A/N:
Someone actually said at least now the worst was over. Oh, you poor deluded fools. Didn't you learn from Shepard saying that sort of thing what happens when you do?
Reviews are always welcome, positive or negative.
"I am Omega. The beginning and the end, the source and the sea. Beyond me, there is nothing. Below me, only enemies. Above me...only whoever I'm fucking this week."
- Aria T'Loak, Queen of Omega.
Aethyta had not gotten to be her age without having a good sense of how to estimate danger.
She didn't know who the odd human with the glowing eyes was, but Liara had followed him back to a much more elaborate aircar and gotten inside. The human, who called himself Jack, had offered them both a drink, and Liara had merely stared at him.
"This is not a time for such things, Mr. Harper." Aethyta had never heard such iron her daughter's voice, and subtly checked that her mono-blade was in easy reach.
Harper merely nodded, pouring himself one inside the richly appointed limousine. "You are of course, correct, Lady Liara." His eyes narrowed. "I will be direct and blunt. The Broker sabotaged the Normandy, installing some kind of tracking or homing beacon into it before she launched. Now that the Normandy has crashed on Alchera, agents working for P. have reached the site – after paying off Aria – and are salvaging the wreck – including Shepard's remains."
He leaned back. "P. plans to sell them to the Broker, who will in turn, according to our source, sell them to the Collectors. This will happen in five days. We haven't discerned the meeting place for certain, but our … inside source says it will almost certainly be on Omega."
Aethyta tensed her jaw. "And exactly what the shit do you expect us to do about it?"
The man named Harper inclined his head to her. "I am not in a position to act on this myself. I only have two or three people I can send, and while they are skilled, that is simply not enough to prevent this incident from happening. The other people I have are, sadly, out of position to respond. My organization was very much reduced not too long ago, you see."
Liara shot him an angry look. "Your associates were monsters. Rachel more than the others."
Harper merely nodded again. "You will get no arguments from me on that. However, it is far afield from what I need from you. The technology of the Normandy isn't my concern, Lady Liara. I have reason to suspect the Broker could obtain it elsewhere. But I do not like the concept of Shepard's corpse being given to the Collectors. I've had suspicions about them for some time, and I have reason to believe they may have been connected to Benezia and Saren's activities."
Aethyta interrupted. "So what do you want?"
Harper gave her a thin smile. "I happen to have a very fast vessel in my employ, one nominally registered to a powerful salarian crime lord known as the Shifter – a ship that few in Aria's part of space would fire upon. The ship is swift enough to get to Omega in time to stop the transfer of Shepard's body – and has enough weapons to fight its way out of a bind if it comes to that. And it is docked here, nearby"
He sipped his drink calmly. "What I do not have is a pilot, someone to man the ship, or people to fight off any interfering agents of P or the Broker that will be present."
He turned back to Liara. "You, on the other hand, know an excellent pilot, a very good engineer, and a handful of people who would be able to help pull this off. Namely, Mr. Moreau, Ms. Zorah, Detective Vakarian and his wife...and of course, the deadly Black Blade of the Vasir, your father. Along with a couple of my own people you would have the … muscle … to retrieve Shepard's body and thwart the Broker."
Liara narrowed her eyes. "I am not going to get my friends killed chasing a dead body, Mr. Harper. As hard as it is for me to accept, Sara is gone."
Jack gave her a searching gaze, and then leaned forward. "And what if I raised the stakes, Lady Liara?If there was a chance Shepard wasn't gone?"
For no reason she could determine, Aethyta felt a chill in her azure and midnight at his expression and words.
O-ATTWN-O
Garrus wiped a hot towel over his plates, wincing as he realized the acidic rain at the funeral had messed up his facial markings. Dropping the towel into the recycler, he stepped out into the main room the restroom connected to.
Three hours after the funeral, Liara T'Soni had urgently commed Garrus and Telanya, asking them to meet her in a somewhat shabby hotel in the post-war town of Arlington. Garrus had been in the process of trying to figure out how much it would cost to get back to the Citadel when the call came in, and something about her voice let him know this was serious.
They'd arrived at the hotel room in question, to find it was a fairly small suite of rooms. Joker and Tali sat nervously on the bed, and Liara's father Aethyta was on the single chair in the corner, sharpening her warp sword. Telanya and he had taken the single couch, and when Liara walked in trailed by a familiar figure, Garrus felt his plates rise.
The asari woman looked terrible, her eyes still red from weeping, her hands shaking, her jaw tight. Her black dress was still damp and wrinkled, clinging to her, and her minimal makeup was smeared. But there was an ugly, hateful light burning in her eyes, one that looked something like Shepard rather than the gentle scientist he remembered from the Normandy.
Behind Liara, the black-armored form of Beatrice Shields looked merely worn and tired. She leaned against the wall as Liara took a few deep breaths.
"The Broker sabotaged the Normandy."
Garrus was on his feet before even realized it. "What?"
Liara glanced at him. "He had his people infiltrate the ship and place a homing beacon of some kind on it. Ms. Shields only found out about it after the ship was destroyed. If that was not bad enough, the Broker and P plan to sell Sara's body to the Collectors."
Garrus felt himself growling in outrage. It was bad enough that his friend had been murdered. But to desecrate a body, to deny those who loved her the chance to bury her and see her into the realms beyond so her spirit could be at peace, was beyond outrage.
To actually sell it, like some piece of merchandise...He felt Tel gently tugging his arm to make him sit and did so, but his mandibles were quivering.
Tali spoke, her own voice thick with anger. "What are … what are you doing here then? Why haven't you told the Alliance?"
Shields snorted. "Get real, girl. You think those fucking ass-wipes give two shits? As far as I know, someone inside the SA had to work with the Broker to pull this shit off. I almost got killed getting out of the Citadel after I figured this all out, and the people shooting at me were Alliance soldiers. Bottom line is if you tell the SA I guarantee a hit squad will show up and kill the rest of us off."
Aethyta snorted, but said nothing. Tali glanced uncertainly at the Liara. "Then...why are...we here?"
Liara set her jaw. "I am not going to let them desecrate Sara's body and give it to creatures who may be working with the Reapers. I … I have a very unlikely ally who can get us a ship and some backup, but we need to get to Omega to stop them."
Her voice softened. "It is very dangerous...and Shepard would be the first to say none of you, her closest friends, should risk their lives trying to recover her body. But it is the only chance I have at striking at those who took her from me."
Joker spat. "Fuck that. I don't give a shit if we get blown to shit or not – there is no fucking way I'm going to sit my broken ass here when they blew up my CO and my ship, and let them SELL her to anybody."
Tali looked at Jeff worriedly, then sighed. "If he goes, I go."
Liara glanced at Garrus and Telanya, but the asari merely stared back. "You do not even need to ask, Lady Liara. I … owe Shepard a great deal, as does Garrus. If you need our skills..."
Liara exhaled."There's one complication. The people who are helping us...are Cerberus."
There was absolute silence for several seconds, and then Garrus turned to Telanya. "I'm hearing things, right?"
O-ATTWN-O
"Spirits above, the only thing about this that isn't stupid is the ship. I can't believe I'm actually doing this."
Garrus sat down in the seats that lined the cargo bay of the small ship they were getting into, a thin salarian cutter of some kind that was painted pitch black.
Given the attitude of Cerberus towards aliens, Garrus had been surprised at how quickly whoever Liara's contact was had moved, and the amount of alien-friendly gear they had. Within twenty minutes of them agreeing, a heavy air transport vehicle had shown up, taking them to a starport some fifty miles away. On the way, they were fed some survival rations – dextro for Garrus and a prepared slush in a bottle for Tali that had been run through a sterilizer.
Someone had planned this quickly, but thoroughly.
They'd entered a ramshackle looking warehouse, only to find two men in head-to-toe black armor with orange highlights and rack upon rack of weapons and armor. They'd been brusquely instructed to get armored and armed up, and then the two had stepped back.
The armor Garrus wore now was some repainted, refurbished suit of turian make – Clan armor, he figured, with a faint marking where the helmet had been repaired. It was a little loose, but otherwise in excellent shape. He'd picked up a customized Phaeston rifle and a monstrously powerful Devid-IX sniper rifle, which drew nods of approval from the two black-armored Cerberus types.
The two men – one large and strong, the other skinny and graceful – had introduced themselves only briefly, as 'Mr. Theo' and 'Mr. Kai". The one called Theo had a heavy Saber rifle and customized shotgun in his slingpak, while the one called Kai had only a pair of slender, elongated pistols and a single, glimmering mono-edge blade on his back. From the way they moved, Garrus wasn't sure if they were soldiers, cops, assassins or worse.
Tali had augmented her suit with an armored jumpsuit of some kind that made her look more like a male turian, while Joker had been carefully put into a set of light armor that managed to go over the braces on his legs that Tali had repaired. He even had a gun, although he complained he had no real training in shooting it.
Liara was wearing a set of black combat armor and Aethyta had dug out a set of thin armor from one of the racks that had a light yellow hue. "For old times sake." Garrus wasn't sure if he was more amused by the fact she bitched the chest was too tight, or the fact that the matriarch apparently carried her warp-sword in the luggage of wherever she went.
Shields still wore her own armor, but had picked up a heavy machine pistol and a sniper rifle. Telanya had put on a set of riot armor, complete with a helmet, and picked up an ugly looking shotgun and a heavy pistol.
After they'd armed up, the one called Mr. Theo had given them throw-away omni-tools and a stack of credit chits. "We don't have no clue what the shit will be on Omega, so our plan is pretty simple. Go in, bust heads, grab the body, and get the shit out. If we run into problems, well, the chits have enough cash for you to buy a ride out of Omega on your own, assuming you don't get shot, mugged, or pushed into a pit of plasma slurry. Them's the breaks."
The man's armored visage gave no hint to his expression, but somehow Garrus felt he was grinning. "If we run into nasty shit, me and dip-shit here – " he nudged Mr. Kai, who merely snorted – " will handle it. You folks just get the lady's body and get it back to the ship."
The final person to join had been waiting on the ship itself. A human female, with somewhat exaggerated curves and a waist too thick for Garrus to really like met them at the open cargo bay. She wore a tight armored bodysuit, but unlike the other two her face was bare, revealing what Garrus thought were somewhat ugly features.
Her voice was cultured and elegant, if sharp. "We're already behind schedule. Mr. Moreau, can you fly this vessel?"
Joker swaggered past her. "Lady, I can fly anything." He stepped into the cockpit, and a moment later, back out. "That is, if you have a damned overlay for all the salarian bullshit on this console."
She gave him a frosty smile with no humor. "Indeed." She touched her omni-tool. "Get us moving, please. Everyone else but Ms. Zorah, please strap in. Ms. Zorah, there is an engineering monitoring station down that ladder-well – we have had little time to test this ship after we … ah , acquired it."
Tali nodded, dropping down the ladder, and Garrus strapped in. Across from him, Liara was shifting her gun back and forth from pistol to shotgun, her jaw clenched. He wondered why she'd brought it to the funeral, and then came up with the obvious and ugly answer. Rather than call her out on that directly, he simply looked at her and spoke. "Liara...are you okay?"
She looked up, and something in her eyes was twisted, torn between some ugly choice he could almost smell on her. Her heart sped up sightly as she smiled. "I'm fine, Garrus."
She was lying, but he didn't call her on it.
The cargo bay doors shut, groaning as they did so, and Garrus glanced over at Telanya. The absurdity of what he was about to do – storm Omega, in a ship owned by Cerberus, to fight the two most dreaded crime syndicates in the galaxy over a dead body – suddenly hit him.
"You know...Shepard would smack us if she knew we were doing this."
Only Aethyta chuckled as the ship lifted off.
O-ATTWN-O
General Jason von Grath gently massaged his temples as he sat his desk. He'd rarely used the family lodge on Earth, finding the planet fairly depressing, but it had come in handy when he was planning to run for office, and he'd kept it cleaned up and stocked ever since. He'd retreated here after the funeral, too emotionally exhausted to even think about getting on a ship and heading back to the damned Citadel.
He had things he needed to be about, he knew. Messages from Karin, messages from his father, from the Fleet Admiral. From that blasted fool Branson.
Instead he was focused on the short text message he'd gotten from a man he very much disliked, Jason Dunn. The message was only a few words, but they troubled him.
"If you owe Shepard anything at all, keep anyone in the Alliance from asking why Liara, Tali and Joker are missing for one week. Also Aethyta."
He exhaled. He owed Shepard quite a bit. He thought back to the angry discussion he'd had with Ahern not too long ago, the man's blazing anger at his own lack of vision and foresight when it came to his tormented soldier.
He'd answered confidently and now, he felt, perhaps arrogantly – sure in his belief that Shepard, while certainly having the rough edges you would find on any diamond in the wild, was a tough enough cookie to make it threw whatever the galaxy threw at her. She'd was born to suffering and privation, lived through a hell few could even describe, laughed off being trapped behind enemy lines, fought like six kinds of demon and thought fear was something kind of fruit.
The idea that she could be killed was so ridiculous that when he'd heard the news he almost thought it was some extremely gauche joke. After seeing the funeral – the wreckage left behind by her death, the shattered figure of Doctor T'Soni, he was in a strange place emotionally.
The anger of that crowd echoed inside him. What did the name von Grath mean, if not loyalty to those who had served him more valiantly than any knight.
And thus he cleared his messages – he'd comm Karin later – and responded to the one outstanding Commissariat inquiry from a certain Alfred Jiong.
"Commissar Jiong, General von Grath here. In response to your inquiry, Lady Liara and a few of her close friends are currently staying with me rather than engage some form of hotel on Earth, where they are ill prepared to experience for a first trip. The Lady in particular is extremely distraught...I have an old asari acquaintance who might be able to help her, and her father is here with her to assist in that."
He paused. "If you have a specific message, please let me know. Von Grath out.,"
He leaned back, biting his lip, and then sighed. "The die is cast. I hope that fool Dunn knows what he is doing."
O-ATTWN-O
Kasumi Goto sat in the lounge of the rather exclusive lounge in Vancouver, sipping a drink calmly, wearing a little black dress and some nice heels for once. Her hair was down, bangs falling to either side of her face to shield her eyes a little, but she always felt naked without her hood.
She could hardly go out drinking and dancing dressed up like some baka ninja girl, though, so the hood and her other tools were back at her latest hidey-hole, while she chatted up people and worked through the list of hints and clues the Broker had given her on Kejii's killer.
She was relaxing – as much as she could – when the silver bracelet on her arm illuminated with an incoming call, and she touched her ear implant. "Goto!"
The drawling, bass voice of the Broker rumbled in her ear. In her mind, which was often a scary place, she imagined him as a giant bull, grazing on tall grass and flicking his tail back and forth.
Well, he sounded like one.
"Goto. I have a commission for you, if you are available. You have kept track of the recent alerts?"
She had. Beatrice Shields, a level four contact on the Citadel with all kinds of very nasty chop-chop-kill-kill augments, had gone rogue. A cursory investigation showed that she'd trawled the Broker net – somehow without being caught – then wiped her tracks, but not quite well enough.
By the time the liquidation team had arrived she'd gone, but they'd found the nice present she'd left behind, a M/AM antipersonnel mine that maimed two and killed the other six agents. Kasumi was torn between admiration that some gun-toting thug had actually spied on the Network and disdain at her messy exit.
"Yeah, I did. Sounds ugly to me, Ōotoko-sama." The pet name she'd dropped on the Broker literally translated to 'Lord Big Man', a moniker he seemed curiously amused at.
Today he was not amused. "She is believed to have made contact with a man known as Jason Dunn. He is a known element once involved with Cerberus. Your assertion that they thwarted Shepard's assassination on Arcturus was correct...and now we know who our leak was."
She shrugged. "Okay...but why call me?"
The Broker's voice took a slightly softer edge. Which meant it sounded less like trains colliding and more like them merely sliding off a cliff. "My most effective assets are currently deployed on a longer-term mission. With the chaos on Earth, our ability to penetrate and strike is … lessened. You are already, however, deployed on Earth, well within their security net – and one of our operatives trawling the network broadcast of Shepard's funeral managed to catch an image of Mr. Dunn at said funeral."
She nodded. "And where he is, she is?"
The Broker's voice deepened. "Yes. We are aware of your stated preference for gray-work instead of wetwork, Ms. Goto...but in this instance, we have no one else in the area who can act. You are well known at being able to track people down – elimination of the target would be well paid for."
Kasumi's eyes narrowed as she sipped her cocktail. She didn't mind killing, but there was a difference between a fight and shooting someone in the back of the head. One was defense, the other was cold-blooded murder. She was a big enough girl to realize that sometimes eggs got broken and morals wouldn't stop a bullet. But she also knew that she had more than enough regrets already in her life, making more wasn't a good step toward stability or recovery.
And she wasn't stupid, either. She knew, from going over materials in planning the hit on Shepard, that both Beatrice Shields and Jason Dunn were former team-mates of Shepard – who had very recently died in very strange circumstances on a mission she'd heard the Broker command Charles Saracino to get her assigned to.
Kasumi was hardly a patriot. She didn't know a lot of why Kejii was killed or who did it, but she knew it had to do with the ugly facts he'd stumbled across, facts that were dangerous to the Alliance. The fact that Shepard got killed didn't really bother her that much – she didn't know her and didn't care much about her.
But Shepard had saved Neo Berlin, where her parents had raised her after leaving the Home Islands on Earth. It was where she'd met Kejii, where the house they'd planned to raise children in and start an art museum still lay empty, covered in dust-cloths and old tears. She didn't owe Shepard anything, but she felt a little bad at helping to get someone who'd saved her home get blown up.
She thought a bit more. Shields was, unfortunately, a very nasty number in a fight, and given what had been included in the Broker's report on her, waaay more than Kasumi could expect to chew and swallow without choking. If she was in league with Cerberus, that made it more likely that Kasumi-chan would be Headless-Kasumi-chan in short order if she wasn't both careful and lucky.
She sighed. She didn't think she was being monitored but she never took chances – the Commisars could be anywhere, after all. "With sadness, Ōotoko-sama, I'm not very good with dogs. I understand your difficulties, and I'll ask my people to look for your lost dog and the other stray. But getting involved personally would derail what I'm working on now, and it's very important to me."
The Broker growled. "I am not used to hearing no, Ms. Goto."
She inclined her head. "So sorry, but no money is going to fix me if those dogs bite very hard, now is it? And I am not an employee of your company, merely a freelancer."
The Broker was silent for several seconds. "Very well. If you are not inclined to become involved, I will engage...other methods. But understand this, Ms. Goto – I am disinclined to offer your little quest any further assistance without the appropriate remunerations from this point on."
She shrugged. "Understandable. I will be in touch if I hear anything." She disconnected and then dropped her bracelet into her clasp purse.
Ugh. The Broker was so creepy sometimes. She finished her drink and stood, swaying a bit, before eyeing up a hunky fellow at the bar. She didn't see the person she was supposed to find here, and the night was shot anyway, so she might as well have some fun.
She was in mourning, not dead, dammit.
O-ATTWN-O
Anderson frowned. "What do you mean, you can't get in contact with her? What about Vakarian?"
Jiong sighed, his image looking drawn and tired on the haptic screen in Anderson's rather cheap hotel room outside of Arlington. "General von Grath has said Liara and most of Shepard's friends – which I would assume also includes Mr. Vakarian – are staying at his family lodges here on Earth. I do not know why you were not consulted on this, although I suspect Liara is simply not ready to speak with you. Your importance to Shepard would have had some impact in her own mind, due to their bond."
Anderson sighed. "I understand that. But Shepard named me her executor for some damned reason, and I need to ask someone some kind of questions about the estate."
Jiong gave a bleak smile. "I can probably assist with that, Commodore. I was often involved in her financial matters myself, given her lack of education on such."
Anderson winced at the subtle dig, but knew it was well deserved. "Thank you. I'll … try not to stir anything up, although von Grath better have a damned good explanation for this stunt. The first thing..."
O-ATTWN-O
On the icy surface of Alchera, the small band of heavily muffled and armored figures finally cut into the wreck of the Normandy.
Rolan Quarn wished he was anywhere but on this icy spirit-hell, but P had given very explicit orders, and six of his crazy Daughters were her to see those orders carried out. Gesturing with now-numb hands, he gestured. "Get the wreckage cleared forward and aft. Once we're done we'll be setting charges, so make sure you don't block the exits with anything."
The Normandy had come completely apart in the atmosphere, its shattered corpse impacting into an icy glacier near the poles, less than a mile from an ice-choked ocean. Only the forward third of the ship had survived mostly intact – all four engines were mostly gone, and the midships was scattered over a good square kilometer.
Amazingly, some human infantry vehicle had survived the landing, smashed into a spike of ice hard enough to impale it. Quarn sighed and ventured deeper into the still smoldering wreck, triggering his light.
The interior of what looked like some kind of command deck was dark, the walls crumbled in some places, crushed in others. The roof was just gone, filled with slowly constricting ice, and drips of moisture had congealed on the floor in a half frozen mess.
The temperature was beyond merely cold – Alchera got down to almost ninety degrees below zero – and a snowstorm had blanked the area, slowing their recovery. The weak signal that had doomed the Normandy had cut off when it crashed, and P was very interested in just how the Broker had engineered such an elegant kill.
His men dug aft, while he and the Daughters headed forward, the latter using biotics to clear away scrap and debris. The entire cockpit was almost entirely crushed, but he saw that the main supporting beams had buckled, not broken, at the impact. The heat of rentry had softened the metal but also got it hot enough to melt ice, and the impact vaporized enough ice to not smash the cockpit itself completely flat.
The seat next to the pilot's chair was little more than cold, melted metal, and black soot and plasma burn debris covered everything in a fine glittering patina, highlighted by frost. Seated in the pilot's chair, her back clearly broken at an awkward angle, was what was left of the once mighty Shepard.
One of the Daughters made faint gagging noises and even Quarn was grimly impressed. "Spirits of fire, this bitch died hard."
Shepard's corpse was missing it's left arm – burned off by something that had fused her battered armor shut – and her left leg had literally been torn from its socket, strips of flesh dangling from the gory frozen fringe of shattered armor. Her chest had been crushed by some hard impact, blood stains dribbling all over her front, and her back had been smashed in by a spar of metal upon impact with the ground.
The helmet was still on her head, but the clear faceplate was completely covered in congealed black blood. He gingerly engaged his scanning devices, running it over the corpse.
As he suspected, frozen fucking solid. First good news he had all day.
"Have the others bring in the stasis capsule. We'll have to cut off her lower leg at the knee to pull her out, and we'll need some warp fields here and here to shave her back out of this pillar thing." He supervised the removal carefully – the Broker and P had both wanted the body as intact as possible, but this tattered thing was so battered that he saw no real point in doing much more than being careful with the torso and head.
When they had the remains laid out in the stasis chamber, he checked the armor more closely. Much of it had splintered or melted – the neck and throat piece was a ruin, the bitch had burned to death while her lungs filled with blood and she ran out of air. He shook his head in wonderment anything was even intact, then carefully disconnected the helmet.
The ruin of a face below the mask was just too gruesome to see. The eyes had ruptured, either from vacuum or over-pressure during the crash, and the mouth and nose had gushed the weird red blood humans had before she'd died, staining her ugly alien features a dark crimson. The jaw was smashed in at an angle, and strange bits of bone-like things fell out of the mouth to tinkle on the floor. It took him a moment to realize they were human teeth.
He tossed the helmet aside, and nodded. "Cut off the rest of the armor, then seal her up and let's get moving." He stepped back as the Daughters went to work, and strode back through the ruin towards the back of the wreck, where his salarian security chief waited. "You find anything?"
The salarian shook his head, his expression hidden by the thick faceplate of his survival suit. "No. The entire ship is smashed to bits – we found about ten feet of Silaris armor that wasn't ruined and we can salvage though, that should fetch a damned good price. Whatever device the Broker used to break the ship's stealth is either vapor or buried under ten feet of wreckage in one of nine piles – or in the damned ocean."
The salarian folded his arms. "We are in the processing of cutting out the remains of the computer core and the nav comp, and we think we found something else neat." He held up a battered, dog-eared notebook. Quarn flipped through it, finding page after page of innovative weapon designs.
He grinned. "Good work." He tossed it into the stasis pod, letting it land where one of Shepard's legs would have gone. "Plant the charges aft and forward – and the scraps of her armor we took off, toss those in with the helmet. Make it look like she burned to ashes or some shit. Don't have to be perfect, it will be the thaw season by the time the monkeys come looking."
The salarian nodded, and Quarn tapped his commlink. "Boss, job's about done. We found her alright. Bitch looks like she got gang-banged by ten krogan, but it's definitely her."
The voice that answered him was turian, but yet not turian. It didn't flange,and the sound of it was enough to make Quarn's fringe fall and his spurs relax. "Good work, my dear friend. Such a delightful thing to find our lovely new friend isn't all bits and pieces after all. Did you find any evidence of skulduggery or anything else to suggest our overweight ally in the shadows was involved?"
He clicked his teeth in irritation. "No, boss. We looked, but we didn't find anything. We did find a book of drawings – gun designs, it looks like. Might be useful. And some Silaris armor plating, and the comps from the Normandy."
P gave a breathy laugh. "Guns, guns guns. I love guns. A nice bonus for me, and so for you a nice bonus as well. Get the lovely fried cargo to Omega as soon as you can. The quicker we hand this over to the Broker and get paid, the quicker I can find out how exactly he plans to sell it to the Collectors."
P laughed again. "And have your people and my baby-girls ready to move – if the payment is interesting enough, we may have to take it for ourselves. We might even take Shepard's body back and sell that two or three more times too. Or maybe just put it in my collection. I have a dead Prothean and a dead Inusannon, a dead Krogan and a dead Rachni – why not a dead Spectre?"
Quarn just let his boss ramble. Crazy as someone trying to fuck a vakar, but still effective. "Whatever you say, boss. We'll be moving in about an hour and twenty minutes and on the Citadel in four days. Have shit ready to go when we get there."
P trilled more laughter. "Oh, I always have the party ready to go, little Rolan. Leave it all to me" He clicked off, and Quarn sighed, turning to find one of the Daughters behind him.
"Your dad is fucking crazy, you know that?"
The asari smiled. "Well of course. Sane never helped anybody."
Quarn just sighed.
O-ATTWN-O
Three days in a tiny ship with only basic facilities and sharing it with a pack of racist assholes was not exactly Joker's idea of a good time.
The ship had a very tiny galley (which had been carefully stacked with the most repulsive survival rations he'd ever tasted , in both dextro and levo flavors), a small row of sleeping pods (none of which had hibernation features) and giant fucking engines.
On the one hand, the ship handled like a dream. The seat was sinfully comfortable, the controls responded to everything with a master's precision, and the sensors were chillingly good. He would hate to fight the salarian navy if they had sensors like this on all their ships.
When it came to other creature comforts, though, there was nothing. The two creepy Cerber-goons mostly bickered with one another, which to Joker's amusement was a constant source of hilarity. Tali fiddled with the engines and spent time in the cockpit talking to him when she found the time. Liara sat cross-legged on the decking, eyes closed, radiating anger and sorrow, while Aethyta talked to her now and then, leaving her alone at other times.
Garrus and Telanya tried talking to her as well, but Liara was very angry and almost snappish. She couldn't or wouldn't explain why, but more than once she had whispered, angry conversations with the woman calling herself Miranda, done in a questioning tone.
For her part, the woman named Miranda mostly typed things in on a omni-tool or worked on a portable terminal in her lap. She was researching medical things, eyes narrowed in intense concentration, the text scrolling past at a speed Joker couldn't even follow the few times he'd looked.
He had no idea what was happening, but he really wanted a sonic shower and some real food soon.
O-ATTWN-O
Liara sat trying vainly to mediate once again.
She couldn't forget the words that the Illusive Man had spoken in that limousine, the smell of old earth and rain still in her nostrils.
"There is a possibility – slight, but there – that Shepard may have been exposed to vacuum rapidly enough that her Spectre armor's stasis system may have kicked in. It is a very slim chance that she could be revived...but my people tell me it's not totally impossible. It depends on how much damage she took during the crash – or if she didn't get immolated by it."
Her mind had fixated on that one idea and wouldn't let it go. She could still be alive.
In her mind, that was the only reason the Broker – or anyone else – would be interested in her body. Harper was too good with words and mind games to figure out what his angle was, but she knew her aithntar had much more experience reading people.
When he'd done, Aethyta had touched her wrist, the flicker of a memory of Benezia speaking flitting across her mind. She didn't know the context, but her mother spoke a single sentence. "Despite what it sounds like, Aethyta – I think he is telling the truth".
She nodded to herself, and smiled grimly. The message was enough for her to take a chance.
The sheer organization – and stealth – of how they'd gotten from the funeral to deep space let her know one thing – Cerberus may have lost most of its people but they were still dangerous. She didn't need Shepard's memories to feel the biotic power pouring off the woman named Miranda, or see the lethal grace of the slender Mr. Kai, whoever he was.
Her aithntar was sure the man was a lethal swordsman – a very high complement from her. The other one looked and acted like a thug, but Liara somehow doubted a man like Jack Harper would bother employ common thugs for any reason.
She'd been told Miranda was studying the potential methods of resuscitating Shepard and had questioned her several times on the process, only to be basically told it was too complicated for her to understand. Spectre armor contained several life-support functions that Shepard had never bothered to read up much on – ways to nullify biotics being the only one she'd really studied.
According to Miranda, in severe stress and when the suit detected a breach in zero atmosphere, it would attempt to cocoon the Spectre in a generated stasis field. Like all stasis fields, if it took too much external damage it would break, but the fact that Shepard was in the cockpit when she died meant that some of the shock-support systems installed should have aided in the crash landing. The cockpit had taken no direct hits as far as Liara could remember – if it had been able to survive re-entry through Alchera's fairly thin atmosphere and didn't land in the icy oceans, it could survive the impact stress of a crash, although Shepard would be critically wounded when the stasis field was broken.
It meant that they had to act very quickly to stabilize her and get her to medical attention as soon as possible, which was why one small room in the ship was stuffed with medical and life support equipment and Miranda was studying as much as she could on how to stabilize a badly wounded patient.
When Liara had asked why they didn't bring a doctor along, the human woman's answer was curt. "Saving her life may require more … extreme methods. Experimental cybernetics. Certain … technologies Cerberus has access to. A doctor that we could trust not to object to our methods is not one we could trust to keep secrets."
Liara had nearly exploded. "What about Chakwas? Or Sedanya!?"
Miranda merely gave her a cool look. "You clearly do not understand, Doctor T'Soni. This operation is risky enough with you all along. No one will miss Ms. Shields, and both Detective Vakarian and Offier Telanya are not expected back to duty for several days. But sooner or later, someone will notice you, Mr. Moreau, and Ms. Zorah are missing. Every additional Alliance member we bring along raises that risk."
Liara folded her arms. "And without a doctor Sara could die!"
Miranda sighed. "I see Mr. Harper did not explain everything. There is a very high chance that someone within the SA was involved in the destruction of the Normandy. You are well aware of what Shepard uncovered in working with Major Kyle before his death. There is more, and more disturbing information, that she had not found, and people within the Alliance – "
Liara cut her off, paling. "We … found out. About... NOVENSILES."
Miranda had gone stiff for a second, then a grim smile crossed her features. "Then you understand what is really at stake. If people high in the SA got her ship blown up...we can't afford them to realize she might be alive."
Liara had slunk back to meditate after that, a storm of emotions warring in her head. Hope. Fear. Desperate pain and longing, mixed with an almost irrational anger at those who had stolen her love from her.
Shepard's anger, she knew, burning inside her very soul. Before this, she'd suppressed it, feared it. Now she welcomed it, let it light her very blood on fire and stoked its flames. If Sara was alive somehow, she would save her.
And if she wasn't, she would make the Broker, P, and anyone else responsible pay, and pay, and pay.
O-ATTWN-O
Tali sat numbly in the small engineering monitoring bay, her thoughts in turmoil. The engines were powerful but finicky, the entire ship's power and fuel systems were a mess, and whoever designed the computers was clearly higher than a kite when he or she programmed them, as they needed constant babying and monitoring.
It kept her busy, but didn't require a lot of critical thinking, leaving her far too much time to figure out what to do with her own life.
She'd been happy to follow Shepard – to take a bit of time, for once, for herself. Her leave period had given her a great deal to think about, after she finally broke through Kiala's protective anger and aggression and found a desperately sad and lonely woman worried her own race would cost the man she loved his job or even his life.
The two weeks on leave had opened her eyes to what Joker had to be dealing with as well, as she remembered the almost painfully awkward dinner with his parents. They'd been bewildered and a little hurt, but put on the best face they could and made an honest effort to be accepting and positive about his choice.
She'd almost felt ashamed to be a quarian that night, until Jeff's mother had talked to her, venting her worries about her crippled, brave son. "I am not a really flexible person. I don't know much of anything about quarians. I don't know if you are good for him or not. But you care. Just...take care of him, please. He needs that more than anything else – not for someone to do things for him, but just to care about him."
The future had seemed so clear not that long ago. She'd learn and figure out more and more about human technology. She'd tell her father off, and live with Jeff. Maybe on Arcturus. The people were so nice there. A little girl had called her reik pretty and everyone was honestly polite. She could imagine becoming honored in human society for who she was, not who her father was.
And then the Normandy had been blown out of the sky, and she was sitting in a pod for a full day not knowing if Jeff was alive or dead. She'd found him in the hospital, shaking and bloody but alive, and managed to calm him down as he kept blaming himself for her dying.
It wasn't his fault. It wasn't like he'd chosen to be pinned by wreckage, and he wasn't able to move. Shepard had sacrificed her life so they could all live, but the ugly matter of her death and what it meant for Tali's plans were what filled her head now.
She could, she supposed, stay in the Alliance. She had no idea who else but Shepard would want a young quarian engineer, but she could do it. What she couldn't see happening is being assigned to the same ship as Joker ended up on. Then again, the Alliance might not even want her as an officer anymore, given the conflict it would cause with the Flotilla.
She could go back to the Flotilla. Jeff, she thought, would almost certainly go with her. But that wasn't much of an answer either. She had nothing to offer as a gift, although her father wouldn't care about that. But he would be beyond furious when he found out about Jeff, and there wasn't any telling how he might react. And by quarian law, regardless of age, until she returned from Pilgrimage she was technically a child – she couldn't defy him in the Flotilla and have any standing.
She couldn't see herself and Jeff striking out on their own, either. They had little money – most of it had gone into Jeff's braces – and she doubted the results would end up well.
She focused on the fuel flows, unhappy. She'd talked over things with Jeff but he had no more ideas than she had, and had sourly noted maybe they could work for Ahern. That idea might work, but she had no idea if Ahern would agree or not.
She wasn't even sure if they would survive this trip. Her anger at Shepard's brutal death and the Alliance not recovering her body had cooled, and now she was more than a little scared. The hard motions of the Cerberus soldiers in the cargo bay spoke of their experience, but she'd never forgotten Wrex's stories of how deadly Tetrimus and the other Broker people were. And all she knew of P. were basically horror stories, full of bad jokes and bloody endings.
She monitored the engines and worried.
O-ATTWN-O
Garrus found his thoughts curiously scattered.
One part of him was angry at the loss of his friend. Another part was slowly coming to realize that the rest of them could very well be killed in this stunt. Still another part of him was questioning why he was here.
He should have taken the information Shields had revealed back to C-SEC. The Alliance may have been infiltrated by traitors, but surely the Council would act on the knowledge that the Broker had killed one of their Spectres.
Except, as Telanya had pointed out in a quiet conversation, they had no proof. Whatever information Shields had, it was clearly something from within the Broker network itself, hardly admissible in any court. And if P's people were already at the crash site, surely they'd remove any evidence that may or may not have survived – or just blow it up entirely, to cover their tracks.
Worse still, he was beginning to wonder just how convenient it was that an attack on the President had occurred just at the right time to distract the Alliance, at literally the exact moment an asari Spectre with well known ties to the Broker found information that only the Normandy could check on.
He grimly admired how neatly the Broker's people had done it. He'd seen firsthand how clean Tetrimus worked in how slickly the ragged turian had somehow convinced his own boss to revoke his suspension after the mess at Chora's Den and Dr. Michel's clinic, but he'd never really thought what that meant in terms of how the Broker probably had C-SEC infiltrated too.
As much as he disliked trusting people who had cut up aliens, this batch of Cerberus was at least polite enough to not call him or Telanya names. The burly one had even given him a few tips on bringing in the choke on a Phaeston.
"Damn good weapon your people make, Detective. The rest of what you get up to is completely backassward, but your people make a good rifle."
Garrus had nodded. "Thanks. I think. Is that a complement or a backhanded insult?"
The gruff shape of Theo had laughed quietly. "Both, maybe. Dealt with your people a long time. Fought with one of the big-shit Palavanus once, even. Big corn-fed fucker, Vorkus."
Garrus swallowed. "I … knew him. He's dead."
The man sat down, grunting. "Hell. Didn't think anything could kill him. How'd he die?"
Garrus sighed. "A long, ugly story involving plant zombies and an omni-bayonet."
Theo had laughed again. "Well, shit, get to telling."
As blunt as the Cerberus soldier was, he wasn't hostile. The other one, who smelled like oiled leather and blood – Garrus didn't care for him. The man's heartbeat never altered in speed, and his voice didn't either. He was coiled like a stalking renva beast on a hunt, patient in the deep grass, and something about his whispery voice made Garrus itch to hold his rifle a bit tighter.
The last human, the one with the too-thick waist and over-wide face, wasn't much fun to talk to or listen to either. She had the bark of command in her voice, but didn't understand how to delegate, or how to motivate. She acted like a damned Primarch, but with no context to back up her talk, he tended to ignore her.
Telanya spoke to him later. "The human female is … striking. But her words are so ugly and hard."
Garrus flicked a mandible. "Her waist is too thick, her legs too skinny, and the fixation with breasts is something I have never understood in humans or asari."
Telanya laughed quietly, arching her back. Garrus knew she'd been working out like crazy the past few months with crunches and other methods, and her own waist was deliciously slender due to her efforts. "Well, the Thirty, honor to their names, are always saying asari are superior."
He shook his head. "Maybe. She just smells … off. Like...it's almost as if I can smell drell on her, but that makes no sense. I can't really see her sleeping with an alien if she's Cerberus, and there's no such thing as a half-human, half-drell outside of really bad science fiction movies."
Telanya's lips quirked, then she sighed. "Garrus...this whole trip is crazy. You know I go where you go, but … what do we do if we get there and there are too many of them to fight?"
He sighed, and gently wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "We'll have to wait and see. I'm not going to throw my life away if I can help it – Shepard wouldn't want that. But I can't just ignore this either."
She nodded. "No heroics, Garrus."
He smiled. "Promise. My days of battles over a rope bridge across a volcano – " He broke off as she hit him and laughed, and he tried to relax a little himself.
He could only wait and see, after all.
O-ATTWN-O
Pel really, really wished he could take his helmet off and have a cigarette.
Why in the fuck was Miranda tramping around with her face showing to everyone, while he and Kai – who everyone in their right mind thought were long fucking dead – required to hide? He still hadn't gotten a good answer from the Bossman on that, and this gig sucked even worse than writing up how turian dicks worked.
At least the eye-candy was a lot better. Miranda was okay but a touch too top-heavy for his taste. The old asari broad had the best tits he'd ever seen in his entire life, though, and the two other blues were knockouts too. He certainly couldn't fault Shepard's taste.
Quarians had those stupid suits and he didn't bother looking, and Shields ...well, she was hot, but she also had that ugly 'stab you in your sleep' vibe Rachel always threw off. Mike Saracino couldn't throw a punch and looked like a sissy, but he had balls of steel to stick his dick in a girl like Rachel Florez, and Pel didn't plan on taking any chances with his own in that regard.
The other two – the mousy pilot and the big-ass turian fucker – didn't bother him too much either. He didn't know much about the pilot except he was almost as sarcastic as Kai. The spike, on the other hand, seemed pretty solid. He wasn't droning on about duty and honor and he was clearly banging a blue, so he wasn't much like most Hierarchy turians Pel had run into.
Pel didn't think much about Omega. He figured there would be either be a lot of goons with guns that would die really fast, or a few elites and a big-ass fight. Given that had a really hacked-off asari princess, one of the craziest asari blade mistresses in the galaxy, and the entire team that helped Shepard beat the shit out of both Saren and Benezia, he figured they could take pretty much anyone except maybe Tazzik.
Then again, Bossman had prepared for that one too.
O-ATTWN-O
Miranda Lawson found herself torn between irritation and awe. Irritation at her companions, and awe at how smoothly things were going.
When the news of Shepard's death had arrived, the Illusive Man had been very disappointed. Miranda had been looking for some kind of action from the Alliance, spending her time and influence blocking and misdirecting AIS inquiries and the like. She'd been glad when the Council had sent Shepard off on a wild goose chase as it gave her more time to secure things in the Alliance itself.
And while she wasn't looking, the Broker had struck with his usual elegance. She'd never seen Harper look defeated before, and even Trellani looked vaguely upset, for reasons neither explained.
When the message from Jason Dunn came in, about what Shepard's old team mate Beatrice Shields had told him, however, the Illusive Man was suddenly energized. Sending out Kai in their fastest pinnace, he'd reactivated contacts and gotten a hold of assets Miranda never even knew he had. While the media speculated and Shields made her way to Earth, he was a whirlwind – hacking, making calls, spinning a hastily thrown together web of supplies, facilities, and plans.
There had barely been enough time to throw it all together before the funeral, and Harper had actually arrived late, barely in time to see the coffin sink into the ground. She'd been driving for him, listening as he smoothly convinced two alien females who had no reason to trust him to believe in some wild story about stasis fields and Spectre armor.
Oh, the field existed. But it wasn't going to have kept Shepard alive. Maybe in one or at least two pieces, but not alive. Miranda knew better. From the moment this entire mess had started, an idea had popped into her head, one that Harper had quickly confirmed the first hour after they realized a body could be recovered.
"Have Doctor Minsta pull everything we have on Project Osiris...and any details we managed to get from our surreptitious scans of our old friend Richard Williams."
She'd argued. Oh, how she'd argued. Shepard was almost certainly paste in some smoking wreckage on an ice world. It wasn't like you could survive a crash landing when your entire ship came apart after all.
Then the Illusive Man had told her about an experience he had, long ago on Shanxi. About how he'd listened, while a captive of Saren, and watched the Spectre cannibalize a stasis element from his own armor to try and stave off death for a wounded member of his team. How he'd heard the fact that ever suit of Spectre Armor had such a function, to try and preserve the body as intact as possible so that any evidence of who or what had killed the agent could be recovered.
Harper didn't expect to find Shepard alive. He had given her specific instructions, and most of her study was on outrageous theories by a little-known genetech company that even now was having its stock bought by BenCore Enterprises.
A company called Wilson Genomics, run by a rather unethical if brilliant scientist of the same name who'd been one of the key players in literally bringing Vice President Huerta back to life after death.
She bit her lip. Her awe at the very audacious nature of what Harper was planning was palatable. But as he had pointed out, they had no real choices. He doubted they could bring Shepard back to life from death, but the attempt was certainly worth a try. The technology had never been tested, but it existed. Even in the even they failed, they'd at least learn something.
And if they succeeded... Even Miranda could see the advantages.
It would give them unparalleled access to whatever Shepard had learned of the Reapers. It would give them a literal hero to renovate the now smeared and tarnished name of Cerberus. If they played their cards right, with enough time, Shepard could even be reinserted into society, her noble status and miracle survival carefully tweaked to give Cerberus an in into the government it now lacked.
Miranda knew it could work. But as she had argued, it could also be a pointless chase. If Shepard's brain was a splattered mess, nothing would bring her back. If her body was so broken even the radical technologies of Osiris wouldn't work, then surely nothing could be done.
That was when Harper had gestured to the glowing shape of Vigil, floating serenely in the air. "Lucky for us, Miranda, we have an ally who has access to technology far beyond that of Osiris."
She still thought it was stupid and risky, and daring the very teeth of Omega downright suicidal. She wasn't very impressed with her team, either.
Shepard's asari wife was clearly unstable, and the way she was playing with her gun made Miranda want to sneer. The quarian girl was a tolerable engineer, if entirely too mouthy, but then again the pilot was worse, like a mix of Jason Dunn's grating idiocy combined with the too-sharp tongue of Kai Leng. The other asari and the turian were just there – they were jumped up police officers, no matter the role they played in the Benezia Incident.
The only interesting one was Liara's father, the well known Aethyta Vasir. A famous warrior and mercenary, Miranda felt she was the only one of the team who could hold a candle to the skills of Kai Leng and Pellham. She didn't like working with the Odd Couple, but she was forced to admit their skills were very impressive – and they never failed in missions.
She was more nervous about going into combat herself. She'd been excellently trained, supremely prepared, and had every advantage in senses, speed, strength and biotics. Even so, she'd only seen hard battle a few times, and this was likely to be a mess.
She cleared her head, using a mental formula of various weights of molecules to do so, then refocused on the medical text. She had to be ready to implement the first of the steps Vigil had instructed her on almost as soon as they had Shepard's body, and there was no room for error.
O-ATTWN-O
Of all those aboard, Aethyta was the calmest.
She was not happy to see Liara going from depressed and despairing to angry and ready to headbutt someone, but there wasn't tide-damned all she could do about that. It reminded her of how Benezia acted when her turian boyfriend had been killed before they had a chance to bond, and she smiled at the memory.
Nezzy could get really, really angry sometimes.
Liara's friends she didn't really pay much attention to, but she kept a close eye on the slender human, the one with a sword. She knew sword-styles when she saw footwork, and this one was nasty, nasty and dirty. If there had been a little more room in this ship, she'd have asked him for a spar – as it was, she noted he kept an eye on her almost as much as she did on him.
She'd never dueled a human blademaster before, and was almost looking forward to see him at work. The other one was a gun-toting bully boy – probably sharper than he looked, and he'd clearly been around aliens before. Something about his voice sounded almost familiar, but she couldn't place it. Then again, she'd seen a lot of people and faces cross into her bar, she'd probably served him a drink a time or two.
The third human, the sexy one – wow. She had to be augmented, Aethyta hadn't seen an ass like that since the quarians had to start wearing suits. But there was something almost wooden about her expression, as if she was acting. Her snappish tone, her clear expectation of obedience, her narrowed eyes – this one was used to being large and in charge, and frustrated about having to work with aliens, she guessed.
Tough titty.
Aethyta focused her mind on the Nineteen Petals of the Bladedance, clearing her emotions and thoughts. Unlike the rest of them, she'd fought the Broker's people before, and P's too. She'd known Tetrimus when he was a young ass punk biotic, and later on when he was a cripple in a lift chair, bitter and hateful. She knew all too well if that scary bastard was there, someone in this group was going to die.
She was old and her damned back hurt. If it came down to it, she'd make sure Liara got Shepard – or at least Shepard's body – out of there safe and sound. There couldn't be much worse than fighting a damned immortal version of her ex-bondmate after all, and she would rather die than let Little Wing get killed.
She glanced over at the turian and his clanless bondmate. The kid was good with a rifle from what she remembered of Liara's memories, but a hothead. The clanless – hardly anything to bother worrying about. If she'd really survived a damned ardat-yakshi and being shot to pieces on on the Citadel she had to be tougher than she looked, but she was still a clanless – weak and following.
No, the real wild-card in this mess would be the Broker's people. If it was just thugs, this would be a cakewalk. If big boys showed up – or P's doped up, laugh-happy goons – it was going to get messy.
Problem was, there was every chance someone she couldn't beat, like Tazzik or P. himself, might show. She knew she was good, she also knew P. had torn apart a war-priestess almost thirty years back single-handedly and the Temple kept it quiet. So had P – odd, given the bastard usually bragged – but it didn't change the fact that he was a relli in a fight and could probably kill two or three of them by himself.
They needed a plan.
With that thought, she stood and walked over to the human swordsman. He was leaning against a wall, examining his own blade for flaws, and looked up as she came up to him.
His first words, in a cool whisper, made her want to laugh. "The bay is too small to spar, Matriarch."
She grinned. "I know. Not what was going to ask. You have a plan if somebody ugly shows up to this little party?"
The man sheathed his sword in a motion so practiced and smooth he hardly seemed to move at all. The blank face place of the helmet faced hers, tilting slightly. "I suspect if we face extremely powerful opposition, Theo and I will handle it. You will be welcome to assist."
She shook her head. "And if P. himself shows up?"
He stilled. "Ah. A possibility. I have not studied him intently, Cerberus has little hard information on him."
She nodded. "Figured that. He fights either at very long range, or in melee. Fast. Very fast. Shrugs off the worst hits with crazy laughter and pain only makes him fight harder."
The man nodded. "You imply he will have to be overwhelmed and forced back, not defeated."
She shrugged. "I have a few tricks. You don't get the title of blademistress out of a Tupari machine."
He gave something that she realized was a rasping chuckle. The sound was very creepy, and he pushed off from the wall a moment later. "It truly is a pity we cannot spar, Matriarch. But I will discuss options with you, if you like."
She sighed. This was going to give her nightmares, she just knew it.
O-ATTWN-O
The ship erupted into the space around Omega, drifting gently away from the main relay in the system. The other relay, the ominous Omega-4 relay, glowed with faint red radiance, and marker bouys transmitted warnings in a dozen trade languages to stay well clear of it.
Joker brought the ship in, flat and slow, towards the mushroom shape of the station. "Jesus, that thing is as big as the Citadel."
Next to him, Miranda nodded. "It is very much like a dark Citadel in many ways, Mr. Moreau. Take us down towards the lower levels, and bring up our comm array."
Omega glittered with dark lights, surrounded by nimbus of ragged, ugly warships, tramp freighters and endless ranks of small raider and corvettes. Lights bloomed in the hollowed asteroid at the top of the station, the glowing light of eezo mining casting flickering shadows far down the multitude of spires and towers that descended below.
Joker swallowed as his sensors began counting the ships. "Holy fucking God, how many damned ships does Aria have?!"
Miranda gave a tight smile. "These are not, thankfully, all hers. But she has no doubt called the warlords of her circle to her. This is why the Council and Alliance are so fearful, Mr. Moreau. Many may be salvaged and older, but if the entire Traverse unites they can nearly match the turians in weight of ships, if not in dreadnoughts."
She pointed at ugly metallic stations fixed to other asteroids. "And invasion? Impossible. Those are mass drivers – not mere accelerators, they throw slugs weight hundreds or even thousands of kilograms. They could shatter a dreadnought with a single shot, powered by the horde of eezo and uranium she mines and paid for by the drugs, slaves and illegal wares."
"fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck..."
She suppressed a smile as she hushed him and picked up the mike, triggering the vocal pad at her throat. Her normally melodic voice took on the clipped overtones and bland drawl of a Black Rim salarian, and she spoke in their rapid, choppy cant.
"Veseel Bledtish to Omega docking. Requesting birthing. Will transmit payment via blackconn upon request."
The tired voice of a turian answered her. "Vessel Bledtish, this is Omega. Ring 177, dock slip nineteen. Fee is five hundred credits. Dump charge is two thousand, HE3 is 200 for slip, and 800 for pure. Aria does not allow the sale of eezo on this station, if you're hauling it you have ten seconds to get the spirits out of here."
Miranda sniffed. "Eezo? Certainly not. Not idiots. Transmitting payment. Docking lane clearance course?"
The turian chuckled. "Come to course...uh...ah. Two four seven tac nine, slow your mark to three, please. Mind the mess near ring 170, some idiot from the Suns tried to play dodge-dock with a bounty hunter and ate a torpedo."
"Understood Bledtish out." The last words were nearly a single blur, and Miranda shifted the comm off, tapping her throat pad again. "I hate talking like that."
Joker was giving her a strange look. "How many settings does that thing have?"
Miranda was not usually one for levity, but her singing nerves needed some relief. With a small smile she triggered it again, her voice now sounding much like Tali'Zorah's. "Enough to fool almost anyone, bosh'tet. Now fly."
Joker shivered. "And I thought Jiong was creepy. Taking us in."
The ship moved slowly past longer lines of various vessels – bulk haulers, full of food or stolen goods. Slave transports, battered and grim. More than a few damaged batarian ships with markings from the Hegemony Fleet.
Joker brought them down the long strips of docking rings, coming into a slow rising maneuver halfway down. "This fucking place is gigantic! How are you going to find Shepard in this mess?"
Miranda sighed. "First, this is why were are here early. Second, we have a contact aboard the station who will be assisting us. Third, the reason for the upgraded sensors is so that while you sit on the ship you can help us look."
Joker adjusted his hat – a plain black ball-cap instead of his SA issued one – and nodded. "Fine, be that way. I'll just sit here like I always did on the Normandy and Kazan while you guys get shot full of holes."
Miranda grimaced. "Are you always this upbeat?"
Joker sighed, tapping the controls. "They named me Joker as an insult in Academy. What do you think, lady?"