Two hours before the attack on Therum
Shepard hated Therum long before she laid eyes on the desolate, maroon disk through the open viewports in the bridge. There was a nearly imperceptible tug in her gut as the Normandy fired the last thruster sequence to put them in orbit. The engines wound down, and time seemed to halt in the motionless silence.
And then, despite all her efforts, it started going backwards.
One day before the attack on Therum.
“What really happened between Anderson and Saren?”
Nihlus looked up from his datapad. On the other side of the featureless table sat Ashley Williams. She was balancing her chair on its hind legs and staring at him almost accusingly beneath a raised eyebrow and a sharp black line of hair savagely pulled into a bun. To her left, Shepard stopped what she was doing. The parts of a disassembled Kessler were laid out in front of her like the pieces of a children’s puzzle. She’d been tinkering with it for hours, trying to fit it with an obviously incompatible, high-capacity heat sink. To her credit, she seemed to be possessed of an unlimited supply of patience. Seated on the opposite end, Kaidan Alenko stopped chewing on a sandwich that smelled of fish and something faintly sour. Only a biotic would eat this late into the night cycle. Other than the four of them, the mess was deserted, and every sound they made echoed off the tiled floor and the gray bulkheads.
It was very dark and cold in this part of Sovereign. Saren had never been here before; or if he had, he had no memory of it. Which would be no surprise at this point. He had gotten used to the idea that he was forgetting some of the things that he’d done, the same way he was remembering various things he hadn’t.
Well I’ll be damned, Garrus thought as they entered the Consort’s chambers. He’d never been farther in than the main hall – the so-called ‘waiting room’ – and he’d never seen Sha’ira in person. The theme of the decor was ‘twilight on the lakeshore’. Holos of shimmering water, distant mountains and a couple of faint moons in a pink sky projected on the walls, and noises of night-creatures and the wind in the reeds playing in the background. That smell of wet sand – was that part of the elaborate illusion? Or only in his mind?
Shepard squinted in the dim light of the nightclub. It smelled like a distillery and there were nearly naked asari pole-dancing and lap-dancing everywhere. Small round tables riddled with bottles and glasses and rubbish surrounded the bar and the stage. There were all sorts of customers: turian, human, salarian, volus. The music was unpalatable, probably drell or something even more exotic, but there was a rhythm to it and the dancers hardly needed anything else. Out of the corner of her eye, Shepard caught a man sniffing something from the back of his hand. It certainly didn’t look like C-Sec maintained a presence here.
Wrex could smell the shithole called Chora’s Den from the other end of the gallery. He leaned over the railing, his gauntlets screeching in contact with the smooth, matte metal, and glanced at the light sky-car traffic below. None of the cars would be bringing him company: that much was clear from the message he’d just received from his so-called support. Fucking amateurs. Held at the docks for trying to smuggle weapons through customs. What did they do – hide them in their pants? Fucking idiots.