“Left!” He shouted over the hail of gunfire.
Saren jerked their vehicle sharply to their right.
“LEFT! LEFT! LEFT!”
Nihlus closed his eyes. Two seconds later, he opened them again and was relieved to discover that they were still in relatively good shape. Relatively good shape being him firing a machine gun while Saren’s riding what amounted to a unicycle into the thick of battle.
—
Continue reading [11]A figure of a pink-armoured krogan walked over to him and sat down on his cot. Its outline was as fuzzy as a, what was it, a cat? A tabby cat that had been recently washed and blow-dried.
“How are you doing?” It said. It now resembled a quarian wearing a cargo crate head-dress.
“Not good.” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “Am I on the Fleet? Where are the girls?”
Continue reading [10]The window was open, just a crack, letting the star-filled night slip in. It would normally be a security risk, but this was a small turian town in the middle of nowhere, and he’d bested the leader of the local regiment in a friendly sparring match right before they had lunch together. This was not an apartment on the Citadel. This was not a stardock on Ilium. This was not a private residence on Omega. And so, paradoxically, it was okay. It was okay to leave the window open and the original encryption in the door. It really was okay.
Even Saren had agreed. Provided that a pistol was within easy reach.
Continue reading [09]Nihlus paced back and forth in the small cabin, gnawing on his talons. Saren was sitting beside the bed, balancing a tray of delicate instruments and the readout panel of the compact scanner on his knees.
“How’s the readout?”
Saren shook his head, then bent over the screen once more.
“Anything I can do to help?”
Saren paused in the middle of picking up a minuscule probe, then turned and said, “Water.”
Continue reading [08]Nihlus didn’t do mornings. Unless, of course, he hadn’t slept the night before. Which he hadn’t.
The mist was still all around the campsite–it wouldn’t die down until around noon, at the earliest. But that was fine with him. Not being able to see three metres in front of himself also meant that nobody else could, either. He’d even caught breakfast that way. At least, he’d caught two amphibious critters that looked reasonably close to the ones pictured in the decade-old guidebook. A fire was okay, too, since everything was so wet that he couldn’t possibly cause an accident, and the mist would hide the smoke. He loved this dextro planet.
Continue reading [07]Sometimes, years later, Nihlus would lie awake in his cot and stare into the gloom and think: damn, I could’ve saved her.
—
The room is false. All of it. The walls are a sterile white, easy to keep clean, just throw on some bleach every time. And varnished with some kind of plastic, so the vomit doesn’t stain. The smell of it hangs in the air, though; any krogan or trained soldier would be able to smell it. Not the natural vomit you heave up after being punched in the guts by the squad’s best hand-to-hand specialist. The long-suffering, sour, sticky-hot kind. The kind brought on by slow and methodical pain.
Continue reading [06]