MOTE
THREE: FIRE
True to his word, Vortash carried only a pistol. He'd carried it for decades. It was a perfectly-maintained old Mark 1418, a relic from the days C-Sec ran their own gun labs and came out with internally-developed weapons, and it was the finest piece of work he'd ever seen. It would fire thirty-six shots with a power of 0.33 and a fire rate of 0.765 on the Limix scale before it overheated, numbers which subsequent models duly surpassed – but none of them came close to the aesthetic elegance of the Mark 1418, the compact, swept-back grey sleekness of it, the sureness of the cross-patterned grip under his fingers, the thick, solid sound of its fire, the thud of the recoil, as familiar as an old friend.
Vortash had seen trends come and go all his life, and had been unmoved by them. He was a sturdy, weathered rock in the river of the times, and it seemed to him utterly ridiculous to swap his trusty pistol for a newer model which ran out of shots a great deal faster and required bulky quasi-ammunition. The new way had no class. It was the product of an obsession with power and a parallel terror of being overpowered, two things Vortash had never had much truck with. He had kept his Mark 1418 ever since he'd lost his last one in a fistfight with a salarian mugger in Kithoi all those years ago, when he'd been a younger and brasher man, and he was hardly going to surrender it simply because the times had moved on without him.
He remembered a conversation with another officer, a fresh-faced turian whose vigour made Vortash feel even older than he already was. It had been just a few years ago, well before the geth and the advent of thermal clips, but long after the last gun press in C-Sec HQ had been shut down, ostensibly because of its cost and actually because the arms companies were sick and tired of being outdone.
"I don't get it," the officer had said. "The Brawler fires more shots, they're half a point higher on the Limix scale, and its fire rate is identical. It's just a better gun."
Vortash had smiled. "Listen, kid," he'd said, "the first time I held that gun, Zellae Corosthis was Primarch, nobody had ever heard of humans, Perria Maray was still hot and Hunters fans still thought they could win the title. You weren't alive. The drell resettlement was only just stabilising. The Screaming Pyjacks were top of the charts. The idea of remaking the Gamma Ray trilogy was ridiculous. Krogan were ripping their skin off to sell it for leather; the market was exploding just because Terea T'kola wore krogan boots on stage." At that moment, as they stood there by the vast plas-glas window, the white ziggurat of the Destiny Ascension hadponderously floated past, its engines burning a brilliant blue. Vortash pointed to it. "And that, kid, was in spacedock over Thessia, and it was going to be the biggest dreadnought ever built. No Immortal, no Henovax, no Harsh Winter."
"No extranet," the officer had intoned gravely. "The Protheans still ruled the galaxy, turians hadn't evolved yet, Palaven hadn't yet congealed from its component molecules-"
Vortash had aimed a lazy swipe at his head, which the younger man nimbly dodged. "Hey. I'm not that old, you little bastard."
But at times it felt like he was. There was only so long you could stand still in a raging river before it carried you away – or worse, wore you down and smoothed you out until all he'd valued about himself was weathered into nothingness. He'd run the Citadel Marathon in two hours once, edging into the top hundred. The certificate was still hanging on the wall of an abandoned apartment in Kithoi. He doubted now if he could finish it at all. He wanted to be the young Vortash again. In his mind, he still was the young Vortash, cruelly ripped away from a body at its peak and forced into this, this – husk.
Back then, though, there'd been some spring in his step yet.
"This gun," he'd said to the officer, "is better than either of us. It's better than your piece. In a hundred years, when we're dead, and maybe buried if we're lucky, the Brawlers won't fire. You know the cooling mechanism in that thing uses frizium instead of cerronite just because it's a couple of millicreds cheaper per kilo? Worthless in the long run. The 1418, on the other hand... it'll outlast us. Hell, it's got power for three hundred years. Might be it'll outlast the Council. We're due another crisis, I reckon."
The officer was examining his own pistol with interest. "Think about the here and now, though. What use is a weapon with inferior specs? It might last longer, but..." He trailed off and shrugged. "I won't be using it by then."
"Kids today," Vortash had muttered. "No respect for staying power."
Staying power was the wrong term, he decided. There was no power in longevity. All it represented was a slow enervation of all the vitality of his younger years. Power measured in terms of how far the decline had been arrested was no power at all.
A hint of movement on a rooftop a couple of hundred metres away to his left caught his eye, and he smiled thinly. His body was decaying, but his eyesight had always been unmatched. It was a sniper, hunched over a long rifle which, he imagined, was aimed squarely at his head. Vortash waved to him.
He was standing alone in the middle of the flattest rooftop he'd been able to find, unobscured by AC units or irregular shapes that might have been used as cover. It had to be completely obvious that this was no trap. Which means it has to be nice and easy to shoot me in the head. If Vakarian was smart, and Vortash knew he was, then he'd have at least three or four snipers covering the roof from every side.
A few minutes passed. Vortash stood there, uneasily shifting his weight from one aching leg to the other. He guessed that Vakarian was setting up a perimeter, making sure there were no nasty surprises waiting for him. It was all admirable caution, as he'd expected, but he was beginning to wish he'd brought a folding chair.
Finally, a blue-white light hummed in overhead, and a nondescript skycar set down on the opposite side of the roof. Three people got out: two turians, one of whom was Vakarian – the other was a young bareface in sleek combat armour – and, to Vortash's surprise, a volus. Well-honed eyes noticed strangely stilted movement from the diminuitive alien, almost mechanical. He filed it away for later.
The volus stayed with the car. The bareface stayed twenty metres or so back from Vakarian – close enough to intervene, though – while Vakarian himself came striding forward to meet him. Vortash let him come.
He remembered Vakarian well enough. He'd been only one of a horde of young faces in the ranks of C-Sec, though more driven than most – but there was something qualitatively different about him now. He was wearing the same combat armour he'd always favoured, blood-blue and strong without sacrificing mobility, though it seemed that he carried it differently. Vakarian walked taller than he had before, youthful urgency compressed and honed into purpose, brashness into boldness, and when he came close enough for Vortash to see his eyes, he was struck by the quiet resolve he saw there. He saw no flash of recognition in them, and for a moment he wondered if Vakarian had forgotten him entirely.
Vakarian came to a stop eight feet away and glanced down at Vortash's hip. "Give me your pistol."
It was a command, though not an arrogant one; after a moment, Vortash acquiesced, slowly drawing the weapon with one hand before tossing it to Vakarian. The other man caught it and held it up to the dim light, watching the orange wash over it and through its features. The sight of it reminded Vortash of long evenings spent watching the sun slowly set in the Akasha Canyon on his native Digeris.
"C-Sec Mark 1418," Vakarian said eventually. He tossed it from hand to hand, testing the weight. "Yeah. Fantastic condition, as well. There are probably collectors out there who'd pay top credit for a piece like this."
Vortash nodded. "Probably."
"You know, I remember a man with a gun like this." Vakarian flipped the gun round in his hand so that the grip was facing Vortash and held it out. Vortash took two slightly hesitant steps forward and took it, holstered it. "We used to laugh at him. Old man Vortash, still using an old shooter like that. We used to say, maybe he still cooks with an open fire, maybe he thinks the Unification War is still on." Vakarian's cold blue-grey eyes fixed on his own, one glinting behind his visor. "We used to say, maybe he was there when C-Sec started, telling people how much better things were just a few years ago. Because we couldn't really conceive of a C-Sec without him, you know?"
"Neither could he," Vortash said.
"But he was a good detective. A very good detective."
"Top ten, at least."
"So good he knew things he really wasn't meant to know."
Vortash shrugged. "He just followed his instincts."
"Instincts that could very easily get him killed."
Vakarian's eyes were unchanged, as was the intensity of his gaze. Vortash held it, and judged he would survive the night. Just a hunch.
"Thing is, though," he said slowly – and I was having such fun talking about myself in the third person - "I don't think they will. Not today, at least. And I don't just mean because you can't be sure I haven't got some kind of dead-man's-switch that'll beam your face all across the station if you put a hole in my head."
Vakarian cocked his head. "Do you? Purely as an academic point, you understand."
"No." Vortash thought about it for a moment, then added: "Although I could still be lying. It wouldn't matter, though. See, I remember you too."
Vakarian said nothing. Vortash breathed in and ploughed on, hoping he had it right. Because if I don't, and he's not the man I thought he was, then it's an unmarked grave on the edge of the galaxy for me. 'Course, that's likely anyway.
"You're better than that," he said. "You might have been talking about me behind my back, but we were all doing the same to you. It was cases like Kishpaugh and Saleon. Raganis and the M'goli twins. The ones you couldn't close without stepping outside the rules. We could hear the shouting matches between you and your father all the way through headquarters."
Vakarian smiled ruefully. "You could, huh? Nobody ever told me that. I always kind of assumed his office was soundproof."
"I've seen a lot of types on the force in my time," Vortash said. "You get some who do it for the pay and the benefits, some who do it because they didn't really have many options and just treat it like any other job... some who're in it for the power, for kicks, and they're the worst fuckers under the sun. But I always had you down as one of the annoying little bastards who always try to do the right thing. Crusaders, you could call them. And murdering me isn't up your street." I hope.
Vakarian stared at him for a long few seconds, then inclined his head. "No. It's not. But I have to ask: if I'm a crusader, what are you?"
Vortash grinned. "Ah, that's an easy one. I'm a seeker. It's the thrill of the chase that gets me. I'm the guy who digs where he shouldn't because he knows, he knows deep in his brittle old bones that there's something hidden just out of sight, a thread that he can grab onto and just pull, and the whole thing comes crashing down. Then he gets to stand in the wreckage while the whole world rushes around in a panic, and he gets to say 'I told you so'. That's me."
Vakarian was smiling too now. "I think I know the type."
"Sound like something you could use?"
"Yeah," Vakarian said. "It just might."
Vortash stood there for a moment, grinning like an idiot. Just for a moment, he felt like a young man again.
"It's funny," he said eventually, once he'd got his facial muscles under control. "I never expected to see you again."
"Small galaxy."
"Not really. There's something about Omega. It's like..." He groped for the words. "Like a black hole. Everyone who cuts loose and heads out into the galaxy at large... the pull's always there, for one reason or another."
"And what was yours?"
Vortash shrugged. Vakarian's cool, steady eyes watched him unerringly. "You."
"So I'm a black hole inside a black hole?"
"Something like that."
"Well," Vakarian said, "there's a ringing endorsement." A troubled look ghosted across his countenance and vanished so quickly Vortash was scarcely sure he'd seen it at all – but he was sure, and it worried him in turn. It was the first crack to show in the steely exterior Vakarian had presented to him thus far. Vortash had expected more. The kid – no, a man now, he corrected himself, but it was a habit he'd never kick; he still thought of forty-year-olds as 'kids' – was young, and all the myriad insecurities and confusions of youth had been present and correct the last time the two had seen one another, shortly before the geth attack. It seemed unlikely that all of them had been washed away inside little more than a year. For a few moments, Vortash had almost believed just that. The little flash of vulnerability, though... somehow, that worried him far more than it would have had it been far more obvious.
Vakarian was still young, and youth was a strength and a weakness. Vortash wondered how Vakarian felt about his endeavour. Had it ever been planned like this? He had men with him, snipers on rooftops, undoubtedly a few more concealed here and there; every report of Archangel's activities swore he had no less than ten men. For a man like Vakarian, that was a lot, and that flash of anxiety he'd witnessed just now was proof it might just be too much. That was the advantage of age: bones went brittle and muscles evaporated, but the mind ensconced itself deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of knowledge and cynicism and observations that might pass for wisdom at a distance. Vortash's mind knew what was what, and a lifetime's detective work meant a split-second's expression could tell him more than any written report.
"Why would you leave, though?" Vakarian said after a moment. "That's not you. You were C-Sec, more than any of us ever were. I can't imagine you leaving."
"Neither could I. But..." Vortash shrugged. "It wasn't C-Sec any more. Not my C-Sec, anyway. You remember what it was like after Saren. We weren't the police any more, we were... peacekeepers. There wasn't much use for detectives. These last few decades, it was all the same in the end. I mean, you had the humans show up, but that didn't change much until Shepard. It was the same job, the same rhythm. More like a symphony, actually. We all had our parts, and I was happy to do mine... and then someone tears up all the sheet music and breaks all the instruments and shoots the conductor. You can't put something like that together again the same way. C-Sec isn't what it used to be. I- well, I'm not a racist, but the human influence isn't helping. Everything's getting politicised, the Council's pushing for more direct involvement in C-Sec affairs, the Spectres aren't playing ball, the red tape's worse than it ever was-"
"Yeah," Vakarian said. "I remember."
Vortash shook his head. "It's not my C-Sec. Not any more. They tore it all up and put it back together wrong. And the Citadel's not what it was. You remember the way it was just after the attack? Firestorms in Zakera, thousands buried under debris, atmosphere malfunction in a hundred places, bits of fleet raining down for days, isolated geth hunter packs roaming the underworks, looting across the station, personnel and materiel at less than half what they had been when the job was five times harder. It was a damn nightmare. Maybe it was selfish to go when I did, when things were in pieces, but I..." He broke off and shrugged helplessly again. "There's things you can't fix, you know?"
Vakarian smiled again. "I think we're the litmus test for that here. If there's anything impossible to fix in this galaxy, it's Omega."
"The world without law," Vortash mused. "Hm. Even in the darkest days, right after the attack, it was never this bad on the Citadel."
"But there's something different here. A spirit of... liberty, I suppose, with all the good and all the ill that brings." Vakarian's smile had faded, the thoughtful, faintly melancholic expression replacing it. It was the face of a man twice his age or more. "There's no law. Nothing to protect the people here, but nothing to hold us back."
Hard steel glinted behind Vakarian's eyes with the last few words. Vortash had no doubt that he meant it. There were rumours of the terrible vengeances Archangel had wreaked on the criminals of Omega, most too horrible for even the most twisted salarian horror movies. Vortash had dismissed most of them out of hand, and had been sure almost all were fabrications when he'd learned Archangel's identity and recalled the impetuous but well-meaning officer he'd known. With that pitiless flash, he began to wonder.
"The fact is," Archangel said – Archangel? Vakarian, of course, but was that his voice? - in a tone somehow both softer and more determined, "here, we are the law. And when we can deliver justice, we do it. We don't wait for approval. There's nobody holding paperwork over our heads. No lawsuits. No quotas, no police brutality, no legal loopholes, no corruption. There's us. Justice, in its purest form. And in the end, even if it's all for nothing, if we're just lighting a tiny, insignificant candle – the light is there, and the fire burns."
Vortash's throat was suddenly very dry. Vakarian's eyes were still burning steady holes into his own, and it was becoming difficult to hold his gaze. The power in Vakarian's voice had been unmistakeable. It wasn't authority, for that was a different beast – it was simply the power of absolute, unwavering certainty. It thrilled Vortash, and it terrified him. The absolute was alien to him, almost unknown in his life of greys, and the purity of the ideals Vakarian had spoken of exhilarated him, making him feel as if it had been what he'd wanted all along. It also shook him to his core, because he had always known the absolute to be the province of madmen. The world just wasn't like that, but listening to Archangel – and I wonder, is he the same person as Vakarian at all? - could make a man believe otherwise.
And now he knew his choice. He hadn't believed Vakarian would kill him. He was absolutely wrong. He knew he would be welcomed, taken in, trusted... if he agreed to join. But he could no longer walk away. Vakarian's determination was a razor's edge; turned one way, it might cut deep gouges into the vicious, criminal murderers who ruled Omega's roost, and turned the other way, it could whisper across Vortash's throat and silence him forever.
He'd been wrong, then. Hardly the first time, but never quite on such a lethal level as this.
The gauntlet's down, then. Join, or die.
There could only be one answer to that. But even as they left, Vortash now riding in the skycar along with Vakarian and his people, it was an answer that made Vortash feel like an old, old man. The young might be able to see black and white, but for Vortash, it was all still a wash of funereal grey.
