"Return signal, we have a direct hit across the bow," Joker reported as Melara looked up from her displays.

"So the ship is there," Vina said, under her breath but loud enough that her captain could hear it.

"Continue fire, focus on disabling that ship's engines and weapon's system. Disable, do not destroy. If our intel is correct there are innocent salarians on board that vessel, and we want the slavers prisoners, not corpses. Vina, move us in closer and keep the heat up. Joker, see if you can't access their airlock systems. I'm taking in a boarding team. Laws, you're with me. Nevil, Rohweder, suit up and meet me in the shuttle bay."

Though her team never dawdled, Melara was always inevitably first aboard the shuttle. The cockpit was empty, of course- while the shuttle could be manually flown in cases of long-range missions or emergencies, so long as they stayed within a system's length of the Normandy, Joker remotely piloted the shuttle as well as the frigate. Even in full battle, his systems were capable of directing several smaller ships in concert with the Normandy as well as coordinate weapons, shields, and automatic repair protocols.

Moments after she stepped aboard Laws jumped in, followed quickly by Nevil and Rohweder, the latter hitting the control to close the shuttle door.

"We're going to attach to their flank airlock and board. We're going in hot but shoot to wound if at all possible- I want Moore alive. We have an unknown number of salarian colonists on board. Once we secure the ship, we'll shuttle them over to the Normandy for medical treatment and take Moore and his men to the brig."

As the shuttle started to lift off Joker's voice filled the air. "Ma'am, we have a secondary ship already attached to the Lear at the flank airlock."

"Specs?"

"Small, short-range transport- probably only a ground-based ferry on full automation. No identifying marks or signal flag. I will direct the shuttle to the secondary aft airlock on the port side."

"Do it."

"Short-range transport suggests a base, ship, or colony on the planet's surface," Rohweder said. "We could be facing AA guns from the surface capable of taking out the Normandy."

"This close of a range they can't fire without risking taking out the Lear as well. If Moore has a slaver base down there they'd never risk killing their own boss," Nevil said. Melara's eyes were thoughtful, however, and she shook her head.

"Moore has never used bases. He prefers to stay mobile, to keep his stock mobile. If he had somewhere to land on the surface he would not be lurking in the upper atmosphere. No- this feels more like he's meeting someone, making an exchange. If he is, they are far more likely to take the Lear out as well as the Normandy in order to cut their losses. Joker-"

"Already monitoring any sudden energy emission that would accompany an AA gun from the surface, or an activating ship engine," he replied. "So far we're clear."

"Then keep monitoring and keep on mission. Any sign of hostile activity from the surface, take it out."

"Acknowledged. I have accessed the Lear's secondary systems and will connect you to the aft airlock in nine seconds. I should have access to primary systems in the next three minutes."

As the shuttle joined the airlock and locked into place, the group drew their weapons. Mel's eyes narrowed with intent.

"Let's go get this bastard."


As Moore rushed off to the helm, bellowing orders and demanding to know which incompetent was responsible for the Normandy finding them, the ship shuddered again. Warning klaxons were filling the air, almost drowning out the voice of the ship's VI reporting damage to shields and engines. Red calmly turned toward her team, one of whom was consulting his omni-tool.

"Options?" she asked.

"There are no indications they've spotted the Infinity. Their AI is hacking in to the Lear's secondary systems."

"They'll want Moore alive, and they won't risk killing those frogs down in the hold. Which means sending a boarding party."

"They're in the secondary systems. They have control over the airlocks."

Red smiled an exasperated little smile. "So much for our ferry. Cargo door?"

"Still clear."

" Then it looks like we take the fun way down. Vilas."

"On it."

He started working rapidly on his omni-tool as Red and the rest of the team put their weapons away. Moore charged back into the cargo hold with a rifle in his hand, waving it frantically and barking at his men. He zeroed in on Red and the quarians.

"What are you doing? Get your guns out! That bitch is coming on board!"

"You're going to have to pay me a hell of a lot more to defend your ship and your sad little cargo, Moore," Red laughed.

"They've got the airlocks blocked out! You can't get to your pitiful little ship!" He glared. "What are you gonna do, surrender like a pissant coward?"

"No. We're going to leave." She touched her collar. Her helmet folded out of its small pack above her shoulders, expanding in sections over her head and locking down. It completely covered her features, leaving only two round yellow eye lights staring back at him. As her team did the same, Moore seemed to swell with frantic rage, his face deepening from red to purple, veins standing out.

"You're insane! We're in the upper goddamn atmosphere! You can't just leave! Get your goddamn weapons out and fight!"

"I suggest you hold on to something," Red said calmly, as Vilas finished his work. Behind them, the warning alarm for the cargo door began to flash, a low vibration shaking the deck. Moore blanched, then turned and grabbed onto an equipment bank as the doors parted and began to open. Though it wasn't a vacuum outside, the pressure differential was more than enough for a violent, if brief, decompression. One of his men, not as quick as the others, didn't manage to grab an anchor in time and went tumbling out, uttering a single yell of surprise before he vanished into wind and bellowing brown clouds of pollution.

The decompression over, only a sharp and stiff foul-smelling wind rattling through the bay now from outside, Moore released his hold as the quarians headed across the deck toward the open door, saved from the initial blast by the maglocks in their boots.

"GET BACK HERE YOU BITCH!" He shouted after her as her team started casually leaping off the end of the bay door into open air. "YOU GET BACK HERE AND FIGHT!"

She was rather amazed at this altitude that he had the air to be bellowing. There was little oxygen in the atmosphere any more to begin with, and spending longer than ten minutes on the surface required a rebreather or oxygen pack in order to stay alive and well. At the Lear's current altitude, with the bay's entire atmosphere lost when the doors were open, he should have been gasping and wheezing and stumbling toward a mask or rebreather of his own.

Perhaps he is just drawing on the hot air deep inside, the quarian merc thought with amusement.

Red was the last one. She stopped on the edge of the door, and unable to resist, turned back to face Moore. Lifting a hand, she snapped off a sharp and sarcastic human salute, before spreading her arms wide. Despite the hard wind, she fell backward into open air with an odd grace.

In seconds, Red was falling backward through the thick clouds of foul atmosphere, the open bay of the Lear visible only for a moment or two before it was obscured from sight. She was swathed in a cocoon of tans and browns, grays and blacks, soft and nebulous and ever-shifting around her. After a long moment she rolled, tucking her arms in close to her sides and picking up speed. Her HUD showed her rapidly dropping altitude. She wouldn't even see the ground until she was less than a hundred feet from it, but that didn't matter- her infrared picked up every distant crack, crag, hill and boulder in the distance beneath her. She could also see the forms of her team still falling beneath her, the distant shape of the Infinity parked in the shadow of a low mountain. The first ones to have leapt were already activating their jump suits' flight systems.

She had just reached about fifteen hundred feet when something hot and bright lanced through the air, carving through the clouds and flaring with such intensity her infrared blazed a brilliant white. In a reaction of pure reflex and instinct, she recoiled from the flash, letting out a gritting cry as her eyes ached from the intensity. The motion threw off her controlled plummet and she began to tumble, eyes flooding with tears of pain. Her entire vision was nothing but a brilliant after image. She couldn't see her HUD.

Blinking frantically in an attempt to clear them, she started to regain sight only for it to light up again in a bright flash. This time, the source was behind her and not in front, so the flash wasn't as intense or painful, but it was still enough to blind her again. She was still falling out of control, with no way to tell which direction was up or down.

Shaking her head and desperately trying to clear her eyes, the after-image finally started to fade, her HUD swimming back into focus.

She was on her side, the ground now only four hundred feet away, and she was heading directly toward a large rock formation. Twisting desperately, she got into a controlled fall again, activating the control for the jump suit.

With a flash of orange and yellow and an instant slowing of her plummet, the jump suit's flash fabricated glider wings flared out wide along her shoulders and sides, catching the air. She gripped the wing controls just in time to bank and avoid smashing into a large rock formation. Another crag loomed up as she cleared the first, and she frantically banked the other way. Tucking up her feet, she 'caught' the crag with the soles of her boots and pushed herself away from it.

The crags were just the start. She was half gliding, half falling into a narrow canyon, and if it got much narrower it could interfere with and even break the wings of her jump suit. If she was still moving too fast and was too high up when that happened, she was dead.

Banking again frantically, she missed just that eventuality by only a hair's breadth, feeling the tip of one wing scrape momentarily against rock. She angled them sharply, catching the air and slowing her speed, then had to draw them in a bit as the canyon sharply closed around her, rocks and broken ledges seeming to reach out specifically to foul her up.

Finally she had to chance it. Dropping the wings, which separated from the suit and tumbled away, she fell the last twenty feet. As her boots struck rock she tucked and rolled, letting her jump suit absorb the impact. A boulder caught her just over the shoulder and she slammed to a halt with a gasp of breath. Still and silent, she lay there against it for a long moment, taking stock. Then she climbed to her feet and glared upward toward the ugly sky.

Those flashes had been one of the ships firing at her and her team. The Normandy was unlikely to have done so-they would concentrate on taking the Lear and worry about deserters later. Moore, however- it would be just like him to use his last moments of weapons control to try and take her out, fueled by his anger at her 'abandonment'.

Uninjured save some heavy bruising from her landing, she quickly took stock of the canyon she was in, even as she touched her com.

"Vilas, report."

The canyon was uneven. It would take a few minutes to climb to level ground again but it was doable. However, only silence was on her com.

"Vilas. Answer."

Nothing.

"Grov, Marti, Lumy, report!"

Nothing. Her com was functional according to her HUD. Glowering, she set on her way out of the canyon, climbing up the ragged rocks to level ground. She was only about a hundred meters from their powered down ship. If the team were still alive, they would rendezvous there.


Moore grunted around his bloody lips, his nose swollen and reducing his breath to a thick, wet-sounding snore. He managed to spit another curse in a foam of blood and spit as he struggled to roll over and push himself up into a sit- not easy to do with bind cuffs on. Managing it, he glared blackly as the barrier over the brig cell was activated.

"You think you've won some kind of victory, you fucking squid? I have contacts. You turn me over to the Citadel and I'll be walking a free man in two days."

"You wasted your last two shots trying to take out the jump suits that bailed from your cargo hold," Melara said calmly. "Deserting crew? Someone must have really pissed you off."

"No crew of mine," he said with a thick snarl, before snorting up a mouthful of blood and snot, and spitting it on the brig floor. "My boys are loyal."

"Four of your boys are already pissing themselves with eagerness to spill everything they know about you and your entire ring, just to make their sentences lighter," she said. "Who were the deserters, then, if no crew of yours?"

He glared, and she shrugged. "I'll find out anyway. My XO has a full team heading to the surface right now. We're going to find your 'evacuees' with or without your help. I'm just curious."

"Go fuck yourself."

She lifted a brow, then casually touched the control of the barrier again, shutting it off. Moving over, she crouched in front of him. He hawked again, but before he could spit she clamped her hand down over his mouth and gripped his face hard. "Listen to me closely, Moore," she said in a dangerous voice. "If I turn you over to the Citadel for charges you are likely going to make a very strong exception in the Council's stance against the death penalty. You've kidnapped and killed salarian citizens to make illegal narcotics. You've broken sanction on a Council protected world. You've taken members of nearly every Council species from their homes, their beds- beaten and tortured them, violated them, and sold them as if they were nothing but animals. I feel only sheer and utter joy that you will waste away in the worst hell hole of a prison they can discover, before they put a legal and very well deserved bullet between your eyes. However, if you are anything but the very spitting image of a civil man and a model citizen from this moment until you are out of my custody, I'm going to forgo all of that. No trial, no prison, no relatively painless execution. Oh no. Instead, you know what I'll do?"

He didn't move, only continued to glare. Melara barely paused, not expecting any kind of response.

"I'm going to keep you in this lovely little cell until such time as I can stand face to face with the new Ubuuta of Nakira- her and her One Hundred, and her beloved Aunt Sihra- fully recovered and regained of her strength. I'm going to put you in front of all those very angry and toothsome rakir, and I'm going to explain to the Ubuuta how you are the one who has been kidnapping her people, how you are the one that took her aunt, not only torturing her but directly causing the murder of her Ubuut and leading to a battle that decimated their fertile male population down to extinction levels. Then…I'm going to leave you to her kind graces."

As she spoke his expression didn't change, but she could see his face begin to pale, fear creeping in unwanted behind his eyes.

She let that sink in a moment. "I'm going to drop my hand now, and you are going to answer each and every question I pose to you, courteously and thoroughly. Anything less, and your skin is destined to be tanned and hanged in the Kodra Hall for every rakir to see."

He made no motion, and she removed her hand. "Now. Who were the men who left your ship in jump suits?"

His jaw tightened a moment, before he spoke. "Group of quarian mercs. Their leader is a woman named Thiredra…she goes by Red."

"She have a last name?"

"I'm sure she did at one time, but she ditched it. It's just Red."

"And why were Red and her men on your ship?"

He glanced aside, clearly furious to be answering but fearful enough of the consequences if he didn't. "I pay her to bring me things."

"Things?" she asked. "Slaves?"

"No. Red don't traffic in slaves. She gets…items. Rare art, valuables, really hard to find shit-"

"Like this?"

Mel reached into her side pouch and drew out the flat, black square she'd taken off of Moore after she'd knocked him senseless, while Laws was cuffing him. He glared at the sight of it, lifting his chin.

"Yeah."

"What is this? Where did she get it?"

"Dunno where she got it. She doesn't tell me her sources. She brought that to me about a year ago. You hold it right and it neutralizes energy fields and blocks scanning equipment."

"You know nothing more than that?"

"Not a damned thing. I don't know where it's from or where she got it."

"This is how you were slipping past the Nakira security and taking the rakir?"

"Yes."

"Has she brought you any more of this tech?"

He snorted in frustration, before speaking through clenched jaws. "No. I asked her too, told her I'd pay her top dollar. Didn't hear back from her until four days ago. She said she had something new and was sending it along."

"And what was it?"

"Box of junk. Then she asks for a rendezvous here to pick up her payment. I let her on and she tells me that she sent the box as a decoy, that the Broker was monitoring her shipments for some goddamned reason or another."

"The Shadow Broker?"

His look bespoke an insult right on the tip of his tongue, but with uncharacteristic wisdom, he did not speak it. "Yeah. Then she showed me something new she'd picked up."

"What was it?"

"No fucking clue. I barely got a look at it before you hit my ship. Bitch tucked it away and then bailed."

"So she has it now. And you have no idea what it does."

"Not the foggiest idea." Here he grinned. "You might wanna warn your XO before she tries to fence Red in. For all I know, that thing can put a hole in a goddamn planet. I'd hate to see your crew turned into a fine mist, you know? That'd just be the worst."