Personal Log - 008 - Sara Ryder, Andromeda Galaxy / Date: 2819 (CE, 0 1:16:15, AA - After Arrival) Continued: We've met our true enemy.
-start transcript-
Allright, wow.
This new galaxy really got it out for us.
What a day. Again!
I’m getting the feeling that I’ll definitely see all the adventures I can get and then some.
After I’d taken a nap in the comfort of my cabin and ate some stew that Drack had whipped up (he’s quite the cook), Suvi told me that Peebee wanted to talk to me.
As I entered the staging area of the Life pod, she’d taken residence in, I was surprised to find the space in the middle of conversion into a makeshift laboratory and research shop.
The young Assari was hunched over a workbench that she must have dragged from somewhere around the ship. On it one of the „pineapple objects“ stood. It emitted a soft white glow but did nothing else.
Peebee’s convinced that it’s some kind of data storage device too. Only smaller than the others we’d encountered in the vault.
She acted a bit gruff and aloof, said she did not plan on staying on the ship for long. I barely held back a smirk, as just a few hours before Dr. T’Perro had mentioned to me that Peebee showed signs of “commitment issues”.
Setting up her sleeping bag in an escape pod, y’ think?
Anyway, Peebee asked me to keep an eye out for more of this remnant technical stuff. She casually coined the term “Rem-Tech” for it. Personal questions were either deflected with humor or answered vaguely. She “Came here with a certain someone” who had apparently ”changed” somehow while in cryo and “The Milky Way is so: been there, done that.”, she’d come here for the adventure.
I could relate to that at least. We struck a deal of: Rem-Tech for more answers about her. I don’t know if she’ll honor it yet but we’ll see. She turned back to tinkering when I left.
Outside
I met Drack again and took the opportunity to thank him for the meal.
He in turn warned me about a guy named Spender. Who apparently had
played a big role in first getting the help of Clan Nakmor in
quelling the uprising on the Nexus and then had reneged on a promise
to give them more say in station politics. Which caused the Krogan to
abandon ship and strike out on their own.
As he so eloquently put it in his deep bass voice:
“This guy puts the''ass” in “assistant director”.”
I noted that he tended to call everyone “apart from his granddaughter, Kid”. I could’ve answered that one myself though, this man was nearly 1400 years old. He’d earned that quirk.
His parting words to me, as we approached the bridge, we’re that I should watch out for SAM unshackling itself. That I should keep an eye on him, as we’d all seen what could happen in the form of the Geth back in the Milky Way. A race of synthetic beings at war with their creators, the Quarians.
As the old Krogan walked off towards the research room I entered the bridge proper.
Suvi was looking for a tablet that had slipped beneath her seat and Kallo teased her about talking to it like a pet. She admitted to doing so and apologized but I found it immensely endearing, so I stepped up to her station.
Wow,
I was nervous.
Sorry for laughing SAM but I can’t believe that I
had such a hard time asking her out. Since I had first seen her and
talked to her I’d felt affection, even a bit of attraction to her.
She seems to be a very special person, being able to combine her
faith and her scientific career into one whole. Amazing. She says
that her findings in molecular sciences, seeing patterns repeated
over and over convinced her even more of a greater force in the
universe. Like an artist's signature.
Kallo, locking over from the pilots seat, reacted to my awkwardness with a deadpan:
“Kill - Me - Now.”
Salarians don’t flirt, don’t they? They have this complicated family contract thing I think.
Anyway, Suvi just gave a brilliant smile and said the feeling was mutual.
Yes!
On a serious note she also told me that she and her team on the Nexus had found the scourge to be artificial in nature. Meaning either someone placed it here or did something to trigger its creation. Now here’s a worrying thought. Why would someone effectively lay a cluster-wide minefield in space?
With my mind still a bit giddy over Suvi’s reaction I turned the Tempest towards the System that Peebee had discovered in the holographic map, back in the vault on Eos. There should be another one of these great machines, already active. I remember thinking that it’d be amazing to study it without running for our lives first.
That thought turned out to be almost prophetic. For just as we approached the star system a whole load of sensor alarms went off. Over the blaring sirens SAM warned that collision with a massive object on our trajectory was imminent.
I don’t know how Kallo managed it, but he brought the Tempest to a dead stop from FTL speed in just a few seconds. I could feel the inertia dampers strain as I nearly toppled into the viewscreen in front of me.
Suvi said they were Kett ships.
Behind us the scourge loomed like a terrible storm cloud. We were trapped.
As it were, the alarms stopped and shortly after an initial scan the other ship somehow took over the Tempests' controls, trapping us like a bird before a cobra and steering US into their hold. I felt panic rise inside of me. A glance to Suvi showed me she didn’t feel any better.
Kallo just stared at the screen in fear. The bridge's door opened and Drack, Cora, Liam and Vetra stormed in. Peebee came running from her escape pod and crouched beside Suvi to look at the sensor readouts. Vetra took up position behind Kallos' seat. At the same time the main screen activated and the face of a Knucklehead appeared.
He seemed a bit … I don’t know … smoother than the grunts we’d encountered up until now. The camera's angle on his end was weird, he seemed to be looking down on us in a gesture of intimidation, the top of his head wasn’t visible.
He demanded to know where „the one who activated the vault“ was. They were able to scan our DNA. Great.
I introduced ourselves but he wasn’t interested in formalities. His demeanor marked him as someone who didn’t often not get what he wanted. He refused outright to explain what he wanted and claimed that we could not understand it. -expletive deleted-
SAM surreptitiously informed me that he just needed a few more seconds to get back control over the Tempest. So I offered to compare notes on the Remnant. That riled the great, grey Gargoyle on the screen and he declared our defiance naive and reckless. Weird formal speech pattern.
And what the hell did he mean by:
“This day marks the beginning of your greatness.”
Is that a mistranslation, SAM? Would you please go over that? It wouldn’t surprise me, as the software only had a few instances of Kett Speak to analyze before this encounter.
Anyway, just as he had his little fit, SAM got the Tempest's controls back to Kallo and we got the hell outta dodge.
Two Kett fighter ships followed us, but with their weird non-aeronautical shape they weren’t nearly nimble enough to fit through the tight openings between the dark, somehow glowing energy tendrils that made up the scourge.
Kommentare
Kommentar veröffentlichen