Awake
Prologue:
Leena glared at the stars and wished she'd never left home.
Working on a survey ship had sounded so glamorous. A way to see the galaxy that didn't involve skimpy outfits or getting shot at, it had seemed a dream job when she was daydreaming in her apartment back on Thessia. The perfect blend of mundanity and wonder, just waiting for her to sign on for a five year stretch.
What was five years anyway? She'd spent longer than that pursuing her degree in orbital mechanics, and that had mostly been an excuse to chat up the teacher's assistant. Even for a maiden, a five year stretch hadn't seemed like a major commitment. Even if she was wrong about the job it would be over soon enough and she'd be free to do something else.
If she'd known how time stretched out when all you did every day was calculate trajectories of every tiny object the scanners picked up…well that was the problem. She hadn't known, and now she was two eternities into her contract, with three more to go and an ever growing urge to join Eclipse just so she could blow her brains out with the complementary Stiletto.
She would have liked to claim that the idea of turning a weapon on her infuriating crewmates didn't occur to her because, at her core, Leena was a peaceful soul to whom the notion of harming another being was inconceivable. In fact it was because she was the only one on board who hadn't come out of one military or another.
The Turian siblings that occupied the slot immediately above her in the ship's informal hierarchy were obvious. Less so was the Quarian who had somehow gotten himself the position of engineer on an official Citadel survey vessel, and had apparently served in whatever passed for a military aboard their fleet. However it was the Captain and Dirloc, her Krogan squeeze, who really scared Leena.
Captain Ves had been a commando at some point in the past, and had the ink to prove it. While her partner was not only one of the Krogan Remnant, rare sight that they were compared to their Colonist kin, but a veteran of more mercenary companies than Leena had though existed. So many that each and every one of his stories seemed to come with a new name she'd never heard of.
If being the most junior member of the crew hadn't been bad enough, being the only one without any war stories to tell added a whole new dimension of misery to her purgatory aboard the cramped misery can that was their ship.
There was another thing. The ship was ridiculously small. Barely large enough to fit everything they needed for their mission, squeezing in all the scanning equipment came at the cost of real bunks and any kind of cooking equipment. Two years of rolling out of her shift in a pod and choking down warm rations had to have maimed her palate horrifically.
Leena wanted fish more than she wanted sex, and with her last shore leave more than three months past, she really wanted sex.
All of her dreams were the same. Lounging on a miraculously deserted stretch of beach, the sands and waves dyed in the colours of her homeworld and adorned with a vaguely defined figure who beckoned to her with a wide smile, no clothes, and an armful of steamed Rasana, lathered in honey and cooked to perfection.
Her waking thoughts were no less occupied with the fantasy of all the fish she could eat, freshly cooked and hot enough to burn her mouth. Which was why it took her so long to notice.
They dropped out of FTL with the usual lack of fanfare, in another lonely system with another scattered collection of planets to examine and smaller objects for her to spend hours mapping and graphing and cataloguing. Leena didn't look to her screens right away, choosing instead to enjoy her last few precious seconds before the tedium began.
Seconds in which she heard Gaius, the denser of their two Turians in more ways than one, say, "That's odd."
Gaius was in charge of more general data. Everything from the output of stars to the close examination of planets for any life that might be on the surface but probably wasn't. His endless optimism for the prospect of finding some fascinating new lifeform had been charming for exactly three days, and infuriating ever since.
So, because it was better than listening to him acting like a sensor ghost was the prelude to the next great discovery of their time, Leena turned her attention to her screens.
They were brightly lit, showing more returns than she could hope to count, so many that they blurred into a single mass that covered almost the entire display. The counter at the edge of the screen showing a figure in the hundreds of millions.
She swore and brought up the settings for her station's scanners. Praying that she'd set the options to show objects smaller than the proper threshold, because the only other thing that made sense was a fault in the scanners and she'd be expected to suit up and fix them herself if that was the case. So of course the settings were in order, and she had to start a diagnostic and resign herself to hours spent in EVA followed by working through her leisure shift to get everything done in time.
As she was bemoaning her fate, the diagnostic chimed that there were no errors or faults in the scanners. Except that was impossible. She might not have been the best student, but even a first year knew that the spread of objects she was seeing on her display was completely unsustainable.
Either they'd arrived at the exact right moment to witness a cosmic wonder, statistically impossible as that was, or else…
Leena finally looked up from her station, expecting, hoping, for her crewmates to start laughing at her for falling for their prank. Only nobody was laughing, nobody was even looking her way.
They were all too busy staring out the main window, armour panels retracted to let them see the empty blackness of space and maybe glimpse the distant pinpoint glow of a planet, at least if the view hadn't been blocked by an asteroid looming in front of their ship. Close enough to see the details of its surface, the craters and cracks that looked strangely ordered. Almost deliberate, with the light of the system's star reflecting off them in a way that made them look like windows in a ship.
Of course it couldn't be a ship. Her own scanners were telling her it was twenty times the length of a Dreadnought at its longest axis. It couldn't be a ship, just like the dense cloud of readings she was picking up behind it were an asteroid field. Just a bunch of big rocks that happened to be moving in a way that someone could almost mistake for sub-light manoeuvring.
The Captain was shouting, probably berating their pilot for bringing them too close to an asteroid, which wasn't fair because Gaius' sister was a great pilot and the nicest person in the crew besides. Leena didn't listen, focusing on refreshing her scanners and hoping that she could stay out of trouble if she just got things working again in time.
Then the ship was shaking and the lights were flickering and someone was screaming which was odd because her crew was normally so disciplined.
'Oh.' Leena thought.
'I'm screaming.'
It was a strangely distant thought. Just like the sensation of rough Krogan hands tearing her out of her seat, or the sound of the Captain shouting from somewhere very far away about destroying the ship and erasing data. Leena wanted to protest that she'd worked really hard to gather all that data, but for some reason she was too busy vomiting as the ship shuddered again and the lights went out completely.
She was thrown into one of the escape pods, tiny one person things that she'd had nightmares about ever since she was given her first tour of the ship, and for a moment she stared out at her crew. Then Dirloc hit the panel beside the door, and the last thing she saw of him was the hulking Krogan turning back towards the bridge.
Leena came back to herself inside the pod. Gasping in the tiny space, barely large enough for her to move from standing up to curling into a shaking ball as the pod rattled and spun with the force of the ejection. Then rattled a lot more as something bloomed with fire and force in the darkness beyond her fragile little pod. She didn't try to see what it was, because that way she could pretend she didn't already know.
It was the same reason why she didn't check if there were any other pods in range of her pod's puny comms. The same reason she only reacted to the clang of something against her pod by curling into an even tighter ball. The same reason she told herself over and over that she was just imagining the sensation of movement.
And the same reason why, when the pod doors were torn away, Leena kept her eyes shut as tight as she could.
She kept them that way, for as long as she could.
