"What the hell is that?" Shepard demanded as she stopped short, just within the entrance of the central operations chamber.
Liara stepped past her, glancing around the room before looking into the face of the enemy she'd pursued for so long.
The room, as Shepard expected, was full of terminals and cables. Above the room was a sort of transparent panel beyond which electricity jumped and crackled. Likely it was processed into contained form and fed through cables to the expansive array of terminals, intercoms, comm units, and who knew what else.
Shepard's guesses about the tech revealed forcibly the Commander's dual training focus.
Liara's attention fixed on the Shadow Broker, an immense, hulking shape of crude countenance and formidable build. A yahg. Not what she had expected.
"You've come for the drell?" he asked, his words articulate if uttered in a coarse voice. "Reckless. Even for you, Commander."
"It takes reckless to know reckless—that stunt on Illium wasn't exactly subtle," Shepard responded, covering her surprise at finding the Shadow Broker a member of a species she could not readily identify. Clearly she felt that the reason for her desire to do this thing was obvious to all persons in the room.
Her unfamiliarity with the yahg was hardly surprising. Even Garrus' drift pulsed with orange uncertainty and purple determination.
"It was necessary."
"No it wasn't!" Lara barked, stepping forward a few paces, aware that Shepard and Garrus fanned out behind her to have a clear line of fire. "Neither was holding Feron prisoner like that!"
The Shadow Broker chuckled, a scalp-tingling sound that made her shudder inwardly. "The drell's condition is of his own making: he betrayed me by helping you steal Shepard's body. He is simply paying the price."
"And you wanted to sell my body to the Collectors. You had to know I wouldn't take that well," Shepard remarked darkly.
"It was a mutually beneficial partnership. Fortunately the Normandy's IFF will allow me to navigate the Omega-4 Relay and salvage what I wish."
If he meant to surprise or wrong foot Shepard by displaying this knowledge, he failed signally. Shepard laughed, a cold sound that clearly indicated he could have her ship over her dead body, and he shouldn't make any cute jokes about that being the idea.
The Shadow Broker's triangular mouth gaped in what Liara realized was a smile. "Those you love are so often stripped away, Commander. I wonder if it might not be of benefit to you to be reminded of this."
Shepard's drift seemed to flash freeze, then explode. What had previously been dead seriousness with a veneer of humor changed to a homicidal intent Liara didn't know Shepard possessed. The Shadow Broker really hit a nerve.
"Coercion doesn't work on me. It just pisses me off," Shepard remarked dryly, with no sign of the fear that huddled at the core of the shrapnel field her drift seemed to contain.
"I was not suggesting coercion."
Liara forced herself to laugh, found that the sound came easily because it was the last thing she felt like doing. She could not afford to let the Shadow Broker know that, now that she was here, she really was afraid. Not afraid of him, per se, but the smothering force of personality he exerted, the way he waved secret things about, brandished deeply personal items as a threat…it made her wonder what he knew about her…
She let the anger bolster her, even as Shepard's drift consolidated into a single burning ember—an ember the size of a planet. That gave her a little more courage. "You're quite confident for someone with nowhere left to hide." Her voice came out smug, superior, and she found herself restored to grim determination. Time to see whether her own conjectures would have any impact on this…creature.
She rather thought they might: yahg weren't known for holding onto their tempers.
"Your friend Archangel's bounty remains unclaimed. It will decidedly cover the losses I've incurred because of your visit. You have my thanks."
Garrus' drift sparked and fizzled. "He talks too damn much. How come we keep getting stuck with the talkative ones?"
"That's a benefit," Liara remarked sweetly, finding a homicidal smile creeping onto her lips. Threatening the others as individuals had proved a misstep on the Shadow Broker's behalf. She thought she might have found some insight into the driving force that brought Shepard down like doomsday on the people who threatened or harmed her crew. "Let's see if I can't match him."
"Oh, this should be good," Garrus rumbled.
"You wanted to know what he was?" she addressed the room as if lecturing to a class, her voice oddly steady compared to the adrenaline shakes rocking the rest of her. "He's a yahg. His homeworld was quarantined after his people massacred a Council first contact team. He shouldn't even be here. This ship is older than his planet's discovery. Which probably means that he killed the original Shadow Broker and took over. I would guess that he's here because he was captured in the wild. The Shadow Broker wanted a trophy, maybe a slave…or perhaps a pet. How am I doing?"
She'd hit the right notes, all the right notes, like a concert pianist delivering her recital's crowning work.
The Shadow Broker got slowly to his feet, revealing that he had not been sitting on a chair, but had been crouching behind his desk. He seemed to fill up the room in his immensity, like a balloon filling up with air.
Suddenly, he let loose a roar, picked up his massive desk and flung it at the intruders.
Shepard threw herself forward, rolling as she did so, thus avoiding the flying desk.
Liara raised a hand, batting it aside with her biotics—and realized too late that she had diverted its path of travel sufficient to strike Garrus. She glanced back quickly to find the turian stunned on the floor. Fear gripped her at this amateur's mistake…