Interloper: Chapter 8
When the Normandy finally left the Citadel, we had already received another mission. Shepard had apparently agreed to take Nassana Dantius' request. The transition to the Macedon system was as smooth as ever, but I found myself a little worried. I knew that Nassana's sister was in fact the slaver we had been sent to kill, but Shepard and the others would walk in as if riding to the rescue. If Shepard found out that she had basically been conned into becoming a hitman, I didn't know what she would do, especially with the display in the Presidium lounge.
"Ready to go?" I looked up to find the Commander standing above me in her full armour. "We're gonna need a driver down there."
"You're clearing me for duty again?" This was a chance to intervene, if necessary.
"Dr. Chakwas tells me you've made a full recovery, even those headaches you've been trying to hide from the crew."
"Commander, I…"
"Relax, there's nothing wrong with wanting to get back to the fight. Just next time, don't lie to the lady with the med scanner, okay?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Good, now gear up, and wear your pressure seals, this world's a nasty one." It wasn't long before I sat back in the driver's chair on the Mako. I ran the engine and weapon checks as the rest of the team received a briefing outside. The first to climb in behind me was Liara.
"You're coming on this mission?" I asked, surprised.
"Yes, there are pirates down there enslaving my fellow asari. How could I not come?" her voice seemed stretched, and hard as iron. It wasn't the calm and mellow voice that had talked at length about ruins and caves.
"I just didn't take you for a fighter." I said
"Normally I would agree with you, but I have this pistol, and my biotics, and there are people who need our help."
"Well said." Kaidan slid in, followed by Tali and Shepard. I flipped the engine switches on as the doors opened ahead of us. The murky brown terrain flashed by below us, a flash of grey ahead marked our target. I jammed down on the accelerator and threw the IFV into gear. We lurched out into empty space. I kicked in the jets as we neared the ground. The Mako hit the ground running. Shepard ran through the plan one last time.
"This is a hostage rescue; don't go shooting if you don't have to. The stronghold our target is cooped up in looks pre-fab, unless they've put a lot of effort into it, we can be sure to see this kind of layout." The holographic representation of a squat, two story building splashed over the inside wall. "This segment here should provide us with some cover, Liara, Tali, I want you to stick to this wall like glue. Kaidan and I will push along here and do a sweep to the back wall. Liddle, you'll be covering us."
"Commander, this thing won't fit through those doors."
"On foot, Liddle."
"Yes, of course, on foot." The feeling of nervousness started to leach back into my gut. The Mako filled up with silence as we roared along the muddy landscape. "This is it, the compound should be just over this ridge." The Mako bounded over the rise and into a flurry of small arms fire. Kaidan lit up the defenders first with the machine gun, then with the cannon. I ground to a halt just before the closed doors. Shepard popped the hatch. The thick, ammonia laden air roiled in through the cabin.
"Go, go, go!" one after the other, the team slid out of the troop compartment. After I locked down the controls, I followed them. I withdrew my Lancer, the weight felt comforting.
"Tali, the door." Shepard barked over the comm. The quarian ran forward and began to run a bypass on the door. The atmosphere on his planet was oppressive, even through the suit. I felt like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed from all sides. I checked the seals on my helmet. All clear.
"Got it." The doors cracked wide enough to be forced open. The team moved forward into a small airlock. The air cycled out the toxic ammonia and let us out into an empty hallway.
"Alright, the main area should be just through there." Shepard pointed at the door at the other end of the hall. "Stack up, be ready to take fire, remember your positions." We all huddled beside the closed door. "Now!" Kaidan was first through the door. He had boosted his biotic barriers enough to shrug off the hail of fire that met him. Shepard snapped off a quick sniper rifle shot around the corner and looked over at me. "Liddle, you're up."
This is it. I grasped my rifle and bolted through the doors. I also had a second to scope out the room before I began to take fire. Ahead of me, Alenko was engaged in a biotic duel with the asari slaver. Inside my helmet, a shield indicator light flashed a warning. I sprinted hunched over to the nearest cover. I slammed down behind a crate just in time. With a sound like breaking glass, my shields collapsed. I saw Tali and Liara break for their wall. I blind fired over the crate to try and give them some cover. The slavers returned fire, their rounds clawed into the crate. I scrabbled to find better cover under the blistering assault. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a slaver lining up a shot on the distracted Kaidan. I let loose on the sniper, who dove back into cover.
Sheppard moved into the room, firing on the slavers. A shot caught the asari in the shoulder and spun her around. Freed from his duel, Alenko began launching biotic blasts at the slavers still in cover. I hazarded a peek over the crate and let off a short volley of shots. Across the room, Liara pulled a slaver forward, setting him up for Tali's shotgun. Somewhere in the back of the compound, a small fire had started. Through the smoke, I saw the outline of another merc. I thrust out my arm and activated my omni-tool. The mini-fabber fired up, launching a spherical glob of incendiary gel. The glob splattered on the merc's shields and ignited. I unloaded on the distracted enemy. He went down hard and stayed down.
"Clear!" Sheppard yelled. I looked around. There was no movement in the compound. "Split up, look for the captive asari."
I moved forward carefully. The evidence I wanted was in the back office. The door opened smoothly. I snuck over to the desk and booted up the terminal. The screen was locked, so I deployed an omni-gel worm to autohack the system. The silvery fluid worked its way into the hardware and began its work. The extranet had been aflood with all kinds of useful omni-tool programs.
The hack only took a few seconds to run. The terminal opened to a directory. I scrolled through, trying to find anything that would be useful. The asari had kept meticulous notes and shipping manifests. I gave up looking for the specific evidence. I quickly copied over all of the files and deleted the originals.
"Anything here?" Kaidan asked from the door.
"No, looks like they wiped everything when we attacked."
"Damn. The rest of the compound's empty too. I don't think they even kept captives here." There was a sudden burst of gunfire. Kaidan and I rushed up the ramp to the source. In one of the side rooms, a massive krogan had Shepard up against the wall by the neck.
"You have the gall to attack us, in our base!" the krogan shook Sheppard like a doll. Inside the room, Liara had her gun trained on the krogan.
"He came at us from behind a crate. Grabbed Shepard by the neck before we could get a clean shot. He's been ranting ever since." She said quickly.
"And I'll snap her neck if you so much as twitch." The krogan barked back. Behind him, Shepard uttered a strained gurgle. "What!" the krogan loosened his grip.
"I said, you talk too much." She drew her pistol and shoved it beneath the krogan's head plate. She fired until the merc crumpled in a heap. Shepard dropped to the floor and gasped for air. She straightened after a wave of coughs and wiped gore from her face.
"Let's wrap this up then." She said.
Once back on the Normandy, the team split up. Shepard left to contact Nassana Dantius, her neck already showing signs of bruising. She brushed aside any attempt to help aside from a light medigel application. Kaidan had overheated his amp, so he headed to the medbay. Joker had picked something up he thought would interest Liara, while Tali had to run a diagnostic on her suit, which left me alone. I found a secluded spot to begin sifting through the data. A lot of it was just chatter, call logs and invoices from within the slaver ring, but a few files clearly implicated Nassana's involvement. I package those and encrypted the rest. That left the decision of what to do with them. There was always blackmail, but then again Nassana had sent a spectre after the last attempted blackmailer and that was her own sister. After some thought, I decide to turn it over to the authorities. If her business practices on Illium were any indication, the galaxy was better off with her rotting in jail.
I sent a copy of the files to Captain Bailey of C-Sec and the reporter, Emily Wong. That would ensure that something would be done. I closed down the messenger program and broke down my rifle and armour for cleaning. After it shined like new, I left the barracks in search of food.
The mess hall was quieter than usual when I arrived. The crew was huddled around the extranet terminal in the back of the room. I wandered over, but was quickly hushed when I tried to ask what was going on. The terminal was playing a live newscast from the Citadel.
"…lliance reps have not yet made a comment. If you're just joining us, this is Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani, reporting on the sudden disappearance of Alliance Admiral Kahoku. The admiral was last seen this morning on Zakera Ward before departing by unregistered shuttle."
"Wait, the admiral just disappeared?" I asked.
"Just took up and left." Corporal Steiner commented. A cold feeling began to grip at my chest. Had I been too late? "Took his entire flotilla with him."
"Wait, what?"
"He took his flotilla with him, when he left the Citadel. Something about 'not taking these terrorist threats lightly.' He switched off his IFFs past the relay and vanished."
So he's still alive. But what was going on? He should have gone into hiding.
"Oh."
"Yeah, the turians are furious. They say the Alliance needs to keep a tighter leash on its admirals. The batarians are pretty upset too, since Kahoku's never been there biggest fan. They're worried this is going to end up being retaliation to that attempted takeover of an asteroid over Terra Nova."
"The batarians didn't actually get the asteroid did they?" I asked.
"No," Steiner smiled jaggedly, "someone tipped off the garrison, those terrorists didn't even touch ground."
The terminal was switched over to a sports broadcast and a stack of MRE's were prepared for lunch.
"What do you think set him off?" Jenkins said as he took a seat across from me. "Do you really think he's going after the batarians?"
"I honestly have no clue. Guy was a war hero, right, I don't think he'd have gone rogue without a good reason."
"Maybe, I know I'd be mad after what those batarians pulled though. You know they're saying they wanted to fly that rock into Terra Nova's capital city. It would have killed millions if the garrison wasn't ready for them. If I had a fleet I'd be ready for some payback."
"Well Rick, I guess it's lucky you don't have a fleet." Steiner joked. "We'd be in a different war every other week."
"I think I'm going to see the Doc," I said to no one in particular, "my shoulder's been killing me since that firefight."
"Alright, see you."
The medlab was almost empty. Kaidan sat on one of the beds with a book in his hands. He nodded in my direction as I walked in. Doctor Chakwas was talking into the intercom.
"No, Commander, you will not 'just be fine' a krogan had you suspended by your neck and Lieutenant Alenko tells me you were already showing signs of severe bruising. Now either you come down here or I come upstairs with a heavy tranquilizer and a shortage of patience." There was a muffled sound from the other end before Shepard spoke.
"Fine, I'll be down once I place a few more calls."
"Good, now you'll have to excuse me, I have someone here." She turned to look at me. "Ah, Deputy Liddle, how can I help you?"
"It's my shoulder, it's been hurting since the mission down on the planet."
"Take a seat, Deputy." Chakwas pulled a handheld scanner from a draw. The thing prickled as she ran it over my shoulder.
"Hmm, you have some minor bruising, probably from recoil of your firearm. You'll be fine, though I have some light painkillers if it's bothering you."
"Thanks Doctor, I'll take the pills."
"It's a shot, actually, a subdermal infusion of dilute medigel which will dull the pain for up to a day. You should be well on the way to healing by then." She pressed her omni-tool into my shoulder and sent a jet of the medicine through my skin. The effect was instantaneous, a spreading patch of coolness that wiped out the ache of the bruises.
"Thanks, Doc." I stretched out the wounded muscles. "Feels good as new."
"Oh, Michael, I did not know you were here. Were you hurt on the mission?" I looked up to see Liara standing in the bay with a thick sheath of papers in her arms.
"Nothing serious, just some bruises. What's that you've got there?"
"Joker found these while we were dealing with those slavers." She said. "If I'm right, these are some of the last writings of the asari matriarch, Dilinaga. The Matriarch and twenty seven of her peers left Thessia at the dawn of our interstellar age, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge among the stars. To find some of their surviving records is what every asari archaeologist dreams of."
"So how will you be sure? That these are her writings, I mean."
"Well, they will have to be sent back to Thessia for verification, but I want to at least read them first. The secrets they could hold. I don't think I've been this excited since I was a child."
"So these writings, they're pretty important to your people?" Kaidan asked from his bed.
"Yes, I do not know much of Earth history, but imagine a group of your greatest thinkers banded together in the pursuit of knowledge. Over time, many of them left the group, or went missing, but the foremost of them continued writing well into her twilight years. Then imagine centuries later, these writings are found, perfectly preserved. That is what these mean to my people."
"That's… pretty important then." Kaidan agreed. "We'll have to be on the lookout in the future."
"You needn't," Liara said quickly, "My first priority is stopping Saren and Benezia. I couldn't ask for time to be taken from such an important mission, to have found one is reward enough."
"Nevertheless, there's nothing stopping us from keeping an eye out. At this rate we'll have crossed the galaxy twice before this mission's over." I said.
"Only twice? It feels like we've already done that much." A third voice said from the doorway.
"Commander." Kaidan saluted.
"At ease Lieutenant." She gave the biotic a piercing stare. "Sounds like someone's been telling tales."
"I, ma'am…" Kaidan spluttered, "I was just worried and, um, that krogan had you by the neck." His voice faded off.
"I suppose I'll have to let you off this time Alenko." Shepard said in a tone of mock severity. "but thanks for looking out for me."
"Ah, Commander, you actually came down this time. Take a seat." Chakwas had returned from the back office. I shuffled out of the way to let the Commander get settled. "Hmm, yes, textbook constriction. Don't worry Commander; I'll have you good as new in no time."
"Michael, I was wondering if you wanted to talk again, about the Protheans." Liara was speaking to me again.
"Yeah, I'd like that. There are ruins on Feros right? Anything you know could be helpful on the mission."
"Exactly what I was thinking. Come by later, I have a lot of reading to do."
Dinner that evening was spent relaying the action down on Sharjila to Jenkins and the other marines. Most of them weren't really impressed, they were veterans of far more intense skirmishes, but Jenkins hung on my every word.
"And then what?" he asked as I mentioned the gunshots coming from upstairs.
"Well, then the Lieutenant and I rushed up, guns drawn, ready to face a new enemy. When we got there, this massive krogan had the Commander pinned up against a wall. It's like he had gone mad with rage, he was ranting about how we were the villains. And then, do you know what the Commander did? She says, 'You talk too much,' puts a gun right in his face and pow, drops him."
"Wow." Jenkins, "Have you ever considered writing all this down? You could make a killing with the vids."
"Of course he isn't writing it down. This stuff'll be classified until that asari dies of old age, or the Alliance wants to do a spin job on the First Human Spectre." Steiner interjected.
"You know, you're a real cynic Steiner, you know that." Jenkins replied.
"I fought on Torfan, Jenkins, that'd make a cynic out of even you." The corporal took a bite of a close approximation of mashed potatoes.
"Oh jeez, I didn't know, I'm sorry." Jenkins stumbled about, looking to me for guidance. I had nothing.
"Don't worry, kid, I don't exactly go spreading it around. Look, I don't fault you two your enthusiasm, but you've got to realize war isn't a game you can win or lose; good people are going to die out there." Steiner's normally laid back demeanor was gone. A cold fury echoed from behind her eyes. She finished eating quickly and left for her duty station.
"Do you think I should apologize?" Jenkins asked.
"I think this is something you've just got to let go, man. It's a pretty big sore spot by the looks of things."
"You're probably right."
Author's Note:
Special Bonus Mass Effect: Interloper DLC! Completely free of charge. Hope you enjoyed this more actiony chapter. I have more in the pipe, so let me know how you liked it.
-Liddle Out
