Chapter 90. Just Like Ozymandias Taught Us
4. April 2417 AD, Bekenstein, Island Fortuna
"Is he good?" the one security guard in a tux asked, not knowing that Morneau was expecting the answer just as much as the second guard.
"Yes, you can let him through," Good. That meant that at least half of the first part of their plan, namely getting him inside the party through conventional means while Okuda took a more unconventional route, had worked. Now the thief just needed to live up to his reputation and sneak in undetected as well.
"Understood," the security guard took a step to the side and waved his hand to the entrance of the enormous mansion owned by the gunrunner. "Enjoy the party, Mister Gunn," he added before marking something off a tablet, likely the his name which he'd planted on the guest list hours prior with the help of some HSAIS hackers. The twin doors were pulled open to reveal a circular foyer room where the 'business meeting' was already in full motion. The same could be said for the mezzanine that overlooked the lobby. People were chatting and drinking and admiring Hock's decorations. In addition to expensive art pieces, old and new alike, and several glass cases filled with relics, human and alien alike, the one thing that stood out to Morneau was the actual fountain and the marble statue that rested in its middle that Hock had chosen to place in his lobby. Given the first impression he'd gotten of the guy, he really wasn't surprised that the statue depicted none other than Donovan Hock himself.
"Thank you, I will."
Out of habit, he wanted to start a headcount of the people in his immediate vicinity before entering and scan the room for any hidden guards. But considering the mass of people that were attending Hock's function, Morneau knew that it would be unrealistic to do so quickly and realized how much suspicion it'd draw if he stood in the door for another minute counting people. Hence, he forced himself out of the habit and walked into the unknown, only stopping to grab an alibi drink from one of the waiters that were moving around through the crowd. While he didn't actually plan on drinking the bright purple liquor Hock was serving. The fact that everyone else seemed to enjoy it meant that he'd look out of place without one. After procuring that part of his disguise as a partygoer, Morneau weaved through the foyer and entered an equally spacious and equally crowded parlor. In here he could spot four guards, one in each corner of the room. Although their eyes seemed to be set on the glass cases that dotted the room, which were filled with expensive relics and artworks, he wasn't going to ignore their presence or the cameras poorly hidden behind the ceiling lamps. He adjusted the glasses he was wearing, which didn't serve to improve his vision but rather acted as a small scale jammer that scrambled bits and pieces of his face to cameras while also recording his operation, and looked around the rest of the room.
Other than the lax security, the specialist registered that the mahogany bar was well attended by a group of humans, who's matching suits gave him the impression that they all belonged to one and the same interest group. He took care to look at all of them, if only so that HSAIS could have a go at identifying who exactly they were once he passed these glasses and their recordings back to them before leaving Bekenstein. Next he glanced at the large crowd of people who had gathered around someone standing with the back to one of the enormous glass windows. They seemed to laugh at everything that person was saying and while he couldn't be sure about it due to their laughter and the obnoxious, electronic ambient music Hock was playing were overshadowing whatever the person as saying, he assumed that the one in the center was none other than the gunrunner.
After that conclusion, Morneau quickly took his leave from this part of the parlor and moved to a corner that was blocked from view by yet another glass case filled with relics, human iron-age swords and shields to be specific. Since they'd already met once, albeit under very different circumstances, avoiding Hock was high on his list of priorities for now. Until he'd gotten a clearer picture of the manor, and possibly even a glance at Hock's room to figure out if there was something on the Shadow Broker in there, he wasn't going to confront his mark. Even though they'd just talked and Hock had no idea what he looked like, diving into it now would be asking for disaster.
Then again, so was this op to begin with.
If he was entirely honest with himself, this plan wasn't the best he'd ever come up with. There was no substance to it other than 'get it', 'do what you're here for' and 'leave without getting shot'. In fact, it probably ranked on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. It was easily the worst plan he'd ever had. And while he wanted to blame that on the fact that he didn't know what it was that Okuda wanted from Hock's vault, it wasn't just Okuda's part that was making the plan lack in definition. Morneau was here because he had concluded that Hock could lead him to the Shadow Broker.
That was it.
There was no larger scheme or con as to how he'd achieve it and nothing he could use to pressure Hock into giving up the information. It was just him, his impression that Hock would crack easily and the questionable back-up from a rogue Section 4 operative, who Morneau halfway expected to leave without him as soon as he had what he'd come here for.
If Section 13 had sent him on a mission like this, he would've either laughed at the ridiculousness of it all or kicked the ass of whoever had planned it. But as things were, he only had himself to blame. He tugged at the sleeve of his shirt, glanced at his watch to see if the small yellow light behind its dial was already glowing and realized that it wasn't. That wasn't good. The light would indicate that Okuda was inside and on his way to whatever passed as the security central of the mansion. Since he hadn't, he'd have to wait some more, which raised the chances of Hock noticing him. Come to think of it, that was another flaw of his plan. It depended on the thief just as much as it depended on him. Only through Okuda's help would he get his look at Hock's private rooms. Once Okuda was inside and had infiltrated the security center, the thief was supposed to pass Morneau the blueprints of the mansion and open him the doors to the private sections. Only then would Morneau help him with getting in and out of the vault.
If Okuda was actually going to do that? He honestly couldn't tell. Outside of seeming like a gigantic tool with an ego the size of a dreadnought, the man wasn't readable, at least not to him. So it was equally likely that he'd play his part as it was likely that he'd screw Morneau over.
Since Morneau didn't plan on standing around until the light began to glow, he decided to do some more reconnaissance. He left the parlor, went back to the foyer and headed into the other direction. He passed a guard, caught a glance of what he assumed was the entrance of Hock's vault and went up some stairs. Here he found a dining room where very little eating and a lot of arms dealing was taking place. Or at least that's what he assumed to be the reason why cases with guns were being pushed around the tables instead of food and drinks. He settled into one of the lonlier corners of the rooms, pretending to be occupied with the mostly untouched asari-inspired buffet, and glanced at his watch again. Still nothing.
Had Okuda fluked on him? Or had he been caught? He shouldn't be taking this long.
After grabbing one of the plates and giving a blue, lime-like fruit a taste so that it seemed he'd come up here for the food and not to spy on people, Morneau looked around the room again. He scanned the individual tables and the guests. At first he was just doing this to give the analysts something to do, after all, there was a decent chance that these guys were on some kind of HSA hatch- or hitlist. But when he hit a table occupied by a turian in green formal wear, a dark-skinned human in a black suit with a red and black tie and a roughly forty year old woman in a blue dress marked with a small but still noticeable red, stitched on pattern.
In response he nearly spat out the particularly hard fruit he'd been chewing on for the past minute.
These were the Hahne-Kedar guys from Aganian's office, the one's who'd belonged to Project Group Insight. He had ran into them just six days ago. After their run-in, he'd shot the name of the woman, Amanda Bryer, through the databases of HSAIS and everything he'd found indicated that she wasn't the kind of person who attended something like this. So what the fuck were they doing here?
"Three things, dear specialist," a voice suddenly came through the transparent earpiece he was wearing. It caught him off-guard, but except for a startled, split-second twitch of his face, he didn't let it show. "First, you really ought to swallow eventually. The longer you chew on the shuck the worse the taste is going to get," Okuda began, causing Morneau to look at his watch and notice the faint yellow glow of his watch dial. So he hadn't fluked after all. "Secondly, you just ate the one part of the fruit you're not supposed to eat." he continued, prompting Morneau to ceremonially spit out the shuck he'd been trying to crack with his teeth. "Oh and thirdly, I'm inside the control room now and watching you, just in case you hadn't guessed already." He had actually figured that much. He looked at one of the cameras and nodded his head ever so slightly, just enough to make Okuda know that he was listening but couldn't respond right now. The entire time his eyes remained on the Project Group Insight folks. They were still seated at the table and unlike most people, actually seemed to be eating instead of showcasing whatever was in the case standing by the turian's feet. This raised a lot of questions. But first and foremost, it brought him back to his initial question:
What were they doing here?
"Good, with the subject of your poor knowledge of asari fruit and Hock's pesky security system out of the way, I suggest we get on with our mission. While you were busy shewing on shuck, I used the security system to map out the mansion. Most of it's boring. Hock's got two bowling alleys in his basement, seventeen thematically designed bedrooms, a couple of very poorly stocked art galleries, what I think is a personal strip club and some very sporty-looking skycars in his garage, which I doubt he's allowed to fly anywhere on Bekenstein and which I may or may not borrow before we leave," Okuda began to list.
He placed the hand his watch was on against his mouth as if he was clearing his throat to disguise the fact that he was now going to reply.
"What about the actually important stuff?" he muttered, just loud enough for the thief to here.
"Are you implying that having your own strip-club and freaking bowling alleys isn't important to our mission?"
"Not the time for jokes."
"Buzzkill," he stayed silent in return. "Fine. The mission. As it turns out, I do have to rely on you to sort out your part of the mission first before we can get on with getting my property back. Since the vault's secured by several layers of biometric security, I need you to either make Hock open it so I can slip in or get a sample of his DNA and the voice line that opens the locks," Okuda explained. At first something about his voice sounded off, more nuanced than usually, but when it faded away, Morneau payed no more mind to it and focused on the actual problem at hand.
The vault was protected by a voice command.
That complicated things.
"And how exactly am I supposed to do that?" he replied before turning his back to the table with the project group. Although he'd really like to swipe the case, that wasn't why he was here.
"Maybe get into his room and pluck a hair from a pillow or something like that," the thief muttered while Morneau quickly turned around and began to walk away from the buffet. The woman, Bryer, got up from their dining table and was walking towards the asari fruits. While he'd taken care to not look like Solomon Gunn and was rather confident that the Hahne-Kedar representative wouldn't even remember their brief encounter, he wasn't ready to take any chances. Especially not while he was literally in the lion's den without as much as a pistol. "To that end, I feel like you should know that the idiot cracked a window open. So if you feel like making a bold entrance, all you need to do is get to the third floor, climb out of the room located over Hock's main bedroom and swing yourself inside by the curtains or something. I'm sure you they taught you how to do that in super spy school."
They hadn't.
Working with this guy was going to be exactly as horrible as he'd worried, wasn't it?
"Wasn't talking about the DNA sample. What's the line?" he asked before stepping out of the parlor just as the small HUD build into his glasses began showing the path he needed to take, curtesy by Okuda's handiwork.
Ok, so maybe not completely horrible. He continued down the hallways and hoped that he wasn't going to run into a guard that told him he couldn't go any further.
"You see, I haven't actually figured that out yet. So why don't you hurry along and dig through Hock's private drawers while I try to figure out in which of the four languages that this asshole speaks the code's in?"
"You expect me to get him to say a specific line in a specific language?" he asked while passing a half-way opened door to a bathroom. That'd serve as a nice excuse, if he ran into someone, he'd just tell them he was looking for the bathroom.
"Yes, that's usually how that works."
"And how exactly am I supposed to do that?"
"I'm sure you'll figure something out. I mean they picked you to be a specialist for a reason, no?"
"Yeah. But that doesn't mean that I'm a fucking magician," he said before catching the irony of the sentence, given his callsign. He continued to follow the path that was being marked up a stairway and found himself standing in a corridor with green walls, a red carpet, several expensive paintings and a statue wearing what appeared to be medival salarian body armor and, sadly enough, a pair of human security guards,
"Shit. Okuda, eyes on me," he muttered into his watch before the guards noticed the sound of his footsteps and turned around.
"What was that?" one of the humans asked while both approached him while Morneau glanced at the HUD of his glasses.
"I said I think I got lost," Morneau said.
"I'm afraid you can't be up here, Sir,"
Three rooms. Ten meters. A couple more steps. That's all he'd have needed to get to where he wanted to go. If he'd wasted just a single minute somewhere else or walked a bit slower, he wouldn't even have run into the guards.
This was just his luck.
Well.
Time to do what he did best.
"Oh? Really? I am so sorry," he said with a faked frown and false innocence before testing the waters and taking a cautious step towards the guards. They didn't say anything, indicating that they hadn't clocked him as a threat yet. Good. "You see, I've actually been hoping to run into some. I wanted to get to the casino and meet up with some other people, so I asked that waiter for directions," given that Hock owned two bowling alleys and a strip club, he was ironically gambling on the fact that the tool also had a casino in his house. He took some more steps towards the guards and rubbed his neck. They still weren't telling him to keep his distance. "But like I said, I think I got a bit lost along the way. Or maybe she just pointed me the wrong way. I don't know."
One guard held out his arm towards Morneau. "Please stop there, Mister," so much for that. Then he glanced at the other. "Does this place even have a casino?"
"No idea, Greg. I can barely remember the layout of our floor. What makes you think I'd know if Hock's got a freaking casino somewhere around here?" the other replied before looking at him. The arm of the first guard was still stretched out so he wouldn't take that as an invitation to get even closer. "One moment please, Let me just raise my supervisor. They'll be able to tell us where you need to go."
He looked at the camera, hoping that Okuda was paying attention, glanced behind him to check if there was anything coming and then, let out a sigh when the guard brought up an omni-tool.
"You're clear. Take 'em," the thief said through his earpiece.
That was his cue.
"I gotta say. I sure am glad I ran into you. I was getting worried I wasn't going to have a decent fight on this op," he muttered, mostly indistinctively. It did the job of drawing the attention of both guards.
"What was tha-" one of the pair, the one with the omni-tool, began with a confused look on his face, only for Morneau to hit him squarely in the face with a fist that was powered by just enough biotic energy to not kill. As expected, when someone took an unexpected blow with the force of a baseball bat swing, the guy fell backwards like his off-button had been pushed.
"What the fuck are you-" the other guard got out while reaching for a concealed pistol under his jacket. At this distance and against someone like Morneau, that was a poor decision. Before he could pull out the mass accelerator, the guard was sent flying ten meters through the air and right into the armor-clad salarian statue, curtesy of a biotically-fueled kick. His impact caused the statue, alongside the heavy set of ancient body armor, to fall on top of him, effectively knocking him out. He waited a second for either of the guards to get up and when they didn't, he shook out the fist with which he'd just had hit the first guard, producing a painful sting in his knuckles He probably should stop hitting people with biotic punches unless he was wearing gloves or gauntlets. At this rate, he'd break his hand eventually. Or maybe he just had. It certainly felt like it. He reached into the waistband of the guard closest to him, 'borrowed' the guard's pistol and radio and, mercifully, found a pair of handcuffs on him as well.
That simplified the question as to what he was going to do with them. He dragged the first knocked out guard to his partner and cuffed them together with their two pairs of handcuffs. Then he disarmed the second guard und unceremoniously stuffed their ties into their mouths. While he realized that it was a bit of a cliché to keep them from calling for help like this when the inevitably woke up in a few moments, it'd do the job.
"You realise you pretty much blew your cover now, right?" Okuda said over the earpiece while Morneau let himself into the room the thief had marked. While it was dark except for the moonlight shining through the large windows, he could tell that this was yet another parlor with its own bar, own alcohol cabinet and, much to his joy, no curtains to swing from.
"Mansion's massive. They won't find them as long as you're manning the cameras."
"You willing to bet our success on that?"
"Yup. Besides. What was I supposed to do?" he responded while opening the window and looking down. Below him was the opened window and below that, a twenty-meter drop into a body of water filled with spiky looking cliffs. Not the kind of fall he wanted to take.
"Be a more convincing liar, for example?" Okuda responded while Morneau looked around the parlor and noticed that the decoration, which seemed to be centered around a maritime theme, included a long hawser rolled up inside a glass case. He walked over to the case, glanced at the information board that told him that this was apparently an ancient relic dating back to the times of an important Thessian explorer and was valued in the millions due to its cultural significance, and subsequently began to look for a way to open the glass.
"Okuda, you wouldn't happen to be able to turn off the alarms, would you?"
"Implying that me having done that on the entire floor five minutes ago isn't the reason you haven't set off all intruder alarms up to now." He'd take that as a yes. "You really think I'm an amateur, don't you?"
"I think that I don't know you," he responded casually while grabbing a chair and smashing it into the glass case with enough force to shatter it. He reached inside the broken case, taking care not to cut himself in the process, and pulled out the rope. This would do.
"Subtle," Okuda commented.
"You figure out the line that unlocks the safe yet?" he asked while walking over to the parlor and tying the rope around one of the sturdy rods that held up the bolted-down bar chairs. Then he walked to the window, confident that this would work like he pictured it, namely with him in Hock's main bedroom instead of dead in the water.
"Yes. And I've got good news. It's in English, so you won't have to get him to speak Afrikaans," Okuda confirmed. "Want to take a guess what it is?"
"My name is Donovan Hock and I'm the biggest piece of shit this side of the core worlds?" Morneau replied before finding his footing on the ledge of the window and looking down, feeling his confidence in the ancient rope lessen a bit. "Really hoping this works," he whispered to himself.
"Close, but no," Okuda said before Morneau began to climb down as fast as he could but as slow as he felt the rope required him to. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" the thief declared with a laugh just as Morneau swung through the opened window and landed next to Hock's bed, which for all intents and purposes was the size of his room on Cronos Station. Talk about needing space to roll in your sleep.
"Is that supposed to mean something to me?" Morneau replied before looking around the room. Beside the bed, there was a wine cabinet, a couch, a holographic projector and an enormous portrait of Hock himself.
"That's Ozymandias," Okuda replied.
"Ozymandiwho?"
"The poem. Ozymandias. You know? My name is Ozymandias, king of kings," Okuda went on while Morneau leaned down next to the pillow and noticed a disturbing number of differently colored hairs. It was basically anyone's guess which hair belonged to whom and it wouldn't do. His gaze wandered across the room and ended up on two half-finished wine glasses resting next to a computer. Much better odds. Handy too for his Shadow Broker inquiry.
"Yeah. Can't say I heard of it."
"You really are a philistine, aren't you?"
"So you keep saying."
"Because you keep proving it."
"By not knowing some poem?" he countered while running his omni-tool over the glasses. One female DNA sample, one male. Check pot.
"Because you seem to lack appreciation for anything that isn't directly related to doing violence," Okuda said with a sigh.
"Each man delights in the work that suits him best," he said in return while taking a knee next to the small table.
"You know the Iliad, but you don't know Ozymandias?"
"One's about war, the other's not. Considering what you just said, you really shouldn't be surprised I only know the one where people die in droves," he reasoned, omitting the fact ancient human history was part of Grissom Academy's curriculum since whoever had designed it figured that teaching the 'core values of HSA society' should also include the tales of some guy who'd died over two thousand years ago and probably made a lot of what he'd written about up. Maybe all of that had something to do with the HSA's strange obsession with latin? No wait. The guy who'd written the Iliad had been Greek, hadn't he? He shook his head. He knew exactly why he'd never paid attention during these classes and it wasn't just because they happened to always take place after they'd been smoked in biotic combat training. They had little to no practical use and had only really served the purpose of making him dislike anything that had come before the HSA'S time because it showcased how shitty things had been before the discovery of the Mars Ruins and the human unification that followed.
Suddenly a thought crossed his mind.
Maybe they would be useful this one time?
Would Hock fall for that?
"You got it?" Okuda asked, not commenting on his reply.
"I think so," Morneau responded before sending the data to Okuda. "Either it's Hock's DNA, or he let someone else drink from his private collection. Take your pick," then he moved on to the computer and pushed in a data drive that had a VI on it which was programmed to filter for anything on the Shadow Broker. "Give me five minutes," he said watching the progress bar build up and listening in to the radio calls on the borrowed radio. When it was done, the only results he'd gotten from the terminal was that there were no results and his eaves dropping indicated that he had yet to be discovered. The first was a 'damn it', but the second was good news. So all in all, his mood remained neutral.
He pulled the drive and got up. Talking to Hock was now officially his only option. He looked to the window and the rope again. Was he going to take his chances and climb out again? No. Not unless he had to. "Is the door clear?"
"Negative. You'd walk right into the parlor you were in earlier," Okuda replied. "And while I do need you to use your poem knowledge to get Hock to say his line, I don't think you should be taking this shortcut."
"Yeah. You might have a point there," he said with a sigh before looking back at the rope and stepping onto the window's ledge again. "Alright. You better hold me twice, you old piece of junk" he muttered before grabbing a hold of the rope, climbing up and drawing the plan as to how he'd get Hock to say the line. "Say Okuda, you wouldn't happen to know Ozymandias by heart, would you?"
"You aren't thinking what I think you're thinking, are you?"
"I think," he grunted while pulling himself up into the dark parlor," that Hock's enough of a pretentious dick that he'll feel the need to correct me when I fuck up his favorite poem line right in front of him. Or that he'll finish it when I start to show everyone how cultured he is. He strikes me as the kind of guy who'd do that."
"He does. But don't you think you quoting Ozymandias at him is a little obvious?" the rogue Section 4 operative retorted. "I mean he knows that one of its lines is the passcode for his vault. What makes you think he won't make the connection?"
"The same thing that makes me think that taking out the guards just now was a great idea," he responded while striding towards the door and straightening out his suit to look like a passable guest again.
"Stupidity?"
"Nope," he responded before going to pull open the door.
"Then what?"
"The full, unbroken confidence in my ability to wing whatever an op throws at me," he replied before realizing that this was the first actual insight he'd given Okuda into his character. He pulled open the door, expecting to either find the guards still lying where he'd put them or walk right into a set of drawn guns. But instead of either of those, he got greeted by something a lot worse, something that he hadn't accounted for.
As soon as he opened the door, a new guard was staring him down, pistol drawn. He was a younger man with combed back red hair, wearing a black suit and a golden watch. While that alone was already specific enough to allow Morneau to register who it was, the eagle tattoo on the wrist of the hand that was supporting the grip on his handgun and the absolutely confused look on his when he recognized who he was pointing a gun at made it perfectly clear. For a second, he was just as confused. But then he thought back to the conversation they'd had on the ride back to Kosh and sighed.
"Hello, Sixteen. Long time no see," he said before raising an eyebrow at the sight of the Final Wave merc who'd gone AWOL from the company little more than two weeks ago. "Or is it Kyle now?"
The former airborne trooper lowered the gun ever so slightly.
"Whatever you want it to be, Gunn," he said before Morneau saw his finger slide towards the trigger. "Just give me a reason. Come on."
"Easy now, easy," the specialist replied. "Let's talk about this."
"Nothing to talk about. I figured they'd sent someone after me. I just didn't think it'd be you. Or that it'd happen so soon," his finger was now on the trigger, ready to squeeze. And since Morneau wasn't projecting a biotic barrier right now, it would kind of mess up his cover if he was shimmering purple, he'd be dead at this range. Therefor he had to weasel his way out of this in some other way. "I actually figured you'd have enough of a spine not to go after one of your," Sixteen went on. "Guess that was wrong."
"Whatever you think this is, it's not," he replied. The answer was nondescriptive and basically told Sixteen nothing, but that didn't matter. Morneau was just talking to stall for as long as it took him to figure out a solution. Before he'd left, Sixteen had been scared of 'Gunn' because he'd figured out his secret but drawn the wrong conclusion. The former Final Wave merc was still thinking that Gunn had merely lied on his resume to get the Wave to take him in without having to fear that HSAIS was going to kill him. He didn't know that he was actually an intelligence operative in an undercover assignment. He could use that somehow. He just wasn't sure how yet.
"Oh yeah? So it's just a coincidence you of all people, who may I add is the only one I told where I'm going, walk out of a door right after I see two of my new working buddies cuffed and knocked out on the floor?" That sounded like he'd just found the guards and hadn't raised any alarms yet and matched to what he'd been hearing on the radio. "At least say it before I shoot you. You're here to take me out because the Wave send you," his voice was growing more agitated, his finger was starting to shake and he was sweating, all signs of stress. And stress wasn't good. It made him less likely to listen and more likely to shoot.
He glanced at the camera. Okuda said nothing because he likely didn't have a solution either. Then he looked at the barrel of the mass accelerator and its handler. Sixteen was skilled enough to not let himself be disarmed at this range and under these circumstances.
That only really left him with one option.
"Do I look like I'm here with the Wave?" he began.
"I-" Sixteen began. Morneau cut him off.
"Remember what you said to me? That you figured I did black-ops before the Wave and was lying about it so HSAIS didn't ice me?" Sixteen didn't respond at first. "Do you?" he pressured. The airborne turned security guard nodded. "Well guess what, that wasn't entirely right either," Morneau went on while shaking his head. "You wanna know why my resume doesn't make sense? Why I can do what I can do?" he asked before lowering his hands. He hadn't been shot yet, which was good. It meant that he would live long enough to break every rule in the undercover book to save his ass and this operation at the same time. "I'll give you a hint. You were on the right track when you confronted me. You just drew the wrong conclusion at the end," he said before cracking a smirk that was supposed to fake confidence. "I never stopped working for the HSA, Kyle. And I'm not scared of HSAIS because I'm a part of it. Have been for nearly fourteen years," he went on, realizing that Sixteen seemed even more confused now.
"All those things that made you suspicious of me? I didn't learn them because I was one of the black-ops guys you saw on Eden Prime," he took another step towards Sixteen and broke the cardinal rule of his organization, talk about his assignment. "I learned them in Section 13, Kyle. I am not Solomon Gunn, I'm a specialist. And the reason I'm here isn't to take you out, it's to hunt down the Shadow Broker. Your boss is knee deep in the swamp that he calls his operative pool and before the day's over, he's going to tell me how I can find that asshole and put a bullet in his head, whatever shape that may have," he paused to look at the uncertain airborne trooper, realizing that he had actually managed to be intimidating enough to distract him from the fact that he was just one trigger squeeze away from stopping Morneau from talking. While that wasn't exactly what he'd been aiming for, he'd exploit it. "If that's something you want to try and prevent, be my guest and play the hero," the uncertain man took a step back and it was right there that Morneau figured he could finish this with nothing but the myth that had surrounded his bureau ever since the Fringe Wars. "But if I were you, I'd walk away. You got no stakes here and whatever Hock's paying you, it's not worth losing your life over."
The threat relied solely on Sixteen being one of the soldiers who actually bought into Section 13's reputation. That being, that they were a group made up of unstoppable, state-sanctioned serial killers with inhuman abilities who had each raised a mountain of corpses in their wake, instead of seeing them for what they were: Intelligence operatives who, while better trained and more experienced than people outside of N7 and ASOC, were just as human and mortal as everyone else. And contrary to the myth, Section 13 completed most of their missions with deception and tricks, not by shooting or stabbing their way to victory. That was what ASOC and NSOC were for. He knew that relying on rumors and hear-say was risky, especially with someone who was as close to an ASOC operator as you could get without actually joining the program, but as soon as Sixteen lowered his gun, Morneau knew that he was in the clear and that their reputation was still intact.
"Ah shit, man," the red-haired man cursed before taking a step back. "You got someone on the cameras?"
Morneau nodded. Then he glanced to the two now conscious guards, who were looking at them in confusion and trying to shout at Sixteen to do something, clearly believing that he'd somehow deceived the airborne trooper into dropping his guard.
He looked at them with the worst 'what are you trying to say' look anyone had ever faked, completed by a very overdone shrug, and then put his gun away.
"Alright. Listen. I like this job, so I need you to make it look convincing," Sixteen whispered.
"What are you talking about?"
"What do you think I'm talking about? Knock me the fuck out and cuff me, just like you did with them," he whispered.
"You realise Hock's probably going to fire all of you when I'm done, right?" Morneau said in return.
"No, I don't think he will," Sixteen muttered. Believe it or not, he's actually a pretty decent bo-"
Before the airborne could finish his sentence, Morneau had sucker-punched him, reasoning that there was no way to make it look more convincing than actually knocking him out by using the moment of surprise. The red-haired man slumped to the ground and, just like he'd wished, Morneau cuffed him and dragged him into the parlor. Then he shut the door, walked to the pair of guards, who were trying and failing to coordinate their escape from him by rolling along the ground, and kicked them into another empty room. He closed the door with a hefty swing, dusted off his hands and looked at the camera.
"Okay, Okuda. This is how this goes. I go talk to Hock, strike up some stupid conversation about poetry, then you give me the words of Ozymandias, I butcher it accordingly, he corrects me and I record it for you. Sounds good?"
"What just happened?" Okuda muttered after a few more seconds.
"I told you my plan."
"No, I mean with the guard."
"Oh. That. Yeah. I guess you could say we worked together?" Morneau reasoned before beginning his walk back to the main party so he could search for Hock. "Either way. Back to the plan. Like I said, I record him saying it. That should work, right?"
"It should," the thief replied. "But there is one problem."
Morneau paused halfway on the stairs.
"What?"
"The vault's right in the middle of the mansion and there's a ton of people in front of it. Before you clear them out, we're not getting in there unnoticed," in response to that, Morneau looked up, realized with satisfaction that Hock had apparently not ignored fire safety guidelines when building his mansion and continued his stride.
"That's it? That's your problem?"
"Yes," Okuda replied. "Given your reaction, I assume you already have a solution?"
"I do," he replied before strolling down the stairs and stepping into the floor of the parlor.
"Well? Do you want to share it with the rest of the class?"
"Come on. They didn't teach you the basics of clearing a room of people in thief school?" Morneau responded.
"I'm sure they did. But at the same time, I really want to know if Section 13 uses the same ideas as Section 4. So humor me. Please."
In response Morneau pulled out a lighter, gestured to one of the curtains on the floor and then deliberately pointed to the ceiling. While he watched the camera in the floor move, he began to explain.
"Fire causes smoke. Smoke turns on the fire protection system," he reasoned. "And since no one likes getting soaked, everyone's gonna fuck off as soon as the sprinklers start sprinkling, opening up our way."
Okuda chuckled in response.
"Arson," he figured. "That's your method?"
"Not how you did it in Four?"
"No. It's creative, I'll give you that, but it's not Section 4's preferred solution. It causes too much attention."
"Then what is your way?"
Okuda paused and then let out another chuckle.
"I'm afraid that's classified, Specialist."
"Been waiting to say that for a long time, haven't you?"
"Feels good to be on the end that says it for a change," Okuda said before Morneau paused in front of the parlor and looked at the group that was still surrounding Hock, in particularly the women he was directly addressing. Just how as he going to draw the guy's attention if he was competing with at least ten asari, four humans and, strangely enough, a turian. While aliens definitely weren't his type, Hock seemed to have no such aversions. At least not if the sleezy smile on his face was anything to go by. "I'm ready whenever you are. Just start with 'I met a traveler' when you need me."
He considered Hock for a moment.
The guy liked being the center of attention, that much was clear.
So the surest way to draw him in was to take that attention away from him.
That shouldn't be that difficult, right?
Despite their appearances, these people were mostly hardened criminals. Gun runners, mercs, war profiters. And what did Morneau, or rather Solomon Gunn, have that that Donovan Hock didn't? War stories. After sparring a glance to where the project group folk had been seated and realizing that they were no longer there, Morneau made his way to the bar and got ready to start drawing in an increasingly large crowd of people by retelling slightly altered versions of some of his missions and masking them as merc work. He secretly started the recording and ordered a drink when a voice called out for him, or rather for his alter ego.
Hock's voice.
"Would you look at that! Solomon Gunn!" the eccentric gunrunner shouted across the parlor, causing all of the eyes to suddenly be on Morneau. He turned away from the bar and looked at Hock. The man was wearing an expensive two-piece suit made of black and white cloth, was carrying a half-finished glass of alcohol in one hand and had a smirk on his face. "I have to say, I was already surprised that one of your team actually took my offer. And now you're here as well!"
The second that Morneau wondered how the fuck Hock knew what he looked like despite the fact that he hadn't once taken off his mask during the op on Kosh was covered up by the realization that the Final Wave might've simply handed over his file to the gunrunner as a sign of good will. Although this obviously wasn't how he planned things to go, which was becoming a disturbing trend of this evening, he did what Daniel Morneau, and not Solomon Gunn, always did best. He rolled with the punches as they came.
He waved his greetings, cracked a smile, got up and shook a hand he'd much rather be breaking.
"What can I say, Mister Hock, you did leave a rather lasting impression the last time we met."
"Only a rather lasting one, Mister Gunn?" the arms dealer smirked before taking a sip form his glass.
"A very lasting one," Morneau corrected before letting his gaze wonder through the crowd that had followed Hock's move to the bar. Great. Now they were both the center of attention.
"Enough to make you reconsider your employment with the Final Wave as well?" Hock stated with another smile before shushing the crowd away while saying that he now needed to talk business. Then he raised his glass and planted his other hand on his back as if Morneau was just another client he could coax in with his charisma.
In return the specialist made a point out of looking to the collection of iron-age weaponry that decorated this room.
"I'd be lying if I said no," he nodded. "You certainly win in regards to office decoration, I'll give you that.
"Be assured Mister Gunn, I also win in regard to paying you for your efforts and job security," Hock responded before realizing where Morneau was looking at, likely intending to exploit his fake interest. Unbeknownst to Hock however, he wasn't the one who was guiding this manipulation, or the one who was being manipulated. "Weapons of a more elegant time."
"Indeed," he responded. If by elegant Hock meant plague-ridden, war-torn, primitive societies who couldn't dream of a fraction of the things the HSA had achieved in the last two and a half centuries, those things were definitely from a more elegant time. He glanced at the description, which described these weapons as roman, and nudged his head. "The romans have always been fascinating to me. Although I'll admit that I've always been more inclined towards the history of ancient Greece. Started way back when I was a teenager, actually," that was bullshit. Fourteen-year-old Daniel Morneau had spent nearly every history class he'd ever taken with waiting for the lunch break to restore his energy, doing stupid shit with his academy buddies or ogling at some of the prettier girls in his training class. And the only reason he even knew a bit about ancient Rome was because the HSA's strange obsession with everything Latin meant that it was kind of hard to steer around the subject of Rome when growing up in an HSA military academy on Terra Nova of all places.
"Who wouldn't be?" Hock responded before walking to the glass case and studying the mostly broken blades and shields. "Leonidas, Pericles, Alexander the Great. Few periods in history have produced as many men of unparalleled dedication as the Greece antiquity. Barring a few exceptions, the quality of leadership has only ever declined since then," Morneau assumed that Hock considered himself such an exception. Hock took a sip from his glass. "They just don't make them like they used to," he said, his accent shining through for a change.
Morneau glanced at him. "I have to admit, I didn't take you for someone with an interest in art and history when we met on Kosh." It was a carefully placed bait.
Hock took it with a smirk.
"Neither did I you, Mister Gunn. In our business, it is hard to remember that the people who do what we do live lives outside of violence," somehow Morneau doubted that Hock had done as little as dip a toe into the business he was talking about, but whatever. "Yet art and war are so intertwined that it really should be obvious that someone who exceeds in one of those fields also exceeds in the other." Morneau folded his hands behind his back and stared at the shield. He wasn't actually bothering to determine if what Hock was saying was making sense. He only wondered how the hell he was going to swing this conversation towards poems. If he'd paid attention in history class instead of doing what he'd been doing, this might've been a bit easier. But then again, fourteen-year-old him hadn't exactly planned on being anything but another rank-and-file soldier of the HSA and certainly not a spy.
"These really are magnificent examples of craftsmanship. It's a shame these skills were lost in the progress of our society," he said, sounding like some kind of pretend-art collector who didn't know that Morneau himself owned ten different knifes which could all cut through whatever had passed as a decent blade back then. Then he defaulted back to the one thing he knew about the time period. "Although I will admit, my interest in the time period has always been more with the poetry and the tales they created."
"Oh really? Any in particular?"
"The Iliad," he responded, hoping he wouldn't be expected to quote more than the two or three bits and pieces he remembered. Although he'd forgotten ninety-nine percent of the lines, he knew that the three he remembered weren't even a fraction of the actual size of that fairy tale.
"I will admit that when it comes to poetry, I am actually more drawn to the works of the modern age," Hock stated before taking yet another sip and then guiding Morneau to the bar, likely to start discussing how exactly Solomon Gunn was supposed to ditch the Final Wave.
"That's your in, Specialist," Okuda's voice suddenly whispered through his earpiece. "Ozymandias is from the modern age," then the thief began to lay words In his ear. "I met a traveler from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone."
Morneau hesitated, not sure if it wouldn't be too obvious and out of the blue. Okuda noticed.
"For Christ sake. Just trust me on this one and repeat after me. I met a traveler from an antique land."
Oh, what the hell.
"I met a traveler from an antique land, who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone," he began, drawing Hock's gaze. For a second he wasn't sure what to make of it. But then the gunrunner clapped his hands and laughed in excitement.
"Seriously? Ozymandias? That's my favorite!" Hock exclaimed before suddenly calling at the top of his voice. "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip," he went on before suddenly jumping onto the bar, much to the surprise and delight of everyone in the parlor. Well, except for the bartender of course, who'd just gotten several drinks spilled onto him curtesy of Hock's stunt.
Evil as he may be, he would give the man that. He knew how to fill a room. As Hock continued to recite the poem, and getting increasingly into it more with every line, Morneau waited and hoped that he'd go all the way to the end, or at least deliver the part that Okuda and he were waiting for.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my work, you mighty, and despair!" Hock called before dramatically falling to his knees and clutching his drink close to his heart. "Nothing beside remains. Round the decays of that colossal wreck," was that a tear he could? "boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away," then he hung his head. The smirk Morneau could see on his lip suggested that Hock was waiting for the clapping to start. It did not a second after the though crossed the specialists mind and, as if he'd done this a thousand times, Hock jumped up and bowed like he'd just given the performance of a lifetime.
Morneau used the background noise to whisper into his radio.
"You got what you need?" he asked before taking a tiny sip from the drink he'd ordered earlier, as a disguise. Somehow it had survived Hock's feverous performance.
"Yes. I'll leave the security center now and take care of the laser grid."
Morneau had to fight with himself not to spit out his drink.
A fucking laser grid?
"Sorry. The what?"
"Don't worry about it. Just clear the floor while they're gushing over Hock."
He looked at Hock, who was caught up in the eyes of a purple asari, and decided that Okuda was right. He wouldn't get a better chance than this. He weaved through the crowd of hardened criminals who were faking amazement over Hock's poetry fascination, spilled his drink onto one of the curtains and flicked his burning lighter at the burnable combination. Then he attached himself to the crowd again, just in time for Hock to begin with a new poem. Mercifully, this one didn't last long.
"Hey, does anyone smell smoke?" a deep, batarian voice asked.
"Crap. The room's on fire!" a turian declared in return. "Everyone. Out!"
Then the sprinklers kicked in and Morneau and everyone else got drenched by a mixture of water and fire repellant. As he'd assumed, the crowd was quick to flood into the direction of the mansion's entrance.
Well, the crowd minus him and Hock.
Whereas the resident arms dealer was being taken into the direction of the vault, the rest of the crowd was going for the exit.
This both simplified and complicated things.
"Okuda, he's coming your way," he informed the thief. He got no reply. Did that mean that the thief had ditched him now that he no longer needed his help? He had no idea and right now he didn't care either. His priorities were clear. Get Hock.
First Morneau made it seem like he'd joined the escapees. He pretended to be just as eager to leave as the rest of them. But as soon as the last couple of people were going through the exit, he frozein place and ran a hand through his wet hair so that it no longer obstructed his vision. That'd be one of the first things he'd do when he was done being Solomon Gunn. Go back to an actually useful haircut. Next he got rid of his jacket, focused and brought up his biotic barriers, pulled out the gun and radio he'd borrowed and started to jog the way he'd seen Hock run off to. That was incidentally also where the vault was at. He reached it just in time to see Okuda turn off the laser grid that had been hidden behind the already opened door and watched as the thief walked inside with a strange sense of dedication, a submachinegun and a backpack full of explosives and wiring. Despite their surprisingly pleasant experience of working together, Morneau paid him no mind other than pausing for a second to look at him and wonder just why he was really here.
Then he chased after his mission again.
He kept jogging down the corridor, using the wet footprints on the blue carpet of this part of the mansion as a trail. Considering that they were heading away from the entrance, they could've only been caused by Hock and his guards, so that was where he should be going. He only slowed down when he heard voices. A lot of voices. They included Hock's.
"What do you mean I accessed the vault? I'm standing right here, you buffoon!" the arms dealer roared furiously. "This was all a distraction. I am being robbed! Get your men in there! Yes! The entire platoon! Now!" he heard Hock order. Judging by the heavy footsteps that were now heading his way, he'd be in trouble if he was still standing here in the next thirty seconds. Without thinking, and without noticing that it had become dark and started to rain outside, Morneau took one look at the window, muted the stolen radio and climbed outside. He was now standing on a narrow exterior ledge, just outside of view of what sounded like at least twenty armored grunts running down the corridor. Additionally, he was just one slip on a very slippery ledge away from a twenty-meter drop to his death. Needless to say, he wasn't going to stay here long. After the last footstep echoed away, he counted to ten and then slipped back inside the mansion. At first, he listened for Hock's voice. It was still echoing down the way he'd been heading and still complaining about his security. He wanted to run after him immediately, but he still felt like he had to give the Section 4 agent a warning, so he pressed down on his radio.
"Okuda, you've got a lot of incoming."
Again no reply.
He'd tried.
That's all he could do.
He dialed up the borrowed radio again and in doing so, was able to determine that Hock was still heading the way he'd been going earlier. The specialist continued to run through the corridor of the mansion until he could hear Hock's voice, again. Then he slowed down, dialed down the borrowed radio and listened. The voice was coming from the stairs in front of him, the ones that seemed to be leading to the basement. Unless he was in the mood for bowling, Morneau assumed that Hock had a bunker or escape route down there just for this occasion. He aimed the borrowed pistol and crept up to where the stairway connected to the floor he was on, expecting that there were still a lot of guards with the arms dealer. But when he reached the point where he could glance down and see Hock type in a combination into a keypad hidden behind a painting, he realized that there was just three left. Whatever was in that vault seemed to be very valuable to Hock if he was ready to send just about everyone to secure it. Well that or there were a hundred more guys waiting behind that door and he could spare twenty for a few seconds.
Only one way to find out.
Just as one of the guards remembered the importance of rearward security, Morneau made his entrance. He fired the borrowed pistol at the guard, killing him pretty much instantly since for one reason or another, he didn't seem to have barriers. With that in mind, he shifted his aim on to the two remaining security guards. Before either of them truly registered what was going on, they'd each received a headshot for their troubles of guarding Hock, leaving just Morneau and the gun runner in front of what was now revealing itself to be a concealed door. He could tell that Hock was thinking about making a move for a weapon hidden under his suit jacket so he made one thing entirely clear from the start.
"If you go for your gun, you're dead before you ever reach it, Hock."
"What the hell are you doing Gunn?" the gun runner replied.
"My job," he responded, hoping that that if Hock somehow escaped from his, it would make it seem like the Wave had put him up to this. It'd sow discord with his soon to be enemies and that was always useful. "This is how this is going to go. You tell me what you know about the Shadow Broker and I maybe let you walk away with your head attached to yours houlders," he threatened, barely hearing that the radio he'd borrowed was now exploding with cries about an ambush and several casualties at the hands of bobby traps in the vault.
"Shit. The Shadow Broker? That's why you're burning down my mansion and robbing my vault?"
"I'm not the one robbing your vault," he corrected. "Back to the Shadow Broker. What do you know about him?"
Hock smirked.
"You're barking up the wrong tree, asshole, I know just as much as you. He's an information dealer who works through a layer of agents to get his job done-"
Morneau shot a single round into the wall next to Hock's head to stop the tirade of lies. It was just ten centimeters shy of making a clean hole between the man's eyes.
He knew that Hock knew more than this because he knew that Hock was a high-level operative. Otherwise he would've no business being on Kosh and handling a matter that was personal to the Broker.
"I'm not going to miss next time," he clarified with a calculated, cold voice. "What do you know about the Broker?"
Hock looked at the hole.
"He'll kill me."
"Well. So will I if you don't talk. Your choice."
He could see the deliberations on Hock's face. The man was weighing his options and reaching a conclusion.
"Fine. Fine," the man muttered. "Now. Where do I start?" he planted his finger in front of his mouth and suddenly dropped the cultured persona he'd displayed the entire evening. The same distinctive south-african accent he'd heard on Kosh seeped through now. As did the cockiness. "Right. How about this. I'm pretty sure that the guy's a yahg, for starters. Oh. And he also really, really hates us. Like the genocidal kind of hatred. He'd probably kill us all if he gets the chance. He doesn't like to advertise it, obviously, but the hints are there," while this was interesting information and suddenly gave a lot of weight to the fact that the Broker had been increasingly active around the Parnack quarantine zone for the last ten years, that wasn't what Morneau wanted to know. That information would be squeezed out by HSAIS proper, not him.
"I don't give a shit about who he is," at least not under circumstances where every second he was standing here could end with a guard shooting him in the back. "How do I find him?" he asked, once more ignoring the screams for reinforcements that were coming in over the radio.
"That's what you want to know?"
"Yes."
Surprisingly enough, he got a very fast answer.
"The asshole's operating from an old batarian cruiser hidden on Hagalaz. That's in the Sowilo System," Hock stated. "I can write that down for you if you want to. Or have someone make a map if that's what you need."
The easiness of the answer made him weary.
"How do I know you're telling the truth?" he questioned.
In response Hock simply laughed.
"Come on, Gunn. You've met me twice already. By now you should really know that I'll sell out everyone in this galaxy to save my own ass. Double so if whoever I'm selling out will get killed as a result of me spilling their secrets and won't get their chance for payback," the gun dealer reasoned. Then he lowered his arms. "You got what you want. Am I free to go now?"
He was about to say that he'd never said anything about letting Hock go and that he'd now drag him to the closest HSA base so he could be taken into custody for working with a terrorist like the Shadow Broker. There he'd also explain just what Project Group Insight was and answer for abducting a bunch of volus children, possibly by being extradited to the CIP. But before he could do that, Hock's eyes widened, and a spray of submachinegun bullets climbed from his waist all the way to his throat, dotting hm with holes. While Morneau spun around to confront the threat that had shot, the hits stained Hock's suit crimson and made the man collapse to a heap. He was ready to go for the headshot on the figure that had shot, but then that man collapsed as well. However unlike the gurgling noises that Hock was making, he was laughing weakly and clutching a small, grey container in his hands.
Only as his sights were leveled on the figure's head did Morneau registered that the figure was no other than Okuda. Instantly he lowered the pistol and analyzed the sight in front of him. The thief was bleeding profusely from a wound on his leg that, which looked dangerously like a femoral artery hit that had only been secured with a make-shift tourniquet in form of Okuda's belt. Additionally, his face and torso were covered in blood. Except for the odd blue sprays, it was hard to tell which was his and which was from someone else. He rushed to Okuda's side and pulled out the one veil of Medigel he'd been hiding in his back pocket. Before opening it, he already knew that it likely wasn't going to save the thief. The blood loss was already too severe.
Still, he'd try.
"What the hell happened?" he asked while pulling of the cap of the syringe and injecting the gel directly and depp into he wound. While painful, it was the best way to treat this type of injury with as little Medigel as he had.
Okuda laughed again and coughed up blood. That made Morneau notice that the turtleneck the thief was wearing was also covered in small, crimson holes and that most of the blood on him was in fact his own. Right now he could count five gunshot wounds to Okuda's abdomen and chest. Those were five too many for him to treat effectivly. Okuda needed a hospital and there was only one way he'd get it. He made a move to activate the distress signal on his watch, which would sent Bekensteins garrison coming down on the mansion, but before he could do that, Okuda grabbed his hand with as much strength as he still had left.
It wasn't a lot but it made Morneau pause.
"Don't. I did what I came here to do," the man slurred while Morneau instinctively clutched the wounded thief's hand tightly, ignoring how his own got wet and warm from his blood. "Now I can face her again."
The reply made Morneau's mind jump to several conclusions.
His avoidance of the subject of what he wanted to do here, the strange sight at the vault, the continued absence of his so-called partner even in this situation, the act of outright shooting Hock and the risk Okuda had taken in even approaching him for help to begin with.
He wasn't here to take something back to her.
He was her to avenge her.
"Your partner. She's dead, isn't she?" he realised.
Okuda shot a glare at the corpse of Hock and then looked at him, blood trickling down into his goatee.
"Remember what I said about Taetrus? About how she had problems with helping topple the Hierarchy?" he coughed and Morneau nodded. "Well. Hock was the one supplying the guns for the separatists. We were supposed to deliver them. When I canned the job because of my love's objections, the bastard killed her," he opened his hands. "Now this is all I've got left of my Kasumi." Morneau looked at the little box in Okuda's hand. It was a greybox, an outdated medical device originally designed to treat memory loss that had found its way into HSAIS. Although Section 13 didn't use it for obvious security reasons, Section 4 agents used to be implanted with to help with their operations. It could be used to store floorplans, codes, or, in its original form, memories. He assumed that in Okuda's case, the box contained the latter.
The dying thief slipped his bloodied hand out of Morneau's grip and weekly pointed at the greybox.
"Can I ask you for a favour, dear, no-name specialist?" Okuda asked weakly. He was a goner and they both knew it.
"Daniel," Morneau corrected before looking in the dying eyes of the rogue agent. "What do you need me to do?"
"I want to be with her when I go, Daniel," he whispered with blood running down his lips and pouring out of his various injuries and onto the now blood-stained blue carpet. But despite everything, there seemed to be a weak smile on Okuda's lips. "But my omni-tool got busted in the fight-" he explained. "Please use yours to connect me to the box-"
"How?" he asked immediately. Okuda was slipping and there wasn't much time to fulfill his last wish, so he wouldn't waste a single second.
Okuda pressed his thumb against the side of the greybox, making it glow in a faint blue. Then he forced himself to slide up against the wall.
"It's activated. You just interface the two greyboxes and let me bleed out in peace," he groaned. Morneau complied with the first part immediately. He started the interfacing program and watched as Okuda's dying eyes started to glow slightly teal.
"Thank, you," Okuda whispered before his head started to fall sideward alongside the rest of his body. Morneau caught him and straightened Okuda out again. If anything, he deserved to die sitting upright. "My love. Kasumi -" he said, trying to reach out for something that wasn't there. It started to sound like the man was falling asleep and from experience, the specialist knew exactly what that meant. However despite the fact that the man dying in front of him had been blackmailing him the last couple of days and was, on the merit of having gone rogue, his sworn enemy, he couldn't exactly claim to have an easy time watching this, even if it couldn't be more than a few seconds before the deed was done.
"-it's been too long. At long last, we'll be-" the thief slurred and then, the teal glow in his eyes stopped and the painfilled look on his face was replaced by the complete relaxation of all muscles. The greybox clattered to the ground and Okuda fell sideways, hitting the ground with a soft thud.
Morneau looked at him for a stunned second.
Yet another life he hadn't been able to save.
Then he kicked himself out of his inaction and returned his focus on the mission.
Okuda was gone, same as Hock. But he knew where he needed to go and what he had to do next. There was nothing left to do here. He turned Okuda on his back, closed his eyes and folded the dead man's hands over the greybox that had dropped to the ground. Given the meaning the device had had for the thief, it only seemed proper that he had it with him. Next he wiped his hands on his shirt, not realizing that the shirt was just as stained from Okuda's blood until he looked down at them and noticed no change. He let out a sigh, rubbed them over the blue carpet that wasn't blood stained and, once the worst was off, changed the communication channels on his watch. Then he muttered a single transmission on an HSA channel before returning to his alter-ego.
"Bekenstein-Command, this is Callsign Magic. I'm done in the mansion and continuing with my mission. Send in the clean-up crew in ten. Be advised, there might still be armed security personal left on the premises."
"Copy that, Magic. We'll take care of it. Good hunting."
He most definitely would.
"Thank you, B-C. Magic over."
Meanwhile, 2158 CE, Citadel, Presidium, Final Wave Headquarters
Toran Aganian, former cabal soldier turned Final Wave manager, had just been about to leave for the day and spent a nice afternoon with his daughters when an overly anxious human analyst came bursting through the door and ruined his plans and his mood.
"Sir! Sir!" he called. "There's been an incident with a PGI team!"
His head spun around so fast that he nearly broke it himself.
"Which one?" he asked immediately.
"Bekenstein, Sir."
Crap.
"What happened?" he asked, dropping his suitcase on his desk and cringing slightly when he heard the sound of glass cracking. That piece of furniture had been very expensive.
"They attended a function hosted by Donovan Hock," he said in between breaths that made it sound like he'd sprinted up the stairs instead of using the elevator. "The function was attacked, Hock has been killed and the entire mansion, including its vault, have been seized by HSA forces!"
He felt his talons expand subconsciously.
This wasn't good.
This was the opposite of good.
"Were they able to secure the package or does the HSA have it now?"
"We don't know, Sir, not yet."
"Do we know who did this?" he demanded. "Was it the HSA?" they'd be in a world of trouble if that was the case.
"We're working on figuring that out, Sir."
Aganian dropped into his chair.
"No one leaves until you do, is that clear?" he growled.
"Naturally, Sir," the analyst nodded before looking at him.
Aganian realized what would happen next before his employee could say it.
"What else?"
"Sir, we're afraid that there might've been a security breach regarding one of our customers," the analyst muttered before holding out a tablet with a familiar voice-line pattern and comm-link number on it. "He wants to talk to you."
He eyed the tablet containing the Broker's message. Then he held out his hand so that the analyst could hand it to him.
"Get out," he ordered.
"Right away, Sir."
As the man was about to close the door behind him, a thought struck the turian merc. The man was ready, he knew it.
"Get Gunn in here! Spirits know we'll need him on this one."
The analyst carefully peaked out of the doorway.
"Sir, Gunn's on leave."
"I know. I signed his papers. Call him in nonetheless," Aganian muttered. That really couldn't be so hard, could it now? Was it really this hard to get competent personal these days?
"Sir, I already did that," the analyst said carefully as if he was worried Aganian might break him. He obviously wouldn't, but still.
"And?"
"And Operative Gunn has failed to respond to all of our hails. As far as we can tell, he's not on the Citadel or anywhere in Council Space."
Aganian lowered the tablet halfway through the security authentication. His mandibles pressed against his jaw, his teeth rubbed against each other in a painful manner and his eyes stared at the human with enough energy to set something on fire.
"Find out where he went," the analyst looked confused. "Now!" he added with a shout loud enough to echo through the entire office.
He didn't like this.
Not.
One.
Bit.
Codex: Blue Suns Activity in the Terminus System (2415 AD – Present)
Following their invasion of Zorya and several other Terminus Planets, the former paramilitary, anti-slavery organization known as 'the Blue Suns' have turned into one of the largest armed parties active within he Terminus Systems. In addition to having formed an 'emergency council' made up of high-ranking officials who are tasked with governing Zorya and their other claims in the Terminus, the Blue Suns have also increased their activity on the borders of several other Terminus Warlord factions and, as of recently, also been spotted on frontier planets within the Traverse.
While no official diplomatic channels exist between the Citadel Council and the Blue Suns, and the location of Zorya, deep within a heavily pirated region of the Terminus has discouraged journalists from travelling to Blue Suns territory, several independent peace activists have started to raised claims that the Blue Suns, in addition to having taken the role of a proto-government for the worlds they've subdued, have also partaken in acts that could be classified as severe crimes by the standards of a Citadel Space court of law and would warrant a military intervention if proven correct.
These (unproven) claims include but are not limited to: the orbital bombardment of garden worlds occupied by rivalling factions, the development and deployment of biological weapons specifically designed to target vorcha, the unlawful ownership of dreadnought-class warships (of unknown origin), the unlawful ownership of weapons of mass destruction, the unlawful founding and maintaining of an armed group, the unlawful occupation of independent systems, severe violations of the universal rights of all sapient beings, unlawful convictions in absence of a court of law, unlawful imprisonment, unlawful execution of prisoners, violations against the Galactic Credit Tax Code, Subsection 412-331 A.
In response to these claims, the acting commad of the Blue Suns only issued the following statement.
'We get our hands dirty in the Terminus, so you can sit in Citadel Space and judge us for doing what has to be done. Everything we do, we do to protect people. If that is considered a crime by anyone, then we unanimously plead guilty.'
A/N:
Hello again.
It's me.
Bringing you another quick update.
I'll be honest with you, the only reason this thing was written as quickly as it was because I've been itching to get this chapter out for a long time. In many ways the Shadow Broker ark is very important to how the ME2 story ends and SVME3 starts. Therefor everything that relates to Morneau's plot gets extra motivation from.
Additionaly, I haven't killed of a named character in a while, so Okuda and Hock both buying it in what I think is one of the less obvious twist of this part of the story (namely that Kasumi's been dead the entire time, exactly like Okuda was dead in canon) was something I was kind of looking forward too (I realise this makes me sound a bit weird, saying I looked forward to the death of someone, even if they were just fictional characters. But hey, two rather minor recurring characters dying really is just the tip of the iceberg. Don't let the (admitabbly) silly partsof this chapter misguide you. If the last chapter wasn't any indication, we are QUICKLY heading down the rabbit hole of bad shit happening to everyone involved with SVME2 (which is obviously going to reach its highest point in the Reaper Invasion that kicks of ME3)
So yeah.
Get ready for something bad.
Either way, review and let me know what you think of this (very AU) version of Stolen Memory. I'll be the first to admit that the poetry bits were silly but hey... a bit silly is fine when we're headed to where we're headed.. (boy,I sure am making it seem like its the end of the world that's coming for our cast, aren't I?)
Up next:
Several things.
A hint:
I wouldn't write a codex about the Blue Suns if they weren't going to make their official ME2 debut soon. Also, we haven't heard from Kaidan ever since he got beaconed in Harbinger Revealed
Another hint:
No, I actually won't give that to you. I already said too much.
For the record, we're at 714 reviews, 1155 favorites and 1208 follows. Not a huge gain, but that is always expected with chapters like this.
See you around next time.
