Mass Effect: Research and Delivery
Prologue
"What now, Ezekiel?" His voice was as dry as a tomb. I think I've grown soft, I thought. Years before that, I'd done terrible things to worse people and earned my reputation as a murderous cold blooded bastard. Terrorizing terrorists. That was our mission. Make sure the bastards responsible for the Blitz understood just how frightening a place being an enemy of humanity really was. I executed my mission and earned my reputation, even if I wasn't proud of either. And there I was, a former elite soldier sitting on a river bank of perhaps the most beautiful and forbidden world in the galaxy, over watched by one of the deadliest beings I had ever known, and I was shaken to the core.
"Ezekiel?" Again, the question. As focused as a bullet in flight. Rae Arimas was a patient man. Remarkable for so many of his 'talents' his patience is always the attribute that made me most afraid of him. After all, he was a Salarian, and patience amongst his people was an exceedingly rare trait. I remembered when I stood vigil with him for two days waiting for the perfect shot. He was wrapping up his stint with the STG and requested that I be assigned as his over watch. He had been on loan to my unit during the 'mop up' operation after the Blitz, so the Alliance was eager to square their debt to the STG. I still don't know what why the STG decided that man had to die. But for two days we waited on top of that sand dune observing the settlement outpost. And for two days he didn't speak one word. Then the man we were looking for finally isolated himself outside of a prefab. He was smoking a cigarette. Pop! Pop! Pop! Three suppressed rounds released with no discernable pause between them. Still, Rae managed to put two in the targets heart and one square between his eyes. The target was a member of my old unit. Then, after the deed was done all he said was Okay.
On detecting just the undercurrent of impatience in his voice now, I ascended out of my stupor. "How old do you think she was?"
"Older than me." he said to me before deeply sighing, "Younger than you. Relative to your people, she is…was about eleven or twelve." The small blue body washed up on the shore was bloody and broken and drowned. There were old bruises all over her body. She'd lived a life of terrible pain before she finally met her end in that river.
"We're burying her, that's what now."
"That is not the custom of her people, Ezekiel."
"We're the only people she has left, Rae." I said defeated. The only people she ever had. And we were too late to protect her. "We're going to bury her and then we're going to bury them. All of them." A hand came to rest on my shoulder. There was a coldness like the black of space emanating from that hand. A coldness I needed, right then.
Okay was all he said.