Almost as it had before they’d left the Milky Way. More ghosts, perhaps. A reflection that caught him off guard. Salarians, and Tann especially, saw no use for the concept of specters.
“Why’d you leave?”
The voice boomed in the hollow chamber, slammed into his aural cavities and jerked him around. His wide eyes took in the empty—
No. The once-empty chamber.
Nakmor Kesh stood behind him, as if she’d followed in his footsteps. She pushed past him even before her voice had died.
“I beg your pardon?” he asked stiffly.
“You heard me.” She didn’t turn around to address him directly. He watched as she strode toward a dead bank of monitors on the opposite wall, lowered her large bulk to the floor. Without ceremony, she began to pull burnt system boards from an open access panel.
He had, of course, heard her. But the meaning escaped him. “Leave what?” He approached cautiously. Not because he wanted to be in reach of krogan fists, but because he felt it necessary to maintain a certain amount of ground in front of one.
“The Milky Way.” She spoke to the cables and cords, the fried wires and burnt boards. Not to him. “Everyone has their reasons. What’s yours, Jarun Tann?”
“Ah.” A popular topic among the crew. He’d heard enough of them discussing it with friends or coworkers in the crowded common area. All reminding one another of what they’d sacrificed, as a sort of reminiscence-based motivational technique. A coping mechanism, no doubt.
This was the first time, however, anyone had asked Tann the question. He grew nervous. Anticipating questions and preparing natural-sounding-yet-carefully-rehearsed answers was something of a pastime for him. Improvisation wasn’t a skill he had ever quite mastered, though this did not thwart his attempts to try.
The timing. It all came down to the timing.
Which he’d just blown, he realized, as the krogan heaved a long-suffering sigh and sat back on her haunches to glare at him. “You must have more reason than just salarian instinct to stick fingers in all things at the same time,” she said heavily. What may have been a lighthearted joke from anyone else did not translate as such when a krogan said it.
“No need for that,” he snapped, stiffening. “If you must know, I left because I’ve always wanted to explore. Yes,” he added in irritation, “grin away, but it’s the truth. I once wanted to roam the stars. Third-assistant to the deputy administrative director of revenue projections, that was the detour. I see the Initiative as a chance to choose again.”
“Why?”
Why? He looked down at her. Or tried. Krogan were too big for easy disdain. “Although we are among the most intelligently advanced species in the gal—” He caught himself. “—in the Milky Way, we salarians don’t have the longest of life spans.”
Kesh snorted, turning back to her dysfunctional processors. “It’s one of my favorite things about salarians.”
Another would-be joke carried on sharp teeth from a krogan. Worse, a krogan he had no power to remove for her temerity in existing with such confidence on his station.
Nakmor Kesh held a position within her species that was not, in a word, desirable. Liaison to others, a sort of cultural interpreter and ambassador all rolled into one. This wasn’t a role a krogan killed to achieve, it was a role they killed to get out of. The fact she seemed to enjoy the role only aggravated his sense of decency.
Unfortunately for both of them, it was her job to interface with the leadership of the Nexus. Especially Jarun Tann, Director of the Nexus.
Tread carefully, he reminded himself. Krogan or not, he needed something from Nakmor Kesh.
So he would play her game. “And you?” He phrased it as politely as he could. “Why did you join the Initiative, Nakmor Kesh?”
Kesh lay back and pushed herself under the desk beside the broken displays. She tore at scorched wires, tossing them into a pile by her knee. The display was not lost on Tann.
Look how strong krogan are.
Salarians did not roll their eyes. Well, not as a sign of disdain. Salarians could, and Tann had, but only in situations where the thin, protective membranes needed extra help in defending against dryness or irritants. Yet, in this moment, all he could imagine was what it might look like if he mirrored Sloane.
“They invited us.”
The krogan’s words, muffled somewhat by the desk, tore his focus entirely away from hybrid metaphors, pinned his gaze squarely on those bent krogan knees. Bulbous things, horrifyingly misshapen. Though densely packed with muscle.
Like krogan skulls.
Tann pasted on a pleasant look of interest. “Invited, you say?”
She grunted. “The Nakmor clan put muscle and bone into this place. When it neared completion, we received an invite.”
Tann knew all this. However, he found it a reasonable avenue to social compromise. “I was given to understand,” he said carefully, diplomatically as he could, “that the krogan were not the galaxy-hopping kind.”
This time, her muffled grunt sounded like a laugh. “Who is?”
A valid point. They were, after all, the first to travel so far, and for so long.
“The Nakmor have a higher resistance to the genophage,” Kesh continued, tone much more flat now.
Ah, the genophage. Tann took a wary step back. Conversations regarding the salarian-created, turian-delivered anti-reproductive disease afflicting the krogan species did not often end well.
Kesh did not, however, let loose with the usual flurry of muscleheaded posturing. “Jien Garson thought that might mean we’re a hardier bunch.”
“I see,” Tann said. He hadn’t known of the clan’s genetic resistance—did the Dalatrasses, he wondered, or was it a closely guarded secret among the Milky Way Nakmor? How had Jien Garson found out? Save perhaps by genetic investigation. All of the pioneers had undergone rigorous testing. Perhaps she had stumbled upon something the salarians had not.
Perhaps the Nakmor clan had known all along.
If so, that would have made the krogan clan among the first to keep such an important fact away from the salarian matriarchs and their most skilled intelligence operatives.
Tann, of course, was neither. And even if he had been among the Dalatrasses’ informants, there was little he could do about it now. So he filed that little bit of genetic information away.
It might, he reflected dourly, be a matter to correct in the future.
Krogan, after all, had the evolutionary capacity to breed like varren, if left unchecked.
A problem for another time. As Kesh appeared somewhat chatty, he thought to probe a bit more. “But that does not explain why you accepted. An invitation is not a reason.”
This time, her laughter had a dark, graveled undertone to it. “That’s not like you, Tann,” she said, ripping an entire bundle of blackened gear from under the table and heaving it aside. “To miss the obvious.”
He folded his arms, frowning at the krogan. Then it hit him. It wasn’t that he’d missed it. It was that he took the obvious path regarding the information. Not the path that credited the krogan with any agency at all.
A hedge against another genophage. Or perhaps against any attempt to control the species as a whole.
So they had thought themselves in a position to alter the course of the future. He could not fault her for that, nor the rest of her clan, who’d all joined with their clan leader. But he could remember it.
“I see,” he replied, this time with a slow turn that revealed how much he truly did. Best to let her know that he had accepted the information, and allow her to believe it resolved.