“Royal flush, suckers! Lay ‘em down!”

I nearly jumped out of my seat in disappointment and anger, violently flinging my cards halfway across the table. “There’s no way!” I yelled, and I wasn’t alone in my astonishment. Troy, Antarom, and Tali were equally outraged while Vega sat there with a shit-eating grin plastered onto his face.

The pot had grown to well over six thousand credits, and up until Claire dealt the river, it was looking like my three Kings stood a solid chance of winning it all. But no, Vega just happened to have a pocket Ace and Queen. With a 10, Jack, and King all on the table, he beat every one of us.

I'd been less upset back on Tuchanka when a Reaper landed on top of me.

James greedily leaned forward and scooped the pile of credits toward him, much to everyone’s dismay. In reality, we were all well aware that currency didn’t really count for jack shit any more, but the money didn’t even matter in the long run. It was the fact that Texas Hold ‘Em had a fascinating way of turning even the least competitive person into an animal.

“Well, that’s me cleaned out,” Tali frustratedly proclaimed as she sat back down. “I don’t think I like this game.”

“Ahh, it’s not all bad, Sparks,” Vega replied. “You just gotta get more time in at the table. You’ve got the perfect poker face.”

“I’m not sure how, you can’t even see my—” She stopped dead in her tracks, causing us all to chuckle. “I see what you mean.”

“Yeah there’s no way that’s fair, right?” Troy asked jokingly. “I demand everyone’s faces be unobstructed. Tali, mask off, come on.”

“Oh, sure, let me just contract a deadly case of chicken pox so that our game of poker will be fair.”

“If you could, that’d be great.” His voice was dripping with sarcasm, making it even funnier.

“Please don’t,” Claire interjected, playing into the joke but throwing her own weight into it. “If anyone dies on my watch, they’ll take my medic badge away.”

“I’m so glad you care, Daniels,” Tali said, still feigning indignity. “I’ll remember that next time I get a suit puncture. The important thing is that your credibility will be damaged, not the infection that comes with a bullet.”

“I’m glad you understand, Tali.”

Antarom yawned loudly from her side of the table, making it clear that she was waiting for us to continue the game. Claire, Troy and I had all suffered hugely from that last round, with all of us going damn near all-in just to keep up with Vega’s wild bets. Having won the pot, he clearly had the most credits out of all of us, while Antarom was still fairly snug without about a thousand credits in her hands.

There wasn’t much point in the rest of us continuing. I don’t think even Vega expected to play another hand, but we still did so for Antarom’s sake. And for our own, when I really thought about it. The last few days had been particularly heavy, with little down time for us all to shoot the breeze and lighten up a bit. So, while Shepard, Garrus and the others met with Aria, we’d chosen to stay aboard Normandy, have a few drinks, and relax.

It ended up costing me about two thousands credits that didn’t really amount to anything, so really all that I’d suffered was a blow to my pride. At least it wasn’t a physical blow; I’d suffered enough of those already, and was sure to take a few more before the war was over. What was some imaginary currency that didn’t amount to a damn thing when compared to my physical well-being?

As if I didn’t have the scars to prove that my body was a literal punching bag.

Eventually Antarom excused herself when we’d stopped playing cards, and if there wasn’t a competition or a bottle present for her to make short work of, she tended not to stick around in social situations. Troy followed soon after, claiming he needed to do some weapon maintenance on Veritas. I’d begun to wonder if there wasn’t something between the two of them, largely due to the tension of rivalry between them and the fact that they always seemed to leave at relatively the same time, but he’d assured me there wasn’t. When I prodded, he’d only asked me to prove that Claire and I weren’t an item. We weren’t, and I think he knew as much, but there was no convincing anyone else. Similarly, he’d said, there was nothing between he and Antarom.

It didn’t take long for the rest to filter out one by one, each returning to their duties or finding more productive things to do with their free time. Even Claire excused herself due to a bad headache; it would have caused me a bit of concern if not for the fact that I’d also dealt with headaches for half my life, so I understood her plight. She’d been having them more frequently ever since we’d entered the system.

So I waited patiently in the lounge, occasionally skimming through my omni-tool, triple-checking to make sure there was nothing important I needed to do. Until the negotiations with Aria were through, I knew there wasn’t, but that didn’t keep me from obsessing. Consulting on mission statuses and the Reapers’ movements had kept me busy for nearly two weeks, and as much as I’d hated it, it was better than being bored. Or being alone with my thoughts. That was where the fun really started.

I’d haphazardly kept a sort of journal ever since my arrival all those months ago, filling it with vague enough thoughts and details that even if someone were to find it, they wouldn’t learn anything important. Mostly it had just been the random thoughts that crossed my mind in the late hours of the night—or early hours of the morning—all of which seemed to circle around and come back to my mental state or some past trauma. I didn’t like to wallow, but it had also always seemed strange to me that I never had been able to let go of most of the baggage weighing me down. I’d thought that writing would help in that regard.

Truth was, it really didn’t. My father had told me a long time ago that the best way to let go was to write down whatever came to mind and burn the paper afterward. That it was a symbolic gesture in which a person could air their grievances without ever actually putting them out into the world. In a way, I understood what he meant and I could see how it would work for some people, but I’d sunk my teeth deep into my own problems. They helped me survive, in some twisted way. Letting go of them would require much more effort on my part, and I knew it.

But mostly, it was interesting to read what I’d written. I think most authors or aspiring writers will tell you that, if you want to write something interesting, you write what you would want to read. There’s no small amount of merit to be earned in writing some grand opus or some otherworldly tragedy, but if you ever want to truly move someone with your words, you write what you know. You write about the real things in your life, paraphrased and mythicized through metaphors and parables so that you can distance yourself from it in some small way. But at the end of the day, you’re only writing what’s important to you and hoping that it reaches the people like you who can relate to it.

I’d written so much about how insane it was to be a part of this ridiculous world, entering it by the craziest leap in logic the universe had ever witnessed. I’d exaggerated so much—put so much weight and drama behind words and situations that didn’t have any right being remembered so fantastically. Granted, I’d lived through no shortage of events that truly were spectacular and unbelievable, but a fresh, innocent mind tends to hyperbolize a few details; especially if that mind belongs to an aspiring writer.

There were so many things I would’ve changed, or things I would’ve phrased differently had I only been a bit wiser and more mature. But the curse of hindsight is a lack of wonder and zeal, and it would’ve been a disservice not to dip my ink in those emotions that had engulfed me at the time. It had all been so much chaos, punctuated by the brief bout of grounded moments shared with the people I’d grown to care so deeply for. Troy and Adison had always had my back through calm nights aboard the Evanescent and through swarms of monsters surrounding us on all sides, and I’d always known they would—but we’d also forged some incredible relationships beyond the fraternity that bound the three of us. I could honestly say that our squadmates, and Shepard’s, were some of the most standout people I’d ever met. Even the ones who chose to be surly assholes.

Then I found the entries in my journal where I’d chronicled some of the crazier dreams that I’d had in the past few months. In my teens, I’d dreamed quite frequently, and having grown up in a new-age religious household, it had been firmly embedded in me that those dreams were potentially signs from God or some other spiritual nonsense that I needed to decipher. I’d outgrown those notions shortly after starting life on my own, and subsequently I’d had fewer and fewer interesting dreams worth noting down on paper or in an electronic archive such as that present on my omni-tool. Still, every great once in a while, I did slip into unconsciousness and experience something worth remembering.

Most of them were wild ramblings, detailing nothing more than my brain’s subconscious attempt to rid itself of extraneous thoughts and information. I’d dreamed a lot about the end of the world, which seemed only natural given the war raging around us, and weirdly I’d had an odd amount of dreams involving various superheroes and demigods. One standout had been a full-on brawl between Thor and the Hulk that took place on my grandfather’s property, and which involved me somehow joining the fight between the two powerhouses.

These dreams all usually ended in some insane way, like being punched into outer space, or plummeting down to earth thereafter, or being swallowed alive by the ground beneath my feet—again, that one was understandable and almost certainly a result of trauma following my time on Tuchanka. And at the end of every one of them, I awoke in a cold sweat, shook it off as a stupid dream, and went back to sleep.

But every great once in a while, I’d had dreams that served as windows into my memories more than anything. I’d re-lived some of the most difficult experiences dealing with the first girl I’d fallen in love with: our first date, our first fight, our breakup, several depressing experiences over the following years, and eventually her death. Funny, I hadn’t even been there when she passed, nor had I attended the funeral. We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in years, and she’d moved far away long before that. It hadn’t seemed pressing enough for me to go.

All the same, years later those events were still cropping up in my dreams, and were still significant enough to write them down. In the midst of all that we’d been dealing with over the months, it was strange to me that past trauma from what seemed like a completely different life had decided to crop up now.

And speaking of the war, it quickly became evident that we were going to have more of it on our hands soon enough. The door to the lounge spun around and slid open, allowing Garrus to stroll in with the gait of a man who was on a mission.

They’d finished their chat with Aria.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, looking around the room expecting to have seen at least a few more of us.

“Antarom cleared them all out.” That miniscule amount of information was enough to paint a perfect picture for him. “Why? What’s the word from Omega?”

Garrus sighed and motioned for me to follow him, which I did almost immediately. I was all too happy to leave my philosophical musings for some other time. When presented with the intrigue of learning exactly what Aria wanted from us, sitting by myself and questioning my deepest thoughts felt a bit insignificant.

If only foresight were as clear as hindsight.

“Aria lost contact with one of her crews out in the Amada system,” Garrus said as he led us into Normandy’s elevator. “We’re going out there on a search and recovery op.”

“She can’t do that herself?”

“Her people aren’t exactly the most reliable.” I knew all too well that he was speaking from experience. “The mercs and pirates of the Terminus have agreed to follow her lead thanks to the Reapers, but that doesn’t make them soldiers. They don’t have the same loyalty to each other as the rest of us do.”

A huff of annoyance escaped my lips. “So we’re the only ones out here who give a shit about more than ourselves.”

Garrus’s head tilted to the side. “Pretty much.”

“And I guess the queen herself is too preoccupied to do her own dirty work?”

Man, I really had to learn to keep my mouth shut, or failing that, at least allow myself a few minutes before jumping to any negative conclusions. Because when the elevator door slid open once again, ushering us out to the Normandy’s CIC, the first sight to greet my eyes was the familiar white jacket and black one-piece that I recognized as the preferred wardrobe of none other than Aria T’Loak. You might think the frigid demeanor and cold glare of a woman who gave little to no regard for anything but herself would be the first perceptible characteristics, but I’d spent eight months with Antarom. Spiteful asari were becoming less rare with every passing day.

Shepard was with her, as were Liara, Kaidan, and Tali, surveying the planet Aria’s people had been lost on. I could make out the name Takkan and a few boring characteristics, but little else. Didn’t remember much from the games, so it must’ve been one of those desperately disinteresting planets that served as nothing more than a pit stop in the quest to obtain more resources.

“Come on,” Garrus called, and it was only then that I noticed he’d already made it halfway across the CIC and to the bridge. “We’re heading out as soon as all Evanescent personnel are back on board.”

I jogged to catch up with him, ignoring Shepard and the others as I passed. Under any other circumstances I might’ve stopped to chat, but it seemed we were on a deadline. There would be time to waste later.

“We have a precise location on Aria’s operatives?” I asked, following Garrus down the corridor leading to the airlock.

“As precise as we’re going to get,” was his simple response.

“Tactical analysis?”

“We’ll get the details en route. Right now, we just have to worry about gearing up and making sure we’re ready for action.”

That I could do. EDI had already docked the Normandy with the Evanescent, so we got back aboard our own ship and immediately set about our pre-combat preparations. Everyone had gotten the memo, and everyone convened in the hangar to don their armor and do a quick weapons check. All those months spent fighting on Rannoch had drilled into us the importance of being able to ready up on the fly. It was always nice when we had proper time for a mission briefing and a solid gear prep, but that was a luxury that we rarely ever got.

Oddly enough, I didn’t see Troy. He must’ve been on loan to Shepard and the Normandy gang.

In about ten minutes flat, we had all strapped on our armor, loaded our weapons onto our backs, and begun piling into the shuttle one by one. Presumably Aria wanted to rescue her people as soon as possible, which meant we’d be making an immediate FTL jump to Takkan. I didn’t know exactly how far we were from that system, but the greatest distance between solar systems within a cluster was about 14 lightyears. Travelling at FTL speeds, that meant we could jump from system to system in about four seconds flat.

It’s amazing what you can learn just by skimming through the extranet.

The bigger concern would be the travel time once we exited FTL speeds. Assuming that the Reapers were the cause of Aria’s missing squad, we couldn’t just plop ourselves down right next to Takkan. Instead we’d drop out of FTL just beyond the perimeter of the solar system, engage our cloak, and survey the area. We could then move in when EDI determined a flight path that would attract the least attention.

We’d no doubt make the approach to the planet’s surface by shuttle, seeing as it was unlikely that Shepard or Garrus would want to risk having the ships enter low atmosphere, therefore drawing unnecessary attention. If we had a solid location on Aria’s people, we could probably drop in, make a quick exfil, and be home before dinner.

That phrase meant absolutely nothing, seeing as both home and dinner were two words that had almost no meaning any more, but the idea remained the same. We’d engaged in so many ludicrous missions that a simple search and rescue didn’t even set my nerves on edge.

“So, what’s the word?” Adison asked. We had all taken our seats in Evanescent’s shuttle, doing final weapons checks or minor equipment maintenance, and we’d yet to receive any real information about our objective. Granted, we still hadn’t even left the ship yet, but we usually had at least a quick rundown by that point.

Garrus, standing at the front of the shuttle next to the pilot, turned around to face us. The scars from Tuchanka still hadn’t quite healed, and the fact that I could distinguish them from the ones he’d sustained during his tenure as the Archangel was an impressive feat.

“We’re still waiting on specifics, but apparently Aria had a team out on the planet Takkan investigating some ruin or another that she thought might be interesting. Those old ruins sometimes lead to artifacts left behind from past civilizations; I ran into a handful of them with the Normandy crew back in the day.”

“Before the war, I’d have said that was a great idea,” I added, “but what good does Aria think it’ll do now?”

Garrus just shrugged. He was in the same boat as the rest of us. “Doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s not what we’re here for. If that crew’s still alive, we get them to safety. If not, we get the info on whatever they were trying to dig up.”

Straightforward enough. In the majority of these missions, the people we went in after usually wound up dead, so our objective was mostly superfluous. Still, it was important to get confirmation of death, and equally important for us to cement our alliance with Aria. We needed her just as much as anyone else. If this was what she wanted to waste our talents on, so be it.

“Force recon?” I asked. I knew it was likely that we didn’t have any current intel on the situation or the location of Aria’s team, but I had to ask anyway. It was possible that I’d be pleasantly surprised.

“That’ll be up to you,” Garrus answered.

Or it was possible that I’d be severely disappointed.

“Wait, what?”

“The extreme heat of the planet’s surface will interfere with the shuttle’s scanning equipment, so you’re going to have to be the eyes. You, Adison and Claire will perform a low atmo air drop and scout the terrain. If your drop zone’s safe, radio in and we’ll send Antarom and J’Kal in after you. If not, it’ll be your job to find and clear an LZ so the rest of us can join you.”

Fuck me. Ever since Jerusalem, I’d hated air drops more than getting shot or stabbed with shrapnel. It worked much differently now that we had propulsion systems built into our armor, but the concept was still the same: the shuttle would approach the planet at a distance of roughly ten miles above the surface, the door would open, and we’d leap into the air. The fall itself wasn’t so bad; at ten miles up, that gave us roughly two and a half minutes of free fall time, during which we’d take in the sights and potentially get an idea of the terrain below us. It rarely ever helped, of course, because the ground looks so vastly different from a bird’s eye view than it does planetside, but it was still an enjoyable experience. We got to enjoy the scenic landscape, have a minute of calm before the storm, and feel the breeze against our faces as we plummeted to the ground.

The landing was the rough part. At about a mile from the surface, we’d activate the propulsion systems to begin slowing our fall. The abrupt change in speed often left a queasy feeling in my stomach, if not total sickness. Usually by the time I landed, I’d have to immediately remove my helmet and spray the contents of my stomach all over the ground. Even if I knew hours beforehand that we’d be making an atmo jump and forced myself not to eat, something always came up.

But regardless, Garrus had already settled on a plan, and we were still the only ones with the propulsion-assisted armor. As much as I may have disliked it, I’d done it before and survived. One more time wouldn’t kill me.

“Sounds like a fun ride,” Claire absently commented.

“Yeah, you say that now,” I retorted, causing Adison to chuckle and slap me on the shoulder.

“I’ve never seen anyone puke so much despite taking special care not to eat for thirteen hours.”

Antarom got a good laugh at that. “Weak-ass.”

I looked her dead in the eyes and wished I could punch her in the face so badly. In all honesty, she’d probably welcome a good sparring match, but I didn’t want to risk the consequences just as much as I didn’t want to risk getting absolutely humiliated. “You wanna trade, Antarom? I’ll gladly take the cushy job relaxing in the shuttle.”

“All right, cut the chatter,” Garrus intervened, looking at his omni-tool. “We just made the jump. Should be dropping planetside in about ten minutes.”

To Antarom’s dismay, we did as told, falling silent so that Garrus could work out all the details with Shepard. In reality, it only took about five or six minutes for us to reach the planet’s atmosphere; I could tell by the rumbling of the shuttle and the slight increase in temperature. Takkan was a bit of a pressure cooker, with temperatures reaching well beyond the boiling point on the bright side of the planet. Thankfully, the gravity and atmospheric pressure was roughly half that of earth’s, so at least we’d have an easy time crossing large distances quickly.

Then, far too suddenly for my liking, the shuttle door opened and realization came down that I was about to live through a very uncomfortable experience. I’d rather have taken another bullet, to be honest.

“Recon team, that’s your mark,” Garrus said through the comm. “Report back to us as soon as you’ve hit the ground.”

I sighed and stood to my feet. “Copy.”

I certainly didn’t want to be the last one out, and I knew that if I waited for my brain to actually kick in, I’d have to fight myself just to make the jump. So, impulsively, before I could talk myself out of it, I ran for the shuttle door and leapt into the air.

And I was flung like a ragdoll through the sky as the shuttle sped on by. I’d tried to fight it during my first few airdrops, but eventually I’d learned that just riding out the initial chaos was the best way to deal with it. I darkened the visor of my helmet so much that it was impossible to see through it, leaving only me and the sensation of gravity that helped inform me which direction led to the planet’s surface.

A few seconds later, I righted myself mid-cartwheel so that my body began plummeting face-first to the ground below. Only then was it safe to turn my visor back on, giving me visual confirmation that I was headed in the right direction. The heads-up display flashed a few bits of information on-screen in an attempt to identify surface conditions and threat analysis, but I wasn’t too concerned about any of that intel. I’d already known that the planet would prove hazardous if we were exposed for too long, and we were still too far out for local scanners to pick up anything useful.

So we fell. For a solid two minutes there wasn’t much to do other than watch the ground below me get closer and take in the view. Takkan was a very dark planet, and it didn’t help that we were dropping right along the dark side of the terminus line. From what I could see of the day-lit side of the planet, a sort of blueish-brown dirt covered the entirety of its hills and valleys, making the ground below us appear quite dark and ominous. Thankfully the sun was setting; Takkan stood as the closest celestial body to the system’s sun, making the thing appear massive when viewing it from the planet’s surface. Even as its white ghost crept behind the horizon, it felt as though I was seeing the earth disappear behind the moon.

A proximity alert sounded off in my ears, directing me to the fact that it was time to begin my final descent. On instinct, I set the propulsion jets to a slow burn, righted myself so that I instead began falling feet-first, and activated the systems. I really needed to have Liara create a VI subroutine to automate the whole process; if we were going to continue making drops like this, you’re damn right my lazy ass needed a computer to do the hard job for me.

Still, even without a VI, I managed to make the drop pretty smoothly. Given Takkan’s extremely low gravity, the ride went much more comfortably than the average jump. I even decreased the force exerted by the jets at a certain point so that I didn’t fall too slowly.

And then, after what seemed like a much longer drop than the norm, my feet kicked down on the planet’s surface. Purple dust rose into the air upon contact and lingered there, falling quite slowly after an extended period of time in the air. I’d never been on such a low-gravity world before, so my eyes lingered on the sight.

Weird, no desire to vomit.

I didn’t question it. If the gods of the air drop wanted to bless me with one mission that didn’t make me queasy, I wasn’t going to complain.

Adison and Claire made their touch-downs a few moments later, both landing about fifty meters away. Garrus would want a progress report, I knew, and that responsibility fell to me since I was the first one to land.

“Just touched down on the surface,” I said on the Evanescent’s crew comm line. “I didn’t catch any signs of movement on the way down. Adison, Claire, you guys got anything?”

I could see Adison shake his head even from that distance. “Nothing.”

“There was a structure about five klicks east of us,” Claire added. “Didn’t look like much, but we might as well start there.”

I nodded, opening my omni-tool to figure out which direction was east while Garrus issued commands over the comms.

“We’ve got your position on radar,” he said. “Start heading to the structure and I’ll have Antarom and J’Kal meet you there.”

“We should be able to handle it,” Claire interrupted. Both Adison and I turned to face her, and despite his entire head being concealed by a breather helmet, I knew he was wearing the same questioning scowl that had no doubt crept onto my face. “No need to waste time and people.”

I knew that she’d been out of the game for quite a while, but her statement still didn’t feel appropriate given her history within the Alliance. She was young and impulsive, not unlike myself and Troy, yet I’d never so much as heard Claire question an order before. Not even Antarom tried to overrule Garrus’s commands like that.

“There’s no telling what you’re walking into down there, and I’m not having everyone sit on their asses in the shuttle while you explore the unknown.” There was a tinge of annoyance in his voice, but Garrus had dealt with much worse before. “We’re touching down now. Regroup with the others and find Aria’s team. Venatus and I will be linking up with Shepard, so we may fall out of comms range for a while. Watch each other’s backs and complete your objective safely. Vakarian out.”

Damn, he shut her down hard.

I set my omni-tool to display a small directional compass on my HUD so that I knew where we were going, at which point Adison and Claire both made their way over to my position. It occurred to me that I still hadn’t any idea what Shepard and her squad were even doing, but that wasn’t any of my concern. As long as we completed our mission, we were sure to learn more later.

“I think I pissed him off,” Claire said jokingly, trying to appear innocent through the small slit of transparent visor in her helmet.

“Nah, he’s just tense,” I responded. “I don’t think he much enjoys the idea of being Aria’s lapdog, even if it is temporary.”

“Can’t blame him.”

“No,” Adison agreed, “but we better lock it down until we’re done here. Antarom and J’Kal are sure to beat us to the structure.”

“Right, we should move out.” Claire brought up her omni-tool for a moment, likely setting a destination marker like I had, and furthermore sent an invite for both Adison and I to link up our HUD systems to hers. We did so, and another marker appeared on my virtual compass. “The structure I saw was in that direction.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

I tried to start running towards our objective, only to be painfully reminded that lower gravity also meant slower movement. It wasn’t as if we were on the earth’s moon—gravity there was roughly six times weaker than earth’s, whereas Takkan’s gravity was only about half as strong—but it was noticeable enough for me to stumble a bit while trying to build up momentum.

Claire and Adison got a good laugh out of my discombobulation, only to feel like idiots when they tried to gain speed themselves. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be making an ass out of myself by trying to run on a low-gravity planet thousands of lightyears away from earth, I’d have asked you what kind of acid you were tripping on.

Eventually, of course, we did figure out how to run, and we began the rather easy journey to whatever structure Claire had spotted during her descent. It felt a bit like being back on earth during the initial invasion; with all the Reapers and ships landing and taking off from the surface, gravity had been so distorted that Troy and I had been able to run like marathon athletes despite being pretty out of shape.

Now I had the genetically altered body of a guy who’d been fighting a gritty war for nine months, and crossing the purple sands of Takkan felt as easy and liberating as floating in the ocean. Any time we reached the top of a dune hill, one simple leap had us skimming across the surface as gracefully as hummingbirds. If not for the intense heat and the planet’s air pressure, I would’ve loved to take my armor off and feel the wind whipping past.

Even still, it served as a comforting and relaxing moment in the midst of what had felt like a very long day at work. It didn’t even matter how much downtime we had or how lighthearted we attempted to keep our moods—everyone was feeling the effects of having been at war for so long. For our own sanity, I prayed that it would end soon.

At the very least, we made good time zipping across Takkan’s surface. Not more than two or three minutes had passed before we caught sight of friendly markers on our HUDs, indicating the lovely dynamic duo of J’Kal and Antarom. We flew by so quickly that I had to use the jump jets just to slow down, kicking up a cloud of violet sand that spread like smoke through the air in front of me. Neither of the surly bastards were amused, or in good spirits at all, apparently.

“What took you so long?” Antarom asked. Her entire face hid behind benevolent blue armor that did absolutely no justice to her personality, but I knew she was bored and annoyed. Being Aria’s bitch wasn’t her idea of contributing something useful.

“No time for bullshit,” I tersely responded, letting a sigh escape me. “Sooner we’re done here, sooner we can get back to killing Reapers.”

Her head darted in a sort of diagonal nod, and she didn’t put up any more of a fight.

“Structure’s still a klick or two ahead,” Claire said. She wasted no time linking up with Antarom and J’Kal, making sure we were all on the same page, and together we all set out for another couple minutes of gliding across the planet’s surface. I’d never much entertained the idea of getting a motorcycle or a streetbike, but if it felt anything similar to flinging myself through the air inches above Takkan’s deep plum sand, I’d have to look into it.

It was odd, I thought, that we hadn’t encountered any resistance yet. There’d been no reason to think the Reapers would make an appearance any time soon, nor had there been any sign of hostile activity—or any activity at all, barring whatever Claire had seen—but it was unusual for us to not run into even a little bit of trouble along the way. I’d gotten so used to expecting the unexpected and preparing for our plans to go horribly wrong that a nice, run-of-the-mill operation sent up little red warning flags somewhere in the back of my conscious mind.

All things considered, I should’ve just been glad that a Capital ship didn’t randomly drop out of the sky and fry us all to death right then and there.

Quit tempting fate.

If that wasn’t the truth. I set about keeping my mind on the current moment, only to realize that Claire hadn’t been wrong; there was indeed a structure ahead, not altogether different than a lot of the white prefab buildings that had been so prevalent on uncharted worlds in the first Mass Effect. Big enough to serve as a sort of base of operations for Aria’s people to explore the planet’s ruins, but small enough that it wouldn’t even be spotted on ship’s scanners.

To this day I don’t understand why, but those buildings had always reminded me of the little animated Pixar lamp. You know, the one who squishes the ‘I’ and stands there like he’s about to shit himself?

“Looks like we found it,” I said to the others, still advancing toward the building. “I’m surprised you even saw this thing, Claire.”

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty great.”

I chuckled and kept moving, slowing down only when I was meters away from the structure. HUD hadn’t spotted any defenses or active motion on radar, so unless there were some unknown assailants lying in wait for us, the exterior was safe for the time being.

“Looks abandoned,” Adison absently commented. “You think Aria’s people are here?”

I shrugged, stopping a few meters away from the entrance. “Can’t imagine anyone else would be on this planet. Besides, we might as well head inside and give our suits some time out of the heat.”

Adison nodded in agreement, gesturing toward the door that practically beckoned us inside. “You guys go ahead. I’ll wait out here with J’Kal to make sure we don’t have any unexpected visitors. Just radio in if there’s trouble.”

I waved my hand in an exaggerated salute, providing some light banter despite the graveness of the situation. “Solid copy, boss.”

Antarom didn’t need anyone to issue orders, and it always gave me a shot of relief to know that she never passed up on an opportunity to be the first one into a potentially dangerous situation. Without even waiting for us to provide cover, she opened the door to the facility and moved inside, aiming down the sight of her shotgun.

Claire and I followed side by side, entering the decontamination area first. Of course, on planets with extreme surface conditions, any building or structure designed to serve as shelter contained a decon room. In the specific case of Takkan, it served more as a waystation between two very different atmospheres. You couldn’t very well keep the temperature at a brisk seventy degrees Fahrenheit and then open your front door to a five hundred degree pressure cooker. At least, not without a tremendous amount of discomfort.

So we waited while the room cooled itself down to tolerable conditions and filtered out the native environment. I imagined that, if there were any real threat inside the building, they could easily have set the decon chamber to just kill us as soon as we walked through the door. Simple, quick and clean. So the fact that we were still alive when the interior door opened meant that we weren’t walking into a shitshow, at least.

Unfortunately, it didn’t mean that everything would be sunshine and roses, either.

The very first thing I saw when the door reeled open was blood so blue I’d have thought it belonged to an army of lifelong policemen, strewn across the far wall and dripping onto the floor below. A turian corpse lay there, shot twice in the back of the skull. One of Aria’s people, no doubt.

I instantly palmed Invidium and let it unfold in my hands, putting one eye down the sight. Antarom and I moved in a practiced and familiar pattern, clearing corners and establishing lines of sight throughout the room before proceeding further in. Half a dozen more corpses were strewn about the room, all having died rather violent deaths, and we hadn’t even made it beyond the building’s entryway. Weapon and armor racks lined the walls closest to the door, around which most of the bodies were piled up. They must have gotten word that intruders were inbound and tried to grab their gear, only to get gunned down before even reaching their weapons. Anyone who hadn’t made a mad dash to the gear lockers would have been easy targets, which meant there were likely more corpses in the next room.

More importantly, they’d been dead for at least a few hours. The stench hadn’t gotten too bad yet, but the bodies weren’t stone cold either. Pools of blood didn’t tend to congeal and thicken immediately, especially in mild conditions like the temperate climate inside the building. All of it served as evidence that the corpses hadn’t just hit the floor, but they likewise hadn’t been there long, either.

“No movement,” I said softly, just enough that Claire and Antarom could hear me. “These Aria’s guys?”

Antarom directed her shotgun at various bodies, pointing out gang colors and insignias. “Eclipse, Suns, Blood Pack, some unaffiliated mercs . . . It’s definitely them.”

“Shit,” I breathed. “She’s not gonna be happy about this.”

“You think?” was Antarom’s sardonic reply. I didn’t answer; months ago, her brazen attitude would’ve gotten me fuming at the mouth, but familiarity had brought tolerance along with it. Instead I ignored the quip completely and moved toward the door across the room. It was quite possible that the attackers were still inside the building, and if so we at least needed to provide retribution to appease Aria.

I motioned for Antarom to move to the opposite side of the door, and Claire instantly fell into breaching position about five feet from the doorway. The second she did, I immediately recognized that I should be the one taking point. I had no doubt in Claire’s abilities or her aim, but it was her first op in over six months. The last thing I wanted was for shit to go sideways while she was leading the charge.

“Cover me,” I said, moving away from the wall and motioning for her to swap positions. “I’ll go in first.”

She offered no resistance, jogging in place to cover the doorway with Antarom. Odd, I’d had the vague notion that she’d try to reject the order like she had with Garrus, but I quickly put the thought out of my mind. Deep in potentially hostile territory and surrounded by the corpses of the people we’d been sent to rescue, questioning someone’s motives was hardly a priority.

I nodded at Antarom and she opened the door, urging me to rush forward. My blood pulsed with a surge of adrenaline as I breached the room, attempting to take in a hundred details while simultaneously staying alert to the possibility of danger. Protocol dictated that I not focus on anything irrelevant until I cleared my corners and made sure that I wasn’t about to get my head blown off, but it was impossible not to take note of some of the details. Primarily, that it looked exactly as one would imagine given the plethora of identical buildings in the first Mass Effect. There was a wall to my left running roughly ten feet, and another directly ahead with two doorways on either side permeated by a window of sorts in between. Why you’d need a window in the interior of a building was anyone’s guess.

Further into the room were terminals upon terminals, with power banks and data storage devices lining the walls so plentifully that I’d almost thought the tech was the wall. And it didn’t look like Aria’s people had set any of it up. Her mercs were no doubt reliable, but aside from the Eclipse, they weren’t exactly tech experts. Whoever had put together this setup certainly was.

There was more space further in and to the left, but getting a visual would require me to move further into the room. I signalled for Claire and Antarom to follow me, then slowly pushed inside with Invidium firmly planted against my shoulder. Something didn’t feel right.

I rounded the corner to my left, and I very nearly had to do a double-take to make sure the immense heat of Takkan’s surface hadn’t gotten to me. At least a dozen or so mercenary corpses littered the floor, strewn about the entire breadth of the room alongside pools of blood. It hadn’t been a massacre full of carnage, like I’d grown accustomed to after having dealt with the Reapers, but rather the death looked precise and surgical. The attackers hadn’t wanted a mess, despite their victims’ desperate attempts to flee death.

Most surprising, however, were the living bodies spread throughout the room. They weren’t even perturbed by the mess, instead going about their business as if they weren’t standing in a building with dozens of deceased individuals. The majority of them were on their omni-tools or working with the various electronics spread throughout the room, but there were two or three that seemed to be supervising.

And all of them wore a similar uniform: a white and grey lab coat with an insignia that I recognized immediately. It depicted a gold patch on the arm in the shape of an elliptical hexagon that had been split in half vertically. Even though I hadn’t actually seen it during my adventures through this universe, the name popped into my head like a kangaroo on drugs.

Cerberus. But they were wiped out!

I aimed my rifle at the one man in the room who wasn’t wearing a uniform, knowing that Antarom and Claire had my back. By my count, there weren’t more than ten of them—all human, of course. No doubt the only reason they’d been able to overtake all the mercs was due to the element of surprise. Caught off-guard and without their weapons or armor, they’d been easy targets.

“Everyone stay calm,” I commanded, still walking slowly toward them so that I had the best vantage point if the situation went wrong. Several of them turned to acknowledge me, including the man lacking a uniform, but half of them simply continued their work unphased.

They’d been expecting us.

“Ah, here we are,” the bald man in front of me said. It took me a moment to recognize the accent, but once I did there was no mistaking who he was.

“Lawson?”

His brows raised and his mouth parted in response. “A fan,” he said. Already I wanted to punch him in the nose. “I’m afraid I’ve not had the pleasure, mister . . ?”

“Cut the shit,” I abruptly demanded. “The hell are you people doing out here? Cerberus went under months ago.”

A whisper of a cackle escaped his mouth, only making me want to beat his smiling face senseless even more. “I had no idea the Council was so gullible. Were you really so foolish to think that we would be bested so easily? Or was my daughter not honest enough to inform you of her rather . . . amicable relationship with the Illusive Man?”

There was a gut-punch if I’d ever felt one. The implications of that last question alone had my mind reeling like a fishing rod cast into the endless abyss. He was bullshitting me, I knew, but I was equally aware of the fact that Miranda had been one of the driving forces behind the research team’s insane plans. If she had been working with the Illusive Man the whole time, were we following through on our plans, or his?

More importantly, Timmy’s alive?!

No, Miranda was smarter than that, and her father was a shitbag who would say anything to save himself. He was stalling. Had to be.

But if he was on Takkan—or in the Omega Nebula at all, for that matter—it put our plans in jeopardy. We couldn’t have any interference once we were ready to enact the final stages of Miranda’s solution, and if I knew Lawson, he’d find a way to be a serious thorn in our side. The fact that he had decided to fuck with Aria’s people indicated that he was already a problem.

I wanted to sit there and question how deep this particular rabbit hole went, but I knew that we were pressed for time. Lawson’s very presence turned the mission into an entirely different beast. We needed to radio for help, and we needed to get in contact with Garrus and Shepard as soon as possible. We could take the Cerberus assholes into custody and deal with them when we had our entire squad to back us up.

“Hands on your heads, all of you,” I barked.

“Mm, so we’re just going straight to the brute force method, are we?” God, he really was insufferable. It suddenly became clear to me why Miranda had always hated him so much.

“I’m not in the mood for your shit right now, Lawson. Anyone associated with Cerberus is a terrorist and a declared enemy of the Council. Put your hands on your heads and submit to Alliance custody.”

One of the scientists in the background began inching his hand towards his hip, where I knew there must have been a pistol concealed, but Antarom acted before I did.

“You wanna die?” she yelled, taking a few forceful steps forward with her biotics flaring and her shotgun pointed dead at the man’s chest.

Then it all went to shit. Half the Cerberus crew grabbed their weapons, leapt for cover, or started firing at us. It was pure reaction; Antarom and I fell into a familiar pattern, prioritizing enemies with the strongest weapons first and eliminating threats methodically. One of them had a Carnifex that could’ve done a fair bit of damage, so I fired a few rounds at him and he went down like a bag of rocks. Similarly, Antarom had kept her sights true on the first guy to reach for a gun, and she hadn’t given him the chance to get a single shot off. The shotgun spread damn near tore his chest open.

When someone describes the beginning of a fight as ‘leaping into the fray,’ you don’t typically imagine people literally jumping into a fistfight; it’s just an interesting way of denoting the fact that the combatants weren’t timid about the fight ahead, and had decided to be especially proactive in their exploits. With Antarom and I, however, that phrase couldn’t have been more accurate. After taking down my first target, I holstered Invidium on my back and jumped a good ten feet to the next hostile. I heard Lawson screaming some indistinguishable nonsense about not hurting anyone, but the time for reason had long passed. I was already mid-air with my omni-blade active, ready to bring down a swing that would cut right through the idiots who’d decided to pick a fight with heavily armed and armored foes.

And so I did. My blade arm came down in a practiced swing, eliminating one more hostile in what had all too quickly turned into a shitshow. I turned to find Antarom delivering a fatal biotic punch to a man’s gut, making that four enemies down. If I’d seen correctly—and I knew I did, thanks to the Seer implant—only five or six had actually grabbed weapons. That didn’t mean that the rest wouldn’t join in, but perhaps witnessing half their peers get mowed down in as many seconds would convince them to see reason.

When I turned around, Claire was standing directly behind me. She’d taken her helmet off, which struck me as extremely odd given the fact that the situation had just erupted into an active firefight, but I wasn’t given much time to think about it. A blunt object collided with the back of my head, sending stars streaking across my field of vision.

I tipped sideways while the world blurred into a collage of muddied colors, and just before blacking out completely, I saw the same fate befall Antarom.

How had they gotten the jump on us?