Nihlus took a long shower. Real long. Half an hour, or more. It didn’t matter, while they were docked, Saren had said. They’d be leaving soon, though. They’d talk about the details later, he said. He mentioned the name of the place but Nihlus had forgotten it within five seconds. His mind was all jumbled up. He couldn’t recall that tune that had been on constant replay in his head for days, and he struggled to keep track of the damnedest things. Like whether he’d already washed under his crest or not. He looked at the soap dispenser, and—
Eventually, Saren had peeled him off and sat him down on the only chair in the room. The shakes were pretty bad, but he didn’t care. He had questions, so many questions! Only, all his language had slipped away. So he just sat there, gaping around at… his new home.
Continue reading Anchored
Saren jumped when the doorbell rang. The
setting sun painted the cockpit with dense, gold rays. Dust motes danced in
them. Saren sniffed the warm, stuffy air. There was a floral scent in it. The
glass-wiping fluid. Traces of wiping, likely no more than a molecule-thick,
fogged the main control panel when viewed in this light, from this angle. He
blinked his sticky eyes open and unglued his sweaty back from the pilot chair’s overly enthusiastic embrace with a groan. How
long had he slept? The light had been a completely different color the last
time he’d seen it.
The bell rang again. He stood up and stretched, then tapped the unlock command on the control panel. He knew who it was. The outer hatch opened, then closed; he couldn’t quite hear it from the bridge but he could feel it through the fuselage. The airlock cycle would take a few seconds. He straightened his shirt and took one last critical look around. The inner door opened when he was halfway up the stairs.
Continue reading Sanctuary
Okeer lounged in the massage chair. It
was like a water bed, only it wasn’t water but some
kind of soft memory foam, and it molded to the back side of his body down to
the pores on the skin. It poked and prodded in all the right places and shivers
of pleasure went through him in a continuous stream. The only thing he’d change
about it was the purring noises that reminded him of turian voices.
Jedore walked past him. Her silken robe brushed his hand and the trail of her fruity perfume brushed his face. Her long hair hung in heavy ropes, still wet after bathing. She had some snack in one hand and a tiny bottle of something that looked like turian face paint in another. Why the fuck was his every second thought about turians?
Continue reading Honey Moon
Nihlus left the base on a public
transportation shuttle. He could have taken the military subway but this way he
got to see Saren’s ship one last
time, still parked in the spaceport, peeking through the sandy air like a faint
star in the middle of a dusty nebula.
You went back to
what you knew
So far removed
From all that we went through
And then it was over. He was out of Trodar for good. He would never see the distinguished turian Spectre again. His heart ached, but not as horribly as he had expected, and suddenly all those other, more urgent problems, came into sharp focus. For example, where was he going to sleep tonight? And what was he going to eat tomorrow?
Continue reading Revelation
Saren brooded for a long time, sitting in
the cockpit and listening to the slow, heavy beating of his heart. His
omni-tool was laid out on the idle navigation panel, a wire to connect it to
system VI dangling loose next to it. The salarian research data that Okeer had
stolen from Sur’Kesh was still there.
He had reported to the Council right after extraction, of course. As far as they were concerned, it had been another mission successful. Access to the data had been restored, preventing years of research and investments from going to waste. With his ship and his omni-tool destroyed, Okeer could not have smuggled a copy of it on his person. Saren had scans to prove it, and the STG were quite confident that not a byte of it had escaped their extranet siege of Invictus. Any copies Okeer might have secured before Saren had become officially involved were their responsibility, not his. Nobody seemed concerned that Okeer had not been brought to justice.
Continue reading Confrontation
Nihlus sat in the waiting room a long
time. Hours, it felt. Not what the clock on the info-holo said, but he didn’t believe a word it displayed. It said it was
lovely outside. Warm and sunny. Nope. It was scorched-earth hot and the UV was
high enough to make his plates spark. It had taken him half an hour to drive
from one end of the base to the other because visibility was the whole of ten
fucking meters due to sand. A nasty wind had whipped him with it from all
sides. Every square centimeter of his clothes had been made crunchy and
abrasive and his eyes still itched.
Warm and sunny my ass. And no way it had only been twenty minutes.
Continue reading Recapitulation