At first, she listened quietly out of respect. Without realising it or thinking it through, she had clearly touched on a very sensitive subject. She even felt irritation at herself for her callousness, her frustration at her own nervous energy morphing. But Loral kept speaking; and as he did, the sharp points of light that were his eyes held hers, and she could not look away. Something akin to a cold horror passed through her, crystals of ice threading through her spine - a sudden shock of wariness; a realisation that the instinctive trust she had felt had been a grave error, as she contemplated what she may have revealed to him unknowing of his true nature. Sobering and caution-inspiring is the thought of alternate realities in which ones lack of wariness brings all to ruin.

He was right. Exile was a greater punishment than death among the quarians, for it symbolised a rejection from the core of the quarian culture. Family; togetherness; community: the ideals of the quarian race. To be purposely excluded, to have those ties mercilessly cut, was a terrible prospect. For most, anyway - and for those few to whom it did not matter, it was deeply symbolic to the rest of the species. It was the ultimate condemnation, a declaration of the absolute and abject failure of a quarian by the standards and values of the culture they were born into. [i]Home[/i] was everything to them; to be denied it forever was the harshest and cruelest of things. More than boogie-monsters under the bed or bed-bugs in home's brightly-coloured quilts, it was exile that quarians learned to fear. That, and disease.

And yet - and [i]yet[/i] - despite herself, Kali could not help but to feel a twinge of kinship. Loral's open callousness chilled her, but his exile in itself... Kali had not truly considered it before, not daring to really face the truth of the matter, but were she to be caught doing what she had she, too, would likely be exiled. And yet she knew she was doing the right thing for her people; and she knew she wished them no harm, indeed, the exact opposite. Were she to be caught, she would become fuel for the education of the next generation, another case example to demonstrate the horrors of exile and of betraying the Fleet. Kali, too, had shunted aside the lessons she had been taught as a child in favour of her own idea of what was right. Without knowing what precisely Loral had done... perhaps he was simply a man hardened by a hard life, explaining the callousness. She would be careful, in future, but she would not add another note of condemnation to the symphony of the galaxywide quarian population's.

Of course - and Kali did not think about this - she was going out of her way to explain Loral's failings away, giving him far more understanding and liberty than she had any of the hardbitten criminals she'd been so wary of downstairs. Though she thought she was throwing up walls and reneging her trust of Loral, in reality she still gave him more quarter simply by accepting that there may be more than meets the eye. She needed to have someone to relate to, and the mind is terrifyingly good at self-delusion when one does not keep a close eye upon it.

Tanya's call came through on the comm, and with the sound of another voice some of the intensity was broken. Outwardly, she merely nodded, and said: "I am sorry for asking. That was... intrusive of me." And she finally looked away, internally damning her natural inquisitiveness. "You heard Tanya. Who knows what mischief Mark and Jaerdi have gotten up to; we'll have to rendezvous back a-"

And from the room behind them came a colossal blast-wave of noise and heat. Kali cried out - in shock, too caught by surprise to be truly fearful - and reflexively grabbed at her pistol. A moment of hesitation as she heard shouting inside, but she quickly re-oriented herself and pushed down her hesitance as much as she could, refusing to be rendered inadequate by uncertainty as she had during the hacking. Something about the presence of immediate danger clarifies the mind; adrenaline surges and the world turns to amber, even familiar things seeming like alien fossils preserved and kept still, unable to move through the thick treacle. She had millenia to compose herself, and compose herself she did. She caught Loral's eye, hoping he would think the same as her - they couldn't run, for if they counter-hacked and opened the hangar doors the whole mission was screwed. With only a hint of trepidation, she took cover on one side of the door, and opened the door back into the room.

She stopped thinking.

The room was swarming. Sleuth, it appeared, was already down - whether dead or not, Kali couldn't say. The scent of the chemicals from the flashbang that had blinded him lingered in the air. The Administrator was nowhere to be seen. Five, six... CPat officers flooded the room, with others taking cover by the holes from the breaching, in squads of four headed by two with - [i]riot shields[/i]? Shit. Immediately, Kali tactically scanned them, relaying the information to Loral. The riot shields were strong, but enough force being applied could still shove back or even break the bones of the officers holding them. There was a narrow slit in the shields to be seen through, and they had no kinetic shielding - a shot or two through there would bring them down easily. They were vulnerable if flanked; unfortunately, from Kali and Loral's position by the door, there was no safe way to take advantage of that.

Secondly, she Overloaded the kinetic shields of one of the squads, packed so tightly together in the small room that the radius enveloped three of them. That would stop them advancing until their shields recharged, giving them time to take out the riot shields. And, with a flurry of pistol shots, that's exactly what she began trying to do. The thought that this was her first experience of pitched battle barely even crossed her mind.