I hate Illium, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy thought as she scanned passing pedestrians. After months back with the Flotilla, the relative emptiness of the open-air plaza was disconcerting. Conversations buzzed around her in the small cafés. Most of those she overheard involved business deals, some of which would probably have devastating effects on people beneath the notice of the ones around her. She and her companion were the only quarians in sight. Since arriving on Illium, they'd only seen a few of their people at a distance. She hoped they weren't trapped in indentured servitude contracts or worse.
Tali noticed a nervous-looking asari wearing a fairly plain bodysuit and a visor who appeared to be headed for the café door. Tali gestured at her. "Do you think she's our contact? Don't tell me that visor is her idea of a disguise."
"It does hide one or two of her facial markings, ma'am," Kal'Reegar said in a deadpan voice. In her time working with him, Tali had concluded that he preferred his humor so dry that he could plausibly deny its existence.
The visor-wearing asari scurried over to their table and looked between the two quarians uncertainly. "One of you must be Tali'Zorah," she said.
Tali gave her a nod. "I'm Tali. Do you have the logs I asked for?"
"I do," the asari answered, holding out an OSD. "But…" She paused, shifting from foot to foot.
"But what?" Tali pressed.
"There was a fault in the power conduit leading to the camera. So there's a gap in the recording until power was rerouted."
Tali sighed. "Let me guess. The Marra took off during the gap in the recording."
"I'm afraid so." The asari frowned, still holding out the OSD. "I can give you a discount in view of the circumstances, but you still owe me the copying and conveyance payment."
Tali took merciless advantage of the asari's eagerness to leave to shave off half of the demanded price. Transferring the payment to her omni-tool still hurt. As soon as the transaction was complete, the asari said a perfunctory goodbye and headed for the door.
"How is the bribe fund holding up, ma'am?" Kal asked.
"You mean the fee for expedited access to information fund?" Tali asked. Every official they'd talked to seemed to have a more extravagant justification for the money they needed to hand over. Bribery might be commonplace here, but keelah, everyone would rather die than let the word "bribe" pass their lips. She sighed again as her suit helpfully displayed the dwindling balance on the credit chip. "More than half gone. I'd feel better if I thought it was getting us anywhere."
"We should look at the video," Kal said with forced hopefulness. "Even if the departure's missing, there might be some clue to what happened and where the Marra has gone."
Tali brought up the recording with a few taps on her omni-tool. Dock 26C appeared in all its dingy glory. She took a second to count the ships. "Six ships, including the Marra," she reported to Kal. "That matches the docking records."
Kal was silent. Tali thought he was probably focused on the video, but couldn't be sure of his thoughts. Not for the first time or in the first context, she wished she could take his helmet off.
He finally spoke. "Not much to see, is there?"
There was no activity on the dock. Tali sped up the playback, then sped it up again as the scene remained inactive. She paused it as she saw a group of five suited figures emerge from the Marra.
"Looks like the engineering team, plus two soldiers. That would leave three on board the Marra."
"Does it have a time stamp?" Kal asked.
Tali checked the video's metadata and triggered the time display. Kal nodded at it. "That fits the time Nos Astra Fabrication said the team came to pick up the finished parts."
It was good to know that the clerk at the fabricator hadn't been lying about the team picking up the parts at all, but that didn't bring them any closer to the Marra. Tali resumed playback. Three short, round figures, one hauling a cart, passed close to the camera and boarded the ship moored next to the Marra, which left a few minutes later.
"That looks like the Bountiful Exchange," Tali noted. They had already checked the passenger and cargo manifests for the volus trade vessel, finding nothing suspicious.
Tali sped through more footage of nothing, then the video flickered, the time stamp abruptly jumped forward, and the Marra disappeared. She paused the video again. "Nothing," she said. "I'll do a more detailed analysis of the video and see if I pick up anything else, but it doesn't look promising."
"What next, ma'am?"
Tali sighed once more. "I'm thinking of trying to get into the fabricator's records."
"You think they might be hiding something?"
"They certainly didn't seem concerned that their merchandise disappeared moments after they sold it to us." For far too large a share of the Fleet's resources. "And assuming that whoever grabbed the Marra knew what they were getting, they either got a tip from the fabricators, or from within the Fleet itself. No one else knew why the ship was here."
"Tali'Zorah?" The voice was human, and female, and very familiar, but so unexpected that it took Tali a moment to place it.
"Operative Lawson," Tali said slowly, switching off the video as unobtrusively as she could.
"Just Miranda Lawson now, please. I'm no longer anyone's operative." Miranda pulled up a chair and dropped into it.
Tali looked her over. Miranda was wearing a red asari-style dress which struck her as incongruous; Miranda ought to be in black and white. She looked pleased to see Tali, which struck her as immediately suspicious. She had made no secret of her antipathy for Shepard's former XO. Miranda might have renounced Cerberus in the end, but the memory of all the times she defended the organization still rankled.
"Have you heard anything from Shepard?" Miranda asked.
Tali shook her head. "Nothing new. Apparently she's still under house arrest on the human homeworld. I get the impression they can't figure out what to do with her."
"A pack of idiots," Miranda muttered. "So, Tali, what brings you to Illium?"
Tali shrugged. "Kal and I are running errands for the Admiralty Board. The usual." Kal made a quiet noise that sounded a bit like a strangled cough. Tali wasn't ready to share her promotion with Miranda – certainly not without a better sense of what she was doing here.
Miranda turned to Kal. "Kal'Reegar, if I'm remembering correctly. We met briefly on Haestrom. I'm glad you appear to have made a full recovery."
Kal nodded to Miranda, but left it to Tali to respond. She decided to press for some answers. "What brings you to Illium, Miranda? I would have thought you'd be avoiding public spaces like this. Cerberus assassins can be very persistent, I'm told."
She was rewarded with a slight furrowing of Miranda's perfect brow. "They're looking for me, but I'm also looking for them. I received word that a Cerberus operation was going on in the Tasale system, one involving a significant commitment of resources."
"A Cerberus operation?" Tali asked. She was sure Miranda wouldn't be telling her this unless she needed something.
"Indeed. They seem to have seized a quarian ship." Miranda gave a slight smile. "I had hoped, in fact, that you might be investigating its disappearance."
Tali doubted that hope had anything to do it. She wondered nervously what Miranda could tell from her body language; she'd always feared that the biotic could read her right through the suit. Espionage was not her strength. Give me a tough fight or an impossible hack, instead. She wished for a moment for Shepard, who was as adept as talking her way out of a situation as winning an impossible fight, but who left the hacking to her and Garrus.
Miranda's gaze was burning through her helmet. Tali swallowed. If it gave her any chance to recover the parts for Xen, she had to play along. "The Admiralty Board did mention that we should keep an eye out for a missing ship. I believe it was the Marra?"
"Yes, the Marra. Cerberus purloined it, and they covered their tracks well. I've worked with Popescu, the operative leading this one. She's… competent." Miranda frowned. Was she disappointed that the Cerberus operative was competent, or was she not competent enough to meet Miranda's standards? Tali couldn't tell. "But I have a good idea where they've taken her."
"How do you know?" Tali asked skeptically. "I can't imagine that you still have access to Cerberus data, now that you've left them." If she had…
"My codes, passwords, and contacts were all burned," Miranda said calmly. "But Cerberus doesn't know about all of the information in my head, and changing physical locations is a lot more effort than changing codes. I know of three bases in this system that they might have used, and going through sensor data only shows activity at one of them."
Her wording suggested that the ship was more likely in space, not somewhere on Illium. But with hundreds of stations at the L4 and L5 points alone, it didn't do enough to narrow down the possibilities. Tali tried to feign reluctance. "If you give us the location, we can probably take the time to check it out."
Miranda gave a quick, sharp shake of her head. "No. Not unless you take me with you."
"What's your interest in a missing quarian ship?" Tali asked.
"That ship is important to Cerberus, and I…" Miranda gave a predatory smile. "I am invested in Cerberus's failure. They're working on something new, something on a massive scale. If I can get my hands on this project, I can track what I find to other projects, and eventually bring the whole thing down."
She sounded sincere, but Tali couldn't think of a time when Miranda hadn't sounded sincere, and something still didn't add up. "Why are you here, then? Why haven't you gone to check it out already?"
"If I tried, I'd be detected and destroyed long before I could dock. I'd need the Normandy to approach undetected, and I doubt that the Alliance would be willing to loan her to me. I have some resources, but they don't include a ship with stealth capabilities."
She knows. Keelah, how does she know? She could see from the tense set of Kal'Reegar's shoulders that he was wondering the same thing.
"I think I see." She wasn't about to discuss secret quarian ship capabilities in public.
"Excellent." The smile looked less predatory, but it didn't reach Miranda's eyes. "Let me know when you're ready to leave Illium. Once we're in space, I'll give you the coordinates."
Miranda could certainly be helpful, assuming that she was on the level. Tali wasn't at all confident in that assumption. "You're not worried that we'll drop you off" – or put you out the airlock – "once we know the coordinates?"
"Tali." Miranda's eyes still weren't smiling. "That wouldn't be any way to treat an old friend, would it?"