K is for Kerosene
K is for Kerosene
There’s always an air of desolation hanging around these deep space colonies, like a swarm of flies summoned to a corpse. The prefab structures are all gray, lifeless. When the generators fail—the way they have on Feros—the colonists have no choice but to start burning oil so they can keep watch for geth even at night.
Kaidan surveys it all—the dull concrete, the duller faces of those who live here—and shakes his head. “I can’t see why anyone would want to stay here.” Or migrate all this way to begin with. Then again, Feros is a corporate colony. It wouldn’t surprise Kaidan if the people at ExoGeni’s head are cut from the same cloth as those who ran Conatix.
Shepard sidled up beside him, plunging the butt of his rifle into the ground to lean on it the way a sage would a walking stick. No one could mistake his scarred armor for a scholar’s robes. All the same, the hard set to his jaw relaxes as he surveys the colony, as though one of the screws holding him together has suddenly come loose.
“I don’t know. It’s a shit place, sure, but…” Shepard shrugs. “If you’ve got nothing to your name already, I can see how it’d be tempting to just start over. Better to reign over shit than beg in paradise.”
“That’s rather…profound. Commander.” Especially coming from someone not generally known for such declarations. What sparked this insight? All those redactions in Shepard’s file pointed to a man with a questionable past. The Alliance wouldn’t have bothered blacking so much out if he’d routinely rescued lost kittens from trees, after all. They’d be crying it from the rooftops, rather. Look at what a saint the first human Spectre really is. They don’t say it. It isn’t true.
Shepard squares his shoulders. It’s like someone hit the reboot button in his brain. The gritted teeth come back, the narrowed eyes with them. The soldier eclipses the philosopher. “Yeah well…I vote for less thinking and more shooting.”
Lumbering up behind them, Wrex grunts his approval. “Here, here.”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult,” Kaidan sighs, but the other two have already left him in the dust.
