A/N: There was a lovely thunderstorm over my house yesterday. In about five minutes there was standing water on the road outside and the roof of my crappy little car was becoming a lake. I'm at least thankful that it doesn't rust!

The good thing was that I actually got motivated enough to get on with doing some work on the story yesterday instead of moaning about how it's too hot for an English summer. Today, that summer returned, and so did the moaning, but at least the cricket was on to lift spirits. 287 for 7 isn't bad considering we had slumped early in the innings to 28 for 3...

Day Thirty Six. Tuchankan orbit, Krogan DMZ

Naylor opened the door to Liara's office, entering in as she finished up another long and gruelling sixteen hour long shift monitoring the Shadow Broker's network. He initially received a quiet nod from the asari as he locked the door behind him, making sure that nobody that was unwanted could enter the room over the night shift, but as he finished locking the door, Liara had closed down her terminal and had begun walking back to the sleeping compartment at the back of the room.

"Nice to see you this evening, Peter."

"Evening, Liara. Anything important to know before I get going? Translations, things to focus on?"

"Not particularly. I'm expecting a few reports from agents in the Terminus systems, but I think you can handle and analyse them before you hand them over to me in the morning." Liara shrugged off the heaviest parts of her outfit, placing them in a neat pile beside the bed while still retaining enough in case of an absolute emergency during the night shift. "Also, if you could keep an eye on anything from Omega, that would be incredibly useful. There isn't remotely enough information flowing out of that hell pit, and I'm sure that something is happening there. Though what has been happening, I don't know."

"Have you actually asked anyone yet?" Liara looked back at Naylor, raising one of her eyebrow markings at his comment. "Liara, you have agents everywhere, but have you literally just gone to someone and asked 'What is going on with Omega' yet?"

"I, oh Goddess, how could I have forgotten something like that!" Liara hung her head slightly as Naylor laughed, before seeing the funny side of it and laughing along with him. "If anything pressing happens, I trust you to make the right call."

"Well, hopefully that trust is well placed. So, expecting reports from the Terminus Systems, check for anything on Omega and, if needed, ask someone about said hellhole. I think I can cover that."

"Thank you for doing this. I'll check up on you in eight hours time then." The glass partition slid closed as Naylor took up his place at the Broker terminal. Instantly, the feeds from the Shadow Broker's network sprang up in front of him, and he set down to work, running searches throughout the network about Omega and the Terminus systems.

A few hours into the shift and Naylor was busy collecting intelligence on the Reapers' advances thowards the galactic north of the Milky Way. The synthetics had reached as far as the Armstrong Nebula, just inside the Attican Traverse, but another bound could see them shoot up the galactic east of the galaxy and take the Nubian Expanse, the Hades Nexus and the Caleston Rift, three key areas of the galaxy that the Reapers, at the moment, could waltz through without much resistance from locals or the Council races.

With the taking of the Attican Beta, the Reapers had arrived over the planet of Feros, a colony under administration by the ExoGeni corporation. Liara hadn't paid much attention to the planet, but Naylor noticed that there was still some coordinated resistance from the colony of Zhu's Hope, the capital and a former battleground during Shepard's quest to take down Saren Arterius. A few thousand colonists were holding out there, working well against the Reaper ground forces that were attacking the colony. On his own initiative, Naylor had organised a transport to evacuate them via the colony's small spaceport. They had just arrived back on the Citadel on the transport, the colonists being represented by the asari Shiala Vosen, a former bodyguard to Matriarch Benezia, when Admiral Hackett had met them on the station. Hackett and Shiala agreed that those amongst the colonists that were not suitable for military operations would be housed on the Citadel and on nearby Bekenstein while the rest would be extended positions with the Alliance. However, a good number of the original colonists, despite lacking any training, fought together against the Reaper invaders like a well trained unit of veteran asari commandos. Those colonists were formed into a small platoon, led by Shiala, and were given equipment and sent into asari space for formal training with commandos.

The night had worn on, and the promised reports from the Terminus Systems had come through over the Shadow Broker's network. They were sometimes promising – the Alliance had offered to send advisors to coordinate the defences of a number of worlds, and by and large the governors of the worlds in the Terminus systems had agreed. The haphazard defence fleets they mustered would only buy the worlds time, not throw the Reapers back, but that granted a greater chance for the civilians to escape or find shelter from the attacks. Some of the larger worlds, mainly those held and run by mercenary companies but some of the richer worlds in the Terminus were self-confident, assuming that what they could hire with their money or their mercenary fleets would be enough to save the worlds. The Alliance offered no help with the defence when these planets refused their aid, but they did give provisions for the evacuation of civilians to other worlds.

Liara's reports came from a number of the populated worlds within the Terminus systems – Garvug, Lorek and Talis Fia all had agents for Liara's network embedded on the planets, and while some reports were good, others painted a poor picture. Lorek was in the middle of an uprising, the batarians there rebelling when contact with the Hegemony was lost in the initial days of the war. Though the hegemony forces were gaining the upper hand, the uprising was not good when the Reapers were breathing down their necks.

Naylor was noting down everything he got from the reports he had received and was still awaiting the final report from the turian world of Altakiril when the first yawn snuck up on him. Recovering quickly, he began rubbing life back into his cheeks to try and stave off the inevitable drop in the attention he was paying to the Shadow Broker's network. Despite his efforts, a second yawn broke through and the Lieutenant knew that he had to do something, because otherwise he'd be fighting the urge to fall asleep well before the end of the shift.

Locking down the terminal, Naylor stepped outside Liara's office and out into the mess hall. As it was the middle of the night shift and with most of the Normandy's crew asleep in their sleeper pods and the crew quarters or relaxing while off duty in the observation lounges, the mess hall was empty aside from two of the crew members taking a coffee break from working in the main battery, but the ever-reliable coffee machine was still working. Or, more importantly from Naylor's British point of view, the hot water dispenser was still working. Taking one of the disposable paper cups from the dwindling stack beside the coffee machine, Naylor reached into one of the cupboards above the coffee machine and grabbed a small plastic tupperware box. Inside sat an ornate pot of what were the asari equivalent of tea leaves (prized by Liara to the point where she chastised Shepard any time anyone used them) alongside several small sachets filled with a mix of human tea leaves from Earth and Eden Prime.

Taking the top bag from the box, Naylor placed it at the base of his cup before placing it into the coffee maker and dispensing a torrent of scalding hot water into the cup, a few drops splashing over the side and singing the flesh on his left hand. Instinctively he pulled his hand away, hissing and shaking the boiling hot water off and into the sink. Taking up a spoon in his unharmed right hand, Naylor took the cup and began stirring away at the contents, mixing it into a deep and rich brown before removing the tea bag and placing it into the bin. Adding a dash of milk to the streaming drink, Naylor carefully brought the cup round and towards Liara's office.

Unfortunately, as the door to the office opened, Naylor suddenly spied the person hunched over the broker's terminal in the centre of the room. Instinctively he brought his non-tea carrying arm up, mentally triggering the command to lock an incinerate burst onto the figure. Unlike the standard incinerate used by Paladins, which fired a single superheated round of flash-forged silicon at low speed, Naylor's modified incinerate fired four smaller rounds at a higher speed towards the target. While the single shot could arc towards targets, Naylor's incinerate relied on the number of rounds being fired to hit its target. It was less elegant but ultimately more effective, and if Naylor was confident he could quickly fire four shots at four different targets with a single thought.

The target he was targeting now, however, reacted as he primed the incinerate burst, and she flared her biotics. The walls of the room were bathed in conflicting hues of orange and yellow from Naylor's omni-tool and incinerate, and blue from the target's biotics. But both realised who the other was at the same time, and the colours died down, leaving the room to be lit by the normal light fittings on the ceiling and the glow from Liara's massed array of computer screens.

"Commander, I'm sorry about that. Wasn't expecting you to be down here during the night shift."

"No problem, lieutenant. Just checking how everyone on the night shift is doing." The Spectre turned her attention back to the terminal she had been tapping away on as Naylor walked into the office, her red hair lying uncared for across the shoulders of her heavily creased officer's dress blue uniform. "How are you holding up?"

"Bit tired, but I have enough tea to suffice until the end of the shift. You, on the other hand, look like shit commander. No offence."

"None taken. In fact, I know I look like shit." Shepard stepped back from the terminal and leant against one of Liara's servers, taking care not to damage the important equipment stored inside. "I've barely had a chance to relax with all that has been happening. The back to back operations with the trapped turian platoon and then the turian bomb has drained my energy. As a biotic, that's not exactly nice on the bones."

Naylor walked back up, placing his cup of tea down onto the metal plate beside the terminal and turning to face the commander. "I can't really relate to that. Not a biotic."

"Nah, sometimes I hate the power that biotics grant. It's like evil blue voodoo magic that saps your energy by simply being awake. But my biotics have saved my life numerous times and I can't argue against having them."

"True."

"I imagine you've had your fair share of experience with biotics, though, given how your service history is littered with assignments with asari."

"You'd be right, but I try to refrain from making any real judgements on things I can't relate to. But, and I can't help asking, is it just the biotics or is there something else? I can't imagine that a lack of sleep can be attributed to just that."

Shepard frowned. "You're treading a thin line there, Lieutenant."

"Well, you were the one that put me in the role managing the biggest information broker network in the galaxy, commander. Being curious comes naturally with access to these terminals."

"Fine. It's the quarians that I'm worried over. Or, well, over the lack of information regarding the quarians."

"You know someone on the Migrant Fleet?"

Shepard sighed, looking back at the door as if she was regretting the decision to not leave the office as soon as Naylor had returned. "It's complicated. One of my old crew members, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy nar Rayya is with the Migrant Fleet, and it's killing me that I haven't heard from her at all."

"Were you two really good friends?"

"A lot more than that. But I really just don't want to be going there, Lieutenant." The spectre looked down at her feet. "The more I think about Tali the more I want to track the Migrant Fleet down and drag her back onto this flying circus of a vessel. Hence, and as much as I love her, it's why I try not to – we can't endanger other people's lives for the sake of our own selfish needs. Tali would definitely be the first person in the entire galaxy to say that to me if I did fly out to find her."

"I understand. Well, it's none of my business anyway." Naylor turned his attention back to the terminal in front of him. "Do you want me to do some searching for anything regarding the Migrant Fleet, commander?"

"Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. Perhaps doing so would be overstepping the trust that Liara's placed in you doing this job."

"I think she'd understand the reasoning if I did. I won't start assigning agents or anything to tracking the fleet, but I will see about collecting information from more static sources."

"Thanks for doing that, Lieutenant. Send the info up to my terminal whenever you find something."

"Of course." The commander left the room, the door automatically locking behind her as she walked into the mess hall to grab a cup of coffee and continue with her rounds. "Glyph, can you set a reminder for me to remind Liara about the search I'm starting on the Migrant Fleet?" The normally blue VI drone blinked red as his programming set up the reminder, before turning back to the normal shade of blue.

"Done, Lieutenant." Naylor began working away at the terminal, tapping out the requirements for the automated search. Anything regarding quarians, the Migrant Fleet and as a final addition the geth would be collated by the search and given to Naylor for analysis. Except that Naylor would probably just give it all, without analysing anything, to Shepard. The final report from Altakiril had come in via the broker's network, and the report, according to Glyph a short while later, was something unexpected.

The Turian Hierarchy had approached the planet and offered that, in return for defending the planet, the Hierarchy would be granted control of the planet's factories and the limited repair facilities. Despite considerable resistance from the owners of said facilities and factories, the Hierarchy's offer was accepted, and a small naval flotilla and a turian marine division, with attached auxiliaries, were sent to the planet. However, the fleets were restricted in where they could operate, unable to patrol thanks to the inhabitants of the Terminus systems and their hatred of the Council races and their laws. The flotilla was limited to patrolling the Thal and Xe Cha systems, the latter only included after fierce negotiations as it would be the only way for the turians to get warning of the arrival of the Reapers. An element of the Blood Pack, operating from a ruined base on Zada Ban, resented their appearance, but the turians responded well by sending the vorcha and krogan a number of automated heavy weapons, slaved only to fire at Reaper units and completely redesigned to not be useable without the automated controls. The krogan withdrew their complaints when they received the weapons.

Naylor archived the final report with the others from Liara's agents in the Terminus Systems, before turning to the search he was running on whatever situation was regarding the Migrant Fleet. There was disappointingly little. The fleet had last been seen assembling in the Raheel-Leyya system in the Valhallan Threshold. The fuel depot there had been completely overtaken by the quarians for an unknown reason during their stay in the system, but that was nearly a week ago, and there had been no sighting of the entire fleet since. What made the assembly strange was the huge abundance of chartered shuttles flying into and out of the system while hurriedly dropping off their cargo at the fuel depot. The other reports suggested that most quarians had been recalled from their Pilgrimages, and the few available shuttle reports that were filed on Council worlds suggested that they brought with them as much technology as they could, and gathered as many crates of dextro-specific supplies as they could. However, the fleet had disappeared from the system, believed to have moved through the mass relay to another part of the galaxy, and hadn't been seen again.

Naylor turned his attention to information regarding the geth and the worlds they controlled. The synthetics, thanks to information gathering satellites close to the Far Rim and spy drones sent into the region, had been seen to be fortifying their borders, installing orbital defence platforms, ground based cannons on planets and satellites and fighter bases hidden in asteroid fields and in the extremities of gas giants. More worrying, however, was that the synthetics were building something big inside the Dholen system, though the exact specifics of what they were building was not known. But there was nothing to suggest that the quarians had launched an invasion and been wiped out.

"Glyph, can you collate all the information in the search on the quarians and the geth and send it to Commander Shepard's cabin?"

"Of course, Lieutenant." Glyph set to work, the terminal in front of Naylor began sending the data, while a little blue bar appeared on the screen, the percentage completion going up steadily. He glanced at the clock on his omni-tool as he waited for the upload to complete. Naylor realised that the night shift was coming to a close, and with less than an hour of the shift remaining, he still hadn't taken a look on anything regarding the situation on Omega. Barely noticing as he suppressed another yawn, the Lieutenant set to work.

"Peter?" A prodding finger jabbed at his shoulder, incessantly bringing his attention away from the dreamland he was occupying and back into the real world. "Lieutenant!"

"Huh, what?" Naylor forced his eyes open, seeing Liara standing, fully dressed, between him and the door.

"You were standing asleep at the terminal!"

"Oh. Shit." Naylor stood up, peeling his face off of the metal base of the holographic terminal and cracking his neck as he subconsciously rolled his limbs to get them back to a working status. "Sorry about that. Must've happened suddenly after Shepard left."

"Yes, Glyph told me that the commander had been in here when I noticed that you were asleep and not waking up of your own accord any time soon. Do you mind if I ask what you found out when you ran that search for Shepard's benefit?"

"Not much." Naylor beckoned for Liara to come closer, shifting over slightly from where he had been standing up while sleeping to allow her to look at the condensed version of the information that he had been gathering. "The quarians were last seen in the Valhallan Threshold at a fuel depot orbiting Raheel-Leyya and near to the relay nexus in the system, where they chartered a lot of supply and transport vessels to deliver both supplies and personnel to the fleet. That and all of the reports of quarians abandoning their pilgrimages suggest that they've ordered a total recall of all quarians, including even those they've exiled, to the fleet. They disappeared a while ago, just before the Reapers attacked Palaven, but nobody has since seen them."

"And the geth?"

"They're fortifying their borders, but I have doubts that it will be against the quarians, as the defences seem to be clustered around the three primary relays that lead to the Attican Traverse. Lots of orbital defence platforms, fighter stations and ground based cannons have been erected in the Far Rim, and there are signs of large orbital structures being created in the Dholen system. I find that strange, given that the geth were in concert with Saren and Sovereign."

"The geth helping Sovereign were revealed to Shepard to be a heretic branch that were affected by the Reapers, wanting them to guide the future of the geth rather than letting the geth consensus do that themselves."

"So that seems to support a hypothesis that the main motive of the non-heretic geth would be defending against a threat from the Reapers, not the rest of the galaxy."

"Yes, so it would seem. But looking at the way that the Reapers have invaded the galaxy so far, they seem to be directing their efforts against the more militaristic races. Perhaps the Reapers may ignore the geth until they have defeated the militaries of the humans and turians."

"I wouldn't ignore the krogan from that initial list, Liara."

"True. Especially now that we are curing the genophage, the Reapers will have to see them as a threat very soon. The Reapers have yet to reach the bulk of the Attican Traverse yet, so we won't see what their plans regarding the Perseus Veil for a while. And what did you find about Omega." Naylor switched the terminal back to the window with the information pulled from his search on Omega.

"Disappointingly little. Just so that I don't repeat information that you know, what do you know?"

"I know that Cerberus controls the station, though which cell of the organisation and who commands the forces controlling it I don't know. The whereabouts of Aria T'Loak, the previous 'ruler' of Omega if that what you want to call her, are unknown, but the organisation with which she ruled the station, which was previously an incredibly large and very well organised group, for mercenaries and criminals that is, is completely in tatters." Liara paused, racking her brain for the rest of the information she knew about Omega. "I do not know much about the current situation of the station itself, nor the majority of its inhabitants, but hopefully you were able to dig something up about that."

"Well, on the former, I can only say that there have been considerable shipments of supplies to Omega, according to a number of your agents operating within Cerberus-funded companies. A lot of it is in the form of materials, advanced metal alloys and advanced technological components, but there have been a lot of shipments of food, both levo and dextro, being transported onto the station as well."

"The dextro supplies surprise me, but the food must be for their large garrison, for the technicians that they are probably sending beyond the Omega-Four relay, or both."

"Cerberus are sending technicians through the Omega-Four relay? I thought that was impossible."

"Remember, Peter, that Shepard flew through the relay on her mission to destroy the Collectors in this very vessel, but bearing Cerberus colours. The Illusive Man has probably been sending technicians to pour over what is left of the Collector base, and hence holding Omega, or achieving an alliance with whoever ruled it, would be crucial in doing so."

"Are you trying to come up with ideas on how Cerberus ousted, who was she called, Areea T'Loak?"

"Aria. And yes, I can't help but think how she was ousted. I'm not particularly certain but I think she probably allowed Cerberus access to the relay and use of the station as a supply base in return for massive payments of some kind to T'Loak. The Illusive Man probably then went and stabbed her in the back, not literally of course, I doubt he could actually kill a fly if he wanted, and Cerberus forces took over the station by working their way into the gangs' and mercenaries' good books."

"It's quite elaborate, but it is defiantly feasible."

"So what could you find out about Aria T'Loak then?"

"Well, nothing. It's like she's a ghost, disappearing off the radar a few weeks before the Reapers attacked Earth. I reckon that's when Cerberus took the station." Naylor angled the monitor to show Liara the most interesting thing that he had found out. "But there have been a lot of anonymous messages being sent between the Citadel and an unregistered vessel in the Terminus Systems. What makes it interesting is that the destination on the Citadel was a codename, Estana."

Naylor knew the codename through Tevos, and was not sure whether Liara would know it, but the asari recognised it immediately, and putting two and two together, she came to a shocking realisation. "Ambassador Irissa is in league with Aria T'Loak? No, that can't be possible."

"Ambassador Irissa? As in the asari-focussed matriarch and ambassador to the Citadel who is vehemently against negotiating with any form of party in the Terminus Systems?" Liara looked at him pointedly, but gave him a small smile as he continued. "I doubt she would be. Irissa is definitely the sort of person who would understand the threat that T'Loak and Omega posed to Council space, even before Cerberus controlled the station, so why would she be working with a criminal?"

"Perhaps there's a supporter of T'Loak inside her staff using her codename and transmission codes? But I don't know. I'll be looking into this lead before we reach the Citadel." Naylor nodded, heading towards the door and intending to get enough rest so that he wouldn't be exhausted while taking the brief spell of shore leave on the Citadel. Before he could leave, he caught Liara quickly turning towards him in the corner of his vision and paused before his hand activated the hologram on the door. "Oh, one final thing. Did you get anything from actually asking someone?"

"Well, I ended up asking an old friend whether she knew much about the situation on Omega through her own contacts and intelligence. She only knew that control over Omega had changed and that was it."

"So it seems that everyone is in the dark over the situation on Omega then. That is pretty strange." Liara paced around the room, before stopping beside the broker terminal. "Who did you ask?"

"Just Councillor Tevos." Liara's expression turned to one of bemusement as the lieutenant deadpanned revealing his source of information, her right eyebrow marking lifting in the exact same fashion as a human's eyebrow. Naylor stifled a laugh, exiting the room and setting off towards the sleeping pods before the mess hall was too crowded with people eating their next meal rotation.

"Councillor Tevos. Councillor Tevos?" Liara pondered the thought, considering exactly how he could have gotten a favour in from the asari's representative on the Council. She then remembered their conversation on Naylor's past, and how he had served with the asari councillor on the Ascension. But there was something niggling away at the back of her mind, the asari interpreting it as the surprise of what Naylor had said despite a part of her getting the feeling that there was something off. "Why am I surprised? He knew the Councillor before so he's probably earned some favours anyway."

A/N: Tea is brilliant. Great for an early morning boost, an afternoon drink with cake or for staving off sleep while writing stories about fictional characters in a fictional universe. I'd pick it any day over coffee…

Is Liara getting close to working out something between Naylor and Tevos, or is she just overanalysing the situation like her Shadow Broker-y self?