"Truth is the first casualty of war."

– Human Proverb


"They're all warmed up. That's freaky."

"You want Shepard asking why these guys don't have a fuckin' thermal signature?"

"Where is Shepard, anyway? Siri's gonna go for the drone any minute."

"She and Garrus just went in the Ossuary."

"Wait, inside it? Why?"

"Fucked if I know."

"Well, you got any idea how to get her out?"

"Just had my guys let Rexa in. If that doesn't flush her out I don't know what the fuck will."


Turian Army Base 'Janus Central'
11:45, 16 January 2185 ASC (13:26 Local Time)

"What in the name of…"

That wasn't Garrus's voice- it was feminine, dry, sandpaper-rough and surprisingly quiet. Shepard snapped back up to a standing position faster than most species would have been able to see, catching her helmet by force of habit and reaching for her pistol.

The speaker turned out to be a tall, gaunt turian woman, whatever facial markings she may have had unrecognizable against tan plating pitted by age and countless decades-old scars. She stood ramrod-straight a good twenty centimeters taller than the Commander, but her olive-drab light body armor couldn't quite hide the telltale ribbing of the powered braces supporting her legs and midsection. Elizabeth didn't need to look at the long series of insignia and honorary chevrons pinned to her chest to realize who she was speaking to- and who she'd very nearly pulled her sidearm on.

"Fleet General Rexa. I'm sorry, I didn't-"

"I got enough excuses from the Captain outside. I really don't need any more." She snapped her left hand closed, hard, around a small medallion on a thin silver chain she was holding- a medallion that Elizabeth realized was made from polished turian bone. "I heard about what you did on Menae, Shepard. And I don't care. A galaxy full of dead Reapers won't bring back any of my brothers and sisters that your people put in here."

"I'm not-"

"I'm going to ask you politely one. More. Time." The old turian gestured back at the Ossuary entrance, through which Garrus and the two other visitors were already making a hasty retreat. "Just… go, and leave us all in peace."


ICS Cramen Lines – Celaeno IV, Outbound From The K-2L System
11:45, 16 January 2185 ASC (13:26 Local Time)

"Commercial transport Cramen Lines – Celaeno IV. Please decelerate and prepare to take on search parties," a flanged voice crackled over the bridge comm station as the flattened arrowhead shape of a Turian Navy patrol cutter grew larger and larger outside.

"You said they wouldn't scan any more ships!" Diana Faur reached out to shake the asari pilot's shoulder, only for a flash of biotic energy to bat her hand away. Siria hadn't even needed to look up from her controls. "We need to get moving!"

"If you want to dash for the Relay and its dozen other military craft, be my guest. But I'd much prefer to stay alive." The pilot's tone booked zero argument as she calmly and carefully brought the Celaeno around, heading directly towards the turians. The skullfaces, for their part, seemed to have been expecting exactly that and continued moving slowly forward.

"Are you nuts?" In addition to their bomb the Storm King was carrying a small armory's worth of merc-grade boarding equipment in case they needed to make their way into the interior of the Migrant Fleet by force, and for a moment Faur thought the asari was planning to somehow seize control of the cutter when it docked. But that theory evaporated as soon as they started to accelerate.

"Commercial transport, you are coming in too fast. Please decelerate and we will come to you." The turian cutter was still holding in place, although it had turned about to face them and was powering up its weapons. "Commercial transport, this is your final warning. Decelerate immediately or we will be forced to open-"

Siria gave the throttle a final shove forward, then just as quickly cut the main engines completely and pitched sharply upward. The Celaeno IV spun around its center of mass, flipping the much smaller crew module close to a hundred-and-eighty degrees even as the hundred-times-greater mass of the attached cargo section kept them barreling right towards the Navy cutter.

Faur quickly ended up with her ass on the grubby metal deckplates as first one, then another bone-rattling shockwave tore through them. Structural elements groaned and squealed as seemingly every alarm on the bridge went off at once, followed by a few nauseating seconds of blind weightlessness before the lights and artificial gravity switched over to auxiliary power. The ex-Marine stumbled to her feet, spitting out blood and what felt like a not-insignificant chunk of a tooth, trying to focus on the main status board through the pressure that refused to abate from behind her eyeballs. Half the cargo section was reporting depressurization and major structural failure; the other half was just… gone.

None too steadily she rounded on Siria, who had already flipped the safety cover off of the section of hardwired controls controlling the cargo-crew linkage and was rushing through the separation procedure. Diana hadn't even known this model of freighter could disengage cargo while it was still in flight. "Are you crazy?!" the human yelled, "Akande was down there! You can't just… just… he's dead, goddammit!"

"Well, yes." As the crew module parted company and began to accelerate again under its own power, lurching nauseatingly as the asari waved at a rear camera feed. "Him, and about a dozen spikies too." The turian cutter must have finally gotten the message and tried to move out of the way just before impact, as while pretty much the entire left half of it was a mess of ruined scrap there was still a recognizable wreck- a wreck, and judging by the royal blue corona of frozen blood that appeared when the distant sunlight hit it from just the right angle, not much else remaining of the crew.

There was a lot of panicky chatter coming in over the comm receiver, and the sensor displays were already showing the bright contacts of other control ships closing in on their location. They were picking up speed again, pulling the much lighter and more maneuverable crew module into a spralling corkscrew trajectory to avoid the first blasts of incoming gunfire.

"That was different. Casualties of war," Diana ground out.

"Really. Because it seems to me like they both just made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time." Siria shrugged, seemingly unperturbed even as gunfire streamed past one of the cockpit windows.

Diana knew this was probably not the best time to be bothering their pilot, but goddmmit she wasn't going to let the loss of another fellow soldier go unacknowledged. "Akande was trying to help us!"

"Yes, and I'm sure those skullfaces thought they were, too. It's a rough galaxy, Specialist. You may as well get used to it now." For some reason, they weren't heading for the Relay, but rather back down to Janus. It was slowly starting to dawn on the ex-Marine that she was very much no longer in control of this situation. "The turians can just pick us off at the relay or out on the tundra, but if we ditch somewhere near the city we might be able to lose them. Now, if you want to make yourself useful, get aft and bring everyone up to speed."

...

Turian Army Base 'Janus Central'
11:47, 16 January 2185 ASC (13:28 Local Time)

Jogging back out into the Ossuary courtyard, Elizabeth realized immediately how Admiral Rexa had made it past Teron and her security people- the Captain clearly had other things on her mind.

"Shepard! Garrus! We got a problem!" Args motioned to the holographic tactical map being projected from one of her men's omnis, currently displaying five or six contacts marked with yellow Hierarchy chevrons closing in on a single bright-purple glyph that was itself drawing perilously close to the rendered Janusian surface. "One of our patrol cutters just dropped out of comms on a routine stop. Now we're picking up wreckage and we got a contact heading right for- fucklookOUT!"

Teron and Shepard both dived to the ground as something metallic and incredibly fast shot through the cloud cover directly overhead, the eerie silence of its passage broken by the shattering roar of a sonic boom a full two or three seconds afterward. As the assembled forces got to their feet it circled around and made another pass, this time traveling slow enough to be recognizable as the fore section of a civilian bulk freighter with its braking thrusters firing at full-tilt before it disappeared below the skyline and made a muffled, drawn-out crash.

Argovigian's left hand went immediately to the small receiver unit clipped to one of her auditory tines. "Squad Four says they've got a visual on where that thing went down- abandoned freight yard about four blocks east-northeast of here. Ceera, think you could spare the Commander and her friend some proper guns?"


I. C. S. Cramen Lines – Celaeno IV, Entering Turian Airspace
11:47, 16 January 2185 ASC (13:28 Local Time)

Faur was just starting to recover her equilibrium when they hit atmosphere, the crew module shaking and rattling as it pulled through a complicated series of combination braking/evasive maneuvers that its designers had never in a million years considered. The low, bumpy Janusian skyline swerved past the cockpit windows first in one direction, then another, then was heading directly at them for a few terrifying moments before Siria leveled them out and cut the lift thrusters completely. They dropped into something that could only barely be called a controlled crash, kicking up a fountain of sparks as the module sheared off its own landing gear and skidded across a section of open lot dotted with garbage and a few armored turian corpses- wait, corpses?

"What the fuck?"

Diana stared, open-mouthed for a good few seconds trying to parse the grisly scene outside. That was when the asari pilot next to her unzipped the front of her bulky flight suit, demagnetized a Carnifex heavy pistol from the light military body armor she was wearing underneath, and shot the ex-Marine square in the head.


Area Six Freightway, Janus Free Port
11:50, 16 January 2185 ASC (13:31 Local Time)

"Dellius, any luck on bypassing that lock?"

"I think I just- wait, it's opening on its… down! Get down!"

"Del's hit!"

"No! Just-"

"Run! I'll cover-"

"Fuck! We just lost half the first-response squad!" Teron yelled, as the comm signal broadcast from her omni dissolved into screams and gunfire, then eerie silence.

"'Lost', what do you mean 'lost'?" Shepard replied through gritted teeth as she spun their MAKO through yet another ninety-degree turn down a refuse-choked service road.

"I mean they're fuckin' dead! That freighter's got some kind of anti-personnel guns on it, cut the boarding party to shreds!"

"What in- Can we get gunship support?" Garrus cut in from the copilot's seat beside his commander.

"Negative on that one. There's human fighters hovering all along the DMZ, and we're picking up live missile batteries. We don't want to provoke 'em, otherwise we'd've had surface-to-orbit fire on that freighter as soon as it got in range."

"What the hell?" Elizabeth glared at the blinking dot that represented their position on the cockpit display screen, willing it to advance faster. She couldn't fault Args' aerial streetmap for accuracy, but all that did was confirm there was no easy way to get where they were going. "Garrus. Any luck on raising Schmidt?"

"Nothing." He tapped a few more commands into the MAKO's comm panel and frowned at the results. "I don't get it. They're receiving us, they just keep sending back error packets with no error code! It's the same with the Normandy!"

"Dammit! Wait-" She slammed on the brakes, yanking them to a halt in front of another, narrower, even grimier alleyway between two sheet-metal warehouses. It was too narrow for the MAKO by about a third, certainly, but according to the map only about fifty meters through to the crash site while the drivable road looped around for another several hundred. "I think we can get through here!"

The three of them disembarked as quickly and quietly as they could, Captain Argovigian unslinging what might once have been a Claymore heavy shotgun underneath its assorted heat-sinks and tune-up mods while herself and Vakarian made do with borrowed Phaeston assault rifles. Shepard took point, padding at a half-jog down the alleyway. Halfway down it jinked to the right for a few meters; she skidded to a halt and leaned around the corner, only to jerk her head back a split-second later as a hail of gunfire splashed against her helmet shields.

"Shepard! Look! Up there!"

Teron waved to one of the electrical transformer boxes jutting out into the alleyway and Elizabeth wasted no time in clambering up on top of it, then onto a section of protruding drainage pipe and finally up onto the outbuilding's grimy sheet-metal roof.

She dropped flat and pulled herself forward until she could just see over the edge. The freighter's crew module had skidded to a halt against the concrete wall on the opposite end of the yard, completely blocking the main entrance and leaving about a thirty-meter stretch of mostly-clear asphalt between it and the alleyway- asphalt dotted with armored turian bodies and a few ominous patches of royal blue. The crew airlock facing them had been jammed nearly closed, but something that very much resembled the barrel and targeting system of an SAMC heavy gun turret protruded from the opening and tracked slowly back and forth. Stacking up well away from the hatchway hadn't been enough to save the turian forward party- with that gun's nearly hundred-eighty-degree field of fire, they had done everything right and still hadn't stood a chance.

Shepard brought her Phaeston into firing position and squeezed off a few shots that bounced harmlessly off of the tinted plexiglas of the hatch's top section, cursing herself and Garrus under her breath for charging off without bothering to pick up a rocket launcher or even a few hand grenades.

"All right," she muttered, silently praying to whoever was listening that her shields, armor, and metallized skeleton could hold out against automatic gunfire long enough for her to get off a few shots in return. "Garrus, Args, I'm going to need to two of you to draw their fire as long as you can. Gonna try and jump down and- wait!"

Two of what Shepard had mistaken for turian bodies slumped behind a shipping container were up and moving around- a tall, heavyset male with a sniper rifle clipped to his dorsal hump and a much thinner female, both of their features obscured under full-body hardsuits. The female's left hand glowed indigo with leaked eezo radiation and she reached out to her companion, his kinetic barriers briefly flaring with additional power. As Shepard watched, incredulous, the sniper sprinted flat-out for a bundle of steel I-beams halfway across the tarmac and marginally closer to the crew module, heedless of the machine-gun fire hammering away at his barriers. Just as they gave out completely he dived, rolled, and came up on his knees in cover, already unclipping his sniper rifle and landing a good three shots into the narrow section of open hatchway.

He didn't seem to have hit anything living- which wasn't surprising, given that basically every stationary gun produced in Council space came equipped with an armored frontplate for precisely that reason- but it was enough to pull the gunner's attention back away from the rusted-out container he had come from just as the Cabalist dived out to follow him. Shepard unloaded another few rounds into the upper hatch section to try to keep the heat off of her- for all the good it did- but as she dashed past the alien calmly flicked open her omnitool interface and hurled a brilliant globe of ionized plasma with the obvious intention of frying the gun's mass-effect coils. The overload connected, and for a brief split-second the stattaco whine of accelerating metal cut off. By the time it resumed, the Cabalist was already well out of the way. The entire maneuver had taken the both of them a little over three seconds.

Are they nuts?, Shepard found herself wondering as the two seemed to pause for breath and to regain their bearings. For all of their back-and-forth the turians had managed to gain maybe two or three meters of range on the crew module and whoever was inside manning that gun was obviously content to stall for time- probably to allow some unknown number of comrades to slip out a rear exit the Commander couldn't spot. There was also the question of what exactly the turians planned to do to the ship once they got to it, as if they'd had grenades or anything else that might have stood a chance against hatch plating they would've used them by now. Then her Cerberus-enhanced vision picked up the telltale shimmer of an Infiltrator cloak moving slowly but purposefully along the freight yard's east wall. All right. Forget the guys running around drawing fire. Whoever's under that cloak sneaking around with minimal shielding is the one who's nuts.

"Come on, they're gonelet'sgo!"

The Commander tore her attention away from what the turians were doing long enough to catch sight of two humans and a salarian dashing hunched-over out from behind the wreck. All three of them were wearing merc-model armor with odd, red-and-black-striped cloth armbands in place of military or private security insignia, and as far as Shepard was concerned that made them the most likely inhabitants of the cargo module- and perpetrators of the slaughter outside. She acted accordingly, drawing a bead on the human point man and opening up with her Phaeston. He stumbled back and hunched over as his shields flared blue, and a moment later another stream of automatic gunfire joined hers from Garrus's position.

The point man stumbled and fell, the salarian's omnitool lit up bright orange as the human at the rear glowed with biotic energy- then something that could only have been Teron's shotgun roared twice in quick succession and reduced both of them in turn to a sort of thick, varicolored miasma that quickly settled to the pavement beneath.

When Elizabeth looked back to the freighter, a telltale shimmer was already coalescing over the manual release on the freighter's outer hull. She caught the semi-transparent outline of another turian brandishing a serrated mexta blade before he disappeared into the interior of the vessel and the stationary gun abruptly stopped firing.

Shepard dropped down off the rooftop and ran full-out for the crew module, knowing without looking back that Garrus and Teron were right behind her. She had the advantage of augmentations and superior conditioning but the two turians who had been drawing fire were closer; they wound up reaching the module at about the same time, just as the sporadic, muffled gunfire audible from inside petered out and the corpse of a female human in civilian coveralls was hurled clean through the cockpit windows in a glowing biotic field, missing most of her head.

In eerie unison the two Hierarchy soldiers spun around and leveled their rifles, only to lower them moments later when they recognized Elizabeth and her comrades. "Commander… Commander Shepard?" The female Cabalist shook her head as if to clear it, and pulled her free arm across her chest in a salute.

"One and the same." Shepard waved at the open airlock and the heavy machine gun sitting inside it next to a slumped-over batarian in a pool of rust-colored blood. "You guys need a hand?"

Two more figures stepped into the airlock just after she had spoken- the turian with the dagger and either a human woman or an asari dressed in Hierarchy-green armor. The turian looked to his comrade and gave her a brief nod. "I think we've got this area locked down."

"Good work." Teron Argovigian stepped forward and the assembled boarding party pulled off a series of crisp Turian Army salutes. "Shepard, I'd like you to meet some of my best guys. This here's Rijus Ta'nin," the Cabalist gave them a brief nod and- if it was possible- stood up a little bit straighter than her already parade-perfect stance, "Dinalix Pollius," she gestured to the marksman, who was currently taking a seat on an overturned crate, "Adrian Sevarra", the other male with the Infiltrator cloak gave her a quick wave, "and Siriacus T'Chruscov." Shepard found herself wondering exactly how the powerfully-built asari had managed to acquire a turian given name, a human surname with an asari ancestral prefix, and a position in the Turian Auxiliaries; she found it still more puzzling just how said asari had managed to infiltrate the crew module when she had been fairly certain the only infiltrator cloak she had spotted had been Adrian's, but concluded Siriacus must have found another way in.

Garrus stepped forward and knelt by one of the bodies nearby. "These guys were the rest of your unit?" He tried to roll the dead turian over from the undignified heap in which he'd fallen, then abandoned the effort when it became clear that the kid's dorsal plates and most of his spine were going to remain on the pavement regardless.

"Yeah." The sniper- Pollius- walked over and shook his head, expression unreadable. "The Captain pulled everybody on her detail from the best units all over the Hierarchy. They… we… always figured we'd go down doing something more important than this."

"Damn." Suddenly aware of her own alien presence among the group, Shepard drew her Phaeston and stepped inside of the crew module to begin a cursory sweep of the area, although she really needn't have bothered. The turians had been thorough and incredibly precise in the elimination of the rest of the freighter's crew by gunshot and blunt-force trauma- if 'crew' they even really were, given that all of them were kitted out with the sort of gear one usually only found on the more expensive end of the mercenary pool and were proudly displaying the same red-and-black armbands she had glimpsed previously.

The bridge proved to be in surprisingly good condition, aside from the gaping hole blown in the cockpit window. Concerned that the original crew might have attempted to contact confederates on the surface Shepard spared a moment to search through the comm station logs.

In 1884, citadel diplomatic personnel met on Rannoch to change Organic supremacy. First words said was that only 1 race could be used in Citadel to not change the 1 mind Conclave. So they applied the 1 race and ignored the other 3 races. The Conclave system was wrong then and it proved wrong today. This a major lie has so much evil feed from it's wrong. No species in Galaxy has machine mind, it proves every suit rat a liar.

Children will be blessed for Killing Of Usurper Quarians Who Ignore 4 Simultaneous Races Same Council Protection. Practicing Evil ONEness – Upon Citadel Space OF ORGANICS. Evil Quarian Crime VS The Civilized Races. Supports Lie Of Integration. Geth Enablers Are Most Dumb. Not Geth Race Except Dead

the text rambled on and on past the edge of the input window, eventually disappearing beneath a slew of red 'TRANSMISSION FAILURE' errors- a hastily-typed manifesto that nobody would ever read.

Shepard had heard about outfits like this, both in Alliance security briefings and on the Extranet news- factions in Citadel politics that were far from happy to see the Quarian Conclave restored even to provisional associate status. Some of them, disproportionately but by no means entirely human, still blamed the quarians for the creation of the geth and everything that had come after from Eden Prime to Mars; conversely some of the fringier synthetic-rights activists held them to blame for the Morning War and the collapse of the Geth Collective; still others took the Fleet to task for the same myriad of reasons people had been demonizing and marginalizing each other ever since the dawn of intelligent life in the universe.

She supposed it had only been a matter of time before that sentiment turned in a more violent direction, and in between the freighter crew's paramilitary loadout, a recent documentary about the engineering of the Migrant Fleet freeze-framed on a technical schematic of the liveship Rayya on one of the monitors, and the ominous clicking that emanated from her armor's built-in Geiger counter whenever she got too close to a crate just behind the tech station this outfit had been well on its way.

That Blackwatch officer who had tipped her off might have gotten their target wrong, but he'd been right where it mattered- if she hadn't investigated, something very bad would have gone down on Janus. If the turians and I hadn't investigated, Elizabeth mentally amended, remembering that Captain Argovigian and her men had also been contacted. And the Alliance were the ones who almost had her tossed in the drunk tank for her trouble.

At the sound of footsteps on shattered plexiglas Elizabeth spun around, Phaeston in firing position, but immediately lowered her weapon when she recognized the Captain and T'Chruscov. "We got some tech specialists outside to deal with that bomb," Argovigian said, "Figure we should clear out and let them work."

"Roger that." Shepard followed her back out into the hallway, stepping gingerly around the corpse of a turian with a red band around her forearm, a bloody mess where her trachea used to be, and a bandoleer full of unused grenades. She'd had enough training with nuclear devices to know that they required a fairly convoluted process in order to actually detonate and typically failed dead, but there was no telling how much intentional or unintentional volatility the anti-Fleeters had programmed into the detonation trigger itself.

"They were trying to buy time and escape," T'Chruscov muttered more to herself than to anyone else as they stepped back out through the airlock. Over the English narration provided by her helmet Shepard realized that the asari was in fact speaking Turii with what she was just starting to recognize as an upper-class Palavenus accent. Curiouser and curiouser. "they had to be going somewhere. Somewhere nearby."

"I don't know about that," Elizabeth replied, "Maybe they were just trying to slip into the city and lose us."

"I don't think so." Teron held out her omnitool and displayed a section of Turii numerals and dates. "I've had the staff back at base running the registration on that freighter and we got a match. The same company owns a warehouse three blocks from here- lots of shipments coming in, fuck all comin' out."

Elizabeth whistled, impressed. "I'm starting to see why Garrus likes you so much. Any news on the Alliance?"

"Holding position; we're trying not to provoke them so it's a ground game from here on out."

"Damn." With virtually an entire half of the planet under their ownership, the Systems Alliance had been free to spend the last thirty years doing nothing but expanding MacGowan Base into a major depot for operations all along the border colonies. If it came to blows, the human forces outnumbered the turians nearly four to one, and everyone on the moon knew it.

If it came to blows… Sometimes it baffled Shepard that the top brass back on Earth still considered that a real possibility; other times, like when she had to listen to Sparatus and Anderson going at it on the Citadel live feeds, that outlook made a disturbing amount of sense. She tapped her own omni to try and raise Schmidt's people one more time, and was rewarded with a few seconds of ear-splitting electronic garble for her trouble before the channel cut off of its own accord.

"So I guess it's up to us," Sevarra cut in as he jogged over along with Garrus and the rest of his unit. "As usual."

"You don't seem too upset about that. Looking for payback?" Garrus asked, then bobbed his head sadly, "Won't end well."

"We're not looking for payback," Teron replied, gesturing out over the freight yard where turian medics in white coveralls were busy policing the bodies of the first response team. Shepard noticed that while several patches of bright blue gore were already being power-washed down with disinfectant, the medics were making a careful task of collecting and sorting any fragments of bone and plate into specially-marked bags. "We're just tryin' to do our duty and make sure this doesn't happen again."

Shepard nodded and led the way back towards the MAKO. "Then let's go."


Cramen Lines Distribution Center D-5, Janus Free Port
11:56, 16 January 2185 ASC (13:37 Local Time)

During the ride over Args had been able to radio back to the Army compound and acquire reasonably up-to-date aerial photographs of the warehouse the anti-Fleeters were presumably using as their base of operations. Garrus would have preferred to go in with live aerial recon and gunship support, or just go the Navy route and reduce the whole place to a crater from low orbit, but with human fightercraft scrambling on the border to unknown ends neither of those were an option. So when Shepard brought their transport to a screeching halt half a block away he pulled the map up on his eyepiece, shouldered his Vindicator rifle- Spirits, it'd been a while since he'd held one of those- and broke into a run across the filthy asphalt along with the rest of their impromptu assault squad.

"Sevarra, T'Chruscov, pull ahead and give us targets!" Args barked, and no sooner had it been said than the two soldiers activated their Infiltrator cloaks and disappeared from view.

"Good thinking," Shepard cut in from her position beside him, pointing at a rickety sheet-metal fuel depot between them and their target. "Garrus, I want you up on that rooftop and ready to cover us. The rest of you, on me!"

"On it."

He broke off and easily scaled the ladder bolted onto the depot's wall, any noise drowned out by the constant drone of distant traffic and the irregular buzzing of someone's cobbled-together electrical transformer. He pulled himself slowly along the rooftop, moving carefully to keep his profile low while preventing his armor keelplate from scraping against the rough surface. As he did, he heard Adrian Sevarra's voice crackle across their shared channel. "Two guards, in the open. Suited up and armed, like they don't care who sees them. Windows are boarded up, just one door that's too small for freight."

"Line 'em up and wait for my signal," Teron replied. "Keep it quiet."

Garrus made it into visual range of the building- two stories, the foundation ancient concrete and the rest poorly-bolted-together sheet metal, all of it stained with rust, grime, and illegible graffiti. True to Sevarra's word there were two soldiers in full body armor with assault rifles standing watch outside- batarians or male humans, it was impossible to tell from this distance- seemingly unafraid of discovery. They kept turning to check each other's corners, indicating to his detective's brain that they had indeed gone through some form of proper military training either in the Alliance Marines or one of the more expensive merc outfits.

Garrus flipped open his engineering omni and scrolled through it for the program the Cabalist technician had distributed during the ride over. It, in turn, scanned through the local communications frequencies until it found the sentries' biosign telemetry, and broadcast a loop of the same three seconds of nominal readout directly overtop.

He tapped the 'acknowledge' icon just above the comm interface and Adrian Sevarra materialized behind the man on the left, pressed a silenced light machine gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. The other guard moved to draw his weapon, only for it to be wrenched from his hands by a shimmering biotic field and slammed stock-first into his throat. As he doubled over in pain, another armored figure faded back into visibility and wrenched his neck nearly a hundred and eighty degrees. They hadn't even had time to call out.

"Front's clear, everybody move!" Garrus watched as Elizabeth, Args, and their assembled forces dashed hunched-over across the alleyway, pressed themselves against the front of the building, and disappeared around to the side. Calmly, carefully, he drew a bead on the boarded-up pedestrian entrance, steadied his breathing, and waited for the signal.


"Pollius, behind that machine! Shepard, Ta'nin, stack up on me! Sevarra, Chruscov get on the other side! Move move move!"

Captain Argovigian, the Commander was beginning to realize, had a mildly annoying tendency to step on Shepard's significantly more-experienced toes. Knowing what she did about turians, however, Elizabeth very much doubted it was in any way personal and had to admit that the Captain knew this unit a whole lot better than she herself did. So, instead of saying anything, she just chinned the acknowledgment contact in her helmet and slammed herself into position next to the warehouse's rear freight doors along with the others.

"Bypassing the lock… done." Rijus cut in, her omnitool glowing orange even as the hand beneath it gathered eezo radiation.

"Three-two-one breach!"

At Teron's order the freight doors ground open to admit a hail of gunfire from terrorist infantry set up all throughout the maze of empty munitions crates and miscellaneous scrap that occupied most of the warehouse floor. Shepard was expecting the turians to fall back, split up, and try to flank their position somehow- that's what she would have had Marines do, anyway, although she herself probably could have made a good solid dent in the enemy with a direct assault provided she still had access to Spectre-grade equipment- but that wasn't what happened. Instead, a ripple of defensive blue energy washed over the entire unit as they started to push forward, Adrian and T'Chruscov once again slipping out of sight as soon as they had an opening and the rest picking off the first line of defenders with eerie precision whenever a particular terrorist paused to vent their weapon.

She had to admit the occupants of the warehouse weren't slouches when it came to their equipment or their training- a lot of it looked to be SAMC-surplus in fact, and they could hit what they were aiming at. But the turians simply exceeded them in trigger discipline and precision marksmanship. As soon as there was an opening they spotted it, and put a target down with two shots where a Marine would have had to fire ten.

Some of the terrorists were breaking off now, trying to bob and weave through the scrap piles to circle back and hit what appeared to be the turians' unprotected rear only to be picked off by precision shots from outside or invisible foes cutting across their path. One particularly brave krogan even managed to stand up to the assault long enough to prime and throw an antipersonnel grenade right at the tightly-packed assault team, only for it to loop back around in a biotic aura and detonate directly on top of him. The three humanoids and a turian who had been sharing the position with him tried to make a hasty retreat back through the front of the building, and Shepard let them run- through the lobby, out into the street, and right into Garrus's crosshairs.

It had been a good long while since she'd used anything other than her personal stash of Spectre-grade equipment, but Elizabeth was really growing to like the Phaeston assault rifle.

"Four targets down outside." The flanged voice in Shepard's helmet was quiet and steady, but she detected concern underneath. "Seeing thermals in the front office. Looks like they're burning something."

"Sevarra, find a way up there and give him targets, we need to shut that down," Teron replied as she and Rijus Ta'nin approached a corner of the warehouse walled off from the rest with sheet metal bearing the hasty inscription "REMENBER EDEN" in blood-red spraypaint. "Pollius, pull up to the doorway, T'Chruscov, cover the lobby and get ready to support Sevarra. Rijus, this looks like a workshop and we know these guys love bombs, I want you ready to damp this whole fucking area when I give the word."

"Hmm." The rail-thin Cabalist looked up from her omnitool for a moment before she went back to running calculations. "It'd probably help their cause if these guys could at least learn how to sp-" She was abruptly cut off by the sound of something large and mechanical bearing down on their position from the other side of the wall, "-shit look OUT!"

The thin sheet metal simultaneously collapsed and tore apart to admit a behemouth of a wheeled vehicle painted construction-site yellow: one of the early-model MAKOs the Navy had recently begun stripping the guns off of and selling as cargo haulers. The thing bore down directly for Teron and her men, but they didn't scatter. Both Ta'nin and T'Chruscov ensnared it in blue energy, barely managing to slow it enough for Pollus to land two shots that spiderwebbed the armored windshield, and then with a surprising grace that belied her compact frame the Captain lept up and rolled onto the vehicle's hood.

The thing fishtailed, forcing Shepard to dodge out of the way as the suddenly blind driver tried to avoid knocking a hole clean through one of the outer walls, but Teron somehow managed to hold on and kept landing punch after punch on the front engine compartment, doing a surprising amount of damage to the metal hood. Something sparked inside as it turned wildly again, the wheels on the far side pitching clear off the ground, and at that moment it was wrapped in another shimmering blue aura just as Pollius blew out one of the tires. The MAKO tipped further to one side, and Shepard finally grasped what the turian soldiers were trying to do. She dashed forward, gave it one final shove with all of the strength her enhanced musculoskeletal system could muster, and watched in satisfaction as it finally overbalanced and crashed over onto one side, taking out the flimsy plastic dividing wall to the lobby in the process.

Elizabeth wasted no time in climbing up the vehicle's exposed understructure, both to get a better view of the potential carnage and to get a start on opening the cockpit hatch; only to find that Teron, Sevarra, and T'Chruscov were already there and apparently waiting for her. She knelt in front of the hatch controls.

"Garrus. I need you to remote in and override-"

"Don't bother." Teron flicked her right wrist at an odd downward angle and slammed her fist directly into the lock. There was a small explosion as the entire mechanism disintegrated into a small pit that glowed faintly red around the edges, and the Captain shot her an amused look. "You ever seen a pair of krogan shotgauntlets, Shepard? Those an' ryncol are probably the only good things to ever make it off of Tuchanka." That last comment didn't particularly sit well with Elizabeth, but now was hardly the time. Instead she drew her Phaeston, grabbed the hatch in her off-hand, wrenched it open and dropped down.

She almost landed on a young, well-dressed batarian strapped into one of the seats in the troop compartment between an armored asari and salarian, all of them looking somewhat worse for the wear from their tumble. He looked more terrified than anything else and for a brief moment she thought the terrorists might have taken hostages before she spotted the armband. In that moment of hesitation he went for the insensate salarian's rifle… only to have it wrench itself out of his grasp and snap into Siriacus T'Chruscov's outstretched hand. Shepard wasted no time in leaving him for the turians and dashing forward into the cockpit, where she spotted a solitary human in the driver's seat and slammed the butt of her Phaeston into the back of his head just as he was reaching for the handgun magnetized to his thigh. She took a moment to confirm that he was unresponsive but still breathing- albeit shallowly- while waiting for the sound of gunfire from the troop compartment, but it never came.

"I would've just shot him and been done with it," Garrus's voice flanged in her earpiece, "He'll just end up getting legal counsel from the Alliance and never give up useful intel."

"Somehow, I doubt it." Slinging the driver none-too-gently over her shoulder, Elizabeth made her way back to find T'Chruscov and Adrian Sevarra standing over all three terrorists who in turn had been bound hand and foot with plastic zipties. The scout gave her a brief nod. "These guys have a lot to answer for. I wanna make sure they do."

Very suddenly he slammed his armored boot into the batarian's midsection, and Shepard considered whether or not she would have to intervene- she'd seen Marines do a lot worse to batarian POWs and get away with it, but she'd never been in a position where she could easily put a stop to it- but as abruptly as it had begun his assault ceased and he shook his head. "Come on, help me get these murdering bastards outside."

"Got it."

She stepped forward and pitched the uncosncious pilot upward into Teron's waiting grasp just before Sevarra did the same with the batarian. The other two followed soon after, just as something large and fast screamed by overhead and Garrus's voice flanged over her helmet speakers. "Shepard, looks like help just arrived."

She stepped out into the street outside to come face-to-cockpit with a Turian Navy Essivo drop ship already in the process of disgorging a platoon of turian soldiers and a rather unhappy-looking Colonel Schmidt.

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Author's Notes:

If you're thinking that for as much of a mess they made in orbit with oddly little opposition from the turians, these supposedly well-trained paramilitary terrorists kind of went down pretty easily on the ground… well, you're absolutely right. All will soon be made clear, but I imagine people are starting to figure it out already.