“Tell me again why I’m with the fun group?”
Zhu’s Hope seemed to have taken all their bad ideas and made it colonial zoning law, an accomplishment if there ever was one.
That was Zedd’s immediate and professional opinion after another good half-hour of scouting out the colony with three of the Normandy’s resident jarheads for company. Granted, one of those jarheads had biotics and the other was now the first human Spectre.
So maybe “jarheads” was unfair.
“Well, for one…” Jane Shepard didn’t bother looking back as she picked her way through a narrow metal stairwell that was once again a Prothean-grade safety hazard. “Because no one with a brain would trust your ass out of sight, Victors.”
…nah.
Jarheads.
“Aw.” His boots hit the next landing with a clang that echoed through the space. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were being sweet there.” Honestly, he felt like he was the one being sweet, especially considering that Shepard had offered him a lay-up of an ass joke.
One he was kind enough not to take.
“Well, I wasn’t.”
“Felt like it to me.” A smirk crossed his face, the expression dying a little as he looked out over the stacked mess of the colony. Zedd wasn’t quite sure what stood out as worse exactly; maybe the prefabs bolted badly onto Prothean bones, the walkways welded over alien stone, or just so much else shoved into place with the human confidence of people who thought “good enough” counted as an engineering philosophy.
Granted, that was one of his favorite things about humanity, but he also had an eye for design and this was an entire rafter poking its way into it.
It really wasn’t just the aesthetic.
Well…
Okay, the aesthetic was a major part, but the real beating heart was the shape of the place. You see, colonies had logic, even frontier ones.
Especially frontier ones, actually.
It was a simple logic but an effective one; water close to habitation, power routes isolated from traffic, medbay central enough to reach, but not too central to risk a stray shard as a casualty multiplier. Evac paths, storage, and defense; they all followed the same basic but highly useful logic.
Zhu’s Hope had none of that.
Zhu’s Hope had loops.
“...God, I hate the Protheans.”
Behind him, Ashley Williams made a sound that might have been a scoff if she hadn’t choked on it halfway. “Commander, permission to throw him off the stairs?”
“Permission denied.”
“Disappointing.”
Jane hummed. “Very.”
“No offense, Victors, but if you wouldn’t mind keeping some comments to yourself for a little bit longer…” Kaidan Alenko sighed from the rear, words filtered through his helmet comms but sounding no less exhausted for it. “I have a bit of a headache.”
“Well, that’s because you’re around a lot of negativity, Alenko.” Zedd glanced back at the older Marine, blue lenses catching the dim yellow of the emergency strips as he looked over his shoulder. “These two… they’re kinda bad for the aura.”
Kaidan sighed again. “Please don’t say aura.”
“Biotic says what?”
A third sigh sounded out over the comms, Zedd beginning to wonder if the man’s constant sighing wasn’t at least a minor contributor to his migraines. “I’m not doing this.”
Zedd hummed low. “Coward.”
“Victors!”
“Fine.” Zedd raised both hands in a lazy motion as Jane turned around to snap. “Fine. No more vibes-based medicine.”
“Good.”
Zedd smirked at her back. “For now.”
Jane stopped at the bottom of the stairs, the Spectre turning enough for him to catch the sight of one green eye through that polarized faceplate. “As a direct order, I’m requesting thirty seconds of silence from you.”
Direct order? Zedd tilted his head. “...Asking a lot.”
“Starting now.”
Zedd clicked his tongue but, for once, let the silence sit.
Not because Jane said so.
Obviously.
Mostly because the lower level of Zhu’s Hope had pulled his full attention as the corridor they were moving through opened up into what was clearly being used as an infrastructure spine.
Power couplings ran thick along the left wall in black bundles already patched several layers thick with insulation, water pipes snaking along overhead in a crooked lattice, while ventilation fans hummed behind rusted grates and just pushed along more bad air.
…bad air. Brown eyes blinked slow behind blue lenses, a realization sliding into the front of his thoughts. Those same eyes slid down to his Mantle, the barely-there hum of the kinesis fields bringing something to mind. We’re all rated for vacuum, right?
“Hm.”
“What?” Jane heard him because of course she did.
The smirk he’d been faking slid down into something far more neutral. “Nothing.”
“Victors.”
“I said nothing.”
Ashley grunted back towards him. “You never say nothing.”
“Sure I do.” He walked past her, eyes already tracking the layout as several faint blue outlines came alive across his lenses. “Sometimes I say nothing and just think deeply uncharitable things.”
“Oh, really?” Ashley came up beside him, rifle angled down but far from relaxed. Honestly, nothing about the woman had been relaxed since Eden Prime. “About us or the colony?”
“This time…” His eyes slid to the nearest wall panel, the thing half-opened and left that way to show off a junction controller that was blatantly ExoGeni-branded. It only took him a few seconds of staring for those eyes for design to narrow in anger. “...the colony because wow.”
Kaidan stepped closer, gaze moving from the panel to Zedd. “That bad?”
“No.” Zedd couldn’t bite down the frown on his face at the sight of it as he moved closer, glasses projecting more detail onto his eyes and ratcheting up his cortisol. “Bad would be… be impressive, maybe. This is stupid.”
“Can you explain that in a way that doesn’t sound like you complimenting yourself?”
“I…” Something close to a laugh slipped out, the sound almost a perfect and unintentional mimicry of Williams herself. “Probably not, Ashley.”
Jane leaned toward him as Zedd crouched in front of the panel. “Try.”He lifted two fingers, a tiny sphere inside his coat pockets flicking out and snapping from ball-bearing size to golf-ball in a near-second. With a chime, the drone bobbed in the air near his shoulder, blue optic blinking awake as it registered on his HUD as LV-1.
“Okay, see this?” A knuckle tapped the side of the junction box to punctuate the rhetorical. “This little guy is supposed to manage local power priority. Anything important you can think of, pretty much all the fun little things that stop a colony from turning into a smoking coffin go through these guys.”
“Looks intact, though.” Ashley hummed, the Marine leaning forward like Shepard. “Apart from the fact that someone left it open.”
“Yeah, and that first part…” Zedd clicked his tongue again. “That right there is what’s weird right now.” Apart from the fact that someone left it wide open, of course.
The drone zipped forward with another chime, a needle-thin interface spike sliding from its body and plugging into an exposed port. Data flickered across his lenses, old ExoGeni menus coughing up logs and uneven bars.
“...What the fuck?” Alright, weird was being nice. This was starting to slide into suicidal.
“Problem?”
“Several, Shepard.” Zedd shook his head. “Pick a category.”
“Victors.”
“No-no-no. That’s not even a joke. You could literally pick a category when I say everything connected to this is just fucked up priority-wise.” The routing map crawled out slow in front of him as he blinked at the read-outs. “Not damaged-wrong. Definitely not geth-shot-it-to-hell wrong. Sure, it’s doing what it was told to do, but what it was told to do is… dumb.”
Kaidan leaned over his shoulder, the only one of the three careful not to crowd him. “How dumb?”
“Just from this section, I can see that upper hab life support is geared for low efficiency but for some reason lower vents are kept overactive. Water reclamation’s shot to shit, but humidifiers are cycling in three modules that could probably use a shut-down.” He flicked two fingers across the projection, drone shifting his view deeper into the system. “Emergency lights are apparently considered non-essential, door motors too, and internal comms are just a fucking prayer. But these vents?”
A finger aimed sky-high, three sets of eyes turning to take in the old fan behind the grate turning, turning and turning; the thing steady as a heartbeat. “Eating power like a fat kid at a buffet.”
Ashley grunted at the grate. “Could be damage.”
“I’m gonna be nice here and act like I didn’t just say this whole thing is not damage.” Zedd rose to his feet slowly, eyes narrowed behind blue lenses. “Cause for one, damage isn’t usually this consistent.”
“What?” Jane looked toward the corridor ahead, then back the way they came; green eyes narrowed back at him. “Are the geth using them or something?”
“Doubt? They’re not that small.” A breath had him pause for all of a second, his own eyes narrowed as he corrected himself. “Well, maybe some of those little drone bastards, but not the point. If you’re talking network access, I’m not even gonna lie on a strong maybe. ExoGeni’s security here is…”
He sucked his teeth. “Well, you can figure.”
“Can you tell if anyone accessed it recently?”
Zedd looked over at Kaidan. “Define anyone.”
The biotic’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “That really doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Wasn’t trying to.” Zedd pulled the drone free of the port and sent it ahead with a focused stare in a direction; two more spheres sliding out from inside his coat to unfold in mid-air, little optics blinking in sequence before they shot down the corridor after the first. “There’s traffic all over the local net. Nothing clean, but definitely some dumb pulses. Open, close, cycle, vent, redirect, repeat. Same commands again and again.”
“Geth?” Ashley’s rifle rose with the question, grippers tightening around the weapon out of what had to be combat instinct.
Zedd shook his head. “Too stupid.”
Ashley blinked his way, a frown behind her helmet glass. “For geth?”
“They’re synthetics, Williams, not idiots.” He sucked his teeth again the longer he stared. “This is… analog.”
Somewhere above them, colonists moved across a metal walkway with slow careful steps.
“I…” Ashley shifted her grip again. “I don’t like this place.”
“Wow,” Zedd's mutter was almost inaudible. Unfortunately, the Alliance comm system wasn't as bad as he'd like to complain about. “Common ground. Historic moment.”
“Well, I don’t like you either.”
“It’d be weird if you did.”
“Keep moving.” Jane ignored both of them, stepping past Zedd as she followed the corridor deeper. “This is exactly the sort of thing John hoped we’d find. If you can get more info from more than one bad junction, I want you on that immediately, Victors.”
Brown eyes flicked to her back. “Bossy, bossy.”
“I’m a Spectre.” Jane grunted the title. “I’m allowed.”
Those same eyes narrowed as the woman kept walking. “...I’m pretty sure you were like this before a whole three days ago, Shepard.”