A/N- Thanks go to 'Guest' for leaving the review. It's good to know someone's still reading this. Much appreciated. As I said, there will be two more chapters. Here's one. The epilogue should be up soon.
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CITADEL
PRESIDIUM
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Alice stepped around the steel tubes imbedded in the granite, long auburn strands of her hair whipping around her face from the strong, constant breeze. Fifty yards in front of her, Legend was slowly approaching a break in between two large embassy buildings. She glanced up at the Tower, shielding her eyes.
"Anybody on the Tower, talk to me."
Silence followed her command. Footsteps scraped the ground behind her as Merl stood up. She heard him readjusting his omni.
"Shepard."
"Not now, Merl. Garrus, Wrex; answer me."
"Shepard, I've got-".
She glared back at the salarian and he bit his tongue.
"Commander," Wrex's voice crackled through.
"Wrex! I need a casualty report or good news, now."
"Yeah, you got it."
Merl stepped to her side, looking as if he'd been holding back his bladder for the last several hours and simply couldn't do it anymore. "Shepard, I think I've found the source! We need to go now, before that thing can do anymore damage looking for it!"
Tired, she begrudgingly nodded, scanning the area. "Yes, I know, just…"
Merl followed her look of sudden terror. Several buildings away, the roof Liara T'Soni had been standing on had disappeared in a cloud of dust.
"Liara… Liara!"
The asari didn't respond through the comm.
On top of the Council Tower, strong winds whistling around him, Wrex crawled through the destruction and peered over the edge. He could now see the large, hollow interior of the Tower, with its fountain, lush, vibrant walkways and trees and the beginnings of the reconstructed raised platform beleaguered Citadel citizens used to address the Council. Much closer, Wrex saw Rickard West, dangling ten feet below, arms and wounded leg wrapped around the cable, swaying.
West stared back at him. "Pull…me…up!"
Wrex did nothing at first. He just observed Rickard through the swirling dust clouds around them. He could see blood trailing from Rickard's hands down the cable in thick red lines. Rickard's pant legs flapped crazily in a gust of wind from the automated weather system and the excess leather from the belt tied around his thigh swayed in a circular motion like a snake about to strike at its prey. One of the lenses of his glasses had cracked down the middle.
"Urdnot," West gasped.
The krogan nodded and grabbed a hold of the cable. He began to heft the other man up.
Together, Jordan and Garrus pushed the pockmarked sheet off of them. It thumped onto the roof, vibrating.
Jordan coughed and rolled onto his stomach, pushing himself up. He glanced at Garrus. "You good?"
"I'm alive."
The human stood up and held out a hand, which Garrus took. Jordan yanked him to his feet.
West let go of the cable when he reached the edge of the roof and grabbed onto the uneven surface, attempting to pull himself the rest of the way up.
Wrex grunted at the sight of the man's shredded palms, sticky and red with blood. He reached down to Rickard's back and grabbed him by the lapel of his suit, lifting Rickard bodily and setting him down amongst the twisted metal.
Rickard lay there for a long moment, taking deep, tremulous breaths. "I thought…for a second…you were going to leave me there."
Laying on his side, Wrex looked away from Rickard and watched Garrus and Jordan yank the barrel out of the cab's windshield, dragging bits of glass out with it. When they tossed it away from them, it banged on the roof, bouncing and rolling slowly before coming to rest against a thick, four-foot chunk of granite with re-bar sticking out from both ends.
West was still staring at him open-mouthed when he looked back, panting, apparently waiting for a response.
Wrex brought one leg up, balancing himself on his other knee. He knelt over the human, red eyes trained down on him. "I wasn't. She wouldn't have liked that."
West nodded, the breaths coming steadier now. "Right. Her again. Well, that's good, I guess."
"Course," Wrex continued, "I was hoping you were gonna let go, lose your grip. If you'd fallen and died before I could lift you up, I couldn't be faulted for it… Gave you ten seconds to do it."
He got to his feet. "But you just kept holding on, so I had to pull you up."
Rickard didn't respond. Wrex left him by the edge.
Down at the building tops, Shepard leapt from one roof to the next, shouting. "Liara!"
"Shepard, wait! I've got the signal, come back!" Merl cried, his voice pitched, cracking and hoarse. He sounded tired. They were all tired. She couldn't think about that now.
She bolted across the next rooftop, sliding around and jumping over the pieces of the Tower that had crashed down around them. She spotted the top of the clothing store Liara had been standing on when she last saw her. Shepard saw the gaping hole, the cave-in.
"Christ, LIARA!"
"Shepard-" Merl's voice shot through her omni. Not stopping, she flicked the comm switch on her omni off.
She bounded across the last gap, misjudging the distance between the building tops, arms and legs flailing through the air before her chest slammed into the wall and her arms swung over the top, grasping the edge of the roof.
Scraping her legs against the side of the building, Shepard pulled then pushed herself to safety on top of the store. She rolled over and trotted to the hole in the roof. Shading her eyes, she looked down inside.
"Liara?!"
The rubble took up the majority of the floor below her. It would've smashed anything beneath with ease. She knew that.
She punched the metal she laid on. "Shit! Shit, shit, shit! Liara, answer me!"
From inside the store Shepard heard shuffling and, searching frantically, she spotted a pile of clothes moving.
"Liara?"
A terrified salarian peeked out from under several pairs of pants. "Excuse me. I'm going to go home now, okay?"
The transit cab roared to life on the Tower roof as Garrus, sitting in the driver's seat with the door open, flipped the switch on the dashboard. He sighed with relief, glancing up at Jordan. "Well, that's one small favor."
Wrex appeared next to Jordan at the side of the cab, speaking into his omni, his voice echoing through Garrus'. "Commander, I said everyone's breathing and stable up here…" He looked at the turian. "Can't reach Shepard."
"Hey!" A high-pitched voice shot through the comm back at them. "I need some help here!"
"Identify yourself," Garrus responded.
Merl paced at the edge of the damaged roof alone, his eyes on the whale. "Merl Orthanc; Shepard wants me to find the signal that's driving Legend, the birdsong, but I'm gonna need that transit cab the krogan said you guys have up there, if you've still got it."
Wrex chuckled. "You hear that? Birdsong's a signal. I told you it wasn't no AWS feature, Vakarian. 'Oh, subliminal elements, keeps people from panicking, exactly what the council would do, blah, blah, blah, I worked for C-Sec so I get to be an insufferable know-it-all.' Heh. Dumbass."
"Oh, we're mocking now, is that what we're doing?" Garrus gave Wrex a look of exasperation. "Well at least I knew they weren't importing live birds, Mr. 'I may be krogan, but hey, look at me, I'm saying words like 'promenade' and 'insufferable' now, so don't call me stupid.' What exactly have you been reading in your downtime?"
Garrus and Wrex glared at each other.
"Uh, hey," Jordan interrupted, "is now really the appropriate time for… whatever this is?"
Wrex smacked Garrus in his stinted leg with the shotgun. The turian grit his teeth and scowled.
"Hello?" Merl's voice came through the comm. "Am I going to get some help or not?"
Garrus growled into his omni-tool, "Where's the Commander?"
"She took off after the asari disappeared, I can't reach her over comm."
The three men on the roof hesitated.
Merl shook with frustration, glaring at his omni. "Look, we need to do this now! If you can come and get me while somebody else distracts that thing, I can reach the signal's source and destroy it before anymore buildings fall down on us."
Garrus paused in the driver's seat. "What do you think," he asked Wrex.
Wrex grunted. "I think if we're quick about it, you and I can throw West off the roof and say it was an accident."
"I'm game for that," Jordan said.
Garrus thought for a moment, stepped out of the cab and gestured for Jordan to take his place. "Go get the kid, I'll stay here with West and try to keep the blue fish-"
"Whale," Jordan corrected as he settled into the driver's seat.
"…the beast occupied. Just don't forget about us."
Wrex nodded and moved for the passenger side.
Jordan frowned at Garrus. "I can stay, help you-"
"You're more use down there, as long as you know how to pilot one of these things. West and I aren't suitable for anymore running right now."
"I don't do well with-" Jordan whispered and jerked his head at the krogan.
Garrus' mandibles twitched. "Get over it," he said, swinging his sniper rifle into his other hand and limping back towards West.
Wrex settled into the seat next to Jordan and threw a surreptitious look at the dash. "You didn't just bust through the panel and cross the wires?" He drawled. "Waste of time."
As the transit cab flew off, Garrus sat down alongside Rickard, who was inspecting the crack in his glasses. "They left us here?"
"They'll be back." Garrus switched out ammo cartridges in the rifle, opting for explosive rounds.
"Mmm."
Garrus brought the scope up to his eye, aimed for the whale and flipped the safety off.
"Oh, you can't be serious," Rickard groaned, glancing up from his glasses at the click of the safety.
"We'll be fine, I think," Garrus said. "Just need to occupy that thing for a little while."
Shepard stood on the roof of the clothing outlet, staring at the emergency staircase. At the remnants of Liara's shattered omni-tool. Relief washed through her and mixed with the worry and fear. It clung to the inside of her gut like a sickness and a fresh wave of nausea washed over her. The sound of a transit cab flying above her brought her back to her senses and the she looked up in the sky. A blond man, short hair whipping back and forth on his head, peered from within the open window and busted windshield, glancing back down at her briefly before continuing on to the roof she'd been on with Merl. He was going to pick up the salarian, search for the signal's source. That was good.
But Alice had a singular focus.
She turned from the sight and jumped down into the hole in the roof of the retailer.
The transit vehicle didn't even land. It skimmed the surface of the building top Merl stood on and the krogan, reaching over the front seat, opened the door as the vehicle slowed its pace and Merl hopped over rubble and debris, tripped on a rock and fell face-first into the backseat of the moving cab.
A small, clawed hand grabbed the back of his work suit and dragged him the rest of the way. Merl quickly sat up and reached for the open door, looking down as he did. Big mistake. The Presidium was passing quickly beneath him over a hundred feet down.
Merl suddenly heaved and threw up outside the open door, his stomach clenching in quick, sharp spasms. The krogan in the seat in front of him laughed. Merl thought it sounded like a landslide of rocks.
Down on the grounds of the embassy, Sami fearfully ran for one of the bridges that would take him through the embassy to a path leading from the Presidium and into an undamaged sector where he could catch a rail train to the residential sector where he lived, away from all this madness. His head filled with images of the apartment he shared with Merl; of the living room with the overstuffed comfy chairs and the massive vid-screen and the coffee table they used for books because neither of them ever drank coffee, the smaller vid-screen he'd recently installed in the bathroom above the tub (much to Merl's dismay), the brightly lit, warm kitchen alcove with all the quick-fix dinners he loved so much and the bedroom where he kept his extranet action figures, his krogan comic books and his krogan war-plushies and his krogan computer games and greels, how he really wanted to play the most recent one he'd purchased, the controversial, adult-themed adventure where he assumed the role of the krogan warlord Donka as he invaded and conquered asari colonies and created a harem-
Wet vomit splattered onto the ground directly in front of him, splashing on the stone and speckling the bottom of his suit and the tops of his shoes. More of the stuff rained down around him, most of it landing in the glade on either side of the bridge.
Sami stopped running. He stopped thinking of all those things. He just stared down at the vomit on his uniform. Somewhere in the distance, he heard gunfire. Then the massive blue whale in the sky moaned angrily and Sami looked up and watched it change directions, swimming through the sky in front of tall embassy buildings, damaged and pristine both. He could barely make out that the whale had several miniscule fires burning on the skin of its midsection.
Then the red-headed human he'd seen on the news-vids who'd looked down at him from the roof of the clothing store the asari had left him in ran past without a word, breathing hard with a pistol in her hand.
Sami thought of his warm, soft bed with the bar in the middle that sometimes made his back hurt. He started to cry.
Thinking only of the bed now, Sami continued towards home.
Jordan focused on steering and adjusting the thrusters to keep control of the transit cab. He'd noticed almost immediately that removed from its automated mode of travel, the cab handled much as any other light-passenger vehicle would. He glanced back at the salarian when he heard the rear door slam shut. With the windows down and the hole in the windshield and the altitude they were traveling at, he had to yell when he asked, "What's your name again?"
"Merl," the salarian shouted back, buckling himself into the cab's restraint straps, sounding like he was going to upchuck again. "Merl Orthanc."
"Okay, Merl Orthanc, where are we headed?"
The salarian checked his omni, which was still tweeting, and looked up. He blinked, surprised. "Um…what happened?"
"What?"
Merl motioned to the windshield, then nodded towards the krogan. "Did…did he-…you know…" He screwed up his face and shook his fists, imitating what Jordan guessed was supposed to be rage.
"A barrel crashed through it on the Tower. Where're we going?"
"Oh, yeah. Keep heading towards the shipping warehouse at the edge of the district. Then…" He looked at his omni again, "it looks like we'll need to turn left. I'll say when."
"What the hell are you talkin' about," Wrex said, "the beast was headed to the north, you're taking us east."
"The signal's bouncing off of data hubs and Presidium terminals acting as relays," Merl said over the rushing wind, "like that last direction Legend was headed in;" he navigated the holographic display projected from his omni with ease as he located the relay, "it was an Avina kiosk on one of the market walks. Whoever set this up wasn't interested in Legend finding the source. They just wanted as much carnage as possible when it woke him up."
Jordan briefly shot a glance over his shoulder again. "Well, how many relays are there?"
"Legend's hit at least thirteen since it left the golden dome. I've found four hundred and thirty-two more…so far. They're spread throughout the entire Citadel."
"Holy shit," Jordan said, looking out the window at the wreckage of the Presidium, imagining what it would appear like if the whale had the opportunity to hit every relay on the Citadel.
"Somebody can do that; just create these things all over the place?" Wrex asked.
"Sure. Now, anyway. The Citadel itself is an interconnected hub of digital data; everything's wired together. When the Keepers were running things, firewalls and system protection were almost unbreakable. Now that they're gone, there's nothing stopping your techno-savvy criminals from hacking into the system."
Comprehension struck Jordan like freezing water. "And with the authorities dealing with all of the real-world felonies, the soaring crime rate-"
"-there was no better time for whoever did this to set up the beacon and draw Legend out of its home." Merl finished, glancing up from his omni as Jordan flew between two high-rise buildings, the squat six-story shipping warehouse just in front of them, the roof peeking up at the edge of the windshield. "Turn left now."
The vehicle swerved left at the end of the high-rise and several rows of skyscrapers lay before them on either side as they neared the edge of the Presidium and the beginning of Financial District Three. The artificial sunlight reflected off the glass buildings in a pinkish-blue hue and for a moment the three men watched the light glint back at them, wind whipping through the busted windshield, sounding like a thousand fervent whispers.
"It's eerie," Jordan said, "you look through the windows. All the buildings have been evacuated. Just empty chairs at empty desks, monitors and vid-screens left on. Everyone's just…gone."
"Those were the lucky ones," Wrex replied.
Merl screwed up his face in anger and punched the leather headrest in front of him. Wrex and Jordan turned in their seats, surprised.
"See," he said, "and if those stupid, pigheaded, grabbaks at Citadel Security had just listened to me, this could've been avoided. If we'd known how important the Keepers were, if we'd known what they were doing, every purpose they served, especially what the Legend system was capable of, then maybe we could've seen this coming! That's why I helped Chorban develop the damned software! But nooo, now I'm just a petty criminal with a debt to pay. Ridiculous!"
He sat there, fuming.
"…Being a criminal ain't always a bad thing, kid," Wrex grumbled, "sometimes it gets you places you'd never thought existed if you'd stuck to the straight and narrow. You mentioned that place with the golden dome."
"Legend's system."
"You were down there?"
"Yeah," Merl said.
"Me too. It was somethin', wasn't it? Not just the roof. How 'bout all that electricity in the air, swimming around you, thick as a surf; felt like walking through high tide on the shores of Tuchanka. And a thousand aisles of terminals blinkin' colors at ya'."
"I guess it was pretty amazing," Merl relented.
"Sure it was. And I seen a hundred places you wouldn't believe, just as amazing, all different from each other. Many of 'em in the last few months. Being a criminal got me here. Not being a champion of the law. But you know what's the most important thing for you to keep in mind?"
"What's that?"
"If you hit the back of my seat again I'm gonna clear away the rest of this glass from the windshield with your face."
Merl's eyes went wide and his lips thinned to a straight line.
Wrex looked back at him, red eyes narrowed. "You got me?"
He nodded vigorously.
On the ruins of the Tower roof, Garrus fired several more shots at the whale. He and Rickard watched it quiver as if they were bee stings.
"You keep pissing that thing off, it's going to come back for us," Rickard said, "and when it hits the Tower again it won't be some absent-minded swipe of the tail."
"I've got to keep it out in the open, above the embassy, away from the other buildings. I highly doubt the caliber I'm using is going to do a lot damage, much less 'piss that thing off.'"
Rickard rolled his eyes and struggled to his feet. He ran one hand through his disheveled brown hair, inspecting the damage around them. After a moment he took a deep breath and sighed. "Maybe I should've listened to Pasqualino…"
Garrus arced a brow, looked away from the scope of his rifle. "What?"
"Nothing. Talking to myself."
"Who's Pasqualino?"
Rickard smoothed down the front of his suit, eying the spill of thread where he was missing a button. "No one important. Just an adviser for the organization. Don't you have a gigantic fish to shoot?"
Garrus gave him a look and returned to the scope. After a second he adjusted the rifle and fired another shot at Legend. He watched it twitch. "Why don't you tell me about this organization?"
"What do you want to know?" Rickard responded loftily.
"Udina said it was unnamed."
"He did."
"But you guys on the inside must call it something."
"We do."
Garrus shot Legend again as it neared the balcony of the embassy the elcor and volus shared. "So what do you call it," he asked.
"That's classified, Mr. Vakarian."
"Is 'Rickard West' your real name?"
Rickard smiled. "I could tell you yes, but if it weren't I wouldn't tell you what it was. It'd be classified."
"What purpose does your organization serve?"
"That's classifi-"
"Enough," Garrus spat. "I get it. You could've made this easier on the both of us and said you couldn't tell me anything from the beginning."
Rickard's smile grew wider. "Ah, but that wouldn't have been any fun."
Frustrated, Garrus rattled off four more shots in quick succession. The beast was closer now, drifting over storefront rooftops and Garrus could tell in more detail through the scope what he'd already suspected. None of his shots were breaking its blue skin. The only irritation came from the fact that the rounds were explosive.
Garrus noticed Rickard out of his peripheral vision, tapping the heel of his wounded leg.
"What's your problem with Shepard," Garrus asked.
Rickard shifted stances and stared at him oddly for a moment. His expression seemed almost… awkward. He cleared his throat. "I don't have a problem with her. Not on a personal level. I think I made my points-… the Alliance's points of professional grievances fairly clear today in the meeting."
"You were over-the-top."
"I had my reasons."
"Being?"
Rickard West frowned, words seeming to fail him.
"Please," Garrus continued wryly, "tell me that's classified."
Rickard looked at him, sizing him up. "…How much do you know about the Alliance?"
BOOM! The Tower trembled from a mighty blow to the side, Rickard stumbling backwards onto his backside, Garrus gripping the raised edge of the roof to stabilize himself.
"No-no, not again!" Rickard said, crawling back to him.
Garrus peeked over the twisted metal at the roof's edge. Several floors at the middle of the Tower were dented in and shattered from the force of the last hit. Legend was speedily swimming away at an angle, looking to turn around for another go.
"Shit!" He said, mentally kicking himself for losing track of the creature.
"What?"
He turned to Rickard, grim-faced. "I may have pissed it off."
"We've got to do something," Rickard stated, voice raising. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Garrus. "Call that cab, get them back here to pick us up!"
"There's not enough time for that."
Legend had completed swiveling around and was now plummeting on a collision course with the Tower once more.
"So what are we going to do then, just watch it barrel into us?"
"Looks that way."
Rickard put his hands on his hips. "Well…that sucks."
"There it is!" Merl shouted, long green finger thrusting at the windshield to a high-rise in front of them.
"Alright," Jordan said, "we'll park it on the roof-"
"Urdnot," Garrus' voice shot through Wrex's omni-tool. "You about to take out that signal?"
"We're working on it," Wrex said.
"Well, you've got about sixty seconds before this thing takes out the Tower and Jordan and me with it…so, if there's a way to speed things up, we'd appreciate it."
"For the love of…" Jordan pounded the steering wheel in frustration. "Merl, you wouldn't happen to know what floor this signal is coming from, would you?"
"Uh, hang on," Merl said, frantically searching through the holographic display his omni projected, his fingers swaying through a series of shimmering blue blocks and lines. "Yeah, that one," he pointed again.
"Gonna need to be a bit more specific than a finger this time, kid," Wrex rumbled, "right now."
Outside the vehicle, the building front was racing closer and closer towards them.
"Dammit, okay, one, two, three…seven floors from the top!"
Jordan brought the vehicle down in a slight arc so they faced the line of plate-glass windows on the floor Merl had suggested.
"Um, what are we doing," Merl asked nervously. He glanced down at his omni. "WAIT," he shouted, the building front thirty feet away, "eight floors, eight floors down!"
"Come on!" Jordan griped, jamming the steering wheel forward, the transit cab nosing down one more floor, the office window taking up the entire view outside of the windshield.
Garrus and Rickard both were standing now, backing away from the damaged roof on their wounded legs as Legend raced towards them.
"They're not gonna make it in time," Rickard said.
Garrus shook his head. "Nope."
The blue whale was upon them, about to strike the middle of the Tower.
Both men inhaled deep breaths. Legend struck fiercely-
-and they felt nothing.
The building didn't rumble, nor quake. They weren't thrown to the ground or off the roof from the force of his attack.
There was no attack.
Garrus shared a look with Rickard and the two of them slowly approached the edge of the destruction. They looked down.
Legend was stuck ten feet from the edge of the roof, struggling within the binds of a biotic force field.
Down on the embassy avenue beneath the Tower, dried blood caked on the back of her head, running through her tendrils, uniform ripped and tattered around her shoulder blades, Liara T'Soni gritted her teeth and kept her arms stretched up above her, palms thrust out, energy surging from her.
The whale attempted to surge forward and she stopped him again, her foot scraping against the pavement as Legend's power dragged her forward an inch.
"That's it," she said in a ragged, angry voice, "fight it. Let us see who is better at this."
The transit cab exploded through the plate-glass window into the offices of the fifty-sixth floor, eight floors from the roof, demolishing potted plants and cubicle walls, desks and expensive leather office chairs and kept moving through the large, open room.
"Where?" Jordan yelled.
"Down that hallway to the left, through the double-doors at the other end," Merl called back, in awe of what he was witnessing.
Jordan steered the cab to the left, cutting diagonally through the cubicles, adding more pressure to the thruster control with the stick on the dashboard next to the wheel.
Cream-colored, plaster cubicle walls broke apart in their wake, bouncing off the hood of the cab, slapping against the windshield and hammering down on the roof before landing on the floor in pieces.
They crashed into a computer desk with such force that the flat-panel monitor flew from the splintering oak surface and slapped against the hole in the windshield.
The three occupants of the cab stared at the screensaver on the monitor as the vehicle continued to blast towards the hallway. On the screen, three small, white, furry animals with whiskers and little pink noses hung from the limb of a tree, side-by-side, their long fluffy tails curled between their legs. A caption beneath the picture read: 'Hang in there, you little pussies!'
"Give me a break," Jordan said, swerving into the long, brown, wood-paneled hallway and causing the monitor to fly from the windshield.
"Great," Wrex griped, "now I'm hungry." He gripped the shotgun and leaned out the window.
Aiming the Inferno at the double doors, Wrex fired off a round of metal slugs and watched the doors separate and blow off their respective hinges. He grunted appreciatively.
The vehicle breezed into the room and Merl screamed, "STOP!"
Jordan brought the vehicle to a jarring halt, all three of them jerking forward against the cab's restraint straps.
They had entered a luxurious office room with a single mahogany desk in the center, bookshelves lining the walls and a digital picture window at the far end displaying a view of a cityscape at night.
Merl popped open the back door and attempted to scramble out without unbuckling himself, fighting and jerking against the restraints before realizing what he was doing. He paused, fingers slipping over the silver metal buckle and unclasping the restraints. He launched himself into the office and leapt across the desk, knocking over several paperweights and scattering the stacks of papers beneath them.
Jordan and Urdnot exited the cab after him.
Whipping a data link from his omni, Merl jammed it into a port on the side of the monitor.
"You sure the signal's coming from here?" Wrex asked him.
Merl nodded furiously, eyes narrowed in concentration as he operated his omni.
"So this is the guy who did all this?" Jordan looked around the room at the lush interior. He picked up a knick-knack from the floor that Merl had knocked over; a small, black, plastic ball. "Seems kind of weird for the head of a-"
"No," Merl said, "I told you, everything on the Citadel is connected, the signal, the true signal, not the relays, wasn't created here, it was simply sent here. I doubt the human who worked in this room even knew he was party to such a crime."
"How do you know he's human?"
Merl jerked his head at the digital picture-window, eyes still focused on the omni-tool. "I excelled in Colonial Education. That is a city from your home planet, isn't it?"
Jordan, tossing the small plastic ball between his hands, studied the view. "Hey, it sure is! That's Chicago. Look, there's-"
"NO!" Merl exclaimed, ripping his data-link from the port, pushing the monitor from the desk, "it isn't there!" The monitor slapped onto the floor beside Jordan.
"What's the problem?" Wrex asked.
"The signal is somewhere in this room," Merl said quickly, his hands running along the surface of the desk, picking up and running through every item on it, searching, "it's not on the computer, it's in an electronic device somewhere in here but it wasn't in the damned computer."
Wrex began pulling drawers open and helping him look, throwing out notepads and pencils.
Jordan stepped to Merl's other side to help out as well, giving the knick-knack in his hand one last glance.
On the surface of the ball, the only part not in black was a circular emblem of the number eight.
Jordan turned it over, a sense of déjà vu sweeping over him.
There was an indent on the other side, a break in the ball the size of a half-dollar, with a smooth, flat, plain surface. No…not plain, Jordan thought as he noticed a murkiness through the panel.
"Hey, Falks," Wrex called angrily, an entire shelf in his hands, "that thing doesn't look electronic to me. You gonna help or what?"
"Yep," he said lightly. There was something in the murk, something rising to the top-
From inside the ball, through the panel, a tiny, bright blue triangle popped up at him with writing stenciled in white on its face.
Tweet-tweet.
"Oh shit."
Merl and Wrex looked up from the desk in time to see Jordan hurl the plastic ball at the brown paneled wall.
It shattered against the wall, inky black fluid spewing in every direction, plastic shards landing amongst the spatters of dark liquid sinking into the burgundy fabric fibers of the carpet.
A small, shiny rectangular box the size of a toy car clattered against the wall and tweeted loudly as it came to rest on the floor.
Wrex moved to step on it.
"No!" Merl shouted, stepping around him and snatching the box, searching for and finding the omni-port on the side of the box.
"What're you doing, you little runt-" Wrex started to threaten.
"You destroy this thing," Merl interrupted, connecting the box to his omni, "yes, it stops Legend, I think, but it leaves us with nothing. Just a few extra seconds, and-"
"We don't HAVE a few extra seconds," Wrex roared, snatching the box from Merl, still connected to his omni.
Legend struggled violently against the shimmering, blue biotic force field, Rickard and Garrus watching it apprehensively.
"LIARA!" Shepard found the asari on an embassy pathway near the Tower.
Liara gasped, blood flowing freely from her nostrils, the strength leaving her body, stars exploding in her vision as she began to black out.
Shepard rushed at the other woman.
Wrex crushed the small metal box.
The display on Merl's omni shivered and disappeared.
Liara felt a sudden lack of resistance from the whale, let go of everything in her and blacked out.
Shepard reached her at that moment, catching her as she slipped from her feet, unconscious, the Spectre's arms folding under hers and around her chest.
High above them, upon the Tower roof, Rickard stood stock-still as Garrus gingerly stepped down onto a twisted steel bar jutting from the roof's remains to get a better look.
"Is the field still up?" Rickard asked. "I can't see it."
"It's not up."
"Then the beast?"
"Look for yourself," Garrus said, enormous relief in his voice.
Rickard shook his head. "I'm not stepping on that thing, it barely looks steady enough holding your weight."
Garrus turned to him, smiling. "You don't have to."
Behind Garrus, the whale drifted slowly into view, its eyes shut in slumber.
"You-you-you grabbak," Merl stuttered, enraged, "you bully! You jerk!" He stood in the office room, shaking his fist at the krogan.
"Yeah," Garrus said to Wrex over the comm, "yeah. It's done. You did it."
"You lousy, grotesque- you frakking worm-baiter-"
Wrex glanced at Merl and chuckled. "It was a group effort, Vakarian. We're celebrating right now, can't you tell?"
Jordan put his hand on Merl's shoulder. "Hey, calm down, everything's alright, kid."
Merl shoved Jordan's hand away. "No, no everything is not alright. And stop calling me kid!" He turned back to Wrex. "You have no idea how close I was, what we could have learned, what one more second could have gotten us, you gigantic, filthy dung-swaddler, you stupid mongrel-"
At that, Wrex snarled and moved towards Merl, hand moving to his shotgun. "Watch it, salarian. I'm losing my good humor."
His eyes and lips twitching, Merl fought the terror quaking in his stomach and somehow managed to stand his ground.
Jordan crossed his arms, watching the exchange. "Why not, instead of pissing off the krogan, we explain to him what was wrong with crushing the signal?"
Merl glanced at the human, a bit calmer now.
"And by 'we' I mean 'you'," Jordan continued, "because I have no idea what you're complaining about."
Merl sighed and took a step away from Wrex. "This entire time, ever since I started chasing the signal in the evacuation tunnels, I wasn't running after the signal. I wasn't chasing some stupid birdcall. I was trying to find the guy-the person responsible for it. You can't make something like this without leaving a digital footprint. And I almost had it. I was this close," he held up thumb and forefinger a small width apart as emphasis, "and you took it away from me. Just like that."
Wrex snorted. "I'm not defending myself actions to you; lives were on the line. I did what I had to do. Here," he moved for the transit cab, tossing the crushed box at Merl, who caught it in his hand, "rip it apart, see if you can salvage anything of your footprint, you little geek."
"Oh, yeah, brilliant. By the time I manage to pull anything off of this now, the creator will be long off the Citadel, along with you guys. And I'll be back at my stupid job!"
"What the hell do you think Shepard was carting your ass around for," Wrex asked, stepping over one of the doors he'd blasted with the Inferno, "you're conversation?"
Merl cocked his head, confused. "What are you talking about? She wanted my help…"
Wrex grunted in response. He rested his hump against the battered roof of the cab and spoke into his comm again. "Commander, you back online yet?"
After a moment, a tired voice responded. "I'm here, Wrex."
"I destroyed the signal before the kid could find the guy that made it. He's pretty pissed. You wanna assuage his temper?"
Shepard sat on her knees in the ruins of the embassy grounds, Liara's unconscious form laid out against her.
She looked up at the sky of the Citadel and gave a weak smile. "Hey, Merl?"
"…yeah." An equally exhausted and clearly irritated voice answered her.
"I find myself in need of a tech expert. How'd you like a job onboard the Normandy?"
Legend continued to rise dormant in the air above her, the whale's large form twinkling in the rays of artificial sunlight.
"Um…okay."
