Notice: Over the next few weeks I'll be posting the chapters from the sequel here to fold everything into a single story.

An apology in advance for all the email warnings you're going to get. Apparently there's no way to have this done quietly.

MSV Deliverance — Omega Nebula

Mei was busy running tests on the samples obtained on the derelict Reaper shipyard when Ziegler walked into her lab. Snowball perked up at once and chirped happily; that prompted its master to turn around: "Oh, hi, Anika!" she said gaily. "How was your trip?"

The blond Swiss smiled fleetingly. "Hello, Mei. It was fine, but it didn't work out." After a deep breath, she added: "Liara is just too depressed. I couldn't shake her out of it."

"Oh." She recalled what she had last seen of the young Asari. "So, no change at all."

Anika shook her head. "I know she was attached to Shepard, but I didn't imagine it would be so bad."

Mei thought for a little about what to say. Her dalliances as a teenager had been stupidly silly… not to mention distant. Those people would be in their senior years now. Her closest friends had been her fellow Antarctica scientists.

All of them dead at Reyes' hands.

A twinge of pain wracked her. She was still grappling with that. Trying to reconcile what the late Talon agent had done — the good and the bad. Almost sixty years had passed since Antarctica, but those events were achingly fresh for her. Except for the time spent in suspended animation, all of that had happened just scarcely a year hence.

"I didn't… I didn't have anything like that," she let out uncomfortably. "But losing my colleagues and friends…"

Anika nodded. "I can understand that." She changed subjects, aware of Mei's pain: "Javik told me of what you saw on that asteroid."

"Oh, about that…" The scientist straightened up. "I've sent requests to the Alliance Health Service to see if this poor man was a registered citizen, but I don't think that'll pan out. I hear there are tons of independent settlers out there on the Terminus and the Attican Traverse."

Ziegler bent her head slightly sideways. "Perhaps you should try talking to the people living on the Freeports too. Hiroshi knows about them."

Mei frowned, then understood: "Ah, they kind of know who's who on the fringe worlds?"

"So to speak. He said Freeports act as commercial hubs for many of those colonies. Plus, they are a paranoid lot. Everyone who visits them gets registered and searched."

"That's an excellent idea. I'll get on it right after I'm done with these tests here."

Anika approached her, careful not to touch anything. Mei's worktable was a chaos of flasks, instruments, tablet computers and samples on different stages of processing. "What are you working on?"

The Chinese scientist handed her a tablet computer. "Here. Look at this."

Anika watched with her brow knotted, trying to understand what unfolded before her eyes. Living—well, dead muscle tissue now. But it was… changing. Before her eyes, individual fibers were being… transmuted? Into some kind of carbon-silicon mesh?

"What am I looking at here?" she said, though she suspected it. Incredible as the idea that hovered at the edges of her mind would be…

"Reaper nanotechnology."

Anika's eyes widened. "But… how?"

"That's what I've been asking myself for hours. No nanites, no exotic chemicals, no electromagnetic emissions. Nothing."

Anika looked at the recording again. She zoomed in to the point she could make the individual atoms of each molecule. And they were—were outright transforming into different elements.

"But this is…"

"Impossible?" Mei chuckled. "Tell me about it."

Anika put the tablet down. She mentally reviewed what she knew of nanotechnology. She could tell in her sleep how the nanites used on her shots worked, down to the last detail. And she could understand the mechanisms of Sombra's and Reyes'. But there were none of the telltale signs of any such things on that recording. Not one.

And before taking that into account, what she had just seen was way beyond the best the Alliance or the Citadel could achieve on that field.

"Is this nanotechnology at all?"

"Good question. You could as well call it magic, right? It's like a Philosopher's Stone, except it's real. You've seen it."

"If we… if we could figure out how it works…" The possibilities…

"I don't have half a clue. I'm going to stick with it for a little longer, but I get the feeling I'm just going to bash my head against the wall until I start hearing squishing sounds. I'm out of my depth here."

Ziegler smiled at that. "That has never stopped you before."

Snowball let out another happy chirp at that. Mei smiled in turn. "That's why I keep at it. I might strike gold."

"I have faith in you, but if you'll let me go grab some tea—" she said as she turned around "—I can stay here and help you out."

"Make it two cups!" the Chinese girl said eagerly. "If there's green tea here—"

"Don't get your hopes up, but I'll check." Then she was reminded of something: "You should get out of the lab later. Hiroshi talked to Amélie and Lena on that Freeport."

"You could have started with that! What did they say? Are they coming back?"

Anika shook her head slowly. "He said Amélie looked okay — better than what passes for usual for her, actually. She kind of has taken it upon herself to look after Lena, and Lena… he told me she's a mess."

The war room was small and uncomfortable, its seats cramped by human standards. But that was what they would have. Javik had ordered to avoid anchoring their assets on fixed locations, judging them safe only for as long as their enemy did not know about them — and had had the Deliverance, an otherwise nondescript Kowloon-class freighter towing two container assemblies, rebuilt from the ground up to serve as a mobile operations center. The end result was gritty and spartan.

There were only four people assembled there at the moment. Javik's uniqueness as the last surviving Prothean had made him a galactic celebrity overnight — and he had had no qualms about using his newfound fame to call out the governments of all major galactic entities for their lack of commitment, reluctance and outright opposition to confront the Reaper threat. Said governments had reacted in lukewarm fashion at best, but enough of their members had privately acknowledged him and given their backing — and so earned him enough support to relaunch the Compact anew with him at the helm.

The other three people present were the most important Spectres of each Council race: Nihlus Kryik, Shilyna T'Perro and Jondum Bau. There were also the holographic avatars of their Alliance counterparts — Admiral Steven Hackett and Colonel David Anderson. It was the Alliance officers that had called the meeting, and Javik hated meetings. Still, he knew them to be a necessity for these primitives without his psychometric talents… which of course were one of his most closely guarded secrets.

"We are all here," he said curtly. "What happened that required this conference?"

Both Hackett and Anderson were now used to his dry manners. They missed Shepard as the capable officer and leader she had been, too, and had resigned themselves to the change.

"There's been a development," Anderson replied. They watched him tap commands on his omni-tool, and another hologram appeared, this one a map of the Attican Traverse and part of the Terminus worlds. "Many independent colonies have sprung up here. Most of them fail, as you know. Alliance-sanctioned initiatives usually fare much better, but there's always people wanting to live outside of established society, so new colonies are founded almost weekly." Now several purple icons appeared on the map. "Our strength there is allocated to guarding official Alliance colonies, but we still try to keep an eye on the fringe worlds. The Zoners that run the Freeports don't really like us there, but they're working with us on this one. And together we're finding out that comm buoys are blinking out."

The Spectres exchanged glances. They all knew Anderson as a skilled and experienced officer. That comm buoys were blotted out of the sky was an everyday occurrence, especially in such lawless regions. He would not raise this issue without good cause.

"You've set us up for something," Bau quipped. "We're waiting."

Hackett answered instead. "Our comm buoys are outfitted to take note of traffic as part of our efforts to combat piracy in these regions. When they started going dark, both our teams and the Zoners' found them intact, but depowered and wiped clean.

"At first, we thought it could be some pirate gang trying to cover their tracks, but disabling the buoys like that without alerting us requires considerable skill. Our next step was to conduct recon sweeps to try and catch the perpetrators in the act, but those attempts met failure.

"Then the Zoners brought something new to our attention: there have been rumors and unconfirmed reports of sightings of strange ships on these sectors. Neither they nor we have been able to confirm them, but given that there is at least one Reaper ship unaccounted for, this is a cause for concern."

The Prothean studied the map. He knew some things the rest of those attending the meeting did not. Several buoys were on sectors where once his kin had secreted assets away. "Show me in which order the buoys were shut down."

A new hologram appeared then: Stella, the Redoubtable's AI. "Commander Javik, I apologize for the interruption, but there's a message I believe you should hear," she informed in a cool voice. She knew the Prothean detested AIs and did not want to set him off.

Javik regarded the avatar coldly before bowing his head in a curt nod. "Then let us hear it."

A helmeted face appeared next. It belonged to a middle-aged man of severe features: the grim black eyes and the square jaw marked him unmistakably as a man in command and in charge. "This is Malcolm Brock, commander of the Wings of Icarus. I believe you should be the first to learn about this. I was dispatched by my employer, Sagawa Tatsuya of Lucheng Interstellar, to his homeworld of Minamo after repeated failed attempts to communicate with the colonists. We have arrived at the main settlement of Kamihama only to find it empty. All the settlers are gone."

In parallel, Stella marked the location of Minamo on the galaxy map. It was roughly in the same area where the buoys had gone dark.

Bau frowned. "This escalated quickly."

Nihlus asked piercingly: "Did Brock attach some data to his message? Observations? Pictures?"

Stella answered by creating another hovering screen where a video started playing. Both the agents gathered in the war room and the human officers conferencing with them watched the footage in silence. The city in view was pristine. The video had been recorded shortly after dusk, and the lights started switching on as they watched — lamp posts, shop signs, domestic lighting. That only intensified the sheer wrongness of what they saw. The place was intact. But the citizens had vanished in thin air.

The video focused on a Predator pistol lying on the grass. The person doing the recording picked it up: "It's been fired," a female voice said. They saw her scan it with her omni-tool. "Thirty-one hours ago."

"No battle damage." Nihlus was studying the footage intensely, his experienced eyes dissecting everything as he looked for patterns. He was right: there were no bullet holes, no scorch marks, no signs of any explosions.

Javik hid the unease that was creeping into him behind a stolid, arms-crossed facade. This was new. He had been born after the arrival of the Reapers and his entire existence had been one long study into asymmetric warfare, but nothing in the annals of his kind mentioned an entire colony popping right out of existence.

T'Perro asked guardedly: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but only humans lived here, am I right?"

"Yes. Minamo was a private enterprise set up by a conglomerate of small Japanese companies," was Stella's answer. "They are noted for being distrustful of other humans not of Japanese ancestry and borderline hostile to non-humans."

Bau spoke next: "I'll hate myself for stating the obvious, but there aren't any slavers that can capture a whole colony like this."

"Nothing is as obvious as we would like it to be," the Prothean quipped. "This once, however, I fail to see how you could be mistaken. We will pursue that line of inquiry nonetheless."

The Salarian stood up at once. "Then I'll put out some feelers. How many people lived there?"

"Around 3,500 permanent residents," Anderson answered.

"3,514," Stella said in agreement.

"That's not a haul you can move with just a couple of shuttles." Nihlus searched his memory. Many slaver rings lurked on those lawless worlds, but how many would be outfitted to quickly move about that many people? "The Blood Pack jumps to mind, but they aren't known for their subtlety. And yet… that's the perfect cover."

Bau followed his colleague's train of thought. "We're just getting started here. We'll examine what we find, and once we've discarded the impossible—"

"—what's left should be the truth," Anderson finished for him with a very short-lived hint of amusement in his voice. In another moment, he would have asked if the Salarian knew the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Citadel

The door flew as if propelled by a rocket, blowing right through the thick glass doors to the balcony. Tela Vasir was inside the apartment before then: "DON'T MOVE!"

The tenant, a Batarian, had a sidearm out. He was not intimidated: "What's the meaning of this!"

The former Spectre merely flicked her left hand and an unseen force knocked the gun away with a sickening crunching sound. The Batarian screamed and reached for his broken wrist with his good hand, but before he could do that another blow sent him flying right through a cabinet and against a wall. The impact knocked the breath out of him and he crumpled to the ground with a tortured groan.

"Waste my time again and the next one will be worse." The Asari picked him up by the collar of his suit. "Your contact. Who is he?"

Her quarry was injured, but not broken. He stared back through his pain. "I tell you and I just trade this beating for a worse one later," he spat. "Do your worst."

Vasir rolled her eyes. A few palm gestures, and the piping on the walls twisted around her target with ugly noises. The Batarian grunted but his defiance did not wane.

"In a while." She paced around him with deliberately slow steps, and spoke in a deceptively suave tone: "You see… time is important for me for the next few minutes. If you talk now, I can get some strings pulled. Save your sorry butt from jail. But if you don't… I'll have to do things the old fashioned way. And, Goddess help me, I hate doing things the old fashioned way. So, um, I may… need to blow off some steam." Her eyes were glacial, but her lips curved into a frighteningly dangerous smile that promised all kinds of pain. "After the next few minutes I can take *all* the time I want. So, go on. Stall me if you want. It's your head."

It was a terrifyingly effective act. And the Batarian believed it. "Th-the b-bedroom… M-my-my a-armoire…"

Her smile changed slightly. "Oh, thank you, citizen." She went to the bedroom and after a few minutes of inspecting clothes and shoes she found a small box in the pocket of a jacket. Carefully she took it, went back to the living room and held it before her captive with a raised eyebrow:

"It's-it's not locked, it's not-not trapped," her target stammered.

A 'friendly' nod. Inside the box there were a series of standard memory modules, universally compatible with any omni-tool. "Which?"

"The… the blue one…"

Vasir punched the blue card into the slot of her omni-tool. Her VI scanned it at once. Among other things, there was a contact book file there, and the VI cross-referenced the contents with a database of known and suspect agents of information brokers. There was a beeping sound: at least one hit.

The Asari bowed her head pleasantly. "Thank you for your cooperation, citizen. Now stand up." A lazy gesture of her hand and the piping that restrained her captive loosened with a jumble of plastic and metallic noises. "Best to get you elsewhere fast before your employer moves to plug the leak."

"So… ¿Qué has encontrado?"

"Would you at least try not to add insult to injury?" Tela Vasir would not go as far as saying that she hated her current situation. In retrospect, she was happy and relieved that they had —kind of— let her off the hook in the first place, if the mind-numbingly huge stakes involved in the moment of her betrayal were considered. Thinking that she had been minutes away from enabling Saren's —and Sovereign's— ultimate victory never failed to cause her soul to groan at the impossibly heavy weight of the guilt consuming her.

And thus having to work under the infamous Sombra as her agent against the machinations of her competitor and Vasir's erstwhile employer was not that bad a way to work off that guilt.

Except that Sombra was insufferably smug.

"Bueno, está bien… actually, what I'd like to know is your feel for it."

They were in one of Sombra's many bolt holes, a reconverted courier ship docked in an undeclared wharf on the lower wards. Her… handler? Was that the right word? Sombra was not her employer, really. The people who would someday decide her future had agreed to the hacker's suggestion and handed Vasir over to her care. And care for her she did — she had quarters on that ship, gear, guns, a well-stocked medbay, and even her choice of food and refreshments.

That only made it worse. Sombra never missed an opportunity to remind Tela Vasir that she was watching —literally— her every move.

The Asari snorted with annoyance. "Well, fine. For what's worth — as long as there's people willing to pay, there'll be someone selling out. The Broker merely had to tell big business who was that someone. Really, nothing new there."

Sombra did not miss a beat and watched her 'asset' with the enraptured attention of a child listening to a fantasy tale. "I have to agree with you. And the rest?"

Vasir looked at the hacker with cool eyes, then she sighed and turned away. "The rest… well, you've seen it. But I don't know what to make out of it. It doesn't happen that often. A lot of people would find it interesting, but more would want to know what kind of work is coming up that demands just that much capacity. And I don't have half a clue." Again she looked into Sombra's eyes coolly. "You know, don't you."

A smug smile, then her host stood up — and unexpectedly poked her in the nose. "Boop!"

A normal person would blink and pull back by reflex. Vasir did not. She stared relentlessly at Sombra instead. "That's not funny."

"Oh, come *on*, lighten up." The hacker paced to and fro in the small room. She knew other things, of course. Some of the data they had obtained from the Batarian was a report from an informant on the Shadow Broker's payroll. A quarter of the yards at Aephus had received orders to postpone their current projects and retool for upcoming work. Word was not yet out, but as Vasir had pointed out, it would cause a lot of upset and anger. She could picture how it would go: an angry businessman would rant at some Hierarchy officer or another, only to be told in a dry mixture of legal and military jargon to look at the fine print of the leasing agreement. While mostly rented out for commercial use, the shipyards still were under the jurisdiction of the gargantuan logistical machine powering the Turian Navy, and said agency had the authority to rearrange the schedule as it saw fit without warning.

It was strange alright. Something huge was coming. The Aephus shipyards were some of the biggest naval yards in the galaxy, and they worked to capacity every day of every year. Setting aside a whole quarter of them…

Mentally she reviewed the other recently learned tidbits. There was a change in Compact procurements, and Javik was covertly pushing efforts to commission a new ship. Apparently of his own design, and crewed by people he was in the process of handpicking himself with as much secrecy as possible. Were both things connected, she wondered. Most likely not. Unless it was something about as big as the Destiny Ascension, one ship was not the kind of work that would demand setting aside such a huge part of the installed capacity at Aephus.

Still, the hull, weapons and equipment alone did not make a ship. They also had to get crews. Spacefaring vessels were self-contained communities; larger ships that had to travel alone would have entire hydroponic decks to allow for trips lasting several years. If such a big piece of work was being commissioned, then provisions had to be taken to crew them as well, as Javik's efforts illustrated. She had not gotten any hints on that regard, but that was—

Avitus Rix.

He had gone to Freeport 74 to try and recruit Tracer and Widowmaker.

The universe was too mind-bogglingly vast for coincidences.

Now, what was her competitor's take in all of this? She would have liked to ask him.

Vasir did not watch her. She fixed herself a meal in the meantime. She had long since learned to hold her curiosity in check — Sombra would turn her questions away with the perverse glee of someone watching a rodent hunt after cheese on a maze. Infuriating as it was, it had taught her a valuable lesson: she just did not know enough about her current line of work to entertain speculations.

But she had not earned a Spectre commission for being a muscle-brained lummox. Her intellect was as finely tuned as that of any former colleague of hers, and she could not placate it or discipline it for long.

It was part of her penitence. She was not trusted, and would not be trusted with the privilege of background intelligence for a long, long time.

Sombra headed for the door. "Take some time off. But don't go far. I'll be in touch."

Vasir grunted her acknowledgment and watched her leave. She always met Sombra in the flesh, without warning on the hacker's part and in situations when both women could go about their business without prying eyes. How she did it was yet another enigma she could not crack.

Author's note: Kudos to BrokenLifeCycle for the proofreading and the suggestions. He helped make the quarantine more bearable.

Hope you've read my fiction at home. You didn't - go home and stay home. Don't take any chances with this whole coronavirus thing.