Just a BioWare Fan

Stormy Weather

Thankfully, Captain Anderson proved to be as anxious to confront the ambassador as his trumpet player. Kaidan got a reply while he was still assembling his meal.

Having a deadline settled his stomach further. By the time he’d finished eating he had begun to look forward to clearing the air. It almost doesn’t matter what Udina says, he thought. I’ll just be glad to be done with it.

The next morning dragged with routine problems and fixes. The green recruits under his training could tell their Lieutenant still hadn’t fully returned to them, though they assumed he still suffered from his migraine rather than simple distraction. He’d long ago earned enough respect to keep them on diligently on-task without his scrutiny, a fact for which he was thankful as he found his thoughts turning every five minutes to the afternoon’s confrontation.

Something’s Gotta Give

In a low voice, Kaidan told the group about the camera and microphone he’d found in Jenkins’s crushed pin. “I wasn’t about to confront Udina right there but Captain Anderson and I thought you should know.”

Pressly leaned back with a low whistle. “No wonder they always put the spike-heads on the right.” Jenkins, whose eyes were already round with surprise, turned to stare at the navigator as comprehension dawned. Pressly nodded knowingly, as though none of this were a surprise to him.

A passing wave of suspicion left Kaidan dismayed. Pressly enjoyed the way Jenkins looked up to the more-senior officers and was just playing the world-weary cynic. He didn’t exactly embrace alien relations but there was no way he was a good enough actor to have sat through all of those discussions about the insignia with Kaidan and Anderson without giving away that he knew something.

With renewed energy Anderson and I fought our way to the pick-up point. Earth may have been under attack and the war with the Reapers just beginning but this was one tiny battle we would win.

In the distance I spied the long lines of the ship I loved, the replacement for the one the Collectors had taken from me. I wondered briefly if my armor still lay tucked away in my old quarters then I turned my attention back to the sons of bitches who were keeping me from finding out.

I cursed my frustration at them, my anger at what the Reapers had done to my life, my fury at their appearing just when the Alliance had finally started to take the threat seriously. The almost-Turian creatures kept coming, snarling and shooting, and they kept falling before us. Their recognizable weapons proved that they’d once been a more-familiar species but at least they kept us in ammo as we advanced.

Kaidan’s hackles rose a bit. He’d heard rumors of an organization within the military, an analog of the distasteful Humans First political movement that held the occasional rally on the Citadel and, in his opinion, set back the cause of human integration into galactic society every time they opened their mouths.

Such a speciesist group within the Alliance would have access to technology and funding about which the rabble busily spouting human superiority in the Zakera Ward wouldn’t even know. It would explain the band’s presence at the cross-species receptions as the only people in the room not subjected to careful scans.

“Is that what this is about?” Kaidan unconsciously kept his voice low, the wheels turning in his head. A scandal confirming the existence of Cerberus, it there was such a thing, within the military could destroy the tenuous alliance that held the two species together on the SR-1 project.

“Kaidan.”

I hoped I didn’t sound as breathless as I felt. I hadn’t had too many opportunities to practice my cool composure over the last several months. What else could I say to the man I loved, the man who’d already dismissed me once, who’d never even sent me a message after I’d survived my suicide mission and returned triumphant, much less while I’d been imprisoned in his home town?

He couldn’t have contacted me directly but surely he could have gotten a message through Anderson. He hadn’t. I still missed him so badly it hurt.

He looked down at me, his face coldly neutral. “Shepard.” Where was he hiding those eyes, the ones that had softened when he’d looked at me, the source of those looks that I dreamt of at night? He’d had them on Horizon. They’d flashed at me for a few long moments before he’d stuffed his feelings behind his good-soldier façade. No hint of them showed now.

I crossed the open room toward Admiral Anderson, surrounded by people in familiar Alliance blues going about their business. Six months’ isolation had allowed me too much time to contemplate the fact that I had, as accused, blown up an entire star system and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The anticipated dramatic accusation, or at least gasps of recognition from the soldiers around me, never came. No one paid much attention to the notorious Commander Shepard in their midst, at least openly. I suppose I should have been relieved that the staff at HQ had that much discipline.

In all the time I’d been under arrest only Anderson and James Vega, the soldier who’d guarded my cell on the day shift, had been even vaguely friendly with me. I’d been held strictly incommunicado, even from my closest friends. Anderson had passed along a couple of declarations of support, though not the one I wanted most to hear. Otherwise it had been aloof guards and interrogators going over the same information for the hundredth time.

Two more relatively uneventful weeks passed, filled with work and practice and three performances. On a Thursday evening the band met in the same corridor in which they’d gathered for their first Turian-Human dinner show.

Ambassador Udina strode down the crowded hall toward them, nose first, in one of his innumerable white tunics. He gave the crew a once-over before every performance, though he’d never found reason to complain. His persistence finally paid off.

“Where’s your pin?” Udina snapped at Jenkins.

The corporal paled and fumbled with a flap on his dress blues. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I just had my uniform cleaned and I hadn’t put it back on, yet.” His shaking hand fished out the little note but it fell from his fingers. Udina made an impatient noise that prompted Anderson to step in to help.

The men met Chakwas at the rear entrance to the hall where the first reception was held. The dim corridor bustled with people of every species, the work that went on behind the scenes that few people even considered. Jenkins kept dodging trays of one thing or another that the serving crew carried past at impressive speed.

“Turians can’t even eat real food,” Pressly observed as a passing tray of some mysterious meat left a lingering, pungent odor. “The cooks have to make two full meals.”

“Half the species in the galaxy have different metabolisms,” Kaidan said, irked a bit by the navigator’s superior attitude. “It’s not like they chose to evolve that way, any more than we did.” Pressly shrugged and they both dropped it.

Kaidan hadn’t thought about how awkward parties would be to throw on the Citadel. You’d have to make sure that the right species got the right food or all of your guests would be off to the infirmary instead of celebrating. As he pondered how much must have gone into pulling off Chakwas’s birthday party Udina strode down the hall, beak of a nose in the air, impatiently maneuvering around various aliens without ever deigning to speak to them.

The weeks passed quickly. Kaidan and the others found a real groove in rehearsal and spent more time together outside the practice room as well. Despite his enjoyment of his day-to-day duties he hadn’t pursued much of a social life since his last shipboard assignment. The Alliance discouraged fraternizing with subordinates and, under normal circumstances, he simply didn’t see other officers much.

He found himself out for raucous evenings with the others. Jenkins warmed up slowly, intimidated by the ranking officers and the age difference, but he turned out to have a talent for imitation that kept the group in stitches over drinks.

Pressly acted as the perfect foil for Joker’s derisive sense of humor, a straight man with a face of iron. Kaidan was never sure whether he truly didn’t understand the pilot or just loved egging him on for comment after sarcastic comment. Even Dr. Chakwas showed up from time to time, sipping a glass of wine and smiling indulgently at the hi-jinks of her band. Some nights Kaidan felt more like he was living out a classic vid from the 1940s rather than his own life.

The young man emerged, blinking in the sudden light, and spied his father down the landing platform standing at parade rest, as casual as he ever got. Both men ran a hand over the wavy black hair they shared and froze when they realized how the gestures mirrored one another. Kaidan hadn't realized that he'd picked up the habit from his old man. The two laughed and came together for a firm handshake.

The Alenko men had never been close. Between his father's frequent absences on Alliance business and his own physical struggles with the effects of his burgeoning biotic powers as a child Kaidan had never gotten to know him well. Though he'd missed his mother dreadfully when he'd gone to Brain Camp at the age of fourteen he'd been relieved to be away from the near-stranger who had months before moved the family to his new post Earthside in Canada.

The Game’s Afoot

Once we’d recovered from the idea of Garrus rubbing up against Joker in a dark closet Anderson briefed us on our objectives and procedures. “Trust me, you wouldn’t want to see the encrypted forms of the messages he sends,” Anderson assured me. “He hides them in the sorts of pictures that have made him infamous on the extranet.”

I cracked up again at the idea of some staid intelligence handler opening cross-planetary, 3-D porn every time Joker had something to report. I supposed it was someone with whom he’d served on another ship so that it would look natural for him to keep sending smut like he did to half of the people he’d ever met. On certain subjects Joker was pretty easily entertained.

We finished the actual details and left the Cone of Silence, wandering over to Anderson’s desk. Garrus, Jack, and I replaced our comm links and chatted about how little Anderson enjoyed his diplomatic duties on the Council. As we did so, I became more and more curious about the photo on his desk. He’d never mentioned family to me and I had been under the impression that he’d been as much a loner as I always had. Spectre status didn’t lend itself to spouses and children.

Raising the Specter of a Spectre

Captain Anderson was the man, or at least he had been. His long and storied career with the Alliance contained enough daring exploits and classified ops to make a rank private green with jealousy. He would have been the first human Spectre but for the sabotage of his turian evaluator, the same Saren who’d later been indoctrinated by the Reaper, Sovereign, whose defeat had been a spectacle of human-alien cooperation and had led to Anderson’s place on the Council. I guess the Captain had gotten the last laugh, after all.

I respected him like I had no other commanding officer in my career. But by the time I was shown into his office I was ready to kick him somewhere completely impertinent. Not only had he put Hackett into the uncomfortable position of pissing me off but he’d kept me waiting more than half an hour for the appointment that he’d scheduled. Whatever shady dealings were going on between Anderson and the Alliance the time I’d spent pacing in the reception area for the Council had me ready to spit nails. Even Jack was more relaxed than I.

Evasive Maneuvers

Admiral Hackett looked a little older and a little greyer than I remembered but not dramatically so. The battle with sentient robots and the ship creature they had worshiped as a god had taken a heavy toll on both the Alliance and Citadel fleets alike. The aftermath had been near-chaos, particularly without a Council to make overarching decisions and enforce cooperation between the various species.

The mess of politics that had existed when I’d died must have been settled by now, at least in part. I had recommended the original Normandy’s previous captain, Anderson, for the human seat on the new council but who knew how that had all shaken out in the end.

The ambassador for us Humans had been a slimy, life-long politician named Udina. Choosing between an Alliance officer who was almost ready to retire anyway and a professional snake like Udina had been vastly easier than deciding to let the old Council fend for itself in battle. I imagined Udina making an argument before the Council while Anderson yelled at him to stand up straight and stop waffling. That made me smile as Hackett waved me in. He smiled in return though his eyes seemed guarded.

The next morning Kaidan made time between his normal training duties to dig around the extranet for some information about the ambassador. It seemed Udina had a reputation for being rather more rabid in pushing for human recognition and inclusion in galactic politics than one would expect for a theoretically diplomatic position. The representatives of the other non-Council species pushed for their own gains, of course, but none had drawn as much ire or derision from the pundits and analysts that covered Council matters as Udina.

When Kaidan arrived at the practice room the next evening, Joker and Jenkins were kicking around I’m in the Mood for Love and looking relaxed. Jenkins seemed particularly mellow, doodling with the melody in a way that belied his normal hesitance. Good for him, thought Kaidan. Apparently the success of the night before had finally convinced the young man of his talent.

The two broke off when Kaidan entered, greeting him warmly. He’d no sooner put the mouthpiece in his trumpet than Anderson opened the door. The big man waved a hello and began setting up his bass.

Lieutenant Commander Kaidan Alenko shifted his trumpet case nervously. He'd never met any of the people with whom he was supposed to play here on the Citadel and he wasn't sure if they'd know or care about his other rare abilities. But he'd been blowing the horn since he was four and he supposed in the end that was the only skill that would matter to the others.

He opened the door to the rehearsal room and found a beefy older man tuning an upright bass. A keyboard sat empty several feet to the right. The man introduced himself as David Anderson and offered his hand. Kaidan had heard plenty about Captain Anderson before but no one had ever mentioned that he was a musician. “An honor to meet you, sir,” Kaidan said.

He took out his beloved trumpet, set aside the case, and began warming up with some scales, tuning as he went. The two were doodling around a bit, each getting a feel for the rhythm of the other, when the door again opened and a young man entered hesitantly. He carried a saxophone case his right hand and a beret in his left, the scrub of dirty blond hair on his head showing that he'd recently been wearing the latter. A reed poked from one corner of his mouth. Alenko and Anderson broke off and introduced themselves. “Corporal Richard Jenkins,” he offered, speaking around the reed from long practice and looking intimidated at the rank of the two men with whom he was intended to play.