art by stonelions. post BAaT kaidan alenko–messed up kid that he was–has a run-in with the vorcha, 5000 credits, and possibly a bottle of whiskey.
They hadn’t written home to Mom and Dad in Brain Camp, either. So Kaidan wasn’t looking for that kind of touchstone. Shooting words into the darkness like rounds out of an empty clip.
Hey, Mom. It’s about oh four hundred, local standard. I’ve been worse, but the thing I keep thinking lately is… I’ve been better, you know? No. I mean, you don’t know. I’m not blaming you for it, but that’s just how it is. All I wanted to say is, if you hear any rumors about the vorcha mafia… I’m still in one piece. As of writing this I am, anyway.
The messages he composed in his head never made it onto the terminal, much less past a button called send. They flashed on and off and entered the darkness, relegated to a deletion space and marked for termination. No time for messing around.
At least the more dangerous hot spots off-world didn’t pretend they weren’t dangerous. They didn’t ask anybody to come in to breakfast in the mess single-file or keep everybody’s records in alphabetical order. These weren’t practice drills with all the intensity and adrenaline of the real thing, bones aching after, head throbbing at the end of a long day of training. Just enough sleep so the body could reset itself, L2 implants shrieking like an emergency lock-down alarm. And nothing but the quiet padding the walls during the night, lights-out curfew at twenty one hundred, sharp.
The lights never went out in this corner of the galaxy. They were always there. And what was one more streak of biotic blue flashing through the neon?
But, okay. The vorcha mafia was a pain in the ass.
They weren’t BAaT-trained, though. They weren’t the product of Commander Vyrnnus. Who was dead now, by the way, and Kaidan’s brain—the tricky part that didn’t have a hole drilled through it, pulse drumming around the center—kept reminding him of that like a weather report from a corner VI. Cloudy, with a chance of heavy fire. Commander Vyrnnus was a bastard, and now he’s dead. He’s dead because you killed him. Have a nice day.
Having a nice day wasn’t on the books, no matter who was keeping them. Kaidan skidded to a halt around a sudden corner because he knew, in a game of varren and mouse, the varren usually got cocky.
But they weren’t animals. Commander Vyrnnus had been big on that—despite having treated them like animals on more than one occasion. No; they were smarter, faster, stronger. They could pretend they were being chased when actually, they were the ones doing the leading.
Make your enemy think they’d cornered you—and they’d never know you’d been the one bringing them to your corner all along.
Of course, there was always gonna be a time when you stopped running. When you made a stand. Or when pure anger blacked out the drill sessions and you blasted a CO into pulp against a wall because you were so damn mad and that sucked up strategy like light into a black hole. Nothing could escape that event horizon.
Kaidan skidded to a halt. It took his heart a few seconds to catch up—but then again, it always did.
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
gummygunk
izzy806
kaledo-art
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
jbbartram-illu
