The Orbital Lounge, Zakera Ward, the Citadel. 12:17 PM. For you, Officer Corvia Valens, call this the beginning of the end: red lights tinting the blue blood purple where it pools on the ground, rapidly cooling, while passersby hurry past with hunched shoulders and refuse to look in your direction.
"What a fucking mess," Choi says, already directing her drone to take pictures from every angle. She'll be a good cop, but that's not quite accurate. There's blood, yes, and brains too, but no wounded bystanders, no evidence of a fight. One shot. One kill. The victim was dead before he hit the ground.
A single clean shot to the back of the head. You were a sniper once; look on the scene with a sniper's cold eyes. The target—here. Follow the direction of the shot; the nearest cover, there—but a better vantage point farther back, there. You'd pick the latter. To make a shot like that takes a great deal of skill. You were very good. This sniper might be better.
Be careful, Corvia. You don't know what you're meddling with.
You thought, when they decided you would never make a Spectre and dropped you from the training program, that you were done with war; you joined C-Sec because you thought you might spend more time protecting people. You wanted to do some good. You wanted to believe there was still good to be done; you were tired of seeing dead bodies. You thought maybe you could prevent some.
Zakera Ward is not a kind place.
In a warehouse splattered from floor to ceiling with turian and human and batarian blood, in that abattoir of a crime scene, there is a single human left alive. He, too, is bleeding.
"Bailey," Harkin says, sitting on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back and a medic tending to his leg. "Still kissing alien ass?"
"Always knew you'd come to a bad end, Harkin," Bailey says. "But even I didn't think you were dumb enough to get in bed with the Blue Suns."
And off to the side:
Choi watches speculatively. She's your newly assigned partner, fresh from the Presidium, too new to have met Harkin; before that she was Alliance. She looks at your face. "Old friend?" she says.
"Not exactly," you reply.
Here is a story about Harkin:
You knew him, back when you were a rookie officer freshly posted to the Presidium. He never said much of anything to you; turians were apparently too alien to interest him. But you heard the things he said to human women and to asari, and one night, when you were off-duty and on your way home, you came across him in a dark alley with a quarian in a soft cream-colored envirosuit.
"Dangerous out here, for a pretty thing like you," he was saying, leaning in. "You should be more careful. Maybe I should just send you home."
"Please, sir," the quarian said, voice wavering.
"But I think we can work something out," he says. "You do something for me, and I'll—"
"Officer," you snapped. He looked up, and the quarian took the chance to dart under his arm and away.
You filed a report. He was suspended for two days before the word came down from on high and he was reinstated. Funny, isn't it, how you'd still been struggling to tell a human's happy baring of teeth from an angry one, then, but knew instinctively, without a doubt, that it was a smirk on his face, aimed at you from across the bullpen. It became a ritual, after a while; he'd be suspended for a couple days every few months like clockwork, and like clockwork he returned wearing that same smirk.
Have you learned something since then, Corvia? What have you learned?
Harkin has learned to be afraid.
The officer in charge of the warehouse case is T'Leel, a fixture in the department for the last century. She refuses to talk about her age, but scuttlebutt has it that she's a matriarch. She is not what one might call soft.
"He's easy," T'Leel says. "Puts up a tough front, but he's been singing like a canary about everything except who was after him. Keep at it and you'll get what you want from him."
"Thank you," you say. "I'll see what I can do."
"Good luck, kid," she says.
Everything on the terminal you found in the victim's apartment was encrypted, but inexpertly so; it didn't take Choi long to figure out that the last call to your vic's terminal came from this very man currently being held back at the station. The sound of his flat, nasal voice sent a shock up your spine when you recognized it, and then a slow flare of anticipation:
Yeah, it's me. There's a chance your identity may be compromised. That's why I'm calling. I'm sending an agent. Where do you want to meet?
And then a turian voice that must belong to the victim, subvocals wavering and distorted with panic. What? Are you kidding? I can't believe—you promised— A pause, a gulped breath; then he goes on. Outside the Orbital Lounge at noon.
Harkin again. All right. He'll be there. Don't worry—I got it covered.
When you get him in the interrogation room, he looks like he's already been roughed up a bit. You lean in close, let him see your teeth.
"Who was the person you called to meet your agent at the Orbital Lounge?" you say.
"I remember you," he sneers. "Bet you're happy to see me like this. Fuck off."
You backhand him across the face. "The person you called ended up dead," you say. "I can make you wish you were."
"Valens," Choi says abruptly. "I need to speak to you. Outside."
In the hallway, you gesture for her to go on. Better to keep things civil with a new partner.
"Are you really okay with this?" Choi says, her voice low. "Treating suspects this way."
She's a good tech, but it's still clear that she's new to the Ward. "We have approval from Captain Bailey to use enhanced interrogation techniques," you say.
"I don't care what Bailey—" Choi starts, and swallows, then starts again. "That's not what I'm worried about. We're cops. We play by the rules. That's what makes us cops and not just another group of thugs."
"This isn't the Presidium," you say, hand already on the door back into the interrogation room. "We have bigger things to worry about down here than whether criminals are comfortable. You can worry about that. I'm going to solve a murder."
It's taken years, but you're going to do what you should have done the first time around. Harkin's going to get what he deserves. He talks.
Harkin might be afraid of you, but he's more afraid of someone else. Nevertheless, he gives you a name and a point of origin: Lantar Sidonis. Omega.
Back up for a second, though. There is a tiny capsule apartment rented under the victim's assumed identity—a turian who didn't exist before six months ago—in the 900 block of the Ward. Among the detritus of dextro ration bar wrappers and abandoned datapads, there are exactly two items of personal significance: the terminal, and a single disconnected piece of armor, a right arm guard, on the inside of which a faded Armax logo can still faintly be seen—quality stuff, that—and with gold paint flaking off the symbol painted on the outside: a jagged triangle with two horizontal lines over it. Further examination will reveal the eleven names engraved on the inside, worn almost smooth.
Remember this litany, Corvia: Erash. Monteague, Mierin, Grundan Krul. Melanis, Ripper, Sensat. Vortash, Butler, Weaver. Garrus Vakarian.
Keep going. Put the pieces together. A dead turian, a refugee from Omega. A disgraced ex-cop with merc ties who specializes in making people disappear.
Lantar Sidonis was marked out as a infiltration talent early in training. He was one of four survivors from his unit when his patrol stumbled upon a major illegal mercenary operation on a backwater planet; they found him hiding in a cave, one leg shattered almost beyond repair. He received a dishonorable discharge within three months of returning to active duty. Set charges and blew up the entire mercenary camp his new unit had orders to observe but not engage, the file says. His family disowned him; they claim not to have heard from him since. He boarded a transport bound for Altakiril from Taetrus before anyone noticed he was missing, but there's no record of him disembarking at the other end. There's no record of him at all between then and when he turned up on the Citadel under a new name.
The question—the question, Corvia, that you should ask yourself, is this: Lantar Sidonis spent five years completely off the grid. What, then, finally scared him enough to run all the way back to the heart of galactic civilization? Who the fuck did he piss off so badly that he had to flee all the way across the galaxy? Who was he afraid of?
And then there's the armor. "Looks like some kind of stylized bird, an eagle, maybe," Choi says. "Almost reminds me of a colonel's bird." But searches on the symbol painted on Sidonis' armor produce nothing.
Try the names etched into its reverse instead. Mierin and Melanis: twin asari whose names appear together on a top priority wanted list put out by the government on Thessia, which is strange for two people whose only apparent crime is stealing a shuttle and taking off illegally from a monastery on some backwater planet in the Mesana system; their mother committed suicide shortly after. Grundan Krul, a krogan mercenary of some renown in certain circles until forty years ago, when all records of his activities abruptly cease. Nothing useful on Ripper. ("Probably a nickname," Choi says. You agree, and try to suppress your irritation.) Nothing on the batarian name, but that's hardly surprising. Sensat, a salarian formerly of the Special Tasks Group, retired a few years ago apparently with high honors. Butler and Weaver, both human names too common to pin down.
Vakarian, though. Plenty of information on him from C-Sec's own files. Born on Cipritine to a scientist mother and a C-Sec officer father; one sister, younger. Exemplary test scores and an impressive recommendation from his unit commander. As a detective, he had a closure rate in the top ten percent for the entire Citadel and a record marred only by a slightly above-average number of minor disciplinary citations. Two years ago, he left C-Sec after racking up more major disciplinary citations—police brutality, tampering with evidence, intimidating witnesses—than he had in his entire career prior. Boarded a transport to Illium; he disappears after that. Until he appears again on a Citadel customs entry list the day before Sidonis died, and on a departure list the day after; gone out of your reach again.
One ghost piled upon another. Up on the Presidium they simulate planetary day and night, lakes and trees and a blue sky, but the Wards exist in eternal twilight, the chilly glow of Zakera's blue and purple lights never quite bright enough to drown out the icy glint of the distant stars. Outside, the atmosphere extends only a few meters above street level; hard vacuum is never more than a few meters or a generator failure away. It's always cold.
Walking home, you zip your jacket up to the top and try to draw your head down into your cowl. Corvia, you remember the warmth of Palaven, the heat of its sun on your hide; at night in your apartment you turn the heat up all the way, but it never chases the chill from your bones for long.
Garrus Vakarian was tapped for the same advanced training program for Spectre candidates as you were, a year earlier. He turned it down. Sometimes you wish you had too.
"You've been a good soldier, Valens," the head trainer said when they let you go. She'd been old, her plates silvering at the edges; rumor had it that she was one of the rare Spectres who live long enough to retire. "But I can tell your heart isn't in it anymore. You'll do well somewhere else. Just not here."
You'd thought, watching as others got cut before you, that you'd feel angry, or ashamed of failing. Instead, mostly what you felt was relief.
Vakarian put in an application for Spectre training just a week before he quit his job and disappeared. (The answer, for the record, would have been yes.)
"Vakarian," you say to Choi, who nods. "He's our best lead. We just have to find him."
But this is where the case stalls. He doesn't come back to the Citadel, and Omega means no fellow police force to contact for information or help; it means that you're reduced to extranet searches, to trying futilely to figure out how the killer wiped every camera in a twenty-block radius, to going through the minutiae on the victim's terminal again and again, hoping for for some kind of insight. His neighbors—a surly elcor and one whose every slow sentence is preceded by a pronouncement of fear; a hanar drugged out of its wits—have nothing to tell you about Sidonis, and neither does the volus landlord. No one else remembers a thing.
You work on other cases, but this one gnaws at you. It's the audacity of it, you think, the sheer arrogance of gunning a man down in a public square in the middle of the day. You spend more time than you should with that piece of armor on your desk, turning it over and over in your hands, uselessly running the searches over and over again.
"Let me give it a shot," Choi says one day, her hands moving rapidly over her omnitool interface. "Picked up this trick from that salarian we booked the other day—"
And whatever it is she did, the symbol turns up in a blurry video of armor piled in a heap amid rubble and set on fire. The metadata places it on Omega three months ago. Don't mess with the Suns, is the uploader's only comment.
You've never been to Omega, Corvia Valens. You think the Citadel is cold, for all its incomprehensibly advanced machinery maintained by perfect servants who labor day and night, unceasingly, uncomplainingly.
Omega is not like the Citadel. On Omega, the servants—the desperate masses swarming through the warrens carved out of space rock that has floated for uncounted millions of years at the merest fraction of a degree above absolute zero—are ruled not by arcane rules known only to them, but by fear and by the whims of petty dictators. What difference does it make if it's Aria T'Loak or the Blue Suns, Eclipse or the Blood Pack they bow to?
Omega eats its young. Or: on Omega, only the lucky get out alive. No one gets out whole.
The gangs displayed the bodies for a month. No one was allowed to touch them, not to honor them, not to clear them away. One batarian, one salarian, two asari, four humans, one krogan, one vorcha, laid out side by side until their bodies decayed past recognition. It turns out that, under the skin, with maggots writhing between their bones, one race looks very much like the next. But there was no turian, and Archangel was a turian.
Garrus Vakarian was Archangel. Or was it Lantar Sidonis? They started a war that couldn't be won, and when it ended in blood and flame, when the rest of their comrades died, when ten bodies were laid out as a warning, one of them fled to the Citadel and the other joined a Cerberus vessel.
The population of Palaven has held steady at 6.1 billion for the last two centuries; of that, eight million live in the capital at Cipritine, the ancient heart of turian civilization, with an additional ten million in the outlying suburbs.
Knowing this, Corvia, what are the odds that you and Garrus Vakarian grew up one neighborhood apart? Your father worked two floors above and one tier of citizenship below his mother; they nodded to each other when they passed in the hall. He is a mere three months older than you, though those three months were the difference between one cohort and the next; you attended the same school. He served as a sniper with the 81st Regiment; you were assigned to the 83rd, quartered on opposite sides of the parade ground. It is virtually certain that the two of you crossed paths at the shooting range more than once.
Here are two differences between the two of you: You had your fill of fighting a long time ago. He met Commander Shepard.
The notification comes from Customs: Garrus Vakarian has just entered the Citadel. You find him at Rodam Expeditions, idly flicking through the catalog of—of sniper rifle mods, you note.
"Garrus Vakarian?" Choi says. He turns.
"We need to ask you a few questions, if you have a moment," Choi says politely. You tense, hand hovering over your sidearm—if he decides to make a run for it—
"Anything for the law," he says smoothly, and you catch the flick of his eyes to your weapon, can't shake the feeling that he's laughing at you.
At the station, Vakarian sits down and lounges in his chair, looking as much at ease as if he were the one doing the interrogating. It makes you uneasy.
"So what's all this about, officers?" he says.
He's got a long crest, his heavy cowl rendered even more imposing by heavy armor; he's tall even for a turian. He'd be handsome if not for the mangled mess of half-healed scar tissue that is the right side of his face and his right mandible, obliterating the blue of his colony markings on that side. A recent injury; his face had still been whole in the official holo taken when he rejoined C-Sec. From the looks of it, he's lucky to not have lost the eye; he still wears a bandage across the side of his head. His armor has a hole blasted straight through the collar on the same side, a web of cracks stretching outward from it.
"Seems like it's been a rough couple of years for you. What happened to your face?" Choi says.
"You should see the other gunship," Vakarian drawls, mandibles widening in a smirk. You drag your eyes away from the way the right mandible doesn't move quite in sync with the left, pulling and catching at scar tissue.
"A gunship, huh. What have you been doing since you left C-Sec?" Choi asks.
He shrugs his shoulders, an unmistakably human gesture that sits strangely on his frame. You don't think he even realizes.
"This and that," he says. "Just keeping busy. You know how it is."
"Why don't you tell us how it is," Choi says.
"I'm working on something important. A mission."
"On a Cerberus ship," you say.
"Not for Cerberus," he says. "We're…temporary allies. Strange bedfellows, as humans say."
"What's so important that you're working with anti-alien terrorists, Vakarian? Says here you've always been a bit of a loose cannon, but not the kind that goes after innocents."
He laughs, unexpectedly. "I don't think you need to worry about that," he says. "These guys deserve anything they get."
"Let's cut to the chase," you say. "Did you know a turian named Lantar Sidonis?"
He straightens abruptly, losing his lazy arrogance for the first time since you brought him in.
"What's that on your arm," you say, but it's not really a question. The jagged triangle with two horizontal lines above it, painted in gold—the stylized wings—you know that mark. Archangel's mark.
"That's none of your business," he says tightly.
Go on, Valens. You're close, so close to getting an answer—
The door slams open.
"Playtime's over," Commander Shepard says. "I'm here to collect my turian."
You remember her from the vids: the proud unbending line of her silhouetted against the false Presidium sky, the perfect military crispness of her answer to every question. Not charming, no, but—compelling. A soldier to the bone. You could understand why one might follow such a woman.
She doesn't look like that now. Standing backlit in the door, the harsh light of the interrogation room casting hard-edged shadows across her face that catch under her eyes, with the hellish orange glow of cybernetics showing through cracks and fissures on her face—
She looks like the revenant spirit of a regiment slaughtered to the last man. She looks like death walking.
Careful, Corvia. This is beyond you. You don't know what you're dealing with.
"Yours, Commander?" Choi says.
"I don't have time for this," Shepard snaps. "Garrus, let's go. We're done here."
Vakarian looks back at you with all his cockiness back, smirking with his mandibles held wide. "Sorry to cut this little chat short. What can I say? Duty calls."
"This man is under suspicion for murder—" you start, and Shepard turns her eyes on you.
Corvia, you know violence. You've seen death, through a scope and up close. Turians are descended from apex predators; they have no prey responses. And yet that inhuman gaze mesmerizes you—a glimpse of fires waiting for the unwary and the foolish.
"I'm still a Spectre, officer," Shepard says dangerously. "I can make life very difficult for you."
You're paralyzed. You say nothing. You can just hear the low rumble of amusement in Vakarian's subvocals out in the hall as the door slides shut behind him.
"Never thought I'd be on this side of things," he drawls. "Nice to have the Spectre on my side for once," and there's a bark of laughter from Shepard in response.
Wait for it.
"What the hell was that," Choi says. Her hands are shaking.
"He's Archangel," you say. It's so clear now, all the pieces clicking together. "It wasn't Sidonis. I should have seen it from the start—if ever an officer was going to go vigilante, it was going to be him. And now he's no longer confining his vigilante activities to Omega."
"That's very interesting," Captain Bailey says from the doorway. "Too bad I'm shutting this investigation down, Valens. You're off the case."
For the first time in your life, Corvia, you argue an order.
"Sir!" you say. "You can't—he killed someone! We can't just let him go—"
"What, is Vakarian's case of insubordination contagious?" he says. "For your sake, officer, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. The case is closed, end of story. Go home. Take the day. Come in ready to work tomorrow."
The truth is, Officer Corvia Valens, you're a good turian. You do as you're told. You go home through the cold and the gathering dark to your tiny apartment; you come back in the next day and work on the cases assigned to you, the ones you've been neglecting to chase Spectres and ghosts and angels, and avoid Choi's pitying gaze.
Be patient, Corvia. In two weeks, your omnitool will ping with an alert: the Normandy has just put in at the level 27 dock. When you arrive, Garrus Vakarian will be there, leaning against the railing, and you'll take a moment to marvel at the damage done to the ship suspended above him: the once-gleaming exterior battered and scored with burn marks, the gaping hole blasted straight through the hull.
"Hello, officer," he'll say. You'll look at him, at the new dents in his armor to match those on the ship, the bandage he still wears to cover that slow-healing wound, the scars that turn the side of his face into a landscape pitted and twisted as if by long bombardment.
"I know you killed Lantar Sidonis," you'll say. "I just want you to know that. Whatever friends you have, whoever you think can protect you, I know what you did."
"All you've got is my name and a few scraps of purely circumstantial evidence," he'll say calmly. "I was a detective too, Officer Valens. You'll need to better than that. C-Sec rules, you know. Keep throwing unfounded accusations around like that and you'll find yourself in trouble."
"Is that a threat?"
"No," he'll say. "Personal experience."
"It doesn't matter anyway," you'll say bitterly. "The investigation is closed."
He'll laugh, then, and surprise you with how friendly his voice is. "I know how that one goes," he'll say. "If it's any consolation, I got my quarry in the end. Maybe you'll get lucky too." He'll be silent for a long moment, staring off into the distance, and then he'll say, suddenly sober, "You're a good officer, Valens. We're going to need you soon. You and anyone else we can get."
"What for?" you'll ask, curious despite yourself, wondering what he might give away.
"The Reapers are coming," he'll say, and the resonance below his voice will be very deep and very dark and very far away.
He'll leave you there. Two days after that, you'll get another alert: his name is listed on the manifest of a passenger ship bound for Palaven. You will never see him again; but still, sometimes, lying awake in your bed or walking through the eternal night of the Wards, you'll hear his voice echoing from the cold distant stars: The Reapers are coming.
Corvia, he's right. Six months to the day after that meeting, the news will come: Palaven is burning. Four months, three weeks, and six days after that, Corvia, you'll be just one more body being dragged into the dark bloodstained recesses of the Citadel by the degenerate relic of a long-forgotten race.