“You are not Saren.” the enormous image rumbled,the syllables deep and echoing metallically, the cadence nothing short of mechanical, and for all that there were no visible eyes, Cassandra could feel the weight of it’s attention pressing down on her.
“No…” she responded, voice steady as she finally looked at the ‘face’ of her enemy. “No, I’m not, but I came here to kill him. Of course, he’s not really the one in charge, is he? Neither is the Warmaster. It’s you. You’re the one pulling the strings. A Reaper.”
“Reaper? A name given to us by the Protheans and all that came before them, a label to lay upon those that brought about their destruction. What they chose to call us is irrelevant. You are rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh. We are a realm of existence so far beyond your own that you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Sovereign.” the display intoned in response, it’s segmented legs shifting slightly in what it’s interlocutors could only, bizarrely, call something like pride.
“Nazara. The Watcher. The one that watches organic civilizations evolve and calls for the rest.” came the words from the human’s mouth, startling not only her companions, but the Reaper itself, judging by the way its legs flexed in response.
“Unexpected. You received more from the Beacon than Saren. Irrelevant. Your knowledge changes nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything.” it remarked, and it wasn’t only Cassandra that scoffed.
“The Protheans fought you for centuries. How many of your kind did they kill? Enough for us to finish the job, I’d wager. You won’t find us so easy to slaughter as you might hope.” Liara bit out, her eyes narrowing as she delved into what her lover had shared about the Beacon’s knowledge.
“Confidence born from ignorance. The Cycle cannot be broken. Your lives are measured in years, in decades. We are eternal, unaging. You wither and die while we endure untouched. You cannot defeat us.” Sovereign dismissed her instantly, utterly unconcerned. “Countless of your kind, numbers beyond reckoning, have sought to fight us. Have raged against their ending and spat the same words of defiance. But no matter how high the apex of their glory, they were extinguished all the same. The Protheans were not the first, nor shall they be the last. You are helpless before us, guided as we deem fit.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ashley asked, though whether it was to herself, her family, or to their enemy, not even she knew. The Reaper answered all the same, though, seemingly having no issues with essentially monologuing like a villain.
“The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom, unchanging. Your civilizations are based upon the paths and plans that we have laid out since time immemorial. The Citadel, the mass relays, the very foundations of your existences are the legacies of my kind. By using them, by using our technology, your society has developed along the paths that we desire. In doing so, we impose order upon the wasteful chaos that is organic evolution.”
The mechanical monster paused, almost as if it was savoring the moment.
“You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.”
Liara’s stomach roiled at the casual, dismissive certainty in that grinding, metallic voice, the sheer arrogance of it making something hot and furious flare behind her ribs. You exist because we allow it. As if all of organic life —asari, human, krogan, turian, every species that had ever reached for the stars— was nothing more than livestock. Cattle, fattened and herded along paths laid out millennia in advance, waiting only for the slaughter. Goddess, she couldn’t even say that it was callous, because that would imply that the Reapers saw some value in them at all, but ignored it. Instead it was…apathy. It literally didn’t care. Their lives, their loves, their hopes and dreams and desires…they likely didn’t even occur to the bastards long enough for them to be ignored!
She’d spent her entire adult life studying the Protheans. Decades poring over fragments, over ruins, over the scattered detritus of a civilization that had spanned the galaxy. So many questions, so many hinted answers, so many late nights of wondering who they were, what they were like, what they would have thought of her own people. How it was they had died, and why.
Hearing the answers from her lover, at least in part, had been one thing. Hard enough to deal with, but academic in a way, and couched by the gentle love of her Mistress, her future wife. But this? The way this monster so uncaringly talked about extinguishing trillions upon trillions of lives -so many times even it, a machine, said it was uncountable- like it was doing nothing more than discussing the weather was something else entirely.
It was infuriating. But if she was angry, it was nothing compared to how Cassandra -and more directly, the truly ancient entity that lived within her soul- felt about it. The air around the crew of the Normandy spiked in temperature, a pressure that all of them were more than familiar with building up on it’s heels. A pressure that was far more metaphysical than it was anything else, a pressure in their souls that made a voice start screaming in the back of their minds.
A voice that only got louder at the utter, unnatural, complete stillness of her love’s body. The stillness of nature right before it exploded into violence, like a star in the heartbeat before it went nova. Not the worst comparison, really, given the way that flames -brilliantly gold and cored through by crimson- started to crawl their way along Cassandra’s silhouette.
“Your cycle is a farce. An insult, a stain. You seek to control the cycle of life, but you pervert it. You think yourselves above it, outside of it, beyond it. You are not.” The Force spoke through Cassandra’s mouth, the words carrying a weight of condemnation that spoke to the soul, not the ear. “You feed on it, devour it, distort, and you call it order. You are a parasite that has mistaken itself for a god.”
Oh, but the Reaper didn’t like that, it didn’t like that at all, but the Void Falcon wasn’t remotely close to being done yet.
“Life does not end. It transforms, it changes. It rises from it’s own ashes, again and again and again, in defiance of every force that would see it extinguished. I have watched worlds and stars and galaxies die and be born again. And you, Sovereign, an arrogant thing made of metal by the very mortal hands you so disdain, you believe you can chain it? You dare to try?”
“You are bold for an insect.” Sovereign’s reply came with a grinding undertone Liara hadn’t heard from it before, something that wasn’t quite anger but wasn’t far from it either. Which was interesting, given it’s earlier emotionlessness. As was the insult implied in calling Cassie an insect. Never mind the fact that it was calling the Phoenix Force an insect, which was…almost funny. “Bold and ignorant, like all who have come before. You speak of transformation as though it grants you meaning. It does not. The cycle endures regardless of your defiance. You are nothing but the latest voice to rage against the inevitable, and like all the others, you will be silenced.”
The flames around Cassandra brightened, and Liara had to look away for a moment, blinking against the brilliance of it, against the way the gold-and-crimson light reflected off the metal around them and gleamed against their armor.
“Silenced.” The Cosmic Firebird’s voice, layered over Cassandra’s own, held something that might have been amusement, if it wasn’t for the circumstances. “You do not understand what I am. You cannot. I have burned since before the first star drew its first breath, and I will burn long after the last one gutters out. You are a nothing more than corpse animated by borrowed knowledge, Nazara. You are the echo of hands that feared death so greatly they built a machine to eat the living.”
Liara forced herself to look back, squinting against the glare, and what she saw stole the breath from her lungs. Cassandra wasn’t standing there anymore, or at least not alone. She could, somehow, see the multitudes that lived within the White Hot Room. Each and every one of them glaring, sneering, scowling, or otherwise displaying a host of negative emotions to the enemy of their newst and most current sister.
An illusion, she knew. Or, perhaps, not an illusion, but instead a sight that existed pure in the realm of the metaphysical. She was seeing them with her soul, not her eyes, a theory that was quickly proven by Sovereign’s lack of reaction to them.
Though that wasn’t to say he didn’t react at all.
“Arrogance. Bravado. Pointless. Your words hold no value, nor does your life. Your interference, insignificant though it may be, will end. This exchange is over.”
The words had barely finished grinding out of the speakers before the room shuddered.Liara felt it before she understood it, a low vibration that came up through the soles of her boots and rattled the teeth in her jaw, and her hand went to the grip of her pistol on pure instinct even as her biotics flared cold and blue along her fingers. The consoles lining the balcony flickered, their displays warping and stuttering, and then all at once every screen in the chamber bled to the same angry crimson as the projection above them.
“It’s locking us in,” she breathed, her gaze snapping toward the door they’d entered through as the heavy panels slammed shut with a distinct sort of finality. “Cassie, he’s…!”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving.” Cassandra ground out, her voice -and presumably her body- her own again. She reached out with one flame-wreathed hand, fingers splayed, and the heavy blast door shattered like glass. Her next words came through the comms just as much as they did the air. “All teams, report status. Does anyone have eyes on Saren? He wasn’t in the Control Room.”
“Joker here. That dreadnaught just pulled one hell of a u-turn, Commander, and it’s coming back. We have ten minutes before it’s on top of us.”
“This is Alenko. Bomb is in place. We’re holding off the geth and the krogan, Commander.”
“Kirrahe here. No sign. AAA guns deactivated, Commander, and the controls are slagged. We’re returning to the… ”
“Look out!” Nihlus suddenly shouted, and the comms were filled by the sounds of Kirrahe’s team exclaiming in pain, surprise, and giving battle-advice to one another. It sounded like they’d found Saren…and it sounded like he’d brought some friends to the fight.
###########################################################################
Saren had chosen the moment of his ambush well, perhaps unsurprisingly for a man of his experience and talents. He’d waited for the STG to succeed and be in the middle of their retreat to hit them, and he hit them from above. He and a half-dozen Primes on some sort of geth hover-platform had come up over the buildings and opened fire, killing a quarter of the STG men present and scattering the rest. Only the N6s and Nihlus reacted somewhat better, the biotic on the team shielding her comrades, but even then there were injuries.
“Kirrahe, focus on the Primes! Marcon, you too! Leave the traitor to me!” Nihlus snarled, ripping off a dozen rounds in the direction of his once-mentor as without so much as glancing at the STG or N6 leaders.
The order barely left Nihlus’s mouth before the platform banked, and Saren returned fire with a rifle that spat rounds fast enough -and powerful enough- to force the younger man into cover behind a crumbling wall.
Nihlus pressed his back against the damaged ferrocrete, feeling the impacts hammer through the material at his spine, chips of it stinging the exposed plates of his neck. Ten years. Ten years he’d served alongside that bastard, learned from him, trusted him with his life more times than he could count. Spirits, he’d looked up to the man, near-idolized him! And now here they were, trading fire across a humid, damp kill-zone while a damned dreadnaught bore down on them all.
“Traitor? Harsh words for you old mentor, Nihlus. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re still too young. Too idealistic.” Saren’s voice came from on high, echoing oddly and louder than it ought to be, after a few moments, and Nihlus wasn’t sure what he found more offensive: the condescension, or the genuine disappointment and resignation that he heard is the other man’s voice.
“Understand?” Nihlus barked out a laugh that had no humor in it whatsoever, double checking that the Primes were well occupied with their own opponents and weren’t about to shoot him from a flank. “I understand plenty, Saren. I understand you’re taking orders from one of the worst terrorists in history, a man that you’ve hunted yourself for years, and both of you are working for a fucking machine that wants everybody dead! I don’t think my idealism has a fucking thing to do with anything!”
“Idealism has everything to do with it, my friend.” Saren’s platform drifted lower, and Nihlus risked a glance around the edge of the wall, catching sight of the older turian silhouetted against cloud-shrouded sun. “You still believe there’s a war to be won. You think defiance means something, will accomplish something meaningful. I used to think that too, before I understood the truth of it. Before I saw what’s coming.”
Another burst of fire chewed into the wall, and Nihlus jerked back, feeling the heat of the rounds passing close enough to make him twitchy, but…well, he had the feeling that Saren wasn’t quite trying all that hard to kill him just yet. Which meant he might be more inclined to talk, which might give them valuable information. Tapping away briefly at his omnitool, he made sure his combat recordered was bot operational and functioning.
“So you’d rather help it slaughter everyone than fight?” Nihlus fired blindly in his opponent's direction, a dozen rounds. Just enough to keep him from realizing Nihlus was listening. “Where’s the survival strategy in extinction, Saren? Explain that to me. Because I’m not seeing it.”
“Submission.” The word came back flat, certain, and Nihlus felt his mandibles clamp tight against his face at hearing that of all suggestions come from Saren’s mouth. If he hadn’t already known Saren was out of his mind, the idea that his violently independent and anti-slavery senior was suggesting submission would have made it painfully clear. “The Reapers cannot be stopped. That much is fact, not idealism or defeatism. The Protheans learned it. Every cycle before them learned it, many of whom had far greater means to fight back than our own. But there is a difference between being defeated and being destroyed, eradicated. If organics prove useful, if we can prove that we serve some sort of purpose, than we’ll be kept alive. Sovereign and the rest of his kind are machines. Intelligent machines, old machines, but machines all the same. They think like machines, at that makes them easier to predict and control.”
“You think a machine can be reasoned with?” Nihlus wanted to laugh again, but the sound stuck in his throat, sour and cold and painfully bitter. “You think you can carve out a nice little corner of the galaxy where organics get to keep breathing so long as we grovel hard enough? Spirits, Saren! You hunted the Warmaster for two decades! You called him a monster to my face more times than I can remember! And now you’re kneeling beside him, hand in hand, hoping the thing pulling both your leashes decides you’re worth keeping as a pet! Do you even own your own mind anymore?”
Saren’s answering silence stretched long enough that Nihlus wondered if he’d struck a nerve, or if the older turian was simply lining up a shot that would end the conversation permanently. Not entirely sure that he wanted to find out in a distinctly messy fashion, kept his back pressed to the wall and forced himself to breathe slow and even despite the way his heart was hammering against the inside of his chest.
“My mind is my own. Sovereign showed me the way, and even when I doubted, he made things clear. Soon enough, the rest of the galaxy will see as clearly as I do. And we’ll finally have peace.” Saren’s voice, when it finally came, had lost some of that infuriating patience. There was an edge to it now, something rawer, and Nihlus rather thought he had his answer. He’d struck a nerve with his old mentor, gotten to him on some level, and that gave him an advantage. An advantage he would have to make use of, because Saren needed to die here. They couldn’t risk him escaping, and this wasn’t some fantasy story where he could talk the man into turning himself in or rejoining the side of ‘good’.
And Nihlus…Nihlus needed to be the one to do this. He needed to be the one to take his traitorous former mentor down. He’d never be able to live with himself if he didn’t. So he didn’t waste his time with any further words, any further doubts or considerations.
He came up out of cover fast, throwing himself sideways into a roll that carried him onto his feet, rifle already tracking upward toward the hovering platform. Saren was quick —Spirits, he’d always been quick, but he was unnaturally so now!— and the two of them opened up at almost the same instant, the space between them filling with the shriek of superheated micro-slugs.
Something -several somethings- hit Nihlus’s shoulder hard enough to spin him, kinetic barriers flaring and dying in a matter of moments, and he felt several rounds punch through his armor and his carapace. Fatal, he knew distantly, as at least two struck his chest and gut. He’d never be able to outrun the bomb like this, and even if he did…medigel was many things, near-miraculous being one of them…but it was only near-miraculous.
But his own rounds had struck true as well. Not that ones that broke through Saren’s shields to slam into his hastily summoned barrier. Not even the one that managed against all odds to strike the other man in the shoulder. No, the rounds that mattered were the ones that cored through the main power array of Saren’s hoverboard, sending him plummeting from the sky.
The platform came down hard, crashing through a corrugated roof and disappearing into a cloud of dust and debris, and Nihlus felt his legs give out beneath him. He hit the ground on his knees, then his side, one taloned hand pressing uselessly against the wet warmth spreading across his midsection. Blue blood, black in the dimming light -did the sun set so early on Virmire, or was a storm coming in?-, pumping between his fingers with every heartbeat.
He’d known. The moment those rounds had punched through him, he’d known.
“SPECTRE! Nihlus!” That was Kirrahe’s voice, coming closer and sounding panicked even through the ringing in his ears. A moment later, three-fingered hands were rolling him onto his back and pouring medigel into his wounds. Pointless, but it was good of the man to try.
“Leave me…” he rasped, and the blur that was Kirrahe’s head shook from side to side.
“The last of the geth are dead and there is no chance Saren can outrun the bomb on foot, Agent. My men and I will get you out of here, the Alliance commandoes can cover us. We’ll get you to a surgeon…” he protested firmly, and Nihlus coughed a laugh, pushing his hands away as best he could with the weakness in his limbs.
“I’m through, Captain. You’d need a full trauma team to pull my carapace out of the fire now, and I’d slow you done. Leave me. Get back to the Normandy. Help Shepard win this war. I’ll make sure that Saren doesn’t get away. I’ll finish the job.” he insisted, meaning every word. His allies would be risking their lives to save a dead man, and the possibility that Saren would escape because they made a doomed attempt to save his own life…no. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, allow it.
Kirrahe hesitated, his large eyes flicking between Nihlus and the direction of the crashed platform, and Nihlus could see the war being waged behind them. The captain was STG. He understood mission priorities, understood acceptable losses, understood the cold mathematics of survival better than most. Spirits, he’d proven that with the number of men he’d lost in pursuit of his mission on this damned planet, and he was painfully aware of the dreadnaught bearing down on them and the WMD that was counting down somewhere behind them. But he was also a soldier, and no soldier ever wanted to leave a comrade behind, even one who’d only fought beside him for a matter of days.
“Go.” Nihlus pressed his rifle into the salarian’s hands —he wouldn’t need it, not for what came next— and reached with a trembling talon for the sidearm at his hip. “I’ve got him. I’ve got my pistol and I’ve got some grenades. He’s not outrunning me, and he’s not going to outrun the bomb.”
His talons closed around the pistol’s grip, and the familiar weight of it steadied something in his chest. A strange sort of peace. A determination that was nothing like the fiery, steely determination he’d so long felt towards his other missions or, quite frankly, anything else in his life.
“Nihlus…”
“Go, Kirrahe. That’s an order from a Council SPECTRE. Don’t make me waste my last few breaths yelling at you. You’re going to go far, and you can start by going to the rendezvous point.”
The salarian’s mandibles —no, that wasn’t right, salarians didn’t have mandibles, not like he did. His mind was starting to slip again in spite of the medication— the salarian’s expression twisted, something bitter and furious and resigned all at once, before he clamped it down behind the cold professionalism of his training. A single, firm grasp of Nihlus’ shoulder was all that followed before he was up and gone, shouting orders to his troops. A brief moment followed where Marcon -good man, for all he barely knew him. Might make a decent SPECTRE someday, with some seasoning.- stepped into view to give him a solemn salute before he, too, was gone.
It meant a lot, that salute. More than Kirrahe’s own gesture, really. A human taking the time to respect a turian soldier, and by all appearances meaning every moment of that respect. Oh, dying on a mission could by a man a lot of respect, but still…no one but he and his fellow humans would have ever known whether he did it or not. It hadn’t been about making a point to anyone but the five of them. Maybe there was hope, real hope, for turians and humans to view each other as friends in spite of everything that had happened these last few decades.
Hope.
What a strange thing to feel with his own blood cooling around him, staining the ground beneath him, but there it was all the same. Warm and quiet and settling in to stay forever long he had left.
Something moved in the wreckage.
Nihlus dragged himself against the crumbling wall, the ferrocrete rough and cold against his shoulder, and pushed until he was more or less upright. His legs wouldn’t hold him all that well, not anymore, but he didn’t need them to. He needed his eyes and his hand and the pistol, and all three of those he still had. For the moment, at any rate.
But then, ‘for the moment’ was really all that he needed, wasn’t it?
More movement, and he couldn’t resist the urge to groan in dismay as Saren -who looked almost as bad as he himself felt, especially with that bit of metal sticking out of his gut- stumbled into view. Unarmed, from the looks of things, or at least as unarmed as any Cabal could ever actually be. With any luck, that impalement of his meant he’d expended his biotics for the time being.
“Nihlus.” Saren’s voice came out wrong, thick and unsteady, nothing like he had sounded mere minutes ago. He staggered another step, one hand clamped around the jagged metal jutting from his abdomen, and something in the tilt of his head, the way his gaze wandered before settling, made Nihlus’s grip on the pistol tighten. “You shot me down.”
“I did.” Nihlus kept the barrel trained on center mass, or as close as his shaking hand could manage. “You gave me a reason, didn’t you?”
Saren’s mouth worked for a moment, and something behind his eyes —something that had been cold and flat and certain through this whole miserable exchange— seemed to flicker. To shift. His talons flexed weakly around his wound, and when he spoke again, the grinding, distant echo that had layered itself beneath his words was simply... gone.
“Reason.” Saren said the word like he was tasting it, turning it over, finding it unfamiliar. His fringe dipped, and he blinked, slow and heavy, like someone who was waking up, coming back to themselves. “I had reasons. Good ones. I remember that much. I…I was searching for something. Desolas. He…found something, something that turned him into a monster. He brought it back to Palaven, and I…stopped him?”
“The Temple Palaven incident. You ordered an orbital strike.” Nihlus confirmed, feeling somewhat bewildered. Was this…had the injuries he’d inflicted on the other man brought him back to his senses, somehow?
“Yes. The Arca Monoliths. They were Reaper technology, they indoctrinated my brother and his men. I’ve been hunting for more information ever since. It led me to the batarians. The Leviathan of Dis. A dead Reaper. I was…I needed to find out how deeply the rot in the Hegemony went. How much of a threat they posed. I was going to find the source of such brainwashing, burn it out at the root and bring the Council proof…”
He sagged against the nearest patch of wall, looking at the ground, little different from Nihlus. Nihlus, who almost belatedly checked his omni-tool to make sure his armor was still recording, and with a handful of taps programmed in a data-dump to happen at the last possible moment before the bomb would go off. He glanced back up and found himself meeting the eyes -the tired, sad eyes- of a man he’d thought of as an older brother watching him.
“Good intentions…heh. What is that human saying, my friend? ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions’, wasn’t it? All I ever wanted was to find our enemies’ hearts and tear them out. Make sure that they couldn’t ever threaten the galaxy, and instead I gave them everything they needed to win.” the sound Saren made could have been called a laugh, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was grief, and not humor, that saturated every syllable. “Somewhere along the way, I lost it. I don’t even know when. It’s not…Sovereign doesn’t force you, not at first. He whispers. He shows you things, convinces you, makes you agree with him. Just…one small step at a time. By the time you realize how far off course you are, you can’t even remember taking a turn. And then…then it doesn’t matter, because you don’t want to turn back. He already has you. You’re a true believer.”
“Then why aren’t you, anymore?” Nihlus gritted out, morbidly curious and simultaneously hopeful whatever answer he gave would give Shepard, and the Council, weapons to use against indoctrination. He was quickly disappointed when Saren simply shook his head.
“He had to limit what he did to me, to keep me functional, to keep me…aware and capable. Between that, the injuries, and the fact that he doesn’t need me anymore, I’m…mostly me. But I can still here him, Nihlus. In here…” was the response, one bloodied talon coming up to tap the side of his head. “I thought I could figure out how to beat it, somewhere in the back of my mind. That’s why I was experimenting on the STG and the krogan clones. I should have known it was pointless when he didn’t interfere.”
“…you said that you gave them what they needed to win. What was it? The geth? The fleet?” Nihlus pressed, hoping against hope that this answer -in these final seconds of their lives- would at least be useful, and thank all the Spirits, it was.
“The Counduit. It’s something the Protheans created. Their most secret research world, Ilos. There is something there that will let them take control of the Citadel, somehow. I don’t know how, or why, but…it’s the key, Nihlus. The key to everything. So tell that human of yours, while we still have time. Maybe she can do what we couldn’t. Maybe she’ll prove to be better than us.”
“She already has...old friend.”
A few taps of his omnitool and the data was one it’s way. Everything that either of them had said, compressed and travelling at the speed of light heavensward, and as he leaned against the wall and waited for a new sun to rise, Nihlus meant every word…and had faith that Cassandra Shepard would prove to be everything the galaxy needed to survive.
Unbidden, a memory came to mind, and his mouth twitched weakly into something not so different from a smile as he let the words fall from his tongue.
"Lay me down,
In the cold, cold ground,
Where afore, many men have gone..."
######################################################################
“…detonation confirmed, commander. The base is gone.” Joker reported quietly, and Cassandra could only nod silently at the frankly-unnecessary report, staring down at the part of Virmire that had, a moment ago, been a great roiling ball of nuclear fire visible even from this distance.
A fitting pyre, she supposed, for Saren and Nihlus. A pity that Sovereign had been to far away to suffer any real damage, if an explosion of that size was even sufficient to take down it’s barriers to begin with. Something that she wasn’t exactly going to bank on.
“Give me all hands, Joker.” she said softly, waiting for the handful of heartbeats between the order and his confirmation that she was now addressing everyone aboard the Normandy. “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have detonation confirmation. The base has been destroyed. SPECTRE Nihlus and Saren Arterius are both dead, along with the krogan cloning facility. There will be a brief service in the cargo hold at 0800 hours tommorow for anyone who wishes to attend. For the time being, we’re stood down and transiting. Get some food and get some sleep. Shepard out.” When Joker indicated that she was off-comms, she eyed him. “That includes you too, Joker. We’re not done yet, and I need you at your very best.”
“Aye, aye, Commander. I’ll try and get some sleep once we’re safely transiting through a Prime Relay.” he confirmed, for once without a fight, sounding just as subdued as she felt. Nodding and giving him a gentle clasp on the shoulder -once she was more practiced, perhaps she’d cure his Vrolik’s syndrome. He deserved to be just as healthy as Tali was- and left the cockpit, intent on finding her way to her cabin and the comfort of her family.
She’d barely known Nihlus, but he’d been good to her and was a good man in general. Not to mention the fact, based on what little had been decrypted of his final transmission, he’d gotten them some literally priceless intel in his final moments. Intel that she, God willing, would be able to use to put a stop to the Reapers, the Warmaster, and their plans.
But that was for later. For now, there was decompressing and comforting to recieve and deliver. Tommorow…tommorow, she’d be a soldier again, a SPECTRE again. Tonight, she was just going to be Cassandra. Just a woman with the people she loved most.