Chapter Three
The Citadel - 2175
Lucius awoke with a jolt. He was groggy, sore, starving and for a moment didn't know where he was, until the memory of the previous day came flooding back. He was slumped against a wall near a dimly-lit, four-way intersection of cramped corridors, about a metre and a half across. The ceiling was also unusually low, he noticed, only as high as the corridor was wide. More of a tunnel than a corridor, really. He could walk comfortably around, but an adult would need to stoop to get around.
A green four-legged monster came around the corner and started walking towards him. Lucius gasped and, unable to find a shred of energy to defend himself biotically or even enough breath to scream, he curled into ball and hid his face. The monster approached slowly until it was right in front of him. It paused and then, without so much as glancing down at the boy, awkwardly stepped over him and continued on it's way. Lucius remained in his ball until the echo of the scraping footsteps disappeared down the path.
The silence was broken by a painful groan of his stomach. He was hungry, hungrier than he had ever been. While a big part of him wanted to remain in this corridor in the foetal position, terrified as he was of what could be around any corner, the pain in his gut wouldn't let him. He slowly picked himself up and started walking.
He didn't know if he was going to the right way, he didn't even know what 'the right way' meant in this situation. He tried to go in as straight a path as he could, peering down every fork to see anything different, but all he saw was more and more thin, low corridors. Whatever this place was, it was big and… confusing. The layout made no sense to him, and there were no maps or even markings on any of the walls to indicate where he might be.
He came across several more of the monsters as he wandered. Some were busy at at a wall where they had somehow slid back a panel and were doing… something to the machinery hidden behind it. Others were walking the paths like him. He avoided them all, doubling back to avoid the stationary ones and ducking down an adjoining path to avoid the walking ones. Many should have seen him, must have seen them, but made no indication they were even aware of his presence.
Eventually he looked down a side path and saw a ramp heading up with a brighter light source shining down. He cautiously approached it and headed up to peak at what lay above. When he entered the underground labyrinth he had been in an area consisting of large, flat building only a few stories tall, but the buildings here were much taller, stretching high into the sky. High above him cars flew through the air in dense but coordinated streams. The most surprising thing, however, was the people.
Were they people? The warehouse district he was in earlier seemed deserted, but this area had dozens of… things, some walking around, some gathered in small groups, some coming in and out of the many buildings surrounding him. They all had two arms, two legs and a head, like people, they moved roughly like people and wore clothes like people. They even seemed to be speaking to each other like people, though Lucius couldn't understand what they were saying. It seemed to be a language, or languages, but filled with sounds he had never heard before and didn't think he could ever reproduce. In many ways they seemed like people, and yet they were completely unlike any people he had ever seen.
There were tall beings with hard shell-like plates covering their face and every other part of them Lucius could see. They had a row of sharp-looking spines protruding from the back of their head, two more spines coming from the backs of their knees and three fingers on each hand tipped with dangerous talons. Then there were others, almost as tall, with big black eyes and thin limbs and bodies. A third kind looked almost human, if not for their blue or purple skin and some kind of strange crests instead of hair.
Lucius ducked back down the ramp and waited for several minutes, not sure if he should continue. Soon his hunger overcame his trepidation and he ventured out into the street. He walked cautiously amongst the strange beings, trying not to stare for too long at any one individual. Unlike the creatures in the labyrinth below, these 'people' did notice him. Many stared briefly back at him, returning his gaze, but soon went back to whatever it was they were doing.
Lucius turned a corner and saw a small stall manned by one of the thin, black-eyed creatures. His hungry eyes were immediately drawn to a display of small, individually wrapped, bar-shaped food items. He had learned to read at the orphanage many years ago and while he hadn't had much practice the past 5 years, he thought he remembered enough. The writing on these packages, however, was completely unfamiliar to him. Among other symbols, slightly more than half of the bars had a large blue symbol prominently displayed, while the others had a yellow symbol in place of it.
Lucius picked up one of the yellow bars and began to examine it more closely when the creature snatched it out of his hand. It pointed at the yellow symbol and spoke rapidly, then pointed at the blue symbol on another bar before offering it to Lucius. Lucius, confused, reached out to take the bar, only for the creature to snatch it back again. Now it was pointing at a small device on it's wrist. It looked at Lucius' wrists and, seemingly not happy with what he was seeing, began shooing the boy away.
Lucius didn't understand what was happening or what the creature wanted but was too hungry to leave empty handed. He grabbed an armful of the blue bars and ran. There was shouting behind him and all the creatures around him stared as he ran past them. He ran back into the relative safety of the tunnels until he was sure he wasn't being followed before stopping to examine his bounty.
After unwrapping the bars he decided that they were almost definitely food. They looked strange, and smelled and tasted even stranger, but he ate them all quickly anyway. After his meal he sat for a while, not quite knowing what to do with himself. He considered trying to find his way back to the warehouses and begging for forgiveness, but he thought that if he wasn't in trouble before he definitely would be now. Besides, he didn't think he'd be able to find his way back there through the maze of tunnels. He was alone, in a strange place he didn't understand filled with 'people' he didn't understand. He held his knees to his body, making himself as small as possible, and cried.
The Citadel - 2176
Garrus Vakarian was almost a C-Sec detective. Almost. He had it on good authority that his promotion was forthcoming and that soon he would be assigned real cases to work instead of just an area to patrol. So he walked through a quiet Zakera neighbourhood, content that it was for one of the last times.
The neighbourhood of Zakera ward he was currently patrolling was nothing special, mostly residential with some shopping areas dotted around. It wasn't a wealthy area, but fairly safe. All in all a nice place to live, but a boring place to patrol. It was so quiet that usually C-Sec didn't usually have an active presence here, but there had been a spate of shoplifting recently. A human youth had apparently taken to stealing food and other low-value items from some of the local stores.
He must be one of the station's homeless, Garrus thought. Homelessness wasn't a major problem on the Citadel, but it still existed to some degree. Most of them, however, managed to get help from one of several charities. There were usually enough food banks and shelters on each ward so that even the downtrodden didn't starve on the Citadel and, being a space station with an artificial climate, the cold or other extreme weather wasn't a problem either. Which made it odd that someone was stealing food, regularly enough that they were probably living off of it but not enough to be selling it for any meaningful sums. Odd, but not unheard of.
Also odd was that the thief had been seen escaping into the keeper tunnels. These were a vast network of cramped tunnels that ran underneath each of the wards which the keepers used to get around while they did whatever it was that they do. While at first glance they seemed like a smuggler's wet dream and great way for criminals to get around unseen, there were a few problems with them. Firstly, they were small. They were the perfect size for a keeper to get around, which meant that adults of all species, except the Volus, had to awkwardly stoop or crouch to get through. It would be especially uncomfortably for a turian like Garrus. More importantly though, was the fact that they were almost impossible to navigate. Secondly, all the tunnels looked the same and the network seemed to be designed at random, no pattern had ever been found. More than that, they changed. Every few weeks keepers would somehow rearrange the tunnels so that any effort to comprehensively map them was doomed to failure. Anything left in the tunnels, be it contraband or simply some markings on the walls to help navigation would disappear when left unattended for a few hours, presumably removed by the keepers. Their one saving grace was that there were enough entrances dotted around that if (or when) one did get lost in them, you could just wander around aimlessly and eventually find a way out in an hour or two. Or three. Still, most Citadel citizens had an almost superstitious unease about them, so only the truly desperate even tried to use them.
Mid-way into his shift Garrus heard a shout, then a crash as something fell to the floor and saw a small human run out of a nearby shop carrying a full backpack. "Get him! Stop him!" shouted the Asari merchant as Garrus ran past her shop in pursuit. He followed the boy around the corner, drawing his pistol and taking aim.
"Freeze! Kid, stop!" The boy did not stop, didn't even slow down or look behind him. Garrus briefly thought about taking the shot, but hesitated. So far the thief had only made off with food and other necessities. This didn't excuse anything, the law was the law and if he was really in need there was help available but still, it didn't quite seem worth shooting over. With Garrus' aim as good as it was he was almost certain he could have successfully shot to wound only, but almost certain wasn't certain enough.
"Damn it" he sighed, holstering his gun and taking off after the thief. The human was fast, but Garrus was fast too, and he had much longer legs to help him catch up. He was a few seconds away from catching him when the boy leapt into the air. He made it about a few metres into the air, grabbing onto a wall before pushing off the wall, sending him even higher and onto a wide walkway, about two stories above the ground and running perpendicular to the road they had been on. "I didn't know humans could do that," Garrus muttered, until he noticed the faint glow of biotics around the acrobatic thief.
The now frustrated cop ran underneath the wide walkway to the staircase on the opposite side and climbed the flights of stairs as fast as he could. Coming to the top out of breath, he looked around but saw no sign of where the kid had gone. A nearby salarian, looking mildly surprised, pointed Garrus back down to the ground floor road he had come from, letting Garrus catch a glimpse of the thief turning a corner fifty metres back down the direction they had come from. The boy had jumped up to the higher path, only to jump back down and double back when he saw Garrus take the bait.
"Great," muttered Garrus, still panting, "outsmarted by a human child. Some detective I'll make."
The Citadel - 2178
Miranda Lawson and her partner Paul looked over their briefing data one last time before heading out. Their target: Lucius, a fifteen year old human vagrant on the citadel. Their mission: capture alive at all costs, but preferably discreetly. According to the reports he had escaped from Cerberus custody three years earlier and had evaded recapture ever since, which was quite impressive for a child. Or a teenager, as he now was. Of course it was always going to be hard to find him, considering he was one person out of over thirteen million and that this was the Citadel, centre of council power and inter-species cooperation. Cerberus had precious few contacts here, and were severely limited in how many men they could put on the street without attracting attention.
Another complicating factor was that the target was a powerful biotic. Just how powerful they weren't sure, their data listed his power level as 'unknown', which was… troubling. The report was fairly light on details of his life before the escape (apparently Miranda and Paul didn't 'need to know'), but surely if Cerberus had previously had him in custody they would have been able to ascertain his biotic potential? That and the fact that he had managed to escape at the age of twelve in the first place gave Miranda an uneasy feeling, but she ignored it. Miranda and Paul had been on dozens of missions like this since she joined up and they were both unscathed so far.
Miranda had joined Cerberus seven years ago, when she was just sixteen. After a few years of training and education, she had been put into the field with Paul as her mentor. Paul was fifteen years older and had had got her through some tough scrapes, though after a brief learning curve Miranda was more than able to hold her own. In fact, their reputation as one of Cerberus' more effective teams for this kind of work was as much Miranda's doing as his, but Miranda still relied on his cool head and years of experience. If she were honest with herself, she saw him as something of a replacement father figure, but she was rarely that honest with herself.
After three years of sporadic sightings and stolen C-Sec reports, Cerberus finally had an opportunity to bring their former subject back into the fold. They had long known that Lucius was surviving off petty thievery and probably living in the keeper tunnels, the trouble was that he seemed to pop up all over the citadel at random. There would be a sighting of him at the outer edge of Zakera ward one week, then near the Presidium on Kithoi ward the next. Their best guess was that he couldn't properly navigate the keeper tunnels much better than anyone else, and that once a week or so he would get lost in them for a few hours before finding an entrance that brought him to an entirely different part of the citadel. Cerberus couldn't predict where he would next appear and didn't have the manpower to cover everywhere.
After three years, though, Lucius seemed to have settled into something of a routine. He would still reappear in different areas of the Citadel at random, but now he would stay in each area for a few weeks before moving on, unless he had too close a call with C-Sec or an angry shopkeeper. There had just been a sighting in a Tayseri neighbourhood that was probably him (though with more and more humans living on the Citadel it was becoming more difficult to confirm this), so Miranda and Paul were sent out to stakeout the area. Hopefully they would spot him before he moved on. Sounded like a bit of a long shot, but it was their best chance yet.
Miranda and Paul got out of their aircar and separated. Miranda settled on a nearby bench with a drink and pretended to read something on her omni-tool, while Paul browsed some nearby shop windows. They were in a mid-sized square dotted with a few cafes and a couple of convenience stores, with a keeper tunnel entrance tucked away in a nearby alley. Just the sort of place Lucius frequented.
Today was the third day of their stakeout, but their patience was about to pay off. Miranda spotted someone matching Lucius' description head into one of the convenience stores. He was a young human male, long black hair and blue eyes. Skinny, maybe even gaunt but not to the point of being emaciated. He looked a bit younger than your average fifteen year old, but then Lucius always was small for his age. Miranda headed over for a closer look, getting in line for the next door cafe to avoid standing out. A display in one corner of the convenience store suddenly fell down, and while the shopkeeper was distracted the boy inside began smoothly stuffing items into his bag at the other end of the shop. "I think we've got him," Miranda whispered into her comm.
Before the shopkeeper had finished reseting the display, the boy was out the door. "He's certainly got better at this," thought Miranda. She followed him discreetly, from a distance. The boy headed towards the secluded alley, coming to the entrance to the keeper tunnels he had emerged from minutes earlier only to find a man standing in his way.
"Lucius?" asked Paul placatingly. The boy's eyes widened. "It's okay son, I just want to talk," Paul took a step forwards, arms open and hands empty. Lucius gripped the strap on his bag tighter, but otherwise didn't move. "No one wants to hurt you. We just want to take you home, where it's safe. You don't have to live out here anymore." As he took another step towards the boy, Lucius dropped his bag and exploded with blue light, leaping clear over Paul and landing several metres behind him, and took off at a sprint.
"Damn it Miranda, it's definitely him and he's on the run, heading north. I'm going after him, try and head him off," Paul yelled into his comm as he ran after Lucius. Obviously there wasn't really a north on a space station, but convention treated the citadel tower as the north pole for navigation purposes.
Paul sprinted after Lucius, following him around a few corners until they headed up a staircase leading to a landing several metres above the square. Paul almost had him in arm's reach and drew a small device from a holster on his hip: an injector loaded with a powerful sedative. Lucius, feeling the man closing on him, lashed out with a clumsy throw. He mostly missed Paul, but the telekinetic energy winged him on the arm sending him spinning to the floor.
Lucius paused to catch his breath and was about to continue fleeing when something stopped him. This wasn't the usual angry shopkeeper or C-Sec officer he was running from, this man knew his name. He wanted to take him 'home'. Lucius had grown to like his new the life, the independence and the freedom of it. No more spending years locked in a room and being told what to do with every minute of his life. His current existence was socially isolating in the extreme, but he never really had any friends or anyone to talk with at the lab anyway so it barely registered to him as a problem. An anger rose in him towards the man now quickly getting back to his feet. Lucius picked him up with a blue wave of his hand, held him a metre off the ground and slowly began to squeeze.
Miranda had been tracking Paul's movements with her omni-tool and had seen him heading up the stairs. Using her biotics, she jumped up to a balcony above one of the cafes, then up to another one before jumping across to land silently on the landing some distance behind Lucius. She made no visible reaction to seeing her partner at the boy's mercy, but internally she began to panic. She drew her gun and took aim. Orders were to take him in alive at all costs, but her partner's life was not a cost she was willing to pay. Paul caught sight of her and groaned through gritted teeth, "Miranda!"
She fired.
