Not that he could blame anyone for feeling angry. Waking up abruptly had been a shock, to say the least. He could only imagine how it had been for the first survivors, to have been expelled from their stasis pods without care or warning. It had to have left them shaken.
That’s why it was Calix’s job to ensure the next group to wake up got everything they deserved. Everything denied him—and his exhausted team.
A tic jumped in the center of his brow. Right at the crest. It wasn’t supposed to move like that. Calix rubbed at it grimly, but no amount of that would make the stress go away.
“How steady are we?” he asked. Irida passed him a screen. It only took a glance. “Right. It’ll hold for now. Take some R&R,” he added, setting the tablet on the dash—out of the asari’s hands.
She noticed. “But—”
“I’ll handle any backlash,” Calix said firmly. “You’re all working as hard as you can, and you’ve performed miracles out here on your own. Take a well-deserved break.”
Irida exchanged glances with Nnebron, who shrugged. “If you say so,” the human said.
The rest of the team were too tired to do more than drag themselves away from their stations. “Cookout in the commons!” one said, a decree met with cheers of support.
Irida eyed them warily. “Cookout, huh?”
Calix grinned at the asari’s wrinkled nose. “Hey, don’t knock it. Nothing beats a good cookout in hard times.”
“Mm.” Not really a word, but her skepticism came through loud and clear. “Don’t cookouts usually require meat and vegetables?”
“Yeah, well…”
“And aren’t they held, you know, outside?”
“Well,” Calix repeated with a laughing shrug, “you get rations, and if you’re lucky, some club music. Just go with it. It’s called improvising.”
Her nose was still wrinkled as she walked away, following the others.
Calix’s amusement faded. A wave of exhaustion rolled over him, and he took a moment to lean against the dash and rub the back of his neck. Even his fringe ached.
What in the galaxy did they expect Calix and his team to do here? They couldn’t wake more people. The krogan were great at labor and terrible at the finesse work—Kesh excluded, Calix could admit. And if they slipped up even a little, thousands of people would suffer.
Pressure?
Try an entire station’s worth of pressure. A generation’s worth of pressure.
The headache between his eyes had become a constant companion the past few days. Every time he found himself thinking like this, Calix told himself it was better than the turians’ meritocracy. That the Nexus had real thinkers, planners, and doers up there in Operations. Not just some lucky bastards who’d survived a calculated decision.
Except…
Except that’s exactly what they were. Weren’t they?
The comm signaled a connection. “You coming, boss?”
Nnebron again.
“Be there in five,” Calix replied, and he signed off before the youth could hear his sigh.
The turian meritocracy might not be Calix’s idea of qualified leadership, but neither was some halfassed algorithm based on a reporting structure. All that accomplished was allowing stooges to fill in for the real talent.
He frowned as he made his way out of the system’s arrays. They’d been hardwired together in places, interrupted by glossy segments of neatness where his team had started putting them back together. The paneling gleamed.
Foster Addison was fine enough as the director of Colonial Affairs. She had a steady head. Mostly. But seemed more like an organizer than a solid leader. The kind of brain that set things into plans and gave them to more forceful or subtle personalities to execute. Colonial Affairs was a good fit for her. Running a station without Garson’s guidance? Not so much.
On the other hand, Jarun Tann was neither forceful nor subtle. The salarian’s snide habit of looking down his nose at Calix and his team still got under his skin. And of course, he was the one with the “acting director” title. In theory he could make decisions entirely on his own, though Calix wondered what would happen if the salarian tried. Nothing good, he suspected.
Calix grumbled to himself as he paced down the corridor, unzipping his uniform at the neck to let him at least feel like he had more breathing room. Few people traversed these particular halls. A couple krogan lumbered past, grunting acknowledgement of his presence. He nodded, but didn’t say anything.
Too tired. Too past the point of exchanging niceties.
It was a trait he currently shared with Sloane, at least. He hadn’t expected to enjoy the human’s company, but her lack of ulterior motives and forthright personality appealed to the turian as the better of the three options. At least he could trust the security director to take care of problems the old-fashioned way. Hell, she’d probably have made a good turian, the way she liked to cut through the bullshit.
Sure turians politicked. Calix was all too familiar with that truth. But not the way salarians schemed and asari hovered.
Of course, humans could be just as bad. The First Contact War had proved it. But the way Calix saw it right now, Sloane was a leg up.
One out of three ain’t bad.
Voices peppered the quiet corridor as Calix approached his destination. The lights were kept dim to save on resources, but that didn’t stop the music. It threaded through the sound of merriment and shouting, with a techno beat somebody had decided was a good idea.
“All right, Corvannis,” he muttered, his own voice cut with grim humor. “Face up.” His crew would only be dragged down even more if they saw how defeated he was feeling. He’d buck up. They’d buck up.
They all had to.
He rubbed at a mandible as he worked on arranging his features into something much less brooding. It wasn’t exactly a smile, not even by turian standards, but it’d do. He couldn’t erase exhaustion.
Ready as he was for whatever version of a cookout the crew had managed, Calix didn’t expect the voices he heard to translate into angry shouting. He rounded the corner and entered the commons with a greeting ready, only to draw up short.
Four of his team had gathered in a loose semi-circle around what appeared, to his ignorant eye, to be a still of some kind. They weren’t looking at whatever chemicals dripped inside, though. They were staring at the other side of the room, where a row of brighter fixtures highlighted the faceoff between his young engineer Nnebron and Addison’s twitchy assistant.
The shouting came from the peanut gallery, and the tension was like walking into a dust cloud. His facade of good humor snapped.
“What’s going on here?”
The small crowd went abruptly silent. William Spender angled his body away from Nnebron, just enough to make it clear he considered the engineer of no consequence.
“Ah. Are you in charge of this motley crew?” the politician said. Calix’s fingers twitched to zip up his uniform, but he refrained. They’d met before. Clearly, the man thought little of ground and tech crew.
“Calix Corvannis,” he said calmly, striding past his crew, ignoring the still and planting himself between Spender and the rest. A nice, easygoing barrier. “Engineering.”
Spender frowned. He shifted his tablet from one hand to the other, waved it at him officiously. “I can see that from your uniform,” he said. “Anyway it’s not what I asked. Are you in charge here?”
“Yes.” Clipped. Calix looked to Nnebron, bypassing Spender entirely. “What’s going on?”