Chapter 8: Is it Paranoia if it's True?
July 28th, 2185
The Lucen was a fine frigate. As a former turian vessel it had all the armour and weapons one would need for a stand up fight. More importantly for Liara, it was fast and manoeuvrable enough for their purposes within the Shadow Net Organization, inserting and extracting Shadow Broker agents across the galaxy. Liara had renamed it after the mythical servant of the goddess of Athame in asari religion. Lucen had given, among other things, the gift of biotics to the asari. That knowledge had made her people what they were today, whether or not the myth was true. It would've been more appropriate on an asari vessel admittedly, but the Shadow Broker seemed to own very few of those and they weren't built for her current needs.
It was a pretty decent sized ship, although it had gotten a bit crowded now with the new crew. For one, Wrex had brought two squads worth of krogan aboard. They were a bit rowdy, but at least they had enough spare rooms for them to sleep in. They seemed to get on with the Shadow Net mercs well enough, although it was more out of a mutual respect for each other than a real sense of camaraderie at this point.
As for the more prominent new crewmembers, they were as far apart as they could be aboard the ship. Saya Empa, the STG Agent, had taken up residence in the communication hub on the CIC floor. Liara decided it was okay for him to stay there, as he needed to keep in contact with Kirrahe anyway. She had offered Wrex his own room too, but he decided to take up residence in the armoury downstairs in the shuttle bay. He liked being near the guns according to him. He said it reminded him of the "the old days," as he claimed, when he was leaning next to the personal lockers in the Mako's hanger.
As for Kayap, Liara gave him one of the storage rooms on the engineering deck. He ran around happier than she had ever seen him since they first met each other. He was even delighted at the fact she had moved a small bunk down there to serve as a proper bed. It was weird to see the little alien so pleased by basic commodities. His actions made her wonder how many things that she took for granted had been denied to Kayap.
For her part, she remained in an officer's room on the crew deck where she had a link to the Shadow Broker Network, complete with several holo-screens of varying size on the wall for monitoring all the incoming information. It wasn't pretty looking, but looks didn't matter. Finding links to Balak, and this Covenant he had joined with, was vital if they were to track him down and find out what they were planning. However, finding information about Balak had been a lot harder than she thought. She expected to find some records, pictures, video files, but she had nothing. It seemed there were secrets even to the Shadow Broker.
It wasn't a complete waste of time though. She had uncovered some preliminary information. Other than extranet news articles concerning the Terra Nova incident, she had discovered what Balak had been up to in the past two years since then. He had reportedly been in the Terminus systems hiding out on a few Batarian colonized worlds. There were plenty of sympathetic people there that would hide him.
There was also a manifesto; it surfaced online about a month after the destruction of the first Normandy. It was a statement from "The Swords of Khar'Shan," a batarian terrorist group that spoke about returning their people to their rightful place in the galaxy. The declaration was almost word for word verbatim from what she recalled Balak saying on Terra Nova. Humanity and the Systems Alliance were upstarts, they forced the batarians to attack Elysium, the only solution was violence, etcetera, etcetera. It wasn't exactly very original in terms of political statements. Balak hadn't signed it, but it matched word for word what he had said on Terra Nova.
After the manifesto's publication, The Swords quickly made a name for themselves. They started attacking Alliance colonies and supply routes, then sabotaging shipyards and killing Alliance soldiers on leave. It was all horrible, no doubt, but nothing near the level Balak was working on now. Then again, those were only the attacks that they publicly admitted to. Who knew what else they were involved in. There were other attacks with similar methods and motives that happened in the same areas, but no one had claimed responsibility. She could only assume Balak was responsible for those too. It suggested they were a lot more organized and better equipped than most people thought.
The Hegemony, the batarian state government, denied any affiliation with the group and claimed to denounce their actions. Liara knew better than to believe them, but so did everyone. The Hegemony had been sponsoring terrorist groups for years, along with pirates and slavers of all stripes. The Shadow Net was full of their transactions. They didn't even bother to hide them all that much. They gave them guns, money and set them loose like wild dogs. They ended up conducting unorganized acts of state sponsored terrorism and in good time the lucky ones all faded away. The unlucky ended up getting hunted down by the Alliance to the last man, like during the infamous raid on Torfan. The Alliance had slaughtered a lot of slavers that day.
Except for "The Swords" for some reason, somehow they had managed to survive. Liara had thought they were just better funded, but even the network couldn't tell her if that hypothesis was true. In fact, concerning links to the Hegemony, she could find none between them and "The Swords." It made no sense. Everything pointed to a link to the Hegemony government. They had to be getting these supplies and resources from somewhere. She could find "classified" memos concerning the Hegemony exploiting their attacks for their own gain, but nothing directly connecting them to providing Balak with resources or funding.
None of her contacts inside batarian space could tell her anything it seemed. Apparently, her predecessor had had trouble infiltrating the rogue government for years. It was hard to spy on what was essentially a highly paranoid police state that possessed a stranglehold on its news media, let alone infiltrate the upper echelons of the government. She was apparently lucky to have everything she already did. If there was a connection, she wasn't getting it from Khar'Shan directly. She gave orders to her people on Khar'Shan and within Batarian space in general to double their efforts in breaking government security. Each one told her the same thing: "That's easier said than done."
"No excuses," she ordered all of them in her best attempt at sound fearsome. "Get me an ear in the seats of their government house. Otherwise you're useless to me."
She supposed the identity scrambler technology helped in making her sound a bit more vicious than her usually calm and even tone was. It still didn't feel right to her though, sounding like some kind of crime boss, threatening people, but she had her part to play in this too.
She thought maybe her next best bet was the Blood Pack mercenary, Trox. She had a lot more information on him. He was a krogan biotic, recruited into a Pack chapter by another krogan named "Kreave." The fact he was biotic was interesting to her. She had assumed they didn't place much faith in the power of the mind, preferring brute strength and firepower. Apparently this Kreave didn't possess such a prejudice.
Trox soon garnered a reputation within the Pack. He had been hired by a number of governments and organizations for security, as well as one or two black ops missions. He had helped run slaves and illegal drugs in his tenure, as well as lead raids on a number of eezo mining facilities.
Now his former boss, Kreave, was supposedly dead, leaving Trox in charge of the chapter. That is, if what she had overheard from Balak was true. Why a batarian terrorist group would outsource to the Blood Pack, she wasn't entirely sure. Usually they sought out the Blue Suns, due the large amount of fellow batarians in their ranks. Yes, there were humans, but that was usually overlooked so long as they did the job.
The answer seemed to lie with new aliens, the Covenant as they called themselves. She had had a long talk with Kayap about things. It was still hard to get him to talk about everything in one sitting, but he was more open now. For starters, the sangheili in gold they saw was named "Vorsa 'Jadumai" and he was "always mean to Kayap" according to the little unggoy. She supposed she couldn't expect much else in terms of details from him. Kayap seemed to think in rather simplistic terms.
As for the giant aliens, they were called Mgalekgolos, the walking tanks of the Covenant. He did not know their names, he had never asked. All he knew was "never get close." That seemed like good enough advice given what happened back on Tuchanka. Those plasma cannons they had attached to their arms seemed incredibly dangerous though, so even at a distance they were still going to be a threat. They'd need to start carrying heavier weapons.
As to the Covenant at large she got a lot more information. Kayap explained the history as best he could. Again, he wasn't much for details. As she worked on her terminal, going over the footage of the fight her men had captured with their helmets' onboard cameras, Liara recalled what he said vividly.
"Covenant come to Unggoy long time go." He began. "They make us fight for them. We have to. They kill us if we don't. They take us away from home. Put us in war. Make us fight. Kayap hate fighting. Kayap just want go home, but you try they kill you. Leader Vorsa say we come here, fight war against heretics in new place. Me no understand, but me follow, no choice. They say we doing work of Gods, have to kill infidels, kill humans. Four-eyes hate humans so they join with Covenant. No like Four-Eyes much either, they once use Kayap as kicking ball for fun and throw garbage at him. Me no like them at all."
It was not the most intellectually stimulating conversation, but it told her much. This Covenant, as the name implied, was some alien alliance with a hierarchy system. As suspected, they had a religious motivation of some sort for being here and they had joined with Balak out of a similar hatred of humans. It probably explained why they chose the Blood Pack instead of the Suns. The Pack didn't recruit humans and they would probably be the only merc group they'd be able tolerate given their apparent religiously motivated racism.
Why the Covenant hated humans was something Kayap couldn't explain to her. He just followed and did not question why. To do so would apparently have earned him a beating. That seemed to be standard practice among the Covenant concerning Unggoy. Kayap claimed it was the same treatment they got from all the other species in the religious order. From what she could tell, Kayap and his people were little more than fodder for this war machine of the Covenant.
Kayap's people's position was so low, all of the other Covenant species looked down on them. He even described each species that belonged to the religiously driven coalition of aliens by retelling how they had mistreated him. He had been shot at, kicked, pummelled and even tossed around like a ragdoll. Perhaps she had done him a favour by taking him alive. Whether Kayap saw her as a path to freedom or as a new kinder leader, she couldn't say though.
"Kayap like you." He had said. "You no hurt him as much. And you give me bed. You got food nipple too?"
She didn't know what he ate, but she promised to find him some food, just as soon as she figured out what he could eat. He gave suggestions, they sounded rather distasteful to her. She didn't judge though, there were lots of asari delicacies she loved that a lot of other races found disgusting.
Right now, she needed to find a lead on Balak and his Covenant friends. She had an idea, but it was a bit of a long shot. It was worth a try though. As she was looking into the idea, the door to her office slid open and Wrex walked inside.
"The boys have settled in." He said regarding his krogan obviously. "They don't exactly like the idea of the salarian spy aboard though."
"They'll have to deal with it." Liara explained. "I'd prefer to keep Kirrahe in the loop. If he comes across something we can use, it will be easier to get in touch with him now."
"I'm just wary I guess." Wrex explained. "He hasn't uttered a word since we met. I just get a creepy feeling from him."
Liara had noticed Saya didn't seem to talk. She admitted she wasn't used to that either. Everyone usually had a lot to say in her experience, so it was a bit unnerving. She brought a camera feed of the communications hub where the salarian was currently. He was still in his armour and presently in a sitting position of sorts while facing away from the camera.
"I'm keeping watch on him at least." Liara told Wrex. "I'm sure that eases your mind a bit."
"I guess, more important things to worry about now I suppose." Wrex admitted. "Like Balak and his new alien buddies."
"What about Tuchanka and Clan Urdnot?" She asked him.
Wrex stepped all the way into the office now. Liara turned her chair around to keep her eyes on him as he leaned against one of the walls.
"I put the Shaman incharge as Acting Chief." Wrex explained. "He agrees with what I'm doing and no one will try anything against him. Killing a cultural and religious leader doesn't get you points. And the Female Clan Leader has also stepped up a bit to offer her support in keeping things as they are now. Wreav won't try anything with those two running the show. For now, the notion I'm off to a war seems to be giving Urdnot some confidence I haven't lost my edge."
"And the plasma guns?" Liara asked as a follow-up.
"I gave orders to give them to the females." Wrex answered. "They could use the extra protection and it keeps the majority of the guns isolated in the camp and away from people like Wreav."
That was good to hear. Although, Liara imagined if something did happen, Wrex could easily just walk in and fix it relatively quickly. He was Wrex after all. It was his people on the ship she was more worried about in the long term.
"How are your men with the idea of serving aboard a ship?" She asked.
"I told them it's just a transport to get us to where we need to kill stuff." Wrex explained, slamming his fist into an open palm. "I'm still in charge as far as they're concerned. Although they do have a bit of respect for you staring down a bunch of bad guys with nothing but a pistol. They expect you to lead me to more opponents now, so they're mostly okay with you."
"Well, it may be awhile until I can find them that fight they want." She sighed. "This Covenant is keeping out of the limelight and Balak isn't exactly holding up a sign for us to follow him."
Liara turned back to her screen as Wrex plodded over. He leaned over her shoulder, lightly supporting himself on her chair, and looked to the screen itself.
"No luck at all?" He asked.
"Nothing concrete on Balak as of yet," Liara explained, "he's in the wind. But after giving it some thought I decided our next best chance was that ship he escaped in."
"The one with the actual cloak you mean?" He asked. "How are we going to find something that turns invisible? I don't get the plan."
Liara quickly scanned through her files, bringing them up one by one on the screen.
"Kayap's description of the Covenant suggests they're greater than just one ship." She said as her eyes darted over the scans. "I can only imagine there are more like that vessel we saw on Tuchanka."
"So you think they're here in force then?" Wrex continued for her. "So where are they? Guarding that wormhole you keep mentioning?"
"Most likely," Liara surmised, "if Shepard is 'on the other side' as Balak suggested, they won't want him getting back-up. Or they're lying in wait to ambush him if he comes back. In any case, going there now would be too dangerous and Shepard isn't there anyway."
Wrex hummed under his throat and crossed his arms as he stood up right.
"Well I guess that's one reason we're not racing off there." Wrex admitted. "That still doesn't explain how we're going to find that ship."
"A small flotilla of ships holding around a wormhole are going to need supplies to keep them running." Liara answered. "One reason they probably sought out allies among Balak and the Blood Pack. What I'm saying is there have to be more ships than just that one. Even if they all possess cloaking technology, that vessel we saw still had to de-cloak at some point. Meaning someone out there may have another piece of the puzzle, but they just don't know it yet."
Wrex smirked a bit at Liara's plan.
"You're the greatest information broker alive and you're telling me you need to outsource?" He said, laughing only a bit. "That's kinda embarrassing, isn't it?"
"I can't find anything on these 'Swords of Khar'Shan' that Balak has put together or these Covenant." Liara replied, grimacing at Wrex's little joke. "If we are to find a connection, we need to start looking at other means of gathering it. I've input a search across the entire Extranet for anything referring to the Swords, the Pack and Unidentified Flying Objects. I've also input the specifications of the ship we saw into the scanner to see if anyone has caught a detailed glimpse of this thing."
Wrex looked up to the larger screen above Liara. It was filled with rapid fire images and streams of content. He couldn't keep track of it.
"And you can follow that somehow?" he asked her.
"My new job tends to force me to keep an eye on several developing situations at once." She admitted. "It's not that hard actually, I do have help."
It was then, rolling from around a nearby corner, came a little ball VI program.
"Over six hundred thousand relevant sites have been fully searched as of now, Dr. T'Soni." Glyph stated. "We have not located anything of value."
She had finally got him to stop calling her Shadow Broker. That was certainly helpful.
"How long is this going to take exactly?" Wrex asked her, unconvinced of the plan.
"It is a long shot, I know, but if it doesn't pan out I'm going to see about digging deeper into the Hegemony systems." Liara assured him with a convicted look in her eyes. "I just know they have a connection to the Swords and Balak himself. I will find it eventually. Nothing stays secret for-"
Her feeds suddenly stopped and a flashing green light buzzed up on her board. Glyph was quick to inform them both of the development.
"It appears we have located something of interest." The VI declared.
Liara quickly pressed at the flashing green button and brought up a single image. It was blurry and dark, but the distinct outline of a ship could be seen. She quickly ran a comparison to the Tuchanka vessel and saw that they did indeed closely resemble each other. She could see the distinctive fins at the back and the broad front of the ship, if only barely.
"An eighty-seven percent match." She observed aloud, reading out the information on screen. "Let's see where it's from."
Tracing the image with but a button press, she found the link led to an online blog of some sort. It was entitled, "Free Truth Daily." Skimming it quickly she saw it was a very amateurish little conspiracy extranet site that was open for anyone to post on about anything they wanted. No oversight, no verification, a total free-for-all for outlandish ideas and theories. Because of this policy the site was a jumbled mess of images and rants. No wonder it took so long to find, this place was loaded with dead ends and people making outlandish claims. Wrex himself couldn't help but scoff at some of the stuff.
"Heh ridiculous, 'Rachni-Asari Hybrids being grown by Thessian Government', how stupid can you be? If they only knew half of what we knew, eh Liara?"
Wrex may have had a point, but there was no denying that the picture they found was of that ship that they saw on Tuchanaka. It had also been posted recently, one day before her ship was attacked to be precise. The image was probably of the very same ship she saw taking off, possibly heading out to raid that salarian research lab Kirrahe had told her about and definitely before the raiding party was sent to Hagalaz. That still left the question of who took the picture unanswered.
Liara looked at the poster, simply labelled "3DomLives!" and apparently he was the fifth most active poster on the site from what she could gather. Looking over his posts, Liara found that he had made a lot angry declarations against the Batarian Hegemony, among others. There were far too many to properly sift through, but the picture that brought her here was the most important piece of evidence for the moment.
The description said it was taken over Tuchanka using a CDEM satellite. How he had gotten the image, he did not say. Only that he claimed it was an experimental Hegemony ship that was on a secret mission to stir up the krogan or something. It was a rather blabbering post. She did admit though that it matched a bit of the information she had, although highly distorted through the poster's uninformed perspective. It didn't take long to find where the post had originated from. A simple trace led her to the Terminus systems, specifically one system in particular.
Wrex seemed to grin at the prospect of their destination.
"Well, that sounds like a fun day." He said rather excitedly.
"Indeed," Liara added, less enthusiastically, "I'll tell the bridge to set course then."
She let the image of the giant red glowing space station lodged in its asteroid hover over them for a while longer before closing the window. Omega awaited them.
July 29th, 2185
Omega was not a place you wanted to live in, not if you had a choice. It was full of pirates, slavers and the general denizens of the criminal element. There were good people there, innocent people just trying to squeak out a living and get by, but the corruption outweighed anything else. What had once been an asteroid mining station now shined bright red in the void, a beacon to outlaws from across the Terminus. This was the land of the lawless and pretty much everyone wanted to keep it that way.
Liara remembered the last time she was here, just a few weeks after the destruction of the first Normandy. She had lost a friend and in a way lost herself. She was angry, inconsolable and determined to find a way to make it right. Cerberus asked her to find Shepard's body and she did so, hoping somehow they'd do as promised and bring him back. And they did indeed do just that. For all his flaws, the Illusive Man had remained true to the deal she set up with him. She was just grateful that Shepard didn't hate her for it when he returned to the land of the living.
Now, she had lost her Commander again and while he was not dead this time, it appeared that Omega was once again the key to helping him. She dreaded the return there nonetheless. It wasn't because of the criminals that stalked the halls, she wasn't afraid of them, not after all she had been through. No, it was because last time she had been here, she had crossed paths with someone. She had been quick to tell Liara not to come back. She hadn't done anything to upset her, but she had mentioned something that spooked even her. Not something that was easy to do to Aria T'Loak.
Aria was a powerful asari, far older than Liara and twice as powerful in both position and skill. Her biotics were strong enough to devastate a krogan and accurate enough to crush his internal organs without killing him or setting off his blood rage. That was how she took over Omega, starting out from nothing so many years ago to the literal "Queen of Outlaws" today.
Liara did not relish the idea of going back to her domain or meeting with her again, as she knew she would have to. They already had to inform a docking bay that they wished to land and Aria no doubt was aware of their coming. As the station grew bigger upon their approach, its red eerie glow beckoning her closer, she took a deep breath and eased her mind.
She decided to leave Kayap on board the ship. He wasn't going to be much help here and he had had enough excitement to last him awhile. Besides, she wouldn't be able to fool anyone by saying that he was a baby elcor, not here. She had asked Wrex and Saya to come instead. Wrex was quick to jump at the chance to go to the station as he had visited it a few times in his mercenary days and felt like seeing how much things had changed. She thought Saya had agreed to join her, she wasn't sure. He still wasn't talking and Liara was starting to wonder if he even could at this point.
She was already ready, her pistol and submachine gun at her side, when Wrex joined her near the airlock. He had his claymore in hand as usual. He cracked his neck once or twice, jerking his head from side to side.
"This is going to be an interesting trip," he remarked, "maybe we'll even get into a fight with some dumbass half-drunk turian if we're lucky. There were tons on this station last I was here."
"I'm hoping to avoid that," Liara informed with an aura of seriousness. "I just want to find this '3DomLives!' person and get as far away from this station as possible."
"Party pooper." Wrex joked. "Relax, I'll protect ya. No one is going to mess with Urdnot Wrex. I have too much of a reputation here. Most of it involving cracked skulls... and maybe one or two gunfights in the lower levels."
Liara appreciated Wrex's attempt to ease her mind, but really there was nothing he could do. Omega brought up a lot of bad memories, not just Aria. Her first visit eventually led her down a dark road she had only just gotten out of. Omega in general just brought out the worst in people, eating them alive. She honestly wondered if she could handle it.
Saya Empa arrived moments later, armed with a Viper sniper rifle, a Tempest submachine gun and his sword. He didn't say anything, but just looked to Wrex once before turning to Liara.
"Hello again to you too then." Wrex greeted grumbling with sarcasm. "Care to share your thoughts on Omega? Maybe tell us why it's vastly different from your own culture? We kinda did it all the time back in the day, right Liara?"
Again, Saya Empa said nothing. He instead kept looking at Liara and pointed to the airlock. Liara could only assume he was asking if it was time to go.
"I suppose we should get aboard." Liara agreed. "Aria probably has someone already waiting for us on the docks."
As the airlock opened, Wrex turned to Saya once more in growled.
"You are the first salarian I've met who has annoyed me by staying mute and not by being a blabbermouth." He told the black armoured STG Agent. "That is a rare accomplishment. I just want you to know that."
As expected, waiting for them in the docking area were three armed guards, two turians and one angry looking batarian. All heavily armed and none too pleased to see Liara back on their station. It was nerve racking to say the least, but Liara wasn't that nervous. She had Wrex backing her up for one. Together, they could easily handle these guys if things turned sour. Thankfully, they didn't seem like they were looking for a fight, just trying to portray a show of force.
"Aria told you not to come back, T'Soni." The batarian growled. "Mind explaining why?"
"Business," she replied thusly. "I'm looking for someone."
"Well don't explain it to me. I'm just here to point you to Aria. See her, do not make us find and take you to her."
The batarian left with the turians, although Liara imagined they hadn't gone far. They'd be watching, closely. It was best that they saw Aria as soon as possible. Otherwise, the next time they saw those three would not end so well.
"Just as friendly as last time I was here." Wrex observed as they walked down the corridor of the dry dock.
"Same," Liara agreed, "it's nice to know there are some constants in this Galaxy."
Entering into the station at large revealed it as the sprawling brown and red drab colour soaked hellhole this place was. Air-cars sped across the skyline that stretched for miles outward. Towering pillars spanned the breath of the station, housing hundreds if not thousands of people inside. This was not like the majesty of the Citadel, it was an open wound, cold and sour with all the harsh and bitter realities laid bare.
Everything was muted, darker, nothing stood out, the colours of the station mixed together like some sort of glorified garbage dump. A fitting analogy for a place where the refuse of the galaxy came to plot, scheme, and perhaps even disappear forever if they wanted. And at the center of this pit of scum was the hive all the cutthroats and villains could congregate in, Afterlife.
Afterlife was, from all outward appearances, a seedy exotic nightclub. The image of a dancing half naked asari in silhouette on the front view screen was just its cover though. Aria resided within, ruling over the entire station as the boss, the lord, the master, the queen, whatever you wanted to call her. Liara had every reason to be nervous about seeing the leader of Omega again, and for the most part she was. But she wasn't the little asari taking on the biggest fish in the underworld pond this time. Aria was still the shark that could eat her alive, but Liara knew how to keep a shark at bay now.
As they approached the front door to the glittering nightclub, the elcor bouncer moved in front of them, plodding on all fours. For a species that could show no real emotion in their faces, not like most other species did, he looked pretty damn surly. Maybe that was just what Omega did to you.
"Assertively: You must get in line like the others." He said in a monotone bland voice. "No exceptions."
"Aria is expecting us." Liara explained.
"With unconvinced ire: You and every other person in said line."
Liara looked to said line and saw that it stretched for a good while. She had no desire to stay stuck on this station for that long.
"Call up Aria herself and inform her Liara T'Soni is here at her request." She replied authoritatively.
The elcor turned slightly away and mumbled something in a lower voice. His head looked back slowly to Liara when he was done.
"Apologetically: Welcome, Doctor T'Soni, please come in." He said plainly. "With sarcastically tinged relief: I am happy I am not you right now."
If that was his attempt to scare her it wasn't working, she, Wrex and Saya passed him by and kept walking. As the doors opened wide to let them inside they could hear one of the patrons complain as they did.
"I've been waiting here for hours! You just let three people in there! I thought it was full up!" he shouted.
"With barely contained resentment: Be thankful. They're not going to have much fun. Also you're not on the list. So you don't get in, plain and simple. Threateningly: Now do you want to go to the back of the line or do you not want to waste another few hours of your existence?"
Whatever the outcome of the conversation would be was lost to Liara as the doors shut closed. They were again forced to walk down a hallway, lined with animated fire graphics, to the main hub of the nightclub itself. Entering it, they found a lively scene. Holoscreens everywhere, asari strippers on a stage over the central bar and on tables for patrons, several little corners you could get drunk, at least three designated dance floors and a musical track that boomed excess and chaos with every chord. Omega distilled into a single building; that was what Afterlife ultimately was.
Passing by the seedy patrons, Liara and the group approached the stairs at the back of the club that would lead up to Aria's little overlook, the place where she watched over her kingdom of crime. It wasn't nearly as intimidating as it had last been, that was at least what Liara told herself.
"We can go up with you if you want." Wrex informed her.
"No," Liara insisted, "bringing you up may seem a bit threatening. After all, you both are pretty intimidating."
Wrex chuckled a little.
"I know I am, but I wouldn't call him that." Wrex replied, pointing to Saya.
The Salarian gave the krogan a look and although Liara couldn't see it, she had a sense it wasn't a pleasant one. This was another reason not to bring them up. Aria would probably sense the confrontation in them. It had nothing to do with asari prowess, Liara just knew how smart she was, how in tuned she was. It was best not to give her a sign of weakness. Ultimately, however, it was a personal reason for her to keep them down here. She wanted to prove, to herself and Aria, that she could hold her own.
"Just trust me on this, Wrex." She told the krogan. "If I need you, I'll call."
Wrex just shrugged and nodded.
"Don't let'em see ya sweat, Liara." He encouraged her. "Remember, I'm here if you need me. And I guess so is he."
Wrex pointed at Saya, who turned away from Wrex gripping his fists tightly together. Hopefully they wouldn't come to fisticuffs while she was up there with T'Loak.
She ascended the staircase cautiously, doing her best not look weak towards the bodyguards. She eventually arrived at the top, the nightclub floor sprawled out before her. Just across the way was a dark purple skinned asari, her back turned, her white high collar suit with her syndicate's symbol on it staring back at her. Her arms were crossed behind her back as she looked out onto the floor.
"Two years ago I threw you out and now you come back." She began. "Do you have a death wish, T'Soni? Cause if that is the case I can help you achieve it."
"I have no quarrel with you, Aria." Liara assured her. "And, for what it's worth, you threw me out because of my involvement in fighting an enemy even you didn't want to stir up. They're dead now, there's no reason to worry about that coming up again."
Aria turned, her gaze meeting Liara with a rather menacingly glare.
"I don't worry, Doctor." She assured her coldly. "The only concern I had was you forcing a conflict on my station which I would have had to clean up. I like things ordered on Omega, my order. You wouldn't have returned here if you had no intentions of stirring up trouble. No associate of Commander Shepard would come here otherwise. You people tend to make things explode in your wake from my experience. I don't need that now, thanks."
Aria's curt attitude towards her had been expected, but Liara was not budged.
"Shepard is why I'm here." Liara informed her. "He's in trouble and I need to help him."
Aria's glare turned to a sinister smile as she laughed under her breath.
"That's why you're here?" She asked, restating matters for her own amusement. "Why does this feel like a case of Deja Vu all of a sudden?"
Keeping her unimpressed look she approached Liara, her hands still behind her back.
"Explain to me why this is my problem again?" She asked.
"Shepard helped you." Liara reminded her as she looked dead in the crime lord's eyes. "If it weren't for him you'd have a coalition of mercenaries trying to take you down, a dead advisor and a bartender serving poisoned drinks to customers right now."
"That debt has been paid, T'Soni." Aria replied unconvinced. "I don't owe the Commander anything. Nor do I owe you anything. So explain to me one good reason I shouldn't call Anto to kick you off my station all over again. And this time, I won't give you ample time to leave. I'll just make you."
Liara kept a stiff upper lip. Like Wrex said, she thought, don't let her see you sweat. Aria was the Queen of Omega, but Liara was the Shadow Broker and she would not be scared off by threats. Not this time.
"You must've noticed my associates downstairs." Liara said, calling attention to Wrex and Saya once more. "If you try something now, this nightclub is going to have to close early I'm afraid."
Aria turned to look down on her club once more, noticing the two at the nearby central bar.
"Hmm, a krogan... and a salarian," she observed, "an odd combination indeed."
Aria turned to Liara once more, that sly little smile still on her face.
"Trying to emulate the good Commander, T'Soni?" she asked. "Keeping diverse company, I mean."
"If you just give me what I want, Aria, I'll be gone from here within the day." She promised, ignoring the question entirely. "You won't have to lift a finger and, with any luck, you'll never see me again."
Aria walked over to circle around Liara, sizing her up more. Liara kept her shoulders straight and eyes forward, she refused to flinch.
"Still trying to play the big girl game, aren't we?" She taunted in a whisper. "You don't have leverage here, child. You're barely out of your Maiden stage as it were. You may have this krogan and your salarian, but I still don't see why I should help."
"I just want information." Liara reiterated, staring straight ahead. "You're just wasting time right now."
"Yes, because I'm taking a moment out of my busy schedule to deal with this formality of a meeting." Aria explained. "You want information, good for you, but what do I get in return? How does helping you help me besides making you leave sooner?"
Now it was Liara's turn to smile slightly. She pulled out a data module from one of her pockets and held it up for Aria to see. The crime lord stopped circling and gave the device a curious look.
"This storage module holds everything on a certain asari criminal mastermind that I possess." She explained to the Omega ruler. "Admittedly, it isn't much. You managed to remove anyone who could spill your secrets long ago. However, what it contains is most damning. A name for one, a real one, as well as the identity of another child, just like me. One who has a rather estranged relationship with her mother, just like I had at one time. It was good reading material you could say. I really related to the principle character."
Aria's eyes turned to a calm quiet sort of rage as she stared at Liara with growing incense. She raised her hand to pluck the device from Liara's hand, but she pulled it back.
"I give it to you, when you help me." Liara assured. "Everything else I have is deleted except for this. If you want it, then you give me what I want."
Aria kept her angry look for awhile, but soon softened and gave a slight laugh and an amused little smile.
"Well played, T'Soni." She admitted. "I misjudged you. You're not much of a child anymore."
She turned and sat down on her lavish posh couch, crossing a leg over the other as Liara remained standing.
"So, what do you want to know?" she asked.
"Someone posted an image of an alien ship I encountered from this station." She began to explain. "His username is '3DomLives!' and he may be able to lead me to the ship itself. I doubt anyone is able to post on the extranet from here without you knowing about it. After that near fiasco with the merc gangs you've no doubt tightened your security. So, I imagine you'd know who he is."
Aria stayed silent for a moment, thinking to herself before she sighed and put her head back. Then, at last, came a name.
"Vik'Sajee." She blurted out in annoyance. "Fuck."
That sounded distinctly quarian in origin. What was a quarian doing on Omega of all places? This station was worse than the Citadel for his people. They hated quarians out in the Terminus, barely even tolerated them. He couldn't be a slave. Slaves didn't get extranet access from what she knew. So he had to be either stuck here or here voluntarily.
"Who is he?" Liara asked.
"He's a jumpy little quarian dumbass who is apparently causing me no end of trouble, for starters." Aria exclaimed exasperated. "He shows up out of the blue from nowhere a week or two ago and in the first few days he's docked he gets into a fight in my own club somehow. How he got in I don't know. The next thing I do know is that he's flying off the handle on a group of batarians, calling them slavers, murderers, some other crazy bullshit, grabs one of the batarians' damn shotguns off his back and near starts a gun battle on my own dance floor."
"What did you do?" Liara asked.
Aria leaned forward, placing her arms against her legs as support, her brow heavy with agitation.
"I stepped in, removed his gun and kicked him out of my club." She replied.
"That's a surprising amount of restraint for you." Liara noted.
"Please, the man was obviously disturbed mentally. I didn't kill him because he wasn't a threat to me." Aria elaborated with a bit of venom in her irate voice. "He crawled around on the floor after I hit him and kept weeping about how 'he couldn't go back' or something. Now, I can tolerate a few gun shots in public, but I can't have an unstable lunatic pulling weapons on my patrons, even if they probably do deserve it. But I'll admit, I kinda felt sorry for the little bucket, he obviously just needed help, and a good shrink. I couldn't provide that, but I could keep him away from Afterlife. So I set him up in a little apartment in the lower levels. That way he's far away from my club where he can ramble on about whatever crap that's floating around in that little addled brain of his while being safely away from my alcohol, my customers and my dance floor."
It was still surprisingly generous of her. Liara half expected to learn she at least broke an arm or something. More than likely she didn't want to waste energy on killing someone that was so beneath her.
"Where can I find him?" She asked.
"If you really want to suffer his delusions then that's your poison, and far be it from me to stop you from indulging it." Aria exclaimed as she was handed a data pad by one of her associates. She tossed it onto the table in front of Liara. "His address, with any luck you'll take his ass far away from here and back to his fleet."
Liara took the datapad in hand off the table.
"I didn't realise you disliked quarians so much." She commented as she looked it over.
"I'm fine with quarians. They're a very tenacious and intelligent people, I knew some before they lost their home world. It is crazy people I hate." Aria explained succinctly. "Well, unless they're Mordin Solus I guess. That crazy I can respect. Now then, you got what you need, what about your part of our deal?"
Liara pulled out the storage device again and tossed it to Aria, who caught it with relative ease in an open palm, without even blinking.
"I want you off this station with little incident." Aria warned. "And if you try to blackmail me again to prolong your stay, you'll find I won't be very accommodating."
Liara just nodded and began to make her exit, when Aria got her attention once more.
"I am impressed though." She called out. "That was almost like something Shepard would've done in your position. Maybe you do have what it takes to play with the big girls."
"We'll see." Liara answered as she descended back down.
The apartment that Aria had sent Vik'Sajee off to appeared to be less than ideal as a living space on the outside, even for Omega. This area of the station had been largely neglected, with garbage covering the halls and streets, burnt out lights every few feet and more than a few bullet holes in the walls alongside the graffiti. Liara had to wonder if Aria had just stuck the quarian down here in the hopes he'd probably die and she wouldn't have to worry about him anymore. It wasn't a far-fetched notion since that would be the easiest answer to her problem.
Regardless, Liara was a bit concerned about meeting this quarian. If he was so quick to pull a gun on a batarian just because he thought he was a slaver, how easy would it be to set him off against her? And why was he on Omega of all places if he hated slavers? This place was crawling with them. There were a few possibilities, he could be an exile from the fleet, and thus a criminal himself, or he was just a pilgrim stuck on this station because he had no money left. Both answers raised up concerns in her mind, which Wrex of course voiced for her.
"How do we know this quarian even knows anything about this ship and what's going on?" He asked her. "For all we know, he just lucked out and caught a picture of the thing and nothing else."
"He claims that it was taken over Tuchanka on a CDEM satellite, remember?" Liara reminded her krogan friend. "I want to at least know how he accomplished that. If he doesn't know anything, maybe he can lead us to the person who gave him that picture in the first place."
"Oh great, the run around," Wrex grumbled, rolling his eyes. "Yeah I remember this part of the adventure. He's probably gonna demand we do something for him first and we got to go to another planet and drive around for a few hours chasing some god damn pyjaks for a stupid module or some crap."
She had hated those missions herself, especially when the Geth or a bunch of crazy mercenaries suddenly became involved. Tali had said it best once on Feros to Shepard, "What is it about you that makes people think we enjoy being in harm's way?" With any luck that wouldn't be the case here.
Before they knocked, Liara turned to Saya.
"Keep an eye on things from the shadows outside." She told him. "This neighbourhood isn't the best and I don't want to intimidate Mr. Sajee more than we need."
"Yeah, one krogan is more than enough to freak a little jumpy quarian out." Wrex concurred before looking at Saya. "Better not throw in the sword wielding salarian secret agent. He wouldn't be one for conversation anyway, right Mr. Quiet One?"
Saya didn't seem to appreciate Wrex's little jovial comment, but followed Liara's request anyway. He activated his cloak and disappeared. Moments later, Wrex seemed to jump forward a bit, as if someone had shoved him. He growled seemingly at nothing, but he knew who had done it.
"He is working my last nerve." Wrex grumbled.
"I'll have a talk with him." Liara assured. "Till then, try not to antagonize him more."
"Good luck getting him to talk back," Wrex replied grumbling. "Alright, if you think I should lay off him I'll try. But only because you asked."
She could accept that. Carefully she tapped on the door to the apartment, waiting for a response. It was only a few seconds before she got one, almost as if the person on the other side had simply been waiting for them to knock. The apartment's shutter opened suddenly and revealed a pair of silver eyes behind a bright blue visor.
"Who are you? Who are you working for?" The eyes demanded to know in a frantic pace. "You're with the vorcha outside the clinic who looks at me funny aren't you? Aren't you?! He works for the Corpies, I knew it!"
Liara tried her best not to look too taken aback by the random comment. She expected as much of a greeting from what Aria had said. In fact, she had expected a bit worse. He wasn't pointing a gun at her. She tried to calm the quarian as best she could.
"Am I speaking to Vik'Sajee?" She asked carefully. "Alias, '3DomLives' if I'm not mistaken?"
"Who told you my name?" He demanded once more accusingly. "Did you hack my e-mail account? Steal a blood sample and run an ID test? You want my blood, is that it? Well you can't have it! I still need it! You're not putting a chip in me! I know how it works!"
"I don't want to put a chip in you." Liara assured him. "I'm Doctor Liara T'Soni, I came to talk. You recently put up a post on the extranet? Of a ship in shadow over Tuchanka?"
Vik's eyes went back and forth, peering to the sides of the street and behind Liara to see Wrex.
"I post many pictures on the extranet." He said hesitantly. "I, uh, don't know what you're talking about. Go away."
"I just want to talk to you about the ship." She explained, keeping her calm collected voice as soft as possible. "It's important, Mr. Sajee. People's lives may depend on what you might know."
"What I know? I know the truth." The quarian rambled. "I know what they keep behind that little veil of secrets of theirs, I know it. They can't stop truth, not forever. Truth will come out. Truth sets us free. Sets us all free. Can't go back. Won't go back! You won't make me go back!"
Vik tried to close the shutter, but Liara got her hand in it and pulled it back before he could. He didn't fight to close it again, but stepped back from door.
"I'm not your enemy. I want to know the truth too." She assured him. "Maybe we can even help each other. Help everyone else see it."
Vik still looked nervous, but as Liara stared into him his paranoia faded if only a little. He sighed greatly.
"I want to help. I need to help. Need to go home. Need to help. Can't run. Must not run. Never run again." He mumbled to himself. Eventually he turned his eyes back to Liara. "Alright, you can come in."
Liara let go of the shutter and Vik closed it. The next few seconds were preoccupied with the sound of several electronic locks opening up on the door. It took a while, but it eventually slid open, revealing the quarian as he slowly backed away.
"Just, come in, we can talk then." He said, nervously scratching his neck and his arm.
Vik's apartment looked almost as bad on the outside and that appeared to be both his fault along with the decor. There were a lot of what looked to be empty pill canisters scattered across the apartment. There were also discarded nutripaste tubes and empty bottles of what Liara assumed was water littering the floor and furniture as well, but they weren't the most plentiful bits of refuse lying around.
There were datapads and papers scattered all over the place, more of the former than the latter though. They were on the table in the small den, the kitchen counter in the corner, all over the bed and around it. There was even a makeshift study at the center of the room covered with them. To think, the datapad was made to avoid this kind of mess. The quarian no doubt had been taking a lot of notes for whatever he was working on.
And he was indeed working on something. On the side of the wall, surrounded by cluttered desks and shelves, was a magnet based bulletin board. That was very low tech, especially for a quarian. It was covered with pictures of places, people and events, alongside news articles, printed out extranet ads and movie posters. All of them connected by black lines drawn on the board proper.
One of the stand-out items Liara saw was a turian dollar bill, not a credit chit, old paper money. It was probably just a replica though, those things were antiques and Liara couldn't see Vik possessing enough money to buy one. Upon closer inspection she even thought she saw creases in the dollar bill, like it had been folded in several different ways. She had heard about this, the old turian paper money was said to hide a lot of strange little secrets in it, like prophecies of galactic events and symbols of secret organizations.
That and everything else told her everything she needed to know about how this was probably going to go. She would need to tread carefully around the quarian. He was easily agitated from what she saw at the door and his apartment's messy appearance matched his own.
Vik wore a dark green envirosuit with a shade of brown along the legs and arms. His hood, which was a bit too big for his helmet, was coloured dark orange and peaked over the top of his bright blue visor towards a little point while covering the entire back of his head. The pattern on the hood was a stream of wavy lines that cascaded down the length of the hood towards the back. His helmet was also dark green, matching his suit in general.
The suit was a far cry from Tali's vibrant purples and stylish swirls in her hood. It certainly wasn't the most fashionable ensemble. More importantly, it looked like it had a little custom work done to it, probably as repairs for one reason or another. There were bits of metal tubing, extra pouches around the waist and what appeared to be a little shoulder strap that had a few extra thermal clips lodged in as spare ammo. He probably had a gun around here somewhere. Liara would have to watch out for that, just to be safe. Not because she was afraid of getting killed, on the contrary. She was more afraid that Vik would get killed by Wrex if he tried pulling a gun.
For now, Vik appeared more interested in his giant board, looping thread around the magnets that held items on the board, connecting articles and pictures to each other. All the while, he mumbled more to himself. It was unsettling, but Liara carefully approached the problematic quarian. Wrex was close behind. Almost sensing that he was keeping his hand on his pistol, Liara waved him down subtly. They were just here to talk. There was no need to think Vik was going to attack them. All she needed to do was engage him firmly but nicely, within reason of course. It had worked at the door after all.
"Little niphler rats outside noodle shack, infestation growing, obviously part of implanted remote control organic spy network." Vik mumbled incoherently. "Probably sent by Binary Helix to spy on Aria... or me. More likely me."
"Mr. Sajee," Liara spoke up, trying to get his attention.
"Backing of ExoGeni helped the Alliance Military Industrial Complex get rights to the water supply on almost every human colony in Citadel Space." He continued. "Why? Follow the Eezo, cause they're pumping it in! Five richest people in the galaxy control who gets more though, so in the end they're all just puppets anyway."
Had he forgotten she was even here? Liara looked back to Wrex, who was already twirling a single claw against the side of his head. She shook her head at him, only for the krogan to shrug as if to ask 'What? It's true.' She tried again.
"Sajee," she said stepping closer.
"Those fascists in the Hierarchy sold their souls for those shifty looking cows." He randomly spat out. "Genetically engineered by the Suits for them, perfect spies, smarter than they look. But who cares? No one it seems, because no one asks the question. Just ordinary cows they say, no biggy. Just wait until their regular milk gets replaced with shifty milk."
Okay, he really had forgotten she was here. He was engrossed in his board, fixing it, adding to it with his twitchy little fingers and random nonsense. She didn't exist it seemed. She needed to snap him out of it.
"And the Asari Huntress swoops in and kills all the smugglers, drug trade finished, but who does the huntress work for?" Vik asked to no one but himself. "Who makes the drugs? Why am I the only one who sees this?"
"Vik!" Liara barked at him.
The rambling little quarian jumped up and spun around, slamming his back into his board. He was hyperventilating, staring at Liara with his silver glowing eyes wide open. When the asari stepped back slightly, Vik clasped his hands to the side of his head.
"Don't do that!" He shouted back. "I... I was working, I need to focus. Need to think!"
"I apologise for scaring you," she replied politely, "but I think your board can wait a few minutes. I was only trying to get your attention again."
Vik sighed and stumbled over to one of his desks, propping himself up on one of them with one hand and looking at Liara.
"I'm... I'm sorry." He eventually said. "I'm not feeling well. I haven't been sleeping much lately. I can't sleep, I get nightmares. And they steal your thoughts in your sleep through brainwave scanners."
"Quick tip, quarian," Wrex interjected, "you need a doctor. You ain't well."
"I saw one, I got a prescription." He replied frenetically. "I Haven't been taking them, it dulls me. I can't think as much. Don't like them."
Liara picked up one of the pill canisters she had spotted before. From what she could determine it was some kind of depressant that worked as a calming agent on the mind. In Vik's case, it more than likely dulled his paranoid tendencies, along with other functions as a side effect. She doubted Vik would give her specifics in his current state, but she hoped he could remain focused enough on her questions to answer them for now. Perhaps engaging him in his interests would help ease his mind slightly and build some much needed trust. She looked to the board.
"What exactly is all this, Vik?" She asked, honestly wanting to hear what the story behind this all was, no matter how insane it ended up being.
Vik looked back, his demeanour calmed and sounding more than a little delighted to offer an explanation.
"This is everything," he started, "it is truth, THE truth. For as long as anyone can remember there has been a single overriding will guiding the course of galactic history. They've been controlling not just governments or worlds, but entire civilizations. They weed into the fabric of everyday life and get you to consume and be complacent, all while they control your destiny from the shadows. They hide themselves within conspiracies and lies wrapped up in more conspiracies and lies, making it impossible for anyone to get to the truth. Unless, you wake up and start questioning, asking, thinking. You need to look at the galaxy around you and ask... why?"
Wrex had waddled over to the board itself and had given it a thorough look as Vik kept talking.
"Chem-trails dropped from low flying starships, the spread of Fishdog Food Factory chains, salarian boy bands," Wrex began to read off the board, sounding unconvinced by the content. "Unknown humanoid monster tracks on Noveria, Turian separatist upheavals, the resurgence of human reality shows on holovision?"
Wrex looked to Vik with an incredulous face.
"Seriously? Who has anything to gain by all of this?" He asked.
"That's the inevitable question, isn't it?" Vik asked back in kind, the krogan's disbelief seemingly lost on him.
"Here's another inevitable question," Wrex asked in his usual deadpan manner. "You sure that helmet of yours has been keeping out the noxious fumes you're breathing in?"
Upon Wrex's question, Vik's hands leapt up to his helmet and began caressing the seams frantically. He was suddenly tense, but quickly loosened his shoulders and sighed in relief.
"Nope, I'm good." He responded cheerfully to Wrex.
The krogan rolled his eyes in frustration and walked away. Liara was quick to reassert herself into the conversation. She brought up her omni-tool and opened up the file concerning the ship's photo that Vik had posted.
"How exactly does this fit onto your little board?" She asked.
Vik gave it a look for a few moments, studying it carefully before looking back up to the asari.
"Oh yeah, the Hegemony's experimental spy ship." He stated. "Almost forgot I posted that a few days ago. Everyone knows the Hegemony isn't following that treaty they signed with the Council that limits their fleet size. Now there's proof, but apparently I'm the only one who's been able to spot it from the looks of things."
"Well you and CDEM," Liara reminded him as she lowered her omni-tool. "It is from one of their satellites."
"They just think it's an old smuggler ship." Vik grumbled, frustrated not at Liara but at CDEM's dismissal of the ship's identity. "Bunch of idiots just filed it away in a miscellaneous data stream and forgot it."
"So how did you get it?" She asked him.
Vik was taken aback by the question and looked over at Wrex who was leaning in a corner. He had suddenly become very nervous, his shoulders slumping and his stance parting.
"Why? Are you CDEM or something?" He asked nervously.
"And why would a krogan work with CDEM?" Wrex asked sounding annoyed.
Vik just nodded, his nervous appearance returning to a more relaxed state.
"Good point," he sighed. "Okay, yeah, I bounced a worm program off a few communication buoys and got into their systems. They didn't detect it because it integrates into their systems as a piece of random code. It appears harmless to their security. I've been looking through the satellite for at least a month now, way before I even got here. I was hoping to spot some proof of corporate gun smuggling, particularly from the Hegemony as they give lots of guns to the krogan, and low and behold I find that Hegemony ship doing the smuggling just a few short days ago."
Liara couldn't say she was surprised, impressed, but not surprised. Quarians were notable tech geniuses after all. Vik being a hacker was almost too predictable a skill set given his obvious disdain for governments and corporations. But his prejudice towards the Hegemony apparently coloured his view point. It was time to fill him in.
"It's not a Hegemony ship, but it does belong to a group of aliens that are working with a group of batarian terrorists." She explained, the quarian looking intrigued. "They're called 'The Swords of Khar'Shan' and they're led by a man named Balak. I have the resources that can track them down, but I don't have the means to access their information. If you got into CDEM's systems, do you perhaps know anything else about their activities on Tuchanka? What they were doing there?"
Vik just stared at her for a moment. He walked back to the board, giving things some thought before he came out with any theories. His eyes darted all over the board as he tried to think.
"Well, while I was plugged into the CDEM system, I was looking into some increased chatter from the Blood Pack on Tuchanka on some alien assistance." Vik reasoned, scratching the back of his neck. "That and I heard through the grapevine about this Blood Pack attack on a Salarian Research lab. They say that the place was just a medical facility, but I figured that there was more to it. I thought that maybe the mystery ship played a part in it and tried to see if I could find sightings of it in the system. No luck there."
Liara was suddenly worried that they hit a dead end, but Vik quickly brightened up as a thought came to his mind.
"But now that you tell me that 'The Swords' were involved, that makes things a bit easier to connect." Vik exclaimed happily. "I've been keeping tabs on them for a while, including their leader Balak. He's a tough man to find, but I've been looking into his reported sightings for at least a year now."
"That could be useful," Liara told him, trying to maintain her composure and not get her hopes up. "Have you been able to find a link between them and the Hegemony government? How much funding do they get?"
Vik huffed a little laugh at that.
"The military kind of funding, ma'am," Vik responded, sounding rather proud as he held his head up high. "The thing is, Balak's little gang of thugs aren't run-of-the-mill state sponsored terrorists. They're Black Ops, premiere frontline Hegemony Soldiers. Some are even veterans of the Skyllian Blitz! All of it fully supported by the Hegemony government."
Wrex raised an eyebrow, rejoining the conversation at hand.
"Wait a minute here, you're telling us the Swords are Hegemony Special Forces?" He asked in disbelief. "What makes you think that?"
"Well for one, it's a lot easier to create your own terrorist group in house with professional military personnel than to constantly sponsor a bunch of disparate pirate gangs and slavers who are more concerned about profit than actually hitting the Alliance hard." Vik surmised. "More importantly, Balak is in fact a military officer within the Hegemony."
Wrex still didn't buy it, shaking his head.
"That's crazy, he's just some slaver turned terrorist." The krogan insisted. "He's just moved up in the world since Terra Nova."
"Maybe, but remember what his comrades said back on that asteroid?" Liara asked him. "They said it was supposed to be a quick snatch and grab, but Balak suddenly complicated things and turned it into an act of terrorism. What if that wasn't just spur of the moment? If it was his plan all along, maybe he had orders to do it from the batarian government."
"Plausible deniability." Vik cut in, finishing the thought for her. "The Hegemony gets to strike a huge blow to the Alliance and can just blame it all on a rogue terrorist group. And unlike a real terrorist group, they can control them better and actually direct them against the Alliance specifically. They'd also be a lot more organized than the guys who tried to pull off Elysium. Look, I can even show you proof of it! Give me a second!"
Vik took off to a corner of his apartment and began digging around in his assorted documents. As he did, Wrex took Liara by the arm and led her away from the quarian a bit.
"Are we seriously going to keep listening to this nut?" He asked her.
"If we can corroborate his information he may prove useful in tracking down Balak." Liara suggested.
"He doesn't even know where the ship is." Wrex reminded her. "For all we know, all this crap he's got is just that. Just a bunch of wild theories he's flung against the wall with little to no evidence. He's got more than a few screws loose, you have to see that."
Liara wasn't blind. Of course she saw that Vik was clearly disturbed. His at times fragmented speech, his inability to focus on a singular task, his paranoia, they were all classic signs of someone suffering some form of mental illness. He was broken, that much was clear, but who was she to judge? They all had their dark places. Both she and Wrex had been some place similar. She couldn't imagine what it was like lose your grip on reality, like Vik clearly had. Despite that, he wanted to help them. She could see that in him, it was why he let them in despite what his mind told him to do.
"Shepard had every reason turn away people like you and me, Wrex." Liara told her krogan friend. "Despite our connections and our professions, he let us become part of the crew. He accepted Garrus and Tali, a loose cannon and a child experiencing the galaxy for the first time."
"We had our heads on straight. Even Garrus despite his 'screw the rules' attitude." Wrex argued back. "Tali killed two salarian mercs with a grenade and evaded Saren's assassins for over two days. She had the skills to make up for her lack of experience. This guy we can hardly trust as much because he's so damn unhinged. Next thing you know he'll think you're part of some Matriarchy Conspiracy in the asari government to nationalise Thessia's Rainforests for eezo mining rights."
"Actually, the asari Dairy Industry wants to nationalise the rainforests so it can have more land to breed its genetically enhanced mutant cattle stock."
They both turned to see Vik just a few inches to their left. He looked a bit sullen, although not as much as he probably should've been given the fact they were talking behind his back.
"I know you don't believe me." He admitted, sounding relatively cheerless. "No one ever believes me. But I'll prove I'm right, I have evidence, see."
Vik handed Liara a datapad in his hand. On it was a digital copy of what appeared to be a hegemony military service file. It had the official seal of their armed forces and even their registry code in the corner. From what she could tell, the file was genuine. And the picture in the corner of the file was definitely Balak's face. Liara recognized the green-yellowish tint to his skin. It said he was highly skilled in hand to hand combat, a first rate marksman and even had experience in demolitions. That explained his propensity for explosives.
So Vik was right, Balak had at the very least been in the military at some point. So maybe his hunch about "The Swords" being a black-ops group was right. It would explain why she couldn't find anything on them in the Hegemony's systems. Something this big, Special Forces masquerading as terrorists, would be accessible only to the highest levels of the government and military. But that did leave one other question unanswered.
"How exactly did you get a Hegemony Military Service Record?" She asked Vik with a furrowed brow.
The quarian fumbled his hands a bit, shifting slightly in his stance as he tried to mumble out his words.
"I, uh, I know Hegemony systems. I'm familiar with their military and government codes. I worked with them at one point. The codes, I mean. I don't... I don't want to... it's hard to explain. I don't want to."
It was a question Vik clearly didn't want to answer, and perhaps far too personal. Regardless, if he did know Hegemony codes, he could be more useful to them than she originally thought.
"Do you have anything else on Balak and his group?" She asked, changing the subject. "Contacts? Numbers? Facilities?"
"Not sure," Vik admitted with a shrug. "They don't exactly have a newsletter. I pieced together what I could from news articles and the like. I have a back log of stuff at this point and the medication makes it hard to remember all of it off hand. If you give me some time, maybe I can dig through my stuff and locate it."
That would probably take a while and Liara wasn't counting on Aria to let her stay here for that long. So far Vik seemed to have more information on 'The Swords', and potentially the Covenant with any luck, than she did. If he really did know Hegemony codes, and the fact she was holding Balak's service record suggested he did, he could be even more useful in helping her operatives crack the batarian government's systems. Before she could suggest anything, however, her omni-tool's alarm started to ring. It had to be from Saya, something was wrong. She looked to the door just as a strange sound caught her attention and Vik's.
A blue blade suddenly sliced through the door's lock and Vik screamed aloud in a fright, panic taking over once more.
"They've come for me! I ain't going back! I'll never go back!"
Vik had already ducked behind one of his desks by the time the door got sliced through. On the other side were two sangheili in blue armour. The roared aloud and pointed towards Wrex and Liara menacingly.
"Good," Wrex said with a smirk as he pulled out his shotgun. "I needed to hit something really badly."
One of the sangheili rushed forward jumping up on a desk and launching himself towards them. With a combined throw attack, Wrex and Liara sent the alien flying backwards into a wall. He landed in a forward kneeling position as his comrade came up to fire on them with his plasma rifle. The two took cover behind one of the desks. It was then Vik popped up from his cover, armed with a shotgun of his own.
"You'll never take me back! I'm never going back!" He screamed in anger as he fired at the two with his shotgun.
The Covenant hit squad went to ground, turning over a table loaded down with datapads to act as their own piece of cover. Vik then activated his omni-tool and the micro-replicators inside created a small hovering sentry turret that floated just above his cover. It opened fire on the Covenant, keeping their heads down as he made a break for a wall to the side and a bookcase pressed against it.
"Where the hell is he going?" Wrex asked.
Vik pulled the bookcase down and ducked behind it. Liara couldn't see it from her angle, but she could hear rummaging behind the turned over case through all the gunfire. It didn't take much thinking to figure out what he was doing.
"I'm going after him." She told Wrex. "Think you can handle this?"
Wrex looked briefly at the sangheili and then just laughed.
"Please, I'm me, remember?" He chuckled. "You do what you need to."
Liara nodded once and ran for the bookcase. Wrex covered her with a barrage of shotgun fire that kept the sangheili pinned behind their table. When she reached Vik's position, she found the quarian gone and an open ventilation shaft on the wall. He had bolted, as she suspected. She couldn't exactly blame him. He was only a civilian, one with serious mental issues. If she were in his place a few years ago she'd have probably done the same thing, but she couldn't let him leave now. The Covenant's sudden appearance made that fact clear enough. She scampered through the vent as Wrex continued the gunfight.
Wrex taunted the aliens with a chortle as their plasma bolts harmlessly struck his cover.
"Ha! You couldn't hit a thresher maw if you were right in his face!" He said mocking them.
They must have taken offence to that statement as the sangheili switched tactics. A blue ball arced over the counter and landed a few inches in front of Wrex. He was smart enough to figure out what it was and dove away from it quickly. The explosion ripped through his former cover as fierily plasma rained down. Wrex quickly pulled himself up, but the sangheili were rushing from cover already. One of them had jumped up on one of the desks and aimed his plasma rifle right at the krogan.
That was when a sword tip cut clean through his upper torso. The sangheili only flinched in pain slightly and tried to grip the sword's blade to pull it out. Instead an electric shock pulsed through his body and the alien fell to the desk dead. Saya Empa, decloaked and sword still drawn, stood over him. He seemed to look at Wrex in a rather demeaning fashion. The krogan could just tell his intent, even without seeing his face proper.
Saya didn't get to bask in his kill for long. The other sangheili fired on the salarian, forcing him into cover. The Covenant soldier bolted for the door in a hasty retreat. They would have to follow him, keep him from doubling back or getting more of his friends. If there were two of these sangheili here, Wrex surmised, then there were doubtlessly more.
The tight space of the ventilation system of Omega made for slow going, but Liara had been in smaller confines than this in her digs. Her only concern was finding Vik before he hurt himself in his panic or got lost in the crowd. Then she'd never find him and whatever he knew would be lost to her.
The quarian had fortunately not gotten far. She just had to follow the frightened little sobs. As she rounded the third corner she found Vik, curled up in a ball holding his head in shame. He was rocking back and forth a little, his shotgun by his side.
"I'm sorry." He kept repeating. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He didn't seem to be talking to her. He was off in his own world again, retreating into his fractured mind. Just like Aria had said he had when she had struck him back in Afterlife.
"Vik." She called out to hi calmly.
The quarian looked over to her, looking ashamed.
"I left you. I'm sorry." He sobbed. "I left you. I shouldn't have left you."
He sounded distant as he apologised, she was still unsure if he was really back. Liara pressed him anyway. She needed him to focus now.
"Vik, I'm not mad." She assured him. "You were scared, you panicked. I get it, I understand."
"No, I should've stayed." He sniffed. "I should've stayed. I should've died."
"Stop it." Liara told him sternly but softly. "You are not going to go to pieces on me here. I will get you through this, but you need to focus on me and right now."
Vik took a few deep breaths and then took up his shotgun again. He stopped shaking and sobbing, returning to a more stable frame of mind.
"Were those the, um, aliens you mentioned?" He asked her at last.
"Yes," Liara confirmed nodding. "They're the ones working with the Hegemony. I doubt they tracked me here, so I can only imagine they're probably after you."
"I knew it. The Hegemony has finally seen fit to silence me." Vik growled in righteous anger. "Well, they can't stop the truth. No one can stop the truth."
Perhaps feeding his paranoia was a bad idea, but it was true. The sangheili would've sent more than two soldiers to take her and Wrex out at this point. They had sent a whole squad just for her after all. It was highly probable they weren't expecting anyone else in that apartment but Vik.
"But how did they find me?" Vik asked. "You don't think Aria tipped them off do you?"
"Aria just wanted you out of the way, she doesn't want you dead." Liara assured him. "Somehow they must've been able to trace your extranet posts directly back to you."
"That would've taken a lot of time." Vik replied. "I have firewalls for my firewalls, dummy addresses, reroute software, the works. How could they locate me or even know who I am? Unless they got some sort of tech that spies through the extranet tubes!"
Liara doubted that very much, but Vik was right about one thing, it would've taken time. She had only been able to find Vik's approximate location before. The Covenant would've had to been working towards finding him for a while now.
"They probably found a way to hack into Omega's security systems and worked from there." Liara assumed. "But that's still a lot of work to go through just to silence the poster of one blurry photo."
"Keelah, what are you saying?" Vik asked nervously. "That... I may have found something worse than their spy ship?"
"Possibly, we'll need to go through your files to be sure." Liara informed him. "If this is about something besides your photo then we may have a lead on our next target."
But first things first, they had to get out of these vents. Vik seemed to realise that himself and began crawling away, beckoning her to follow. Liara stayed behind the quarian as they moved through the twisting old shafts. Vik seemed pretty at ease despite the claustrophobic nature of their surroundings.
"Do you know where you're going?" She asked him.
"This was my escape route." He explained to her. "I figured if Aria or someone else sent someone to put me down I'd need a way out of the apartment. So I mapped out the ventilation shaft with a drone and found the best way to get out of the line of fire."
"That's remarkably forward thinking." Liara complimented.
"You have to plan ahead of the liars and the corrupt." Vik replied, his voice carrying a sting. "You can't let them outthink you. That's how they subvert your intentions. How the bosh'tets get into your skull and feed you their poison."
He was still a bit out there, but Liara admitted to herself that it seemed, in this case, Vik's paranoia had been warranted. What did he know that the Covenant and Balak wanted to silence? It had to be big to go through all this trouble.
They finally came to a grate in the wall. Vik turned his legs around to deliver a swift kick to it, knocking it clean out of the vent. He hastily scrambled out of the duct, Liara close behind. They found themselves emerging from the other side of a food vendor's counter. The turian owner did not look happy to see them.
"What the hell?!" He shouted in anger as Liara exited.
Vik had already jumped over the counter into a crowd of patrons.
"Sorry! So sorry!" He apologised. "Go about your business! Nothing to see!"
Liara pulled herself up from the ground, earning the ire of the turian vendor as well.
"If it isn't bad enough I have vorcha stealing my stock, I have damn suit rats and asari beggars coming out of the walls!" He growled as he waved his hatchet around.
"Apologies, we meant no offence." She quickly stated. She held up her omni-tool and clicked a few commands. Within seconds she had accessed the vendor's omni-tool and transferred a few credits into his account. "That should cover the damages, forget you saw us."
Liara raced out of the vendor's stall and met up with Vik among the bustling crowd of the marketplace. She didn't wait for the angry turian to reply to her bit of charity, she needed to find a way to double back and get to Vik's data. As they moved through the packed streets of Omega, she tried to get more out of her new quarian companion.
"How much of the data on Balak and his group is back at the apartment?" She asked him.
"A good chunk," Vik admitted, "but I keep most of my crucial stuff backed up on my omni-tool and with me at all times. That includes Hegemony related data."
Then there was a good chance that whatever the Covenant were looking for, they already had it with them. There was no time to check it over in the open. They needed to get Vik somewhere safe. The Lucen was probably their best bet at this point, if they could get to her. She first wanted to link back up with Wrex and Saya. Hopefully they were okay. She activated her comm-link.
"Wrex, I have Vik." She began. "We're in the marketplace. Are you alright?"
It took a few seconds, but she eventually got a response.
"Yeah me and the salarian are fine." Wrex's voice assured her. "The quarian's apartment is kinda trashed though. Some kind of plasma grenade went off. One of the sangheili tucked tail and ran though. He's probably alerted everyone that we're here by now."
"Listen to me Wrex, have Saya download everything he can from Vik's files and try to link up with us." She told him. "We need to get to the Lucen and fast. They're after Vik and what he knows."
"Figures," Wrex grumbled. "I knew this crap was gonna involve a damn rescue somehow."
Vik suddenly tugged on Liara's sleeve at that.
"Tell them to bring the board." Vik requested. "I need the board."
"We'll get it later," Liara told him, not really sure she should be making such promises as she tried to calm him. "Right now we have to put some distance between us and those assassins."
"Keep a low profile out there until we can get to you, T'Soni." Wrex added over the comm. "There ain't many quarians on Omega and if he's their target you'll stick out like a thresher maw puking up its lunch."
Liara grimaced and shook slightly.
"Thank you for the image, Wrex." She sighed.
The marketplace of the lower levels was packed with various species, loud barking vendors and merchants, more than a few wannabe musicians trying to subsist on credit chits. Like Wrex had said though, no quarians and absolutely no quarians with an asari escort. This was not a good place to be. They needed to get out of the open before something happened.
Liara scanned the crowd as they kept moving through the streets. She and Vik were easy to spot sure, but so would eight foot tall aliens in blue armour. There were so many bodies though, it made locating anything difficult, at least from this angle. Then she thought of something. Maybe it was Vik's own sense of paranoia bleeding into her, but she realised if the Covenant assassins were in the same boat in regards to locating each other on the streets, how would they counter that?
She looked up to sections above the streets, the maintenance catwalks, high up positions on the structures, overlooks, something that would make for a good vantage point. Then she spotted it, something moving up above and the faint pink glow of a familiar weapon. Without thinking much about it, she pushed Vik to the ground with her on top of him. A series of shots rang out. A nearby human fell to the ground clutching his leg with a pair Pink needles sticking out of it.
Liara looked back up to the ledge she had seen the assassin fire from and stuck out her arm to reel the gunman in with a pull attack. The assailant was pulled from his perch with ease. It was then Liara caused him to plummet back to the ground at lightning speed with a slam attack. The attacker rushed back to earth with a thump.
By now the commotion had caused the large crowd to disperse. Liara pulled herself and Vik up and walked over to their would-be killer. It wasn't a sangheili, it wasn't an unggoy. No, it was something new. It looked like a bird, with feathers on top of its head and beak of sorts. No wings though. Its weapon appeared to be a rifle version of the needle gun she had seen previously. She picked it up from the floor, no sense leaving it for the Covenant to retrieve.
"What is that thing?" Vik asked, still eyeballing the alien bird creature.
"I'm not sure, but we best watch above for more of them." Liara warned.
They had other problems though. The crowd had parted enough to make them lose their cover from the streets. In moments Liara spotted one of the sangheili with two others of his ilk, shoving around a salarian shop owner when his companion pointed in their direction. The old saying was true, if you can see them chances are they can see you, and these sangheili could see them very clearly.
"Move! Now!" Liara ordered Vik, who obliged post haste.
The sangheili started firing as the two retreated. By now the various vendors had either abandoned their makeshift shops or carts or were huddling behind them for shelter from the rapidly increasing chaos. With plasma bolts flying past them, Vik and Liara ducked into cover behind one of the vendors. The bolts struck, blowing item stands apart and showering them with bits of food that were hanging from the tarp above.
"Get a drone out there," Liara told Vik as she flipped her pistol to fire warp rounds. "We need to distract them!"
"On it." The quarian complied.
Doing as told, Vik activated a combat drone. It was your standard ball shape, but possessed a bright red and yellow colour scheme. It appeared to the side of one of the sangheili and quickly shocked him with a blast of energy. The alien pulled away, readying to fire on the drone. That gave Liara the chance she needed. She stood up and flung a throw attack that sent the sangheili and his partner flying backwards into one of the vendor stands.
Knowing that wouldn't keep them down for long, Liara and Vik continued their way along the vendor stall. They eventually came to a bend in the line of stalls. The only way forward was an open street. It seemed like an easy enough run, except for a sudden development when they arrived. A green plasma bolt struck near the edge of the stall their using for cover. It had come from further down the street. Liara looked up to see the shooters were a pair of those bird-creatures, these ones carrying yellow circular shields.
"Keelah, they got a riot squad?" He said astonished.
"With energy-based shields it seems." Liara added rather plainly.
She suddenly recalled one of the aliens of the Covenant that Kayap had mentioned to her. He had called them kig-yar, said they mostly worked for money and enjoyed picking on Unggoy as a stress reliever. From what she could piece together from Kayap's explanation they were very fast, very agile and were crack shots. Kayap hadn't said it in exactly those words of course, but she preferred to paraphrase his broken speech at this point.
And now, these kig-yar were blocking off the way down the street. She fired on the aliens with her pistol with warp rounds, but they didn't seem to affect the shields all that much. She thought since they appeared energy based her warp rounds would bring them down. It seemed to disrupt the shields, but she didn't have time to whittle them down as they continued to approach.
A further complication appeared soon after. Liara heard something down the other end of the street. Scrambling down from the structures above were another pair of kig-yar, these ones armed with the same needle rifles as their now dead friend. They scurried and slid down the side of a wall, one of them flipping over onto the ground with his rifle out while the other dropped onto the overhanging roof edge of a nearby establishment. They both began firing on the position of the two, their needles pinning them down as the ones with shields continued approaching.
Liara looked for another escape. She found it in a bar across from their position named "Tyrexius' Place." With an under title that said "Guaranteed to Raise your Spirits, in your Glass or Otherwise." There was little question as to what "otherwise" meant. They could get to it, but they needed to be quick and keep the fire from bring them down the middle of the street.
"We're going to make a run for that bar." Liara informed Vik.
He gave one good look at the name and shook his head.
"They don't accept quarians in there!" He explained. "I just passed by one time and the owner threatened to shoot me!"
"I think he'll make an exception." She informed him unconcerned by the information. "Set down a turret and stay with me."
Vik seemed a bit shaken by the asari's stern resolve, but followed nonetheless. He got his omni-tool to set up a turret in the street. It opened up on the shield carrying kig-yar, forcing them back as the bullets pummelled their protection. Liara moved out, holding Vik by the shoulder as they did. She fired her pistol at the other set of kig-yar down the street, forcing them to cover as the warp rounds zipped by. They didn't stop running until they burst straight through the door of the bar.
The inside of Tyrexius' was pretty typical for a scummy den in the bowels of Omega. This wasn't Afterlife, the music was muted through an old stereo system and the lights were dimmed to near darkness. Smoke, booze and sex filled the air with a pungent aroma denoting to a non-functioning air conditioning system and the colour of the filthy walls and floor was moody and grim.
In the center of the establishment was a gambling table seating two humans, three turians, a salarian and a vorcha. They were playing skyllian five poker with each other, most were smoking on cheap cigarettes and guzzling cheaper beer. The music was some old turian rock song from 2160's, ironically playing what looked to be some krogan built jukebox system that was probably older than the rebellions. How it still worked Liara wasn't sure. Its design was Spartan, with an electronic screen that was cracked and most of its lights were either busted or dead. On the walls there were some risqué posters of asari dancers and a dartboard with a picture pinned to it depicting a rather offensive caricature of a quarian clutching a snatched bag of credit chits.
Vik wasn't kidding about the owner being a racist. The patrons seemed to share the sentiment, eyeing Vik with suspicion and distaste when they walked in. Besides the poker players there was a krogan in one of the corners, a pair of asari hanging off another turian near the bar and a whole mess of vorcha. Despite being usually equally loathed the bar's owner seemed to tolerate them more than quarians.
The owner himself was behind the bar, serving a drink to a human sitting at the counter. The second he looked at Vik his expression turned to an incensed glare before he shouted at them.
"Hey! The fuck is this?" He demanded to know. "Quarians aren't allowed! Escort or no escort!"
Liara moved forward undaunted, Vik following. The exit had to be at the back. She'd just move through and get out of this before things got unreasonable. As they approached the bar, Liara's grip on her gun tightened as she noticed more and more eyes on her and Vik.
"Apologies for interrupting," She said, trying her best to sound polite in her frantic state of mind. "But this is an emergency. We just need to cut through here and-"
The turian owner didn't let her explain further. He picked up a knife and with his free hand violently shoving a finger in her face. She tried to keep moving to the back where she saw a door, but one of the vorcha blocked their path, punching his fist into his hand and snarling at them.
"I don't give a shit what you need. You and your suit rat boyfriend wanna fuck? Find someplace else!" The owner growled as he pointed the knife towards them. "Get out, before I toss you both out like garbage! We don't accept stolen money!"
Liara T'Soni was a very understanding asari. She had been taught since birth to be tolerant of other people's beliefs. That it was her people's place to act as a source of reason for the galaxy. As much as her familial relations had faltered in the past, that tenet remained one of her core values, always present in her mind. However, she was not having a good day and this belligerent racist yelling at her was a person she had no patience for.
She went for her holster, pulled out her pistol and pointed it straight at son of a bitch's head.
"Do you accept bullets?" She asked coldly. "I can assure you I didn't steal them."
The turian owner looked bug eye at the piece now staring him in the face. He dropped his knife, tossing it to the side, but to his credit he stood his ground nevertheless. Vik was more put off by the sudden change in attitude than him.
"By the Ancestors," he shouted in shock, stepping a bit away from her in fear. "Can we not point guns at people in the middle of a bar for local thugs?"
Liara could already see some of the patrons going for their weapons, including the krogan who brought out a club and began to slowly advance on them. So Vik's concerns were warranted. They didn't need to stay for long. All they needed was get to that door in the corner. It was probably their best bet for an exit. The vorcha was still blocking them though, so they needed to get past him. But before could think of a plan to remove him from their escape route, the front door burst open as a sangheili kicked it in. The door slammed into the face of another vorcha who was trying to leave, making him fall to the ground blotching his mouth.
"Oh damn it all, what now?" The turian owner complained.
The sangheili spotted his two targets almost instantly. He readied his weapon to fire just as Liara rolled over the bar's countertop with Vik scrambling to follow. The sangheili fired three quick shots over the heads of the poker players who ducked down when he pointed his gun in their direction. The turian and his asari companions at the bar dashed out of the way, but the human wasn't as lucky as one of the shots hit him square in the back. He slumped over dead on the bar.
"Spirits!" Was all the turian owner could say before he backed up into his liquor cabinet in fright.
The sangheili didn't get another shot off as he received a punch to his face. It was from the vorcha he had inadvertently knocked down when he had entered. He was barely staggered by the strike, but the vorcha had gotten his full attention.
"No one knock me to floor and get away!" The vorcha demanded as he faced the alien with an aggressive toothy frown. "Who you think you be? Me kill you now!"
The vorcha's rant was cut short when the sangheili ignited a plasma dagger and sliced the vorcha's head clean off the second he finished his sentence. The body collapsed limp to the floor, the eliciting a few more shocked swear words. Everyone who had previously been pulling out guns on Liara and Vik now had them trained on the sangheili. Even the owner had gone for his assault rifle under the bar.
"Waste whatever the fuck that thing is!" Someone shouted.
The sangheili rolled to the side as bullets began to whizz all over the room. Two more sangheili rolled into the fray through the door, their weapons at the ready. The poker players turned their table over, spilling chips, cards and drinks as the bar room broke out into an all out gun fight. The kig-yar were close behind the three sangheili, their shields raised high to defend the sangheili. With everything going on, Vik and Liara could only watch as this situation spiralled further out of control.
One of the vorcha took a full blast of plasma bolts to the chest, he was down in seconds. Even with the insane regenerative powers he possessed he was no match for so many close range energy-based shots. The krogan at the back raced forward, firing his shotgun into the fray. The kig-yar's shield withstood the shot and the sangheili behind him opened up with a torrent of plasma fire.
The krogan took the hits better than the Vorcha, his armour absorbing much of the impacting bolts, so he closed in to deliver a powerful punch to the sangheili. The Covenant soldier simply dodged out of the way and then stabbed his plasma dagger straight into the krogan's back. One of the turians managed to land a few shots to the back of the sangheili in question, but his shields absorbed it. The Covenant soldier tossed a blue ball at the turian, sticking it onto his upper torso. As the turian tried to pull it off, the object exploded into a ball of flame, killing him and what was left of the poker group in a burst of blue fire.
"Holy shit!" The owner screeched as he ducked behind the bar. He then noticed Vik and Liara. "You fuckers! What did you bring to my fucking bar?!"
The enraged turian levelled the rifle at them, but Liara simply trapped him in stasis before he could pull the trigger. She did not intend to stay and wait for him to get out of it. They just needed to get out. Vik apparently had the same idea and made his way over to the door to the right corner. She followed as vorcha was flung over the bar and slammed into the liquor cabinet behind her. When they got to the door they saw the holographic sign on it indicating it was locked. Vik quickly pulled up his omni-tool and tapped a few commands.
"Security for this place is garbage." He muttered over the gunfire as he worked. "Bosh'tet should've invested in a better lockout system."
The door was soon bypassed and opened wide for them. The two raced inside and Liara had the door shut behind them. She then shot out the opening mechanism so it would stay shut for a while longer. She still doubted the Covenant would let a door stop them for long.
"What about the bar goers?" Vik asked her.
"You mean the racist thugs who were two seconds away from shooting us before our friend showed up?" She asked plainly in return as she holstered her gun. "What about them?"
The quarian looked at her, eyes wide.
"Keelah." Was all Vik could muster in response to her statement.
It was cold, perhaps, but if they had just let them pass through without making a fuss about it, this wouldn't have happened. It was just how it was, Liara couldn't change that. What was important now was getting out of here alive.
They moved down the steps to the basement. There resided the owner's side business. A few old beds and mattresses rested on the ground and against walls, occupying them were asari, humans, turians and one elcor female in various states of undress. They were shrieking, covering themselves or groaning in disappointment over the interruption. They had probably all heard the gunfire, but a few were more interested in their current activities.
"You may want to consider finding someplace else to spend the evening." Liara warned them all.
She found the emergency exit door and kicked it open. She let the patrons all run out first before she and Vik left. When the basement was empty, Vik pushed a nearby dumpster against the door, scrapping it along the street. It was a straining process, but thankfully Liara saw what he was doing and helped push it the rest of the way. As they took off again, Vik looked to Liara.
"Thinking a few steps ahead, remember?" He said to her.
It had been a good idea blocking the door like that. Sadly, it didn't help them lose the Covies. As they made their way down the back alley, one of the kig-yar with a needle rifle jumped down into their path. He saw them instantly, stretched out his bony claw-like finger and screeched loudly at them. Without thinking, Liara pulled the needle rifle from her back and fired it on the alien. She hit him with five clean shots, and then, just as the smaller needle weapon had done before, the needles exploded into a pink cloud that engulfed the kig-yar. Vik jolted back at the explosion and Liara eyed the weapon more carefully.
"I bet Garrus would love this gun." She thought aloud to herself.
She was relatively calm, but Vik was frantic and hyperventilating. Liara could hear his heavy breathing even now. He hadn't planned on running for his life today. Then again, when she started out, she hadn't planned on getting trapped by Geth. Vik eventually voiced a question he had no doubt been meaning to ask for a while now.
"What kind of a Doctor are you exactly?" He asked seemingly in disbelief.
Brought out of her slight daze, she looked to Vik and answered.
"I'm an archaeologist." She told him succinctly. "Come on, we need to put some distance between us and them."
They kept moving through the alleyways. They needed to stay off the streets as long as possible. The Covenant were probably all over this area by now. It wasn't safe for them or anyone else around them.
Aria rubbed her temples in frustration as she watched the security footage. She knew letting one of Shepard's friends, let alone T'Soni, back on her station would lead to trouble. She didn't expect this kind of trouble though. A safe house shot up, a marketplace devastated with a number of dead in the crossfire and a bar shot to pieces. Yes, she was fine when this was more confined, but this was fast spreading to the majority of the lower levels. If what Anto was showing her was correct, there were more aliens moving in to hunt down T'Soni... with bigger weapons to boot. These things were running wild on her station.
That would not do.
Anto switched to one of her flying drone cameras, spotting that strange flying ship again moving towards T'Soni's position. It was a live feed and from the looks of things more of the bastards were converging on her. She wouldn't have cared all that much, were it not for the fact they were headed to one of the larger business strips in the lower levels. Not vendors or street merchants, but actual stores and places she had her hands, both in terms of protection and distribution.
"Damn it all." She growled to herself.
She got up from her couch and marched passed Anto.
"You need us to send in the troops, boss?" he asked her.
"No," She answered gravely, looking over her shoulder. "I'll handle this. Someone had to remind these aliens of THE rule."
Storefronts lined one end of street while the other end hand a few small side shops against a ledge along the level. The strip's position along the ledge gave a perfect view of the desolate grimy splendour that Omega was so famous for. For Liara's purposes at least, there was more cover here among the small shops on either side and sometimes in the middle of the street, along with the various benches, holo-sign ads and garbage bins.
No one seemed to pay much attention to her and Vik. They were too busy shopping no doubt. Although the more accurate word given the smell of some of the smoke in the air was probably "dealing." Liara wasn't fool enough to think that they had lost the Covenant. They were around. She was more concerned about Wrex finding them first, if at all. Knowing him though, he'd most likely follow the gunfire straight to them. They'd just have to hold the aliens till then. Another reason she appreciated the added cover this area provided.
"We're not going to be able to outrun them forever." Liara warned Vik. "I hope you got some practice with that shotgun."
"I've had a little." He admitted weakly. "Mainly at firing ranges that let me in."
Vik's lack of practice was disconcerting. He wasn't ready to hold a line against a group of religious fanatics. However, she had been the same way once. Perhaps she could help at least make him more confident.
"Take it from me," Liara said, trying her best to sound reassuring. "Sometimes the best practice is the kind you get in the field."
She wasn't sure if that helped ease the quarian's mind, but he did seem a little less shaky.
Liara looked back and through the crowd where she saw one of their hunters. The sangheili had gotten around the bar barricade and had made their way through the alleyways. Now they had caught up with them again. They pushed their way through the crowd, one of them holding up a datapad to the crowd. She couldn't see it, but she could imagine her face, or Vik's, was on it. They weren't speaking any clear language, but their intentions were clear enough to passersby.
They were going to be spotted sooner or later. Liara motioned Vik to go to cover. They found it in one of the advertisement screens on the promenade. It was for some aircar dealership. Ducking behind it, Liara got out her gun discreetly. This was going to get hot fast, she just hoped Wrex was closing in on them. Vik had his shotgun out as well, although at this range she didn't think it would do much good against the Sangheili on the other end of the street. If only she had a spare pistol she could lend him.
"As soon as they get close drop a sentry turret." Liara told the Quarian.
"Alright, that sounds good." Vik responded, trying to remain calm and failing as he shook. "Just say when."
But while the Sangheili were pushing themselves through the crowd, something flew into view from out of the red-hued skies of Omega. Liara looked to see a small of flying craft with two prong-like sticks protruding out of its slender purple frame. They had brought air support in on the search, lovely. This complicated things slightly, but they could handle it.
The craft moved towards their position, its nose horizontal towards the length of the promenade. It would spot them easily behind the sign, they'd be sitting ducks. They would need to move, fast. She looked around, spotting another holo-sign, this one advertising a local weapons mods store. It was sticking out of the side of said store which was in the middle of the street. It was a bit of a run from their position, but they were going to get spotted anyway.
She was more concerned about all the people in the way. While she had not been too concerned with the thugs in the bar, they had after all threatened her and Vik, this was different. These people were just going about their regular business and now they were caught in the crossfire. Currently, they were all curious about the flying purple aircraft floating past, some a bit scared of it, others possibly wondering if they should shoot it first. She would need to clear them out, and since she was going to get spotted anyway...
She leapt up, urging Vik to follow. The quarian did his best to keep up as the asari rushed through the street, firing her gun into the air like mad. The crowd quickly scattered, scrambling away from the area as fast as their legs could carry them. Some with the twitchier fingers and greater bravado stayed, pulling their guns out and trying to figure what had just happened. The Covenant aircraft didn't wait long to answer that query. It opened up on Vik and Liara with a barrage of plasma bolts as they ran for the shop. They ducked behind their new cover, Liara pressing herself up against the sign as Vik slid against the exterior wall of the store.
"Bosh'tet has us zeroed." Vik said, trying to remain collected and failing. He turned to Liara. "It's gonna circle around to this side you know."
"Drop the sentry turret and check the door to the shop." Liara told him. "If it's locked, bypass it. We can use it as a miniature bunker."
Vik got his omni-tool out and put a turret down in the street. As it opened up, Vik turned to work on the door. Liara kept watch on the street. The civilians had cleared out, even most of the trigger happy ones. Apparently, this was a fight few wanted to get involved in. There were still a few though, turians and vorcha too stubborn to leave. They kept off the streets however, firing bursts at the approaching Covenant. It barely slowed down the sangheili or their riot shield toting companions. The kig-yar acted as walking extra shields for their taller friends.
As Liara looked out into the fight she quickly turned attention to the rooftops. She spotted a few more of the kig-yar, the ones armed with those needle rifles. She pulled her head back when she saw one of them aiming in her direction. The pink shards slammed harmlessly into the sign. Vik's turret moved to turn on the snipers, firing up at the rooftops with a furious barrage of bullets. It would only keep so many hostiles at bay for so long.
"We need to be inside now, Vik!" Liara shouted at the quarian.
"The shop has a triple combination lock system with an added security program that could lock me out if I'm not careful." He explained to her frantically. "I don't work well under pressure."
"Just work fast then!" Liara replied, plasma bolts now hitting the sign.
She peeked out to see one sangheili beating a vorcha into the ground with his foot. She could barely see it, but she saw another sangheili firing indiscriminately at something blocked by a kiosk. She didn't have time to think about it, all she knew was the distractions were slowing them down. She didn't like how she felt somewhat grateful for that. It wouldn't matter in a minute anyway, that aircraft was no doubt getting closer. She could hear its terrible low screeching noise growing louder.
"Anytime now, Vik!" She screamed out.
Vik's eyes seemed glued to his tool, almost like his board back in the apartment. Liara wasn't even sure if he had heard her that time. All she knew was that in the next few seconds the door suddenly slid open and Vik scrambled in with her close behind. Once inside she had the door shut behind them and she fired a shot into the control mechanism to keep it that way for now.
"Virus needed a few extra seconds to override security," Vik told her, seemingly apologizing to her. "I found this was so much easier when omni-gel could solve half my problems. It was a hacker's paradise for about a year."
"I know the feeling." Liara concurred.
The shutters to the shop's windows were still closed, but they could find the switch for them eventually. At the moment they were in the main storage area with the clerk's counter just past their enclosed little gate. The shelves were packed with mods for every kind of gun Liara could think of. Even the under counter was stocked to capacity. The owner must have gotten in a big order.
"Place has some quality parts." Vik said eyeing a shotgun choke on the shelf.
"How much of it do you suppose is illegal in council space?" She asked him offhandedly.
"Eh, I guess over seventy percent." The quarian reasoned. "And that's giving the owner the benefit of the doubt."
Liara shot off the lock to the storage area's gate while Vik looked for the breaker box. As she opened the door, the shop was rocked by some kind of explosion that rattled the shelves and shook the walls. The ceiling cracked, showering them with bits of metal and stone. It was a good thing this place had been built to last. Given the business it was in and where it was stationed, Liara could understand why.
"It must be that aircraft," Liara rationalised, "get the shutters open, Vik. We need to keep them at bay."
Vik found the breaker box and turned one of the switches. The shutter flew open and almost at once, plasma bolts began to strike the building. At least the openings were slender enough that most caught the sides of the building rather than sailing through them. Both Liara and Vik pressed themselves against the counter near the store terminal. She got a quick view over the counter to see the Covenant had pretty much surrounded their position.
"Anything in here we can use to make our arsenal a bit stronger?" She asked Vik.
The quarian dug around under the counter a bit and pulled out a few mods. He looked around for anything potentially useful, eventually passing off an extended pistol barrel to Liara. She took it and quickly attached it to the gun. The extra damage could prove useful.
Once it was on, she popped up from cover and fired into the assembled crowd of Covenant. The rounds hit one of the sangheili, taking down his shields after a few clear hits. That was when one of the kig-yar stepped into her line of fire to cover him with his shield. The orange energy stopped her shots cold.
Vik tried his best to help take him down. He popped up beside Liara and fired a blast at the kig-yar. It failed to penetrate to shield, but the shot did stagger the alien backward. His fellow kig-yar soon approached to help support him. When the kig-yar regained his composure, he fired back with his needle gun from behind the safety of his cover, forcing them back down into cover.
"We need a new strategy." Liara suggested. "I don't suppose you have some grenades on you."
Vik checked his pouches and pockets, but came up empty.
"Damn, I probably left them back on my runabout." He complained.
"Why would you keep grenades on your shuttle?" Liara asked confused.
"Not important." He replied, dismissing the question. "I can improvise."
Vik began pulling out boxes under the counter, spilling the contents onto the floor. As he scoured the various mods he began picking up a number into his clutches. He discarded some, before taking a pistol melee stunner upgrade and SMG Heat Sink component. As he clutched them tightly, plasma bolts flew clean through the open window.
"Keep them busy, Doctor." Vik requested as politely as he could while he rummaged through more boxes. "I need time to work."
Liara hoped the quarian knew what he was doing. At the moment, she just had to do her best to keep the Covenant on their toes. She stood up from cover again and fired into the crowd of aliens. They were behind their own signs and benches as well by now. The kig-yar were the only ones out in the open and that was because they had their own cover. That didn't make them invulnerable though. Their shields could only protect them from the front and from bullets after all.
She stretched out her hand and formed a singularity behind the line of kig-yar. The shield carrying aliens were picked clean off the ground and pulled into the whirling ball of blue energy. Unable to fight it, no matter how desperately they clawed at the air, they were helpless to Liara's follow up attack, a 'throw' sent hurtling into their midst. The attack detonated the singularity, decimating the kig-yar with a biotic explosion.
As the bodies of the kig-yar fell to the ground, biotic energy cascading around their bodies like fire, needles from above struck down on the shop's window. The kig-yar snipers had them pinned again and the sangheili had renewed firing on the storefront as well. It would take a lot more than a singularity detonation to take them down. This was especially so given their extra shielding, that would probably absorb most of the blast, and their own tenacity to keep fighting.
Luckily, Vik seemed to have a solution. Liara looked back to him to see that he had added a shotgun spare thermal clip mod and a power magnifier for a pistol to his collection of items. He had broken out his extra tools and was beginning to piece the mods together. He was pulling out pieces, placing the mods inside each other or connecting them together. As it neared completion, the stunner and heat sink seemed fused to one another. The sink's part was transplanted into the spare shotgun clip while the generator had been forcibly plugged into the stunner. As Vik furiously continued making cuts and welds into the jury rigged device, Liara felt compelled to ask the inevitable question.
"What are you doing?" She curiously enquired.
"Making a bomb." He replied simply.
At that moment, he pulled something free of the generator and it burst to life. The stunner suddenly glowed bright as an electrical charge built up. Vik rushed to the window and looked out into the street, the improvised explosive sparking in his hand. He looked to one of the groups of sangheili behind an ad for Fishdog Food Factory and tossed his creation towards them.
The device landed just to the left of them. They understandably looked down on the sparking pile of mutilated junk confused and bewildered. When it glowed red hot, however, they realised their mistake and tried to run. The resulting explosion was like that of a powerful pipe bomb. It ripped the advertising sign apart and did the same to the sangheili. Their shields were drained to nothing and their bodies riddled with shrapnel. The two aliens fell over dead in the street. Vik pumped his fist in the air at the success.
"You Hegemony stooges can go choke on that!" He shouted in triumph.
Liara pulled the quarian down just as the kig-yar snipers opened up on the store front again. She was still happy that they had eliminated two of the sangheili, but there were more out there than just those two last she saw.
"Where'd you learn to jury rig a bomb?" She asked him.
"Extranet." Vik answered rather hastily. "Curiosity only."
Given the nature of the seedy underbelly of the extranet that was probably mostly true. Although Vik's paranoid personality was clearly showing again. But while there was no doubt more to the story behind Vik's engineering skills, she couldn't delve deeper into an interrogation.
The storefront was suddenly rocked once more by a terrible explosion. This one cracked the roof over them. Liara motioned Vik to run away from the collapsing section and they both dove away as the ceiling came tumbling down. When the dust settled, a large portion of the roof was broken off. A huge hole was now in its place. It gave them a clear view of the hovering alien aircraft above. Both she and Vik rolled into what little cover was left as the aircraft began to strafe the now more open storefront.
"I really hope your friend shows up!" Vik shouted over the increasing fire.
"I know Wrex, he'll be here." She assured the quarian confidently. "He's probably just looking for the best way to make an entrance!"
It was then, almost as if on cue, that Liara heard the booming roar of a krogan carrying through the air. She looked to the rooftops through the hole in the storefront. The alien aircraft was flying low nearby the rooftops at this time, but it didn't block Liara's view of Wrex across the skyline. He sped past the kig-yar snipers, aiming straight for the alien aircraft. He launched himself from the edge of the roof and flew several feet towards his target. He slammed into the vehicle's side with his shoulder, throwing the aircraft into a spin. The craft seemed heavily damaged, but it remained airborne.
Wrex kept himself grasped to the side of the craft best he could. He stomped down on the wing-like appendage beneath him, perhaps hoping it would cause the craft to crash. As the appendage broke loose, however, the vehicle remained aloft. The only change was it seemed to become more unwieldy in the air.
"Fine, Plan B." He reasoned.
The krogan slammed his fist straight into the side of the aircraft, easily breaking through the armour. He pulled out a mess of wires and the aircraft suddenly dipped. Smoking and on fire, Wrex leapt from the vehicle and to the ground just a few feet below. The craft continued to spin out, crashing into a nearby building at the end of the street.
Wrex got to his feet and quickly ran to cover. As he did, the kig-yar snipers on high fired down on him. Their needles did not pursue him for long though. One of the snipers was struck down with a sword clean through his stomach. Materializing behind him was Saya Empa, blade in hand.
The second kig-yar jumped back as the salarian slashed towards him. When Saya next tried to cut him down with an overhead swing, the kig-yar blocked it by holding up his rifle horizontally. The blade struck down on the gun instead of cutting through his head. Saya pulled the sword away and delivered a terrible kick to the side of the alien's face. When the kig-yar tried to fire his weapon at the salarian, Saya artfully dodged the incoming needles, spinning and ducking out of the way of the incoming shots. He rolled forward across the rooftop, slashing out at the side of enemy alien's leg. The kig-yar crumpled to the floor on one knee and tried to turn to catch Saya in the back. Instead a blade caught the kig-yar in the eye, killing him instantly.
"Told you they'd come." Liara told Vik, still looking up at Saya on the roof.
They still had quite a few sangheili to deal with, but the odds had decidedly turned in their favour for the moment. Saya had taken over the former sniper's nest and was now firing on the sangheili on the street. They fired back, but weren't willing to stay out in the open. They fell back down the street, Wrex firing his assault rifle into the retreating crowd. He passed the demolished mod store as Liara and Vik climbed out of what was left of it.
"Sorry about the wait," Wrex apologised as he continued to fire. "Level is crammed with panicking people. We closed in on your transponder, but we got a little lost it seems, ended up on the roof somehow."
More like Wrex wanted to pull off a krogan air-drop, but Liara said nothing. She was just glad he had shown up in time with Saya.
"Point is we have them on the ropes." She told him. "We can end this."
"Cornered varren are just as dangerous as ordinary ones." Wrex warned. "I'll keep them focused here on the right, you and the quarian move up the left side."
Liara did so as, taking Vik with her to the other side of the street. The Covenant were holding their ground again among some benches and signs. With Saya firing on them with his rifle, they were also keeping their heads down. Getting the sangheili out of cover wouldn't be easy, but Liara liked their chances a lot more now than before.
As she and Vik moved up, a series of plasma bolts sliced through the air near them. They both went to ground near a dumpster set up near a small kiosk. Plasma continued to strike the container, melting bits of metal off it.
"Alright, Vik, we can do this." Liara started. "Set up a sentry turret again and keep them down. We can move up to that corner there and get a better angle."
Vik was about to carry out the plan, but he didn't really have the chance. Without warning, an explosion erupted among the sangheili. It wasn't a grenade or rocket. Looking out, Liara saw that it was some kind of biotic flare attack. As the energy dissipated, the cause of the attack was revealed. Stepping out among the devastated street was the familiar violet skinned asari crime lord, Aria T'Loak.
Her attack had thrown three of the sangheili out of cover. They were alive, however, and recovered quickly. They turned their weapons towards the Queen of Omega now, shouting out angry declarations Liara's translator couldn't decipher. Aria barely flinched at the plasma bolts as they sailed past her, easily ducking her head out of the way. She did break into a run eventually and launched a reave attack at one of the Covenant soldiers. The sangheili clutched himself tightly in pain, but it was only a precursor. Aria fried another flare and the detonation it caused when it struck the warp field was enough to finish the sangheili. Their limp bodies were thrown across the street as the biotic aura of the flare faded.
Two more of the remaining sangheili ran forward firing his plasma gun in rapid succession. She rolled away from the bolts and pulled out her shotgun. She aimed at one of the charging aliens and fired a devastating carnage round from the weapon. The blast ripped through the alien's shields and his body. His friend survived, merely shaken by the attack. He kept running at Aria, plasma dagger now at the ready. The asari criminal spun her body away from the lunging attack. The sangheili turned to strike again only for a biotic punch to send him flying.
The last of the sangheili opened up on Aria from his cover, trying to pull back to a nearby shop and escape. He didn't get far before Aria slung out her hand and captured the alien in a lash attack. A strand of biotic energy reached out, grabbed onto the sangheili and pulled him into her. Aria then fired a full thermal clip from her pistol into the helpless Covenant soldier. His dead body fell to the ground moments later.
"Well, that was not the kind of help I expected." Liara said to herself when it was over.
Vik hid himself behind Liara when he spotted Aria. The good doctor accepted he had his reasons, but she still needed to talk to her. She never would've saved her lives without a reason and Liara had to know what it was.
She got her answer as she approached. Wrex followed suit, with Saya bringing up the rear when he dropped down from the rooftops. Aria was currently standing over the last living sangheili, the one she had biotically punched. He now had a shotgun levelled at his forehead.
"What did I tell you about Omega?" She asked the alien with a low growl. "What did I tell you?"
"We do not follow the whims of a petty pirate." The sangheili spoke in defiance as he sat himself up. "We follow a high order, a higher calling than your avaricious existence."
Aria barely contained a sarcastic laugh, still showing no emotion, save for a quiet sense of rage.
"I'm no 'petty' pirate. I'm THE pirate, THE Criminal." She declared. "And on Omega, there is no order higher than mine. You forgot that, so now you're going to serve as an example."
"You only send me to paradise with this murder while your sins weigh your feet in this hell." The sangheili declared. "My brothers will avenge my pass-"
A loud bang silenced the alien, the ring of a powerful shotgun slug cutting him down with ease. Aria rested the smoking weapon to her side.
"I should've made that more painful just because he was so annoying." She said aloud to herself in monotone.
She turned to Liara now, the former archaeologist giving her an accusing look. The conversation had told her everything she needed to know. She was not happy with what she had learned.
"You knew about them." She said simply. "You and the Covenant were working together."
"Hardly," Aria replied defensively as she holstered her shotgun. "It was a business arrangement, nothing more. And they just broke the terms of our contract in any case."
Liara crossed her arms, not seemingly convinced by Aria's denial.
"What contract?" She asked accusingly.
Aria sighed, almost annoyed, and continued.
"They wanted easy access to the black market for supplies, a place to dock discreetly and somewhere they could meet with specific contacts in the underworld safely." Aria explained. "The deal was simple, I let them do so and ask no questions, as long as they give me some of their weapons and keep whatever agendas they were working towards away from the station. That meant they make sure it doesn't come back to me and they don't start a firefight on my watch."
Aria looked over to Vik now, who was trying to keep himself hidden behind Liara.
"And apparently, one of those agendas involved a certain someone," she spoke up, a venomous tone in her voice. She then turned to Liara. "Of course, I should've expected as much with you involved looking for the little idiot."
"If we had known they were here we could've planned for it." Liara told her adamantly.
"I didn't even know they were of interest to you." Aria answered back with her voiced raised slightly. "Then again, you always seem to show up when mysterious aliens are lurking about. So maybe I should've anticipated your connection, however hostile it was."
Aria looked back at Vik, who was peeking out behind Liara's shoulder.
"You're making me regret I didn't kill you, quarian." She said coldly.
"I didn't mean to get shot at today, ma'am," Vik weakly protested, walking out slightly from behind Liara. "I'm sorry."
Liara quickly stepped in to defend Vik, putting herself once again between the quarian and the Omega Queen.
"You can't blame Vik for what these aliens did." She told her adamantly. "He's not responsible for their rampage across your station."
"Yes," Aria seemed to agree, "I suppose you're more to blame than him."
Liara glared slightly at Aria as she continued.
"I have several dead in two separate sections of this level. There are ten business fronts, including that Mod Shop over there and one of the local drinking holes, now shot to pieces. All of them by the way either owe me protection money or a cut of the profits. Now, granted, it's barely a pinprick in my assorted income, but it's still my money." Aria explained thoroughly. "You're lucky I didn't particularly like that turian who owned the bar though, I think he was taking more than his required cut. I still have to repair the damages, however, and a bunch of random crazy aliens doing my work for me doesn't help my reputation with the local population. I'm supposed to enforce matters within my businesses, not get outside help."
It was Aria's way of saying she could be angrier than she was now. It also somewhat answered her main question.
"That's why you had to step in and save us." Liara surmised. "You can't have someone executing people in the streets when they're not doing it on your orders. You can't let others get the idea that they can start running things without your say or making you look like you can't protect your own business ventures."
"Precisely," Aria answered simply, "there may be only one rule on Omega, but it carries a lot of weight and I need to show people why it matters."
So, at least for now, they had Aria on their side. How long that would last, Liara wasn't sure. She still was in the dark about something though.
"How long have the Covenant been operating here?" She asked her.
"About three weeks or so," Aria answered simply. "They behaved themselves until now, although I admit they started getting into places they probably shouldn't have awhile back. They were skulking around the back alleys down here for one. I also sometimes caught them in my security systems. I looked the other way though because they weren't stealing credits from me, otherwise they'd all be dead already."
That proved it. The Covenant had been coming and going from here long before Vik had posted that picture. They couldn't have been here just for that, nor attacked Vik because of that one posting. There had to be another reason they wanted to kill him.
It was then Liara heard the sound of another one of those flying machines. She turned to see it coming in from down the street. Saya looked through his scope down the street and then passed it to Liara, pointing it down range. She saw another squad worth of Covenant, kig-yar and sangheili in it. They were definitely the reinforcements for their now dead comrades. She handed the rifle back to Saya and turned to Aria.
"It looks like they still need to learn that rule." Liara told her.
"Predictable." Aria sighed, pulling out her pistol. "Let's end this quickly if we can."
They rushed past the destroyed mod shop and took cover within a parking lot for aircars in the center of the promenade. As the Covenant got close, Wrex was the first to open up, firing a barrage of assault rifle fire. The shots bounced off the shields, but it forced them to seek shelter. Saya opened up with his sniper rifle. Equipped with disruptor rounds, the rifle's rounds cut through the shields with ease. One shot caught a sangheili in the face. He reached up to clutch his eye as another shot hit him center mass, taking him down for good.
Not to be outdone, Wrex switched to his shotgun and fired a carnage shot at a group of kig-yar. Their shields absorbed the shot, but they seemed to be shut down from the force of the impact. Wrex was delighted at the sight of a clear shot, so he got ready to aim again. Except Saya beat him to it, firing three clean shots that killed the kig-yar with ease. That earned the salarian a glare from Wrex.
"You know, we have a rule about taking kills on Tuchanka." He warned.
Saya didn't seem to listen as he kept firing on the Covenant. Wrex just shook his head annoyed and went back to defending.
Vik dropped a sentry turret early on, letting it pepper the Covenant as they approached. One sangheili brushed off the shots, even as his shields died. He bounded over the aircars, plasma sword in hand, and sliced the turret apart. He went straight for Vik, he pulled his shotgun up and fired two clean shots at the charging alien out of fear. The sangheili's blood spilled across the parked vehicles and the alien slipped down onto the tarmac below and right at Vik's feet. The quarian stood there shaking for a moment, as blood pooled onto his feet. If he had pulled the trigger a half second later, he'd have been dead. It was hard not to hyperventilate at that fact a bit.
Wrex saw the quarian frozen up and pushed his head back down before a furious barrage of plasma could do it for him. He shook the quarian vigorously.
"Wake up, princess." He ordered. "We still got a fight to win."
Vik tried his best to get over his shakes, but it wasn't easy to grip the gun again. He turned to his omni-tool and readied another sentry.
"Maybe I should've taken my meds today." He mumbled half scared.
Liara and Aria tossed out biotic throws one after the other. It wasn't easy to keep the Covenant back with the strategy, as it only seemed to knock them down for a bit. Liara set down a singularity in the path of a few sangheili, trapping them in the field long enough for Aria to fire a carnage shot into their ranks. It killed one with a direct hit, but the others just got up and began searching for cover among the aircars.
"We're going to need a bigger explosion." Liara told her fellow asari.
A green blast rocked the parking lot just then. Aria looked up to see the Covenant's air support hovering above them. She gave it a sinister little grin and then put her gun away. She backed up from her cover slightly and then swung out a powerful lash attack from each of her hands. The biotic leashes grabbed the aircraft, encasing it in a blue aura. With a heavy grunting heave, Aria pulled the aircraft down to the ground and caused it to crash among the assorted aircars. The explosion rocked the ground and killed several Covenant, their bodies incinerated by the blast or thrown into mangled heaps.
The sangheili and kig-yar that remained looked on through the flames for a moment, before something emerged from the smoke and fire. It was Aria, Liara and Wrex by her side. She had no weapon in her hands, but the latter two kept theirs trained on the alien horde. There were only a few of the Covenant left now, all of them kig-yar who hadn't run forward with the sangheili. They glared at the assorted group.
"This was not part of our arrangement," Aria announced coldly as she stepped casually over the dead body of a sangheili. "I told you to keep your machinations and plans away from my station, from my business."
"This took precedence over the deal." One of the kig-yar tried to explain. "Look, the sangheilis are dead, we can resolve this easy. Simply give us the sickly suited one and we leave."
"The thing is you people are going to be leaving here either way now." Aria replied unmoved by the demand. "You've destroyed half this level and made a nuisance of yourselves. I have no desire to continue doing business with you zealots. So, explain to me why I should do anything for you?"
The kig-yar simply pointed his weapon at her, as did his comrades.
"We kill you and burn this station to ashes!" He threatened. "How's that?"
"Well isn't that just adorable." Aria laughed. "You actually still think you can win? I would admire that determination, if it wasn't so patently misinformed. You see, you have no air support anymore. I've already had your dock locked down by my men so you can't call in those ugly purple ships of yours. And as for me..."
Aria pressed down on her omni-tool with her thumb, activating a command button. Moments later two gunships rose up from behind the ledge to their right. Their cannons and missiles were aimed squarely at the Covenant positions.
"I called them in as soon as I saw you all running up the street." She explained. "They informed me they just arrived about two seconds after I brought your friend here down from the sky."
Aria pointed back at the burning hulk of an aircraft, lying in the burning lot behind her. The kig-yar seemed to get the message, but he still bartered.
"We'll leave what remains of our weapons if-"
"You don't get it. I'm just going take them." Aria interrupted. "You have nothing to offer me. So here's how it's going to work. You're going to walk back to the dock under escort from my people. You're going to take one of your three big purple shuttles you showed up here with, leave everything else behind and never come back to Omega again."
"And?" The kig-yar asked, his weapon still pointed at her.
"And then I don't shoot you all dead on this street." Aria answered back curtly.
It took only another moment for the kig-yar to lower his gun and drop it to the ground. Aria smiled proudly as the other Covenant did the same.
"You're gonna pay for this." The kig-yar threatened still.
"I never pay for anything I've already gotten free of charge." Aria answered back. She then got on her comm-link. "Send enforcers to my position. I need to get some trash off my station."
The Covenant were gone and the fires put out. A few emergency workers were cordoning off the area, helping wounded and assisting in general clean up. Liara looked over it all in despair. She had never expected this much trouble just from going to Omega. The Covenant had proven themselves ruthless, merciless and without regard for innocent bystanders. It had gotten pretty bad. All of this just to save one quarian. Not that Liara regretted saving his life, he was as caught up in this unfortunate circumstance as any of them.
For better or worse, they owed Aria a debt for getting them out of this alive. It probably would've gone a lot worse without her sudden last minute intervention. However, among the devastated remains of the level's marketplace and the dead bodies that littered the streets, many of them who apparently owed her money, Aria didn't appreciate their gratitude. She was with two of her armed thugs as she stared down Liara and her team.
"You've cost me a lot of my time and money, T'Soni." She stated. "I should've known letting you have even an iota of free reign on this station was a bad idea."
"You're the one who let a bunch of fanatics come aboard." Liara shot back. "Maybe you should pick your business partners better."
"You also made this rampage worse by leading them on a chase." Aria added tersely. "A lot of people died just so you could save that blubbering idiot you're apparently so fond of protecting."
All eyes turned to Vik, who didn't like the extra attention as he backed up slightly from the assembled line. Liara was unapologetic regardless.
"If you're referring to the thugs in the bar, I don't feel sorry for them." She stated. "If they had just let us slip out the back they'd probably all still be alive. Plus, they antagonized the Covenant, like most of the dead did."
"Most of them got involved unnecessarily, yes, but not all." Aria declared. "Take a look for a moment."
The Omega Queen pointed towards a stack of bodies, two of whom were humans. They were a middle aged woman and man, lying dead from plasma burns. Liara suddenly realised, that Sangheili who was firing indiscriminately before, she had been mistaken. He wasn't firing off shots at random, those humans were his target. He took time out from the fight... just to kill humans. Kayap had mentioned the hatred they had for them, but that was just insane.
"Why do you care about that?" Liara asked back at Aria, looking her dead set in the eyes.
"I don't, but I expected that one of Shepard's friends would." Aria charged. "It's just a little lesson from me about how your actions have consequences and why you shouldn't feel so unmoved by them. I'm not the only one you hurt today."
Admittedly, Liara felt a bit sick at the knowledge. She had indirectly put those people in harm's way. She knew that. But she wouldn't show it. She wouldn't let Aria get the last word here. So she turned it around.
"What about your actions?" She asked. "The Covenant will be back. You're going to be on the top of their list of people they want to see fall."
"They can certainly try to attack Omega." Aria shrugged unconcerned. "The Terminus Fleet will probably kill them all first though. So I'm not worried."
"You'll still need a leg up on them." Liara told her. "Information about what they can do, their weapons, their ships, the other aliens they have with them. I can provide that and maybe even keep them focused more on me than you, for a price."
Aria didn't flinch or even raise an eyebrow, but she sounded intrigued by the offer.
"What do you propose?" She asked.
"You keep me updated on the underworld. Tell me about any possible connections to the Covenant through various criminal organizations and groups if you find out about them." Liara explained. "Keep me informed about any developments with them you discover and I'll make sure to handle them for you. The Covenant won't bother attacking you if I'm the one making all the trouble."
Aria thought it over for a moment before shrugging and relenting to the offer.
"If you honestly want to keep going after these fanatics, be my guest. I'll keep you in the loop. Who knows, maybe you'll kill yourself in the process of me helping you." She reasoned. "Either way, you stay away from Omega, from now on."
"I'd be happy to." Liara agreed wholeheartedly.
Aria seemed about to leave, but she suddenly looked over to Vik with a grave frown upon her features.
"I want you off Omega in the next twenty four hours." She told the quarian. "Otherwise, I'm throwing you out, through the airlock."
Vik gulped and he tried to speak up, but the words died in his throat as the asari glared at him.
"He's not responsible for this either, Aria." Liara said. "You can't blame him for what the Covenant did."
"They only went wild because they wanted to kill him for some reason." Aria explained. "I don't care what he did to set them off. I want him gone. Plain and simple."
Aria began to walk away, stopping briefly in front of Wrex. The krogan stared back at her in response. Aria remained silent for a good twenty seconds as she looked him over.
"You seem familiar." She said. "Have I ever tried to kill you before?"
"Possible, I know a lot of asari who tried to kill me." Wrex replied.
Aria placed her hand up to her chin and cocked her head. She then just huffed at it all, her face remaining as stone.
"I suppose I was mistaken." She sighed regretfully. "I've fought so many Krogan sometimes the faces blur a bit. You just reminded me of someone for a second."
"I hope he's as good-looking." Wrex chuckled.
"Not really, but he was almost as smart." Aria admitted nonchalantly. "I don't think you're him though, too bad."
Aria continued to walk away, looking back for a brief second.
"Too bad your stay on Omega turned out so badly, Krogan." She stated. "Better luck next time, I guess."
Liara could've sworn saw a slight smirk on Aria's face as she left. She wasn't sure if Wrex did. Neither had long to ponder it, as Vik spoke up.
"I guess I better start packing up everything in my apartment back onto my runabout shuttle." He said aloud. "Well, what's left anyway. Thanks for saving me, Doctor."
Vik began to walk away as well, but Liara didn't let him get far.
"Wait," she said calling out. "We could still use your help."
Vik stopped dead in his tracks, looking back at her.
"I can just get you a copy of all my files on the Hegemony and you can sift through them if that's what you mean."
"No, I mean actual help." Liara corrected him. "You can join the Lucen's crew, like I said before."
The quarian looked confused at the suggestion.
"I thought you just said we were going to your ship because you need to take me some place safe so you could question me further." Vik said sounding befuddled. "What with all the shooting and the crazy alien assassins chasing us..."
"I'll admit I wasn't looking to recruit you at first." Liara informed him. "But we could use the extra technical expertise."
Wrex just groaned aloud upon Liara's words.
"Liara, do we have to?" He asked.
"He knows Hegemony systems and how to break them, Wrex. He's an expert hacker and engineer, maybe rough around the edges and unhinged, but he's not an idiot. We need his information on the Swords and Balak and taking him along would be easier than sorting through his files by ourselves." She listed off for the krogan rapidly. "Besides, if the Covenant finds him again, he won't last five minutes against them. He's on their hit list. He needs protection. Shepard wouldn't turn someone away when they need help."
Wrex still shook his head with a sigh. But he looked to Vik anyway.
"I suppose we do have room on the ship." He admitted.
Vik stepped back over to them, still surprised by the offer.
"Really? You want me to join you in fighting these aliens?" He asked confused. "You want my help? No one ever wants my help."
"If the Swords are working for the Hegemony and using their codes, and if you can crack them, then yes we can use your help." Liara told him. "But we need to know if you'll be committed to this, perhaps even putting your board on hold when we need you in the field."
"If it means I finally get to stick it to those slaving fascist bosh'tets in the Hegemony," Vik replied, slamming his fist into his palm with righteous fury. "Then yeah, I'm in, Doctor T'Soni."
"You can just call me Liara." She assured him, stretching out her hand for him to shake. "Welcome to the crew, Vik'Sajee."
The quarian eagerly took her hand and shook it joyfully. She was worried for a second he was going to pull it from her socket.
"Now then," she said when she eventually wrenched her hand free. "Let's get your stuff then."
"I just need to get it all back to my shuttle and I can park it in your hanger." Vik told her happily. "It shouldn't take more than a few minutes, tops."
Another new face added to her steadily growing crew. This one, a little quarian who apparently knew too much and had needed saving in the bowels of a space station. Once again, just as Aria said, it really did sound familiar. She was just happy that this time she could be around for this part of the adventure.
Aria sat on her couch in her club, staring at the feed in front of her. The Covenant had been stuffed back aboard their transport and were now leaving the station. Good riddance to bad rubbish in her mind. At least she kept the majority of their technology. Perhaps something could even be salvaged from the wrecks of those two aircraft in the lower levels.
In the end though, despite T'Soni setting all this off, she was happy to be rid of them. This Covenant had been boisterous, loud, spiteful and self-righteous in all their dealings. She liked working with racists even less. Running this business had taught her to never judge a person by the colour of their skin, the place of their birth or even their different amino acids. It all came down to how you were inside really, as cliché as it sounded. That and how many credits you could offer. In the end, the Covenant weren't worth dealing with to be honest.
T'Soni had been right about one thing though, the Covenant would come back once they heard the news. She wasn't about to be embroiled in a conflict with these aliens and was more than happy to let the good Doctor take the heat. She didn't enjoy making a deal with her, but she did admire T'Soni's determination. How much of Shepard had rubbed off her was anyone's guess.
However, despite her best efforts, she had failed to hide that tiny weakness of hers. She had seen it in the little asari's eyes, compassion. It drove her to save that quarian. She could see it in her eyes when she spotted the dead human couple. She may have been trying to hide it, but she wasn't quite ready for the cold, harsh real world. Her empathy would be the end of her. As for Aria, she had no time for that liability inherent emotion, especially not with her current concerns.
She watched the Covenant ship begin to slip away from her station. As it flew away, she turned to Anto.
"Did they plant it?" She asked him.
"Didn't take long to rig up, boss." He assured her as he passed a remote to her. "Whenever you're ready."
She couldn't let these sangheili reach their masters and inform them of how she had turned on them. With any luck, they'd assume T'Soni killed them all. She was not about to get Omega embroiled in a pointless war, even if she knew she'd eventually win. It wasn't good for business. She had promised not to kill the Covenant while they were within the station. She had said nothing about their safety after they left.
Regardless, she still had make an example for others to recognize.
"One rule," She stated plainly as she stared at the screen.
She pressed down on the trigger and watched as the alien dropship exploded into a ball of fire in the vast empty void.
"Don't fuck with Aria."
AN: I'm guessing some of you were wondering when she'd say it, eh?
Anyway, I really enjoyed writing Aria this chapter. It's such a blast to do a person who knows how powerful she is and doesn't really give a crap letting others know it. I was pretty much sold on her the instant I met her in Omega in 2 and was really looking forward to helping her take it back in 3. Before you ask, I did enjoy that DLC, save for some elements of the ending. For those disappointed Aria didn't join the crew, don't worry, this won't be the last time we see her. But you can't expect the Queen of Omega to drop everything she's got going on to save the galaxy. After all, what's in it for her?
So this chapter was important to me for one reason, Vik'Sajee. He's a quarian I made for an RPG a good while ago. Unfortunately, you can only do so much in an RPG like the one I joined and introduced him to. That's fine and all, and I don't mean to mix my peas with my carrots here, but I kinda wanted to use him again with a few more liberties on my part. That, and probably see how he goes over with you fine people.
I'll have more on this chapter in my profiles page where I'll properly expand on some things. For now, please leave a review and do feel free to visit/add to Guilty Sparks' new TV Tropes page. The link is on my profile and now here: /Fanfic/GuiltySparks
Just type that into the main TV Tropes page and you should be good.
Next chapter, we'll finish off this portion of Liara's sub-plot with some more revelations about what the Covies are doing in the ME-Verse. And after that, we'll return to Halo and see about finally saving Jack and Joker.
