Mass Effect - Cabin Fever

Metgos was a planet with an atmosphere like the inside of a furnace. It was a godforsaken clump of dense mineral in one of the most godforsaken corners of the galaxy. Whatever planet it had once been, an expanding sun had reduced the surface to a scorching ball of nickel with air made foul by sodium and calcium. Advanced suit air filtration could wheeze and whine to provide an hour's worth of surface time but would need to be scrubbed afterward, any longer and you'd be lucky to suffocate but more likely to drown in your own blood. The Mako would fare better, with localized air recycling, but even it had limits. The excursion would need to be surgical, anything else risked lives.

"We'll set the probe up when we're twenty kilometers south of the distress beacon after we check the source, that's thirty kilometers north of the drop zone. Liara, that probe needs to be ready to go when we arrive, every second outside the Mako could be life or death."

"Understood Commander." Liara nodded, her exosuit had been locked into place and she was fiddling nervously with the joints to ensure that they were airtight.

"Commander, any reason we can't drop closer? Seems like a bad place to get a flat tire." Ashley asked, her exosuit was still casually half-off.

"Atmospheric reports make it seem unlikely any distress signal is legitimate, too dangerous to drop in close on a potential trap. Fifty gives us distance and keeps us from dropping into any mountains."

"So why answer it if we're sure it's a trap?" Ash asked with her arms crossed.

"To assume otherwise would be to leave those poor people on the planet's surface, we cannot afford even that small risk." Liara interjected with a look of shock.

"Better them than us."

Shepard sensed a fight brewing and cut in. "At ease, we have our plan and our job is to execute it. Dismissed, we drop in five."

Ashley shot Liara a quick scowl, Liara seemed more confused by the gesture than anything else.

Breaking up fights like these was an all too common occurrence, even with galaxy-class credentials you couldn't make this many different species get along indefinitely. If Shepard could, they would be part of the council by now probably.

Unfortunately, at a certain point, there was nothing she could do. Jane Shepard could make others respect her but she couldn't stop two humans from fighting at times, let alone two people of different species. In the Spectre's world of long lonely missions where outside communication was monitored, at times it felt like the whole ship was at your throat. Shore leave was rare for the average crew member and rarer for Jane and those closest to her.

But now wasn't the time to worry about that. The Normandy was on its way back to Citadel for some rest and relaxation when the distress beacon had pinged against Normandy's sensors. In a world of relays and easy travel, it wasn't unheard of to just ignore some distress beacons. It was a dirty secret that everybody liked to ignore.

But not for a Spectre and especially not for Metgos.

Every minute a human being spent on Metgos' surface was a new brush with a painful death. Shepard wasn't sure what the pre-space exploration concept of hell was like, but she was pretty sure Metgos looked like it. In a universe where planets could rain acid or produce toxins that made your brain come leaking out of your nose, Metgos was still a particularly godforsaken rock in space.

Shepard made her way to the loading hangar, where it seemed most of her companions had gathered already. As Jane clicked the last of her combat suit's locks into place, the general comms crackled to life.

Joker rang out into the room, his usually snarky demeanor a little softer than most were used to. Trouble. Bad trouble.

"Commander? Bad news, no landing craft is getting within low orbit of that place. The gravity will shear the thing apart."

Shepard winced "Is a high-orbit Mako drop an option?"

"I think that thing is designed for high-orbit drops, you could probably dunk it in a volcano and it'd keep on ticking."

There was a moment of silence.

"I won't dunk you in a volcano though, purely hypothetical."

The comms fizzed dead as quickly as they'd opened. Shepard sighed and looked around.

"Well, you heard Joker. This is a high-orbit Mako drop. That means minimal crew, no more than a three-person team. I don't suppose anybody wants to volunteer?"

She offered it mostly as a joke. High-orbit drops were an agony most wouldn't wish on their worst enemies. Especially in a gravity dense environment, the landing was going to feel like your entire skeleton trying to squeeze its way through the top of your head. The silence in response spoke louder than words, those words being "Not even for you Jane."

Shepard did a quick scan of the room. There was an obvious candidate, of course. Krogans were used to intense gravity, maybe not this intense but it was a lot easier on them than it was on anybody else.

"Wrex, it's you and me this time. "

"Shocking, and here I thought it would be somebody else this time." The Krogan chuckled.

"Are the two of you going to be alright on your own?" Liara asked worriedly.

"Relax, I can pull a thresher maw's tooth with my bare hands. Shepard will be there too, I guess." Wrex snarked.

"We should be fine, it looks like a routine search and rescue."

"It always looks routine." Ashley snipped, though she was visibly grateful to not be taking the plunge.

"Sometimes danger is only skin-deep. Dismissed." Shepard finished.

The drop had gone predictably. It had also gone well, considering the lack of permanent damage. At a certain level of danger in the maneuver being performed, predictable and boring became the ideal. Shepard took a couple of shaky steps as she tried to settle her stomach.

"Lightweight." Wrex huffed as he popped his neck loudly.

"Not all of us were raised on Tuchanka." Shepard winced.

"I could tell, you wouldn't last a mating season, let alone a clan war."

"You krogans have a mating season?"

"What do you think we do when we're not fighting?"

"Do I want to know what Krogan sex looks like?"

"Sure, picture two eight hundred pound piles of pure cartilage being smashed together like they're toys and-"

"All right! I get the point!"

"Lightweight"

The journey to their destination had been uneventful, again, desirably so. When Shepard had popped the visor to view the origin point of the beacon, there was nothing more than a pile of burnt metal with a single radar dish poking from it. With the visor popped, the insane heat of the planet's surface became an undeniable reality.

"Flesh melting temperatures and piles of desiccated metal?" Wrex droned "Reminds me of home."

"I don't know that I need to see much more."

"You want me to go out and kick it?"

"I don't think that'll be necessary."

Shepard opened comms. "Landing party to Normandy."

"Joker here, should we roll out the red carpet?"

"That's going to be a negative, if there were any survivors they're long gone."

"Good timing, you guys need to be back at the landing zone stat."

"What's the issue?"

"That sun currently making the planet into a microwave? You've got about an hour before it pumps out enough radiation to turn the Normandy into a paperweight."

"Understood Joker, we'll run the engine hot and be back in half of that."

In reality, they made it about halfway before a noise like a bomb going off hit them and the Mako trailed to a stop.

"Computer, what just happened?"

"Structural readings indicate a failure in the suspension rod of the right front tire, due to the location of the failure, I estimate that any further movement on the Mako's part will only spin it in circles."

"Are we close enough for a shuttlecraft pickup?"

"Negative, the time it would take to reposition the Normandy for pickup would exceed the safe window that our sensors give for the solar storm."

Wrex scoffed, "Never thought I'd die in an oversized hamster ball."

"Is the damage to the Mako going to harm the environment systems?"

"Negative, barring an additional failure the Mako is still safely graded for a week with two occupants, though those numbers account for two human occupants, the Krogan may-"

"Keep your motherboard on, neither of us will starve," Wrex grumbled.

"Joker, take the Normandy out to safe range, Wrex and I have been through worse."

"Yeah, but have you been through worse together?"

"That was an order, pilot."

"Don't worry about us, I've never cared for the taste of humans, too stringy."

The comms crackled to an uneasy peace, leaving them in the quiet cabin. Shepard took the moments of high power they had left to specialize a few of the systems for the long wait and took stock of what they did have. Even if Wrex out-ate what she was pretty sure he actually ate, at worse they were maybe a day without food. Water could be near-infinitely recycled, though it was best not to think about that while taking a drink. They were only at the mercy of a fairly newly replaced filter for water, air filters too, though those were held to more rigorous standards and they did have replacements. The emergency generator was graded for long periods of life-sustaining maintenance, it could even be pushed longer if you didn't care so much about things like air freshening or making the water taste less... recycled.

Wrex sat in his seat, getting some hits in on his omni-tool, unsure if he would still be able to use it after things went dark. He would quietly nod along to Shepard dryly reading and marking down supplies.

"And three gallons of non-recycled water."

"Make that stuff count, the longer I can go without thinking about how much of my own DNA I need to swallow to stay alive, the less fuss I'll make."

"Then three pints of non-water refreshments, mostly high-vitamin juices."

"Give or take 750ml of non-refrigerated liquids."

Shepard looked her page up and down, "I must have missed that, where is it?"

Wrex shifted as he reached into his armor, pulling out a large stainless-steel flask. "Make this stuff count too, a little goes a long way."

He tossed her the flask, unscrewing the lid and taking a sniff, Shepard could feel her brain cells dying.

"That gasoline?" She gagged out.

"Worse, Ryncol."

"Do I want to guess the ABV of this stuff?" She resealed the container and set it up in a cabinet.

"Might be easier to guess the Sieverts, I warned you about it going a long way."

"Looks like you packed enough for a whole away party."

"Or at least a Krogan and a plus one, I refuse to die sober."

"Well, if I think we're going to die, I'll toast with you."

"Or if you get bored and don't mind getting peeled off of the floor."

"I'm not that much of a lightweight."

Wrex laughed, "Anybody who says that hasn't tried Ryncol."

There was a shuddering screech outside of the cabin. For a moment, both froze in painful anticipation. As it started to fade, the lights flickered then died. It took a moment of quiet anxious blackness for the emergency power to kick on, bringing them back into a dull red light. The air kicked back on, immediately stiff with heat as the air conditioning below life-saving levels was a good way to hemorrhage power. Shepard unwound her rankled muscles slowly, from head to toe she had seized up like a lock. She had to sigh and stretch her fingers and toes to work the tension out of them. Wrex didn't look much better off.

"Maybe I could use a drink," Shepard mumbled.

"Save it, we might be here a while," Wrex mumbled back, he pulled out a second flask.

"You double pack on that poison?" Shepard grumbled.

Wrex nodded as he took a deep swig, he pulled his mouth away and shook his head violently, pounding his fist into his palm.

"I refuse to die sober."

A day passed into night quickly, both of them too high strung to be bored. The time for boredom would come, she wouldn't be able to escape it when it hit, so Shepard embraced the fast-passing hours while she could. Wrex was all business, helping to rearrange some of the larger bulk and set up the stations. The heat didn't hit him like it hit her, he described the slow stifling heat that built in the cabin as a "Tuchanka Spring Breeze." Shepard gave up on her regulation armor in record time, Wrex following not long after despite his bold exterior. As the heat built, even her stiff uniform became unreasonable. She was underdressed underneath it, but a reasonable amount of skin being shown was an acceptable price. Wrex wasn't going to ride her ass about it like Garrus or Kaidan, metaphorically and literally, respectively. She undid the stiff overcoat, throwing it under the bunk with her armor and letting it ride with her sports bra. She kept the pants, but rolled the legs up past her knees. Exposed panties would be a little harder to convince herself as being "just cooling down and not giving the Krogan an earthling fashion show." Wrex wore a fairly simple sort of robe, open-bottomed and extending up over the hunch of his back. His feet slapped heavily against the ground when he walked, making it hard to miss when he was on the move.

She realized that she had never seen a Krogan out of armor or official uniform in person before. Wrex's body didn't bulge with muscle in the way she would have thought. He was big-framed, but his scaly grey skin clung fairly close to his body.

"You want a picture?" He grumbled. Shit! She had been staring.

"I've never seen a Krogan in casualwear before."

He snorted, "Not much reason to when everybody in the universe wants to bite a piece out of you. Is it what you pictured?"

"Honestly, I thought you'd be some muscle-hulking powerhouse, you look downright... underfed?"

He turned to her, pulling the sleeve of the robe up his arm. "Putting too much meat on your bones is a party foul in high gravity. We're bony, but it's the kind of bones a thresher maw would choke on."

"Is that where the hump comes from?"

"This?" He looked back at it briefly, "No, that's where I store my testicles."

Shepard's face twisted at him, he giggled with surprising abandon.

"That was a joke. It stores water."

"Right... so..."

"So I can take anybody in a fight even though I'm all skin and bones, that's both of the reasons why if we run out of food you're the one getting eaten."

"One of these days, I'll trust that that's a joke."

He turned back away, "And one of these days, you'll have let your guard down."

He started to go back to disassembling weapon cartridges to see if they could be used as batteries. Anything to get the ice machine or the ac working, even if just for a few minutes. Shepard started to put her hand up, but swallowed her question before she asked it.

"What?" He grumbled.

"Nothing."

"Did you want to see where I actually store my testicles?"

She bit her tongue, that wasn't exactly it, but it was closer than she'd admit.

"Is it true about..." She cut herself off and held up four of her fingers.

"Are you this bored already? The Ryncol is in the cabinet."

"I just... I was always kinda curious."

He sighed, "Yes, and they all work. Or did, until the Salarians came along."

"Right, sorry."

"Shepard, it doesn't offend me when other species ask about my junk."

"Do Krogans get that a lot?"

"More than the Asari even, you should see the extranet, there's a whole industry for Krogans."

"In uhh?" Shepard mimed sex with her hands.

"The galaxy wants to see us fuck just about anything with legs, some things without too. Hell if I know why."

"Without legs?"

"On video, of course, the extranet is full of shit like that."

"Have you?"

"What, fucked or been filmed doing it?"

"I guess the filming, though the things without legs statement deserves an explanation."

"No. I'm not opposed, but I'm not about to put down my gun to get fluffed by some Turian, those mandibles look painful."

"Ever done it with any other species, like say, one without legs?"

"Usually the ones without legs only fuck females. What about you, ever been enkindled yourself?"

"I'd never considered it."

"Maybe you should, the girls in the videos seem pretty enlightened."

"How did we get on this topic?"

"You asked questions about my junk."

"Right," Shepard blinked. The sweat pouring into her eyes only added to the sensation that her brain was melting and they were both watching it happen in real-time. "Sorry."

"Told you not to apologize, no skin off my junk."

"Could you stop talking about your junk?"

"You started it."

Shepard needed to stop talking. She stepped over to the cabinet and pulled out the flask. The first taste of it on her tongue made her feel like her whole body wanted to squeeze itself out of her nostrils in protest. She managed to choke it down, sputtering and coughing afterward.

"I'll drink to that," Wrex grumbled from the back.

"You sure this isn't poison?"

"Nope." He took a large pull from the flask.

It took roughly five minutes for Shepard to be hit with a feeling like her entire nervous system was unspooling and leaving through her fingertips, leaving her body oddly weightless and numb. She stumbled against the wall, blinking twice. Each time, the world seemed to come back more in slow motion.

"I don't think I like Ryncol," She grumbled.

Wrex stepped behind her, setting a hand on her shoulder. "Go lie down, the first time is rough. It gets less bad the more you do it."

She lifted her foot to take a step forward but couldn't manage to put it back down again. She rocked in place on one leg, eventually throwing herself off balance and falling forward onto her outstretched foot.

"I think I forgetting how to walk?" She giggled.

He sighed wearily, "Lightweight."

He lifted her with seemingly no effort, cradling her briefly in his arms as he stomped to the back of the cabin. He was warm, smelled nice. Kind of sandy but very crisp, like a day at the beach. She looked up at him with a goofy smile. He set her on the cot gently and stepped away.

"Try to sleep, it's neutralized while you sleep."

"Yah boss, sorry boutcher junk."

She closed her eyes, she hadn't expected to get goofy village idiot drunk off of a single mouthful. When she did sober up, she was probably going to be extremely embarrassed with herself. She heard Wrex grumble as he walked out of the back cabin. Her body fought rest at first, but the longer she laid down the more she seemed to sink into the meager cushion of the cot.

Her eyes shot open, she didn't know how long she'd been down. It was extremely surreal to jump in seconds from the sleep of the dead to fully awake. She wasn't hungover, shockingly, or at least her hangover didn't behave like a normal hangover. When she got up, her stomach turned a little, but she was missing the earth-moving headache. Or perhaps not missing it, but its absence was conspicuous.

She stepped into the main cabin, past the refrigerator unit in the neck. Wrex was slumped in his seat, heavy and deep breathing seemed to rumble the entire vehicle. A trail of drool leaked quietly onto his robe, the length of the dark stain it caused implying that it had been dripping for some time, or that he drooled a near-infeasible amount.

"Four saliva glands?"

She shook her head. She usually didn't think this much about Krogan anatomy, at least not outside of her private quarters. She didn't not think about Krogan anatomy. Every person who had been on the extranet long enough had seen a Krogans err... "junk" thought about Krogan anatomy. Wrex hadn't been embellishing when he'd said that people would pay good money to see Krogans fuck just about anything. Each other, Asari, Turians,

"Human alliance captains?"

This was not the time or place to indulge that line of thought. That line of thought was best indulged in private quarters, with a locked door and wine. A communal cot and Ryncol were not appropriate replacements. Why was she having such a hard time purging this line of thought? Was it seeing Wrex slumped and sleeping in his chair? Was it finally seeing what he wore under his armor? Finally feeling the skin of his body against hers, even if briefly? Was it the peaceful lump in between his legs that the tight robes were pulled against him and showing?