A/N: Sorry this took so long to update, had most of it written a while ago honestly. Finals were keeping me from finishing it, but I'm free now and hopefully can dig in more! I look forward to writing it.
Garrus pulled up the hood of the loose orange and green coat, shifting his weight as he took the data pad from Patal. He swallowed the indignation at the woman's offer, reminding himself of the help she'd been giving. That she had no idea how insulting her suggestion was.
"No, Patal. My markings will be fine."
They had split up for an hour and worked through the lower wards. Changed into plain clothes, Garrus felt exposed. He was being paranoid, even if his armour and most of his favoured weapons were nearby.
"Alright, alright."
Patel stuck the small jar in her pocket, looking up to Garrus.
They'd accomplished a great deal in the short time; trashed and shot up his apartment to seem like a break in, reprogrammed his omni-tool, and found him somewhere to stay far out of C-sec's way. It made him uncomfortable. A lot of it seemed ridiculous, but maybe it'd buy him time. If nothing else, it'd sure confuse people.
Standing in the alley outside the boarding house, the bare side of the tower shadowed their activities, the passages thick with people and activity. Day and night were the same in the wards, and the ebb of life never stopped.
"I have to be going soon. My shift starts in an hour." Rocking on her heels, Shala keyed something into her omni-tool, and shaking her head, transferred the information to him.
Garrus raised his brow. She sighed.
"They've already been to your apartment. So C-sec will be looking for you. Maybe it's better to stay in your room a few days."
"Locked up a different way, I guess."
"I'll send you anything I can. More will show up as we go through the readings from the scene. Always does."
Garrus crossed his arms across his waist, "It links back to Kell. I'm sure of it."
"Well, do what you do best. It might be a day or two before I can come see you again. You've got all the data from the scene."
"I'll look into others who were there - anyone who stands out, anyway."
Shala stood there a moment looking up at Garrus, until his head swung to meet her gaze. She looked tired.
"It's hard being a good guy."
"You're telling me." Garrus 's mandibles flexed, near to a smirk.
"I'll be in touch."
Hesitating a moment more, Shala turned and disappeared into the street. Standing in the shadow of his new home, Garrus sighed, looking up the side of the building.
The smell of burnt composites was rich in the air, and overhead the air buzzed with the constant whirr of passing transports. Garrus walked with a slow gait around front, turning through the other transients clustered outside. He waved through the smoke, the smell somehow more pleasant then the one that permeated this level of the ward.
Up the elevator and into the corner where his room was, Garrus passed his omni-tool in front of the door, and it slid to let him into the confined space. The lights from the club next door glowed in the slatted windows. The room was bare, but something beside the desk terminal caught his eye. He hadn't even thought of it when they'd hurriedly vacated his apartment. Patal must have left it. It was the Citadel Star he'd received for his part in stopping Saren.
Snatching it with a talon, Garrus tucked it into a waist pocket, and sunk into the chair. Leaning into his hand, he synched his omni-tool with the terminal and began going through everything Patal had given him.
Snug in light armour, Garrus traipsed up the steps of the club, and the door swished open to let the bass of the music thud through his chest. He'd been isolated in his room for a few days now, and the sudden crush of people in the confined space set his jaw to twitch. Snaking along the wall, he placed a chit on the bar, ordered an ale and let his eyes sweep through the crowd.
The beat-driven shifting lights made it difficult to focus on faces, but Garrus had been here before. He knew the hierarchy that the two levels of the club created, and what the divisions of the room dictated. One of his most useful informants frequented it, and had helped him track the salarian down.
C-sec kept out of the small-scale drug deals that went on in places like this. It wasn't worth their time. There were bigger fish to fry. So it was little surprise that Roa was able to latch on and ensure he was always able to get his fix here.
Garrus took a gulp of the ale as he pushed off the wall and strolled towards the back of the room. Silm Roa. He'd dealt with junkies before. There were more than anyone liked to admit down in the dredges of the wards.
Through the crowd he could see the salarian grinning, smudging a gel along his lower eyelid. Blinking rapidly, Roa tilted his head back, shaking his arms before laughing at the person beside him. The high pitched sound reached Garrus.
Roa's lips pressed in, blinking a few too many times as he looked at the human across the table from him. There was something in their glances, movement under the table. His three-fingered hand appeared and jittered on the table top, bouncing like his leg underneath.
Garrus drained the rest of the ale away, a flush through his fringe as he sidestepped an asari, casually strolling up in the place of the human that left Roa's table. He sunk into the seat, spinning the empty glass onto the table.
"Hey, hey, hey."
Roa grinned, closed lipped, his fingers still alight on the table. He stopped the glass, lifting it to stack in neat symmetry with the others to his left before wiping under his weepy eye.
"Don't get to see turians a lot, coming to find something?"
Garrus' mandible twitched, resting a taloned hand on the table. The other stayed down, by his hip.
"Yeah."
"Maybe I got that something, tonight's the night, you know, beating bass and moving, I saw that asari look at you."
Casting a cursory glance out at the dance floor, Garrus saw the asari grinning their way, and had to stop from rolling his eyes. His talons strummed over the butt of the pistol at his hip. Leaning an arm onto the back of the seat, he turned to Roa.
"You know I could swear I saw you at Cloud Nine recently."
Roa's wrinkled brow twitched as he blinked a number of times, and then the worry fled and he laughed again. Readings of his vitals scrolled over Garrus' visor, scans matching particles on his clothing with ones found on the remnants of the explosive.
"Asari for you maybe, not for me. Ya right."
"Ha-ha. I heard something went down there, lots of people died."
The salarian's fingers were strumming again in a regular trio of beats.
"But you wouldn't know anything about that."
"I dunno what you're talkin' about."
Garrus cocked his head aside, looking over the dance floor again as he spoke under his breath. He knew Roa did tech work.
"I bet C-sec would love to know what you've been up to."
"Hey, my stims are legit, it helps me with my work, keh, who are you anyway." Roa waved him off, moving in his seat as he sized up the turian.
"Your work, right. Good at piecing together explosives?" Garrus lifted his hand off the back of the booth, sliding his talons together. "Salarians are pretty soft from my experience."
Silm Roa squirmed in the corner, his head turning as his gaze flitted from here to there, but no one else in the club seemed to have noticed them. The base shifted, the refrain of a new song warping to life. The dance floor moved with it.
"Or would your employer want to know about the stims? There's a lot I can do to make things uncomfortable, Roa."
His fingers twitched, and the salarian avoided Garrus' unwavering gaze. Finally, the turian looked away, clacking his talons onto the table and crossing one leg over the other.
"I know you were there. And you really don't seem bright enough to have pulled this together on your own, so why don't you start talking." Garrus' voice rumbled beneath the music.
Roa perched his leg up on the seat between them, leaning back, "I just built the thing, I swear. I didn't ask questions, I don't know how they found me, and don't care. They paid me, it's more then I'll make in a few months!"
Silm Roa wiped under his weepy eye again, wide eyes twitching away to the dance floor again.
"Who did."
"Isn't that enough? Ya, yea, that has to be. I mean yea, I didn't put it anywhere, they picked it up and I got the creds."
The salarian was starting to get on his nerves. These people in the underbelly of society often did. Hedonists. They didn't care about anyone but themselves.
Garrus sighed, and he stretched his mandibles. Rolling his shoulders, he sat up straight and uncrossed his legs.
"You know it isn't enough. Why protect them? Just going to get yourself in trouble, they don't care about you."
"It uh, it was a drop point, I swear, I just was supposed to leave it there, they'd get it, just leave it for them."
"Then who paid you?"
The outer finger on Roa's right hand flexed and tensed repeatedly, his gaze dragging from it to Garrus more then once.
"Stop moving your damned fingers!"
Damned junkies. Garrus' mandibles pulled tight as he clenched his jaw.
Roa pulled his hands back like a child, concealing them under the table. The jiggle of his body betrayed the bouncing of one of his legs. He blinked his large, averted eyes again a few times.
"James Hanis. He's Eclipse."
"See? Was that so hard?"
Garrus almost snickered, smirking as he nudged the salarian. His visor betrayed the junkie's erratic pulse, and Roa scrambled into the corner of the booth to escape the turian.
"Better not be lying to me, Roa."
Clicking his tongue, Garrus kept his eyes on Roa as he stood up and wove into the throng of dancers.
"Omega, huh? So what'd you do?"
Garrus moved the strap on his shoulder, adjusting the crate it held at the same time.
"Pardon?"
The pilot snatched another piece of freight, hauling it into the gut of his ship.
"People don't go to Omega because they want to."
A sound clicked in Garrus' throat, amused, and he looked back through the docking bay.
"I'm looking for someone."
Stacking the crates along the hull, the turian turned to Garrus, before looking back to the job at hand. Drawing a strap down, he secured them with a ratcheted lever.
"Uh huh."
Garrus strolled up the gangway, swinging his shouldered crate back so he could pick up another one, following the turian into the hold.
"I'd gotten the name of your ship, but uh, yours wasn't on the manifest."
The turian cocked his head aside, dropping the crate and pushing it into place with his foot.
"Easier to just use the ship, I find. It's Sidonis. Lantar Sidonis."
Garrus inclined his head.
"Garrus Vakarian."
Sidonis' mandibles clacked as he nodded, striding past Garrus to get the last crate.
"I don't usually transport people."
"Glad for the exception then."
"Hey, you're paying. I can use the creds." Sidonis secured the last crate in, lashing it into place. "You got a few ticks if there's anything you want to do before leaving dock. Just don't go far?"
"Thanks. I'm just going to send a message off."
Sidonis nodded, turning away to traipse deeper into the shadows of the hold. Garrus finished keying the sequence in his omni-tool, and he walked back out into the bright Illium sunrise peeking over the edge of the open docking hangar. The air was clogged with the waking sounds of business and transport, stagnated with industry and without breeze.
James Hanis was a human merc, a lackey low in the ranks of Eclipse - albeit, from what Garrus had found, he'd be moving up with his skills. They had been expanding their ranks, and there was already a warrant out in Citadel space for a previous incident. Precise execution of pinpoint explosives was his MO.
Since leaving the Citadel, Patal had pieced together some vid references placing Hanis near Cloud Nine the night of the explosion, but nothing yet had placed him at the scene. There'd also found proof of Roa and Hanis meeting, which only encouraged the nagging in Garrus' gut that had pushed him to book transport to Omega.
The accusations against him had been kept hush-hush, much to Garrus' amusement. The evidence they had was inconclusive - for once he'd been glad Pallin was such a hard ass about it. It had enabled him to get off the station with relative ease, though, it hadn't been through the public transport. Patal had sent him a note hinting at the commotion his father raised, too. It touched something inside - that his father didn't believe the accusations.
My son might indulge in the occasional asari stripper, but he would never blow them up.
It was impulsive, more than he usually was. Admittedly, Garrus had always been a little self-serving of his own ideals for a turian. Guided by a strict moral compass, that needle had only grown more cemented in place with all the fallout after Commander Shepard's death. He didn't know where this little adventure would lead him in the end, but he was certain he was following the scent of the murderer. It felt right to be out in space again, tracking down the 'bad guys'. At least someone was.
Standing by the communications terminal, Garrus coded in the sequence to send the information packet to Patal. Word enough to let her know he'd made it through to Illium and was onward to Omega. The asari gateway to the Terminus had proved useful; he'd acquired more information not only on Hanis, but Kell too. It was like a stiff drink warm in his gullet. Satisfying.
Back through the cargo bay of the Vocoto, Garrus bumped into an asari in the dim light, and she snorted.
"Watch out, buddy."
"Oh - ah, sorry. Didn't see you."
"I noticed."
Turning sideways into the passage, the asari reached past him to tweak a console in preparation for flight.
"Anything I can do to help."
Stopping she put her hands on her hips, and in the dim light, Garrus could see her teal colouring more clearly. Snug coveralls and a loose, long-sleeved ash shirt underneath it accentuated her curves. She pursed thin lips, rich amber eyes looking aside in thought.
"Well, considering I have no idea what you can do, can't really answer that." She shuffled further into the passage past him, her omni-tool flaring aglow as she worked.
"Right...battlements? Or huh... calibrating just about anything."
The asari snorted again, eyes on her work. She spoke and pointed down into the ship.
"This isn't a frigate. Find Sidonis, ya eager beaver."
Eager wha-? Garrus nodded either way and strode deeper into the ship. The passageway barely fit him, being as small as possible to conserve precious space. He could see hack jobs where spare parts had been worked into the matrices - the few private shuttles he'd been on were always like that.
For a second, he questioned his own actions - again. No, he was doing the right thing. Here's hoping he survived long enough to do it.
The short passage led to a vertical ladder in the wall that brought him up to the main deck. The chamber was the width of the ship, and was partitioned by half-walls into a navigation chat, mess nook and others. The head of the ship bubbled out into the bridge, where Garrus could see Sidonis backlit by the holographic control console. The turian looked back at him.
"All good to go?"
"Yea. Met the, ah, asari, down below."
"That's Raimy. And you made it out without any blood drawn, that's good. You can't be half bad then."
Sidonis ambled back towards Garrus, swinging his arms to clap his hands together.
"We're just getting the clearance. But once we're off planet and the course is charted, wanna join me for some daeka?"
"Might be nice."
Turning, Sidonis motioned around. "Mess, our lounge, I know, nothing impressive but," The turian shrugged, before waving a hand Garrus' direction. "There's a sleeper pod in the cargo bay if you want to rest. Otherwise uhhhh make yourself comfortable?"
The daeka brew pleasantly surprised Garrus, it had a subtle boldness on his tongue. The few hours they'd had together through the relay and on course to Omega had been pleasant. Raimy had proven particularly adept at jibbing Garrus. Though, maybe he was just an easy target.
"I can't imagine ever working for C-sec. But then, I'm no turian. But, I knew I recognized you!"
Raimy settled back into her drink, a pink haze that had progressively dilated her amber eyes and relaxed her spine.
A rumble of sound vibrated in Garrus' throat, and he reached back over his seat. Few people recognized him from his work with Shepard, but even one was more than enough for him. The matron asari wasn't as glib as the Commander had been, but her sense of humour - it left a twist in his chest.
"You're so out of the loop, Lantar."
Sidonis waved a hand uncaringly, gulping some more daeka.
"You just like making turian men uncomfortable."
Raimy sniggered and raised her glass as she purred, "That I do."
A clarion alarm and light went off on the bridge, prompting Sidonis to his feet. Draining the last of his daeka away, he was there in a moment. Coughing out as the drink sliked down his throat, he sank into the pilot's chair.
"Lucky fucking us. Raimy get your green ass up here."
"Teal!"
The asari widened her eyes at Garrus as she got up and made it to the bridge without finesse.
The Vocoto shuddered as she was hit, the kinetic barriers holding, but unable to keep the force of the shot from rocking the ship. The daeka and all else slid off the table as Garrus found himself on the floor. He could hear Raimy's startled cry from the bridge, and he was still scrambling up as she wavered back to the navigation bubble.
The ground veered again as the ship banked, and Garrus steadied a taloned hand against one of the support struts overhead as he made it to the bridge.
"Sorry, Vakarian. I guess there's some people looking for me."
Mandible twitching, Garrus looked over the controls and ladar. There were two ships tracking them. He grunted as they turned sharply. The FTL drive had disengaged only minutes ago. That meant whoever was on those ships had enough sense to track and predict their trajectory mid-stream. Not two-bit thugs.
Through the forward windows he could see debris all around them. Garrus had never been to Omega before; he'd never had any cause to go. It was the world without law. Maybe he should have found his way there long ago. The red light of the station and hazy glow it bled into space swung into view.
Could be me they're after. No - he wasn't that important. Was he?
"Strap in, this might get a little queasy."
Looking around, Garrus flipped down a seat panel in the wall flanking the pilot's chair. Sitting down he clicked the X-strapped belts closed, his eyes still flitting over the controls, gauging the situation.
"You don't have any guns?"
Sidonis was on the edge of his seat, shaking his head at the situation or at Garrus, who knows. The ship jumped faster, the ominous, mish-mash of Omega station looming larger in the windows. Some of the asteroid debris fractured under a blue hit, and the Vocoto banked again.
"It's on my list."
Garrus' fringe brushed against the back wall as he sighed, looking up. He really knew how to pick them.
Raimy's voice bleat over the sound of system blips and alarms.
"Fuck Sidonis, what did you do this time!"
This time? The ship shuddered again as it was hit, and the trajectory wavered. Sidonis shook his head, doing his best to keep up.
"I haven't the faintest, my delicate flower, I swear."
Another series of choice words muffled in the back. Sidonis' eyes flickered with amusement, talons spinning through the holographic console. Her mutterings continued.
"She hates that."
Garrus clenched his teeth, the ship jolting almost continuously now. The stars cut away as the Vocoto dipped into the precipice, piecemeal edges of Omega's outer shell. Lights flickered by, and Garrus pressed into his seat as the ship veered hard, the surroundings blurred with their speed.
"Luckily, we're smaller then they are."
Another cannon blast hit their shields, sending off a host of alarms and Sidonis sighed. Sighed like he'd spilt his daeka. Not like their kinetic barriers had completely fallen. Garrus watched Sidonis, his movements jittery and frayed.
The ship twirled again, the windows darkening as they slowed to weave deeper into the station. Far down the arm, the ship burrowed into Omega. Sidonis went on the comm.
"Jaffer, hey it's your favourite customer. Tell me you have a dock for me?"
Garrus couldn't make out the reply, but Sidonis gave a snarky laugh, pitching the Vocoto again to press into the maze. They had slowed enough that Garrus could see windows, docking arms and signage wiz by. It was all cast in a hazy, rusty red. He unclipped the harness over his chest and stood up without fanfare.
"Agh, what about something deeper?" Sidonis clacked his mandibles, "Come on, you know I'm good for it. Don't gouge me like that." There was more banter until the turian finally said, "That's more like it, perfect."
Raimy ran a hand back over her ridges as Garrus poked back.
"You okay?"
She turned, smirking as she did.
"Yea. That dick's gonna get me killed though."
