23 October 2401

The column of vehicles was moving up a muddy dirt track through a forest that had been clearcut in the last decade, and was now beginning to grow up again. Thin-stemmed pines brought in from earth, the kind that grew in any kind of soil. After algae and sawgrass, they were the third stage of terraforming.

Every so often there was a bomb crater, sometimes in the road itself, forcing the convoy to drive around, into the woods, knocking down trees. The mat of pine needles burned in places, but the atmosphere was still thin, and fires generally didn't last long or grow very large. Every now and then the lead vehicle stopped with a jolt that slammed the helmets and shoulders and weapons of their occupants together. The man across from her, a human, not particularly young with dark stubble on his chin, leaned forward to spit on the flatbed between them. He'd been doing it for better than an hour, and the no-slip coating looked slick and greasy.

Across from her, beside her, up and down both rows, a squad of soldiers, most of them humans, most of them male, all of them wearing the same mobile armor that would stop a fast moving projectile, or shrapnel, all powder coated in the black-on-gray pattern worn by Kano Security.

Ten vehicles in the column. So many more efficient ways to move around a planet, but this was the cheapest, and Kano was an outfit with its eyes on maximizing its take.

The truck had stopped again.

"Dead on the road," their gunner whispered. His turret swiveled, and he stared down the sights for a good long while, before he relaxed. The vehicles sat quiet, their fuel cells letting out a nearly imperceptible hum. In the distance, they heard the roar of a gunship holding station near the front line. Chatter said to watch the trees to the northeast, where the enemy had broken through the encircleent and was retreating en masse, in poor order through the woods. Desperate troops looking for safety somewhere, Kessia thought, and understood that they might find it down by the river, five kilometers to the east. A place to regroup and bind their wounds before slipping away our mounting a counterattack.

Broken troops were unpredictable. Desperation did that, made large scale units surrender en masse, or fight to the death. It was always hard to know which one it was going to be, before the shooting started. Best to stay clear of them, if they could. The gunner swiveled again, then relaxed. With a jerk the column began moving again.

#

The asari known to her comrades in arms as Tech Corporal Kessia Thalomis, riding in the fourth vehicle from the front dropped in and out of sleep, in spite of the stim cap she'd crushed between her teeth an hour earlier. Did she know then, that her luck was running out? Or did she see the trap closing around her, and simply not know the way out?

She had been in Echo company for about three years now, never their best operator, but reliable, and only one of two biotics in the entire operation. She kept to herself, but not enough to not fit in. She trained, she assisted, she was a good field medic, and every now and then let slip a little about her life before becoming a mercenary. Usually it came out when a new squadmate saw the scar across her belly for the first time.

"How did you get that?" they would ask.

"During the reaper invasion." The new squaddie would nod, processing, realizing their history books weren't just books.

"But where?" they would ask

And she would answer, "Earth."

That usually ended the conversation. Humans felt a reverence toward the homeworld, even though most she'd met had never set foot there, and likely never would. If they kept pressing, she would say in London, but never add following Commander Shepard, the best your species had to offer.

Kessia rarely felt anything but pity for the former Alliance Marines who came out to the traverse to be maimed or wounded or killed for no other reason than the need to make a living. She tried not to listen to their conversations home with their families, asking if they'd received the last payment, or promising to send money that she knew they had already gambled away, or spent in bars or brothels. Kessia tried not to judge, because she sometimes did the same. She was, after all, not made of stone.

#

Kanus Security, optimal outcomes in uncertain times. On any given day they numbered little more than two reinforced battalions. They were good at training local police, or pulling VIP and high value cargo security duty, with the occasional search and rescue or grab operation or hostage exchange, all of which were in high demand across the traverse. She'd put her name on the line, taken her uniform and pay chit, and, so it appeared, had sealed her fate, even then, though she couldn't have known that. Not yet.

And so it went. Horizon. Taetrus. Benning. Security. Picket. Hostage negotiation. In between loads of downtime, soldiers trading stories during idle hours in their bunks, lies, true tales. Hers were all lies, wrapped in the vellum of truth. Kessia was a forged identity, taken from an asari who had died in an accident on a struggling colony world where record keeping was poor. Everyone in her unit thought she'd come from Illium, the lower levels of Nos Astra, and, having come from similar places themselves, understood the impulse to get out.

In any case, most of her comrades had never met an asari who wasn't a mercenary or a dancer or a prostitute, so the story fit, as far as they knew, and Kessia spent most of her time confined on ship, or in barracks, or busy in the field. And with altered fingerprints, retinas, and genetic markers—all thanks to several rounds of illegal stem cell treatments— the alias had, over the years become an identity.

And so it went. Ontarom. Noveria. Ismair Frontier. Security. Ambush and grab. Secure cargo transport.

#

Two months earlier, during transport from Horizon to Ilium, the Central Hierarchy News Agency had broken a story about a young quarian who claimed to have survived a massacre on an abandoned colony planet. Liara's squadmates had gathered around the screen. Humans, she had learned, were suckers for stories about disasters. She listened in but she knew the broad strokes of the story already. The turians had dredged up a figure from Liara T'Soni's past. Given the level of highly sensitive information the news agency had, it was likely they were working in conjunction with the Hierarchy Information Services. The person they'd found was a young quarian named Ashana nar Vesta, last survivor of her crew, killed on Esan, sent to look for something Matriarch Benezia had hidden in the old colony. Kessia remembered having saved her, remembered the quarian's blood on her tunic, as she carried her to the med bay on her ship. The lump of clotted blood that had slid to the floor with a wet slap, like something alife, when she'd taken off her clothes to clean herself.

There she was, still alive, still suffering the effects of her decade old wounds. Kessia, though, couldn't quite fathom why they'd decided to trot her out in front of the galaxy. Even in turian custody, the poor girl would be marked forever. She would never again travel unguarded. And even then, it was likely that Matriarch Deniri could still reach her.

The turians were whipping things up to suggest that there was a vast conspiracy on the part of the asari government and that in particular their chosen delegate to the council, Matriarch Deniri, had, among her many other crimes, paid Aria T'Loak to massacre crew of the Vesta who had landed on Esan, and to kill Liara T'Soni.

There were other claims, too, some backed up by evidence some not, that Deniri had commissioned a Krogan mercenary, who went by the name of Arclight, to release a parasitic symbiote of the leviathan on the human colony Pirin. Arclight had ties to the High Council on Tuchanka, was in fact, married to one of its more important members.

What wasn't clear was why the asari government would want to cause such trouble with its closest allies. Here the report faltered, suggesting simply, that turian naval power was a perceived threat to the asari and human governments, and that each Council race had been wary with one another since the reaper invasion.

Deniri had responded before the broadcast was even over, calling the accusations "inflammatory," thought what they were seeking to inflame, exactly wasn't clear. Except that the turians and the asari and the humans had become locked in an arms race, each seeing who could build more warships per year. The turians were winning that race, but their edge was decreasing steadily as Arcturus station had been rebuilt, and human industrial production had increased. But up until now, the race had seemed to have no point, other than as a means of artificially stimulating each race's respective economies. Gathering weapons only declares intent to use them, the old saying went, and now this little spark had come along.

But there was more to the turian broadcast. After the young quarian had explained herself, the report had shifted to another series of events, namely Liara T'Soni's death on Omega. They produced documentation that two separate organizations had been hired to capture or kill T'Soni on a colony world, Tiptree, that prior to the attack, had served as a refuge of sorts for non-geth AI platforms. Recent exploration of the former colony world showed that the planet's capital had suffered a direct nuclear strike, and had subsequently been stripped of all former signs of habitation. The world was now effectively abandoned, save for small enclaves of homesteaders that were carving a life out of the equatorial forests.

The final section of the report showed several grainy still images of Dr. T'Soni making her way across an open street in the port complex of Omega. This last bit of information aroused particular interest in her barracks room.

What had it all meant? The news had hid Kessia's barracks room with particular force. Tensions between council races meant large-scale instability, and that made for profitable business. Kessia stayed quiet and listened.

"Do you think it's her?" one of her comrades said.

"All blue is blue if you ask me," said another. They leaned in and stared, then half of them jumped on the extranet and began searching for more information.

"It's a good conspiracy," Kessia said. She rolled on her side and tried to sleep, but found she couldn't. Or the next day, or the next. She lost focus on duty and nearly shot a squadmate during a live fire drill. Her sergeant docked her two weeks' pay as a penalty and called it a gift. Most troopers, he said, would have been sent off with their final pay chit and swift kick in the ass. Or spaced.

Kessia thanked him, and got herself under control, using some of her saved up bench time to sit out an op and think things through off base.

#

The still images troubled her. The face troubled her, because, after all it was hers. She had a different face now, rounder, fuller, her eyes narrower, her skin a few shades darker. Still the resemblance was there. She could be a distant relative, one of the T'Soni clan who had grown up downcoast from Armali.

But she wouldn't be identified so easily now. She quite literally was no longer Liara T'Soni. Even the scanners on the Citadel would find that she was a distinct individual, ever square centimeter of her body having been changed. Only a brain or a bone biopsy would show the real her.

During her time away, Kessia studied the images again. The fact that they existed at all was bad enough. It meant two things, the first being that Aria hadn't been careful and had all the data scrubbed from Omega's surveillance network, or that she had saved the images on purpose, for reasons Kessia couldn't explain. Worse, it meant that others might have found news of her escape as well. The turians knew. It was the Hierarchy Intelligence Service that had furnished the images—as the broadcast itself made clear. How long had they been sitting on them? And how had they come into Hierarchy possession anyhow. And whatever else was true, Councilor Deniri, if she hadn't known before, she knew now that Liara was alive, and now she would be looking. Her trail would be hard to follow, but not impossible. Nothing ever was. And Deniri had access to everything, including the Serrice Guards and the whole of the Information Services at her disposal, and their hooks ran far and wide and deep. What did Liara have, aside from an alias and a bad, dangerous job? The Councilor wouldn't even need to acknowledge that Liara had survived her trip to afterlife, but just manufacture an incident to have her killed.

Well, now Deniri had her incident.

#

When Kessia returned to active duty, she immediately boarded a transport with her unit. There were two raw recruits in with the old hands. Replacements for a wounded sniper, and a dead tech specialist. The ship ran dark out of Illium, no communications in or out, and no indication of the assignment until they had entered the Vunia system, where volus—and by extension turian—mining interests had come into conflict with asari claims to land rights on the system's only habitable world.

No one wanted a shooting war between the major powers. If it came to that, it could potentially split the Council apart, leaving Citadel space without an effective government. Clearly someone wanted that as an end result, but that wasn't the aim, at least not yet. And so the turians had been careful in dealing with the conflict, nearly gentle, sending nothing bigger than a frigate, and using mostly contractors to do the fighting, claiming at least that this was a business dispute gone awry.

Canus had signed on with the Hierarchy as low-cost logistics and flank guards for the bulk of the assault force of two reinforced brigades, armor, and their attendant air cover and infantry, hired from the . Kessia had seen them unloading and drilling at the staging area.

They had their objective. Cover the flank of Minos as they advanced toward the capital. Hit a small city along the way. Extract a high-value entity from said city and get them off world without Minos finding out. That last bit was going to be a problem, Kessia was sure.

#

The column of vehicles had stopped again, and the order was going out to ready gear. This was it.

The attack was one of those anticlimactic affairs that starts with a lot of shooting—suppressing fire, breathless scrambling from cover to cover, an airstrike—followed by silence that stretches on into the early afternoon, while you hunt through the rubble looking for signs of an enemy that maybe hadn't ever been there. Kessia's team advanced into their sector, finding nothing but low buildings shattered by rockets and heavy weapons, and perhaps the occasional body. The air smelled like burnt plastic, and high explosive. The underground levels of the buildings were crawling with volus civilians. There was nothing she could do for them, Kessia knew, and moved on, avoiding looking too deeply.

Now and then, small arms fire broke the silence, but it was the exploratory kind, troops advancing under covering fire, or just making sure a burnt-out window frame wasn't hiding a sniper. As the day wore on, even that ended. The enemy, it seemed, really had fallen back to the river. Kessia took no comfort in it.

"A counterattack is coming," she said.

"You always say that."

"I'm usually right," she said. "Be ready."

"Sure thing, boss."

They had set up for the night in a corner room of a third-story building, a pre-cast concrete structure that would provide better blast and bullet shelter than the prefabricated housing down the street. Out below them lay a market square that was empty except for shell holes and a vehicle that had been overturned during the initial bombardment. Beyond the open zone of the square, lay their objective. The other section of the encirclement was meant to push the target out into the open, where their target's security detail could be neutralized and the VIP could be taken into custody. Her platoon had orders to wait until things started moving, likely in the morning.

#

Night came and she didn't sleep. It was easy to stay awake, thinking about Matriarch Deniri, who had done much more than this to try and kill her before, back when her name had been Liara T'Soni.

On the far edge of the square, about four or five hundred meters away, a group of infrared targets had appeared, volus civilians by the look of it, though they were arrayed like they were forming up for an attack. Kessia gave the platoon leader a kick and woke him up. He squinted out through the scope.

"If you're so worried, why don't you hit one of 'em? See what happens."

"Not until we're sure," Kessia said.

"And here I was, thinking you wanted to live long enough to get paid again."

Kessia didn't answer, but shouldered the rifle, took aim, and missed one of the targets by a few millimeters. As it dove for cover a wave of shooting erupted, unfocused, but generally on her position. Some of it came from the rooftops far beyond the square. Whatever else was true, the force in the neighborhood beyond the open ground wouldn't be easily subdued by the second battallion that should have been moving into flanking position.

Kessia shot again, blindly, until the rifle overheated, before retreating toward the back wall, which was now disappearing under a more concentrated barrage. There was a blast, and the wall facing the street shattered and fell into the room. The platoon leader was dead. So was the new tech specialist. Liara rolled down the stairs, clutching her SMG, and struggling to clear the debris from her mouth and eyes.

Rounds struck the building on the second level, coming in at a flatter trajectory. Nearly all of the troops who had been camped here were dead. She grabbed a rifle from the ground and put the facemask on her helmet down. No sense in shooting back. A projectile zipped off her shields. Another rocket hit the building and threw her to the floor, but a hole opened up, and she crawled through it, falling to ground level, and reaching the street just as the house collapsed into a cloud of dust, broken glass and jagged blocks of concrete. Three others had made it out, and they took shelter behind their gun truck, which was shooting, blindly perhaps, at the enemy positions on the far side of the square.

Kessia was dizzy and half deaf from the blast. The rest of the company, arrayed along the edge of the square, was returning fire, though as she watched from underneath the truck, she watched the number of positions that were shooting begin to dwindle. Either the platoons were withdrawing, or they were being picked off one by one.

One of the other soldiers who had taken cover with her had been shot, the bullet coming in through his side, splitting through a seam in his armor, and making a fist-sized exit wound in his chestplate. By the time she got to him, he was dead. The other two were in bad shape, one with a broken leg, the other with a crushed hand and foot.

"We need to get out of here," she said.

They stared at her blankly. A sniper had taken out the gunner on the truck. The one with the crushed hand climbed up and manned the gun, while the other pulled off his helmet.

"We have to move!" she shouted, but he only shook his head. He was bleeding from his ears. Kessia got up and ran, watching her sensors as she went. Behind her the gun truck exploded in a ball of white flame. The comms were roaring with chatter about dropships coming in from the west. The ground moved like a rug being shaken out, and Kessia fell flat on her stomach as the low buildings around her groaned and fell in on themselves. The comms had gone dead. All channels gone, even their transports, still in orbit, were nothing but static. The entire neighborhood was black with dust.

The blast had destroyed the company command post, and most of the neighborhood around it. All of the civilians were buried under the rubble. Who was it? Kessia wondered, that would be willing to spill so much blood, and why? She wondered if the asari and turians had decided to enter a full-on shooting war. With destruction like this, one couldn't be far behind.

She was hurt now, something jagged had pierced her armor and was wedged between her skin and her left side, and it dug a little deeper with every step she took. Her infrared scopes were dead, and so was her motion tracker. She stayed low and moved on, aiming her SMG at the imagined enemies that stood before her.

Two transports roared overhead, braking hard, and stopping to dump their troops not far away. Kessia turned left, her west, and ran hard, ignoring the pain in her side. She found a ditch, and rolled in there, then found that the ditch broke through into the basement of a house, and from there into a tunnel that ran a hundred meters in a fortunate direction. She hurried down it, scanning the channels again.

There was new chatter now, orders going out, reports coming in on how the attack was proceeding. So far the orbital strike and flanking maneuver had been effective. It was possible that the Kessia's entire unit had been wiped out.

So much the better for her, they wouldn't be looking for a wounded straggler, not unless she were really unfortunate.

The tunnel ended. Kessia found a broken flight of stairs and picked her way up to street level. Troops were moving parallel to her position, northward, and just out of sensor range, apparently.

When they had moved away, she hurried to the next open area, where their dropship had landed, its engines at idle thrust. She slipped around toward the ramp, and finding it guarded by a single soldier, pulled him close with her biotics and shot him in the head.

Inside she found the pilots busy, and pulling one out, she trained her weapon on the other. The one she'd pulled, she threw out the back gate and crushed him with her biotics.

To the other, a young female, she said, "What's your unit, human?"

The woman stared at her, her mouth gaping like a fish, but she said, "116th Marines."

"You're Alliance?" Kessia said.

The woman nodded.

"Your ship's unmarked," said. "That's a violation of Citadel code."

"The fuck do you care, mercenary?" the human said, finding some of her ingrained toughness.

"Today I care a great deal. Now tell me why. Your life depends on it."

The woman gaped again, looking like she was about to pass out. "Haven't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"We're at war."

"War? The Alliance?"

"Everyone," the human said. "Asari, salarians, turians, us."

Kessia lifted her out of her seat, her biotics snapping the straps of her seatbelt, then dropped her down. She fired a round into the chair between the woman's legs. "Next one's in your stomach, human. You're going to fly me out of here."

The human nodded, and then touched the controls.

"You're going to report a mechanical failure and that you need to return to base."

"They'll catch you," the human said.

Kessia risked a glance out through the viewport. "Your friends are dying out there," she said. "A lot more of them will die. In part that's because of me." She pulled off her helmet and threw it to the deck. "My name is Dr. Liara T'Soni. Now fly me to your betters."