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The Translation in Blood	By : Mayamahal Category: +M through R > Mass Effect Views: 19003 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Bioware or ANYTHING in the Mass Effect universe, including the characters therein. I make no money on this story.

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She was all but yanked to her feet some undetermined amount of time later, her ankles freed and her body shoved hard towards the darkening cavern. The shadows were growing deeper, which was weird because the twin suns still glared a good hand or so above the horizon-
The growl of the Turian had become a shout, he was practially in her face and hauling her backwards. Everything about his body language told her he was scared shitless and she didn't have the presence of mind to disobey. Without warning, he was stuffing her into that hole in the ground at the back of the cave, ignoring her yell as she began a free fall slide down stone into blackness.
She didn't know how long she tumbled, rolled, and sometimes scooted, but she took his angry, short growls and clipped words to mean she had better hurry the fuck up if she didn't want to get trampled or maimed. Eventually the lavashuite leveled out, but there was a tremor in the walls around her that told her to move even if the verbal prodding behind her had gone silent.
Wrists still bound, she felt along the walls and trusted her feet as best as she could, but after the fifth knee-bruising trip she yelled at him to give her some kind of light. There was an amber flare over her shoulder; he'd accessed his implanted interface.
The light wasn't much but it was better than nothing, sparing her knees as the two of them scrambled single-file down into the endless cavern. When there looked like a chance to go up, he would bark at her and slam her shoulder down, forcing her to scoot deeper into the tunnel and down into the earth.
It couldn't have been more than ten minutes, but damn it felt like an eternity. After a while she was beginning to wonder what was really going on, when the ground heaved beneath them.
There's really no better way to describe it. One moment, they're on their feet running through the dark, the next, the ground wasn't there and they were neither falling nor thrown; they were floating.
And then gravity remembered them.
The stream of words from both of them could have scorched ice when they both tumbled, plummeted, rolled, as the earth opened up and swallowed them whole.
ooo
Trickling water. Pressure on her shoulders. And back. Actually, there was weight pressed all along her spine and across the back of her hips.
Were her eyes open? It was hard to tell. Was there just no light?
A groan resonated through her ear when she tried to shift, the flutter of something rigid and textured against her cheek. Face down, her cheek pressed against wet stone, her arms were folded under her, immobile from the weight of the Turian laying on top of her.
A scrape of flesh on dirt, arms drawing in around her as the pressure eased off. She was pulled effortlessly up and rolled over, a mutter in the dark that clipped into what she was rapidly recognizing as a curse. There was a flare of amber light, brighter in the pitch black they were encased in, and she saw his alien face outlined in the shadows he created.
He'd pulled her over his thighs, looking her over, starting from her legs and traveling up. He seemed surprised to see her blinking in the light, pausing for an awkward moment before nodding at her and twitching one brow plate upwards.
He was getting good at this non-verbal communication.
She nodded back to him, mumbling, "I think I'm alright," before struggling to sit up.
He helped her before standing carefully himself, lifting his arm to peer around. Hannah winced as she stretched sore parts, felt for scrapes or bruises in the dark. Despite the free fall from hell, they both appeared relatively uninjured.
It was hard to see, but the sound of water gave her hope that they weren't completely trapped. Girl Scouts, spelunking 101: where there's water, there's a way out. Usually. Most likely.
She caught a flash of green when the Turian turned away from her, blocking the light with his bulk for a moment. With a hiss, she pushed him lightly with her bound hands and whispered, "Turn it off a second."
Without a sound, he flipped his interface inactive.
She couldn't help herself and gave a soft laugh. "You Turians do make good soldiers. Never question orders, do you?"
For a second she thought she'd offended him, but then she caught the low rumble of returning chuckle. It made her smile in the dark.
Soon, her eyes began to adjust and she looked around for that flash of green. Keeping her bound hands on his lower arm, she took a few steps over and leaned towards the sound of water.
There it was again. What was that?
Still keeping a grip on him, she carefully wandered forward, shoulder brushing the wall of the tunnel, inhaling sharply when the strange green light revealed an opening in the dark.
Phosphorescent lichen or moss coated the stone here, spreading out into a cavern like it was lit with green starlight. It clung to the floor and outlined strange rock formations, and skirted the edges of an underground stream that sank along the wall. Hannah gave a soft laugh, hearing the sound echo and triple around her.
She thought of her daughter, and wondered if she'd live to tell about this.
Her laughter faded, making her painful, slow inhale loud to her ears.
She whirled around to look at the Turian behind her, embarrassed to see him looking at her face so intensely. She pulled her hands from his arm and raised her wrists to his eyes.
"I'll move better if I didn't have these," she told him, lifting her chin and glaring up (and up and up) at him.
He didn't respond or budge. He hardly even twitched, but she thought she saw a flick of movement from his exposed jawline. Still, the silence stretched out for several long moments.
He hooked a finger into the opening between the manacles, voicing a question that was both soft and serious, peering at her, white markings across his face glowing green.
And while she still couldn't understand him, there was something about his tone that had her blushing. She was never so grateful for the dim light as she was right now.
What she said was, "Still don't understand you, bird." There was another one of those jawline twitches, but she pressed on. "But if you're worried about escape ..." She huffed. "Look around you. The war is far, far away from here, from this place, and right now we don't even know if we're going to find a way out. Our best shot is to work together, and that means-" She shook her wrists at him. "Trusting me enough to let me loose."
Again, he said nothing.
She continued anyway. "And besides." She stood on her toes to get as close to his strange, alien face as she could. In the glowing light, his eyes look so very green. "You. Owe. Me."
He remained silent but she could tell he was thinking it over. By the time he moved, the arches of her feet were killing her and it took every bit of her strength to keep from shaking on her toes. With a deft movement, he pressed a few points at her wrists, twisted a talon into some unseen opening, and the cuffs snapped open. He caught the bonds before they fell, folding them in on themselves and tucking them some place out of sight.
She didn't remark on this as she rubbed at her sore wrists, nodding her thanks. She jerked her chin at his inactive interface arm. "Are you going to show me what happened?" she asked. Free from her bonds and settled into an unexpected truce, she felt bold, and weary, and tired of being in the dark.
To his credit, he hesitated for a moment before lifting his arm, keying it up and accessing a video program. She wrinkled her nose in confusion.
"You had time to record it?" she asked. He shook his head and mumbled something, point at the transparent screen hovering over his wrist.
It wasn't this planet, that much was sure, but the ships orbiting the planet were unmistakably alien. Turian, no doubt. She watched as several shuttles hauled bits of orbiting debris, satellites, asteroid material, even a broken freighter, swung it around on a series of pulls, and loosed it towards the surface of the planet.
The video switched perspective to some place on the surface, a good distance from the intended target. The impact was astounding; something the size of a skycar could reduce a city-block into a crater, and the Turians could do all this without expending hardly any energy at all.
By the time the video ended and his interface keyed out, she was breathing hard.
"That's what they're doing, isn't it?" she whispered to the dim lit figure next to her. "That's what they're doing to Shanxi?"
His silence was enough, but he gave a small nod anyway.
She passed a hand over her face, ignoring its tremble. Well, she had to give it to them: it was an ingenius way to put down a surface city, if completely inelegant. Low cost, minimal damage to themselves and their equipment ... as long as chunks didn't break off on the way into atmo-
She frowned. "Was that what happened?" she asked him, her tone sharp. "Did something hit us?"
He grunted and glared somewhere past his shoulder, a flurry of angry syllables pouring forth as his mandibles flicked out once before drawing in, tight and rigid. She filed that away as the 'mad Turian' look. It seemed he was almost as put out by the technique of his fleet as she was, but she wasn't about to push their new partnership; it was still too new.
The subject was changed swiftly as they did a quick inventory of what they had. Scrounging about where they'd woken revealed two bits of luck: his pistol and survival pack. All of his camping equipment was probably smashed into bits a mile above them for all they knew, and they marked that as a loss.
Access to water was a big save for them both, but especially for her as she had nothing to eat as of yet. Exploration of the stream revealed it was hardly more than a trickle, but Hannah hoped it would lead to a bigger source and maybe even some kind of underwater, edible something-or-other.
Actually, the idea of a pool was incredibly appealing; she hadn't bathed in days.
That gave her a surge of energy to cling to, as it was more likely than finding food at this point. He showed her a bunch of rations she had, but experimentation proved to be a bad idea; the tiny nibble made her promptly throw up, and he only just missed getting vomit on his boots.
When it was obvious there was nothing else to look for, they made the unanimous decision to follow the little trickle of water to see where it led to.
In the meantime, while their feet were otherwise occupied, they talked.
Well, she talked, and he pretended to ask questions she understood. In the beginning he tried to trade words, teach her a few in his language, but it proved impossible; the creature had subvocals she couldn't dream of reproducing. If she were honest with herself, though, his voice was incredibly pleasant to listen to er, analyze. Yeah.
As easy as it was to slip into some kind of relaxed comraderie, she still kept in mind that he was technically the enemy, and she his, and any information she gave him could be used against her species. But she figured it was alright to talk about her childhood, life on Earth, human customs, and especially her bouncing baby girl.
"Eh, I shouldn't call her a baby anymore," she said with a soft laugh, stepping over a twist in the growing stream as it wandered in her path. "She's almost three, and for humans, that's six times bigger than where she started."
This got her a scoff and a few questioning words; he didn't believe her.
"It's true!" she passed her hand across some of the glowing lichen, feeling it tickle her palm, organic texture against cool, wet stone. "I don't know how to describe a pound to you, but..." She considered it, then turned around, making him backpedal a few steps. She blinked; she hadn't realized he'd been that close behind her.
She cleared her throat, then reached for his pistol. "May I?"
He gave her a look that was impossible not to translate: Do I look that stupid?
She rolled her eyes at him. "Look, it's a weight reference. I'm sure the thing has a safety lock, just key it up. I'm not about to kill the only company I have right now." To prove her innocence, she stuck her tongue out at him.
Warily, he pulled out his pistol and did something to it that made the thing chirp and pop a red light, before handing it to her.
She hefted it experimentally, considering the rig, and then, true to her word, gave it back to him. "That's about a pound. A unit of weight, if you will." She didn't know how sophisticated his translator was, but she figured it'd be best for the both of them if she could be as clear as possible.
"A human infant can weight between five and nine of those, give or take a few pounds." She beamed at him. "My daughter weighed ten when I gave birth to her. And that was natural, right through the pelvis." She patted her hip with pride.
He stared at her. And then let his eyes wander her from head to toe, before settling very obviously at her wide hips. He tilted his head at her, drawing what appeared to be a triangle in the air, the widest part of the shape spanning from her hip bone to hip bone. Then he held up his hands and made the shape of a circle in the air with them, fingertips touching. He eyed her hips, and then looked back at the space between his fingers. And then back again.
Well, that answered that question.
Crossing her arms very deliberately over her chest, she leaned against one glowing cavern wall and considered what his actions revealed to her.
Live-birth with placenta-mammals wasn't a phenomenon confined to Earth, this much humanity had learn from their relatively brief explorations of space, but it was still uncertain if sentient life in the galaxy had a similar birthing process. From what she had surmised, this was definitely the case; there were other species out there besides Turian, species that shared similar DNA structures and body shapes, maybe even physical appearances.
That was why he'd stared at her tears. He'd seen them somewhere else before.
Imagine that, she thought. Another sentient race that knew the value of tears.
"I take it Turian babies aren't nearly so big then, hmm?" she said, lips twitching into a wry smile.
He shook his head and pointed to his gun, then held up three fingers, then six. Three to six pounds. Little things. He gestured to her hips again, then pointed at his, said a rapid collection of syllables where he mimicked something being stretched. The motion he made at her hips, with a much larger radius of stretching, came with a waggle of brow plates so comical that it completely brought down her guard and made her laugh.
"Mmm, yes, well... flesh does seem to be a bit more flexible, than... whatever you have under that armor, doesn't it?" she chuckled, before she reined in some of her courage and took a step forward, ready to say what was truly important in the here and now.
"Look ... I know that this truce of ours can end in a big mess through no real fault of our own, but ..." She sighed. She should have been a diplomat instead of going to officer school. "Turians are the first species humans have encountered that are sentient. The relay we found in our system was a dormant block of ice, and we had no idea what we'd find when we went through it." She fixed him with a look, putting every last bit of her sincerity into it, ignoring how tired she was, or how hungry; if this was where peace was going to start, she wasn't going to blow it now.
"Are you the only ones out there besides us? Are there more races? More cultures?" she asked, hoping for an answer she would understand.
His eyes lit up as his head tilt, regarding her with an expression she couldn't quite recognize at first. His mandibles had flared apart just a little bit, and he growled a few words before giving a small, careful nod.
Hope burst hard and sharp in her belly, and when she threw her arms up in excitement, he gave a startled laugh.
Apparently that gesture was universal too.
More races meant more perspectives, which meant hope that this stupid misunderstanding (because, god dammit, it had to be a misunderstanding, it's the kind of thing that started the best wars) had a chance of getting untangled. She said as much too, and it made her feel all kinds of giddy when he nodded in agreement.
And then she laid all her cards out on the table.
"I know we can't talk about it right now, not until I find something to eat and regain my composure enough to not sound like a prepubescent girl, but I'd like you to explain to me ... what we did wrong. Or are you going to tell me that your people didn't fire on us first?"
He went very still at that, tilting his head the other way and taking her in again. She could almost see the gears grind behind his eyes.
She caught herself just before she hugged him, when he finally gave a slow nod.
"Well, hot damn, bird. We might just fix this whole mess on our own."
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The Translation in Blood