Their first drift was born out of fear and desperation.
Shepard watched him tread up the cockpit. Vakarian was big, even for a turian, and the convex swell of his armor seemed to enlarge as he stepped further into her space. He touched a hand to the side of his visor. The glass filmed, then retracted.
“What do you think?” he said. Shepard couldn’t read his face but she understood the words. There was grim acceptance in that tone.
It was the first time that he’d looked at her, and she’d looked at him, and they’d known with complete synchronicity what the other was thinking.
Shepard wanted Vakarian’s three-pronged hand away from the cockpit.
Another blow to the ship, this time so bad that Shepard actually lurched with the impact. Vakarian was braced against the console. He didn’t budge.
Shepard pressed her lips together into a hard line. Kicking the chair around, she unclasped the helmet and slid it free. The curve of polyplystic was cool in her hand.
She threw the helmet at Vakarian, jerking her head towards the empty console. “Come on.”
Shepard hadn’t piloted a ship in some time. While flying was much like the proverbial bicycle, the complex set up was not. Scanning the dashboard, she decided to ignore everything apart from the basics and hooked the cable into the shunt in her wrist. The helmet’s hydraulics hissed as they engaged somewhere near her jawbone. She was breathing a dead man’s air.
The AI flickered to life. “Configuration unknown. Procedure not recommended. Do you wish to continue?”
The Areto was a Human warship. Shepard dredged her initiation sequence from the recesses of her memory and rattled it off accordingly. “Shepard: verify.”
Although she’d been expecting it, she still started when his voice came through. “Vakarian: verify.”
“Crew members verified. Please hold as we initiate the neural connection.”
Shepard closed her eyes. The fluid flowed cool around her neck, pooling up her cheeks. She fought the panic and forced herself to breathe it in. There was that strange dissonance: the cool caress of the gel against the numb burn on her brain. Then, like a switch flipped, Shepard dropped.
Lightning flashes: twenty, thirty years of memories—strings flying over the edges of the consciousness. Shepard was brushing by a life that was as infinitely complex as her own. She even had it easier: Vakarian had more experience than she did in the pilot’s chair. Years of contact in the bridge had callused him. He packaged his life better.
Shepard learned many things about her partner in that split-second. Garrus Vakarian was a soldier through and through. He had enlisted because that had been expected of him; he had excelled because that, too, had been expected of him. He felt solid to Shepard, stable somehow—he believed that, in the end, wrongs would right themselves and that friends would come through. But if Vakarian was over-trusting, there was also a grit that ran to the bone: something stark and determined and maybe even grim.
An alkaline soup rolled around the caverns of her mouth. Wind rushed across hard-backed carapaces, the sensation both strange and familiar to her.
But the bind was reciprocal. Millions of threads were flying out from Shepard too, and it had been three years since she had last jumped. Here, the first cigarette she’d shared with a mate: the grimy paper salty on her lips, the smoke catching at her lungs with the first inhalation. Then, a dull pull at her side, and she knew that wasn’t good, but she needed to get to her next point—
There was a big hand cradling her face. It was as gentle as Shepard had never known. She turned her face into it, the long line of her nose tucking into the curve of the palm—
Shepard didn’t have Vakarian’s finesse. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact thread that she wanted to cut. Instead her ringing word froze all hundred thousand threads in the void between them.
The silence echoed with the absence of energy. Shepard felt like she had run a thousand miles. Her chest was heaving up and down, and her heart hammering fast as a rabbit’s. There was a hard burn across her cheeks.
At least buy me dinner first, she thought inanely.
To her great surprise, there was a response: A drink? Assuming we get through this alive, of course. The words were tentative. They were a far cry from the rapid-fire dialogue Vakarian had thrown at her earlier in the cockpit. If he were human, he would’ve nodded at her: an awkward chuck of the head. His awkwardness made him 3D, and that made her uncomfortable.
Shepard cleared her throat. Alright Vakarian. You’ve got a pilot’s mind, am I getting that right?
Vakarian had been military since his age of majority. Comparing potatoes to carrots, he outranked her human qualifications by about a rank and a half. Shepard had no plans to defer to him—he had been on a human ship as a consultant—but he had more experience in the cockpit than she did. She wasn’t so proud that she wouldn’t use this.
Vakarian didn’t respond with words. Shepard felt rather than saw him engage with the wetgear: a cold wave that rippled down her body. Clink-clink-clink.
Tough guy, she thought, raising her eyebrows. She plugged in.
Grimspace bloomed before her.
Shepard had been asked what Grimspace looked like. She could never describe it. Grimspace was like a thousand colors flying by, wrapping around in an impossible three-sixty panorama. The implacable cosmos.
You good? Shepard asked him. Only she wasn’t asking him anymore—they were with each other now. She could feel his thoughts like her own.
Vakarian was considering the situation at hand. They were on a tiny foot-fighter, marooned off the side of the Eos system. Their pursuer had caught them by surprise. While Shepard’s previous pilot had been good enough to evade the first missile, the second had grazed the starboard side, taking off one of the back fins. The third—a bio-missile—had been fatal. The blue wave had short-circuited the electromagnetic signals of the bridge crew, killing all twelve of them almost instantly.
We won't outrun them in a straight chase, Vakarian concluded grimly.
An image came to Shepard. A ship moving in Grimspace, producing splintered and ghostly after-images.
Disbelief from Vakarian. You’re not serious.
The alien ship was coming up; Shepard could feel the burn at the back of her throat. She asked him: Are you in?
They waited until their pursuer had flitted into their periphery once more. Shepard fumbled for the dullness betwixt dimensions and latched upon it: she charted the way and Vakarian guided them out. They stumbled back into the greyness of normal time-space.
Next one, Shepard said to him.
Again, she felt for that notch in the fabric of reality; again, Vakarian pushed into the sliding crevasse of technicolor. They were making little jumps in and out of Grimspace. For their pursuer, it would look like they were jittering—instantaneous flashes that existed in past, present, and future.
They were losing their pursuer, but jumpers weren’t meant to navigate Grimspace like this. Shepard was tiring. Her physical body was panting in the cockpit. A blood vessel burst in her eye, a florid patch of red over pupil.
We have to move on, said Vakarian.
He plotted a path ahead. Distantly, Shepard felt their final location burning ahead of her like a tiny star. She moved through a tide as thick as molasses—faltered, froze, and then fell to her hands and knees.
Hands looped underneath her arms. Startled, Shepard looked up: Vakarian had come back for her. Half-supporting her, they stumbled together out into normspace.
In the cockpit, Shepard flipped the clasp under her chin and dragged the helmet off. The ozone stench shot painfully to the back of her skull. She massaged her temples as she checked their bearings.
And checked them again. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Vakarian looked up. The neural link was still on: Shepard could feel the astonishment radiating off him in waves. It was strange to think that even two hours ago she had thought his expressions unreadable.
They had come out somewhere in the Belt of Astaria. It would still take them some time to reach a Council world, but Astaria was a destination that should have taken a day of staggered jumping to reach. Neither of them could believe what they had just accomplished.
And this had only been their first drift.
