A/N: So, this is the third chapter. Sorry I haven't updated in a while...moving back to the US was a bit chaotic and I didn't have much time or energy to really get down to writing. But hopefully I shall update again soon!

I hope you guys enjoy this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it! Leave some reviews and let me know what you think about it and the story in general. Definitely don't mind some constructive criticism, but destructive criticism is of no use to me or anyone.

Thanks guys!

Tali, have I ever told you how ravishing you are?

You've never even seen me without my suit.

I don't need to, babe.

Anton, go away before I toss you into the drive core.

I love it when you talk dirty to me.

"Oh, spare me your mewling and give me the damn password before I pistol whip you to Hell," Anton ordered, a cruel edge tainting his otherwise mirthful voice. He was rapidly losing patience with the human officer who rudely and stubbornly refused to divulge the password to the terminal, as if it would somehow alter the inevitable outcome. He had graciously explained to the man that if he would simply cooperate, Anton would simply beat him up just a bit more and then the poor guy could explain he had resisted as much as he could. Knowing C-Sec and its increasingly lax and embarrassingly lazy administration, the fool would just get a pat on the back and for his "heroism" in the face of dire odds. It might even get him laid. Only a turian would dare fault him, but they would secretly wonder to themselves if they could have fared any better against the infamous and feared Shadowdancer.

The answer, of course, was a firm and resounding no.

"Fuck you!" the officer shouted, immediately following his rebuke by spitting blood and snot onto Anton's new boots.

Anton, cold fury supplanting his irritation, responded with one swift kick to the face which sent the man reeling. He then delivered another blow with his fist to the officer's blood-stained face, and the broken, bruised, but frankly impressively tough enforcer of justice fell into unconsciousness, a bleeding heap of human trash sprawled on a metal floor. Anton briefly contemplated putting a bullet into the back of the jerk's head, but decided he wanted to keep up his years-long streak of no C-Sec blood on his hands.

The red-haired rogue sighed, somewhat saddened that things had had to get so violent, but mostly because he didn't feel like expending the energy required to hack the system. But he had no choice except to overcome his inner sloth and get to work, lest his boots have been sullied for nothing.

He walked over to the terminal, nimbly stepping over a small crimson spray of blood left from his fist's first encounter with the officer's face, and put his fingers to the keyboard. They felt most at home here; really, all keyboards were the same, and he had been raised on one. The screen lit up and characters in various languages danced across the screen, lining up into a language selection menu. Anton pressed the button for Tayasi'en, a prominent asari tongue that he spoke fluently, and sighed when the next screen came up, cheekily demanding a password and before it would allow him to probe its innermost secrets. The computer was needier than his first girlfriend.

He had, however, come prepared.

He reached into his left pocket, removed a small chip, and slapped it onto the terminal. The screen phased briefly into static before reforming back into a solid picture. The chip was actually a small, ingenious device that utilized a combination of tiny mass effect fields and strong electromagnetic currents to disrupt the computer systems. It wouldn't be very useful for finding passwords, and on a secure C-Sec terminal, it would take five precious minutes to do its job, but…

His patience was rewarded when the screen flashed and the terminal shut down. Within twenty seconds, it had rebooted itself and the language menu flashed up again. He impatiently set it back into Tayasi'en and waited for the next screen. One quick flash and a new screen appeared with the golden words he had been waiting to see.

Please select a new password.

He quickly typed a string of foul obscenities in several languages and pushed forward. C-Sec would crack the password in a minute flat, but that was of no importance to him. What mattered was the stream of beautiful words flying across the screen, access to information on almost every current operation C-Sec had going on. With a few delicate keystrokes, he had honed in on his target, the reason for this entire distasteful one-man assault on a C-Sec outpost. He was now staring directly at all the details of Garrus Vakarian's investigation.

His face fell in disappointment. Thus far, the hot-headed bastard had managed to find nothing of any interest, mostly just two sentences about a past Asari lover who had long since perished. Vakarian was many things, but he was not incompetent. Saren must have done a damn good job of covering his tracks…but what can one expect from a Spectre?

Anton silently cursed under his breath in his father's native language for being such a fool. He should not have let his ennui deceive him into such an idiotic move: C-Sec would now be on his ass for the next five years because of this, and he had nothing to show for it except for a tiny paragraph of data that was about as riveting and shocking as the realization that space is empty and cold. He had hoped to find something that could help him interfere so he could piss off Vakarian, but this was about as useful as an asari without tits.

He backtracked through more menus of various shades, hues, and shapes, causing Anton to wonder if C-Sec employed fashion designers to design their user interface. His search unearthed useful, delicious hints of other going-ons in the Citadel, involving a significant amount of shady folk he was well acquainted with, but nothing relating to the investigation.

Wait…

Of course the obvious he had missed him; he was simply too intelligent. He flew through the menu directly to Saren's profile on the list of "persons of interest." At last, he found something worth reading.

C-Sec has been alerted that the turian Spectre Saren Arterius has been stripped of his Spectre status and is now a rogue agent. If seen, he is to be apprehended immediately. The Council has declined to offer reasons, but the Executor has ordered that all officers are to follow the order. It seems likely that, despite the failure of Vakarian's investigation to turn up compelling evidence regarding the charges that Arterius led the recent geth attack on the human colony of Eden Prime, new information has surfaced that has convinced the Council of Vakarian's guilt. Though some C-Sec officers have expressed reservations about treating a respected turian Spectre as a criminal, the Executor has ordered that the Council's command is to be followed. Failure to do so will result in dismissal and charges of treason will be filed against the offending officer.

Anton almost burst out in laughter. This was just too much; the Council's picture-perfect poster child for their vaunted agents of justice had committed high treason by leading an assault on an allied colony, a crime punishable by death. So much for being a guardian of the peace. Controlling his wicked, sadistic glee, he scanned the rest of the profile but found nothing of importance. Immediately, another target popped into his mind.

He would investigate Vakarian. Pressing a few more buttons, he was at his archenemy's profile within moments. There was much more information on the borderline renegade C-Sec officer who spent most of his time failing at capturing the Shadowdancer than on the secretive and apparently quite boring Spectre. He scanned down to the bottom to see the most recent information.

Officer Garrus Vakarian has taken temporary leave from his duties on the Citadel and has joined an elite team headed by the first human Spectre, Commander Shepard of the Systems Alliance Navy, to pursue a mission on the authority of the Council. The Executor lodged a complaint with the Council, demanding that Vakarian be ordered back to the Citadel, but his request was firmly rejected. A warning was issued that Vakarian's employment with C-Sec is not to be terminated unless he requests to be relieved permanently of his position.

The rest of the profile consisted of his service records, many of which listed failed raids in pursuit of Anton himself. It seemed that the higher-ups in C-Sec took a fairly dim view of Garrus' predilection for violent raids, blatant disregard for regulations, staunch refusal to politely accept political bullshit, and his general tendency to be an ass. There was a whole list of rebukes and warnings, but Vakarian had never actually been censured or punished. He was one of the best C-Sec had; Anton did not attribute Garrus' string of failures in his endless chase of the red-headed human to incompetence. It was simply that Anton was a genius.

And it was at that very moment that that genius realized he might pay for his arrogance, when he heard a skullsplittingly obnoxious alarm go off and the voices of C-Sec techies trying to open the door he had magnetically sealed behind him. He had maybe five minutes before his fate was sealed and he began the inevitable march to prison, and he would not allow that eventuality to come to pass.

He instructed his chip to download the data to his omnitool, which he should have done in the first place. He could analyze the data on his own and sell the juiciest bits for large sums of credits. Selling it would provide him valuable funds that he could spend on…well, anything really. Five seconds and he had it all. He grabbed the chip off the terminal and prepared to make his exit.

He estimated that he had about four and a half minutes to make his great escape. A quick analysis of the room revealed that he had two routes of flight: crawl through a vent or use one of the emergency envirosuits that were conveniently left for personnel in case the room depressurized. It would take him all of a minute to don the suit and shatter the window, after which he could walk across the surface of the Citadel, and duck into another chamber just around the time C-Sec blew through the door. That was the safest option…

…but it would mean that the unconscious cop he had beat the shit out of would die, either from asphyxiation, exposure, or, worst of all, being sucked into the vacuum. There was no way he could put the guy into a suit without sacrificing himself to C-Sec, and using the vents was significantly more risky than the other plan. C-Sec could flood them with sleeping gas or, if he had really pissed them off, plasma, which would kill him instantly. He would have maybe a minute to duck out of the ventilation shafts, and not even he was that quick…

He really did not have moral issues with killing the guy; he had killed many people in the past two centuries who were more saint-like than the battered officer. But he had learned one very important thing in his long life: do not kill cops if you know what is good for you. You could humiliate them, beat the living crap out of them, and frustrate them into pulling their hair out, but the instant you took an officer's life, the game was over and the gloves came off. C-Sec would stop trying to capture him; they would hunt him down with a veritable army and shoot him full of lead until he was nothing but human paste.

As so often before, a stroke of brilliance brought him his salvation.

First, he opened the vent with the terminal. Twenty seconds later, he had finished uploaded a virus that would delete and jumble large swathes of data, frustrate efforts to access the terminal, and disable many of the system's mechanical functions, such as, for example, control over the ventilation shafts. Seeing his escape clear and with four minutes to spare, he decided to leave C-Sec with one last parting gift: a smoke bomb that would fill the room with a foul, noxious miasma in about five minutes. Satisfied and smug in his confidence that he would escape C-Sec once again, he hopped into the vent and used his naturally superior agility to crawl his way to safety.

When the C-Sec engineers finally cracked the door, they saw a horribly trashed room and a bloody, bruised, and battered officer lying on his side. Too late they noticed the smoke bomb, and soon they found themselves hacking and coughing, their eyes filling with stinging tears, their nostrils burning as if they were on fire. A biotic asari mass effect field that pushed much of the choking haze away; even smoke had mass, after all, but the engineers soon found they could do nothing. Someone deduced that the Shadowdancer had escaped via vent, but without a functioning terminal, there was simply nothing they could do.

The officer was revived, treated for his wounds, and later commended for his heroism. C-Sec techies were able to verify that the Shadowdancer had used one of his own devices to hack the system and reported that the officer had resisted "torture" and had not betrayed the password. They didn't give him a medal…but Anton was right: the story of his "triumph" over the Shadowdancer did get him laid…multiple times…from the same woman…who soon became his wife.

At least someone got a happily-ever-after.

Anton laid on the floor of yet another dark storeroom, stretched out over some stained and weathered carpets like a contented cat. He held a datapad over his head, gloves protecting his vulnerable fingers from the accursed metal, while he sorted through all of the information he had swiped from the C-Sec terminal. He had spent the past day categorizing the information and sorting it by importance and worth, putting various clusters of data onto different omnidisks and pondering to whom he should sell the info.

It was when he reached the enormous section on traffic regulations and fines that he decided to put it off until later and look at something more entertaining. He idly wondered if there was anything interesting left about Vakarian or Saren. He had combed through troves of data and found nothing to suggest C-Sec knew anything about Vakarian's whereabouts. Honestly, he wasn't sure what would even he do with that information. All he knew is that the days of the merry chase were over; Vakarian had ventured off into the void seeking vengeance and glory and would likely wind up taking a geth bullet between the eyes.

A pity.

Speaking of geth…

He opened the files on known geth activities. As he had suspected, there was little, but seeing as C-Sec existed to defend the Citadel and not to police the entirety of Citadel Space, this was hardly surprising. But what little there was to be found gave him a valuable idea…

Human officers with contacts in the Systems Alliance have reported suspected geth activity in the Horse Head Nebula and Attican Beta clusters. Though sightings have been seen in multiple points in each region, most of the activity reported has occurred on the worlds of Noveria and Feros, located in the Pax and Theseus systems respectively.

As Noveria lies outside of Citadel Space and contact with its capital, Port Hanshan, has not been interrupted, little attention has been given to the matter and it is believed that the sightings are the product of overactive imaginations unnerved by news of the geth attack on Eden Prime.

Contact with the small human colony of Feros, however, has been lost. Though it is possible the geth are responsible, this is not a matter of the Council to settle. The colony also lies outside the jurisdiction of the Systems Alliance, and no efforts have been made to investigate the situation. The colony's financial backer, the ExoGeni corporation, is publicly denying rumors that something is wrong on Feros.

No other data on geth activity is available. Due to the strong isolationist tendencies of the geth, it is likely their forays beyond the Perseus Veil are very limited in scope.

Anton read the three paragraphs over multiple times and allowed his thoughts to proceed along their natural course. Commander Shepard ascends to Spectre status following a geth raid on Eden Prime; Saren is charged and convicted in absentia of leading the raid; Vakarian disappears with Shepard on a secret mission at the behest of the Council. The mission's intent was obvious: find the rogue Spectre who had embarrassed the Council and apprehend him. If they were chasing after geth in order to find Arterius, the only logical course of action, they would definitely be stopping by both of those worlds.

And if Anton could intercept them, he might be able to garner useful information that could sell at a very, very high price. And more importantly, it would be fun, far more fun than his original plan of disrupting one of Vakarian's investigations on the Citadel.

Feros was out of the question; he was not keen on throwing himself into the middle of a war zone. Noveria was a far more attractive option, though he had heard that the planet was a frozen hell that could freeze God into a block of holy ice. But if there were labs rented out to two dozen major tech corporations, each filled with a feast of tempting, delicious secrets, he could scrape additional data to sell that could fetch even more credits, and Port Hanshan was likely to be a haven of corporate espionage, treachery, and corruption. It sounded like a cold paradise.

The credits he would get from selling the C-Sec data would be more than enough for a night at the bar, new boots, the services of a beautiful asari or six, a pack full of medigel, new gear, and transportation to Noveria. It should be enough to live off of in Port Hanshan for a few weeks as well. The main issue would be getting in; Noveria was not exactly open to tourists, but Anton was resourceful and had full confidence he could hatch some brilliant lie.

Perfect.

Anton let out a long breath, contented with having something to look forward to. He laid the datapad down next to him, placed his arms behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, his mind lost in daydreams of irresistible temptresses, beautiful men, and webs of lies and deceit. Soon, his breath steadied and he fell into a light slumber, his dreams now of days long gone and a life long since lost and buried…

Opa, was wohnt im Weltall…?