“Men,” Andria muttered.
With a strained groan and lengthy creak, the doors opened. A quick survey inside showed much of what he had expected: stark, bare, broken, and—
“Good god.” Andria’s voice. Horrified.
“Yeah.” The krogan manually operating the door sounded entirely too gleeful for the moment. He peered not at them, but at the sight spread before them. Space. So much space, millions and billions of stars and gases and black in between. “Ain’t it something?”
It was something all right. It was a deathtrap. The debris alone would present something of a problem, if no shield was in place—which he knew was not.
“Mostly,” Na’to said briskly as he strode into the room with exaggerated care, “it’s something to deal with on task. I’m—”
“Unless the next words out of your mouth are ‘here to do my job’,” came the deep, guttural voice of another krogan, “we don’t care.” The big meathead gestured to the edge of the crevice, where space met the corner of the emergency bulkhead. “Arvex is waiting.”
“Well, then.” Na’to turned back to Reg and Andria, shrugging at them with exaggerated emphasis. “Guess we’d better get to it.”
Andria, much smaller than Reg or the krogan, didn’t stomp so much as stride with pointed effort toward that brink. The minimal gravity didn’t allow for much by way of heavy tread. Her shoulder clipped one of the krogan’s thick wrists, which didn’t really move.
The krogan, his features much more visible in krogan-specific protective glass, leered at her as she passed. “Ooh, this one has attitude.”
Reg and Na’to followed the piqued engineer, ignoring the toothy smile behind them. “A hull-walk,” Reg grumbled. “Awesome.”
“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” Andria replied back, slinging her large pack to the metal flooring. “Na’to’s taking the walk.”
A fact he was well aware of. Na’to eyed the fascinating ribbons of unknown energy as his companions finalized last checks for the gear that would see him over this remarkable ledge and into all those stars and black. The energy hovered in bothersome layers of black and gray, shifts of yellow and orange. Not so close that he had to worry about brushing through the stuff. Not so far that it wasn’t on his mind.
“You good, Nacho?”
“Mm,” Na’to said, looking out again into the black. A word that wasn’t one, he realized when he glanced back at his team. “It doesn’t seem close enough, and barring any unforeseen alterations in trajectory or force, it should remain so.”
The krogan looked at each other, then shrugged in unison. “It’s weird,” one said.
“Yeah,” the other added. “Like a thresher maw pet.”
“What?”
“I think,” Na’to translated slowly, “they mean it’s unpredictable.”
“All right, then. Let’s get this conduit scoped in record time.”
Without further ado, Na’to coiled enough slack to keep Reg on his toes and made his way to the emergency hatch that had, miraculously, survived the devastation. “Well,” he said, testing the comms with false cheer while the air hissed out around him and the small hatch pressurized, “it could be worse.”
“Oh, yeah?” Andria’s voice sounded younger in comms than it did in person. A fact he had pointed out once to unfortunate consequences. “How so?”
Once settled, the exterior hatch opened to reveal little but space. And the occasional projectile, albeit none so large as to block the breath-taking view. Na’to’s smile tipped up behind his mask. “I could be stuck down there smelling krogan.”
One of the krogan grunted something Na’to thought might be a laugh. “Don’t worry,” he graveled through deep chuckles. “It could be worse in here, too.”
“Yeah?” asked Reg, thoughtful but focused. Na’to knew the slack of his secure cord was in good hands. “How do you figure?”
A large, bulky shape blocked out the stars in Na’to’s peripheral. “Because,” came a voice deeper, meaner than the others. He turned slowly, grav boots locking with each step, to stare into the faceplate of a krogan whose hump towered well over Na’to’s head. Despite the sizable mass, all he could catalog for sure was a row of ragged, sharp teeth. “They could be stuck with me.”
“Ah.” Na’to went still, swaying faintly as his coordination struggled to get used to zero gravity and the singularly difficult boots meant to counter it. Na’to nodded his head. “You must be Arvex.”
“And you’re the tech-head sent in to secure this piece of crap so I can get back to work.” Arvex bent to peer at him. “Funny. I didn’t think they’d send in a salarian.”
Na’to sighed, sending up a small prayer to the Dalatrass that had birthed him. “Funny,” he responded in kind. “I didn’t expect a krogan to think.”
The comms were dead silent. The only sound coming back to him was his own breath, and the illusionary hum of tension as it filled the vacuum between them.
Arvex rapped out a burst of laughter. “Come on.”
He turned and led the slow, methodical way across the hull. Each step thunked in force felt more than heard, while the delicate sea of mysterious tendrils seemed to drift without form or reason. So close, he felt like all he had to do was stretch a hand to touch it.
A fallacy, of course. Distance between what his eyes could perceive and the depth of dimension provided by the Scourge, the space it occupied, the pattern of light refracted off of the quietly floating Nexus, and his own fascination provided inaccurate perceptions.
The hatch, though. Now that was something a salarian could dig his hands into. To start, anyway. Arvex stopped first, folded his arms and glared at the brightly lit interior. “Here’s the thing. Do what you came to do and then let’s get the hell off this hull.”
Under the light, wires and connectors gleamed in pristine condition.
Well, nearly so.
“Ah,” he muttered to himself, climbing the last steps up the station’s hull with eyes fixed on the hardware. “Definite auxiliary,” he reported, tenderly lifting a bundle of wires to the side. “Can’t see the source of the problem, not yet. But this… and this…”
“What’s this?” A question Reg asked, but not to him. To Andria.
She had visuals through his feed. “It feeds life support, all right. An auxiliary power source, and one that I would guess wasn’t meant to provide as much power as it currently is.”
A grunt from the krogan beside him. Na’to didn’t pay much attention.
“Andria?” Reg asked.
“Yeah. I’m worried, too,” Andria replied quietly.
“Listen, Na’to, that Scourge is giving me the creeps out there. It’s closer on this side than on the populated side.”
Na’to made a thoughtful sound, but most of his mind was already entangled with power draw and mathematic values.
“He ain’t hearing you,” Arvex cut in. “Typical salarian.”
“Typical Nacho, anyway,” Reg replied with a sigh. “Let’s keep an eye on the stuff and see if it shifts. Mumbo! Jumbo! Go stand watch on either side of the bulkhead.”
“Who do you think—”
A foot clanged against the edge of the hatch. “Do it,” Arvex growled. Then he felt the weight of the krogan’s stare, heard him shift to crouch down on his haunches. “You hear that, appetizer? Get this old shit running like new before it all goes sideways.”
Old? No, no. New. Cutting edge. Failing, perhaps—fuses were beginning to show char. Overheating, maybe. Stress, decidedly. The salarian ignored the krogan, bent and thrust his face almost fully into the hatch. He wished he could take the helmet off, really use all his senses on the receptors and the connectors and just… just know what the tech was doing.