Counterstrike

The ruse held, Vance saw. With her hood up, and with a human body ahead of her, the damage control teams they passed didn't notice the pistol, or her blue hands. In a quarter hour, they'd ascended toward the exterior hull, where the Whitman's ships were stored in their launch tubes.

Below decks, all hell was breaking loose. The small fire had damaged a plasma line, and soon there were calls for a medic on deck sixteen.

They had made it as far as the launch deck, where the prisoner stopped and pushed her against the wall.

"Move and I will kill you," she said. Vance did not doubt it. She suspected that Chief Wilkes or Turner, or both, had been mortally wounded. As though she'd understood Vance's thoughts, the asari said, "I didn't kill them. I don't, if I don't have to. Now put this on."

She thrust a lightly armored flight suit at Vance. They would need it for the launch deck. The crew there wore the suits in case there was an atmosphere breech. While Vance put on her suit, the prisoner pulled up a schematic of the launch deck on a nearby screen. "Here," she said, pointing at a particular ship. "This one."

"I can't unlock it."

"You won't have to," the asari said. The direction of the ship changed. She felt it under her boots. "We're maneuvering," the prisoner told her. And in an instant, the floor rumbled. Vance looked up at the screen.

"They're scrambling the ready fighters," she said.

The asari studied the screen again, and smiled. Somehow she had put on her own flight suit without Vance seeing. "Helmets," she said. "Visors down, understood?"

Vance nodded. "Combat operations," she said. "It would look suspicious if we did otherwise."

Out they went, through the airlock and onto the main deck. Another wing of ready fighters launched, as they turned right out of the lock, and made their way across the deck, using weapons racks and other equipment to screen their movement. They turned right again, and were soon walking toward midships, a busy location right now. Pilots ran to meet the prep crews. Auto-loaders fed weapons into internal launch bays, while semi-autonomous loader mechs lifted empty loading racks clear.

The asari hurried skillfully through the controlled chaos, until she had reached a hatch that stood open on the deck. "Here," she said.

Vance looked down into the interior of the ship, a Phantom. An odd, but interesting choice, she realized. It was a picket ship, a low-energy stealth craft that didn't look like much from the outside, but that were often deployed in screening orbits, where they would patrol on the drift for days or weeks. They were known for running cold for a long time, then powering up and taking out the screening ships of a flotilla. A single squadron of fighters like these could decide a battle before it even began, though with the galaxy at relative peace, they'd never had to. Not yet. Unlike most fighters, they could interact with a Mass Relay.

The asari saw Vance hesitate as she worked through all this information. "I'm not going to kill you," she said. "I need you to get us launch clearance." She gestured toward an interphone console bolted to the deck. "Plug in and see if you can get us free."

Vance hesitated again. Helping the prisoner was treason. And then suddenly the ship jolted sideways, not much, but Vance knew what it was.

"We just took a hit."

"It went off the barriers. We need to get free before one penetrates. Understood?"

Vance did, but still didn't want to believe it. The ship moved again and she was suddenly on her knees by the panel. A flash of light passed over her, and somewhere just beyond the curve of the deck, a hole had opened up. The link cable was in her hand, and in an instant she'd plugged it into the port on the chest of her suit. The ship's serial number and the callsign for the day appeared on the display. She punched the button for the deck chief's station. "Hitman 3-1 to Deck Command, over."

When the answer came, the chief sounded busy. There was an alarm going off in the background, and voices shouting over each other. "This is Deck actual. Make it quick, Hitman 3-1."

Vance said, calm as she could, "Hit man 3-1 requesting immediate launch clearance and release."

"Your squadron isn't tasked, Hitman 3-1. Wait on orders."

Vance cleared her throat. "We were just tasked. Fire mission in sector 819."

"Not on my board, Hitman 3-1. Stand down until—" There was a loud sound on the other end, and the deck shook hard enough that Vance was thrown flat against the console.

"Say again, Deck Actual."

There was no answer but for static. Vance cycled through the channels, but in the outermost hull there was a circle nearly ten meters across. Its edges glowed hot orange, and through it, she saw a patch of stars. She switched the comms to the cockpit feed. "Deck Command just got taken out. We're going to have to blow the clamps manually."

"Understood," came the reply, and an instant later, the asari appeared in the hatchway.

Vance pointed at the hardpoints. "There's three of them, there, there, and there. We'll need to blow them simultaneously.

"Right," the asari said. "We'll set a timer for the first, and blow the second two. Regroup in the airlock."

Vance shook her head and reached for the asari's pistol. In an instant she was in a wrist lock, and a knee had forced all the air from her lungs. Her faceplate was spattered with a roundel of saliva and mucus. The asari grabbed her and threw her into the ship. An instant later, she heard the clamps being armed and then a loud clap as all three separated at nearly the same instant. The fighter began drifting away from its mooring in the interior hull, and bounced against the hard surface of exterior hull, five meters below. As Vance struggled to gain a foothold, the asari appeared in the opening of the airlock. Vance tried to force herself up toward the interior hatch. The asari threw her back against the hard flooring of the fighter, and Vance blacked out for a moment.

When she came to, the hatches were sealed and locked, and she was halfway buckled into the copilot's chair, her writs tied to the armrests to prevent her from interfering.

"Are you quite done?" the asari said. Vance didn't say anything, but was quickly regaining consciousness. Vance nodded as best she could inside the helmet. The cockpit spun a little when she did. "Good," the asari said. She got into the pilot's seat and steadied the fighter inside the hull. Using maneuvering jets, she found a hole in the outer hull large enough for their ship to fit through, and then blasted out into the dark of space.

#

Out ahead, a chaos of drive plumes, debris, weapons and detonations. She watched as the HUD tracked MAC rounds, and torpedoes. Fighter squadrons darted in and out of view, and out in front of them, the massive propulsion flare of an asari dreadnought.

"They're coming from out of the ecliptic," the asari said. "Common attack maneuver in the fleet. Slash from above or below, and then burn hard as you pass straight through the enemy formation."

"High risk," Vance said. "In simulation we regularly inflicted losses of thirty percent."

"High reward," the asari said. "And this isn't a simulation." She studied the situation on the display, and glanced upward through the fighter's canopy. When she'd finished, she put the blast shield down. "We'll be clear of the body of your fleet. We may slip by unnoticed."

Vance looked through the canopy. One of the troop ships had split open, the edges of the rent in its hull, still hot to glowing, and a cloud of debris expanding outward from its interior. Two other ships had been crippled, but the attack had cost the asari fleet, too. A cruiser had plunged through the battlegroup, and exited with its drivecone damaged, a massive jet of gas was venting out through a giant hole in the near side of the ship's hull. The hot plume was nearly a hundred kilometers across. A reactor breech had probably killed the crew already, Vance thought, but as she watched, the cruiser's hull began to glow, red, then orange-yellow, then white. It began to stretch, and then tear, and finally failed completely, ripping the ship apart, stern to bow, sending out a bright flash of light, followed by two rapidly expanding plumes of gas and wreckage, spreading along the axis where the hull had split.

The attack had been meant to scatter the Alliance force, but the fleet had maintained discipline, and though about a third of the ships had taken damage, the bulk of the fleet held together. They were already regrouped around the Whitman, and had executed a hard turn and burn maneuver in pursuit.

Vance took all of this in just a few seconds. Almost as quickly, she understood that the debris field from the battle was concentrated right now, but was rapidly expanding. If they accelerated hard and didn't maneuver too much, they might be taken for a bit of wreckage, or maybe a fighter that had been jettisoned after suffering irrecoverable damage on the flight deck.

No one was going to come looking for her, she realized. At least not for a while, until someone reviewed all the security feeds on the Whitman, provided that the ship survived the coming battle.

By then, they would be long gone.

The asari said, "I thought we might have to wait for them to leave the system, but it appears we're in luck." She began programming the Phantom's VI to direct them to the mass relay.

"You think no one will notice we're missing."

The asari shook her head and unsealed her helmet. "We're out of danger for the moment." The mechanical way that she said this, given their circumstances, suddenly filled Vance with dread. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go, except out the airlock.

She kept quiet, but her vision grew blurry. The asari handed her a rag.

"Tears don't run out of your eyes in microgravity," she said, breaking the silence. "Do you have family?" she asked.

"Why are you asking me that?"

"It's a simple question. Do you?"

Vance didn't answer.

The asari said, "It was just me and my mother. She was—let's say she was distant. Yes? That's something humans say, don't they?" Vance agreed that they did. "And you know who I am. My mother—she's been somewhat forgotten by your historians. With them it's always Commander Shepard this and reapers that. Well, I knew them both, and my mother was right there with them. On the wrong side, of course, which is perhaps why they forget her more often than not." She paused and studied the threat board again. The two fleets were ready to clash again. The asari cruisers had turned on their axis, and were firing while their momentum carried them away from the body of the Alliance battlegroup. "They're firing interdiction rounds. I suspect your comrades will break their pursuit."

The asari went quiet, as though she'd lost the thread of their conversation, and Vance said, "I've read about your mother. She was a hero to your people."

"For a time," the asari said. "Then she was a blight on the asari name. In any case, you know the story about Saren, and Sovereign, and the rest."

"I don't remember it in detail."

"Likely you didn't hear that it was I who killed her. On Noveria." Vance shook her head. The asari went on, "I hadn't seen her in a decade. She'd been working on joint projects between the Intelligence Directorate and the SPECTRE program. I didn't know what that meant at the time. I do now—she'd been chasing leads across the galaxy about rumors of a powerful starship that turned out to be a reaper. Much later, not until minutes before I shot her twice in the chest, did I realize she'd been suffering from the long-term effects of indoctrination. As she died, she said something to me that I didn't understand for a long time. She called me 'Little Wing,' right at the end. It's an old nickname, but she hadn't used it since I was very small." The asari was quiet again for a moment. She said, "A little over ten years ago, I began tracking down leads related to information my mother left behind."

"For you?"

"No—" the asari said. "She began hiding information centuries before I was born, but even then, she knew someone was working against her, trying to sideline her, or silence her, if they could, and she left behind what she knew in caches scattered all over the galaxy. In the end, I was the one who silenced her. Now Matirarch Deniri has effectively silenced me with this war of hers."

"You think the asari went to war to keep your story quiet?"

"Perhaps not directly. There are other forces at work. The krogan are again expanding into the asari and salarian bubbles. The Citadel Council was fragmented and likely to fall apart. The leviathan may have broken their section of the Dekkuna Accords. Not to mention the arms race between your Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy. Somehow you must have known that would work against you."

Vance ignored the jab, and instead asked, "But what do you know that's worth keeping quiet."

The asari looked at the threat board again. Nothing there had changed. "I'm honestly not sure, but I know this. My mother and Deniri were friends. For a time. They were part of a commando unit known as The Lovers—I'll leave you to speculate as to why they called themselves that. After my mother left to join the Intelligence Directorate, the friendship broke, and was never repaired. I suspect there was more to it than just a quarrel. Now that I know what I know, I think Deniri might be concealing something worse than just governmental intrigue."

"Indoctrination?" Vance said. "But how? The reapers are gone."

"Are they?" the asari said. "They're not all accounted for."

The cramped space of the cockpit suddenly felt close and impossibly hot. She pushed open the faceplate on her helmet and tried to slow her breathing.

The asari put a hand on her shoulder. "It's a great deal to take in," she said. "I can't quite fathom it yet either. I'd like you to know," she said, as she pulled the pistol from her thigh holster, "I did mean it when I said I wouldn't kill you." She stripped out the ammunition block and handed it to Vance. "I would set you free, but I can't just yet. You're useful to me, and I need you. Call me Liara if you like."

Vance sat in stunned silence. When the asari didn't speak again, Vance slipped the ammo block into a loop in her belt. She would work on getting the pistol later.

Meanwhile, for nearly an hour, Liara sat quietly while Vance dozed. Liara said again, "You have family back on Earth, don't you?"

Vance nodded. "My mother and a sister. Back on Earth."

"Good," the asari said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?" Vance shook her head. All of a sudden her burned ear was throbbing, and she pulled off her helmet to rub it. "Why are you in the Alliance?"

Vance looked up at the asari. The hard look, the fearless look she'd seen in the interrogation room, on the flight deck, and as they maneuvered out of the battle—it was gone. She seemed genuinely curious. Still, Vance held her tongue.

"Let me guess, you were running away from your drab little hometown." After a pause, she said, "Or maybe you were good at school, and wanted to do more, but there was no money. Maybe both. You're from Glasgow, aren't you?"

Vance shook her head. "How—?"

"We live a long time. Some of us are curious and, since we have nothing but time, we absorb a lot." The threat board showed both groups of ships arcing away from each other, though the Alliance ships seemed to be repositioning for a counter attack. She stared at the two fleets for a while, then whispered something to herself.

"You're wondering why they're here, aren't you?"

Vance nodded, but didn't answer.

"How many aboard that troop ship? Three thousand? Five thousand?"

"About that?"

"And the heavy cruiser?"

"Two hundred," Vance said, "not counting shipboard marines."

"About twice as many aboard the Rumaila, the asari ship that just foundered." She was quiet for a moment. "The asari battlegroup will likely be torn to pieces by your fleet."

"That's a lot of lives wasted on bad strategy."

"It's not bad strategy if it works. They were sent to kill me, as I suspected when your intelligence man told me you'd broadcast my name to the galaxy."

"We didn't—" Vance started to say, but the asari interrupted.

"You might as well have. Something tells me your colleague might have done it on purpose."

"And that's why they're here? To kill you?"

"I guarantee it."

Vance was quiet. Turner was a prick, and she wasn't going to miss him. Still.

The asari tugged at her straps, making sure they were secure. "Seven hours, give or take. Sensors aren't showing pickets at the relay, so we may not have anything to worry about."

"And from there?"

"I'll let you know soon enough."

"Yes, but where are we going?"

"Have you ever been to Omega?"

Vance nodded. The memory was not a pleasant one.

"Well," the asari said. "Prepare yourself. Tortuga is a good deal worse."