CAPPED PAWN

PART I: CATO

Chapter 1

"Shepard is lying to you. Find him quickly."

The message came with nothing but a small beep—at least, it must have, because when Joker saw it at the top of his inbox, "two minutes ago" ran along the opposite corner from "unknown sender." Joker's finger drifted to the delete key, hovered over it. Shepard is lying to you. Find him quickly.

As the skycar shuttle emerged from a tunnel, black gave to the whites and greens of the Presidium. Creepy anonymous message is creepy, he thought. It was a damn perfect coincidence for a harmless trick. A harmful one was another story.

He forwarded the message and opened a com-link. "Hey EDI, can you take a look at this? See who it's from?"

The AI's voice came over his earpiece. "Very well."

Lying meant there was something to lie about. Liara had contacted him, Shepard said hours ago, armed and armored. She disappeared from Illium before the attack on the Collector base, but now she needed his help with a lead on the Shadow Broker. The Broker's network once infiltrated Cerberus through Wilson, so it was safer for Shepard to stay off the Normandy's radar.

Shepard could have lied about that, but lying to Joker, to the crew, meant that the truth wasn't pleasant. But only space dust remained of the Collectors and their base, and work crews had painted over the Normandy's Cerberus decals. The Reapers' apocalypse drifted ever closer, but right now independence and relationship fuzzies made "pleasant" a great description of Joker's life. Shepard's too, he hoped.

I'm probably just making a big deal of this.

The view outside shifted when the skycar dipped out of traffic. It slowed to a halt, then descended on a landing pad and opened. Joker climbed out, eyeing the squeaky-clean enclave marked with the Alliance's symbol. As if he didn't have enough to deal with.

A light-armored guard halted him at the entrance, now blockaded with queues and kiosks. "Stand there for a moment, sir." She raised her omni-tool. "Just have to scan you. Security measures and all."

"Since when did they have this?"

The officer quirked an eyebrow at him. "It's been this way for a while. You don't come here often, do you?"

"Second visit, and honestly? Twice too many."

She tossed a cautious glance over her shoulder. "I hear you." She tapped the display, eyes scanning the new window that appeared. "Former Alliance Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau. Here by Councilor Anderson's request."

"The one and only."

"I'm picking up one open com-link on you. To where?"

"My ship?"

That earned him a blank stare.

Suppressing a sigh, he straightened himself and summoned his official business voice. "The frigate Normandy SR-2, currently docked at the Emerali Spaceport in Zakera Ward."

More tapping, more scanning. "A ship we've marked as affiliated with Cerberus."

"Formerly affiliated with Cerberus. Look, Anderson's waiting for me, do we really need to fuss over a com-link?"

"Sorry, sir, just my job. Lot of new faces in the embassy these days." She dismissed her omni-tool, stepped aside, and gestured him into the bustle of well-dressed diplomatic types.

Very fast-paced bustle, he found soon enough, centered on an unmoving core that was the line at the front desk. "… how many people vanished on Freedom's Progress?" a man who didn't fit his suit asked the receptionist. The ten people behind him tapped their feet or rolled their eyes.

Didn't the colonies in the Terminus pride themselves on their independence? Joker moved on, following the signs on the embassy's walls to a flight of steps and a hallway.

Two suits passed by him. "… this Terminus Systems business is any concern of ours." "The Hegemony…" The further he walked, the trend continued: batarians, Blue Suns, Eclipse, Blood Pack. Even Aria T'Loak. He glanced over his shoulder. The poor colonist didn't have a chance.

"You got anything yet?" he asked EDI. "Security got all uptight about this channel—'oh no Cerberus'—and I don't wanna get thrown out or interrogated."

"Councilor Anderson did want answers to his questions."

And Joker was to provide them. Shepard had bribed him with a fancy sushi date. "Okay, yeah, but that'll probably involve awkward silences in the fake sunlight. I'll take that over being strapped to a rack in a dark room."

"I would remind you of humans' varying preferences regarding straps, racks, and dark rooms…"

Thanks, EDI.

"… but I have finished an initial analysis of the anonymous message. It's heavily encrypted."

That killed the "harmless prank" idea. Figures. "You can break through it, right?"

"It would take time, but I'll get started."

Shepard is lying to you, but between a faceless message and their fearless leader, the latter's words won out. Joker entered an elevator, then punched in the top floor. A few answers for Anderson, and one for me. Nothing to worry about.

Kasumi Goto followed from the rooftops, keeping the black-armored figure distant but visible.

It wasn't that she mistrusted him. Weird behavior bore the best insights into a personality, and years of observing marks, pursuers, and everyone in-between had given her a sharp eye for it. Destroying the Collector base should've set Shepard at ease, and for the first few days after the victorious return, it did.

The change happened overnight. Everywhere he went, he examined the ship, the crew, the squad, appraising them with hundreds of gears turning in his head. He was subtle about it, too. Even Joker, who seemed to share the man's bed every now and then, didn't notice.

The roof ended over one of Tayseri Ward's innumerable narrow alleys. She took two steps back, darted forward, and leaped across. Her landing was perfect and soundless. Shepard turned a corner. She went for diagonals.

Kasumi didn't get far in her profession by ignoring the easily dismissed. So of course she slipped off the ship and into her cloak and visor, and followed from a distance when Shepard's weirdness culminated in a sudden departure. Something about one of his old crewmates, he said, but was that true?

With each building Kasumi crossed in the dark violet cityscape, the flow of sentient traffic thinned from a tiny stream to a trickle, from a trickle to nothing. Two years ago, Tayseri's Talsin District offered plentiful storage space to companies big and small. The Battle of the Citadel turned it into a refugee hub. The companies left, then C-Sec and better fortunes cleared out the refugees. Talsin remained a shadow of its former self, sparse and silent.

Kasumi let a grateful smile touch her lips. The Cerberus job took her from pitched battles in merc bases to suicidal sprints through the galactic core. All very open, all very loud, with the Hock heist the only thing resembling a reprieve. This was her element, the rooftops of a galactic metropolis, chasing a shadow with her wits and skills.

That shadow, still a small fleck in her sights, winked out of sight. Took him long enough to cloak. But the trail hadn't gone cold yet. Invisible or not, Shepard had to follow the streets and alleys. When he reached his destination, he had to go through a door.

He could be telling the truth. Where the Shadow Broker was concerned, cloak-and-dagger tactics were more than necessary. But if he isn't… It was better to find out than stay ignorant.

A man in a hardsuit appearing out of nowhere would've caused a fuss in the busier parts of town. On emptier streets, camera memory was easier to deal with than people memory—both for him and for her. She opened her omni-tool, visible to her through her visor. A push of a button sent her spy programs into the wide network of Talsin's unused security systems.

"A human Reaper?" Councilor Anderson stared at the computer screen the same way he watched the unfolding of Eden Prime, though some of that intensity had long left him. The light streaming in through his mostly glass office made that clear enough.

"Well, a human baby Reaper," Joker said. "Mordin had a theory that it was supposed to be the core of something like Sovereign."

"So the Reapers aren't just machines. They're… hybrids. Like Saren was, in the end, but on a larger scale."

"Seems like it. And they reproduce with DNA goo."

"But why did they only capture humans? What about other species?"

"Harbinger didn't seem to like 'em. It got real vocal about their 'deficiencies' whenever it possessed a Collector."

Anderson frowned. "I see. Continue."

"Not much else to say. Shepard and company blew up the baby Reaper, then they blew up the Collector base. The Illusive Man wanted to keep the base intact so he could study it. Shepard refused and quit."

With a reassured "hmm," Anderson nodded, setting the datapad atop a tall stack of them on his desk. "Good choices."

"So. Will the Council listen to us now?"

"On the Reapers, I'm not sure. Since only human colonies were targeted, they might just wave the Collectors off as a human problem, like they did with Saren. On Shepard… I still have a few concerns." He opened a new window with diagrams and stills.

They were orange-tinted from Joker's side of the desk, but the shape of the skeleton was clear, with Cerberus's synthetic add-ons marked in green. Layer by layer, nerves and organs and muscles faded in, then out. At the bottom of the window was the picture from the operating room.

Joker wanted to look away. But Anderson would've picked up on that, even if he wouldn't question it. So he turned his gaze back, focusing on the good Councilor, not on the reminder between them.

"He's been enhanced with all kinds of implants," Anderson said. "You weren't able to get their specs?"

"There were lines." When he asked, Miranda got that look in her eyes that said "no" and felt like a slap to the face.

"And…" Anderson narrowed his eyes. "They did all this, and restored his personality?"

"Yes, sir."

"He remembers everything? He hasn't done anything he wouldn't have before the attack? "

"Yes to the first question, sir, but I can't really answer the second. Death is… kind of a big deal. People aren't supposed to come back from that."

Shepard himself grappled with that question, so much that he cracked: back turned, staring out at nothing, muttering a too-real description of his own death. "You're still the Shepard I remember," Joker said, or some variation of it, not sounding very convincing.

With that Anderson shifted, as if realizing something, then leaned back into his chair. "You're right. I'm sorry," he said with a sigh. "I don't want to sound like my colleagues, but I want to be sure. Shepard seemed fine when we spoke, but that doesn't cover a lot of time. We thought Cerberus was a small splinter group. It's just hard to believe they're capable of a damn miracle."

"Cerberus has done a whole hell of a lot in the last two years."

"Mm. Which leads me to my next questions. But first, and this is the last you'll hear about this, do you believe Cerberus brought back the real Shepard?"

"Yes, sir."

There was no hesitation there. Shepard sealed up the crack, picked himself up, and carried on. The Collector base was left in pieces in his wake. The Illusive Man was left to cry in a corner after Shepard took his ship and a bunch of his best people.

Anderson matched the certainty in Joker's answer with a single nod, closing the Lazarus window. "Then that's enough of that. Cerberus. Alliance Intel says they've been busy. If what you said about the original Normandy is true, then they must have fingers in more pots than we thought. And…" He slid a datapad out from the middle of the stack. "while all this is going on, there's unrest in the Terminus Systems."

His pause was long enough for Joker to raise an eyebrow. "I don't know anything about that, sir."

"You do know that the major merc companies in the Terminus Systems have ties to the Batarian Hegemony?"

"Everyone knows that."

"But somehow, those ties are weakening. We have reports of sabotage, failed negotiations between mercenary commanders and batarian diplomats. With humanity's history with the batarians, attacking that alliance sounds like something Cerberus would do."

"Shepard and Garrus took out most of the mercs on Omega, but that was more a Garrus thing than a Cerberus thing." Joker paused at a realization. "Wait, so you don't know Cerberus is involved, you're just guessing."

"I was hoping you'd be able to give me the missing link. The situation's complicated. If the Terminus and the Hegemony are headed for war, we'll want to reinforce our territories. But if we do that too soon or too openly, it might provoke our enemies into attacking us. Nobody wants another incident like Terra Nova." Anderson sat up. "But I think I've asked enough of you. When you see Shepard, give him my best. He's been through more than any of us realized."

"Will do, sir."

Joker stepped out of the office and started down the hallway to the elevator. Glass panels made up the walls and the ceiling, same as Anderson's office, creating two sprawling panoramas of the daytime Presidium. On the left, the open-air section of the human embassy looked more like a crowded playpen. Despite the elevation, despite the distance, Anderson was still in the middle of the mess. No rest for the Councilor.

"Jeff," EDI said. "The trace may take longer than expected."

"Why's that?" he asked, entering the elevator, then hitting the ground floor button.

"The encyption seems to be modified from the method employed by Alliance Intelligence. It's considerable."

"Modified Alliance… Cerberus?"

"That's unlikely. This encryption doesn't match any Cerberus protocols in my databases, and the modifications are too extensive to have been made in the time since our break-up with Cerberus."

Break-up. The note of amusement was welcome. If it wasn't Cerberus, maybe Anderson knew something. He reached for the elevator's stop button. Probably not, though. Anderson had questions, not answers.

"All right, EDI. Keep me posted." Could still be a prank. But that hope faded with every moment.

It took two days, but the reliable unreliability of cameras rang true again. Kasumi slipped into a warehouse through a side entrance, the cameras outside fed looped footage—and not by her. Still cloaked, she disabled the programs that masked her entry, then waited beside the door for a minute. Nothing came. To whatever security guards or mechs prowled around, the transition from looped footage to live was seamless. Or "should've been" seamless. Wherever Shep got involved, things got complicated.

Further inside, a handful of lights on the high ceiling cast faint white on the main storage area. A LOKI mech patrolled down a row of shipping crates, taps and whirrs accompanying each step. As it passed, Kasumi climbed atop a crate stack. The mech had friends, all strolling along programmed paths, but more interesting was the office in the far corner and the lone human inside.

She descended from her vantage point and navigated the rows. The mechs had no way of detecting her, but again, Shepard.

Turning the last corner brought a man's plain face into clear view—nobody she recognized. The Tri-Ward Securities logo ran across the breastplate of his black hardsuit. He swiped through various windows on the office computer while his eyes flicked between his work and the warehouse proper. One line of text was large enough for Kasumi to read: "Deleted."

The guard closed all the windows, stood up from his desk. If she went for him now, all the mechs would rush—as much as LOKIs could rush—to his defense. Then the guard turned around and ducked beneath the window.

There was a thud, like a door slamming.

Kasumi darted into the office. She opened her omni-tool, broke the trap door lock, and swung it open. Then she dropped down into the pitch-black.

Her visor's night-vision kicked in as she landed. A tight corridor stretched out before her. The dull pangs of running footsteps echoed. Kasumi broke into a jog, then a full run.

The corridor went on for minutes. The guard was nowhere in sight. Faster than I thought. Even with all that armor. Gene mods, she realized.

Light bled into the tunnel. Kasumi picked up her pace. She emerged at a landing pad, a wide hexagon with a small, boxy shuttle at the center. His getaway vehicle. But where was he? She tiptoed around the shuttle. The landing pad was a tucked-away, open-air alcove, with no doorways other than the one. She stopped at the door. The vehicle held still and kept silent.

What if he's doing what I'm doing? As if answering her, the air between her and the shuttle flickered with faint distortion. The guard appeared in a downward ripple of light. He put a hand to the door.

She reached out with her omni-tool and threw out a hack.

The guard froze in place. "What the?"

He struggled against the hijacked locks. Seconds later, however, he threw his arms out with a grunt. His suit's normal code had reasserted itself. "Who's there?" he asked, whirling around and pulling a pistol out.

Not-so-stock security on his armor. Kasumi crept up to the shuttle and climbed on top of it. She inched towards the guard, his back to her, while she picked a tracer off her belt.

She pounced and grabbed on. She smashed her omni-tool into the back of his helmet. He howled. Kasumi held onto him long enough to put the tracer on him. Then she planted her feet on his back and kicked out. The guard fell to the ground while she flipped back onto the shuttle.

"Who…" He staggered to his feet and aimed at her. "Are you?"

"Just someone with questions. You aren't a run-of-the-mill guard."

"What are you talking about? I'm with Tri-Ward."

"I'm familiar with the company. Tactical cloaks? Not in their budget."

The guard lowered his gun. Then he raised his omni-tool. A fiery sphere flew towards her. She rolled off the shuttle as the small explosion scorched its hull.

"So," Kasumi said, crouching, "why don't you tell me who you really are? And while you're at it, tell me where a friend of mine went."

"A friend…" The guard narrowed his eyes. A hint of a smile flashed across his face.

He knows. If she brought him to the Normandy, maybe Miranda or Garrus could get his mouth open.

"I don't know what you're on about," the guard said, pressing a button on his omni-tool.

Instinct jerked her into a sideways roll. The shuttle's thrusters flared, roasting the air she occupied a split-second ago. She got to her feet and ran at the guard. He dashed for the shuttle door. In her peripheral vision, a panel on the hull slid open. A turret emerged.

Can't get to him. Kasumi picked up her pace, opting for an arc around the shuttle. Rapid fire rattled after her. The guard opened the door and stepped inside.

She escaped the firing angle as the shuttle took off. In a few seconds it was a small blip joining the skycar traffic overhead.

Kasumi retreated into her cloak. That could've gone better. At least the guard gave her a few answers, though unintentionally. On her omni-tool, a red dot blinked on her map of Tayseri Ward, crawling further away from her position. She'd get another chance to nab him. Now or later? Alone or with company?

Well, she'd planned on bringing the others up to speed anyways. And before they went after the not-run-of-the-mill, not Tri-Ward guard, she could search one other place. Kasumi returned to the tunnel.