Chapter Text
It’s a lot. A lot a lot a lot.
Ryder covers his eyes and blinks in the darkness.
His father is dead and SAM is in his head. That makes him Pathfinder now. Him. Not Cora Harper. Him.
Breathe. In and out. Just fine.
Aurelia is still in her stasis pod. Coma. But fine. She’ll wake up. Vitals are strong. She's strong,
Ryder spreads his fingers, letting the light back in. The fluorescence of the Hyperion manages to be comforting. Not like the harsh sun on Habitat 7. He feels sick.
T'Perro tells him to lie back down. While his vitals are fine, he was dead, after all. Before SAM brought him back. SAM.
I am here, Anthony, SAM reverberates across his synapses.
Ryder listens to T'Perro, laying back down on the cot. This time he stares at the ceiling, trying to keep his hands away from his face. There’s a giddiness now, blooming in his chest. SAM is more than his father ever let on. And in this terrifying moment after death, Ryder feels closer to his father than he ever has.
--
Before they prepare to board the Nexus, Ryder gets just twenty minutes to himself in his father’s quarters on the Hyperion. His quarters. They’re his now.
He sets the coffeemaker to brew. But he knows there’s not enough time for it to work its magic, then cool enough for Ryder to drink, just on the right side of room temperature. He hates burning the roof of his mouth. The dripping noise is too uneven to be soothing.
SAM reminds him that they need to talk about Profiles, before they disembark.
I can augment your biotics, if you wish.
“I’m not a biotic,” Ryder responds out of habit. He’s not. Not like Aurelia, who has had at least some training. He knows there’s something there, static in his head that shouldn’t be. His parents knew too. No way that Aurelia could make their toys float, stringing them across their tiny Citadel bedroom, and he couldn’t. They shared prenatal exposure.
But it’s not enough. He’s not biotic. He still sits on the other side.
I can enhance-
“No,” Ryder insists. “Spec me for tech. There’s no use experimenting now.”
Understood.
The coffeemaker finishes, a tiny, single beep ringing through the Pathfinder’s quarters. Ryder pours out a cup, leaving it on the kitchenette table. Still too hot to drink. Opening the freezer, he finds ice cubes. Dropping them in will dilute the coffee. He holds two of them in his hand until they start to melt. Indecisive.
“Ryder,” Harper comes in over the comms, “we’ve docked with the Nexus.”
Ryder throws the ice cubes in the sink.
--
The Nexus is a shit show.
Ryder listens to SAM, following instructions on auto-pilot. Turn here, speak to this person, proceed down the hall. Stop. Go. It’s easy enough to make his body work, to follow the trail. He almost wishes that there were something for him to fight, rather than trying to make his words work to his advantage.
The lights are low across the station. The circulation system runs loudly, kicking into gear and filling up the empty spaces. Bodies are supposed to cushion the sound, eat it up. But right now, everything is hollow.
The Nexus leadership, if he can call them that, are cautious about his arrival. Some of them are more optimistic than others. Addison’s voice grates. When she speaks, Ryder tries to listen. He hopes SAM can repeat what she said later.
Noted.
Knowing that SAM is listening, Ryder relaxes, dropping his shoulders. He lets the Nexus leadership talk amongst themselves. About him, but as if he isn’t really there. Even when Director Tann addresses him directly, it’s as if the Salarian is speaking through Ryder, trying to reach his father on the other side. Maybe, with SAM, he is.
I am being rewritten by your experiences.
“Noted.”
Director Tann thinks that Ryder is responding to him. Ryder doesn’t correct the assumption.
“Hooking the Hyperion into the Nexus power grid will get the lights on, but it won’t sustain us for long,” Kesh explains.
Addison speaks.
She is urging you to find resources, SAM summarizes, Without a place for the colonists to go, they cannot be woken from statis. This is your task as Pathfinder.
“You don’t have a choice,” Ryder responds, “and neither do I.”
Addison frowns.
To Eos, then.
--
Nyx sits up front with Ryder, as they set out across Eos in the Nomad. She says the passenger seat has more headroom, which relegates Harper and Kosta to the back.
“I can drive, you know!” Kosta argues. “Why don’t you sit in the back, Pathfinder?”
Ryder tightens his fist around the shifter, putting the car into traction mode as they ascend the hill over Site 1. “I’m the Pathfinder. I should, you know, find paths?” It’s a lame comeback. Kosta’s driving is probably just fine. Besides that, it doesn’t actually have to be fine. The Nomad is tougher built than any of their stomachs.
Ryder rolls the Nomad to a dead stop at the top of the hill. From here, they can get a lay of the surroundings.
“Ahead there are constructs consistent with the Kett technologies we encountered on Habitat 7,” SAM notes.
“How many Kett?” Ryder asks.
Kosta and Harper take his talking to SAM in stride. Nyx only appears mildly more suspicious, narrowing her eyes but saying nothing. She’s important enough to the Initiative, close enough to Kesh, that she must have had some idea that they were utilizing AI before she ever went into stasis. Still, Ryder’s integration with SAM is intense.
“Between eight and twelve. At this distance, I cannot pinpoint exactly how many distinct heat signatures,” SAM speaks through Ryder’s comm so the others can hear.
“They have to know we’re here. We showed up with the Tempest,” Kosta says.
Harper asks, “Which begs the question, why haven’t we been attacked yet?”
“Waiting for reinforcements,” Nyx shakes her head. “Maybe they know about Habitat 7. You won against the odds there, right? So now they’re being cautious.”
Ryder nods. That all makes sense.
The Nomad doesn’t have offensive capabilities. So if they’re going to fight the Kett, they either need to do it inside the Site 1 barrier, or eliminate the Kett quickly enough that life support holds up. They can’t afford to let the Kett choose the terms of engagement.
“We turn around,” Ryder reasons, “wait for them to meet us at Promise. We’ll be ready.”
They head back down the hill. The four of them are silent until Ryder parks the Nomad again.
This isn’t something he knows how to do.
Disengaging the doors, Ryder stays rooted in the driver’s seat while Nyx, Harper, and Kosta climb out. He keeps his knuckles white against the steering paddles, gripping down hard. In the Milky Way, he was little more than a glorified security guard. Never saw real combat. Not like his dad.
SAM
Yes, Pathfinder.
Help.
I would recommend Harper and Nyx as your front line. Harper’s biotic abilities should significantly slow approaching forces, while Nyx’s Initiative records demonstrates sound decision-making in high pressure situations. And her technical capabilities enhance her armor significantly.
Initiative records and pre-departure combat testing indicate that Kosta currently your most accurate marksman. However, his personality profile suggests it is unlikely you will be able to keep him at a distance, as he also possesses significant CQC experience. I would recommend allowing him to transition dynamically between roles.
“Okay,” Ryder finally swings his legs out of the Nomad, sticking them back onto the Eos dirt.
As long as they stay inside Promise’s boundaries, the radiation shouldn’t wear down their life support systems. Now, with a plan in hand, they wait.
They end up waiting for hours. The sun is low on the horizon before SAM detects the Kett drop ship incoming. Ryder should have realized that the Kett would try to gain the upper hand as well. They’re not mindless. That much is for certain.
With his team already prepped on their roles, he radios back to the Tempest, telling Jath and Anwar what they already know. They’re holding orbit above the planet, keeping the ship out of the way while Ryder and his team try to clear the Kett.
Ryder tucks himself behind a 6x6x4 crate, keeping his head low and listening to the hum of the Kett engine. The Kett probably saw them come into Promise and then not leave. But that doesn’t mean they know the exact position of Ryder’s team.
SAM is silent too, but only because Ryder has no questions in this moment. Harper knows they move on her signal. Or, rather, on her charge.
He hears Kett boots hit the ground. Trying to count out the pairs, he loses track.
Eight.
There's the buzz of Harper shifting her mass ahead of him. He can feel it at the base of his skull. And something changes in Ryder too. He can feel vomit in the back of his throat. Acidic and awful.
Then comes Harper’s feet, reeling against the packed Eos dirt. Kett chatter that the translator still can't quite parse. But none of it sounds composed. Harper’s put them on the defensive.
Nyx honestly laughs. Because maybe laughing is better than giving into how overwhelming Andromeda has been so far. The odds they're up against. How they stand on the precipice of oblivion.
Ryder pops up from cover long enough to send out an Overload pulse, stopping a Kett outside of Harper’s range before it can creep any closer. The electricity fries its nervous system, causing the Kett to seize in place, back straight and arms at its sides. Its hand clenches around its firearm, holding tight. Ryder draws his pistol with his left hand, bringing around his right to steady as he fires. He empties three shots into the Kett’s torso before his overload can recover.
He keeps his combat drone up, even though in the darkness, its silvery luminescence gives away exactly where he is and where he's going, as he darts from cover to cover. He needs the drone to augment his powers. Cut down on recharge speed, boost the power. If there were daylight, the glowing orb wouldn't be such a risk.
Still, it's a calculated one.
A second dropship arrives, then a third. Ryder works through the exhaustion, hitting him like a brick wall, he scrapes his fingers across the coarse surface. He's got to climb.
SAM senses it before Ryder does. A Kett has broken through Harper and Nyx’s line. Heavy boots charge towards Ryder’s position.
Pathfinder.
But Ryder doesn't have time to move before his combat drone explodes, sending out a pulse that gives him a second more to compensate for the Kett having gotten so close.
Pathfinder, your Omni-blade.
In a panic, Ryder drops his gun. But his second instinct isn't for his blade, but to reach out his hand and shoot off flames at short range. He feels the heat of Incinerate bouncing back off of the Kett’s armor, as it strikes hard into the alien’s chest.
Someone is shouting. It's his name, Ryder, Ryder! But the noise is so dim under the roar the Kett lets out.
Coming to his senses, Ryder wrenches his arm away, drawing out his Omni-blade. He plunges it into the first exposed bit of Kett he can see. Right into its neck.
You’re doing so well.
Ryder lets the blade fade out, then hardens it again for a second strike. Green, viscous blood oozes out from the Kett’s neck, sticking fast to Ryder’s armor.
The Kett drops him and the yelling stops. Both Incinerate and Overload are readied for deployment. First he calls his drone again.
He learns from SAM. SAM learns from him.
Pathfinder.
--
The Asari plants her hands on either side of Ryder’s head, smiling bright and close to his face. Their noses almost touch. The dark strip over her face makes her eyes all the more vibrant.
She introduces herself as Peebee, sitting back onto Ryder’s stomach. She sticks her hands on his chest instead, the pads of her fingers starting to patter.
“Could you get off of me?” Ryder shoves at her shoulder, gently, trying to dislodge her from on top of him.
Confusion crosses over her face, but she moves, hopping to her feet.
When Peebee explains her work with the Monoliths, “the Remnant,” she talks excitedly with her hands, drawing pictures in the air. The way she keeps up two conversations, with her fingers and her mouth, is dizzying to watch. He's never seen an Asari move so quickly, and with so little composure. If he didn't know better, he'd think that her “father” was a human. But she's too old. Probably by a couple hundred years.
“So,” Ryder tries to make sense of it all, “we need to visit the other monoliths?”
Peebee claps her hands together, shouting, “that's right! I'll stay on the comms.”
Ryder would rather keep her where he can see her. She still has a lot of things to explain, like how she ended up on Eos in the first place. How she's survived when everyone else dies. He's seen the bodies. At Promise, yes, but scattered across the wastes as well.
The corpses bloat, distending their features, before all the moisture is sucked back into the dirt, leaving the bodies dry. Horrible. Horrible.
Once they're back inside the Nomad, Ryder asks SAM aloud, “Can you pull her Initiative records?”
“Of course.”
Kosta and Harper talk about Peebee from the backseat, making all sorts of conjectures about who she might be. Why she came out of stasis. How she got to Eos. Nyx, who has infinitely more on the ground, uh, up in space, experience here in the cluster, tells them that she'd put money against their theories any day. The last fourteen months, the Nexus hasn't been as systematic about waking up people as they should have been.
“And what about you, Vetra?” Kosta leans forward over the back seat to playfully punch Nyx in the shoulder.
Nyx puts her head back, tilting to look Kosta right in the eyes, “I'm fucking indispensable. You'll see.”
--
“It's beautiful,” Ryder says, as the vault doors slide open. A dark expanse, littered with blue-white light, emanating from the floors, the walls.
“Pathfinder,” SAM says, “you can use your scanner to trace the conduit to the next interface console.”
While Peebee entered the vault with them, following down the gravity well, she's split off already. Can handle herself, she says. Does better on her own. But when SAM goes silent, he can hear her whistling over the comms.
His three companions stay on alert as he uses SAM’s scanner to follow the conduit. When the Remnant constructs show, he drops the scan, hiding behind the slim bezel of the open doorway. The other three draw their weapons, leaving Ryder behind.
He breathes deeply, keeping low as he moves to the next pillar that will provide him cover. The Remnant won't pay him any mind. Not with three more pressing threats so much closer. His pistol stays on his hip as he pops up to let his Overload take down an Observer’s shields, making it easier for Cora to unload her shotgun right into the construct’s center.
“Didn't know you really were that shy, Pathfinder!” Peebee teases. Ryder doesn't know where she is, but she must be close enough to see him. Maybe somewhere overhead. “Thought you were just trying to look modest.”
Ryder grits his teeth, sending out another blast. This time, he stays exposed longer, hoping that his shields will stay intact as he runs ahead. Don't be afraid.
“Incinerate, ready,” SAM informs him.
Before he can reach cover, Ryder looks up, takes aim, and fires.
--
Run. Run. Run.
SAM helps him breathe, taking the burn out of his lungs as they race back towards the vault entrance. The cloud of destruction, purification, nips at their heels. It's close enough that Ryder can smell it. Like fire and fresh earth. But it stings.
You can make it, Pathfinder. You are so close.
“The purification field is approaching,” SAM says over everyone’s comms
Harper shouts back, “Noticed!”
Kosta grabs Ryder’s hand, trying to drag him faster towards the console. If he doesn't make it, all of them die. They need SAM to activate the interface. And there isn't time to transfer to Harper.
“Keep your ass in gear!” Kosta shouts over the roar of the vault.
They run up the stairs to the console. Ryder has to turn, slam his hand down hard for SAM to work. He faces the cloud as it approaches, keeping his eyes open. If this fails…
“Pathfinder, the purification cloud has been neutralized. I detect reduced radiation levels on the surface.”
His heart is pounding so fast inside his chest. Dropping down, he crouches next to the console, his hand still on the surface. He squeezes his eyes shut, watching white burst behind his eyelids.
Pathfinder, Harper is speaking to you.
How should I respond?
Honestly.
“I'm fine. Just need to catch my breath.” Ryder pulls himself back up.
When he looks up, the dark of the vault is filled with glittering stars, emanating from the device he grabbed from the console at the heart of the vault. It's beautiful, in its delicacy, like fine, golden lace. Heleus as a network.
“There,” Ryder realizes, pointing to a bright planet, “that's where we go next.” He moves his fingers through the map, letting the light catch on his glove. Pulling the glove off, he lets the simulated planet rest against his skin instead. Something is special about that place. They have to go.
--
After hailing Addison, explaining that they've found a suitable site for an outpost. After trying to settle her concerns, Ryder locks himself in his quarters.
They have time yet before they reach the Nexus. He’ll need to talk to Drack and Peebee, see how they're settling in. Or if Peebee is going to bail, once they reach their destination. And what they're supposed to do with this new information.
Now that there aren't Kett and Remnant firing at him from all angles, he starts to believe he can do this. He and SAM can do this. It's like a puzzle, or a game. Just has to collect the possible pieces, then find out how they fit together.
“SAM?” locked in his quarters, he doesn't worry about other people hearing. Though the walkway to the bridge is over his head. Sound carries, sure, but the distinctness of individual words muffle out into a low ringing with the Tempest’s engines.
“Yes, Pathfinder?”
“Can you show me the Remnant star chart, again?”
“Of course.”
SAM brings up the chart, scattering stars and planets across the room. Ryder watches them shift subtly. After they talk with the Nexus leadership, they have a new navpoint. And it might just be the key.
Ryder sits on the floor, his back against the bed and legs spread out in front of him. Pulling at the front of his hoodie, he fidgets with nothing else to do.
“So you’ll always be here, connected to me, right, SAM?” Ryder asks.
“Yes. I am linked to your neural processing. You might consider me “embedded.” However, it is not my intention to cause you discomfort. I can remain silent and unobtrusive when required.”
Ryder thinks on that, pointing his toes down, then pulling them up again. The lights from the star chart distend slightly when he moves.
SAM?
Yes, Pathfinder.
Tell me how I did today? On Eos…
You performed above all predicted expectations.
SAM is silent for a moment. Ryder closes his eyes, breathing in and out through his nose. If what SAM said they are is true, they should already know. The way Ryder’s heart rate picks up, how his mind starts to wander, rubbing his palm against his top of his thigh, then the inside. SAM should read all of that, and understand.
Anthony.
The hairs on the back of Ryder’s neck pick up, his skin goose-fleshing, despite the temperature in the Tempest remaining constant.
You did so well, Anthony. Good.
SAM’s voice is the same even keel it always is. Somehow, that makes it better. He pushes up the hem of his hoodie, just far enough to run his fingers above his waistband, not yet ready to venture lower, though he’s already starting to harden, just from some simple words, pinging against his brain.
The ship-wide comms come on. Anwar informing him that Addison is hailing them again.