Inquiline – Zaeed Massani

"Skyllian Blitz 2 When?" Zaeed read out. Next to it was a planet – he supposed it must be Earth rather than Elysium, because of how much blue the artist had used – with a rather severe red 'X' drawn through it. To the right of that were the words "REMEMBER TORFIN!" – these in a different hand, jagged orange letters outlined in white. "Balak Lives!" was written across the scanner array, just above "Sho'lem'a Has Meter Long Ivory". "Hackett Sucks Baculum" was next, and beneath that was "Grissom Sucks Baculum" and – Zaeed's favorite – "Shepherd Sucks Baculum". "You can suck MY Baculum" the next writer had opined and, for clarity, he had even included an instructional drawing.

It went on. The batarian ship – an old Cosharc – was covered bow to stern in hostile messages. No few of them were addressed to humanity specifically, though Zaeed imagined it was rare that a human survived getting close enough to the ship to read them.

So in a way, he was doing them a favor.

"Shoulda brought a pen," he observed, stepping over the arm-width cable connecting the ship's painted nose to the nearby pylon. It was good to know there were some constants in the galaxy, with how crazy it had gotten in recent years. The hate between humans and batarians had only grown stronger over time, like a well-aged bourbon. Shepard could have all the alien pets he wanted – salarian, turian, quarian, even a goddamn geth – but if he thought he'd ever add a batarian squadmate… well, he could suck baculum.

The hangar proper was empty but for him and the ship and a few enormous shipping containers. Fuel pumps clattered at the ship's tail and, beneath that, Zaeed could feel the dull hum of Omega's sleepless activity through the floor, but of dockworkers or guards there was no sign. Zaeed raised his scope to his good eye to sweep the catwalks and the elevated room from which the technicians controlled the cranes and fuel rigs. Nothing.

Zaeed grimaced. For half a moment, he considered if he might have the wrong hangar. Hangar eighty-four green was in the middle of Zeta district – perennially batarian territory. Ki Ashen Gauntlet – the most powerful local gang – proudly recruited exclusively batarians, as did its nearest and deeply hated rivals the Iron Qoh'Col. Zaeed knew from experience that this hiring policy did not extend to contractors, as he himself had probably taken in half a million or so credits in bounties for one gang or the other over the years, hired to retaliate against Had'sha So-and-So for Genash Who-Gives-A-Shit's clan honor. But as much as the two gangs hated each other, they were goddamn united against any non-batarian gang that looked to be interested in expanding into their warzones. Even the Blue Suns – still the largest gang on the station after T'Loak's, and forty percent batarian to boot – would have every reason to rent hangar space elsewhere.

But they hadn't. This was the place – Zaeed was sure of it.

Zaeed had spent the better part of three days sitting in a booth in Afterlife listening to the Suns' transmissions filter through his earpiece. Most of the chatter had had to do with their continued efforts to reassert their control over Gozu district after a plague, a few thousand vorcha, and a reincarnated Spectre had pushed them out, but Zaeed had a practiced ear and when an incautious comment had mentioned an operation being prepared in this part of the station, he had made his move.

Zaeed was old but he wasn't that damn old. He still had the hearing of a goddamn cat.

They were here. Somewhere.

He gave another glance at the control room. The lights inside were on, but even if there was some blue-and-white armored asshole looking back at him, the windows had become so discolored with engine exhaust that he would never see them. He'd have to go look up close. He risked another ping for hardsuit signatures – none – and one last long sweep by eye across the catwalks for any suspicious cluster of machinery that might conceal a booby trap – nothing.

Zaeed crept for the catwalk stairs, assault rifle at the ready. Jessie was a reassuring weight on his back – tightly anchored to the electromagnetic clips there, and tied in a makeshift backup holster as well so she could not fall off and give away his position if he were hit by an EMP. He stopped at the foot of the stair to listen, and ran his finger along the edge of the first steps to check for microwires. Still nothing.

"Goddamn fools," he muttered to himself, and climbed the stairwell two steps at a time.

The control room was empty but for a single wide chair next to the console that controlled the cargo crane. The console was littered with discarded food wrappers – some kind of ration bar that looked and smelled like scrap plywood. Zaeed pushed them aside to consider the screens. Zaeed's Khar'shish had rusted over the years, but he could pick out enough to recognize a list of maintenance flags for the fuel pumps (useless) and a berth schedule no one had bothered to fill out (just as useless). He supposed it was too much to hope for that one of the screens would have a file labelled 'UPCOMING PLANS' waiting prominently in the center, but his computer skills weren't going to be much use otherwise.

No luck. He'd have to catch one of the Suns in the act. He squinted through the (equally opaque from this side) windows down into the hangar, weighing his options for an ambush. Assume he was still undetected. Assume a small squad – call it five men. Unless they had worked out some arrangement with one of the batarian gangs, they wouldn't be able to risk much more manpower than that – otherwise they wouldn't have left the hangar unguarded. Most likely they were banking on the chance their ship would be dismissed as belonging to some smalltime batarian merchant and left unmolested.

Maybe up on the catwalks. They come through unprepared, Zaeed could open fire and maybe down the whole lot of them before they knew what was happening. Then he'd peel whichever of them hadn't bled out yet off the grating and make them open up the ship. Then he'd start the interrogation. But assume they all died, what then? Was it worth the risk to try to keep one alive?

Zaeed grimaced. Some part of him actually wished the bitch was still with him. He had been one of the first to leave the Normandy after their little suicide mission had concluded. He'd actually been eager at the time to go back to a lower paygrade for a while, shoot a few thugs whose deaths meant nothing more than unpaid gambling debts or infidelities with the wrong crimelord's girlfriends rather than ancient extragalactic man-harvesting machines that would wipe the goddamn galaxy out if left to their own devices. Truth be told, he'd been more than a little surprised he'd managed to keep up his streak of surviving shit that nobody had any business surviving.

But he'd been more than a lot surprised when Jack had decided to tag along. She'd told Shepard in no uncertain terms that she meant to put some distance between herself and anything that even smelled half-Cerberus to her, as soon as they'd landed on Omega she had met Zaeed at the ship's exit ramp with her pants pockets stuffed full of stolen food and no particular explanation as to why she was following him.

"Suppose you expect a cut?" he'd asked when she was still with him by the time he'd reached his safehouse in Kenzo District and she'd joined him in reading through the bounty requests he'd accumulated over the months on the Normandy.

"I suppose you expect a cut, Fuckface. You can keep half."

Zaeed had humored her, and even given her half of the bounties she joined him in hunting. She was not usually patient enough for the work, but she had the uncanny survival instincts of a cornered animal and a few contacts among depths of crime even Zaeed had theretofore not dared to plumb, not to mention a biotic artillery piece in her skull. She'd been a lot pickier about jobs than Zaeed normally bothered to be – she'd insisted they immediately decline the half dozen requests he'd gotten to undo or retaliate for something Shepard had done as he'd gallivanted his do-gooder ass across the galaxy, and when one bounty had been for a man she thought 'looked Cerberus-y', she'd actually gone so far as to contact the Normandy again to get EDI to verify her suspicions.

That man had ended up… more dead than most. Luckily the asari who'd posted the bounty had been satisfied with a DNA test for identity.

Zaeed had given Jack the whole bounty on that one, and they'd gone to Afterlife and burnt every red credit of it on booze and strippers.

Then one morning he'd awoken to find her cot and half of his ammo stores emptied out. "Old Man," the datapad she'd left by Jessie's case had read, "Fuck Off. Try Not To Get Killed. Love Jack."

As far as he knew, she was not on Omega anymore. Maybe Pragia, if he'd had to guess. Or Invictus. Or wherever she thought the Illusive Man might be hiding. She wasn't here, though, and so Zaeed couldn't have her yank one of the Suns out of harm's way (and – realistically – break all his limbs for a laugh) before he gunned the others down. He'd have to make do and hope one of them survived his opening salvos.

Zaeed 'hmph'ed to himself and turned to go…

…He found himself looking down a gun barrel.

"Human!"

The batarian wore suspicion in all four eyes. Black grease caked his jumpsuit, obscuring the company logos emblazoned thereon, and hammered metal rings hung from matching piercings through the septa of seven pairs of nostrils. From his lack of a hardsuit and the subtle tremble of his gloved hands, he was no great fighter – just a lookout, probably – but he took a threatening step towards Zaeed all the same. "Get away from that," he snarled.

"Calm down," Zaeed said. He slowly eased his own gun over to point at the batarian's gut – the fact that the alien let him do so made him all the more confident. "I'm expected here, pal," he said, reaching up with one hand to pull down the collar of his hauberk and reveal the faded tattoo on his neck. "I'm with the Suns." He had argued against the tattoos, a lifetime ago, on the basis that advertising one's allegiance to a criminal gang made plausible deniability anything but, if one should be caught.

"So don't get caught," Vido had said. He'd insisted the prize of advertising themselves as a brand more than compensated for the risk of legal trouble, and Zaeed had relented. Now the tattoos and the blue-and-white armor were almost the only rituals from those early days the Suns still practiced. The rest had gone the way of competence. And discipline. And hangar security.

The tattoo did not have the intended effect. The batarian aimed down at the floor and squeezed the trigger. There was a boom that shook the dust off of the control panels and blasted the steel grate under Zaeed's feet out of place. The smell of ozone and charred grime filled the room. "Only warning!" the batarian roared, gun trained at Zaeed's head again. "You meltwater Suns think you own the galaxy! No!" He spat contemptuously on the floor. "You are just paper thugs!"

"Hold on," Zaeed said. He took a step closer. "I was lyin' to you. I ain't a Sun anymore. Not for a long time."

"Get back," the batarian warned. "My… my brother is Iron Qoh'col. Get back!"

"Calm down," Zaeed said. Another step closer.

"You ca-"

Zaeed pounced, jumping forward to knock the batarian's gun aside with his own. The gun's report boomed between them, so close to Zaeed's head that he felt a puff of air as the bullet shattered one of the room's windows and pinged noisily off into the hangar.

Zaeed dropped his gun and closed his hands around the alien's gloved wrists. He twisted, up and around, breaking the batarian's stance and smashing an elbow into the soft flesh of his throat. The batarian gave a strangled cry and stumbled forward, his own gun clattering to the floor. Zaeed wrapped an arm about the alien's fleshy neck and threw his weight into clamping neck and armpit together as hard as he could. The alien sputtered and choked, its gullet pressed closed in Zaeed's grip.

"Calm down," Zaeed said, panting as he eased the batarian to the floor. "Calm down before you piss me off." The batarian continued to struggle, so Zaeed smashed his head into the floor hard enough to set the room vibrating. "Stop it, goddamnit!"

"Let go! Blue Suns go home and die! You ruin every district you touch! I hope you all die on camera!"

The alien's piercings clacked against the floor as Zaeed bashed him again. "Listen to me, you dumb asshole," he snarled, fingers digging into the soft flesh on the batarian's forehead as he lifted him up for another strike. "I told you I ain't a goddamn Sun, and I like what you just said about them and so I am trying real hard not to kill you right now. But I will break your goddamn neck if you don't STOP," he slammed the alien's head down, "STRUGGLING," and then again.

They held that pose for long seconds, Zaeed panting with exertion as the batarian's resistance tapered. Finally the alien was still.

"Alright," Zaeed said, letting his grip slacken just enough for the batarian to breathe. The alien wheezed and coughed and gave another halfhearted shake to dislodge Zaeed, but to no avail. "Good. Tell me. The men who own that ship, who are they?"

"Not men," the batarian spat again. "No humans here. It's a batarian merchant ship."

The batarian's forehead hit the ground yet again. "Bullshit. It's a Sun ship."

"Suns go home… go home and die," the batarian said. He was starting to slip away. "Batarian… merchant."

Zaeed grimaced. Even under the extremely loose definition of 'merchant ship' the batarians favored – for even their freighters bristled with ungainly guns – this ship did not fit. If it had ever belonged to a batarian merchant, it had been repurposed to an even lower cause.

"You don't know a thing about it, do you?"

The batarian gurgled.

Zaeed sighed. This fool wasn't a Sun, or even on their payroll. How fucking sloppy had his old outfit gotten? "It ain't a merchant ship at all," Zaeed said, giving his captive a little shake. "Suns don't do merchant. Smuggling, maybe, on a gentle day. You seen the cargo?"

"Hazard uniforms," the batarian wheezed.

"Guns are more likely," Zaeed insisted. "Or drugs. Or goddamn pixie dust."

"Manifest said… uniforms."

Zaeed grimaced. Uniforms. The Blue Suns transmissions he'd eavesdropped had been nonspecific as to details, and he did not know why they had a batarian ship, but he knew it wasn't full of uniforms.

"Let's find out," he said. "You have access?"

The batarian said nothing, but Zaeed did not care. Giving the alien one more good cuff for good measure, he clambered to his feet and retrieved his gun. "Up you go," he said, dragging his captive up by his neck. Almost immediately he regretted beating the alien so hard – he was not the young man he once was, and properly-fed batarians were heavier than humans. The batarian was half a head shorter than Zaeed but wider around the chest, and packed with muscle and fat and bone so dense he might as well have been made of stone. Luckily after a few steps the batarian found his own footing and allowed himself to be manhandled from the room. Zaeed kicked the alien's gun in front of them as they went until it disappeared between two of the catwalk steps and clattered down somewhere into the gloomy crevasses between long-undisturbed crates underneath.

Zaeed released the batarian at the foot of the steps, tossing him to the ground in a heap at the base of one of the cargo containers waiting to be loaded onto the Cosharc. The crates, like the ship, were heavy brown steel, pitted by damage and criss-crossed by colorful graffiti. "Humans Chew Cud Twice," this one said, and another sentence that said "Shepard sux b-" before running out of room behind the container's access panel.

"Open it," Zaeed commanded. "Let's see those uniforms."

The batarian limped to his feet and cast a furious glare Zaeed's way, his pierced jowls tightening over bloodied needlepoint teeth, but he activated his omni-tool and waved it in front of the access panel. There was a dull thunk as a lock disengaged, and the hiss of the pressure equalizing, and the container slid open.

Zaeed fixed the batarian with a victorious look.

The batarian stared down into the container, blinking. "These are… not uniforms," he concluded after a moment.

"Nope."

The container was stacked from top to bottom with tightly wrapped canisters wired in parallel into a small circuitboard. The canisters had been stripped of the tungsten alloy shielding in which they would normally be transported, but underneath remained emblazoned with even more hostile messages than were written on the ship. DANGER, they read, HIGH EXPLOSIVE. ELKOSS COMBINE ASTERUCTION MINING SHAPED CHARGE. PRIMARY EXPLOSIVE SUBSTANCE. DO NOT REMOVE TUNGSTEN ALLOY SHIELDING.

"This… This could hurt someone."

"Imagine that's the idea."

The batarian opened the other cargo containers and found more of the same. One of them did have a few sets of hazard uniforms and softsuit undermeshes inside, but also the ablative armor hardsuit plates that soldiers would wear overtop them, along with a half dozen high-performance assault rifles, three breach charges, a pair of mobile sentry turrets, sleeves of magnetic rail grenades, an emergency oxygen tent, and dozens of field dress medigel packets. "These are wetworks supplies," Zaeed explained, in case the batarian didn't understand. "Expensive shit. Whatever these guys are doing, they expect to be shot at while they do it."

The batarian just stared, dumbfounded and disgusted. "You fucking humans," he breathed.

"So now you believe me that it's not a bloody batarian ship."

The alien ignored him. "They could blow up Omega and everyone on it. People live here." He swallowed bloody saliva. "My family… How dare they? How dare they even bring this here?"

"They're bad men," Zaeed said, shrugging.

In truth, he was almost as confused as the batarian. In thirty-seven years, he had never known the Suns to deal in so much firepower all in one spot. He doubted they intended to detonate these explosives on Omega – even with their losses in Gozu they controlled a not inconsiderable fraction of the station's rackets, and had been courting T'Loak's favor for long years to try to gain even more – but clearly they intended to detonate them somewhere, and all at once, or they wouldn't already be wired. Zaeed supposed they might be used to blackmail some backwater planet capital into submission, but surely they wouldn't be so stupid as to try to pull that shit on T'Loak, right?

They were assholes, but that just wasn't Vido's style, or even Solem's. This was something new.

"Have to do something," the batarian breathed.

Zaeed grinned. The alien wasn't as pretty to look at as Jack or a tenth the fighter she was, but he probably showered more often. He'd do. "What's your name, batarian?"

–

"So there we were," Zaeed was saying, holding up cigar and hand to frame the scene. "Up to our asses in poppy stalks. Two hours of backbreaking work on a firebreak, all so we could funnel the smoke where we needed it. We're tired, we're hot. The farmers are still going apeshit on us, and the goddamn Gilded Whoresons are just over the next hill readying to jump on us. Wem's starting to look pretty goddamn nervous. His plan doesn't work, it won't matter what the Whoresons do, we'd kill him. This was when he still had all his fingers, see."

The batarian – whose name was Orlash – gave a weary grunt and stared nervously out the window into the hangar yet again.

"So we finally set the fire, and the smoke's rising, and the wind holds, so Wem is feeling relieved. We give it a half hour or so for them to get good and baked before we put on our masks and make our move. We sneak around the hill to the Whoreson camp, but do we see a bunch of men high out of their minds on burning opium?"

Orlash did not hazard a guess.

"Not a one," Zaeed revealed. "We see turians. Shit you not. The Whoresons had hired a unit of goddamn turians to wait at their camp in trenches, so they could hammer and anvil us with their career boys from the other side. Turians can sniff opium fumes all day without a goddamn sniffle. They don't like the smell of smoke, but that's not much of a deterrent."

"Could be a sign of civilization, though," Orlash said, eying Zaeed's cigar.

"The goddamn turians? Civilized? Not bloody likely. I could tell you stories about the turians that'd cinch your ass shut."

Orlash was still staring out the command center window.

"Be patient," Zaeed growled, irritated. "They'll get here when they get here." He puffed on his cigar. "You pissing yourself waiting won't bring them any faster."

"How can I trust you with those mining charges?"

Zaeed shrugged and put his boots up on the console. "Don't suppose you have a choice in the matter," he said, patting the assault rifle in his lap. "But look at it this way -" he pointed out to the hangar. "They went to some goddamn trouble to doll themselves up like batarians. They mean to use those charges on batarians or blame the batarians for using 'em on someone else. Whatever shit I might do will be better for you than that." He grinned. "Either way, I ain't on their side – I'll prove that as soon as they show up."

Orlash chewed at his upper lip, causing his piercings to jangle against his skin. His hands were still on the crane controls. At Zaeed's direction, he'd sealed the containers up – minus one charge – and loaded the last of them onto the Cosharc's cargo rail. He'd worn a determined frown as the last had slid into place with a noisy clack, and had seemed to understand Zaeed's plan well enough, but that had been ten minutes ago and Zaeed could see the alien's doubt gnawing at him. "You're sure there's no chance the trap will set the charges off?"

"None," Zaeed insisted, rounding down. "They're shaped charges. Shrapnel will all go this way. Now you going to let me do my goddamn job?"

Orlash still didn't look away from the hangar entrance or release the controls, but he nodded.

"So: Opium. Smoke. Turians," Zaeed continued.

–

It was a few hours and more than a few stories before the Suns made their appearance, and for a moment, all four of Orlash's eyes were wide with horror.

"Calm down," Zaeed said, following the alien's train of thought immediately. He crouched beneath the control room railing, low enough that only the top of his head would be visible through the window the batarian's stray bullet had shattered. "They're not batarians."

Indeed, all six of the men who filed into the hangar were humans, though at a glance the mistake was easy to make. They'd eschewed their usual blue-and-white armor for batarian-made suits, gray and black and portlier than human-made gear, with quad optics on the helmets and room at the waist and neck for a paunch and gullet. They'd clearly padded the excess slack with something to fill out the suits, and between the unbalanced weight of the armor and padding their gaits were slow and shuffling. The overall effect was hardly conducive to winning a battle – hence the nicer hardsuits in the ship's cargo, Zaeed supposed – but from a distance it made for a passable disguise.

"Humans…" Orlash breathed, disgusted. He spat on the floor.

"Just do your job," Zaeed ordered. He crept towards the door.

He paused when one of the speakers on Orlash's console crackled. "Anybody up there?"

At Orlash's hesitating look, Zaeed gestured at the intercom. Orlash held a button down. "A-affirmative," he grunted, and his voice echoed across the hangar. "Just- just me. I'm here, yes."

"Did you vent the air exchangers?"

"Uhh… N-no, no, haven't done that yet."

"Well?"

Orlash nodded to himself. "Right-Right away," he said. He was trembling as he passed Zaeed and opened the control room door, but he did not hesitate. His heavy footsteps creaked on the catwalk stairs. Zaeed stole a glance out into the hangar as the door swung shut. One of the disguised Suns was standing almost directly on their trap, opening up the ship's hatch with a wave of his omni-tool, while his companions waited behind carrying a pair of small crates between them.

The last jabbed at Orlash with the end of his gun. "If I have to smell mud the whole trip, I'm going to come back and gut you," he said, as Orlash scrambled to one of the ship's access panels.

Zaeed waited until Orlash had pried the panel open and started unrolling the hoses that would vent out the accumulated gas from the ship's life support systems, and the Sun had turned away to rejoin the others. They filed onto the ship, bickering.

When the third of six was halfway up the ramp, Zaeed triggered the detonator. The shaped charge he and Orlash had concealed in the maintenance trench that ran underneath the ship exploded with a spectacular clap, filling the hangar with a flash of fire so bright Zaeed could pick it up with his dead eye. The shrapnel – augmented by a stack of hardsuit plates borrowed from the ship's cargo and tucked inside a rolled up hazard uniform – behaved as Zaeed had promised it would, exploding safely away from the ship and its dangerous cargo in a deadly knee-height wave that left the hangar walls shredded with holes and separated three of the Blue Suns from their lower legs at a stroke.

The hangar was still ablaze with light and heat when Zaeed jumped out of his hiding place and opened fire on the downed Suns. His assault rifle seemed noiseless behind the roar of the explosion, but it kicked against Zaeed's hands as he swept it across each of the men in turn.

Bits of burning mesh fabric were still raining about the hangar as Zaeed descended the catwalk stairs. Three of the Suns were already dead. What was left of the fourth was trying to crawl up the ramp – Zaeed casually finished him off with a point-blank shot to the back of the neck. "Good job, batarian," Zaeed called. Orlash peered meekly over the maintenance panel. The ship had protected him from the worst of the blast, but the top of his head was white with dust and ash. "Close that up and go pull the latches for me." He climbed into the ship without waiting for an answer.

One of the two remaining Suns was waiting just behind the door to the ship's forward cabin, and unleashed a fusillade of bullets as Zaeed stepped across the threshold. Zaeed's shield whined and sputtered out as he hurled himself into shelter behind the nearest bulkhead.

As soon as the gunfire stopped, Zaeed pounded on the wall. "Hey!" he shouted. "Asshole! Wait!"

He was answered by another hail of bullets.

He pulled an incendiary grenade from his belt and, once there was another pause in the shooting, held it out into the hallway, just for a second, just long enough that his enemy was sure to see it. "See this?" he shouted, pulling his hand back. "With the shit you guys got in this ship's belly, neither of us wants me to throw this. Let's talk."

"Fuck off!" a voice replied.

Zaeed gave the grenade a good squeeze to lock its detonator and tossed it down the hallway with a noisy clatter. He heard the merc inside shout a surprised expletive and dive for cover. By the time the man had realized the grenade wasn't live, Zaeed had closed the distance between them. A quick burst of gunfire ended things. "Jackass," Zaeed said, stopping to scoop up the grenade and return it to its place with the others on his belt. He stepped over the man's body into the crew cabin.

The last Sun was there, and obligingly already on the ground with a stray bullet in his thigh. The explosion and gunfight had left the cabin a wreck, with bunks and rations and equipment scattered across the floor in pieces. The last Sun fumbled to bring a sniper rifle to bear on Zaeed, but in close quarters its long barrel was a hindrance and Zaeed had only to march up to him and tear it out of his hands.

"So glad you survived," Zaeed said, relieving the man of his sidearm as well. "You about to bleed out?"

"I think so."

Zaeed ignored him, hoisting him up by his armpits and flinging him staggering away from the ship's controls. The man left a considerable streak of blood behind, but Zaeed put a knee into his back and manacled his arms tight behind him with a utility tie from his belt. "Let's talk," he said, flipping his captive around so he rested on his back. He checked the man's wound – blood oozed between his armor plates and the padding underneath. It'd be fatal if left alone too long. That was probably acceptable. Zaeed lifted him up into a sitting position and tore off his helmet.

"Zaeed?"

The face underneath was so much older than Zaeed remembered.

"Jesus. Dungy?"

"Charlie now," Dungpile said. He had always looked the boy to Zaeed. Zaeed and Vido had been in their thirties when they'd founded what would become the Blue Suns – and even that seemed young to Zaeed now – but Dungie had been practically a child when he'd joined them. Now he was balding, and his moustache trimmed with gray. He stared at Zaeed with tired eyes.

"Jesus," Zaeed said, feeling the years. The high of battle receded in a wave. He suddenly felt tired. Jesus, he was old.

He cleared off one of the nearby bunks with a sweep of his arm and sat down with a weary sigh. "It's been a while," he said, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes.

"Yeah. How… uhh… How is Jessie?"

Zaeed said nothing. Memories swelled in his head of the old days back on Earth, and then Invictus and Caleston and every other shithole planet Vido had sent them to. Dung had been there for all of it. The bloody campaign they'd waged on Mwembe. Stealing the Tencendur from the Spacers. Finding the Aegukka. Fitz's dam job. The first few smuggling operations on Oronto, where they'd nearly ended up drowned in a river of molten metal. The clusterfuck on Bonfa. They'd fought and killed together. Gotten kicked out of the Consort's palace for overdrinking together. They wore matching arm scars from the time they survived torture in a batarian prison together. The year Vido had run for Planetary Governor on Zorya – back before he'd decided to start concealing his public associations with the Suns – Zaeed and Dungy had helped him turn it into what had to be the ugliest election season humanity had seen in a century and a half.

Dung continued to bleed onto the floor, wincing as he tried to turned himself over to face Zaeed.

"Are you going to kill me, Zaeed?"

Zaeed didn't look at him. "Why would I do that, Dungy?"

"You're going to make me say it?" Dung asked. He grimaced and cleared his throat. "Because I was there when Vido shot you."

Zaeed nodded. "That does sound familiar."

He set the barrel of his rifle to Dung's knee and pulled the trigger. Dung screamed and rolled in agony, his leg dangling obscenely from a half-severed strip, but with his arms drawn up behind his back he could do nothing.

"Shut up," Zaeed said. He sucked his teeth, trying to decide whether the next shot should go into Dung's other knee or his throat. Dungy had been there, alright. He hadn't fired the shot himself, of course, but he'd joined the others in holding Zaeed down so Vido could do it. He hadn't said a word when Vido had given the order to leave Zaeed where he lay in a widening pool of blood and spent heatsinks.

Zaeed stiffened when he heard footsteps, but they belonged to Orlash, who climbed into the ship and over the dead mercenaries in the doorway with a determined set to his jowls. He stopped at the threshold, casting a nervous glance down at Dung, and then at Zaeed.

"What?" Zaeed asked, irritated.

"I'm… I'm coming with you," he announced. Before Zaeed could disagree, Orlash stepped over Dung and threw himself into the pilot's chair, peeling his gloves off and tossing them aside. Batarian consoles were crudely utilitarian – none of the fancy holographic haptic displays like the Normandy had had, or even the banks of screens that sufficed for lesser ships – but Orlash operated the controls with rote familiarity. The ship hummed to life under his hands, its oversized engines shaking the cabin harder than its undersized dampeners could compensate for.

Zaeed rose from the bunk. "I'm done with you," he said. "Go home."

Orlash tapped in a few more commands and the ship's landing gear released with a dull thud. "I'm not done with you," he insisted, pointedly refusing to look up from the console. He thumbed the communicator. "This is hangar eighty-four green, departing a little ahead of schedule," he said. Outside the ship's squat, bunker-like windows there was only inky black space – from inside Omega, waste vapor coming off the station made it impossible to discern any stars but Sahrabarik itself.

Crackling static resolved into a voice. "Go ahead, eight four green."

Orlash released the button. "I'm not leaving those charges in human hands. Until they're destroyed, I'm not leaving. You'll have to shoot me."

"That so?" Zaeed asked. He let the barrel of his rifle drop to rest on the back of Orlash's chair.

The alien's gullet tightened, but he reached for the ship's yoke and pushed it forward. The ship began to move. "Y-yes. Yes. That's so."

Zaeed nodded. He sniffed the air. "Did you vent the goddamn air exchangers, at least?" The Sun out in the hangar had been right – it did smell like mud.

"…N-no," Orlash said, panicking. "Y-you told me to-"

Zaeed cut him off with a growl. "Fine," he said. "Get us away from the station." He turned back to Dung, whose face had gone terribly pale. Dung stared up at Zaeed with the glazed look of a man on his last legs, and Zaeed knew he would have to make a decision before much longer – blood loss would do the man in soon enough without a little medigel to staunch the flow. "Alright, Dung," Zaeed said, taking aim at the man's remaining knee. "Here's your chance to convince me not to give you what Vido gave me. Where's Vido?"

"I d-don't know," Dung said. He was trembling, but whether from shock or fear, Zaeed could not say.

"Bad start. Where will Vido be tomorrow?"

"I d-d-don't kn-kn-know," Dung stuttered. "B-but I kn-know other things!"

"Ask him what he's doing in a batarian ship!" Orlash snarled, turning to look over his shoulder. "Ask him who the fuck he thinks he is in a civilian hangar with a batarian ship full of explosives!"

"W-w-we were hired to!" Dung protested. He tried to wriggle his knee out of Zaeed's line of fire.

"No shit. Who by?"

"A man n-n-named Petrovsky. W-we think. He d-d-didn't say who he w-w-was, b-b-but the Shadow Broker t-t-told us."

Zaeed searched Dung's face for dishonesty and found none. "Petrovsky," he said, weighing the name. "Never heard of him."

"B-b-big money," Dung said. The effort of speaking seemed to tax him. "Ex-Alliance. P-p-paid a premium if we c-c-could get his team t-to Khar'shan without the b-b-batarians finding out."

Zaeed had an unpleasant thought. "Why, Dungy?"

"R-r-retrieval. B-b-batarians have s-s-something he w-w-wants. I don't know w-w-what."

Zaeed looked to Orlash. "That mean anything to you? What'd they be after on Khar'shan?"

"Nothing that belongs to humans!"

Dung had started to drift off. Zaeed frowned, squatting down to slap the man's bloodless cheek. "Hey," he said. "Dung. No dying on us yet." Dung stared blearily up at him, mouthing nonsense, and Zaeed sighed. "Would have to be something that could fit on this ship," he said to Orlash. That narrowed it down considerably – the batarians exported little enough to the rest of the galaxy, and nothing that would justify the risk of attacking them, even if Petrovsky's men filled the Cosharc from end to end. "Unless they meant to kamikaze this one and take some other ride home, I suppose."

Orlash gave an affronted snarl at that idea. "You humans are monsters."

Zaeed patted Dung on one shoulder. "Can't argue with him there, can we Dung?" he said, chuckling. He stood. "As for you, if that's all you have to say-" He paused. Nestled amongst the mess of toppled equipment that his firefight had made of the cockpit, a yellow metal glimmer caught his eye. He stooped to retrieve it.

It was the yawning skull of some predator, dipped in bronze and fastened to a fiberglass placard. It glinted dully, huge canine teeth bared as if to close over Zaeed's fist.

"Stefan's cat," Zaeed said, realizing. "The Duke." The lion had been the Blue Suns' mascot, back in their first few years, and much beloved pet of their medic Stefan before he'd ended up with his skull dashed out on the wall of a batarian prison. The Suns had taken the beast with them to their mountain base on Caleston, shortly before Vido had put a bullet in Zaeed's head and left him on the street to die.

Good memories and bad jostled in Zaeed's head as he stood. His fingers rested at the top of the skull, right between where the Duke's eyes had been in life. "Hey old guy," he said. Even under the bronze, Zaeed could see the wear on the Duke's teeth from decades of gnawing on the bones of whoever pissed the Blue Suns off. Zaeed remembered the lecture Stefan had given them when one of the Duke's lower canines had broken on a hardsuit helmet someone had neglected to remove from a victim before feeding – the metal cap Stefan had tried to replace it with had never stayed in place for long, and the lion had worn a snaggletoothed look forever thereafter.

"We d-didn't k-kill him, Zaeed," Dung insisted. His voice was barely a whisper. "He d-died of diabetes. Years ago. Damn c-c-cat ate better than any of us."

Zaeed stared at the skull for a long moment. "Batarian," he said finally, decision made. "Get us out of firing range and then patch this asshole up before he bleeds out. I'll go space the bodies."

–

It took Zaeed several minutes to gather the one and three quarters Blue Suns whose remains had made it onto the ship. When stripped of his helmet, the man he had killed in the corridor was no one he recognized – some desperate scraped up from Omega's back alleys, no doubt, to pad out the Blue Suns' constant need for cannon fodder. The other might have looked halfway familiar, but the force of the ship's airlock door closing on his body had introduced all sorts of ambiguities that Zaeed did not care enough to unravel. Zaeed threw the corridor body on top, closed the inner door, and vented the airlock. The dead men bounced out into the vacuum and in half an instant were gone.

And on that thought, Zaeed made another decision.

He was getting pretty goddamn soft in his old age.

He activated his omni-tool.

–

Codex entry: Lecture notes for Arcturus Academy course XI3100 Comparative Xenobiology of Sentient Species, Lecture 12 – Batarian Anatomy and Life History, as presented by guest lecturer Dr. Sophis Harimann

Batarians are hairless mammals from Khar'shan who, despite representing large populations and controlling considerable territory spanning more than a dozen systems, are as poorly understood by the biomedical field as they are culturally by the galaxy at large. At multi-species hospitals, batarian health outcomes typically trail other species by significant margins (10%, Arirosa and Stephens 2181), even when controlled for their relative rarity in Council space. Medical ignorance of batarian physiology drives and is driven by cultural stigma of batarians as combative, untrustworthy, and unpleasant to other species.

Crucially, medical professionals are encouraged to remember that batarian physiology is highly plastic, resulting in strikingly different morphology and body chemistry based on their diet and social circumstances. Most batarians encountered by Citadel species are relatively poorly-nourished males, often escaped slaves or political refugees displaced by the Hegemony. For various reasons, such batarians typically do not have access to the high volume plant-based diet they evolved to eat on their homeworlds, and subsist instead on artificial diets, often rich in animal protein. These diets are calorically dense, and allow offworld batarians to achieve their energy needs quickly, but result in inefficient digestion and malnutrition that can have a host of health consequences. Batarians on animal-based diets typically develop humanlike body proportions (and can often use equipment and clothing designed for humans with little modification) and rarely exceed 100 kilograms.

By contrast, batarians with access to more natural diets – in practice, usually higher ranking individuals within the batarian Hegemony – develop very differently. Batarians on Khar'shan eat a wide variety of woody plants, root crops, and foliage, which they digest via fermentation in their multichambered stomachs, similar to Earth ruminants. Batarian teeth are shaped like sharp rods for tearing vegetation and are of little use for chewing – mastication is instead accomplished in the batarian forestomach, a muscular chamber in the lower esophagus lined with keratinized setae. Food is ground in the forestomach for hours before being passed to the rear stomachs.

Toxins and structural molecules in batarian plant-based foods make them slow to digest and calorically poor, and thus require batarians subsisting on them to eat very large quantities each day to sustain themselves (sentientologists estimate that upper-class batarians on Khar'shan spend more than sixty percent of their time eating). While obviously time inefficient, natural plant diets nevertheless allow batarians to develop much more robust physiques than their omnivorous offworld kin, with males routinely passing 200 kilograms and developing thicker torsos, necks, shoulders, and guts than humans. As a consequence of their elaborate digestive systems, batarians tend to be flatulent, though they claim that plant-based diets result in the production only of clean, odorless gas.

Batarian skin is thick and leathery. They are hairless, though multiple lines of evidence suggest that they had furry coats until their relatively recent evolutionary history – most convincingly, their closest biological relatives, the tabanz'han kapok apes, are furry at birth (but lose the hair on most of their bodies as they age). Many batarian cultures wear braids of fur collected from Khar'shani beasts hanging from piercings on their faces or scalps, often in direct imitation of the beards male kapok apes use to attract mates. Batarians also retain fingerprint-like skin ridges across most of their bodies, which serve an insulation function in Khar'shan's cold climate and are thought to be homologous to the hair in other Khar'shani animals.

Batarians are highly sexually dimorphic, with males often outweighing females by 50% or more. Males, particularly those of higher social classes, tend to maintain harems of multiple females, which they jealously guard from the attentions of their rivals. Male batarians have large bacula (penis-bones), thought to enable their famous marathon mating sessions and reduce the risk of extra pair paternity. Ivory made from bacula are common trophies for batarian warlords, demonstrating their ability to dominate other males. Such trophies are often polished and carved into handles for knives or guns. Alternately, some batarian (and even human and krogan) cultures believe ground bacula can act as a potent aphrodesiac, and such properly-prepared bacula can sell for exorbitant prices on the black market.

Batarian females gestate their young for just under a solar year. Young batarians are born relatively precocial, capable of lifting their heads and holding onto their mothers within hours of birth. The timing of early cell division in batarian zygotes gives the species an extremely high incidence of identical twins or quadruplets.

Batarians have highly variable lifespans, with large dominant males rarely surviving past 60 due to heart complications that may be exacerbated by the stresses of maintaining control over their harems and territories. Females and subordinate males regularly live more than a century.

–

A/N:

Do people still read Mass Effect fanfiction?

I've been away from the series for a while, but on a whim the other day I went back and reread some parts of my previous Mass Effect story, Interstitium. There were things that made me cringe, but by and large I think it holds up and is fun. I miss working on it, I realize.

Then I went online and found out that the inevitable ME trilogy remaster might be out sooner rather than later.

Which is to say I'm on a Mass Effect kick for the time being.

Which is to say here's the first chapter of Interstitium 2.