Saturday, August 18th, 2187 (morning) — 17:35 Daleri local time
From the floor, Kaidan activated his comm mic. "All squad, sound off!" he shouted, no longer caring about keeping his position hidden.
"EDI here," EDI said from beside him.
"Vega here."
"Javik here."
"Garrus here."
"Tali here."
Liara coughed over the radio. "Liara here," she croaked.
"Samara here," she said, sounding strained.
"Liara, Samara, what's your situation?" Kaidan shouted quickly, still laying flat on the ground.
"Seems our 'friends' left us a parting gift," Liara said, still sounding winded. "Concussive grenade I think, wired to go off when we entered the room. We're fine, our biotic barriers caught the worst of it."
"I do not believe this trap was intended to kill," Samara said. "The center of the explosion was at ground level in the center of a large room, but it detonated as soon as we crossed the threshold. This was a warning."
"One hell of a warning," Kaidan mumbled, half to himself. "Stay there, I'm coming to you."
"Acknowledged," Liara said.
Kaidan cautiously stood up, then indicated that EDI should do the same. Kaidan set his omnitool to track Liara's, then worked his way through the maze of hallways and rooms.
"Here," Liara said, sitting against the hallway wall with her legs sprawled out. Samara managed to look more dignified, but was also sitting down against the wall and breathing heavily.
Kaidan set his omnitool to do a medical scan, and ran it over Liara. Some bruising, nothing serious. He repeated the process with Samara, and found much the same. "Right, you're both done for now," he said. "Trade off with Vega and Javik outside."
The two asari got up and left.
"Vega, Javik, I'm sending Liara and Samara your way," Kaidan said over the comms. "When they arrive, you're to enter the building and pick up where they left off."
"Understood," James said.
He reconfigured his omnitool to scan the air for explosives, and the on-board spectrometer immediately lit up with the remains of the grenade. He programmed it to screen out the explosion's byproducts, and the omnitool's view cleared. He plucked one of his own concussive grenades from his cache and held it out in front of himself, and the omnitool lit up as expected.
Kaidan tapped the communications display on his omnitool. "I'm sharing an omnitool configuration to check for explosives," he said into his comm mic. "Continue with the sweep, but proceed with extreme caution."
"Sir," James said.
"On it," Garrus said.
Kaidan looked into the room where the grenade had gone off. He noticed a strange sheen on the tile floor, where the soot from the explosion refused to stick. Ignoring that for the moment, he pulled out a combat knife and tossed it into the room, hoping to trigger any remaining motion-sensitive traps. The knife skittered along the ground, but nothing else happened. He signaled that EDI should wait behind him, then he diverted all of his biotic ability to his barriers and stepped into the room.
Nothing happened. Kaidan 'hmm'ed to himself.
He picked up the knife, then wandered over to the unusual sheen. It was transparent when he looked straight at it, but iridescent at an angle, and from the shape it looked like a liquid had splattered to the floor and dried up to leave the sheen. He knelt down and asked his omnitool to analyze it chemically, but the sheen was too thin to get a good reading.
Kaidan waved EDI into the room. "EDI, what do you make of this? My omnitool can't make heads or tails of it."
"Unknown," she said as she approached. "The optical activity suggests some sort of nano-patterning. I would require an electron microscope to be certain."
Kaidan held out his knife, preparing to scrape off a sample.
"I suggest extreme caution," EDI said, touching his shoulder and giving him pause. "This may be some form of unsecured nanotech."
"Can't be that bad if they let it splatter on the floor," Kaidan reasoned.
"Even so, I suggest you leave it. For all we know, it may be another 'parting gift'."
Kaidan considered this, then pulled his knife away and stood up. "Good point."
He activated his comm mic. "I found a dried-up residue on the floor that appears to be nanotech. Be careful about touching things."
There was a long pause. "Okay," Tali finally acknowledged.
"Loose nanotech? Keelah," Tali mumbled to herself as she walked to the next room.
"Makes you wonder what we'd have found if we'd caught them with their pants down," Garrus said.
Tali stopped cold in her tracks. "Garrus, you enjoy using human idioms far too much. It's a little scary."
"Hey, it's not my fault I've spent most of the last four years working with humans."
Tali raised her finger like she was about to argue the point, but then the wind left her sails. "Right, your 'Archangel' days on Omega," she muttered. "I keep forgetting you weren't alone."
Garrus shrugged. "Yeah, and almost half my team was human. Let's just say there was a lot of cultural exchange and leave it at that."
Tali nodded thoughtfully as she approached the next room. A quick sweep of her omnitool showed the room was clear of explosives. She waved Garrus in to do the sonar sweep; trading off roles was easier than constantly resetting omnitool configurations.
As Garrus began to sweep the room for movement, Tali thought back to her own experiences during that time. While Garrus was on Omega playing vigilante, she'd gone back to the Migrant Fleet to complete her pilgrimage: the triumphant return of the Admiral's daughter; the presentation of pristine geth data discs, fresh from the Armstrong Cluster, as the pilgrimage gift; the naming ceremony, where she received her adult name, a Captain to serve under, and a new ship to call "home". And then the excitement died down, Father became even more distant than before, and she ended up repeatedly assigned to the fleet's most dangerous missions into geth territory because her expertise trumped her youth.
She sighed. She had friends in the fleet from childhood, but she'd mostly fallen out of contact with them, as they'd each gone their separate ways on pilgrimage. And her adult friends… well, they'd mostly been marines. Like Kal. Who was dead now, Reaper bastards.
All her life, every day, she'd asked herself, 'How am I going to do my part to help my people return to the Homeworld?' But now that the deed was done… well, she still had Auntie Raan, even if things had gotten more cool and formal between them since Tali's promotion to Admiral. But Shala'Raan aside, all her deep connections were aboard the Normandy. Actually living on the Homeworld seemed… mundane? She was happy that her people would be able to go home, once the relay repairs were finished, but for herself… damn it. If the other admirals knew what she was thinking, they'd accuse her of spending too much time around the humans and their obsession with individuality. And they might even be right.
Garrus made a little coughing noise, and she wondered how long she'd been lost in thought.
"Sorry, I got distracted," she said as they walked to the next room.
"Credit for your thoughts," Garrus said, tilting his head.
"I was just thinking back to how we went our separate ways after… after the first Normandy blew up and Shepard died that first time."
"Really? Returning to the fleet you were homesick for, with a kick-ass pilgrimage gift? Thought you'd have been happy to be back."
"I was at first," Tali said as they arrived at the next doorway, scanning the room for explosives. "But my time on the Normandy made an impression on me. You saw Haestrom. I was surrounded by some of the Migrant Fleet's finest marines, but compared to Shepard's squad it was amateur hour. And Haestrom was bad, but it wasn't the first mission to go wrong. I'd have faced a suit rupture just to fight next to Liara again, nevermind you or Wrex." Nothing showed up on her omnitool scan. "Room's clean," she said with a nod toward the door.
Garrus approached the room and began to scan for motion. "So what are you saying?" he casually asked over his shoulder. "Is this a 'no' to settling down on Rannoch? Admiral Zorah of the Migrant Fleet, just flying around the galaxy with her turian boyfriend, fighting alongside their two favorite Spectres until they're old and grey?"
Tali chuckled. "I guess I'm just trying to figure out what I want. As much as I love being on the Normandy, there's no way things can stay the same. Cortez and Vega managed to squeeze out another 6-month tour, but the Alliance wants Cortez running a flight deck and Vega needs a new N7 training officer to replace Shepard. Traynor's done great but this isn't remotely the job she was trained for. Joker should probably be flying a cruiser. All their careers will stall if they don't move on."
"Yeah," Garrus said, "but Kaidan's freshly promoted, so he's got a few years before someone tries to make him an admiral or something. Liara's happy where she is — and let's be honest, where Liara goes, Javik goes. Even if EDI leaves to follow Joker, Normandy isn't going anywhere. As for the rest of the crew, well, the faces will change, but only the best get assigned to the Normandy. Anyway, this room's empty. Let's move on."
"Hold on. What's that in the corner?" Tali asked.
"Which one?" he asked.
Tali stepped into the room and cautiously approached. Running along the far wall was a stone countertop with an embedded sink, and what looked like gas feeds were coming up from underneath. Wooden cabinets filled the space between the countertop and the floor. Without the furnishings and equipment, the room looked like it couldn't decide whether it was an office or a chemistry lab. And in a forgotten corner of the floor, beneath the overhang of the cabinets, lay an overlooked strip of paper. She picked it up and examined it.
"What is it?" Garrus asked as he followed her into the room.
"I don't know. Some kind of receipt? But who would use paper for a receipt?"
"Oh, I don't know," he said sarcastically. "Someone who lives on a planet covered in trees?"
Tali looked back at him and shook her head. "Cute, bosh'tet." She returned her attention to the strip of paper. "Huh. Nothing too revealing, just a few items from an office supply store."
"Leave it," Garrus said. "It's garbage."
"I don't know, there might be a clue here," she countered. "I'll keep it just in case," she added, stuffing it into one of her suit pockets.
Saturday, August 18th, 2187 (morning) — 18:48 Daleri local time
The ground teams were standing together outside of the structure, using the shade to hide from the heat as they reunited and shared their findings. Kaidan was standing expectantly, having just asked the teams to report their findings.
James shrugged. "Nada."
"Some sense impressions, but little of note," Javik said. "Our enemies were thorough, methodical, and numerous. I sensed no panic in their evacuation of this place."
"I did find this," Tali said, pulling out the strip of paper. "It's probably nothing," she admitted as she handed it to Kaidan, "but I kept it just in case."
"Hmm. A sales receipt," Kaidan said. "Nothing incriminating. Although… look at the date." He pointed at the date on the receipt, which his omnitool automatically translated into an Earth date.
Tali leaned in, using her own omnitool to translate it to a quarian date. "What about it?" she asked.
"The date is in March, barely a month after the war ended. That puts it three months before the Reapers started to split into factions," he pointed out. "At least officially."
"What are you saying, Kaidan?" Tali asked.
"It means that whoever was working here with these Reapers was doing it before they were moving openly," Kaidan said.
"That lines up with the age of the building," Liara said. "I'm an archaeologist, so I'm not used to dealing with history this fresh, but my scans of the structure indicate that it can't be more than six months old. There's very little weathering on the concrete, and the vegetation on the roof shows signs that it's still recovering from being replanted in the last few months."
"So what?" Garrus asked. "While the rest of the Reapers were off helping to rebuild civilization, these bastards were building this place?"
"That's about the size of it," Kaidan said. "The real question is: why?"
"There is also the question of 'who?'," Samara pointed out. "And to that question, the receipt provides one additional clue."
"Yeah?" Kaidan asked.
"This operation did not consist only of Reaper troops," she said. "In all likelihood, the purchase was made by an asari."
"An indoctrinated agent," he said.
"My thoughts exactly," she said. "And where there is one, there are likely to be more."
"Javik," Kaidan began, "what species did you sense?"
Javik, who had been rolling all four eyes at this 'revelation', responded. "Mostly the Reapers you call 'cannibals', and a few asari."
"Any sense of numbers?"
"There were many overlapping impressions. Perhaps a hundred Reaper soldiers. Far fewer asari."
Kaidan turned away from Javik. "Liara, put in another data retrieval request with Daleri Control. A group that big didn't just disperse into the jungle, especially not carrying equipment. There had to've been multiple transports involved. No way Control could have missed that."
"I'll try," Liara said while bringing up her omnitool, "but I've just about lost my patience with them."
"They could've had stealth, like the Kodiak, no?" Vega pointed out.
"The stealth system works by hiding our heat signature against the void of space," Kaidan pointed out. "We don't need it in-atmosphere because everything around us is already emitting heat. Daleri Control would be using radar to track targets, not heat emissions."
"Didn't there used to be aircraft with anti-radar stealth?"
"Yeah, there were. EDI, do you know what happened there?"
"Yes," EDI answered. "Advances in radar technology made radar stealth systems obsolete. Stealth aircraft were only able to protect against microwave-band radar. When multi-mode terahertz radar was perfected, it was able to pierce stealth by transmitting in multiple frequency bands simultaneously. Stealth researchers tried to adapt by developing active waveform cancellation, but that was quickly countered by the arrival of code-authenticated radar, which made the signal too unpredictable for active cancellation techniques. Passive cancellation is still effective, but can only protect against radar coming from a single direction, making it useless for moving vehicles."
"So there's no way Daleri Control could have missed this?" Kaidan asked.
"Correct," EDI said.
"Okay," Liara said, "I've filed the new request. Still no updates on the request we already have pending," she added with a grumble.
Kaidan opened a comms channel to Steve. "Cortez, we're ready for a pickup here. No one's home."
Liara bent her elbow and rotated her arm from the shoulder, stretching out the joint. She winced a little.
"You feeling okay?" Kaidan asked.
"Sore," she said. "I'll be fine. A little grenade isn't going to stop me. Apparently I'm out of practice with my barriers, though."
"Alright, folks, here's the plan," Kaidan announced to the squad in the shuttle. "I'm going to have another chat with those witnesses that Nira led us to, and Samara's coming with me. Hopefully we can get more out of them with a justicar present. Liara and EDI are going to visit the Daleri Hall of Records to light a fire under their asses with those data requests. Javik, I need your senses in the nightclub district. I know a lot of people pass through there, but an Ardat-Yakshi ought to stick out like a sore thumb. James, you're with him. Garrus and Tali, you're on spaceport duty. At least a dozen ships come and go every day at that port; someone must've gotten a sensor reading."
As Kaidan rattled off the assignments, each crew member nodded in acknowledgement.
The huntress watched the holographic projection of the shuttle as it sat in the clearing. The boss had ordered a holo camera affixed to a tree, so they could monitor the beta site from a safe distance, and the uplink was a quantum entanglement communicator — totally untraceable, even if the camera were discovered. Some said the boss was too paranoid for her own good, but the huntress knew that paranoia was damn well earned.
The downside of watching remotely, though, was that the camera was too far away to pick up conversations. She'd had a VI lip-reading what it could see as the fools discussed their plans in the open, but big chunks of the conversation were missing, and they'd retreated into the shuttle as soon as it had arrived. Didn't matter. From the sound of things, the moles in the Hall of Records were doing their jobs, and even if the Spectre got through the red tape, the data was wiped hours ago.
She turned her attention back to the holo projection as the shuttle lifted off the ground and took off back toward the city. She opened a comm channel. "Mistress, you wished to be informed when the interlopers left the beta site?"
"Yes, thank you," the voice on the other end said.