Chapter 26
Hours later we were still in Afterlife reviewing the postmortem of the earlier debacle.
"We lost all monitoring equipment at the same time the lights went so it's hard to say what happened. Our witnesses are saying they heard ten, maybe twelve shots in the dark before the system reset restored power."
"How many did we lose?" the Colonel asked wearily.
"Two guards and three members of the delegation were killed on the scene, with six more wounded. We got them all to the nearest clinic quickly but the doctors just informed me they lost two of the patients."
"Who was it?" Aria demanded, pacing back and forth restlessly while the rest of us fed her updates.
"Hix and Denson. I'm sorry I know you had a history with them."
"Don't be sorry Lawson, just get me results. Do we know who fired the shots?"
"No, the witness statements are hopeless in that regard, each faction is blaming one or more of their rivals for the attacks. And recommending that the rival in question be cast out of the alliance for good measure. We had to take over an entire district just to house them all separately to avoid any further incidents."
"Let me worry about the politics; just tell me what you do know about the shootings."
"I've spoken to the doctors at the clinic. They inform me that they were able to retrieve several micro-fragments from the wound consistent with the ammunition from the Port Lerama Disciple."
"That's an Asari-made shotgun," Aria noted with surprise. "Originally it was only made to be used by the Justicar but eventually those requirements were relaxed enough to allow it into general circulation. It's still incredibly rare though, rare enough to imply that they were supplied by the League and smuggled onto the station by someone in the delegation."
"So we need to find out who the traitor is."
"No, that wild goose chase will take time and is best suited to my informants. No, the solution here is to do what I should have done from the beginning: track down Vorlak and finish him off. That little performance from the League taught us two things, firstly that Vorlak is the key to their little propaganda campaign so taking him out will shatter their narrative in a heartbeat."
"And second?"
"That they've come here to Omega. That means he's on our home turf so it shouldn't take you long to find him."
"It's a fifty kilometer long station. It could take weeks to search a city this size. We need to direct our focus into preempting his next move. What kind of strategies did he rely on the last time he was here?"
"Direct aggression mostly. I told you he's a thug; he never saw a problem where his first instinct wasn't to hit it."
"A thug that somehow managed to scare half of our collection of the Galaxy's least wanted just by showing up. What aren't you telling me here Aria?"
"I think you may be forgetting who's in charge here Lawson. You need to forget about me and focus on dealing with the problem at hand. If I know our enemy it's only a matter of time before he-"
At this moment she was interrupted by a ping on everyone's omnitool.
"Too late," she stated matter of factly.
I answered the call, expecting bad news.
"This is Bray, we need immediate reinforcements. We tracked a squad moving through Chicane district up on level 26, just before they opened fire. They're tearing the place up boss, we need support right now."
"We're on our way," I assured him, before ending the call.
"What's down there?" I asked Aria.
"Nothing much of significance except..." she paused, scowling deeply as an unpleasant thought crossed her mind.
"For years I kept a small fallback position on that level. It's abandoned now but it might still be usable to house a handful of men."
"Tell me how many is 'a handful' in this case?"
"It was designed to house thirty, maybe up to fifty at a squeeze, but they'll have nowhere to run to. We'd have them cornered."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better? Christ Aria, Garrus held out in a small defensible location on Omega for days and that was when he was all on his own. If we let the League of One get set up there with fifty men it could take us weeks to dig them out of there."
"Then I suggest we don't waste any more time," Aria muttered dangerously before raising her voice to begin barking commands at her underlings.
"Get everyone together and prepare to move out. We'll attack from three sides to breach the defenses before they're ready for us and then we can wipe out every single one of them. By the time the dust settles, I'll be presenting their corpses to the delegates to erase any lingering doubt about my resolve."
'Well at least we'll get this resolved sooner rather than later,' I thought to myself, though in truth the thought of storming that bunker did not appeal.
What I remember most about arriving on level 26 that day (and there is so much I'd rather forget) was the dust and the ash in the air. And the silence, oh the silence was deafening, more than loud enough to consume any noise our band of invading warriors dropped into it. The stamp of our boots, the cocking of weapons as our fighters nervously readied themselves for an attack that never came. It all just seemed to make the silence that much louder.
The fires were still spreading as we arrived, sending up thick black plumes of smoke that had nowhere to escape in this sealed environment. Aria had already ordered all vents closed in order to suffocate the flames. After all, we had our breathers equipped, and there was no one else left alive in this section. Anyone who stood in the path of Vorlak had either fallen or fled.
The bodies covered the ground like the fallen leaves after an autumn storm. Some had been killed by gunfire and other weaponry it was clear. You could trace the lines of fire and see the blast marks of the heavier explosives all too clearly. You could make out where they had strafed across the crowds, and over to the buildings, and into people's homes. Something crunched underfoot and I looked down to see the remains of a shattered picture frame, the photo torn by the broken glass.
And when we got to the bunker there was no one there either, though it was obvious that Vorlak and his party had made it this far. The doors were caved in, the equipment was trashed and ruined, shield generators fried and the fixed emplacements ripped from their mountings. One of the invaders had taken the time (presumably on Vorlak's orders) to graffiti slogans in the heart of the complex. The message was confused, sometimes unreadable in places thanks to the scorching on the walls, but one phrase came through clearly enough. Repeated over and over again throughout the scrawl were the two words "Omega Burns". As I sat amid the rubble I wondered if it was a boast or a statement of intent.
It wasn't long before I had Aria on the line to me. She didn't sound happy.
"Care to explain how you managed to lose an entire army Lawson?"
"I didn't lose anything. Vorlak and his men were gone before we arrived on the scene. According to eyewitnesses, they came in, tore the place up, planted their flag in the bunker, and left again within twenty minutes. By the time we had gathered a large enough to stage a credible assault on the bunker there was nothing left here but rubble. It doesn't make sense those fortifications were too valuable an asset to just give up without a fight."
"Even with proper defenses, the League wasn't ready to risk a siege. It would mean we'd have him boxed in, which is the last thing he wants."
"They're afraid that we'd slowly grind them down with attrition," I reasoned. "But this attack achieved virtually nothing, the district's not key to your operations. It's blind luck that they even encountered Bray's patrol."
"Vorlak wasn't trying to hit us, he doesn't care who his campaign hurts. There's a certain... Power to being impossible to pin down or contain. It keeps them relevant, impossible to dismiss or ignore."
"And we have to waste resources constantly trying to chase down his pointless attacks. So what do we do, throw more resources into trying to flush him out?"
"I'm still thinking Lawson. Don't worry, it won't take long for me to find a way to flush this particular pretender out of h-"
The line was still open but no one was speaking into the other end. In the background, I could hear some commotion, faded voices, far from the speaker but still audible by their volume and anger.
"Aria. Aria? Are you there?"
I waited, while still more shouting started up. this time the voice sounded more like Aria, impatient and demanding.
"Miranda?"
It was the Colonel. He sounded pretty nervous to me, though whether it was from what he wanted to report or from standing so close to the storm that was a pissed off Aria T'Loak I couldn't say.
"What's going on over there Kallen?"
"Aria's going mad. We've just had word that a group of the delegates broke out of the guard perimeter and disappeared. She worried they may have decided to go over to Vorlak and the League."
"What about the people we had guarding them?" I asked hurriedly.
"Most are fine, though they're nursing a few nasty injuries. A patrol in the north west district took the worst of it. A few of them were taken hostage to secure the escape."
The North West district.
Nalar.