Strike Leader

"Permission to speak candidly, Commander?"

Samara maintained an almost haughtily stuffy and professional demeanor, Shepard might have been insulted if she hadn't known the Justicar for a while at this point.

"Granted."

"It is unreasonably fucking hot."

Shepard tugged at her collar, "Agreed."

Liara glanced at Shepard for a moment before looking back to Samara, "Hearing you swear is odd, you often remind me so much of my mother."

"Did your mother never curse?"

"Not when she thought I could hear."

Samara sighed and toyed with the zipper of her jumpsuit, "Then I suspect she never spent time somewhere where it was this unreasonably fucking hot."

Shepard cut in, "Give Kasumi a little while longer, she should treat-"

The comms crackled suddenly and loudly, judging by how Liara and Samara also winced, it was on the shared channel. They could all hear Kasumi breathing heavily on the other end, too close to the microphone.

"What's the status on your end Cap'n?"

"You summoned her!" Samara looked at Shepard amusedly, thumbing her earpiece.

"Shepard has an uncanny ability to do such things." Liara nodded, experience with Shepard was one of the few areas she could claim superior knowledge to Samara in. "Often, to far worse effect."

Shepard ignored them and thumbed down Kasumi's volume a few notches before responding, "Still on our way to meet the strike leader. If you're calling us this soon, I'm hoping it's because you got the environmental controls fixed."

"About that, what say as soon as I have the genny back up and running, we get the hell out of here, ne?"

"You see something that has you on edge?" Shepard was half-amused.

"On that thought, I got dumb news and dumber news."

"Try me."

"Dumb news, nothing wrong with the environmental controls, I can flip them back on with the push of a button."

"And I'm guessing the dumber news is why you haven't?"

"That's the ticket cap'n, nothing wrong with them. They're turned off. And the only account with permission to change how they work is bossman's."

Shepard stopped walking, bracing herself against a wall with one hand while she rubbed her eyes with the other.

"Are you telling me that the reason this place has been a pressure cooker is that Conrad... turned the environmental controls off?"

"Not full off, ne? Enough off to make it suck in here, but not enough to depressurize shit. I think it rules out gross incompetence unless he's got that really lucky kind of incompetence that people on the extranet take into ranked matches."

A click sounded over the comms that slowly shuddered its way through the facility. After a moment, Shepard could see the clouds of dust that had built in the air start to move into vents on the walls. The temperature didn't drop, but the movement of air started to make things more bearable. A few moments later, the lights brightened as the base switched off of emergency power.

"You have my personal thanks, Ms. Goto," Samara sighed into her headset.

"All due respect, how about you guys thank me by doing whatever shameful shit it takes to do whatever it is you need to do quicklike? That or you need to go back to the bossman and put a foot up his-"

"One thing at a time for now, Kasumi." Shepard sighed as well, reaching to thumb down her volume, Kasumi turned it back up in protest, demanding to be heard.

"Here's the thing cap'n, I just blocked a manual request to turn this whole thing back off."

Liara looked back and forth at Shepard and Samara, "Does he think this will end the strike faster?"

Shepard rubbed her eyes again, feeling the sweat drying on her eyelids.

"I don't know, for the time being, let's assume the strikers don't know and not mention it. The last thing we need is to stoke tempers more than necessary."

"Fair warning, you can't stop the signal forever. Bossman knows all the security codes and I don't. Eventually, he's going to get control back and we're going to spend the next few hours playing tug-of-war with everybody's lives."

"We'll keep that in mind," Shepard turned her down again.

The volume rose again, "No, seriously, there's a point where it stops being cute puppy stupid and it starts being a problem. If you have to let them kill him, do it. If you gotta kill him yourself, might be justifiable. If you gotta suck a dick about it-"

Shepard finally just pulled the earpiece out and set it in her pocket. Samara and Liara exchanged a glance and did the same.

"That is a rather effective practical solution to the problem," Samara nodded.

"Only trick I've found that works against her one hundred percent of the time."

***

The strike headquarters, at least as far as being the place where the leader was, was set up in a machine shop, seemingly usually a transitional area for grabbing gear and suiting up for excursions. The Krogan that they'd been directed to was sitting on a stack of crates that had been moved in front of the large airlock door to the mines. It was half-throne and half-barricade. The number of emergency lights, seals, and warnings made it seem like you would have to be pretty certain what you were doing for somebody to make it out of there without their equipment. Considering it was close enough to near-instant, extremely painful ****, it was probably justified. Shepard had spoken to enough Krogans to know the song and dance when she approached. She stepped a stride closer to him than Liara or Samara and nodded shortly.

"You're the boss?" She made it equal parts statement and question.

He nodded back shortly, "Name's Torque, you Conrad's friend?"

Shepard relaxed, the ceremonial part over.

"Look, no matter what Conrad says, he and I are not friends. I saved his life a few times and he continues to be... weird about it."

"Seems like he's got a nose for trouble," Torque grunted with a smirk.

"Is he one of those ones where trouble seems to find him, or does he bring the trouble with him?" Samara asked with a touch of humor, seemingly everybody but Shepard was having a laugh about the situation.

"He's an idiot, whichever that one is," Shepard responded.

"Is that how he got this job?" Torque snorted, "My over-under was on him having pictures of some suit diddling something he wasn't supposed to."

"I think he failed his way up, and this was the post undesirable enough to slot him into, at least ever since you guys killed the last boss."

"Wasn't us," Torque didn't even try to hide the lie, "Poor bastard forgot to apply his suit before he went out for an inspection."

"You don't have to bullshit me, I'm not going to arrest anybody." Shepard shrugged.

"Even if it wasn't an accident, I don't know anything about it. I'm an idiot, that's my job so long as we're striking." Torque shrugged.

"You want me to put that in my report?"

"Go ahead, maybe I'll get promoted that way."

Shepard gave a heavy sigh, "Look, I know how this looks, but I'm obligated to ask you not to kill Conrad. Or to let him make any mistakes like the last guy."

Torque snorted again, "You kidding? We love Conrad. As long as him being stupid doesn't bring the extranet down, he's much easier to work with. Him bringing in strikebreakers is new though."

"Specters don't break up strikes. We're here to get the environmental systems back up, that's what the distress beacon was about."

"Feels like you ladies have done your job then," Torque sneered, "Best up and out before anybody assumes you're here to do Conrad's laundry for him."

"I'd love to shower this place off of me, but unfortunately for all of us, Conrad let slip that you guys have a new element of some kind on your hands."

Torque's face scrunched and he went back to shooting them with suspicious looks.

"His idiocy is getting much less charming," He finally snorted.

"I'll cut straight to the point, we need a sample of it. Give us that and we're out of your way."

"No."

Shepard winced, "Why?"

"Let's talk hypothetically for a moment."

"I'm all ears."

"For the sake of argument, let's say it's above board, right? I give it to you and you report it back to the council, news of that gets out and it ruins Exogeni's big opening announcement. I don't personally give a shit about how much money the company loses, but they sure as fuck will. They find the name in your report one way or another, and suddenly it's my ass. They're already looking for any legal reason to fire me or disappear me, I'm not giving them ammo."

"That's assuming a lot of things," Liara cut in, "Shepard's reports are confidential, it would not be so easy for Exogeni to-"

Samara cleared her throat and gave the younger Asari a sympathetic glance, "The council is not so pure as one would hope, I have tracked targets through illicitly obtained files. And I do not hold the financial power Exogeni does."

Shepard nodded to Torque, "Continue?"

"Other outcome, it isn't above board. Same story, it ruins their payday, the suits get off with a slap on the wrist, eventually, they come looking for who the rat was."

"I could always neglect to record your name, I could give a fake name, any number of ways to hide who it was."

"Alright, put Conrad's name then."

Shepard winced again, "I thought you guys liked Conrad."

"Not as much as we like Exogeni leaving us alone."

"There are other ways around this, we could always duck into the mines and collect a sample ourselves."

"That assumes we're going to let you in."

"We could always ask Conrad for a sample, I'm sure he has one sitting around."

"Alright, do that then." Torque waved them off.

Shepard ground her teeth slightly, turning over a response in her head, but eventually she simply stepped away. They were only a few feet down the hall when Samara cleared her throat.

"If you suspected the boss had a sample, why even bother with the union leader?"

"I don't actually think he does, and if he does, he probably isn't going to share." Shepard sighed, "I was hoping to avoid interaction with him to an extent."

"It seems like you have two bad options to work with," Liara mused.

"Yes," Samara agreed, "Will you choose to interact with the idiot you know or the seemingly hostile agent you don't?"

Shepard pressed her fingers back over her eyes, "I guess the idiot I know, at least he hasn't done anything tremendously stupid yet."

With her eyes closed, she heard the power shutting off before she saw it. As she opened her eyes the lights dimmed again, the air coming to a stiff, stagnant wall again. Shepard's hand darted to her pocket and pressed the headset back against her ear.

Kasumi's voice was shivering with rage, "He... the bossman, he just unplugged the whole fucking system."

Samara looked over from Shepard to Liara with a sigh, "No, seriously, how does she keep doing that?"