Chapter 97. Insight


Three Hours Later, 12. April 2417 AD, HSASV Normandy

As soon as they'd been able to, the ground team of the Normandy had left Illium behind. Between the incident with Morinth, the events of the Dantius Towers and the final conclusion at the police precinct, all of them had had enough of the world for the time being.

After they'd reached the Normandy, the first thing Shepard had done was debrief Harper on her success of recruiting Krios and informed him of her encounter and subsequent partnership with the asari justicar Samara. The Cerberus director obviously hadn't been pleased about the prospect of having an unvetted asari onboard of the Normandy, let alone one someone who held the authority Samara seemed to have. But after Shepard had pointed out that she was now the prime target of an equally powerful biotic assassin, who Harper had assured her Cerberus would 'handle', he had shifted stances and called her a valuable addition to the team.

Once that part had been resolved, they'd started to discuss their next course of action. Shepard, still in the believe that nothing had changed, had assumed she was now supposed to try and find Tali'Zorah. That had been the direction before Illium. But when she had brought that up with Harper, the man had only shaken his head and told her that she needed to rendezvous with General Arterius prior to doing anything else. He had apparently stumbled upon something crucial regarding the Reapers and would come to meet her halfway at Omega alongside Liara and Alenko.

As soon as Harper had mentioned the name of the human biotic, Shepard had known that Cerberus' director had been keeping something from her. At first they'd claimed not to be able to locate her former crewmate and now he was in Arterius' presence? That couldn't be right. The argument that had ensured afterwards hadn't been pretty and had only ended when Harper had pointed out that half the reason he hadn't been able to tell her where Alenko was or what he had been doing was because he'd feared how Shepard would react to the news that Cerberus had set him up to replace her in the event that Project Lazarus ended with her dying after all. Since that had apparently been a very likely possibility for two-thirds of the two years and twelve days she'd spent at the brink of death, she had to admit that she saw the logic behind thinking about what had to happen if she didn't pull through.

But just because she'd been able to understand the part about making a replacement for her didn't mean that she got why no one had told her where Alenko was or felt like it was necessary to mention that he'd been made a Spectre candidate. Had they expected her to have a petty reaction and thrown a fit like a child athlete who'd found out their coach had kept the second-best team member as their backup? Or were the worried that she might freak out at the prospect of having been close enough to dying to the point where a replacement was necessary to think of?

Either way, she had taken that explanation as an insult to her professionalism.

She was an N7.

She liked to think that that meant that she got the concept of her own mortality.

Despite his best attempts, Harper hadn't been able to salvage that part of the argument. He'd only said that he 'didn't need her to understand' why 'Cerberus did what we did' and pointed out that his actions in the past were of little concern compared to what was at stake. It was the basic answer types like him always defaulted to when they were pushed into a corner and after years of being an officer in a special forces outfit, she really should've gotten used to all the oh so heavily burdened secret keepers that made up HSA top-brass. They were about as rare as a corn of sand on a beach.

Personal resentment for the attitude set aside, Emily hadn't been able to argue with his perspective that any personal animosities between were irrelevant. She hated being lied to and having things kept from her for no apparent reason, yes, but no matter how she spun it, she couldn't just lay down her arms in protest or stop talking to Harper. Their mission was too important to be petty. Hence the two had parted without diving too deeply into the subject of Cerberus deliberately hiding Alenko from her and instead agreed that the Normandy would turn back around to Omega and hear out General Arterius. Considering the fact that roughly forty thousand humans had been abducted mere hours ago and that the fight on the colony Vuori had apparently ended with some army officer choosing to end his last stand by nuking the Collector ship instead of letting it get away with the thousands of colonists it had captured, Shepard was now positively frustrated.

The Collectors were picking up their pace and besides Mordin's countermeasure, which was only available to the Normandy, they hadn't made any progress to the goal of stopping them. While she was flying back and forth along the Terminus border, people were getting killed – or worse, being captured by the Collectors to get turned into slush whenever the Harbinger wanted to make a demonstration.

Since she hadn't been able to shake the frustration through will alone, she'd found her way in front of the heavy bag instead of going to see Krios or talking to Leng like she'd originally planned.

Considering the time, she hadn't expected company. It was the middle of the night in the Normandy's ship cycle and usually, every crewmember that wasn't working a shift in the CIC was asleep.

Yet here she was, standing face to face with Lieutenant Nader, and sparring against the young biotic. Despite slugging away at each other for the past twenty minutes, they hadn't exchanged a lot of words yet. Come to think of it, that was actually a pretty nice summary of their relationship ever since Shepard had picked Jack up from the HSASV Lawrence. Unlike the rest of her crew, the biotic didn't seem to have any deeply rooted issues that required her attention or other things that troubled her to the point where her performance was at stake. There hadn't been any need to actually seek a deeper conversation with her, so Shepard hadn't forced it. Or at least it had seemed that way. Considering Jack also somehow needed to blow off steam at two in the morning instead of sleeping, Emily might have misjudged her subordinate.

She dove under the biotic's punch and delivered a hook just below her ribcage that knocked the air out of Jack to the point where she took a step back and raised her hands, clarifying that this round was now officially over.

"Shit," the biotic cursed before slumping down on the mat.

"You already, Lieutenant?" Shepard offered while looking at the young brunette. She didn't seem to be in pain as much as she seemed to be frustrated.

"You want the professional reply or the honest one?" Jack muttered before stumbling to the corner of the mat and picking up her water bottle.

"Forget about professionalism and ranks for a second. What's on your mind, Jack?" Shepard offered before stepping out of the ring and using a towel to dry off the sweat that had collected on her face.

"Off the record?" she asked.

"Off the record," Shepard confirmed. "Just one marine to another. You can do that, right?"

"Right," the brunette biotic pulled off her gloves and let out a sigh before sitting down cross legged on the mat. "When you recruited me for this mission, I figured I'd be able to actually be useful for a change," she muttered. "But instead of actually doing anything useful, I'm just riding in the passenger seat alongside two N7s, one Blackwatch operative, a turian vigilante who fought half of Omega by his lonesome, an STG guy who's the equivalent of my grandpa and still ten times deadlier than me, a drell assassin and an asari justicar," she went on. Shepard picked up on the insecurity in her voice. "And here I am, a BAR lieutenant who can offer you nothing the others aren't ten times better at than I am," Jack sighed again. "When you showed up on the Lawrence and told me that you needed me, I was bouncing with joy. But all I've done since you put your faith in me was not measure up to the rest of your crew. If we ignore the tungsten I shaved off my ammo-block up to now, I've contributed squat to stopping the Collectors. Nothing. Zero."

Shepard wanted to say that 'everyone's had their role to play' and point out that Jack didn't need to feel bad about living in the shadows of the rest of the crew. But then took a mental step back and saw things from Jack's perspective for a moment. Because of this Emily realized that if she were in her place, she'd probably feel exactly the same. Hence she tried a different approach, one that mirrored what Harper's dossier had pointed out about Lieutenant Nader.

"The only reason it seems like you're not measuring up compared to the others is because I didn't need you to flip a freaking APC up to now," she offered before dropping down to the mat as well. "Everyone's got their strengths, Jack, and what we've been doing up to now fortunately didn't involve a situation yet where you need to drag our asses out of the fire with your biotics. Trust me, when shit really hits the fan, it'll be people like Leng, Garrus or me who'll feel like we can't measure up to you," she said before thinking back to the terrifying encounter with Morinth. All the N7 training in the world and she'd still been a ragdoll for the asari. As soon as the thought crossed her mind, she realized how perfect of an analogy it was for the point she was trying to make.

"Just take what happened to me back at the Dracon Precint for example. As far as regular soldiering goes, I went the full nine-yards the Corps and the Navy have to offer. Infantry school, urban warfare center, zero-g, hostile environments, N7 in Rio," she listed. "And all I could do when that freak Morinth showed up to kill me was make a run for it and pray. And even then, it was only Samara showing up that actually saved my ass," Emily jumped to her feet and offered Jack her hand. "Sometimes we are powerless and the only thing we can do is watch or follow someone else' footsteps," she said with a shrug. "That's just the way things go in our line of work. You haven't torn a tank apart yet, yes, and you might not be experienced enough for me to grant you a command like I do with Leng or Callius," she could see the frown form on Jack's brow. "But that doesn't mean that you let me down or that you don't belong on this ship. What really matters is what you do when it's everyone else who's powerless and they are looking at you," she gestured for Jack to finally grab her hand, "and I've got a feeling that you'll measure up just fine when that happens," she meant it.

The Biotic Assault Regiment officer might be young and lacked a lot of the training and abilities of the other special-forces type of characters she had collected on the Normandy. But Shepard earnestly believed that Jack too had that 'something' that made the rest of the Normandy's crew special to begin with. Her believe was reaffirmed when the young lieutenant grabbed her hand.

She wouldn't pass up on talking to Nader from here on out.


Four Hours Later, 12. April 2417 AD, Cronos Station

"Holy mother of-" a Scottish voice declared in disbelief before being filled with nothing but excitement. "That's it! That's the bloody answer!" Yo-yo, who couldn't claim to be entirely awake at six in the morning, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and turned her head towards the curly-haired engineer. On his insistence, the three of them had pulled an all-nighter, which had involved Robin and Aiden actually working and her working to actually stay awake. Since her hunt through the geth database had turned out to be unsuccessful, the specialist who was tasked with watching over the engineers had once more been left without something to do. So for the last couple of days, it was back to square. She was watching the odd pair of lab partners, occasionally reading something she didn't quite understand and felt like time slow down to a crawl.

"Robin I cracked it-" he declared before turning his head and only finding Yo-yo. "Where's Robin?"

"She left to go grab something from your actual lab about ten minutes ago. She probably won't be back anytime soon. I'm honestly shocked you hadn't noticed, considering you are always so aware of your surroundings when you work," the specialist replied sarcastically before spinning in her chair and looking at the ceiling, subsequently being forced to squint when he movements turned on the ceiling lamps.

"One, yes I am always aware of my surroundings when I work, thank you very much. Two, I will neglect to point out how rich that is coming from someone who's been going in and out of sleep for the past two hours because I just made a huge discovery that's finally going to get us out of this lab. And three, what did she go to get?"

"Yeah, I don't actually remember," the brunette specialist replied before getting up from her chair and walking to where Aiden was hunched over his desk. "What did you find?"

"Okay so while you were asleep I decided to go back to the results of the X-ray fluorescence spectrometry I did for the armor plating and syntmuscles of the geth. I took a closer look at the exact composition of the synthetic fiber that allows them to move the way they do. It was actually highly fascinating, you see the quarians managed to reproduce organic muscle for the geth by-"

"I'm sorry, Aiden, but you lost me at that X-ray fluorescence spectrometrics-thing," Yo-yo interrupted, pretty certain that she'd butchered the name. "So instead of trying to explain geth muscles to someone like me at a time like this, could you maybe just get to what you found and why it helps us?"

"Uhm. Yeah. Sure," the engineer hummed before muttering, "how do I put this-" he drummed his fingers against the desk. "After looking at the materials and drawing a blank when it came to narrowing down where they came from, I decided on something else that's more unique. Star light and electromagnetic residue. Since the metal didn't show a lot of residue EM radiation, I looked at the synthetic muscles of the geth and found that the material the quarians used for them does in fact show clear signs of residue. They did in fact show so much residue radiation that it's likely that a human exposed to whatever these geth were exposed to would've died in a matter of hours-"

"I'm still not following," Yo-yo pointed out with a slight pout.

"Because you won't let me finish," the engineer countered before jabbing his finger at her. "I compared the EM residue to the EM wavelengths of places in geth space and I immediately had a match," he turned the terminal that stood to the right of him for Yo-yo to see. It depicted a small planet. "Turns out, our geth walked around on a place called Haestrom, which has a sun that's famous for aging almost impossibly fast due to some poorly understood dark energy event that I personally believe to not be of natural origin because frankly stuff like that just isn't scientifically possi-" her pouting turned into a frown and Aiden noticed. "Anyways. The quarians first noticed this phenomenon about four hundred years ago, back before the war, and ever since then they've been keeping track of Haestrom's sun. They took every reading in the book and they even continued to send spy probes into the system to keep checking up on it even after the war. Then they published it all, which is why I'm one hundred percent confident that this here geth," he said while looking at the disassembled platform lying in the center of the lab, "spent a majority of his time in the Haestrom sun. Tada," he offered. "When do we leave?" he added eagerly.

"Great work," the specialist responded before coming to the obvious problem of that question. "Say, you mentioned spy probes."

"I did."

"Does that mean that Haestrom's under geth control?" she sighed.

"Well. Yes. Kind of?"

"Kind of?"

"There may or may not be a huge geth fleet in the system. The intel I could access was a bit unclear of how many hundred ships there are."

That complicated things.

A lot.

"In that case we might not be leaving at all," she frowned before putting her hand on the man's shoulder. "I've got to talk to someone. Seriously though, great work."


13. April 2417 AD, Citadel, Presidium

Morneau glanced behind him and realized the salarian that had been following him all the way from his front door to the meeting place had met his eyes. That was a relief. Not even a below average trail would ever make the mistake of looking at their mark like this. The specialist was now confident that this particular individual wasn't keeping tabs on him, which meant that it was safe to continue.

That in itself was a rarity nowadays.

He took another look around and spotted no other worrying signs of an observation and then took the turn around the corner into the side street toward the hotel. It looked like a pretty rundown place, at least by the excessively high standard of the Presidium, and from what he understood a good chunk of it was currently locked down due to several health code and fire hazard violations. It really the most stereotypical meeting place his colleague possibly could've come up with but the advertised health danger to several other species, except for humans and batarians for one reason or another, was likely to discourage followers. Morneau reached the hotel's sideentrance, found a door that was open just a gap and let himself in. He was now standing in the kitchen, which meant the stairs he was supposed to take were to his left. He spotted another door that had been opened and started to climb up to floor sixteen, still counting Day 193 of his assignment.

While this entire stint had already felt like a small lifetime before, it had become even more strenuous since he'd gotten back from Bekenstein. A lot of that could be chalked up to him being able to see the finish line. It was only natural for the anticipation to get this over with to influence him. But there was something else that was making time progress slower than natural; the very minor factor of him now being constantly vigilant of even the slightest anomaly around him. Although he would've gladly attributed the recent burst of paranoia to the anticipated end of his mission as well, there was sadly a very real reason for Morneau's current state of mind.

Things had changed for Solomon Gunn and this operation was now effectively a deadly game of cat and mouse.

It had been barely noticeable at first, a glance of a co-worker here, a longer stare from someone in the crowd there, the slightest change in the way his terminal was arranged on the table making him think that he hadn't left it that way and that someone else had moved it. On their own, they weren't anything too worrying. But combined they were all small clues that had led to him to start noticing other things. There were familiar faces that seemed to be there whenever he left his Wave-sponsored apartment and at work it seemed like he'd moved back to Day One as far as the assignments he was given were concerned. Additionally there had been a shift in Aganian's behavior whenever the two of them talked. The turian was on edge and distant and the general tension that hang in the office whenever he clocked in during work had gotten so bad that he felt like the entire headquarters would snap whenever he did something as insignificant as get up from his desk or grab a drink from his bag.

As soon as he'd noticed these things, it hadn't been required a lot of thinking to figure out that some people in the Wave, including Aganian, were onto him. He couldn't be sure what it was that they believed him to have done, or if they even suspected him for the right reasons or were doing all of this for a reason completely unrelated to what he had actually been doing. Nonetheless, it was clear that Aganian himself, or maybe even the turian's own boss, had placed surveillance on Solomon Gunn and that it was only a matter of time before they tried to pull a noose around his neck.

If he wasn't so close to the Shadow Broker, he probably would've pulled out of the op. The chance of the Wave making their move was simply too high.

Additionally, if he considered the last status update he'd received on the other situations HSAIS was dealing with right now, there were more important matters to attend to. Snuffing out some second-rate threat that'd get fucked over just as badly as the rest of the galaxy once the Reapers showed up was really a secondary-priority when compared to an impending galactic cataclysm.

But since all he needed to do at this point to remove the Broker as a factor – he wasn't ready to thnk that the Shadow Broker would stop being a nuisance just because the Reapers showed up – was to wait for HSAIS to positively identify the location Hock had given, Morneau had decided to take a risk. He would stick around in spite of the target on his back. It was like Redford liked to say, who dared, won.

While he realized that this wasn't a particularly logical or probability even smart decision, he had to admit that he felt pretty confident about this dare. Sure, it was him against a prestigious merc company, a strange project group calling itself 'Insight' and the Shadow Broker in all his apparent yahg-ness. But he wouldn't be good at what he did if he allowed himself to be intimidated by the notion that his odds of living through the next week were about one in three.

He had this under control and if things turned out the way he was shooting for, the Shadow Broker would be a non-issue soon enough.

As for what would happen if things went south. Well. While it was preferable to not think about a critical mission failure, he had considered all the ways this could go wrong and determined that he would most likely be able to weasel his way out of most of them with some good, old-fashioned improvisation.

After all, he always managed to stay on top, be it through skill or luck.

Why should things go any different this time?

Morneau reached the floor of the hotel he was supposed to go to and stood in front of a door marked with a flashing hologram. After spending a second or so deliberating on the 'health risk', this time it also involved humans, he pulled his shirt over his nose, ran a bypass program and opened the door. As soon as it had pulled pen, he saw a blonde man standing in the otherwise empty hallway. He had opened a door and was clearly expecting him.

Lancelot.

As he started walking towards the specialist, he allowed himself one final thought before finding out what exactly Lancelot wanted from him and why this meeting had to take place in person.

Even if his cover was blown, he figured he stood a decent chance at finishing this op.

But HSAIS most definitely would not see it that way.

They had never really gotten around to reaching the same level of confidence in his ability to wing absolutely anything the way he had. As such, they would pull him out the moment he informed them of the fact that his cover story was shoddy at best by now and possibly ruin everything he'd done in the last 193 days.

That was the downside of being a valuable asset to an agency that nine out of ten times cared for their personal's life; they weren't ready to risk losing him or his skillset, especially not in a time like this to a foe like the Broker because of something as preventable as a blown cover.

If he told HSAIS what had happened and left Solomon Gunn behind right now – which he would admit was very tempting considering the fact that he could lend a hand at stopping the end of the world right now instead of icing some yahg with an inferiority complex who they could just blow out of the sky with a couple of Disruptor torpedoes- and the Wave knew for a fact that he was chasing the Shadow Broker, that'd be it. By the time anyone would reach the Broker's hideout, the asshole would be long gone and it all would've been pointless. Hence, he needed to stay, even if that put a target on his back and would turn his debrief into an investigation as to why he had kept mission sensitive intel to himself.

He entered the room and the blonde specialist who'd served as his relay to Cronos Station closed the door behind them. When he did, it produced a damaged hissing sound and a metallic creak. When he relaised that his colleague was unconcerned about the health-risk, he slid his shirt down again. Not that it would've done him any good anyways.

"Morning," he greeted while eying Lancelot, or as he knew him, Yegor Solovev.

"Huh. Morning already?" the man retorted with a hint of sleep in his voice, which lacked any hint of his Horizon-accent. Then he leaned against the wall next to the door and both specialists began to muster each other.

If not for the watch on his wrist, he wouldn't be sure that he was actually sitting next to the same Yegor who'd been part of his training class fourteen years ago.

While the two of them had communicated every other day for the last 193 days, this was actually the first time Morneau was seeing the Horizon-native ever since he'd left Cronos Station for the Citadel Embassy. At first glance, Yegor looked nothing like his former self. He really had dived deep into his cover identity by now, which was to be expected considering he'd spent most of the last years on the Citadel as one 'Conrad Verner'. The once religiously maintained crewcut of his pale-blonde hair had turned into a much longer, dark-blonde haircut that looked like something taken straight from one of those blasted 2350s soap operas Wong made him watch every other night; style instead of function – very much unlike Lancelot. Furthermore, the orderly and perfectly ironed uniform he used to wear had been replaced by brown dock-worker clothes that smelled like they hadn't been washed in a week. Finally, the once lean Yegor had become bulkier as if to further sell the fact that he earned his money through manual labor, which was a rarity on the Citadel and now sported a goatee which, in Morneau's professional opinion, was too well maintained to match with the rest of his outward appearance.

After finishing his assessment of his colleague and waiting for the other specialist to finish his own assessment of him, which Morneau had no doubt he had done since he himself also looked differently from what Yegor would remember, the blonde specialist let out a long drawn sigh before drifting back into silence.

"Us meeting hear breaks all kinds of protocols, you know that right?" Morneau asked, realizing that it was hypocritical for him to talk about protocols while not telling HSAIS that 'Solomon Gunn' was burned beyond recognition.

"Yup," the man replied curtly.

"Then why the face to face meeting?"

"Because your shit officially messed with my shit, Magic" Morneau was surprised that he'd use his codename like this. While the jammers in their watches were likely to prevent an auditory surveillance of their conversation and passers-by eavesdropping were unlike in a closed-down hotel, it was a no-go for undercover operatives to refer to each other with anything but their cover identities. Either Lancelot was confident in his hiding spot or he'd really started playing loose with the rules since taking this assignment.

His surprise about the breach of protocol lasted as long as his curiosity took to surface. Lancelot had two assignments that he knew of. One of the assignments was currently flying around on a state-of-the-art warship far off from the Citadel, so he figured that his colleague wasn't talking about Shepard. That only left the other alternative. What exactly had he done that would impact Lancelot's assignment of protecting the HSA's interests on the Citadel? Until now the closest he'd gotten to Lancelot was passing by the HSA embassy. What could he possibly have done that could harm the HSA's interest on the station?

"How so?" he muttered while looking at the boarded-up windows. They'd been covered by metal grids bolted to the walls and the walls themselves were covered in transparent plastic tarps. While only a few rays of daylight got in through the narrow gaps in the window covers, the few that did illuminated the room enough to see just how much dust – at least he hoped that it was just dust - was floating around in it.

"You remember that Project Group Insight you ran into back at the Wave HQ and on Bekenstein?"

"Naturally."

"Well, believe it or not, some douchebags calling themselves 'Insight' tried to kill my protectee a couple of days ago." Morneau's hazel eyes squinted shut for a second or so upon being proven wrong about which mission Lancelot was referring to. Since Yegor still wasn't done talking, he continued to listen. "They approached the Shadow Broker to put out a hit on the commander while she was running around on Illium. The Broker sent some asari merc after her and they ended up flattening a police station."

While he wanted to ask who the asari was, Morneau's brain got stuck on something else.

The commander.

Upon the mentioning of that otherwise unremarkable phrase, Morneau thought back to the last time he'd seen Alec's daughter. Back then the red-haired N7 had been floating around in some weird stasis device and had been on the brink of death. A bunch of Collectors had been ogling her like she was the second coming of their god and in the process of freeing her from their grasp, Morneau had ensured that he could never set foot back on Omega. He'd blown up an eezo refinery, destroyed several expensive skycars in the possession of Omega's most famous crime boss, possibly crippled some of her favorite henchmen in a vehicular collision and definitely destabilized the illusion of control said crime boss held over most of the station. Last he'd checked, his bounty had been increased again.

Fun times, actually.

He let the thought slip and returned to the matter at hand. He was positive that he ranked pretty high on the list of Shepard's least favorite people. But the fact that she was the daughter of a specialist who'd died on his watch was more than enough of a reason for him to be concerned for her well-being. Even if he figured that those concerns were unwarranted and definitely not shared by her.

"I take it she's fine?" It was a rhetorical question. He would've heard about it if she weren't. Besides, she was an N7. What was one asari going to do? Stain her armor with purple blood?

"She's a Spectre. It's gonna take a lot more than some weird Ardat-Yakshi to kill her."

"Ardat-yahg-what?" he raised an eyebrow, this time because he didn't recognize the term. As soon as he realized how he'd butchered the name, he recognized that the revelation that the Shadow Broker was apparently a yahg was still floating around his mind. It was just so mind-bogglingly strange to think that one of the most powerful people in the galaxy belonged to a species of violent upstart primitives that humanity had been keeping in change with a bunch of frigates and the occasional Cerberus raid for the better part of the last thirty years.

"I was getting to that," Lancelot brought up his omni-tool depicting the image of an asari with pale blue skin that turned darker where her otherwise flawless face started to become tentacle-shaped and earless. She had pale-blue eyes, wore dark armor and was glancing up at the surveillance camera of the dock she was standing on with a smirk plastered on her face.

Immediately Morneau felt the hair on his forearms stand up.

"Remember her?" Lancelot muttered.

He did and just like that his previous assessment of what one asari could possibly do had changed.

That was Irna, the merc from Kosh who'd nearly thrown them out of the sky with a display of raw biotic power that had made Instructor Vasir seem like an amateur.

She could've done much more than end up as blood stains on Shepard's armor.

"Sadly, yes," Morneau confirmed. That asari was bad news, partly because of how powerful of a biotic she was and partly because of the unnatural charming ability she had displayed when the two had talked prior to their mission. Normally, Morneau couldn't look at an asari without noticing everything that made them so appalling to him; scaley skin, tentacle heads, no ears or hair, weird mind powers; the whole package of repulsion. But Irna, for a reason he still couldn't explain, had radiated a level of attraction hat had made him forget about all these things and made him behave uncharacteristically compliant and agreeable right until he'd anchored himself to the much more visually pleasing Wong. While her raw display of biotic power was enough to make Morneau mildly concerned for his personal safety, her unknown ability to manipulate his entire personality had been what had made him scared of her. He could deal with life-threatening biotic powers that could turn a tank inside-out, that wasn't a big deal. But he didn't have the hint of a clue how to fight something that attacked you by using your own head against you.

"She's that Ardat-yahg-y you were talking about? The one who tried to kill Shepard?"

"Ardat-Yakshi," he corrected.

"That means something bad, doesn't it?"

"It's the name of the medical condition she suffers from. Since I know you're not one for the boring details, I'll just tell you the short version. She's got a genetic defect that makes her a powerful biotic and kills everyone she melds with. At the same time, she emits a natural charisma believed to be the product of the same mechanisms that allow asari to meld in the first place," good, so he already knew about that part. "Come to think of it, there was a whole page there about small eezo bursts and some other biotic fuckery related to the manipulation of someone else's nervous system. It was quite fascinating actually," Morneau thought back to their encounter and winced internally. So he hadn't imagined that part either. She really had zapped him with a bit of biotic energy back when they'd shook hands.

He looked at his palm and rubbed it with his other hand. While he obviously didn't want anything bad to happen to Shepard, it was a good thing the asari had tried to go after her. At least that way she was now removed from the equation and no one would have to worry about her anymore. Granted, if he had kicked her out of the shuttle back on Kosh, none of this would've happened in the first place. But since Shepard clearly seemed to have managed, which probably shouldn't have come as that big of a surprise considering she was a Spectre and surrounded by an array of equally talented individuals, he was ready to say all had turned out well on the Irna-front.

"Those were a lot of boring details, Lancelot," he pointed out, now even more weirded out. As if she hadn't been creepy enough already, Irna had apparently killed people by having sex with them. If he hadn't already had a reason to stay away from asari other than their outward appearance and the possibility of them learning all of his secrets by taking a joyride on his nervous system, the fact that there was apparently a brand of them that could kill you by sleeping with them certainly would've convinced him to swear off blue aliens for the rest of his life.

"Consider it your fact of the day," Lancelot offered before pushing himself off the hotel wall. "Insight wants to ice my protectee and a merc you ran into is currently doing her best to achieve that goal. You see why I brought you here?"

"Yeah, our messes are officially tangled," Morneau said with a shrug before noticing the present tense in Lancelot's statement about the asari. "Hold up. Currently? Are you telling me Irna's still around?" he'd figured that trying to kill Shepard was a one-way ticket straight to the closest morgue.

"Yes. Shepard did manage to beat her with the help of some asari justicar," he wasn't even going to ask what that was, "but your merc's still alive and kicking. Presumably at least."

"Presumably?" he didn't like the sound of that.

"She was last seen getting shot by Shepard and jumping into flying traffic."

Morneau thought back to Kosh for a second.

"Yeah, that's not gonna stop her," he frowned. So much for not having to worry about the Irna-front anymore.

"That's Shepard's assessment as well, which is why I'm considering her an active threat to her safety that needs to be taken care of."

Morneau looked at the Lancelot.

"What do you wanna do about her?"

Shepard obviously didn't know that there was a specialist tasked with assessing threats to her life that she had no idea even existed. That was half the point of Lancelot's assignment. He kept the Spectre's back free and made sure that Shepard could follow her mission without interference from other clandestine outfits. Back when Captain Anderson, the first human Spectre, had still been alive Lancelot had done the same for him. If the rumors were to be believed, the list of people who were out to kill Anderson had gotten so crowded once that Lancelot had apparently murdered enough people in the wards to launch C-SEC into a serial killer investigation. There were even a couple of documentaries about the Tayseri Ripper, a title that thanks to HSAIS' timely intervention and aid of the C-SEC investigation had strangely ended up getting pinned on a krogan hitmen that had gotten killed in Sovereign's attack two years ago. With the case closed, no one seemed to have cared about the fact that people from the shady businesses of the Citadel were still getting killed at a disproportionate factor eveb after the Tayseri Ripper had supposedly bit the dust.

Morneau briefly wondered how many bodies Lancelot had stacked for Alec's kid by now and what would happen if Citadel Authorities would ever figure out that a human intelligence officer had been merrily murdering his way across their station for years instead of a deceased krogan hitmen.

"For now? Nothing. I can't do anything about Insight until we know more about them and as long as the justicar's around Shepard and Morinth's on the run there's not a whole lot I can do about her either. She vanished off the face of the galaxy and I can't exactly leave the Citadel right now," Morneau assumed that 'Morinth' was Irna's real name and nodded his agreement.

"True," he admitted. "Why the face-to-face meeting if you weren't going to do anything about them in the first place?" he wondered.

"Do I need an excuse other than wanting to see a familiar face? It's been years since I left Cronos and I hardly ever get the chance to talk to any of you guys these days," he said with a shrug. He thought back to how badly he wanted to see a familiar face by now and then remembered that he hadn't been doing this for nearly as long as Yegor. He got it.

"I guess not," he responded with a smirk. "Well now that you saw it, I take it this is where we part ways?"

"Not quite," Lancelot responded with a slow shake of his head. "Don't get me wrong. It is nice to see you again. But I didn't call you here just to catch up or chitchat about asari biology. We needed to talk face to face because we both know that what I'm about to say can't go through our usual channels," the specialist let out a sigh and then dropped a bombshell on Morneau. "I know your cover is shot to hell."

He narrowed his eyes.

"Oh really? What gave it away?"

"Other than the guys doing a shit job at trailing you?" Lancelot retorted, "you. Just now." Great. He'd fallen for the oldest trick in the book. "Listen, Magic. I get what you're doing right now and I'm not gonna tell dad if you don't," he went on, referring to HSAIS. "But so god help me, if you break our class streak of eight years without shrinking because you overestimated yourself, I will kick the shit out of you," now he was talking about the fact that it had been eight years since someone from their training class, which had shrunken from eight to five members by now, had died.

"You realise that's not going to be an option if I'm already dead, right?" Morneau muttered, ignoring the seriousness of Yegor's concern and purposefully not pointing out the clear hurt in the man's voice. He knew that the subject was particularly touchy for Lancelot. After all it had been his partner who'd 'broken their last streak'.

While it was pretty ironic for Morneau to hold that believe considering his own case of survivor's guilt, he never understood why Yegor blamed himself for what had happened to Jordan. There was nothing he could've done to save his partner from dying during a slave recovery operation gone bad. Jordan had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and nothing in the universe could've prevented him from ending up as yet another name on the list of Section 13 agents killed in action who's sacrifice the rest of humanity would never hear about or get to appreciate.

"You know me. I'll find a way to make it an option," the Horizoner retorted. "I'm serious. You're playing with fire right now. Not passing on mission sensitive intel, running on an identity you know is compromised, presumably going after the Broker by your lone-some," he listed. "I know we're all living on borrowed time." What he was referring to didn't need to and definitely shouldn't be said out loud. As far as the people around them were concerned, everything was fine and the Reaper threat had ended with Sovereign. Sadly, neither of the specialists had the privilege of their ignorance. "But that doesn't mean that gambling with our lives has suddenly turned into a legitimate tactic."

Morneau folded his hands and looked at him.

"We're spies, Lancelot. Gambling with our lives is literally part of our job description."

"No, taking calculated risks is. What you're doing right now exceeds that by a longshot."

"So go and tell HSAIS."

"You know I'm not doing that."

"Why not?" he shrugged. "You seem very concerned right about now," he pointed out. He wasn't sure why he was pushing the subject. If HSAIS heard about him neglecting to mention hat he was compromised, he'd at least face an internal affairs meeting, maybe even an all-out investigation.

"I am. But I also trust you, Morneau," he said, suddenly using his real name, which was an ever bigger breach of protocol. "You might be the most insufferable and overconfident douchebag walking the halls of Cronos Station right now-"

"-only because you aren't there," the dark-haired man injected in his own defense.

"-but I know that somewhere below all that bravado about improvisation and insisting on your luck never running out, you're smart enough to know you're just as human as the rest of us. You might not like to admit it, but you like living. And you know that you're not immortal," he muttered. "You dying because you overestimated yourself would suck. Big time."

"I will take that as a compliment."

"It's not meant to be one. I'm trying to give you a warning," Lancelot responded before stepping closer to him. "Be careful," he stressed with a hardened gaze. "There's a chance that I might be wrong and you really don't give a shit about what happens to you. Certainly wouldn't be the first time I read you wrong," he pointed at Morneau's chest where the white Makau-Nui necklace was dangling. "But that thing right there is proof that there are people in this world who do give a shit about your dumb ass. So whatever you do, make sure you don't break our streak. At least for their sakes."

He glanced at the necklace and then back to the other specialist. Back in the day Yegor always had been the unofficial leader of their training class, looking out for everyone and whatnot. He'd preached about the bond they shared, how they had to rely on each other and how they needed to stick together to make it to the finish line. Hehad even stuck to that role after they'd completed their training and gotten separated. At least until Jordan had bought it after the Blitz.

"I appreciate the concern," he responded after the specialist's long plead for caution.

"That's a lie and you know it. You hated every second of hearing me preach, you always did," Lancelot retorted. He was right, of course. Morneau never had been one for big speeches. He didn't need to be told to look out for other people or to work as a team or to start seeing each other as a unit. That part had metaphorically been beaten into his head back on Terra Nova when the HSA had still been trying to decide if it made more sense to stuff him into a BAR unit of the Corps or sent him to the Army to try his shot at the ASOC fast track. Lancelot's watch buzzed, prompting him turn back to the door. "I need to get going and so do you. Remember what I said. Don't die," he stressed, this time with a familiar set of words.

"I won't," he said before stuffing the necklace back into his shirt. He had to get that back somehow, hadn't he? "Watch your six out there, Conrad," he stated. "And maybe try to lay low."

"Yeah. You too, Solomon," with that Lancelot left the room, leaving Morneau with even more of a reason to finish his mission quickly. No way in hell did he want to end up like Yegor. Living a fake-life for seven months was bad enough. How the hell would he ever manage years?

He waited about five minutes before following out of the door and heading out the way he'd come from. Then he stepped back into the light of the Presidium's artificial daylight and headed to work with a lot on his mind.

He had unearthed Project Group Insight, so he'd also be the one who buried them before they did any more damage. Putting out a hit on Shepard would be the one and only chance they got at doing damage to the HSA.

To that end, he had to pry on one of the two connections he knew them to have. With everything going on, the Wave wasn't an option. Hence, he'd go for the person that seemed to be their go-to guy when it came to murdering human Spectres; the Shadow Broker.

Two hundred days, that was his bet. All he needed to win the bet was for HSAIS to confirm the Broker's whereabouts. From there on out, this would be a walk in the park.

After all, if the worst came to be, it was just him against an army of elite mercs, the most powerful yahg in the galaxy and a nebulous organization with the guts to try and murder a Spectre. With those odds, his enemies hardly stood a chance, right?

Morneau shook his head as he walked through the crowd towards the Final Wave headquarters.

That wasn't actually true.

He remembered Yegor's preaching.

No matter where he went, it was never just him.

Once the Shadow Broker's whereabouts where confirmed, he wasn't going to go in on his own as Solomon Gunn like he'd done for the last seven months.

He'd be Daniel Morneau again and Daniel Morneau had a team backing him up; the HSA.

He'd revise his previous plan, which had consisted of a lone infiltration, and consider the fact that he could call in reinforcements at any time. While it obviously couldn't be his opening move, an armada would make the Broker run, he was sure that there was a way that he could finish this mission with the aid of HSA forces instead of doing it all by himself like he'd originally intended.

While that obviously didn't remove the danger he was in right now, it did eliminate some of the risk posed by the prospect of taking on an entire ship full of Broker agents.

With that in mind, it wasn't him against an army of elite mercs, the most powerful yahg in the galaxy and a nebulous organization with the guts to try and murder a Spectre.

It was those guys against the might of the HSA.

And with those odds, they really did not stand a chance.

The smirk plastered on his face at that realization lasted for as long as it took him to reach the entrance of his working building.

He was looking forward to this. This would be fun as well.


13. April 2417 AD, 'Uncharted Regions', Planet H342-June-2378

Vega squinted as the Lystheni ship lifted off and blew a cloud of dust at his guard post, realizing that his assessment from six days ago had come true. The freshly-minted separatist was now half-asleep in his chair as well and he had clearly settled into a comfortable 'nothing ever happens here' attitude, which was ironic since he'd criticized this mindset just a week ago. He threw one look as the glowing engines of the ship vanished into the dark night and then once more tried to get some well-deserved sleep during guard duty.

As he'd done often in the last couple of days, James spent the time before falling asleep with telling himself that everything about this was normal and that there was nothing on June to worry about, except for the aerial predators that Horizon Company seemed to have thinned out to the point of them being a non-issue. There hadn't been an attack or even a sighting in two days now, hence the only fight he had to fight was the one between himself and that damned mural.

With his eyes closed, James went about the process of telling himself the same story he'd spent perfecting over the last five nights.

While his brief glimpse at the mural depicting the ship that had attacked Eden Prime and the Citadel had riled James up, the HSA deserter had come to the conclusion that whatever the IFS had dug up down in the canyon couldn't possibly be related to the vessel from two years ago. After some deliberation and a good part of the units poorly hidden alcohol stash, which their superiors knew about but still tolerated - a farcry from what HSA officers would've done - , James had decided that this was all just a huge coincidence that had led to his mind, and his PTSD, playing a trick on him. The ship had looked like a huge squid and the remnant of the mural, which he'd really only caught a brief glimpse of if he was being honest with himself, had barely resembled that shape. In the literal heat of the moment - back then had been a particularly hot day on June - he'd mistaken its vague outlines for a clear depiction of the attacking ship and gone into a heat-induced flashback.

That was all there was to this.

There was no grand galactic conspiracy, no relation between the mural or the ships and most definitely nothing out of the ordinary on June. It was just a boring, disturbingly level sandbox that at one point or another served as the home of a species that made funky, vaguely squid-like murals.

It was just all a trick on his mind.

Right as James was about to fall asleep, an anomalous sound echoed through the canyon and reached the makeshift base of Horizon Company. For a split second, he believed the shrieking noise to be the call of one of the avian predators, or maybe some other kind of animal they didn't know about yet. But then his mind woke up and he registered that it artificial in nature – the security alarm.

His eyes shot open and he jumped too his feet way before his companion, who was still mumbling something in a sleepy voice. Vega gave him one good kick against the shin and turned to face the entrance to the canyon area. The gated fence was open and a pair of scientists in hazmat gear stood by its side, their helmets removed. In the dim light of the night, he couldn't be sure if it was dirt or blood that they were covered it, but one thing was clear from the get-go.

"This isn't a drill. Get the hell up," he told the separatist next to him before jumping from his guard tower, rifle in hand. His feet hit the sandy ground and he ran towards one of the IFS scientists, hoping to find answers. If they were under attack, the sooner they knew, the better. Since he seemed to be about the only alert member of Horizon Company, no one else beat him to the pair of scientists. Now that the was close enough, he could now tell that they were covered in both blood and dirt.

"What the hell happened down there?" he asked immediately while the alarm continued to blare.

One of the scientists, an older man with dark skin, exchanged a look with his companion, a younger man with a hint of Asian to his complexion. The two seemed out of it and exhausted, as if they'd just ran for their lives. Judging by the way they looked, that probably wasn't so far toff the truth. "Hey. Focus," Vega demanded. "What happened?"

"Damned if I know. One moment we're running geology tests and I turn away from the door for a second, next thing I know Samson stumbles out of the Blue Zone with half his throat ripped off. Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd say one of the tes-" the Asian one began before the older man hushed him sternly.

"There was something in the caves below the mural. It came from the part of the cave we call the Blue Zone and it attacked one of our team," the older scientist said before Vega realized that he was speaking to someone standing next to Vega instead of him. He turned his head and saw a figure in reddish-brown IFS armor that had a healthy coat of sand to it; one of the officers of Horizon Company. "We couldn't seal the lab entrance otherwise we would've ended up just like Samson. But we did manage to alert the other zones. They evacuated through their own exits," he explained. "Our labs and all of Blue Zone are still wide open though. You need to get down there and stop that thing before it damages anything vital," the scientist went on.

"Understood," the officer, a woman by the name of Lieutenant Carrington if Vega remembered correctly, nodded before pointing at him and then waving at the other six other separatist troopers who had collected behind the two of them. She didn't even seem to need to ask what the 'thing' was. That worried Vega. "You're all with me. We're going down there," she pushed down a button on the side of her helmet, activating her radio. Now Vega was hearing her double. "Captain Turanov," she began before gesturing for them to follow her down the stairs, "we've got a possible security breach in the lab. The Blue Zone was compromised. I'm leading a containment team in now." As he jumped down a flight of stairs, Vega took Carrington in for a second and got the impression that the woman knew exactly what the scientist had been trying to tell him before his older buddy had cut him off.

"Roger that, Carrington, I'm prepping the countermeasure. You've got twenty minutes. If I didn't hear from you by then, we're flooding the cave."

Vega narrowed his eyes while keeping in step with the other IFS troopers.

They would do what?

From where exactly did they plan to even get the water for something like that?

The squad of eight left the stairway that led down to the canyon and headed to the mural, which was once more revealed by the absence of the protective tarp. It was only now that Vega was seeing it up close and during the night that he realized that the stones it was made from were actually glowing and that its resemblance to the Eden Prime attacker couldn't be a coincidence. It was a perfect replication, there was just no other way to put it. Someone in the past had seen the same ship as him and made this mural, he was certain of it. Despite that certainty, he did not have time to dwell on the thought. Carrington was already ordering them to move forward before he understood the implications of his realization.

The IFS squad complied with the order and passed the mural. They followed a trail of dim-blue lights that had been tied to small rods which in turn had been punched into the sandy ground floor of the canyon right until they reached a cave entrance which had once been covered by a plastic tarp with a zipllock that was now lying on the ground. The researchers who had fled the cave had probably torn it open and loosened the fine rods that connected it to the cave and now it was blowing in the wind.

"Whatever you find in there, don't shoot to hesitate it," Carrington muttered while the soldiers of Horizon Company stacked up in front of the cave entrance.

Vega briefly thought about the Lieutenant's words and then realized how she'd twisted them; a sign of nervousness... not good, but still better than stuttering or not giving any orders at all. He took his position at the entrance.

From up here they could see a larger illuminated chamber that received moonlight from a hole in its ceiling and several much darker smaller tunnels connecting to it. The strangely well-rounded tunnels themselves were marked with several types of colored chemlights. Green, red, orange, white, yellow and finally, blue. Six paths, six zones, he guessed. Furthermore, they all had a slight violet glow to them parts of the mineral he'd seen being handed to the Lystheni, most likely.

"Especially not if it glows blue and looks like something straight out of a horror film," Carrington added, sending a chill down Vega's spine. Blue glowing monsters out of a horror movie. This was all feeling far too familiar now. He took his first step onto the rocky slope leading to the larger chamber and glanced at the blue marking lights they were now following. Out of all the fucking colors they could have picked it just had to be blue, hadn't it?

The formation of soldiers moved to the blue marked entrance and then entered the dark part of the cave with as much practice as could be expected from a mixture of deserters, separatist-trained rookies and oldtimers. There was a brush of a muzzle against a friendly's back here and an unchecked corner or poorly covered angle there. Since Vega was only used to working with well-trained and well-disciplined marines, every little mistake twisted his stomach. If Horizon Company was ever going to serve as anything other than sandbox guards or let alone help with liberating the Fringe Worlds, they'd have to do a lot of training.

Maybe he could make himself useful and talk to Carrington about that when they-

The sudden echo of a gunshot that illuminated the cave section with a brief blue flash tore James from his thoughts and made him instantly alert. Somewhere in the front of the formation, either on the 'two' or 'three' position of their line, someone had fired their gun into something at the darkness and then gone silent. Vega's first instinct was to dive for cover, which would have been the correct response if there was any cover to being with. But in addition to the fact that the round cave interior provided no cover, he realized that no one else was moving and that nothing was being fired back at them. He stood his ground and stayed in formation.

"Whoops. Sorry 'bout that," the shooter, his older companion from the guard tower, whistled. "Thought I saw something move in the darkness," he shone his flashlight to where he'd fired. One of the blue chemlights was now broken and dripping with luminescent paint. It was covering the wall in a dim-glowing paint and the rod it had been tied to had been cut in half. It might've been a shot at nothing, but god damn it was an impressive one. He had not expected the old timer to have the precision to shoot a small wooden stick in half at a range of twenty five meters, especially not with a gun that was bound to be even older than him.

"God fucking damn it!" Carrington roared angrily. "What did we talk about? Identify your target before you fire! You could've taken someone's head off from where you're standing." She was right, his accuracy set aside, his buddy had fired a live round past two of their comrades on a hunch. In the HSAMC that would've gotten him smoked for the next two weeks and the Army probably would've dragged him straight to the motor pool to spend the rest of his deployment catching exhaustion pipe air with plastic bags. Unlike the Corps, they had the manpower to afford stupid punishments like that.

The older soldier just offered a shrug. Meanwhile Vega wanted to point out that they really should get moving, especially after the gunshot had given away their position. "Like I said, I'm sorry-" the older grunt tried to apologize before once more lifting his gun and shining his flashlight at an empty spot in the cave up ahead, beyond where the paint was leaking. "Wowow. Alright. LT, I know you won't believe it, but this time I definitely saw something!" he called out, his gun darting from left to right and his face locked into a serious, determined expression.

All Vega could see from his position in the back of the formation was the sandy inside-wall of the round cave and a fraction of a larger room somewhere up ahead where a flashlight ray was shining onto something metallic.

"Then identify it," Carrington growled. Despite being the first in line - which was really a very poor position to have as an officer because the number one was the spot most likely to get lit up upon contact, which would effectively leave their squad without a leader – she didn't seem to have seen what had spooked his fellow guard.

"Hell, I don't know, it climbed on the ceiling and it looked like it had feathers and maybe some of the chemlights got stuck to its head," he began to describe before Vega noticed a silhouette appear on the wall next to the leaking paint.

"Hey! Stop right there!" Carrington shouted while Vega considered what he could see. The shadowy figure looked human and as soon as it stepped into the flashlight cone despite Carrington's orders, Vega's suspicion was confirmed. The person was an IFS scientist wearing one of the white hazmat suits and a large bloody gash was visible below his rib cage. A claw injury, Vega realized.

He'd been here before.

The scientist was stumbling and holding his side and despite not being anywhere close to him, Vega could tell that he was a goner as soon as he lifted his hand. No amount of medigel could plug that kind of hole or replace the huge piece of lung he was missing.

The formation of IFS soldiers seemed to be paralyzed by both their own confusion and the site of the injured man

"Help me. They got loos-" he tried to stutter but then, quicker than Vega could blink, something leapt at him from behind and struck him in the head. In the first moment, it reminded him of the creatures he'd seen on Eden Prime. Blue, cybernetic monstrosities that held only a rough resemblance to the humans they'd been made from.

But then he noticed the feathers on its arms, or rather wings , the tubes running through its body and the blue slit eyes of the thin, two meter tall creature that had pecked the scientist in the back of his head and was now screeching at them, showcasing a mixture of natural and cybernetic fangs.

That used to be one of the birds.

What the-

"Open fire!" Carrington ordered before he could make sense of what he was looking at. A mixture of older salarian mass accelerators - which the IFS had gotten their hands on after first contact - older human power weapons -which the IFSDF had produced themselves - and hybrid designs such as the ones Vega and Carrington were carrying began to pour rounds down at the creature. Their shots riddled it and the dead scientist with more holes and any of them could count. While guns to Vega's left and right clicked empty or beeped from overheating, Vega himself had only fired a single bullet before determining that the creature in front of them was already dead from Carrington's effort alone.

He watched as the soldiers reloaded or waited for their guns to be ready again and then spoke the question on everyone's mind. Even if he already knew a part of the answer thanks to watching the white-armored black-ops soldiers plug human bodies from large geth spikes back on Eden Prime, he wanted to hear the IFS's version of things.

"What the fuck is that," it came out less like a question and more like a demand.

Carrington turned her head to them despite the shrieking that was now coming from deeper in the cave. Of course this thing wasn't the only one of its kind. After the attack on their colony, the HSA had found hundreds of these monsters wandering around Eden Prime. They never came alone.

"Something dead that never should've gotten loose to begin with," she muttered before pointing the way they'd come and pulling out several outdated frag grenades. "Turn back and head out of the cave. We're not going any further," she reached for her radio.

"Captain Turanov, we've got a class one breach of the test subjects from Blue Zone. One terminated, an unknown number still one the loose. A recovery of the remaining science officers is unlikely to yield success," she was choosing her words carefully, just like you should when trying to convince a superior of something you knew they wouldn't like to hear. " I suggest we abort the twenty minute recovery period for remaining personal and initiate the purge immediately before any of these things get out. They could cause some real damage to the artifacts or our remaining equipment. There can't be more than ten people left in the cave and we've got backups of their findings. The remaining staff shouldn't have a problem with picking up where they left off."

There was a second of silence where nothing but the footsteps and the distant shrieking echoed through the cave.

Then their captain responded.

"Understood, LT. I'm not going to sacrifice the eight of you on the off chance some of the staff survived the test subjects. Get clear and seal the cave behind you. We'll pop the NTX canisters as soon as you're out. That should take care of any stragglers or anyone unfortunate enough to get caught by them," his response was nothing but an annoyed mutter and he seemed entirely unconcerned with the fact that he'd just talked about unleashing a neuro-toxin on their own allies to kill bird-creatures dwelling in a cave that obviously held the same kind of tech he'd seen on Eden Prime. Meanwhile Vega's eyes widened.

They hadn't been planning on flooding the cave with water.

They wanted to do it with NTX.

NTX was a military-grade nerve gas the HSA had used a hundred and fifty years ago to kill a particularly nasty and particularly large breed of animals on Amaterasu, which back then hadn't been called Amaterasu. They had been an insectoid species that had developed a habit of dragging human colonists into their burrows and then using them as living nests for their youths shortly after the first colonialization attempts on the worlds. When it had been discovered that all the burrows connected to a planted-spanning hive that was far too large to clear out, the HSA, in full pursuit of Amaterasu's resources, had cleared out the colonists. Then they had 'specifically developed' NTX to exterminate the entire population of creepy-crawlies, despite the protests of a part of the scientific community that was convinced that these bugs were actually intelligent creatures with a society of their own.

Once the gas had sufficiently killed everything living under Amaterasu's surface, they people in charge had ignited it to make the planet livable again and subsequently killed just about everything on the surface as well. 'An unforeseen consequence of the mass-deployment of the nerve agent' they had called it, but nutjobs and preservationists still held on to the believe that the HSA had simply used NTX's combustibility get rid of the pesky plant life that was covering up the mining sites.

Apparently, the inferno that had followed had lasted for the better part of two years and had been quite a sight to behold. It had even given Amaterasu its finalized name. As it would turn out ten years later, long after the HSA had gotten its mining deposits, 'specifically developed' had just been another way of saying 'taken it from the old JDI stockpile that we still hold onto just in case you ever get unruly to the point where we need nerve gas'. The public outcry about literally murdering an entire ecosystem in the name of profit had been big, yes, but the realization that the HSA had maintained weapon stockpiles dating back to the tumultuous era before Unification had been worse. It had been big enough to get the acting chancellor to resign and to make the HSA destroy the remaining NTX canisters and its formula immediately.

As far as the history of the HSA was concerned, this was a minor footnote and comparatively small-scale scandal, at least in face of the Fringe Wars. As such, it had slipped from the memory of most people not living on Amaterasu and wasn't to be found in any books outside of colonial history or environmental studies.

The whole incident had in fact become so insignificant that not a single person around who could positively identify the insects that had caused this mess to begin with. Apparently most information on the species had gotten lost sometime prior to the Fringe Wars through a bureaucratic mishap or two and what little preserved specimens or data remained of them in the labs build on Amaterasu after its infernal rebirth hadn't survived the IFS' defeat. It had gotten destroyed alongside all other actionable intel prior to the surrender of Amaterasu. That was the official version.

Vega called bullshit, obviously.

But he was unfortunately in the minority.

Amaterasu's history and the damage the HSA had done to the world and its people, even before the Fringe Wars, was mostly forgotten. Nowadays it was only known as a naval depot and the home of one of the deceased heroes of the battle of the Citadel, Gunnery Sergeant Ashley Williams. Granted, the fading of old memories was probably down to the fact that the HSA had actually gone through the trouble of fixing the damage it had caused to Amaterasu's biosphere. Fifty years after burning the planet to a crisp, they had imported plant and animal life from Earth and Terra Nova, tinkered with their genes a bit to make them adapted to Amaterasu and made the world a hint of green again, if only around the settlements that dotted the planet.

After that, just about anyone had been willing to forgive and forget.

Hell, he only knew about because he'd been deployed to Amaterasu twice before and been exposed to the lasting damage the burning had caused. When he'd been garrisoned on the world in the wake of the Skyllian Blitz, the colonists had still been protesting the fact that in addition to killing all the insects, the NTX deployment produced pockets where the deadly gas would spontaneously burst to the surface from some old burrow or cave that had been opened up by geological activity and kill some unfortunate bystanders. It was rare enough to not make the world uninhabitable but common enough o be a constant grievance for the miners.

He'd spent six months listening to daily protests in front of their barracks and back then all he could think about was how someone could not be happy about the fact that a murderous insect hive had gotten gassed. Then he'd heard about the spontaneous bursts of trapped NTX; seen what the bodies of the unfortunate miners had looked like and taken a hike outside of the green zones of Amaterasu's settlements. All it had taken for him to understand where their grievances came from was to see the edge of the 'Burn', the part of Amaterasu that the HSA had not bothered to heal.

From there on out he had understood and in retrospective, if Eden Prime hadn't kicked him out of the Corps, Amaterasu would've eventually achieved the same.

From what he'd heard the destruction of the remaining few stockpile of NTX had occurred by ejecting the canisters into a star with no inhabitable worlds in its orbit. Any terrestrial method of destroying it would've been too risky because just the smallest mistake or a single leaking canister of the stuff would've killed anyone it touched.

He probably shouldn't be surprised that NTX was still around.

Of course the HSA wouldn't just destroy a weapon like this.

They might still need it after all.

Vega felt his stomach twist again, despite the fact that he could already see the cave exit and the safety it brought.

While he wasn't surprised that the HSA hadn't destroyed the canisters, he still didn't like the idea of the IFS having them and using them against their own people. Even if the circumstances were as dire as this one, it felt wrong to use something like NTX.

These people were not an inch better than the HSA, were they?

Hell, whenever the HSA murdered their own, they at least had the decency to do it with orbital bombardment or artillery shells or fire bombs that incinerated someone in seconds instead of using nerve agents that killed you slowly and painfully.

He thought back to the dead Amaterasu miners.

Well. Not on purpose, at least.

He stepped into the light of the central cave. As did the rest of his squad. Carrington tossed a few of the frags down to where the shrieking was closing in on them and then guided her unit to the proper exit of the cave. On Carrington's orders they sealed the entrance behind them by the use of the plastic tarp, which he somehow doubted would stop the NTX, and then climbed up the stairs in silence to set up overwatch. In Carrington's words, this was just in case one of the birds survived the purge or one of the scientists stumbled out and had to be put out of his misery because a hazmat suit would probably not protect from highly-concentrated NTX.

He threw a glance at the mural while keeping his muzzle trained on the closed-up cave.

What the fuck had he gotten himself involved in?


14. April 2417 AD, Cronos Station

"Project Group Insight," Redford read out loud after being handed a tablet by Director Rei. "Well if that isn't the most ominous name I've ever heard," he cracked a grin that would've made other people mistake him for the exact opposite of the true professional that he was. "Did Morneau come up with that name?" he asked. Before Rei could answer, Redford went on. "If he did, give him my best and tell him that it sounds like something I'd pick and that I'm proud that he finally developed a sense of humor thirteen years down the road."

"No, that's the name they use to refer to themselves," Rei responded with a crooked eyebrow. "I'm afraid you did not manage to pass on your wits to the next generation."

"And that, in my opinion, is truly the biggest injustice of our time," he sighed, casually quoting a moment that had defined Fringe World history. He straightened up in his chair and nudged his head to the right. "Okay. Let's get one thing out of the way. I don't know what I'm about to read and I don't know what kinds of fucked up shit these wankers are up to, but I'll give them that. They sure as hell know how to name a conspiracy. Insight. Bloody amazing name," he went on before beginning to read. The Section 13 director disagreed with that sentiment since he found it to be a rather boring name, but since they weren't here to discuss Insight's naming abilities, he chose not to say that out loud. Instead Rei looked at the sandy-haired specialist and the focus with which he stared at the tablet.

If he'd finally just drop the silly act, Lal Qila could be a prime candidate to pick up the torch when he retired. He was old enough to have fully understood what their work was about and what it took to lead Section 13 but young enough to still keep the position for a time that would allow him to have an impact and to refrain from being deemed as part of 'the old guard'.

All he had to do to make the decision final in Rei's eyes was to become presentable to people like the Chancellor. It was such a simple change. A drop of the Arcadian accent here, a little less of the words 'bloody' and 'mate' there, and he'd be a shining example of a senior HSAIS field operative.

But knowing Lal Qila, that probably wouldn't happen in this lifetime.

Or the one after.

Or ever.

Rei sighed and leaned back in his chair, hoping that bringing Redford back from Arcturus had been the right decision. He hated to draw him off his current assignment and break Redford's focus on the objective he'd pursued ever since the Citadel incident, it was after all nothing less than determining if the HSA's leadership had already been compromised by indoctrination. By all means, and the opinion of HSAIS' chief director, Redford's current assignment should take priority over the little piece of intel he was reading right now.

But if Rei's hunch was right, which unfortunately was the case most of the time, and the group Redford's former trainee had dug up was exactly what he feared it to be, namely a human faction within the HSA working alongside the Shadow Broker to destabilize the HSA for one reason or another – probably the Reapers – then he might not have just thrown away the surveillance of the integrity of their government for no reason whatsoever. Instead, he might have actually found the missing piece.

"I realize that neither the intel Specialist Morneau provided, nor the fact that they tried to assassinate Lieutenant Commander Shepard," Redford peaked up at the mention of his niece's name, "is enough to identify a clear existential threat, especially not while you're focused on a much more clear and present danger in form of the Reapers," he trailed off when Redford looked up from the tablet.

"But this might just be what I was looking for."

"Exactly."

The two years Redford had spent creeping around the high echelons of Arcturus as a 'governmental advisor' from HSAIS had yielded no results up to now. He'd turned just about every Arcturus official into a person of glass, at least from the perspective of Section 13, yet all he could present in terms of compromised governments was the head of the military police detachment on Arcturus had a serious drinking problem as soon as she put off her uniform, that Goyle's secretary had an affair with Goyle's ehad of security, that the General of the Army had in fact not parted from his questionable views on the extend of which the HSA controlled their biotics and all other kinds of personality flaws with the staff of the station.

But that was it. The dirty secrets of Arcturus that HSAIS was not involved in amounted to personal failings of human beings.

If Redford hadn't missed anything, which Rei doubted he had, that would by all accounts be fantastic news. It meant that there were no indoctrinated agents within the HSA government and it also lend some credibility to the hope filled believe that maybe the Reapers weren't as close to an invasion after all.

'Surely they would've undermined their government and shown their hand if they were as close as Jack feared, no?' That was the narrative that the naïve and long-silenced part of Rei -and anyone else who knew about the Reaper threat - wanted to believe. It was a welcome escape from the bleak reality of having to face a galactic genocide inside the next year or so that his former partner turned Director of Cerberus was forcing on everyone these days.

It allowed them to say that Jack Harper was the paranoid one and that they were right instead of admitting that his friend was the only one who could see what was headed their way and come to terms with the fact that they were wrong.

Many people outside of Cerberus and their allies among the Council nations bought into that logic and the two-year gap between Sovereign's attack and today in which not a single sign of Reaper activity had surfaced was all the proof these people would ever need to continue to ignore Jack's warnings and call him paranoid.

But he obviously knew better than that.

As did Redford.

Harper was right and the writing was all over the wall; the developments in Hegemony Space, the Collector attacks, the geth incursions, the increasingly volatile situation in the Terminus. It all painted a clear picture. Something was coming for them and threads that were decades, maybe even centuries, in the making were now being pulled by their masters. The stage for their execution was being constructed in front of their noses and everyone outside a select group of properly-paranoid individuals was too blind and too scared to see it.

But not them.

Despite two years of not finding what they were looking for, neither of them spent even a second doubting Redford's mission or believing that the lack of evidence that he had found up to now was proof of there not being a threat to the Arcturus administration. Instead, they'd concluded that what Redford was looking for was hidden so perfectly that it would not be possible for anyone to discover it until the very moment it sprung into action. That was how indoctrination worked, it created the perfect network of sleeper agents. And that was what made it so damn dangerous.

"You're right, this really isn't a lot to go by," Redford muttered.

"But you'll manage?" Rei guessed.

"Always do."

"If it's any consolation, Specialist Morneau did mention that he intends to question the Shadow Broker on the subject if he gets the chance," Rei replied, prompting Redford to snort.

"That's a big if."

"Don't tell me you suddenly think your former trainee is incapable of detaining the Shadow Broker alive."

"I'm not doubting his skills," Redford said with a shrug. "I just know him."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that I wouldn't hold out hope for even the Broker's ship to survive the attack. Knowing Morneau's luck, this is not going to end without a big-ass explosion, a lot of Broker-bits spattered all over the Hagalaz and another Terminus bounty on his head. Bloody hell, if he gets really unlucky he might just accidentally start another merc war or something along those lines. That's just how things go for him. He's a shit-magnet, no other word to put it. Just look at the Citadel, or Noveria, or Omega, or Bekenstein. And that's just the last couple of years."

Now it was Rei's time to snort in amusement.

"What?" Redford said.

"You realise that it's pretty rich for you to call someone a shit-magnet, don't you, Redford?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"One word. Illium," he began. "Some other words, Omega. Arcturus. Illium-the-second, the Citadel, the HSASV Makalu," he continued, "and that's just the really big ones," he smirked.

"Okay, I get the concept," Redford injected. "There were some minor slip-ups on my otherwise spotless track record."

"Minor? The Nos Astra Police Department still has a specialized investigative division with the sole purpose of tracking you down for the property damage you caused back then and I'm pretty sure there's a poster of your face hanging in front of the Afterlife banning you from entering for life. Also, Aria T'Loak might have a personal vendetta against you."

"Well, I was never the Illium or Omega guy to begin with," he shrugged before locking the tablet. "For my eyes?"

"Yes, you can keep it. It's locked to your bio-signature anyways," he confirmed, ignoring Redford's attempt to get out of this summary of his exploits. "Face it. As far as haywire ops go, you top the list. Same for bounties. So if anything, Morneau is just trying to follow in your footsteps."

"And that fills me with pride. If only he'd have my wits too, then he'd be the perfect student," Redford said with a snap of his finger, clearly forgetting the fact that he hadn't taken a trainee before or after Morneau because he 'needed to focus his attention on the one he'd jinxed'. Rei had allowed it, if only because he was worried if Section 13 could handle another specialist imprinted by Lal Qila without every op turning into an Illium and the word 'clandestine operations' being removed from their mission profile.

Then the tall blonde specialist rose to his feet and returned to his serious demeanor. With him it was like flicking a switch. He could fool around and make you think he had his head in the clouds in one second and then he'd be back to being a seasoned operative who could humbly claim to have been present for just about all of Section 13's significant moments since the Fringe Wars. "I'll take a look at this on my way back to Arcturus. Send anything that has Insight on it my way. I can manage the extra work."

"I'm sure you can," Rei nodded confidently as he watched the specialist leave and dropped the confident look on his face only when the door closed behind him. He just wasn't sure that there'd be enough time to act accordingly.

Rei really wanted Jack to be wrong.

But Jack never was.


Codex: Tayseri Ripper

The Tayseri Ripper is the nickname given to Jackol Hrodt, a vigilante serial killer of krogan origin who was active onboard of the Citadel from 2410 to 2415 AD. In the span of five years, Jackol Hrodt, a mercenary turned security contractor and bodyguard, is believed to have murdered at least 117 people belonging to the criminal underworld of the Citadel wards. His main killing ground was the Tayseri Ward, hence the name Tayseri Ripper, and he was only identified by C-SEC after his death in the attack on the Citadel by the rogue Spectre Saren Arterius. Because of this Jackol Hrodt belongs to the small list of murderers who managed to avoid C-SEC until the end of their life.

While the motive of Jackol Hrodt was never determined with certainty, information provided to C-SEC by the anonymous source that led to his identification in the first place suggests that the krogan acted in response to being denied entry into the paramilitary Terminus-based 'Blue Suns'. The investigative team, with the exception of retired Senior Detective Palaris Attrako, ruled that in an attempt to 'prove his worth to the Suns' Jackol Hrodt began his own crusade against crime on the Citadel, hunting down people that he dealt with in his previous profession as a mercenary.

Although Jackol Hrodt was not identified by C-SEC until after his death, his resume of being a mercenary who 'went straight' and tried to join the Blue Suns matched a part of the profile C-SEC created for the Tayseri Ripper.

(The following are selected excerpts from 'The Unbelievable Hunt for the Tayseri Ripper – Five Years, five hundred million credits, zero results and a suspect still- at-large' by Senior Detective (ret.) Palaris Attrako; 2416 AD)

Due to the precision and military-esque swift execution of the Ripper's murders, which at times included entire groups of armed and wanted criminals, we always believed that he was a highly experienced and highly trained individual with a skillset not obtainable by a civilian.

After the first killings happened and the first group murder occurred in Tayseri, we immediately knew this guy was different. A normal Citadel inhabitant doesn't walk into a club and guns down six fugitive mercs without hitting any of the twenty other bystanders. They just don't. As soon as the autopsy results came in, we were sure that our perp had been in the military or received tactical training from a paramilitary group or a law-enforcement agency. The shot groupings were just too clean to be luck and the killings that followed just confirmed that the Hiro's Heavens Club Shooting wasn't the exception. Whenever the Ripper killed someone, he did it with a precision that we could only replicate or understand by putting our Special Response officers on the scene and having them replicate the shooting.

(…

….

…)

Additionally to his precision, the law enforcement hypothesis gained a lot of track when we realized that every victim he claimed was involved with the criminal underworld. While that obviously could've meant that he was a hitman working for the underworld, the fact that every last killing we could attribute to the Ripper involved a criminal victim made us skeptical. Hitmen take out innocent people as well and as soon as he crossed the 20 out of 20 or 30 out of 30 threshold, we knew that it couldn't be a coincidence. This guy was hunting the same game as we were and that made some officers wonder why we should even stop him. But not me or the other investigators.

A murder is a murder, no matter who the victim was.

(…

….

…)

I'll admit one thing.

I never pictured a krogan merc who wanted to be a Sun and neither did the rest of the team.

In fact after replicating the Hiro's Heavens Club Shooting and some other crime scenes, we almost exclusively spent our time looking at members of our own Special Response teams, spec-ops personal commuting across Council Space from the Citadel or retired vets with a spec-op background. It was just unlikely that anyone outside of those groups could've pulled off the things the Ripper did. When we had narrowed the profile down to a type, we went through every hypothesis in the book regarding our culprit. We considered a lone wolf, we considered an entire team of vigilantes, we considered a black ops outfit. Spirits, I even spent a month interrogating four SR officers who managed to perfectly replicate six out of seven group murders. Yes. You read that right. I spent four weeks believing that the same officers we were holding on stand-by to arrest the Ripper were the ones behind the killings.

In case it hasn't been made clear at this point, I was certain when it came to the spec-ops hypothesis and even if everyone thinks that Hrodt did it and that the Ripper's dead and gone, I refuse to accept that we were wrong. We were the best homicide officers in the galaxy and no matter how damning the evidence against Hrodt is, there's no way he could possibly pull off half the things the Ripper did.

I don't care that the others cracked to the politicians.

The Ripper's out there.

And I'll keep looking.

Oh, and on the off-chance that you are reading this (which my profile of you says you will.) I just want you to know one thing: I will find you and I will bring you in, even if it's the last thing I ever do.

(End of Excerpts)

Despite the doubts voiced by the head of the investigation and the continued number of unsolved killings among the Citadel Underworld, the official statement of C-SEC on the case of the Tayseri Ripper remains that Jackol Hrodt was the culprit and that the case is closed.

Notions of the possibility that an elite operative of the Blue Suns is active on the Citadel and responsible for these murders or that the Tayseri Ripper is none other than a Spectre operative, who C-SEC would not be able to detain even if they were to identify him, have been shot down. Similarly, the claims that the case of the Tayseri Ripper could be the product of an STG operation or some other clandestine service have also been dismissed.

A public inquiry of the possibility of the Citadel-native Keepers plotting a rebellion or secretly having raised an army of supersoldiers within the interior of the Citadel that was responsible for the murders has also been dismissed as 'ludicrous'.


A/N:

Happy fourth anniversary guys!

Yup.

That's right.

SV is now officialy four years old and to celebrate that, you just got the biggest chapter ever. . .

which does not have a whole lot of stuff happening in it.

Despite the occiassion, this is pretty much one of the famous set up chapters this story has oh so many of.

We get a bit of shepard, we get a bit of geth, we get a bit of morneau, we get a lot of vega nad we finally get some Redford (who is back just in time for the four year mark, yay! God I missed writing that guy)

In case you weren't able to figure it out, yes, the implication is obviously that the HSA kind of murdered some wild rachni that survivded the war and then covered it up when they realised they just stumbled upon possibly sapient alien creatures and subsequently genocided the shit out of them. What can I say... shit happens ? :D

Lets just be glad no one besides Wrex remembers what rachni look like, ay ? :P

This codex entry is really just... some fun writing. Unlike usually, there's not something you should pick out from it or expect things to come back from it. Let's just say it... serves to make you notice that crime is something that happens in the SV-Verse (oh god what could he mean by that?! Stay tuned, even if I already told everyone what this is about)

Other than saying that we are gonna get some tali soon and then finish up the Shadow Broker arc and note that I feel like the plot strands are slowly coming together, I don't have a whole lot to put here.

So I wont

review and let me know what oyu think.

For the record we're at 743 reviews, 1158 favorites and 1250 follows.

See you around next time.