And the thought that consumed Na’to.
Just one.
“Tell them,” he said quietly as he careened away from the station. “Tell them the Scourge is aptly named.”
Poetic. To be named by a salarian and fit so well.
Whatever else he might have said, whatever other feedback he could have given as the first tendrils scraped past, it died in the sudden system failure of his electronics. The comm. The air regulators.
New tech. Old tech. It didn’t seem to matter.
The Scourge tore through it all.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Where one emergency ended, another took its place. The progress made before the loss of life was buried beneath the weight of the knowledge derived, and Kesh could offer nothing but the steadfast words of a krogan to Calix for them.
He stood in one of the few places Kesh preferred to have such meetings, an out-of-the-way office rarely found or sought after. He stared out over what should have been a courtyard of some kind, but remained dark and closed. Silent.
Kesh put a large, heavy hand on his shoulder. Squeezed. “He died well, Calix. With honor even my krogan salute.”
“Yeah.” The turian’s voice fell flat. “I’m sure he did.”
The lack of respect for her words didn’t bother her. Kesh knew something of what he was feeling. Krogan were no stranger to loss, but to lose to something so vicious, so unpredictable as this Scourge…
She let out a gusty sigh. “At the very least,” she said, letting him go, “he confirmed for us what we’d suspected. The energy that drifts around us is not harmless.”
“Worse,” he muttered. “It’s hungry.”
“Maybe.” She turned away, lumbered for the door. “More like we are hungry, and in our haste to rebuild, we neglected the real priorities. Return to your unit, Calix.” She paused at the door, braced one large hand on the frame, and looked back at the forlorn turian, his head bowed. “The power conduit they’d intended to fix held, Calix. The hull damage didn’t rupture the core. There’s something in that worth holding onto.”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t say anything. He simply nodded, slowly. Wearily.
Sympathy and determination made for difficult friends. Lacking anything better, Kesh sharpened her voice. “Let’s make sure we lose no one else.”
Calix said nothing.
She left him in silence and shadow, hoping that he was as strong as he needed to be. That he’d gather up his sorrows and his grief and press on. His team needed him.
This station needed him.
And they all needed the lives he and his crew kept alive.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sloane expected something of a rollercoaster ride, but the highs and lows of the recent weeks were wearing on her.
On the upside, work got done. Progress was made, and quite a lot of it. Kesh’s krogan were efficient and basically tireless. If they grumbled, it was indiscernible from the usual krogan surliness, and so didn’t require security to monitor. Not even the loss of one of their grunts put a dent in their work ethic.
Cold, maybe. Sloane couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the krogan way. Krogan died. That was kind of what they did, right? Lived big, full, bloody lives and invariably bit the big one.
So they kept working.
In the interim since the collision with the Scourge, no one had tried to steal another ship, or take more hostages, or go on a murderous rampage. Even if they had, the hidden cameras she’d ordered info-sec to install were in place and functional. Had they been needed, they existed.
And if they were never used? Even better.
Tann hadn’t asked for specifics, and Sloane didn’t offer them. Somehow, she didn’t think the salarian would go for what he’d call spying, but which Sloane called common-freaking-sense.
On the downside…
Calix.
The set of his features when she’d sat through a painful meeting about power draws and energy reserves made her chest hurt. She had seen turians pull through more than their fair share of pain and loss. Kaetus had once explained to her, in his usual surly way, that turians learned to process loss like factors in one’s life. Every victory was achieved on the back of those who didn’t make it.
It made the victory somehow better. Mean more.
Sloane understood. You didn’t strive for success without losing something along the way. But it was her job to keep that to a minimum, dammit.
Not that she could do much against this Scourge. She’d had her hands full with the mass panic inside the commons, and more than a few injuries thanks to that. The Scourge hadn’t rolled all the way through, thank whatever god still hung out on this floating wreck, but the aftershocks had left the whole populace looking panicked for days.
Calix, he didn’t do panic. Weeks after he’d lost Rantan Na’to, his face still bore the sign of his mourning. His whole team felt it. Shock, mostly. Two of his crew had been given temporary leave—she didn’t know where they’d gone off to, but if it was her, she’d guess somewhere the booze still flowed.
But he pressed on. So did she.
They all did. And according to Calix, life support was that much safer. Thanks to his salarian teammate.
And the krogan who’d tried to protect him. Nakmor Arvex.
A salarian and a krogan step out for repairs…
The joke wasn’t supposed to end in death. How was anyone supposed to guess that they’d blindsided right into a Scourge patch? Without sensors, they were all blind.
But the damned things refused to work. And there was only so much she could do.
The only thing they had going for them was confirmation. The Scourge blew. Also, it blew things up. Namely, the Nexus. And anything that got in its path. How, why, was a mystery for scientists to unravel.
Her job was to make sure nobody panicked. This was getting to be something of a crapshoot.
With some semblance of routine came time to think, and with time to think came a sudden abundance of opinions. Everyone she talked to lately seemed to know exactly what the crew’s priorities should be. Who just had to be woken.
They should abandon the station and set up a colony on one of the planets. All in or bust.
They should disperse everyone to the farthest corners of the station, in case the core experienced another catastrophe.
They should test weaponry on the Scourge.
They had to turn around and go back to the Milky Way.
They needed to put a billiards table in Commons 4.
Sloane agreed with that one. The rest, though… not so much.
She sat in one of the intended parks, borrowing a little peace and quiet while everyone else busied themselves with, well, staying busy. The days had proven one thing for sure: No matter the to-do list on everybody’s plate, any effort at relaxation seemed to turn into panic. The Scourge, the lack of the Pathfinders, the loss of life, the next collision…
And when the opinions turned to panic, to fear, to anger, it seemed as if people sought her out specifically. To yell. To plead. To demand.
She’d wanted to lead. To make a difference. Here on the Nexus, people looked at her, spoke to her, with certain expectations. She could see fear in their faces if she had a scowl on her own, whether it might be due to a reactor failure, or gastrointestinal issues. One wrong twitch on her part and the effects rolled out like ripples.