The shuttle drifted silently through the vastness of space, its scorched hull bearing the scars of the pirate attack it had narrowly escaped. Inside, the dimly lit cabin gave them a brief respite as it made its way back to Omega. In this serene interlude, the only sounds were the soft hum of the engines and the occasional creak of the metal, reminders of the chaos left behind. Now, as the lights of Omega twinkled in the distance, Camlos and Rebecca had a moment of peace, reflecting on their journey and the quiet solitude of space.
"You know, we've never had sex without the translators on. I don't
actually know what you sound like without....Turianization, I suppose. Did it even translate that?" Camlos says.
"Yeah, it basically invented an entire new word though. Like, I don't know what you hear if I said Humanization." Rebecca giggled, "So wait, what do I sound like when I'm screaming my head off?"
"You have a
really loud trill, its like...window shaking." Camlos answers, chuckling.
"Oh, no that's accurate. Yeah. That's not the trill, that's me." Rebecca blushed a little, "There's not a lot of people around to listen when you're bunking in a tent in the middle of fucking Botswana."
"Huh, that's good to know. I thought humans like, said words the whole time. But there's not much amateur content on the Turian intranet to study." He admits while the shuttle scans for lifepods.
Rebecca rolled her eyes, "Fine, you can
record it." She laughed. Holy shit... How many people was that? She
had to send a text.
Group Chat with: Becky's Bals
Rebecca
Killed a Krogan in hand to hand combat. Blew up two spaceships. Didn't get paid, but I did have a bad ass spech. [Attached 1.3gb ] |
Quadzilla
I'll get the hubris out of you when you are back. |
Doctor Girlfriend
Amazing work, are you okay lover? |
Quadzilla
She was with you for a week and you fucked her Lisyris? |
Doctor Girlfriend
I don't need to explain myself to you. |
|
|
"The group chat was an amazing idea, you were right." Rebecca giggled as she bit her finger.
"Its gonna explode. They might fuck. I think they have already to be honest." Camlos chuckles, reading the walls of text.
Rebecca nodded, "I
think they met during the Krogan wars, but I can't prove it."
"That'd make both of 'em
ancient, way ancient." Camlos considers.
"She's eight hundred, he's like... Nine?" Rebecca had spent a long time with both of them at this point.
"Add a couple hundred to both. It was... seven hundred on your calendar?" He says.
"Eight hundred, and nine hundred are bigger then seven hundred." Rebecca answered back confused.
"No no, the
year seven hundred. The year is twenty one something right now." Camlos clarifies.
"What. No, I'm from the yea—" Rebecca rubbed her eyes, and realised how arrogant and self-centered she had just been. "Right, sorry, obviously time and space existed before humanity."
"That's weird to think about, they were both alive, and probably knew each other before you ended up here. Or your parents existed, or your grandparents, or mine." Camlos starts to think on the cosmic scale of the two species. "Huh. Immortality, wild."
Rebecca looked at Camlos, and she was curious about something. She never asked anyone, or even really thought about it before, "What uh. What are parents like?"
"Kinda like a sergeant, but usually a little nicer. Tell you what to do, how to succeed. Feed you and put a house over your head. Sometimes they're loving. Not often though, why?" Camlos explains, shrugging.
"I was left at the fire station." Rebecca shrugged, "Had some sort of defect that made a lot of families pass on the baby, nonverbal or something, and then I was in group homes until I was in Juvie."
"Huh, that'd be illegal in Palaven. But that's 'cause we've got actual places to put unwanted kids. The Navy takes them usually." The Turian answers, laying down on the shuttle floor.
"Yeah, I was a ward of the court. They put you in basically a uh..." Rebecca pulled up some pictures on her omni, "See? Like a prison kinda? There's basically a rating of how dangerous you are. The bigger the problem the worse facility." She scrolled through it quickly, "A lot like this example one on this history site."
The headline read
Barbarism of the Information Era. It was a Turian museum.
Camlos moved over to look at the Omnitool, still refusing to stand up but moving terrifyingly well on all fours. "Huh, reminds me of the slums on Palaven, the ones where the, uh, what's a good way to say it. Naked faces? The ones without clan markings live."
"You put them in prisons?" Rebecca asked, more curious. She flicked through the pictures in the Turian exhibit, which somehow was
kinder then what she remembered. "They got a few things wrong. Those slots are for leather cuffs to restrain you if you're a behavioral issue, or the staff get bored or uh...
angry." She remembered the first time she was a problem, and getting the shit kicked out of her by a grown man when she was seven.
The pictures of the Juvenile hall, were somehow
also not nearly as bad. The Turians weren't really able to imagine the squalor. "There was a plague, and a
shit ton of kids died because they couldn't afford the doctor. The adult prisons were just as bad. They threw food in, then locked it up until most of them were dead."
"Huh, you humans really don't like taking care of people. Why didn't you just do it like the Krogans do if you didn't care about them?" Camlos idly asks, "And no, just a thing where they're ostracized, I never understood it, but, eh, never really cared about prejudices."
Rebecca scratched her neck, "There were like... A hundred or some odd people at the top. They controlled everything, so a bunch of people tried to change shit, but if things got too good it'd get slapped down. The nuclear wars, from my understanding, shook the power structure enough for people to rebel. I mean, the humans not at the top had rules for war. Found certain parts of war so detestable they wouldn't do it to their worst enemy."
"We never had that. Turian wars mostly stopped after the last great unification though. Before we invented the nuclear bomb, we'd had the planet under a government. Think right around the time we made the machinegun, the last Unification War started, and right around the time we developed guided missiles, it ended." Camlos thinks on the history of the Turians, "I didn't pay much attention in school to be honest though, so that might be wildly wrong."
"So was there
anything you weren't allowed to do in war?" Rebecca was a little hopeful, but also worried. She snapped on the auto-pilot.
"The purpose of the Turian soldier is to break the enemies will and means to fight as rapidly as possible. There is no task the Turian soldier will not complete to this goal, and no feat he will not exceedingly perfect in the pursuit of this goal." Camlos rattles off with the practiced and confident tone of having to say this a thousand times.
Rebecca took a deep breath, "I meant to each other. Like... Oh I guess you were unified."
"Prior to the unification...not really? We gassed and shot and stabbed and burnt and pillaged and-well, you know how that goes. But that was
over a thousand years ago." He describes.
"I meant... Like... Smuggling drugs in a Soldier's dead body to sell so your government could keep funding it's spy wing. Or whatever." Rebecca tried to make it sound casual.
Camlos looks a little perturbed, "Very specific. Uh, sounds more like a Salarian gig, but I wouldn't put it past Intel to do some shit like that. Salarians though, ends justify the means doesn't even cover it."
"What about the Asari, or like... What if... You had orders, your allies had orders, and then they conflicted. Like, ending in phosphorus." Rebecca realized she kept being
very specific and winced. This was not
casual.
"The Asari don't really have a military, they like ... have anarchist communes." Camlos looks a little worried. "You wanna talk about something Rebecca?"
"I think I did?" Rebecca said, suddenly retreating.
There were definitely things they didn't do during war.
"You ... hey, past's the past, and war's hazy. I'm not one to judge someone, bullets are flying and you have your orders, everything but the orders is unclear." Camlos says.
"I'm..." Rebecca side, "Yeah let's go with that. Do you think if Lisa saw memories... Like that she'd freak?"
Camlos shakes his head, "If Lisa was a Commando in the Krogan Rebellions, she's seen things that'll make you puke your guts out. The Krogans would destroy entire cities by hand. You can find pics of people mounted on fences with their faces eaten off. I don't think there's a thing either of us have seen that'll make her gulp, much less freak."
Goddamnit, why doesn't he understand? Is he fucking dense? Yeah, definitely but she needed to do a dry run. "Let's... Talk about my service. Yeah?"
"Yeah." He nods, "Whatever you wanna talk about Rebecca. I'm here for you."
"Ok, I'm sixteen, a plane hits two buildings." Rebecca said with a deep breath then exhaling, "And starts a war that needs
massive amounts of people. The government doesn't give a fuck, anyone can sign up. People walked into Juvenile detention centers signing up
anyone, no questions asked really. Girls are late bloomers. I'm fifteen, sent off to boot."
She shows pictures of bunk beds, training facilities, old school cots and a log wall in mud with a rope on it. "I get decent, not great scores on the ASVAB. Good enough to get into FORECON. They need to wipe out a city of about... Ten million. There was three hundred and sixty thousand people living there when I left. It's a fucked up, nasty inch by inch crawl through urban hell. Every time you fucked up, you were fighting in tiny buildings, surrounded by enemy and fleeing for your life."
"Few months later, after burning people alive, poisoning people, cutting water and power, and inch by inch annihilating them in a way that's acceptable we 'win'
technically. And we leave. I can't go back home, like... I had nothing. Guy walks up and says, 'Do you want to keep serving your country?' I say hell yeah."
"Now? I'm in Africa, flying opium back and forth. Sometimes my country needs me to watch a warlord. Sometimes my country needs me to shoot kids. Sometimes my country needs me to make sure fellow countrymen don't reveal what my country is doing." Rebecca watches the Turian for a second. "Sometimes my country needs people really upset at the enemy, like ... My countrymen need to be done up in a way that makes the war worse."
"Wetworker." He understands, "You were a wetworker, false flags, smuggling, whatever the government needed." The Turian doesn't sound insulted by the idea, nor has the subtly horrified voice of the average person at this point.
"Yeah." She takes a deep breath, "So ... A lot of it was
bad. A journalist found out, so we had to basically uh 'get' them, but they were in a civilian area, so we kind of just..." This was the worst part, "Well, it'd look really bad if people found out. So we removed a village off the map. Kind of like Fallujah, an evershrinking circle that made sure no-one got out." She exhaled, "Apparently footage got out, and someone had to take the fall, I got a bad thrown over my head, and then thrown into a court house for a trial."
"Its not the
worst thing." The Turian admits, bringing some relief, "Like, don't get me wrong, being an intelligence wetworker not what you lead a coffee date with, but, we're on Omega Rebecca. We've got murderers and slavers we brush shoulders with when going to a restaurant. Its ... just something to know I guess?"
"Ah, yeah. To be clear, were you saying human traffickers were
worse or on par?" She asked, carefully.
"Well, not just humans, and not just trafficking. They have whole planets of them, billions of people in chains, despicable shit." He starts to move into a
tiny rant, but stops, "They're worse, you just killed some people, like, innocent people sure, but there's worse."
"We ... I never like
caught or
sold anyone." Rebecca was already trying to justify it, "But we did have to defend them sometimes, cover for them. Broke a bunch out of a prison once."
"Don't, uh, lead with that." The Turian grimaces, "Asari are, targeted. Often."
"She wants to like, take my night terrors and do some dream shit." Rebecca takes a deep breath, and exhales again. "She's
going to find out."
Camlos nods, still grimacing, "Okay, well, she's willing to live with you so, strong emotional tie there. She's ... I mean, if she can get along with a Krogan after fighting in the Rebellions? I think it should be fine?"
"I didn't really even know it was that bad." Rebecca moaned angry with herself, "It wasn't until hardened creeps got spooked and weird around me that I realized that maybe something might not have been okay. I was fifteen." She muttered quietly, "They locked me in my own place when I was on leave."
Camlos kept trying to be reassuring, "Yeah, okay, that actually makes it okay. You, uh, well, you were kinda indoctrinated into it. What's a kid gonna do when the authority figures in her life are all shit." Something about it was infuriating
"Well, now you're just making me sound like a victim. I'm an elite operative, with thousands of confirmed kills." Rebecca
kept saying 'Elite Operative' and 'Confirmed Kills,' anytime she was questioned. Anytime she felt people were pitying her she reminded them she was a
threat.
"I ... get that, you weren't an elite operator at fifteen. Rebecca, they used you. You were fucked with by someone who had your trust. Command shouldn't do that sort of shit,
ever." The Turian sacred
chain of command is evident in his speech.
"No, I was a patriot serving my country." Rebecca said now
angry, she had just been trying to weasel out of responsibility for what she did, but
no she wasn't a
victim she wasn't weak or pathetic.
"Fuck off! You were manipulated to do things, stop trying to take responsibility for it!" Camlos growls at Rebecca.
"It's possible to
not be responsible." She yelled back, "
AND not be a victim. Victims are people who can't defend themselves, get left behind in the mud. I
survived. That made me the best."
"That's-What?! The fuck are you saying? You got hurt and got used to fight wars against innocents! No shit you're a victim!" The Turian seems to be putting his foot down.
"
And I got really good at cooking! And whittling!" She shouted back, angrily. "I got stuff out of it! Not like... Money or anything but I did well."
There's a
baffled silence as Camlos tries to find a word to describe this
thing he's being fed.
"Look, if god wanted those people to live, he wouldn't have allowed me around them." Rebecca said quickly, justifying it. The explanation sounding just as practiced, even though it was clearly stolen from somewhere.
"No! That's-! No! You're—What? No!" Camlos is trying to find words to begin to describe this
new thing he's been given. "Rebecca, I
love you, but WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with you?"