Legerdemain – Jondum Bau
–
The kuibask gave a sharp tug and rolled and its opponent's arm peeled off like a shed garment. Blood droplets sizzled on kinetic barriers half a meter from where the ambassadors dined. There was a chorus of politely-interested oooohs, a smattering of applause, the clink of dinnerware.
"You look anxious, Spectre Bau. I am sure no one will take offense if you need to step out for a lungful of cold air."
Jondum Bau looked up from the stage. His host's smile bared needle teeth in what Jondum suspected was an intentionally insincere look of concern. Four eyes scanned Jondum's face for reaction.
Jondum gave him none. "I am very well, thank you Pilota," he said, carefully wiping his mouth with the corner of one of the edible reed napkins in which many of the fancier batarian dishes came wrapped. He took a sip from his glass of brellafruit liquor and looked down into the arena, where the kuibask was tearing at the body of a batarian. "I should think they won't have the numbers to finish it now," he observed. The match – the ninth of the day – had been two kuibasks versus twenty or thirty unarmed prisoners. To their credit, the prisoners had managed to swarm one of the beasts down with the bulk of their numbers, but it had cost them too many lives and now the last few were being torn through one by one.
"Offworlders can be sensitive, Spectre Bau."
"Spectres cannot be."
"Hmm." Pilota grunted. By and large Pilota and the other batarian dignitaries were not much impressed by Jondum's Spectre status – being exempt from most Citadel laws didn't mean much on a planet that denied the Council's authority entirely. Nonetheless they seemed to make a point of calling him 'Spectre Bau' at every opportunity, as if to remind him that they knew who he was.
Down below the last prisoner died and there was a new wave of perfunctory applause before the surviving kuibask was dispatched with a harpoon. Slaves emerged from hidden doorways with mops and buckets and hoses to clean the arena for the next bout. In the observation boxes, plates were cleared away to be replaced with yet another course of rich food. A slave made the rounds with a gilded tray of smoldering boama cigars, and Jondum took advantage of Pilota's momentary distraction. The implant within Jondum's left eye translated his eye movements into a coded message.
::Primary bug placed? Secondary bug placed?::
It took more than a minute – turians did not have the eye control to communicate with ocular implants – but eventually Vormus' reply appeared across Jondum's cornea.
::Confirmed. Confirmed.::
Jondum nodded. Something was getting done, at least. Out of intellectual curiosity he idly nibbled at the newest dish that had been placed before him – yet another variety of fried root crop – and found it too astringent for his tastes. A salarian could live on batarian cuisine indefinitely – the STG had tested as much, of course – but he wouldn't enjoy it.
Pilota puffed indulgently on his chosen cigar and looked over to Jondum again. "You still look anxious, Spectre Bau," he said. "Do you not have games on Sur'Kesh?"
"None half so grand as these," Jondum said.
In fact he was finding all the bloodsport tedious, but it did not do to say so. They had been at it most of the day, feasting and watching beasts and gladiators and prisoners die. There had been less violent presentations too, to be fair – in between bouts there had been dances, music, a historical reenactment of the Thousand Years of Might, a demonstration by Khar'shan's foremost sand artists – but the bulk of the entertainment the batarians had prepared for their guests was as gratuitously violent as possible. Almost as soon as the Citadel emissaries had arrived they had been shepherded into the arena to watch two varren fight. Then the surviving beast was slain by a Thuladeski coonacbird, which was in turn killed by a gladiator with a harpoon gun. Three shivering batarian slaves were set upon by a qoh'col gladiator, who promptly cut them to pieces with a short sword. Then more varren, more slaves, a few captured poachers, a dissident. A half-starved Tuchankan athak tore apart a team of spear-wielding hunters. An alpha varren was skinned in mid arena by a brightly tattooed female batarian.
With every new gruesome display Jondum and the emissaries were obliged to clap and cheer and pretend they had never been more entertained. Everyone played their part in the farce.
Jondum was no diplomat, but it did not take a seasoned diplomat to understand exactly what the batarians were trying to communicate.
Look what we do to prisoners, they were saying.
Look how much fun we have doing it.
Look what we'll do to Shepard if we don't get what we want.
–
Another menagerie of misfortunate animals and even-more-misfortunate batarians died before, finally, the talks could begin in earnest. The emissaries were led to a campus of apartments that had been prepared for them inside of one of Thumata's wealthier districts.
Pride of place went to the Council's head diplomats Turani Sethyete, Ansandira T'gonne, and Niara Ni. All three were asari selected from Councilor Tevos' personal staff, judged to be more palatable to the batarians than turians, salarians, or humans, and made more palatable still with grandly opulent gold and brown garb inspired by Khar'shishi fashions. Whether because of the flattery of their wardrobe choice or the relatively great proportion of blue skin it still left visible, the three had received no shortage of gracious attention from the Hegemony princes. Each was given her own miniature palace, replete with heated pools and atmospheric fields and an army of servants to attend to her and her staff.
No wise dalatrass ever laid eggs in only one pond, however, and so aside from the three asari, the Council had also sent a small delegation of turians who, it was hoped, would lend legitimacy to any military matters that needed to be discussed. Their leader Serellis Sparatus – elder brother to the turian councilor – had a suite to himself, while the others shared a cluster of apartments.
Last of the official delegations were the representatives from the Systems Alliance, though their entourage had been intentionally limited to just a few marines and largely excluded from mention in the various scripted peace overtures made by the head diplomats. Even they had been afforded a wing of comfortable apartments to themselves, and three hours of careful scrutiny by Vormus and his staff had not turned up a single booby trap.
The first peace mission to Khar'shan in decades had come about only after considerable hand-wringing, but in the end the batarians had greeted asari, turian, and human alike with unctuous smiles and declarations of eternal friendship. Jondum had seen the young human ambassador Osoba plucked off the floor and wrapped in a crushing hug by one of his batarian opposites. Batarians bowed and scraped and attested to how regretful they were that relations had been left to go so sour for so long, and how hopeful they were of a new and mutually beneficial treaty. In return the Citadel and Alliance diplomats had expressed the magnitude of their sorrow for the Hegemony's recent problems.
It was all very civil.
Jondum knew better than to trust it.
Vormus felt much the same, and when the two of them had finally managed to get everyone in the party where they were supposed to go, the turian wore a harried look on his beaked face. He handed Jondum a datapad, and Jondum made a show of reading its contents as he peeled the tiny OSD attached to its back off and palmed it. With a bit of legerdemain he'd secreted it into one of the many hidden compartments in his armor for later review.
"Very good," Jondum said, handing back the datapad. "Did you enjoy the meal?" he asked aloud.
::Trouble?:: he asked with a gesture of his eyes.
"No."
Jondum nodded. "I checked the west entrance," he said. "Two guards there will suffice."
"I'll put three," Vormus said.
"As you like."
"These… politicians," Vormus groused, and Jondum knew him well enough to know that he had only omitted the word 'fucking' because there were batarians in earshot. "If we get through the night without one of them killing themselves, I'll spit a gizzard stone." The turian's mandibles flickered in irritation. "The actor doesn't want to wear his wristband. Informed me that he's here by invitation and doesn't have to obey security like everybody else."
The human actor Andre Kaygn had managed to insinuate himself amongst the diplomats by virtue of his unusual friendship with the recently deceased Grand Scion of the Hegemony Prince Shilik'ash, and had been doing his best to make the peace summit about him for weeks. He claimed credit for convincing the batarians to allow the summit at all, but of course no one with any sense believed that. Shilik'ash had died in the Tunghusk explosion and the new Hegemony that had congealed in the power vacuum he left behind had clearly not decided how much to cast themselves as a continuation of the previous regime.
"He informed me that I was 'literally Saren' when I insisted," Vormus continued.
"Ahh… There is some slight resemblance, now that I look again."
Vormus gave Jondum a withering glare, for as poor as Agent Arterius' reputation had become in the galaxy at large, the hate for him among the strain of middle-aged ex-Hierarchy turian to which Vormus belonged was something altogether more intense. "I am not g-"
"Be calm, my friend," Jondum interrupted, holding his hands up. His own wristband dangled from his left wrist. "I jest. You are not him."
"The human can wear his wristband as a bracelet or he can wear it as a suppository," Vormus insisted.
Jondum chose not to point out that that was precisely the attitude Agent Arterius would have adopted.
Jondum had known Agent Arterius in passing, and for his part had never grasped the galaxy's acrimony for him. The turian had certainly been a brutal and cruel person – not at all someone you would want as a friend or mentor – but he was shrewd, capable, decisive, intelligent. The turians resented Agent Arterius for having broken the rules, but the entire point of the Spectre program hinged on the idea that there were times when rules should be broken. There was no point in hiring decent, law-abiding people to be Spectres.
Spectres had to do things that such people could not do.
"If Mister Kaygn dies on this visit, it is probably better for it to be at your hands than at our hosts'," Jondum said. "Less clerical work afterwards."
"Even less if you do it," Vormus pointed out.
"True. But let us try to keep him alive." He gestured to Pilota, waiting nearby – just close enough to feign politeness while listening to Jondum's conversation. "Let us begin," Jondum said.
The batarian finished off the last few bites on the previously heavily laden plate he had stolen from the dining room and traded it to a slave for another cigar. "This way," he grunted, smoke curling from his many nostrils.
Jondum fixed Vormus with an expectant stare on his way out of the room. "I am leaving things in your capable grip," he said. "I expect to return before morning. See that things stay safe until I do."
Vormus nodded. "See that you stay safe, sir," he said.
–
Jondum and Pilota were soon in a hovercar speeding overtop dark city buildings. The vehicle's climate control kept the outside's chilly air at bay, even half a continent away it could not conceal the omnipresent smell of smoke from the firestorms at Tunghusk.
Jondum watched Thumata city sweep by his window, noting everything he saw and recording much that he did not. Several of his cameras had been confiscated along with his guns on first landing, but the searchers had not been nearly thorough enough to find all of either. A dart launcher remained expertly concealed within the clasp of his left elbowpad, primed to fire and loaded with enough neurotoxin to put down an elcor in the blink of an eye.
Still, the vulnerability of Jondum's position was not lost on him. Alone, on secret assignment, in a city of batarians. Even his would-be escort was a danger: Lesser Minister Pilota was dressed in the crisp white tunic of a minor Hegemony official, but the sharpness of his outfit did little to disguise the roughness of a career soldier and spy from Jondum's practiced eyes. The fingers of Pilota's left hand bore the tell-tale calluses of a lifetime of holding a weapon, he never let anyone stand between him and a room's door, and when he had stepped past the threshold of one of the shield envelopes that protected the meeting chambers, Jondum had heard him reflexively hold his breath – the habit of someone well-used to wearing kinetic barriers.
This was not to suggest that Pilota was ill suited as a minister, for Jondum had found the batarian personable and diligent and utterly attentive to his needs. He had shown Jondum around the fortress where the diplomats would be staying so he could inspect the security measures in place, had arranged meals and accommodations for Jondum's assistants. He had volunteered friendly tales of his wives Balatha and Kur'a and his children, and when Jondum had expressed curiosity about a spiked steel dueling gauntlet on display in the foyer outside of the living quarters, he had insisted on making the Spectre a gift of it.
But he had also not let Jondum out of his sight. He was there to assist, yes, but also to watch.
They landed on a private landing pad on a palace dominating the opposite side of the city. Stone faced guards looked on as Pilota led Jondum past lavishly textured buildings, every one spotless and covered from base to beam in opulence. As they descended into the palace materials changed, so that every room carried a new marvel to eclipse the ones before it. One great hall was made of black stone covered in intricate carvings. The next was built entirely out of structurally-colored iridescent red cirrussteel so vibrant they made Jondum blink.
Then, very suddenly, they went through a hidden door and the look changed to mossy brown rock and steel. They travelled through a corridor with ceilings so low Jondum had to crouch, and that seemed to descend ever lower into the ground.
Finally they came to the prison, more ancient by far and far less well maintained than the parts of the palace above ground. Here there was no need to project an image of perfection, for anyone who witnessed this part of the palace was not likely to surface again.
This is where they found Agent Shepard.
The first human Spectre shared a single long cell with perhaps a hundred batarians, all beaten and defeated and shrinking away from the slightest movement. They crowded hip to hip on stone benches, clad only in ragged togas.
"Arowat! Away!" Pilota shouted, slamming on the bars with one heavy fist. The prisoners wilted at the noise. Pilota pointed a finger at Shepard and another older human man. "Humans, come here and speak! Visitor!" He gestured to Jondum.
The two humans rose unsteadily to their feet – Jondum noted with some interest that several of their batarian cellmates rose as well to assist Shepard. Shepard's face hairs had been left to grow, and showed just a hint of the paleness that Jondum knew to be a sign of advancing maturity in his species. Still he was nearly double Jondum's age, and might live three times as long.
Or he would have, anyway.
Jondum stroked his chin. "You've tortured him?" he asked Pilota, and pointed to Agent Shepard's arm, which was covered in half-healed burns.
Pilota furrowed his four brows for a moment, then his face split into a slimy smile. "Tortured? No, no. No torture, Agent Bau. Those are identification marks we use to keep track of prisoners."
"Ahh," Jondum said, nodding. "So I see." Indeed Agent Shepard's burns formed letters – Shepard was prisoner number Golka-Tunat-Tunat-Gomrill – but apparently the batarians were exceptionally concerned with the risk of misidentification, for they had seen fit to burn the brand into Shepard's arm in ten separate places.
Pilota looked immensely pleased with himself. "The Council can hardly resent us for practicing our due organizational diligence."
Jondum sighed. "Of course." He met Agent Shepard's eyes – the man was filthy and exhausted, but aside from the burns, Jondum could see no major injuries, nor had the batarians starved him too severely. The human's eyes were bright and determined. "I would like to have a moment to confer with Agent Shepard and his companion in private."
Pilota pounded on the cage walls again. "Arowat!" he snarled again. "To the back of the cell, now, all of you! Spectre needs to talk! Arowat!" The batarian prisoners scrambled to the far end of the cell and packed themselves even tighter together, facing the rear corner. When they were sufficiently compressed, Pilota gave a satisfied nod.
Jondum stared wordlessly at the batarian until he frowned and excused himself back the way they had come. Finally they were alone, or near enough.
"Agent Shepard," Jondum said, calmly removing the listening bug he'd spied beneath the cell door latch and the second one the shuttle pilot had stuck to his pauldron under the guise of checking his safety belts. He disabled them both with a quick pulse from his omni-tool and pocketed their remains. "It is lovely to meet you, despite the circumstances." He extended a hand through the bars to shake Shepard's – a human gesture which he had practiced at some length in preparation for the mission. Right hand. Not too tight, not too loose, ensure full hand engagement. Maintain eye contact. Shake limb one to three times. As he understood it, there was an art to it that non-humans rarely mastered.
Shepard looked confused by the greeting.
"It was my hope that we would eventually cross paths," Jondum said, smiling. "I am an admirer of your work. I am Jondum Bau, an agent of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance."
"A Spectre?" A flicker of hope crossed Agent Shepard's face.
"Indeed. Incidentally, I wish to stress that despite my surname, I am unaffiliated with the Bau family on Jaeto, and also with the Lutabau family on Sur'Kesh. I'm a free agent, unimprinted and fully committed to the Citadel Council. You'll have no worries of conflict of interest on my account."
"That's… good. Why are you here?"
"I was sent here in accompaniment of a Council peace delegation to the Hegemony. But not in fact."
The elderly human standing behind Agent Shepard gave an annoyed grunt. "He's here to close your mouth, Shepard," he said, as if it were obvious. He made a gesture of pulling the trigger of an imaginary pistol pressed up against the back of Shepard's head. By his appearance the man could only be Zaeed Massani, who had been described in some detail in the reports Mordin Solus had made during his time on the Normandy SR2.
Now a look of alarm crossed Agent Shepard's face, and he stepped back from the bars.
"I was tasked to assess the security risk you posed to Council interests," Jondum agreed. "If the ambassadors should fail to convince the Hegemony to extradite you – admittedly a likelihood – I am to ensure you do not remain in their custody. I have leave to decide by which route you depart. But do not be concerned – the Council emphasized to me that they would prefer you alive."
"They're in a rare mood, then," Zaeed said. "Didn't you lot leave him out to dry once already?"
"Shut up, Zaeed," Agent Shepard said, frowning. "Listen. Bau. The Council needs to know what happened here."
"Agreed," Jondum said. He lined up his elbow-mounted dart launcher. "Tell me."
"I was here for good reason. Zaeed and I came here as infiltrators in a Cerberus smash and grab op. They were after something, something big. We tried to stop them, but the mission went wrong – very wrong."
"Hence the explosion."
"Hence the explosion. But there are two Cerberus agents still on this planet with a piece of Reapertech that cannot get off this planet."
"Two more humans?"
"They may have died in the blast, but the fate of the galaxy might depend upon you making sure of it."
Ahh yes, 'Reapers'. Jondum had read the files. "I see…"
Shepard's face grew fierce. "You don't believe me either."
"Not fully," Jondum admitted. "But… enough. Who else have you told this to?"
"Everyone. Everyone, Jondum. Every guard, every prisoner. Everyone I've seen. Something has to be done. I don't care if the Council wants to keep it secret. Kill me, if that's what you have to do, but find them."
–
The purpose of a Spectre was to break rules, and a Spectre who never did was not doing their job.
But precisely which rules to break was up to the agent in question.
Some Spectres threw people out of windows. Some Spectres took it upon themselves to decide the fates of entire species. Some Spectres were satisfied just to scare everyone around them into following along.
Jondum was a Spectre who was proud to do the bulk of his work with a datapad in hand rather than a gun. He was certainly a capable enough fighter when the situation demanded it – like all salarian Spectre candidates, he had undergone a rigorous training regimen with the Special Tasks Group – but it struck him as a waste of his considerable talents. If all he was going to do with his special status was pull a trigger, he had no basis for occupying a spot that might otherwise go to a member of a species that liked doing it.
The galaxy had need of superelite killers, of course, but that was what turian Spectres were for.
What salarian Spectres were for involved a… subtler approach.
Jondum spent the days on Khar'shan writing three reports: one for the Council, one to trade to the STG, and one to sell to the Shadow Broker. Exactly which information should be included in each report was a considerable balancing act that Jondum had long ago mastered. All of them would include the basics – John Shepard was indeed in Hegemony custody, alive and more-or-less unharmed, and being held underground in a fortress in footage of the fortress' interior recorded by the cameras in Jondum's hardsuit would go to the STG analysts first, for inside information on batarian military strength was hard to acquire even for the Union. The Shadow Broker got everything else. Between the bugs he and Vormus had been placing, Jondum had recorded more than a few interesting conversations already. Which companies were close to making trade deals, which of the new Hegemony scions was most amenable to selling out his competitors, which diplomats had engaged in certain indiscretions in batarian brothels – such information was worth a fortune to the right person, and the Shadow Broker had a gift for seeing that it found its way there.
Some Spectres used their immunity to shoot people who obstructed them. Jondum used his to trade state secrets. He ran roughshod over intellectual property and classification laws like Agent Arterius had run roughshod over every pirate he'd ever seen. Jondum stopped short of performing wetwork for the Broker as he understood Agent Vasir had been doing for the better part of a century, but if in the course of his duties he should come across information of value, it was a waste not to make good use of it.
And when he needed data in turn, the STG and the Shadow Broker were only too happy to repay the favor.
And so they did now. Before long, Jondum knew everything there was to know about the Cerberus agents Adam Solheim and Kai Leng and their sordid histories. He had traced the hijacked batarian ship they had flown to Khar'shan back to the Amada system and further, had found the defunct mining operation from which they had bought the explosives.
Pilota's help, begrudging at first, had flowed much more freely when Jondum had plied him with classified information about the Council's colonization plans for the next decade and the Shadow Broker's information about the identities of batarian slaves on Omega and Invictus. In exchange Pilota had been able to share some of the details about the Leviathan of Dis and about secret spaceports, which in turn could be traded to the STG for the surveillance records of the Harsa relay.
Everyone learned something, no one admitted it, and progress was made.
While Jondum and Pilota did their investigations the main peace talks proceeded, ably administrated by the three asari diplomats. Under Vormus' careful watch, only a few minor security infractions had been caught – mostly diplomats overindulging during the nightly feasts and finding themselves too inebriated to adhere to the security checks he had lectured them all about so many times before the journey. Andre Kaygn had finally been browbeaten enough to wear his security band without Vormus having to make good on his threat to install it rectally. One batarian had tried to smuggle a venomous aspa fly into the human apartments inside a half-empty wine bottle, apparently hoping it would sting Ambassador Osoba, but the insect had drowned in the process and the would-be assassin was dragged roughly away by huge pike-wielding guards. No doubt he would feature in the gladiator pits for the next peace summit.
Surprisingly, most of the incidents had involved assassination attempts made by batarians on fellow batarians. Many scions had died in the Tunghusk blast and the batarian nobility was in a state of violent flux as newcomers tried to stake their territory and the old guard tried to hold them at bay. One evening meal Jondum himself had intervened to stop a slave from strangling one of the batarian negotiators with her own chains and thereby, he thought, won some small victory for their side.
By far the worst mishap, however, happened two evenings after Jondum's visit to Shepard's cell. Jondum had been at work writing out his requests for Pilota when Vormus had come exploding into the room to report what – if the old turian's expression were any indication – was sure to be the end of the entire summit.
"Humans," the turian had panted, "two of the merchants. Wounded. Critically. Hegemony in an uproar."
What had happened was this: aside from the main three delegations, the summit had been made the occasion for dozens of smaller meetings that, though not officially sanctioned, were no less important to the negotiations. These were about trade agreements – not between governments but between corporations and merchants – that poor relations had prevented for long years. Despite the risks, there were considerable economic opportunities for those brave enough to establish a working relationship with batarian space – Elkoss Combine had sent three negotiators, naturally, and Cipritine Armory had sent reps to deal with Batarian State Arms, but so too had dozens of smaller companies buying and selling everything from omni-tools to bismuth to cosmetics to corn syrup. The Council had hoped that allowing the merchants to tag along would improve their own bargaining position, as batarian merchants had suffered terribly for the loss of trade with Council space and would put pressure on the Hegemons to cooperate, but the choice considerably complicated Jondum and Vormus' jobs. Even with all their guards they could not keep close watch on everyone at once.
And so, two human representing the Cord-Hislop corporation had dodged Vormus' security guards and snuck off to go to a batarian stripclub with a cadre of Hegemony chemical engineers. Deals had been made, words exchanged, a nose had been broken – all well within the bounds of normal discourse – but batarian drinks were strong and batarian pride was stronger. An argument had erupted, and one of the humans had tossed a stein full of Khar'shishi fire ale at another patron, apparently mistaking the drink's name for colorful metaphor, and it had ignited on a nearby torch. The resulting fireball had cost a batarian the skin on his hand but lit the two humans like kindling, and despite manful attempts by patrons and dancers, both were covered in third degree burns by the time the flames could be extinguished.
Now, of course, the incident had convinced both sides the other was not arguing in good faith, and the Hegemony scions had threatened to end the negotiations entirely. To help mollify them, Jondum and Vormus had decided that the two injured men be treated as criminals. Vormus himself would escort them to an offworld medical facility and then to a prison to await charges. Further, the turian contrived that the prisoners be evacuated during a recess in the talks so they could be wheeled out on gurneys in full view of the batarian delegates. However mad the Hegemony might be, it could not be missed that the humans had paid most dearly for their foolishness. They writhed on their gurneys, unrecognizable under the weight of their bandages, and moaned at every bump and jostle as a pair of Alliance marines loaded them into a shuttle.
–
Ultimately, the talks and Jondum's investigation were allowed to continue.
Early the following morning – while most of the diplomats were still asleep – Pilota and Jondum took a shuttle to the Tunghusk blast site. It had taken considerable effort to get the batarians to agree to the trip at all, and so Jondum pretended not to notice the shuttle's blacked out windows or the heavy armament carried by the huge batarian soldier assigned to chauffer them. He did insist on being able to see the site from the air, and once he had made it clear he would not budge on this point, finally Pilota directed the pilot to a holding pattern over the remains of Tunghusk city.
The destruction was considerable. Even though Tunghusk had been a sprawling city, not nearly so dense as many of those in Council space, and built as much under the ground as above it, Jondum could see at a glance that the batarians had been fortunate to suffer only three hundred thousand deaths. (Alternately, the Hegemony was lying about the numbers, as it did about oh-so-many other things). A month of snow had not erased the enormous black scar that stretched from horizon to horizon, nor ground away the endless humps of burned out buildings. The sky was still red with particles kicked up by the explosion, and Jondum could see the glimmer of a hundred fires the fire crews had yet to extinguish.
Most striking of all was the wreckage of an enormous starship.
The Leviathan of Dis.
It lay in a shattered hulk like a beached Sur'keshan unkia shark, black and ugly and alien on the landscape, as thousands of drones buzzed about it like flies. Jondum judged that the sheer scale of the operations around it must have required the Hegemony summon half the laborers in batarian space to arms. Enormous volumes of rock and soil were being piled overtop the ship's remains, like it was a landfill fire to be smothered. Jondum could see the deep gouges in the land that the excavators had left as they collected the needed material.
The batarians were well underway in entombing the dreadnaught – in another month or two it might easily be mistaken for a mountain – but for now it could not be disguised. Jondum activated the camera built into the bottom of his boot and let his toe lean just over the edge of the shuttle, so he could get the widest possible angle without looking too suspicious about it. The ship was almost two kilometers long. Black, angular. Unlike any Council race's designs. And it had legs.
The ship was monstrous, and it was instantly recognizable to anyone with access to an extranet connection.
The Council had dismissed Shepard's Reaper claims, but Jondum's contacts at the STG assured him that their own investigators had refused to eliminate the possibility entirely. Still, whether or not the Sovereign-class ship Agent Arterius had used to attack the Citadel a few years prior was of geth origin or something else entirely was almost beside the point, for either way it was immensely advanced in its construction and capabilities. It had taken the bulk of the Alliance Fifth Fleet to destroy Sovereign, and though the battle had been downplayed, leaked combat footage had made it clear that the ship's kinetic barriers, armor, maneuverability, targeting were unprecedented. By every metric it had demonstrably outperformed anything the Council races could build – even the Synanceia-class dreadnaughts still under construction under the highest secrecy beneath the ice caps of Aegohr would find themselves outmatched in a fight with another.
Reaper or Geth, there were a lot of people who wanted very badly to know where Saren had found the ship, and how to kill the next one. Accordingly, Sovereign's wreckage had been distributed judiciously between research groups on a dozen worlds.
And now here was a second Sovereign-class ship, and the batarians were burying it.
Wind whipped at the open shuttle door and Jondum had to shout to be overheard. "Pilota! What can you tell me about what I'm seeing?" He gestured down to the excavators, choosing as usual to hide his surreptitious filming not with any particular lie but rather with some version of the truth. If he were circumspect about the Reaper, how could Pilota possibly be anything but suspicious?
"Rebuilding operations are well underway!" Pilota roared back. "Tunghusk will be rebuilt more vigorous and beautiful than ever!"
Jondum understood he would get no more and nodded. "I shall look forward to visiting someday!" he said. He deactivated his camera with a tap of his boot and gave the gesture that the shuttle doors should be closed again.
–
Though Pilota was taciturn (and their driver even more so) on any matter of how the blast had occurred or what role the ruined dreadnaught had played in it, they were helpful enough when it came to searching for possible human infiltrators. Jondum was allowed to speak to the Hegemony scion in charge of the cleanup operations, and though occasionally one of his lines of inquiry would be suddenly cut short by a grim shake of Pilota's head, on most matters Jondum thought he was receiving something close to the truth. They had not captured any humans besides Agent Shepard and Zaeed Massani, who had been in an underground corridor at the time of the explosion (not, Jondum noted but pretended not to note, inside the dreadnaught or any other ship). Shepard and Massani had exchanged fire with security forces belonging to the late Prince Shilik'ash, who had been in the process of deploying siege drones to flush the humans out of their entrenched position when the explosion had knocked out communications.
How many batarians had died in the firefight as opposed to in the explosion itself was impossible to determine, but once the magnitude of the unfolding disaster had become clear, Agent Shepard had offered to surrender to help expedite rescue operations. He and Massani had been taken into custody and flown to the prison in Thumata, where their injuries had been tended and they had been held in relatively generous conditions for the past month.
Of the five other humans Shepard had told Jondum to expect, the scion had no information to offer. Other humans had been sighted during the firefight, but what fate had befallen them was known to the gods and no one else.
"What about human bodies?"
The scion drew his fingers down across his eyelids to mime scooping out his eyes and flicking them onto the ground in a gesture of supreme batarian disrespect. "Under there, maybe," he said, and waved a muscled arm over the heap of concrete and steel rubble that had no doubt once been a fortress of some spectacular scale. "If we handled them, they were so burned we couldn't tell them from our own kind." He scowled. "We weren't exactly counting their eye sockets."
"Understandable," Jondum said. "Perfectly." He rubbed at his throat in thought. Agent Shepard had said three dead humans, at least – two at his and Massani's own hands. But it was not hard to imagine their bodies being lost. More worrisome was the possibility of the two Shepard thought might still live. "There must have been considerable ship traffic after the blast," he observed, "are there any nearby landing facilities where a potential survivor might have snuck aboard a ship?"
The scion looked to Pilota, who shook his head. "The… the Hegemony's hangar security is the greatest that the galaxy has ev-"
"I'll rephrase," Jondum interrupted, uninterested in the official hyperbole the Hegemony liked so much. "Is there any way a human could have escaped the planet undetected?"
"The planet? No, salarian, I think not. Hegemony command closed the entire planet's airspace within a standard hour. My first crews were here after another hour. I doubt a ship could have left atmosphere without being seen."
"Over ground, then? Is there anywhere on planet they could escape to?"
The scion frowned and shrugged. "The blast derailed the train lines, but the roads all survived," he said, "more or less. Freight drones, hover platforms, low-at shuttles. Lot of ways out of the city, if they moved fast enough to outrun the fires."
Jondum nodded. "Very good. Promise me that you will contact me if you do happen to discover any human remains, and I will be satisfied."
This the scion gladly promised, and Jondum let him return to his work.
He and Pilota returned to their shuttle and devised a plan of investigation. There was little point searching for the corpses themselves, but if any humans had survived and fled the scene, there might be sightings along any of the major roads out of Tunghusk. They decided to visit some of the nearby cities. Before the shuttle had left the ground, Pilota had begun contacting ground traffic enforcement and Jondum was back in contact with the Shadow Broker once again.
–
On the fifth day of the peace talks, a compromise was reached. It was not, as Jondum understood, everything that the Council had hoped to achieve – for the Hegemony was committed not to compromise on, among other points, their refusal that Council investigators be allowed to conduct their own investigation into the cause of the Tunghusk blast. There would furthermore not be any further talk of abandoning any of the seven (twelve, actually, Jondum knew, if you knew where to look) dreadnaughts the Hegemony was constructing, and so in turn there would be no talk of reopening the batarian embassy on the Citadel.
But Agent Shepard would not be fed to a starving monster, nor chopped apart by gladiators, nor left with his knees broken in the middle of the Yakstiak Greattundra. He would be turned over immediately to C-Sec custody, to be tried first by the Citadel Council (sans Spectre immunity, naturally) and only then by the Systems Alliance tribunals.
That he was being allowed to leave Khar'shan and take all four of his limbs with him was understood to be a considerable act of good faith on the Hegemony's part, and one for which they were well plied. They had sold Shepard's life for what amounted to billions of credits' worth of relaxed sanctions and a confirmation of colony rights to three separate systems, not to mention the veneer of legitimacy their cooperation would restore to them in the eyes of the galactic community.
For his part, Jondum was delighted that he would not be obliged to poison the man. In fact he had decided he rather admired Shepard, for he thought the man's past willingness to so publicly contradict the Council's preferred narratives was precisely the point of having Spectre agents at all. Shepard's history of honorable conduct was perhaps a minor handicap in their line of work, it was hard not to admire too.
It seemed to Jondum that Agent Shepard's report had been truthful. He hadn't come to Khar'shan to incite a war, and blame for the explosion was Cerberus', not his. No doubt he'd been truthful, too, about the two surviving infiltrators. But Jondum was out of time, and despite days of effort, he and Pilota had been unable to uncover a shred of evidence as to the two missing Cerberus agents' fates. No doubt it was just as the worksite scion had said, and the men were dead and buried under a million tons of rock. The universe was too big to insist on following every lead – sometimes, one had to be satisfied with the force of reasonable inference. His chief mission on Khar'shan was done. He had other things to attend to.
But when an hour before he was set to leave Pilota came to him with a last tantalizing lead, he had not hesitated to put them aside. The guards to deal with the arrangements for the few staff who would accompany Shepard's transfer, and he and Pilota climbed into a waiting hovercar for one last ride.
Pilota brought Jondum to the outskirts of Thumata city, where fantastic ornate palaces gave way to ugly prefabs. They entered a squat building that belched with smoke from three chimneys, where slaves tended to crematoria burning the city's dead. Corpses of batarians and animals lay in hoppers in unceremonious piles waiting for their turn to burn. Batarians did not imbue the flesh of the dead – even those who had been well loved in life – with any particular reverence, and so it was a stroke of astonishingly good fortune that one of the slaves had noticed two unusual corpses among his charges and had fished them out and extinguished them before they were reduced to ash.
The bodies lay on two slabs waiting for Jondum. They were cracked and blackened, but not so badly that their eye sockets could not be counted. These were humans.
"They came in earlier today," Pilota said grimly. "Scraped up from some gutter in middle city. I've got people searching for the slaves that found them."
Jondum ran his omni-tool over the corpses. Both males, he thought, and more or less intact under the burns. Would not be simple to detect a cause of death. These would be Shepard's two missing Cerberus assassins, presumably, having somehow survived the blast and travelled overland to Thumata only to wind up killed by some passerby here. Khar'shan was not a welcoming place for humans on the best of days – presumably only less so a month after a disaster the entire planet blamed on the Alliance as a matter of principle.
"Did they have anything in their possession?" Jondum asked. "A piece of alien technology? Something unusual?" Shepard had not been able to tell him precisely what the Cerberus squad had been trying to take from the planet, only that it had been small enough to fit in a case and nonetheless desperately important. "Could the slaves who found them have pocketed it? Or would they have turned it in to one of your ministers already?" Pilota shook his head, and Jondum felt a flash of irritation, to have run once again into the Hegemony's taciturnity. "I don't have time for your denials, my friend," he snapped. "For days I've been polite in listening to your lies, but my patience goes only so far."
Pilota shook his head again. "No lies this time," he said. He tapped one of the bodies on the left wrist, where a gob of melted material had cinched tight against the bones. The other body had one in the same spot.
Jondum looked at the security band on his own wrist and the pieces fell into place.
–
The prisoners were sleeping when they arrived back at the prison, and Pilota had to bang his hand on the bars to wake them. "Humans!" he roared, sweeping his Kishok across the bleary crowd. Prisoners scrambled to their feet, treading on one another in their haste not to stay in his sights. "Visitor!"
Shepard and Massani came to the bars and the batarians squished themselves to the far end of the cell as they had on Jondum's last visit.
"Agent Shepard!" Jondum said, not protesting that this time Pilota did not bother to back out of earshot. "I apologize to have to wake you so late. I understand it is a rude gesture among your kind, but I have urgent news."
"It's fine," Shepard said. "What's the news?"
"Well, first, good news: the ambassadors have come to terms and you are to be extradited. Further, I have decided there is no need for me to kill you!"
"That's good," Shepard said.
"Yes, I am relieved as well." Jondum nodded to himself. "The terms of the extradition agreement provide the Hegemony with up to two standard days to arrange your transport offworld, but I think it best if you leave with me now." He gestured to Pilota and the batarian waved his omni-tool over the cell's lock. The door slid open.
Shepard stepped out of the cell, a freer man than he had been in months.
"I believe I have uncovered the location of your missing Cerberus agents," Jondum said, gesturing Shepard towards the prison exit. "And unfortunately, I believe them to be alive, and already out of the system. There may yet be time to intercept them, but we will have to hurry."
"Where are they?"
Jondum checked his omni-tool. The signal from Vormus' shuttle was still pinging, but several messages – sent by eye, private channel, and even over the extranet – had gone unanswered. He feared the worst. "They departed on a shuttle for Terra Nova approximately twenty-two standard hours ago."
"Shit. I know one of the garrison commanders on Terra Nova. Get me to a net terminal."
Jondum peeled his omni-tool from his wrist and tossed it to Shepard. "Interface is in Talati script. Press lower left haptic twice to access comm functions."
"I'll figure it out," Shepard said. "Lead the way." The two Spectres marched towards the exit, but when Zaeed Massani attempted to follow, he found himself face to face with a harpoon launcher. The old man froze as Pilota's gun dropped to level with his sternum.
"Not him," Pilota growled.
As quickly as it had lifted, Shepard's face fell. "What? Why?"
"He stays."
"Arrangements were negotiated for your release, Agent Shepard," Jondum said. "A more general prisoner agreement was not considered. Mr. Massani will need to remain here." He turned. "Now, we should hurry. I have a shuttle w-"
"I'm not leaving without Zaeed," Shepard said, crossing his arms.
Pilota did not lower his gun.
"Agent Shepard," Jondum said, burying his frustration. "Our time is very limited. The Cerberus agents have already left the system. We must move quickly."
"Not without Zaeed."
Massani sighed and retreated back into the cell. "Oh, just go, you goddamn fool," he growled, and for emphasis he grabbed the cell door and slid it back into place. It gave a ponderous click as the locks reengaged.
Shepard was unmoved. "That's not how I do things, Zaeed."
"I know it. But I know what betrayal looks like and this ain't it." Massani sat down on the prison bench with a weary whump. "Go kill those fuckers," he said, waving Shepard off. "I'll find my own way out."
Jondum caught Agent Shepard's eye and gestured for the exit.
"You just keep your promise though," Massani added. "My room on the Normandy – that's off limits until I come back. I don't want to come back and find your newest pet picking its teeth with Jessie. Some goddamn pyjack squadmate or something. I swear to Christ I'll kill it."
Agent Shepard had no choice. "Fine," he said finally. "I'll get you out as soon as I can. I promise." He fixed Pilota with an angry look. "If I learn he's been mistreated… I'll make you regret it," he warned the batarian. "Ask anyone who saw the Skyllian Blitz if I won't."
"See what you can do for him," Jondum told Pilota.
The batarian grimaced at carrot and stick and gave the tiniest nod.
"Very good," Jondum said. "Let's be off then."
Massani called after them as they left the prison. "I'm serious about my room, Shepard!" he bellowed. "If I come back and find someone in there it better be someone you don't care about, because they're going in the goddamn compacter!"
–
Codex entry: Salarian Imprinting and the Janlosta Scandal
Salarians are known for their strong imprinting instincts, particularly in males. As larvae, salarians have only the most rudimentary brains. Nonetheless their senses develop mostly in the egg and experiences during the larval stage can significantly impact their development throughout the remainder of their lives. Male salarians in particular are highly sensitive to early life conditions, which are used by dalatrasses to drive development of several specialized castes (superficially similar to those of Earth's social insects). Those larvae fed sparingly develop stunted bodies and neotenic anatomy and function as a laboring class rarely seen off salarian worlds. Larvae with exceptionally rich diets grow into longer-lived, more reproductively viable adults.
Even more critical however is the imprinting of salarian larvae on their mothers. Within hours of hatching, larvae are capable of recognizing individuals, and develop a fixation on any adults they encounter. Such imprinting behavior is believed to have evolved to ameliorate the threat of cannibalism by other salarians (while cannibalism is taboo in virtually all modern salarian societies, salarian larvae will enthusiastically devour one another if housed too densely, and widespread paleontological evidence suggests a long history of both ritualized and routine cannibalism in primordial salarians). Imprinted larvae rarely leave their mother in their first weeks of life, often resting directly on her skin when not actively feeding.
As salarian larvae mature into salarwigs and then mature salarians, the strength of the imprinting instinct diminishes, but it remains a powerful influence on most individuals' behavior for their entire lives. Imprinted salarians typically show extreme loyalty to their mothers, and while disloyalty is certainly possible – especially for clan salarians living offworld with very little adult contact with their mothers – it is generally rare. Most clan dalatrasses as a matter of policy will refuse to employ salarians not imprinted onto them, and certainly never any salarians imprinted onto someone else. Imprinting is regarded as useful enough that when a dalatrass dies, her successor (despite almost always being her daughter) will usually replace even highly experienced staff with her own sons. This form of turnover is generally regarded as a matter of necessity, and displaced staff generally do not bear grudges towards their sisters. Further, effort is made to limit the exposure of larvae to individuals other than their mothers – staff is typically reduced as eggs near maturity, and egg attendants and janitorial staff that must interact with the eggs wear masks.
While fanatical loyalty is highly desirable for dalatrasses engaged in the constant inter-clan struggles for dominance that characterize salarian society internally, the salarian imprinting instinct can pose difficulties when loyalty is needed to an entire planet, or to the salarian Union as a whole. Representatives that deal with other species (or even just non-Union salarians like the Lystheni) need to represent the salarian species, and any favoritism towards one dalatrass over another is disqualifying.
For these roles, Union clans produce a special caste of unimprinted offspring, intentionally hatched in darkness and prevented from interacting with any adult during the critical first few days of life. Instead, rearing and education is largely performed by specialized mechs that use holographic projectors to present larvae with a computationally-genericized simulated mother. These holographic avatars are generated by compositing scanned anatomy of many different salarian females together using a VI-controlled character creator, and steadily shift their appearance from minute to minute. Larva imprinted on such avatars develop the dutiful psychology of a conventionally-imprinted male without the risk of loyalty to any real dalatrass over another. The raising, education, and welfare of unimprinted salarians is entrusted to the neutral salarian Conclaves.
The Salarian Union has long employed unimprinted salarians as diplomats, advisors, investigators, journalists, archivists, justiciars, and prison guards within salarian space, as well as in nearly all roles representing the Union in the service of the Citadel Council (including salarian Spectre agents and the salarian representative on the Council itself).
The Janlosta Imprinting Scandal was a scandal that occurred within the Salarian Union in the year 2178. The specific security oversights that precipitated the controversy, the precise scale of its effects, and much of the Union's response are among the salarians' most fiercely guarded state secrets.
The seeds of the Janlosta Scandal were planted sometime between 2160 and 2162, when agents of Dalatrass Ioresthi are believed to have successfully installed a spy program in the computer systems of the Mannovai Conclave Core Facility Joro on the Union colony world of Mannovai. The program, which went undetected for nearly two decades, gave Ioresthi's Janlosta clan the ability to remotely influence the VI's that controlled the composite avatars used to raise unimprinted larvae in order to increase their resemblance to Ioresthi during critical hatchings.
More than 6000 salarians were raised to adulthood within Joro facility during the period between 2160 and 2178, when Ioresthi's sabotage was finally detected. During that time, the Janlosta clan experienced an unprecedented growth in wealth and influence, rising more than forty places in the official rankings that estimate relative clan power within the Union. At its peak, Janlosta clan had a clan impact rating of 36.661, placing it just behind long-established major clans like Adlin, Asipi, and Heplorn. Contemporary analysts attributed the rise to a string of carefully-negotiated breeding contracts, but later investigations would uncover statistically significant pro-Janlosta biases in decisions made by multiple Union institutions as supposedly unimprinted and neutral salarians raised in Joro facility inadvertently favored Ioresthi's interests over those of other dalatrasses. Janlosta clan gained several lucrative trade contracts and politically-advantageous breeding alliances more typically awarded to larger clans.
Investigators eventually detected the connection between Janlosta's rise and unimprinted salarians raised at Joro facility, and in 2178, Ioresthi's sabotage was finally discovered. Frantic criminal investigations by multiple Conclaves quickly levied charges against Ioresthi, who denied all wrongdoing. While the dalatrass' direct involvement was never proven, extensive evidence of the tampering and its effects were collected.
The Salarian Union went to extreme measures to prevent news of Ioresthi's unprecedented success. In a rare move, records of the case were removed from the public Codices and made accessible only to top Conclave and STG leadership. Ioresthi and her daughters were imprisoned and leadership of the Janlosta clan passed to a distant cousin judged to be sufficiently different in appearance from Ioresthi not to benefit by the tampered imprints (Janlosta clan dropped to an impact rating of only 1.218 before being absorbed by Niorath clan in 2181). Ioresthi and her daughters remain imprisoned under the highest possible security somewhere on Sur'kesh.
The fate of the 6000 or so affected salarians was a matter of considerable debate. Records of affected individuals were classified, but independent analysts established reason to believe multiple high-ranking figures were among them, including at least two Spectre agents and – though the claims are often dismissed as anti-Union propaganda – possibly even Councilor Valern himself. Union leadership made the decision not to retire affected individuals, for many were judged to be irreplaceable and the hope was that Ioresthi's imprisonment would prevent any further risk of manipulation.
–
A/N: My Mass Effect muse has made its approximately-annual return, and so I come with a long-belated update!
No new major canon changes in this one, but I will not be bothering with the Jondum/Kasumi plot, so I moved him here. I like the idea that most Spectres – including the very friendly Jondum – are bad dudes of one stripe or another, and I enjoyed trying to make Jondum's flavor of rule breakage different from Saren, Vasir, and Renegade!Shepard's.
Also, in case it wasn't clear, the events of Lair of the Shadow Broker have not happened by this point in the story. The Shadow Broker Jondum refers to is the Yahg one, not Liara.
I promise this is the last chapter of the batarian arc*. For reals we are about to get into ME3 proper. I have two more chapters basically done already that I hope to post in the next week or two.
(*That said, at one point I considered instead of writing Interstitium 2 to just make the whole story about Zaeed's misadventures with the Leviathan of Dis and Khar'shan politics. So if you've been bored by that stuff, you dodged a bullet).
As always, huge thank you to anyone who takes the time to review. I really appreciate it. Engaging with other fans is the main thing that fanfiction has over my other projects and I love hearing you guys' thoughts, be they negative or positive or just saying hi.
In other news, the thing that precipitated my sudden excitement for Mass Effect to reemerge was that I was recently contacted and asked to participate in a very cool Mass Effect-themed collaboration with some very talented people. I can't tell you what it is yet but I'm super happy with how it's shaping up and I think it will be of interest to anyone who has enjoyed my writing. I will share it as soon as I am able.
Stay tuned!
Next chapter: Quarians face off (in three ways at once).
