trick shoulder. Not even Cerberus had managed to get that one back on the straight and narrow.
“I’d rather you bring it up with the doctor,” replies Elsawy. This is, apparently, what it takes for her to finally speak at a reasonable volume. “If we manage to fill even one of the data gaps…”
“I know,” she says. “I know, and I’m telling you, it’s unrelated.”
A minor spike in her inflammation levels won’t get Meyer on her case, but that changes if Elsawy decides to rat her out, which she most assuredly will. If Shepard could order her not to without making herself look like a liar, she would, but that ship has sailed. Shouldn’t have doubled down so hard. Rookie mistake. She’s getting rusty in more ways than one.
“If we’re done here…” she says, slapping a hand down on the console interface before anyone can interject. The data screen zips out of sight, and there’s a collective sigh of relief as, with a whine, the current steadies.
She rests her eyes for a moment, now that she can.
They’re diode lights, running on unrefined helium. Museum material, or almost; the few museums still standing are more interested in things like recovered heirlooms and accurately-dated census data, she imagines. It’s doubtful many helium lamps were harmed in the war. Perhaps out in the rural areas, on Earth or on what’s left of Shanxi.
They were designed to be frugal. Resource-efficient. Now, her staff is looking at regular, bulky-as-all-hell helium shipments—not H-3, just plain old helium as it was once known exclusively to man—for the singular purpose of keeping all their shitty lights on. Or more on than off, as it were.
God, but her head is throbbing.
“I will see to it that we get those components, ma’am,” says Natalie, deigning to speak up for the first time since they all walked into the room. She leans back in her chair, eyes drifting to the ceiling, flicking an errant curl off her forehead. “There’s some diplomacy needed. No Alliance reach beyond four relay jumps, so that’s Council cooperation, so that’s a call to Hackett.”
“Just be glad I shot Udina,” says Shepard tonelessly. “Or else it’d be a call to him.”
“Right.” Natalie’s eyes widen, but her shoulders stay relaxed. “I still think the diplomacy should fall to you, ma’am.”
“That’s not most people’s reaction to when I remind them I shot a councilor.”
“He was a traitor.” It’s that tone she sometimes gets when someone brings up the Citadel or anything that happened on it. Vowels like steel, strange on her sweet tongue. Shepard never asked. “And you’re the best humanity has to offer on every front there is, Commander.”
Shepard laughs. It’s so untrue it almost hurts. “I’ve no doubt you’ll do your job just fine.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Thanks, Natalie,” she says in the same way she’d say ‘dismissed.’
The use of her given name earns Shepard a glowing smile before Natalie unfolds herself from her chair and scurries out the doorway on her short, plump legs. Sweet Natalie, whose last name is Williams, and who she fears would wilt like a flower if she found out the reason for the familiarity is discomfort rather than friendship.
There’s no relation, shared family name or not. She’s certain of it now, though there were months in which she’d wondered. The coloring’s off—so is the stature—but stranger things have happened, and she never could remember all of Ash’s sisters’ names. Still, she’s not about to say ‘morning, Williams’ every day of the week if she can help it; everything she does here has to do with ghosts, and she’d be loath to add another one to the mix, however pale and well-repressed.
Elsawy sends her another probing look, dark eyes just as shiny as her hair. Shepard is past her and out the door before she can think to mumble anything else.
*
The thing is, she’s not supposed to be going on these evening runs. They’re really only evening runs because that’s when the hallways are empty; depending on the duty roster, which she writes, she either goes right after dinner or an hour after that, depending on whichever time promises the least foot traffic around the outer perimeter.
The janitor’s the only one who knows, but then again he doesn’t talk, which is why he was hired in the first place. The only reason most of the staff knows his name is that it’s pinned to the front of his uniform, a sharp-edged badge that reads ‘A. Grover, contractor, facility upkeep, security clearance 2.’ There had been some contention about the latter, but they needed to at least let him into the bullpen, even if the technicians prefer to clean the labs themselves to keep him out.
She likes Grover. She likes that he doesn’t look up from his cleaning tools when she flits past, and that the noise and the vibration masks the slap of her feet against the unclad steel floor for a valuable minute. It adds up, depending on how many laps she does.
Her hamstrings twinge with each bounding step, annoyingly. While not enough to cost her her rhythm, it is enough to force her eyes off the floor in search of a distraction, and that—well, it’s something she tries to avoid. Separated by stretches of reinforced hull, the outer wall is lined with airlocks and access ducts, each one of them welded shut. The melted edges gleam like scar tissue in the muted lighting of the perimeter. It reminds her of the thick welts that run across one side of her abdomen now, shiny and pink, catching against her nails every time she takes her shirt off.
A tremor cuts into her next exhale. She falters for a millisecond, then pushes on, determined to keep her breathing in line, determined not to stop.
It took some getting used to, this juxtaposition of strength and weakness. If she’s not careful, she can twist the knob off the bathroom faucet, can rip the door right off the wall safe in her office. If she’s not careful, if she breathes out of turn, she’ll rupture a lung on one of these laps. Or strain a muscle in her leg, if it’s an old field injury.
It’s fine; she’ll run it off.
Ahead of her approaches a section of cool-lit hallway, a strip of four meters where the otherwise unbroken shadow lapses. It’s the worst part of each lap: the singular window, square and curved to fit seamlessly into the outer hull. Sometimes it’s dark; tonight, it’s not. She can never bring herself to not look, and right now, she’s not quite fast enough to make it pass by her in a blur.
Her own measured breaths bounce back at her from all the metal that surrounds, an island of sound in the otherwise soundless vacuum on the other side of that glass—a blue sea with no borders, just a window-glimpse at the great might of the planet as it turns, ever-faster than the old station can manage to keep up with.
Whatever she does, she can’t outrun this orbit and certainly not Neptune’s dizzy spin around itself.
Still. She’ll try again tomorrow.
*
Natalie brings her breakfast for the fourth time that week. It’s something she does sometimes, though four times in a week is a record, and the increase over time doesn’t really fit with Shepard’s leading theory of hero worship. It might just be that she looks a little unsteady sometimes, a little worn down; perhaps Natalie, in all her good-naturedness, has some way of telling which mornings go fine and which mornings find her twisted in her scratchy bedsheets and desperately cold. It’s not like she can rule it out. She’s never been that kind of woman, that kind of girl, and wouldn’t know the first thing about what being one entails.
Natalie’s observant enough. She knows not to get her coffee and not to get her anything resembling a fried egg, and not to eat one in her presence either if they’re going to sit together, which they don’t always do. Shepard will sit at one of the tables if she wants company, but sometimes she’ll just lean against the wall and then take the tray back to pick at in her office, to eventually forget about underneath an overspilling pile of datapads. Shepard’s not out to make a friend, especially not one named Williams, but she won’t begrudge anyone the attempt and neither will her joints, which always feel brittle come morning.
“We’re still out of waffle batter, Commander,” says Natalie, exasperated as she slides a tray over the table to her. The plate, in spite of what she said, is absolutely stacked with waffles. Brown and gold and slightly misshapen and topped with a generous helping of sliced, rehydrated apple. “Shortage of whatever chemical they use to give it a shelf life. I kicked van der Veer out of the galley to try and make it from scratch—they did deliver the essentials—but it didn’t turn out as well as I hoped. Fair warning. The texture’s going to be off.”
They smell good enough. Warm and sweet—perhaps a bit burnt—but it’s enough to relax her jaws that have been grinding into each other, ease the tension off the hidden fault lines that checker her cheeks like a web.
“Damn, Williams,” calls one of the lab techs from the next table over, bristling the hairs on Shepard’s arms. “Couldn’t have made some more for the lowly mortals? What’s it take? I’ve been going crazy without those bad boys on the meal rotation.”
“It takes a lot.” Natalie rolls her eyes in his direction. “Like, ‘saving the galaxy’ a lot.” She settles herself into the chair opposite Shepard because she also knows that she’d rather not have anyone at her immediate flank. Smart woman. “Brokering impossible treaties and kicking Reaper ass. Looking smoking hot past the age of thirty. Any number of things you’ve never done and never will do, Yavuz.”
There’s an uproar of laughter.
Shepard feels her mouth twitching, though she can’t figure out if it wants to go up or go down. She says, “I can have them fly in some waffle-flavored MREs if it’ll settle your craving. I’m sure there must be some left over from the Relay 314 stores, floating somewhere around the Arcturus wreckage.”
An awkward cough. “Ah, you see, Commander—”
“Maybe you could go and find them yourself,” she adds pleasantly. “I could give you leave to do it.”
More laughter.
“How stupid are you to heckle the commander’s friend, man?” comes a hiss from next to Yavuz. “That’s just inviting her attention.”
Natalie, who’s been quietly cutting into her first waffle, stops briefly to smile up at her, and something settles like a stone into her gut. It’s not the waffles, because the texture’s not that off. Rather, it’s guilt.
“So,” ventures Natalie, and for a moment she’s afraid she’ll actually ask her if they’re friends. “Why’d you call it that, ma’am? Relay 314?”
Shepard blinks. She drums her fingers on the table—pursuit music in plastic minor. “Well, you all know what I meant.”
“Sure, but I think Whitlock over there flinched. You know. ‘Cause he…” Natalie makes a complicated gesture with her flatware, clanking them together. Locking swords.
Shepard snorts; the First Contact War is no longer the most recent in their history, but it was still very much fought with guns.
Turning her head, she finds the table occupied by most of their security contingent. They’re Alliance—everyone here is, besides the janitor, but they’re the only ones who wouldn’t be caught dead outside of uniform, with their sewn-on Alliance insignias gleaming off their sleeves and chests. Even they don’t wear hardsuits. Whitlock’s the oldest of them, gray hair and always clean-shaven. Stature of a company marksman. She’s pretty sure he’s a sergeant; if he fought during first contact, it was either on the sidelines or in one of the luckier platoons. Survivors tend to be honored with promotions.
Well, survivors who aren’t her, anyway, though she knows Hackett’s been toying with the idea of pinning admiral’s stripes on her shoulders. It’s part of the reason she makes others speak with him.
Whitlock isn’t looking her way; he’s staring down his coffee mug. Not visibly upset. Bit tense, perhaps.
She turns back to Natalie. “I don’t think it matters much—there’ll always be a different term, a differing opinion. It’s just a reminder that humanity’s not the focal point of the universe.”
She cuts off another piece of waffle and brings it to her mouth.
“I suppose if there’s anyone who can judge that, it’ll be you, ma’am,” says Natalie, graciously enough to make Shepard’s teeth clench, except that her fork’s in the way—she clamps down on the metal prongs. The shock of it jolts down into her jaw and from there to her skull, where something spends the next second clicking and whirring before settling back into silence.
Tongue probing at her gums, she tries not to grimace. Asks, as she has been asking every day, “Any luck with getting that tech salvage we need?”
“There’s something in the works now,” answers Natalie. Her lips quirk up, rounding out the apples of her cheeks, and all Shepard can think is that she could be playing the pretty lead in some Eridani Films romcom instead of working on this station four billion clicks from the sun. “I’ll have a detailed report on your desk before long.”
*
When people say that luxury in space is relative, what they mean is that it might as well not exist. That’s never been more true than it is now, with the Citadel Presidium reduced to a seven-kilometer-in-diameter, forty-layered baumkuchen of debris and viscera, old blood gone black and dry and clinging to surfaces like the bad kind of mold.
What a fever dream it had all been, in hindsight. The shiniest of traps to catch the shiniest of birds: the trust of a trillion beings and that of all their leaders.
Shepard shuffles forward a step. Her leading knee ghosts up against the divider that’s just a long mess table, turned on its side. She breathes out. Feels every place her body snapped or shattered on the Citadel, her blood leaving some black streaks of its own among the muck. Her finger squeezes the trigger—recoil snaps her wrists back—the slug craters the metal sheet.
She breathes in. Bullseye. Rolls her shoulders, flexes her fingers. Pressure crackles, screaming, between radius and ulna, but it’s nothing compared to her old M-98. She misses that ridiculous beast of a gun, hasn’t assembled it in months. No space—no time—no point.
A shooting range could count as a luxury, but this one definitely doesn’t. It’s a stack of surplus metal panels that could fit into wall and floor alike and a bucket of red paint in the corner by the curled-up LOKI mechs, which all look like they’re in the final throes of appendicitis. She eyes the mechs for a moment, the faded Hahne-Kedar logo just barely peeking through their legs. Might make for better target practice, but the things are long past being able to stand under their own power and picking them back up after every shot would be a drag.
Not her call, anyway. She’s only doing the honors.
Corporal Allaire is watching from the doorway. She can hear his blood pumping from where she’s standing, can glimpse the way it’s filling out his chest and pinning his thick-lashed gaze on her.
She scowls. He doesn’t see; her face is not where he’s looking.
“Never seen someone handle a Carnifex like that,” he says, all low and throaty and accented. He’s a beefy guy, which is a hard thing to keep up without a well-outfitted gym to visit or away missions to go out on. He’s ruddy-cheeked despite all the swarthy skin. Not unattractive, probably, by fleshy-mammal standards. “The major would send me back to basic if I tried that, but I don’t need an Armax Arena VI to tell that you’ve got us all beat, Commander.”
It’s never ‘Shepard’ with these people. Always Commander. Sometimes it’s Commander Shepard, which is worse, but she’s not going to start correcting them now.
“That’s because I’m handling it like it’s a Talon,” she grumbles, shifting back out of stance. “This form isn’t exactly up to regs and handbook-approved, Corporal. Stick to the one you know unless you’re looking to sprain something.”
She lets him mull that over as she inspects the borrowed pistol, kept shiny and in good condition, though she has a feeling he’ll be hesitant to wipe her prints off the grip once she’s done. She knows he’s been working his way up to this for months, has seen him watching from many doorways, not lecherous but hopeful, which, again, is worse. She won’t punch someone for hopeful.
When she glances back at him, he’s closer than he was, hovering five steps behind her, just out of touching range. She waits him out, clicks the safety back on.
“You use a Talon, Commander?” asks Allaire finally, gesturing at the shitty, old Kessler that’s strapped to her belt, though it comes out sounding a bit desperate. Not the question he wanted to ask. Not her problem.
“Not anymore, I don’t,” she says darkly, because she can never get the image out of her head: the glowing latticework of the Citadel wards, her finger on the Talon’s trigger pulling itself, the bow of Anderson’s back as he doubles over. Shaking her head, Shepard steps away from Allaire and away from the memory. “Just make sure no one’s using armor-piercing rounds or any kind of sniper. If a bullet makes it through that bulkhead, it’ll nick about three water pipes and kill all the lights in engineering. Make use of that paint. Don’t aim for appearances, aim for function. Nothing like screaming red letters on the wall to remind people to follow safety procedures. You’ve got my green light otherwise.”
“I—yes, thank you, ma’am.” He flutters his eyelashes at her, scratches at his dark sideburns. His nails are short and clean, Alliance grooming manual 101. “I was—”
“Allaire.” She hands him back his gun. “I think you really weren’t.”
*
She shouldn’t be going on these runs, and this is why: her hamstrings are fine, as she knew they would be, but there’s a pulsing at the base of her spine now that feels less like a strained muscle and more like a hinge that’s rusted and that shrieks whenever moved.
Keeping herself from slamming her head into the nearest wall all day might have made her overdo it now that her omni-tool is off and no one’s watching.
Natalie’s report was thorough and informative.
It’s, just, whatever.
It’s fine.
They’re finally getting somewhere, and that’s a good thing.
And as for the pain, even if running it off won’t work, she can still breathe through the discomfort. It’s something she’s really good at. For all of medi-gel’s merits, it does little for the initial bite of pain that’s a quarter-inch slug burrowing through her armor and into her flesh; what it takes are nerves of steel, no cyborg pun intended, and a damn good handle on her breathing.
She can breathe through anything. If she could breathe through one of Harbinger’s beams, then she could breathe through any number of unspecified armageddons the universe might have in reserve. She’d breathed through the Citadel blowing apart around her—had breathed lying in its rubble. Who knows what would have happened, had her helmet let her breathe through being spaced. She might have lived, and that’s a thought, all right, but here’s the irony: if she had lived then, she’d be dead as dead can be now.
Fate… is a funny thing.
It’s good, then, that she doesn’t believe in it.
She stands there—breathing—in the cool light bouncing off the gas giant, watching the shadow of Triton cut a circle of dark into its face. It’s all she ever sees of the moon, which zips around the planet slightly slower than she does, and in retrograde, to boot. Not its rock profile, rendered by the sun, but merely the impression it leaves: a small but unwelcome reminder that anything exists at all beyond the all-encompassing blue.
There used to be people on Triton, but it’s safe to say they’re gone. Communications with the facility on the southern hemisphere went dark during the initial sweep-through by the Reapers. The extranet claims habitation around Neptune has fallen to zero, and it had, but now they’re here. It’s not a record-keeping oversight as much as a lie by omission, and it has everything to do with the lights on the perimeter, home of the station’s only window, being perpetually dimmed.
Little record exists of the station to begin with. The name, a string of unimaginative numbers, has faded into obscurity as has the company that built it, back when helium-3 extraction was a new venture and when closeness to the termination shock still meant closeness to the construction site that would become Jump Zero.
Not that any of that matters much if someone comes by in a spacecraft and looks in through this window to see her standing there in a ratty, old hoodie instead of in full gear, breathing air in what’s supposed to be more scrap metal than functional habitat. After all, the geth were the only ones with no love lost for vistas. Now, thanks to her, all of them are dead.
*
She sinks into her bed, and it creaks and groans, undecided as ever on if it’s supposed to be firm or supposed to be soft but certainly unhappy to be either. There’s scant centimeters separating one extreme from the next, and she’s learned to seek out the soft side after a long day, knowing the other would give every wooden plank in the system an inferiority complex if word ever got out about it.
Admittedly, the chances of any word leaving the station are somewhat slim. If perhaps not as slim as she’d hoped.
It’s fine.
It’s whatever.
She understands the necessity of it. She’s the one that asked for it. She won’t have the request be rescinded and watch the whole project be set back for the sake of her own damn self.
It’s never been about her comfort. That’s why the bed fits, along with all the rest. The station is the picture-book definition of weathered, pioneer charm; the only things in the room less than forty years old, other than her, are her pillow, her guns and her stacks of neatly-folded clothes over by the storage locker. By the locker, not in it, because that’s where she keeps said guns.
She shifts off the jab of a bed spring, but the movement only aggravates the sharp twist of wrong in her sacral region. It hasn’t lessened at all in the last couple of days—quite the opposite—and shimmying sideways doesn’t help. It rips gleefully into places that should never be ripped into, like back on the MSV Strontium Mule, where she’d taken a shredder round to the meat of her back and ended up held together only by virtue of some deep-embedded wires and a lot of medi-gel.
The wires have expiration dates too, it turns out, as does everything else worth having.
Her omni-tool reactivates with a flex of her fingers. It unfurls like an Omega holo ad in the dark and with it, like galaxy’s worst pop-up, the last file she had open: Natalie’s shorthand preceding the stark, unapologetic lines of the Hierarchy emblem as it spins in some self-aggrandizing motion, round and round its axis, at the head of the missive.
She squints resentfully for at least a minute before swiping it closed and typing out a request to meet Meyer in the morning. The message burst goes out, and then she lies there. Attempts to hold on to the feeling the run had given her, to the warmth of blood pumping, spreading through her body instead of pooling in her ass from hours of sitting and sitting and then sitting some more.
Before her six months in Vancouver, an indefinite period of time cooped up in the same place would have driven her to madness more surely than any torture method perfected in the Terminus. Now, it’s an old shoe that she slips into. As far as those go, it’s damn constricting, but it’s one that she can wear, that she can endure, if simply because her own flesh has given way in key places to accommodate its shape.
Vancouver’s been on her mind a lot. For other reasons, ones she dares not think too loudly.
She need only go on some more of those runs and all her problems will soon solve themselves, anyway.
*
“This isn’t unexpected.” Something softens the premature lines around Meyer’s mouth, bringing it out of its perpetual pout. “In fact,” he adds, “when it came to which one’s next, it was a toss-up between this and the peritoneal stabilizer.”
He leans back in his chair just far enough to not risk overbalancing, gazing up at where Shepard’s perched on the hard edge of the examination table the way he always does: chin dipped down like he’s peering over a pair of antique glasses she’s never seen him wear.
“Well, then.” This is going better than she expected. “Can we use it?”
“That’s another matter, Commander,” he mutters, swiveling his chair around to look back at the monitors. The way his outstretched legs spin reminds her rather painfully of Joker, and she wishes he’d stop doing it once and for all. She asked him before, on a bad day, and all he did was wave her off.
“Is it.”
“Yes,” says Meyer. He sounds almost cheerful. “I’m hoping—we’re all hoping, I imagine—that the data we get from this will not be ‘expected’ at all.”
Shepard schools her expression; there’s an off chance he can see her reflection in the glass. “Give me a time estimate.”
“A day or two.” His narrow shoulders bob up and down. “Depends on the draw on the power grid. Excess use will slow us down, and I hear we’re expecting a rather notable deviation from the norm. What’s the ETA on that one, Commander?”
“Five hours,” she says. “Three and a half if you want Galactic Standard.”
“I never want Galactic Standard,” he counters, but he twists his head around to smile at her. Probably in an effort to keep her from reflexively shooting his ear off.
It’s a miscalculation: if anything, eye contact makes her more trigger-happy, since she’s never been one for shooting people in the back. But also, she’s not an animal. She’s well-capable of keeping antipathy from turning bloody.
“All the storage and lab rooms are prepared?” she presses.
“Have been since yesterday.” He finally swivels back to face her, gesturing around them with an over-dramatic hand. “We’ll keep this one free for eventualities and to make it easier on the grid.”
“Good call,” she allows, pushing off the table to the singing relief of both sub-lumbar implant and tailbone. She’s lucky the damn thing isn’t any harder than it is; it’s not like it was made with organics in mind, even if she stretches that definition to its limits.
Once both her feet are back on the floor and every component of her spine has slotted back into place, she shakes herself off like a wet dog and heads for the exit. The last time she was willing to waste time on appearances must’ve been some time before Akuze. It might also have been never.
Meyer, of course, has different ideas. After her, he calls, “Can I interest you in some analgesics this time?”
“That’s still a no,” she responds, copying his cheery tone from earlier, lilting syllables and all. She’s not one to turn off any of her sensor outputs, no matter if the feedback’s coming from her hardsuit or from neurons firing in her brain. At least not until the flashing gets in the way of lining up a shot.
“Remember, there’s no shame in it!”
The doors, some of the station’s few hardware features to undergo a complete retro-fit, flash green at her approach but only swish open at her touch. “Dream on, Doctor,” she throws over her shoulder before she’s through them.
The moment she steps outside, an elbow comes sailing past her head. Woosh, in her ears—brutes accelerating towards her, banshees charging, missiles missing her by inches—she recoils into the closing doors, interrupting the motion, and the disgruntled whine of electronics is more of a slap in the face than the elbow would’ve been.
She blinks once. Steps back forward with calm purpose and withdraws her hand from where it landed on her sidearm.
Elsawy, none the wiser, continues flitting from one doorway to the next. Not one glance towards Shepard. The end of her ponytail is stuck in the high collar of her uniform shirt, and to her chest, she’s cradling stacks of datapads—Shepard watches through narrowed eyes as the woman plucks the next one from the stack and then smashes it with punishing force into the wall next to the doorframe, where it stays. Can’t be biotics: Elsawy’s dark energy wells run as dry as Shepard’s. Must be some improvised adhesive agent, which seems more up her alley, anyway, not to mention that biotics are worthless in the departments of permanence and longevity.
Either way, the datapad stays up. Large, alien letters shine off its display of holographic blue, an amalgam of asari and salarian squiggles. Citadel Trade Tongue, Written Version 32.0, if Elsawy’s keeping with the trends. The next version, she’s certain, won’t have ‘Citadel’ in the name at all.
Shepard rolls her neck, un-squares her stance. What a way to go out this would have been: collateral damage in the pursuit of last-minute signage.
There’s a stretched-out pause, filled only with the occasional clash of datapad against steel wall.
She doesn’t mind being ignored once in a while. In fact, she wishes people would do it more often, and so she says nothing as she presses onward, weaving out of Elsawy’s footpath the way she’d weave through a hail of bullets. Not a bit less careful, too.
*
It always takes a while to reach the end of the laboratory wing, something which is especially unpleasant today, when each step feels like it costs her something. She’s not quite decided on the what, yet: a day off her life span, a thread off her patience, some of the enamel that Miranda meticulously painted back on her teeth. The main hallway is one straight and narrow line, doors branching off at intervals, only hinting at what she knows to be a maze of utility rooms and control hubs that haven’t served their original purpose in well over three decades, with only some of them refitted and cleared of pre-FTL-drive dust.
Stations, she knows now, are not like ships, which come in all shapes and sizes. The only time a space station is not big is when it’s very, very big. The lower end of big is not to be confused with small, and this holds especially true when the station is serving at only a third of its personnel capacity.
The thick section doors finally open to the sight of the bullpen. Immediately, the sound of boot soles against metal sets her teeth on edge.
“Commander Shepard!” cries the guard posted by the doors. She snaps a smart salute before freezing back into parade rest, the only person here not resembling a headless chicken.
There’s bodies in the aisles between desks, hurrying up and down hallways, doors swishing open and swishing back closed, raised voices scraping together into discordance.
Pain throbs behind her brow bone; it makes her think of war. Not in that way—in the way it’s not alike at all. War hadn’t been this, the frantic activity. It had been heads ducking low under the weight of the hours, dragging; static and radio silence thick in the air, with most of the communications down and news rare and nearly always bad, nearly always devastating to someone in the room.
Coming to a halt at the guard’s side, she says, voice a bit rough, “At ease, Private Dumont.” She watches the progress of a woman as she goes half-jogging down her aisle, using her elbows to fight through oncoming traffic. “Did I miss a critical alert or is everyone just that excited?”
Dumont only twitches.
“Private?” she tries again.
Her at-eases used to have more effect before. Now, people seem to think she’s trying to trick them—like she’ll ring them up for insubordination or shoot their ear off with her legendary aim or go up in a commander-shaped puff of air and smoke if they look at her too long. Even living together in close quarters has yet to convince anyone that she’s a regular person. It’s something she chalks up in equal parts to simple awe and the slow-receding shock of showing up at their mysterious new posting to find themselves in a runaway celebrity’s office.
No news leaks so far. Military psych profiles hold more credibility than she ever gave them credit for.
“Um.” Dumont’s eyes are still twitchy in the shadow thrown by her uniform cap, but she’s thawing at last. “No alarms, Commander. I wouldn’t call it excitement. Dread, maybe, for some of them. The rest are just scared up ‘cause Specialist Williams tore them a new one for being behind schedule.”
Dread, Shepard gets. That’s kind of where she’s at herself.
But: “I hope they haven’t forgotten that without interspecies cooperation, there’d have been no Crucible, there wouldn’t be much of Earth left, and we’d all be reduced to appetizing gray sludge passing through a Reaper capital ship.”
Dumont, to her credit, doesn’t balk, though her nose wrinkles with abject disgust. “Of course, Commander.” She even sounds like she means it. “No soldier would ever forget. Doesn’t mean that any of them’s ever seen one of them birds up close before. And then there’s the rest of the staff.”
Shepard rolls her eyes. “Listen, Dumont, you seem to have a good grip on reality. Keep an eye out. I don’t want any diplomatic incidents to happen here.” A pause. “Though, word to the wise: they don’t like being called birds very much.”
“Aye, aye,” she says, thin lips pulling even thinner, taut across her face. All that stands between that expression and becoming a grimace are whatever rules of conduct she picked up at Reaper boot camp, Shepard’s sure. “Keeping that in mind, sir. Or, er, ma’am?”
“Whichever one suits.”
Shepard studies her for a moment. There are circles under her eyes, dark against her sickly white skin, but that might just be a combination of the lack of sunlight and those damn diode lights, which take unflattering to a whole other level. A similar sight greets her in the mirror each morning, though she knows better than to blame that on the lighting.
Finally, she comes up with enough mercy to step away and excuse herself, and Dumont is kind enough to refrain from looking excessively relieved. If her shoulders droop just a centimeter or two beneath those unstriped epaulettes, Shepard doesn’t hold it against her.
The meandering path back to her office resembles an obstacle course more than the usual, unbroken monotony she has come to appreciate. There’s reflectiveness to every surface, and today, there are shifting shapes all over the walls and all over the floor, many steps joining the sound of hers, like there’s always someone at her heels.
She lets the doors close behind her. Stands there, eyes slipping shut. Breathes through it.
Three and a quarter Galactic Standard Hours.
*
There may be just one window in the entire place, but the LADAR holo-screens lining the walls of the control room more than make up for it. They detail the bones of Neptune and all its moons, limning everything around her in shifting, caustic orange.
She’s spent too much time plugged into some synthetic consensus or another to not have to fight the urge to reach out to the person next to her, just to ground herself in objective, organic reality. She keeps her hands at her sides, as does everyone else. They hang limp. If anyone were to touch her now, chances are that their nose would shatter faster than she could experience relief.
Crossing just south of the rings and around the oblong shape that represents Larissa, a tiny light approaches from the direction of the Charon mass relay. It blends in with all the orange, just another blip in planet orbit, though it won’t be that for very long.
The protocols they have in place for docking vessels don’t apply to this. There’s the monthly supply shuttles, the occasional crew transport for rotating personnel, the even-more-occasional freighter carrying sensitive cargo. But there’s never been reason for a non-Alliance ship to dock and, beyond that, to stay docked for longer than an hour. It goes against their entire security concept. Major Rana, the woman in charge of it, stands stone-faced next to Shepard, her hands hovering over the holographic interface.
A shifting line above the incoming ship displays its ETA in Terran Coordinated Time. T-15.00 MINUTES, it reads, and still she catches herself converting to Galactic in her head.
In this case, of course, it’s more than appropriate.
By the time the countdown has halved itself, the LADAR has zoomed in on the vessel, picking out its sweeping, sharp lines in vivid green against the backdrop of black void and orange planetesimals. It’s small for a frigate, its forward guns disproportionate for its frame but lining up with the angular hull segments in a way that’s smugly, insufferably effortless. The guns are not just a point of pride, they’re the point, full stop—which makes it all the more significant that, in clear breach of every Hierarchy policy Shepard has ever heard of, they’re powered down to resting temperature.
They each have their own protocols to follow and to disregard in the name of compromise.
Push and pull, as it goes, like the tides.
Thirty-three years ago, both parties would have fired on sight. Now here they are, cannons kept cool and airlocks on standby.
“We’re being hailed,” says Rana into the silence.
“Go ahead,” says Shepard.
The central screen flickers, then rearranges its view of planet and satellites into the single, neat stroke of a line.
“This is the THV Avivea,” a female voice sounds out, metallic as if distorted by the communications link. Shepard knows better. The line on screen shudders in two, painting a double-graphed sonogram. “On approach on special authority of the primarch of Palaven and all imperial worlds. Requesting permission to dock. As per prior agreement, this message will not be repeated.”
The transmission ends; the lines fall flat and merge again. In the sudden absence of the voice, the room rings hollow.
“Background encryption confirmed as turian,” Rana says over her shoulder, low. Like she feels it too. Her eyes flicker up to meet Shepard’s. “Looks up to date, as far as our software can tell, anyway. Commander?”
Shepard waves her hand at Rana, who nods and turns back to the monitors, then at Natalie, who is slouching against the nearest wall as if that’ll distract from the silent tattoo her foot is drumming into the floor. Natalie straightens; Shepard turns on her heels and marches out of the room.
“Remember,” mutters Shepard once the doors slot shut behind them both, “these guys stand on ceremony. They also owe us their homeworld the same way we owe them ours. It should go off without a hitch, and if it doesn’t, remind them.”
Natalie nods but says, “I’ve got to point out, ma’am, that they owe you their homeworld. It would only help having you there. Out of everybody here, it’s you they’ll respect even if ceremony fails.”
“Luckily for all of us, these aren’t war negotiations. It’s a friendly exchange, some low-level diplomacy at most.” She quirks a smile, more pulled muscle than warmth. “Let’s not hike that rating up to mid-level by adding my name to the equation.”
“All right.” Natalie squares her shoulders, activating her omni-tool only to deactivate it again—a flash of orange, a flash of the room they just left. When they first met, nervousness hadn’t been a trait that Shepard would have associated with her. Time spent in isolation has a way of wearing down even the most socially adept. “The major would have my head for revealing that you’re here, anyway. I’d rather live to see tomorrow.”
Shepard nods. Tries to relate to that sentiment. Fails—though that might just be because her gaze has travelled from the tense purse of Natalie’s mouth to the viewing glass over her shoulder, running down the length of the wall that divides the reception area. It’s not one-way, at least not quite, though the lights in the foyer are turned up to their maximum. She has to blink against the glare, too used to the half-shadows to know what to do with bright. The light that spills through the glass shines at all the curly flyaways around Natalie’s head, adding to her harried air.
“How many guards in the first room?” asks Shepard, entirely because she doesn’t feel like looking at the airlock yet and counting them herself. Her eyes are still trying not to water. She’s thinking about the power grid, and that accounts for more of her scowl than the headache.
“That’s two, ma’am,” comes the reply. “Anything more and we’ll come across as too unwelcoming.”
Shepard hums. “Whitlock among them?”
Natalie lifts her head, pauses. Turns around to check for herself. “Yes.”
“I see.” She goes to rest her throbbing back against the cool of the glass. A hand comes up to message at her temple, fingers pressing into the bone. With the glare behind her, at least her eyes stop blinking a mile a minute. “That’s what I get for delegating.”
“Concerns there, ma’am?”
“Unsubstantiated ones. If he’s already in there, he’ll stay in there. It won’t do to stress everyone out by shifting things around last minute.” Shepard tips her head back until it meets resistance. Says, like a sigh through teeth, “I’m just being overly cautious.”
The docking klaxons go off.
Her stomach drops at the first peal of the sound—in truth, she all but bounces off that glass—and the automated voice that follows doesn’t help settle it any as it drones on about the stages of airlock-pressure adjustment. It’s calm and composed; cool and detached. No hint of emotional inflection, though she always expects to hear it anyway. It’s the same voice she once associated with the original Normandy. That one was a VI. This one is too, though nowadays that warrants more awe than it used to.
Dread or trepidation. Whatever she’s feeling, it serves no purpose, so she un-hunches her shoulders and focuses on the damn airlock.
The two uniformed figures on either side stand motionless, faces blank and eyes squinting even in the shadow of their caps. More people crowd into the reception area now, spilling out of the control room and the hallways that lead to bullpen and living quarters. Steps behind her back. Low voices. Clothes rustle. Natalie is still next to her, turned halfway to the glass and halfway to the door that connects to the foyer. She’s stalling; she should be in there already, practicing her best nods and steeliest spine.
She’s about to tell her to move out when the final hiss off the airlock re-pressurizing cuts straight through the walls. It freezes her to the spot more effectively than any Seeker Swarm could have.
“Here goes,” mutters someone, somewhere to her left.
It’s ridiculous. She knows why she’s here, cut off from all the universe and watching that airlock with bated breath, but she has no real idea why anyone else is.
They could be on Earth or on one of the colonies, rebuilding—on the Citadel, trying to get it to move—at Alliance Headquarters, waiting on admirals and sifting through a galaxy’s worth of incoming information bursts. Or, you know, at their posts. Working.
But they’re here instead, trying not to press their noses against glass as the interlocking metal doors turn once and then shift quickly and noiselessly apart, letting over-clocked diode lights shine onto the slim, jet-black armor of the three turian emissaries as they step foot onto their floating relic of a station, the first aliens to ever do so—
And it’s immediately clear to her that it’s not fine and it’s not whatever.
She barely registers herself speaking. “I thought this went through Hackett?”
“It did,” answers Natalie, farther away than she was, on her way to the door to play greeter.
Fire licks at Shepard’s tongue. She might have bitten it. Flicks it out when she speaks like some irate kind of snake, tasting the air: iron, dust, betrayal—“Damn that old man.”
Someone coughs at that. She doesn’t know who. If there’s a response, it doesn’t get through to her.
The three visitors move into the center of the room. Two of them fall back a step as soon as they clear the airlock. The posted guards are acknowledged with little but a sidelong glance; Whitlock and his colleague nod stiffly back, which earns them an angling of heads, just a fraction of an inch in the subtle, blink-and-you-miss-it body language of their people. Whitlock’s colleague doesn’t seem to mind, though Whitlock himself frowns—even he says nothing—and then their leader straightens up even further, looks the men over and nods once, twice. One nod for each of them, in perfect, human, chin-to-collar form.
Reluctantly, Whitlock sinks back into the wall.
The only reason Shepard notices Natalie enter the room is because the turians do, stepping forward in formation like they’re each a fighter jet rather than a diplomatic envoy. Natalie says something, sweetness amped up to the max from the way the sentence lilts—she doubts that’ll endear her to them—and then, the whole reason Shepard stands there lock-kneed: a musical voice, answering, warm in its low notes and flowing in its delivery, like an ocean on some alien world, always rolling in.
Familiar to her even through the distortion of the dividing glass, which rids it of its words and its translated syllables but not of its nature.
Fucking hell.
If she’d known, she could have prepared. Instead she stands frozen and gaping like a Prejek paddle fish.
“That’s one mean-looking S.O.B.,” muses someone behind her. If he thought he was being quiet, he’s mistaken; low tittering erupts around her. It only seems to make him double down. “Look at that mug! Did they send turian Harvey Dent after us? Should I sound some sort of alarm?”
A hissing voice. Muffled, female. “Shut up, Yavuz.”
Shepard can’t feel her hands, notices only when she tries to make a fist.
Garrus looks—
He looks good. Hale and in one piece, as much as he ever was after Omega. No new scars or cracks that she can see. He’s tall even next to the others, lights shining off his clear-cut face, made to look more white than silver by overwhelming contrast. The dark armor is reflective but conservatively so, lacking any of the prideful filigree bullshit she’d expect to see on a turian. Not a single inlaid light. She can scarcely believe it. If there are scuffs marring the plating, even the harsh lighting’s not enough to draw attention to them, though it shimmers faintly rainbow at the curves of pauldron and exaggerated cowl: polished with a bit of grease.
There’s the pride, then. Hidden where few would look.
Natalie’s neck is held at an angle that ought to be painful in order to look him in the eye. Her body language has gone from nervously open to closed all the way off, hands slashing at the air in agitation before she gets a hold of herself and folds them together.
And just like that, the dread increases ten-fold.
Garrus shifts back on his feet, peering down at Natalie like he’s trying not to loom. Torn between contrite and determined, though determination is clearly winning out: his spine is an open curve, a snapshot taken before movement. A sniper’s judiciousness just barely keeping him from pouncing. At his flank, the other man and woman stand stiff and impassive, though Garrus glances back at them to mumble something low and wry—and then turns his long neck to stare through the glass at the throng of spectators, who Shepard should have definitely told to scram five minutes ago.
By some miracle, he doesn’t pick her out of the crowd immediately. Must be the reflection in the glass—not a one-way mirror but almost—and if there’s one thing she knows how to do, then it’s how to use an opening.
She’s out of that room in a second. Long before anyone can complain that she jostled them or that she crushed their toes under her steel-capped boots in her very dignified scramble for the door.