MOTE
TWO: ZENITHS
It was a simple plan. Garrus just knew it would go wrong somehow.
The Eclipse server hub was unremarkable from the outside. Another artless block of durasteel and concrete, three storeys tall and sporting no distinctive features whatsoever. In fact, that was perversely distinctive in the area; Cixis was an area given over to cut-price electronics stores and what seemed like an outlet for every subculture and ethnic group within the uneasy mix of turians, batarians and salarians who dominated the district. The melange of hundreds of mysterious foodstuffs still hung in the air long after the arbitary night-cycle had begun, batarian spices mingled with Kolithian flatmeats and the ubiquitous sweet scent of salarian cuisine. The buildings were adorned with bright neon signs and painted shop-fronts, coloured glass and flickering holograms, a few of which were still smiling and beckoning to empty streets. The server hub was different; it was just a block, which might as well have translated to a big sign over the door reading 'NOTHING TO SEE HERE, GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS'.
Krul and Mierin's recon had confirmed Butler and Erash's assertion that the place was minimally staffed by a handful of techies. In eight hours of observation, only one salarian had left, and then only to pick up a lhusi from a place down the street. Krul had solemnly reported that he'd been wearing a Nekyia Corridor t-shirt. Somehow, it didn't seem like they were up against the cream of Eclipse's crop.
But it was still going to go wrong. It was a fact of the universe. The easier things seemed, the more convoluted and difficult they would inevitably become.
Nothing's ever easy.
Garrus was dressed in dark civvies rather than his regular combat suit. The clothes let him lean back against an alley wall and disappear into the darkness as efficiently as a high-end cloaking suite would have. People could have walked right past him and not known he was there.
"The target is approaching," Melenis said quietly over the comm line. "Two hundred metres."
"Acknowledged," Garrus murmured.
The target was an Eclipse operative carrying some kind of vital component to the hub. Butler and Sensat's combined efforts had hacked into the hub's heavily protected outgoing extranet connection, spelling out every little thing exchanged between the hub and their superiors – the most important of which had been the fact that something had broken in an important system nestled somewhere inside.
In his left hand he held an injector, filled with a smart drug cocktail Sensat swore up and down would identify the species of the injectee and use only the appropriate chemicals to knock them out. Garrus wasn't entirely comfortable with it, especially since he was fairly sure the mixture was a personal variant of the batarian's old ADAPT system, but he had to admit it would probably be safer than physically knocking out whoever came along. Salarian brains reacted particularly badly to blunt force.
It wasn't a salarian who came, however; it was a gangly, dark-skinned human, whistling tunelessly to himself. A nondescript plastic case hung loosely from one hand.
Garrus detached himself silently from the wall and ghosted after the Eclipse man, matching his footsteps to the target's to mask their sound, closing in-
When he grabbed hold of the man, he dropped the case in surprise. Garrus pressed the injector up against his neck and listened for the telltale hiss that signified delivery.
"When you wake up, tell them it was Archangel," he whispered into the man's ear. A second later, the man slumped back into his arms, and Garrus hauled him back to the alley and left him unconscious in a doorway.
Butler emerged from a nook across the alley and glanced down at the unconscious human, something like concern on his face. "I think I knew that guy. Sure he won't be robbed or murdered or something here?"
Garrus tossed him the box containing the part and stooped to retrieve the helmet he'd stashed among the garbage. "No."
The technician was feeling pretty good about his lot in life. He was twenty-seven, a product of Omega's streets and the son of some of the very first human settlers on the station, and he'd managed to avoid being sucked into the brutal gang warfare plaguing it. In fact, people with his skill set were in high demand even in this stuttering economy.
Just a few months ago he'd been contracted to a major arms dealer, which was a hell of a thing to put on his CV. It had also been among the more harrowing experiences in his life. Gus Williams' wintry smile was a hard memory to shake, and every now and again the technician made a point of taking a moment to earnestly thank whatever gods might be listening that he'd made it out of the Hailfire alive. In fact, things had picked up even more from there; working for the Eclipse, he made more than the average salary for his sector in Council space, and it was all tax-free.
In fact, it scarcely qualified as work; he was just there to maintain the top-of-the-line systems and patch the software which held together the syndicate's station-wide comms network. That took maybe a couple of hours a day. The rest of the time, he spent sitting around with Oraim and Valley, watching pirated films projected onto the matte-black side of the server bank and gamely trying to get into Valley's pants. It was a good life, and the technician was entirely content with it.
When the knock at the door came, he was watching Oraim destroy Valley at N7: Code of Honor for the fifth time that day, grinning at Valley's increasingly angry profanity.
"You can go get that, asshole," she said through gritted teeth, without looking around.
The technician shrugged and rose from his favoured indent in the frayed old couch they'd hauled up there a few weeks ago. The delivery of the new processor was pretty much exactly on time, so he didn't think to run any of the more stringent security checks he could have. Nobody apart from management ever came to see them. Nobody else even knew they were there.
He called up the feed from the camera over the door onto his omnitool. The guy standing there had the case in his hand, though the technician didn't recognise him. There was no wonder in that; Eclipse brought in new blood every day. And we lose just as much. That vorcha attack last month alone killed what, twenty?
He slid back the panel and peered out through the slit.
"What's the password?" he demanded.
"Password," the man outside repeated blankly. He looked to be somewhere in his early thirties, though his hair was already streaked with grey.
"Yeah. You know, a password?" The technician couldn't keep a hopeful note out of his voice.
"Nobody told me about a password."
"Well," the technician said lamely, "there's a password."
"What is this, a fucking treehouse? 'No girls allowed', that kind of thing?"
The technician flushed. "This is an important facility for-"
"Look, do you want this thing or not?" The courier held the box up and shook it. The component was probably insulated, but the technician still winced.
"They were meant to give you the password," he said doubtfully. "Basic security, you know?"
The man rolled his eyes and jabbed a finger at the technician. "Look, either you open this door and take your goddamn circuit board or I go back to Captain Gurios and tell him he can't play Galaxy of Fantasy on his off hours because some idiot in Cixis was playing hard to get. Your choice, friend."
The technician relented at the mention of Gurios and opened the door. Gurios was one of Jaroth's top lieutenants, apparently chosen for his sadistic streak so wide that the rest of him might more accurately be described as a non-sadistic streak, and the technician had absolutely no intention of crossing him.
He stepped out to take the box, and somebody punched him very hard in the side of the head. This hardly seemed fair, he reflected as he lay stunned on the ground, blood and drool trickling down his slack face. People were stepping over him and dragging him with them, back through the door. That was helpful of them, he thought, and tried to thank them. Instead, he threw up down the front of his shirt and passed out.
He woke up in an alley wreathed in flickering orange light, a foul taste in his mouth and a savage drum-beat of pain thumping in his head. There was smoke in the air.
The hub was on fire and in ruins, its walls crumbling even as he watched as the flames inside roared higher. Broken machinery fizzled and sparked in the depths of the inferno. The roof was bent up and out by what looked like an explosion, and twisted scraps of metal and concrete dust littered the alley.
He dragged himself upright and spat weakly on the ground. "Ah. Fuck. Fuck."
"Oh, good," Oraim said, in a voice which, contrary to the content of his statement, did not seem to be the voice of someone who thought anything was good at that particular moment. "You're alive. You can tell management why you let the bastards in through the front door, then."
The salarian looked unharmed, but Valley was hunched over and cupping a bloody nose next to him. The technician blinked stinging smoke out of his eyes and put his head in his hands. A steady beat of pain was stamping a steel boot on his brain every half-second or so, and the sharp stink of vomit on his shirt, which was sticking revoltingly to his chest, wasn't helping.
"Take this to your bosses," a turian said. The technician raised his head to see him standing there, clad in a strange combination of nondescript dark clothing and a navy blue military-grade helmet, half-silhouetted against the orange roar of the fire behind him. "This is the start. There will be more. We will not be so merciful the next time."
"Fuckin' asshole," Valley growled, her voice thick from her busted nose. "Do you know who the fuck you're messing with?"
The turian cocked his head. "Do you?"
"Archangel," Oraim muttered.
"Yes. Tell your people: we're coming."
Oh, no, the technician thought, not you bastards again...
Archangel turned and walked away down the alley, stepping over a body the technician vaguely recognised. He raised a hand over his shoulder in sardonic salute. "A storm's coming, boys and girls," he called. "Better batten down the hatches."
The three of them sat in sullen silence for a little while as Archangel disappeared into the shadows, a silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and the scrape and crunches of their hub's ruined interior slowly collapsing.
"That's it," the technician said eventually. "I'm getting the hell off this station."
It really was amazing, Garrus thought. Nothing had gone wrong. For the first time in living memory, something had been easy.
He stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. There wasn't one. He ended up fishing dirty clothes out of the pile by his bed and drying himself with them, but even that wasn't enough to dampen his spirits. It had worked! For what seemed like the first time, they'd come up with a simple plan and executed it perfectly. It was an immense load off his shoulders; he'd been hauling around an immense fear of everything going to hell every time he took the lead, and the tangible confirmation that they could get something done without a hitch was like breaking through a vast psychological wall inside his head.
Sensat and Butler were poring over complete copies of all the Eclipse records they'd been able to pull from the computer banks, another major achievement. In a few hours, they'd know a hell of a lot more about the mercenaries' structure and day-to-day business operations, and it was with genuine glee that Garrus was daydreaming of all the high-value targets intel like that would open up. It was a feeling he'd been missing since they'd taken down Williams: the sense that they'd made a significant difference, that they'd taken a firm stride forward rather than scrambling just to stay in the same place.
It was almost like a drug. He'd been deep in the pits of withdrawal after Kron Harga had slipped away with ninety-two murders committed purely as a taunting farewell, had been lifted by the slaughter of the Shurta Foundation only to sink back as he realised that all they'd accomplished was to make the Blue Suns even more powerful... but this, this was a rush he'd been missing. Not as high as Williams, not as high as the few short moments between Deus and Golf, nowhere near as high as the mighty peak he'd straddled with Saren's body at his feet at the heart of the Presidium... but it was a peak, and he planned to savour it while he could.
Garrus sat down on the bed, still naked, and hooked into the extranet via the omnitool on his nightstand. He'd taken to monitoring everything he could find relevant to Archangel, especially on the local intranet: independent news sites, message boards, social networks and even the propaganda wings of the big syndicates running the station were among his bookmarks.
He flipped through some of them, looking for reaction to the attack on the server hub. Across the social sites, on CrowD and Galnet and Flashee and YouWorld, he watched dozens of updates pop into existence per second.
fire in cixis – Archangel?
Holy shit just heard something go boom |Cixis| |Omega| |Archangel|
hearin word that archangel took down some eclipse hangout! lovin it!
Eclipse site just went down! looks like ARCHANGEL f'ed their systems
ARCHANGEL... TAKIN THIS STATTION BACK 1 DEAD MOTHER FUKKER AT A TIME...
Garrus grinned and moved on to the blogs. Archangel Report was statistically in the top 100 most-visited sites from the Omega intranet, no mean feat considering the sheer amount of porn it was contending with, and it had apparently got wind of the events in Cixis faster than any of its competitors.
THE ARCHANGEL STRIKES AGAIN... was the headline, superimposed in plain text over an image of the ubiquitous white-wings graffiti that had spread across Omega like a virus. Below that, in smaller print, was VIGILANTE IN STUNNING ASSAULT ON ECLIPSE STRONGHOLD.... Whoever ran the site was apparently convinced that Archangel was just one person, and tended to aggressively exaggerate any hint of a story to appeal to the sensationalist market – and overuses ellipses - but half a million people on the station read it regularly. They say there's no such thing as bad publicity...
Omega's independent news sites were guerilla operations, run from unknown locations by unknown editors. The good ones were, at any rate, the ones willing to criticise the gangs and syndicates; those that tried honesty without concealing their writers' identities were prone to harassment, arson, murder and everything else their enemies could conjure up to hurt them. There were five operating openly, all under the protection of one of the four major groups; Aria controlled Omega Today and the Times of Terminus, the Eclipse had The Omega Inquirer and The Keeper of Secrets, while the Blue Suns' viciously partisan, Hegemony-style The Omegan rounded out the list. The Blood Pack didn't bother with publicity. Garrus suspected this was because they couldn't actually read.
In a perverse way, the sites averaged out to be somewhat reliable. At least two thirds of them were willing to report honestly on any given entity, though editorial directive pushed them towards tabloid condemnation of their foes while they sang the praises of their masters. The Inquirer wasn't reporting on the events of the night, but the Keeper's page obstinately refused to load.
Of the true independents, most had picked up on the story and were running it as a headline, though some pushed it down below coverage of the first ever raloi diplomatic delegation arriving at the Citadel. A dozen message boards and newsgroups dedicated to Archangel were exploding, their users driven into a frenzy by the tangible evidence of another blow struck against the gangs. Garrus watched them excitedly debate for a few moments, then logged out and sat back, thinking.
Archangel was the hottest cultural phenomenon Omega had ever seen. It was the ultimate fulfilment of ten thousand revenge fantasies, a hundred thousand bitter somebody-should-do-somethings, a million little vendettas and grudges against the criminal rulers of the station. It was a symbol, an icon, a flag to wave for people who had nothing. Archangel had achieved little, but what mattered was that it appeared to be striking great, heroic blows for justice and people power and any atrophied ideal that would have them. It was as if the hatred and fear of the evils of Omega had built up for decades behind a vast, featureless dam while the station's masters sunned themselves in pleasure barges below, and all Archangel had done was to remove a tiny fragment of a single brick in the great, unforgiving wall, and the first droplets were squeezing through the hole...
A mote in their eye.
Sometimes, he caught himself wondering. Wondering if what he was doing had an end.
On a realistic level, he knew it was a path to certain death, that he was leading his men to their doom. But sometimes, just now and again, often from the highest peaks but sometimes from the despairing nadirs, he caught flashes of a different future out of the corner of his eye. A towering crystal fantasy of a future, a ridiculous, impossible dream; he would imagine a great popular awakening, uprising, revolution, justice for the dead and living alike, the punishment due meted out to the tyrants and murderers, a future where he could hang up his rifle and take off the helmet and breathe...
But the instant he tried to focus on that precious glimpse of the future, it all faded away, and left him with nothing but a long, bloody march to perdition.
A sound emanated from his omnitool, and he sat up with a frown. It was very familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. It was something he hadn't heard for months and months, and when he identified it, a sense of distinct unease set in.
The disused, dust-gathering icon of his C-Sec email account was blinking. He opened it.
To: vakariang13
From: (address unknown)
Subject: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Garrus,
I'm concealing my identity from you for now, simply to be safe. You can analyse it if you like, but you'll just trace it back to a junk account. You might have guessed by now that you and I are acquainted already.
I will not be explicit. I will simply say this: I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what you've been up to since your resignation, and I'm happy for you; you've found a purpose most of us can only dream about.
I want to meet. Attached is a heavily encrypted file, but it seems your people are good enough to unravel it. Inside is a time and a place. I will be alone and armed only with a pistol (hey, it's Omega. I'm hardly going to come completely unarmed.) Bring whatever backup you want. There will be no ambush, no trap, no bomb, etc etc.
I have made no arrangements to disseminate the information about your present activities I have uncovered in the (unlikely, I hope) event that you simply kill me to keep your secret. You have only my word to rely on, but believe me, I have no interest in putting an end to your escapades. In fact, I'd like to help.
Signing enigmatic letters with 'A friend' is a little clichéd, and I'm not sure if it's the literal truth. Let's go with:
A like-minded individual
Garrus read it once, quickly, then again and again, his dismay mounting with every word. There was no doubt. Somebody knew. Somebody had the power to make it all come crashing down. Even if just the knowledge of his identity leaked, Archangel might survive – but how hard would it be to find a few more Vakarians?
For a moment, hare-brained plans to send his own family into witness protection flashed through his head. That was panic thinking, but the self-centredness of uprooting his family to save his own enterprise struck him seconds later and added guilt to the fear.
He sat there for an hour, thinking. If whoever had sent the email really wanted to bring him down, they were doing it all wrong. If Garrus had been doing it, he would have held off until he had guns trained on every loved one he could find and then sent the email along with proof. That would have put a stop to Archangel very, very quickly. More than that, the letter was from someone who knew him from C-Sec; those email addresses were meant for internal communications only, and he'd never used it for anything but work.
He would have to meet with the sender either way, but all the signs pointed to the email being real, that whoever had written it genuinely wanted to help.
And what, the poison voice in his head whispered, if you're wrong?
He had no answer to that.
