Crisis
I flew the shuttle back to the house and tried to go through the shuttle's navigation data myself, but there was nothing saved at all, as if the drive had deliberately been scrubbed. In failing that task, I ran back into my broken home and searched for Churchill, hoping that he had been able to hide somewhere and stay out of sight after providing the distraction for us. I felt a pang of guilt as I thought of that. The distraction had now been for naught now that the enemy had taken Tali prisoner anyway. And it was all my fault.
When I found Churchill, he was lying in the hallway of the upper floor, left on the floor by the enemy where he fell. I rolled my Geth friend over and checked him over to see if there were any signs of life in him, but there was nothing and so I left him to rest. Retrieving my Harrier rifle, I went into my office and opened up a comm link to Liara. I had to tell my friends the terrible news, and I would need their help if I was going to get Tali back. As I was trying to do this, I realised that my hands were shaking like mad and I sometimes struggled even to push the right buttons and my nerves felt like they were on fire. I wanted to meet the leader of these accursed terrorists and put my fist right through their head.
As soon as I placed the call to Liara, she answered and looked extremely worried when she saw the terrible state I was in.
"Scott! I tried to warn you! The enemy terrorists were coming after you. Are you ok? Where's Tali?"
Hearing someone else say her name set me off and tears started running slowly down my cheeks,
"She's gone, Liara. The fucking bastards took her. They attacked as soon as you called and they managed to get her. And it's my fault!"
Liara looked confused by this but was not sure what to say.
"We got away from the house, but our friend Churchill stayed to hold the enemy off while we got away. But… I didn't want to leave him behind, so I left Tali hiding in a cave. They found her anyway. Now they're gone! Churchill is dead and Tali has been captured."
The pain was building with every word. I clenched my fists and shut up for a moment before I lost complete control. I tried to slow my breathing to a steadier rate and get to a state of mind where I could better think out my next move.
"I'm so sorry, Scott," Liara said, her voice quivering like she was close to tears. "I am already watching the Mass Relay in the Tikkun System, as is Admiral Gerrel. I have agents on Rannoch that will search for anything related to these terrorists, I swear to you."
"I know, Liara. Thanks. But I'm not gonna sit still while they've got her, you know that."
"Yes, I do," she said thoughtfully as if she was coming up with a plan.
"You have something?" I asked.
"Possibly," Liara replied. "As soon as your comms went down, I sent a message to all of our friends telling them that you and Tali were in danger. Nearly everyone has pledged to come and help."
"So we'll get everyone together and find out anything we can about this organisation."
Inside, I felt a little better knowing that I would have all my best friends backing me up now that the worst had happened. I nearly felt sorry for the enemy who would have to fight against us. But not nearly sorry enough to stop me ripping their throats out with my bare hands.
On the other end of the comm, Liara was bustling about between her numerous terminals as she put together a plan of action. All I could think of was Tali and how much danger she could be in at that very moment. What were the terrorists planning to do with her? What had they planned to do if they had managed to capture us both? Use us for some kind of ransom? Maybe they were going to hold us prisoner and threaten to kill us if anyone tried to stop their plans. In dismay, I realised that I could not fathom the mind of lunatics and that simply guessing might actually be making it worse for myself.
When Liara came back, she reported that Han'Gerrel's ships were stopping every ship hoping to pass through the relay while their ship was scanned and searched by a boarding party of Quarian Marines.
"Tali must still be on Rannoch, Liara. Just point me in any direction and I'll go there myself."
Liara could see how desperate I was to see Tali to safety, not to mention how scared I was that she was hurt. What Liara did not have any knowledge of was how Tali was pregnant, which made this whole situation twice as bad.
"I have an agent who is already working at the spaceport in Baska," Liara told me and I went to gather some better, less battle-scarred clothes to wear to go there. I also kept my M77 Paladin stuffed down the waistband of my jeans where it would stay hidden under my jacket.
"Just tell me their name and I'll go straight away," I said to Liara.
"You already know him," she replied, "You'll recall Feron?"
"Yeah," I said, glad that it would be a familiar face, "you have him on Rannoch?"
"You know me. I like to have them everywhere."
"Thank you, Liara," I said before rushing off. I walked through my battered home, hating those responsible for it more and more with every bullet hole and smashed window I saw.
With my skycar blown up by the terrorists, the only option for me was to fly the damn shuttle again. There was still blood running freely in the back from where the corpses of the dead enemies were lying. I had made a quick check of their equipment and searched for any signs of identification on all of them, but found nothing. I checked their comms, but everything had been deleted again, leaving me with nothing. Still, I knew from experience that, with enough diligent exploration, there was always something to find. Especially if you had an AI for a friend. My brain was simply swimming in theories on how we could track down Tali and her captors, and more than once I caught myself thinking of how I would make these rats pay for what they had done. They dared to intrude upon the life that Tali and I were forming together and try to destroy it. How could I let that go unanswered?
While I was flying, trying my best to keep the shuttle going in a straight line, my Omni tool lit up as a call came in and when I looked at the caller ID, I saw that it was Admiral Gerrel. Had he caught them? With hope momentarily taking over, I answered, only to have that enthusiasm run dry immediately.
"Scott," Han'Gerrel said, "I'm afraid I've got bad news. We stopped a freighter which was heading for the Mass Relay and my marines were on their way when it launched a shuttle. I believe it was piloted remotely… but it was equipped with disruptors and flew straight into my ship. Just about all of my systems were taken down for a few minutes, and in that time the freighter made a dash for the relay…"
"And they got through?" I said stiffly. Admiral Gerrel nodded.
"The brief moment that we were able to scan their ship showed that there were 2 more shuttles in the cargo bay."
That was all four shuttles accounted for, and who else but a guilty party of terrorists would make such a daring move against a ship of the Quarian military? It had to be them.
For a moment, I was about to scream at Gerrel for letting them slip past, but how could he have foreseen such a move? I relented and calmed myself, flexing my fingers as was my way.
"You did what you could, Admiral," I said, still a little gruffly, "but I'm already on my way to the spaceport. I'll take up the chase from there."
"If you need anything, Scott," Gerrel said, "whether it's a squad of marines or the entire damn fleet, you let me know!"
I detected the blood-rage in his voice too, and knew that he was as committed to finding Tali as I was.
When I arrived at the spaceport, I used my Spectre status to acquire a private shuttle pad which was away from prying eyes that might see the bodies of the terrorists. The moment I stepped out of the shuttle, I was approached by a Drell, though his face was partially concealed by a hood.
"Feron? That you?"
A hand was raised and I heartily shook it as a smile appeared on the Drell's face.
"Good to see you, Commander," his gravelly voice said, "I'm sorry for this whole situation, but Liara and I have a plan."
"Hope it's a good one," I said, "they've escaped the system with Tali and there's no way to track them through the relay network."
"We'll get her back, I promise. You saved me once and I'm going to make sure that I repay my debt to you tenfold."
"Thanks, Feron, much appreciated. Where do we start?"
This was it. This was where we started our journey of tracking the scum down and hunting them until we had Tali back. Feron and I took the Omni tools off of the dead terrorists and stowed them away in Feron's small ship. He gave me a space suit to wear as the plan for disposing of the dead enemies was to fly the shuttle into space and simply blow it up. However, before we did that, Feron said that we had to go back to my home for the first stage of Liara's plan.
We both flew our vessels back to my home, and when I got out of the shuttle it suddenly struck me how sad and pitiful the house now looked after the attack. It sat alone at the top of the cliff with shattered windows, riddled with bullets and whole parts of the house in total ruin.
"Wow," Feron said as he joined me in staring at the sorry scene. "I'm sorry, Scott, this looks bad."
"It is bad," I replied, "so let's hurry. What are we doing back here?"
"You need to call Liara from your comm. The terrorists came here with the intent of capturing both of you. We think that if another chance to capture you arises, they'll take the bait. We can draw them out and hopefully gather more Intel off of them."
"And we needed to use this comm because…"
"Because there's a fair chance that the enemies will have hacked it while they were in your house. Liara is going to give you a location for us to go to, and if the enemy makes an appearance, we'll know for certain. It's not great, but it's all we've got at the moment."
Heading inside and up the stairs, Feron saw the body of Churchill lying there for the first time.
"This was your friend?" he asked. I did not like the past tense that he used, but he was right.
"Yeah," I knelt beside Churchill with a hand on his cold, metal chest, "he gave his life letting Tali and I make a break for it. But I couldn't leave him… and now I've lost both him and Tali."
Churchill's body was potted with bullet holes where he had been shot at point blank range as the enemy seized my house. I had to make this all right for him as well. In the office, I started up the comm as Feron and Liara had planned and placed a call to her, which was answered with Liara's usual promptness.
"Scott. I heard about the terrorists getting through the relay! I'm sorry."
"They've got access to some top-grade equipment if they can disable a Quarian frigate like that," I admitted, "have you got something? Can we track them through the relays?"
"Unless we knew where their destination was, no. I want you and Feron to come and meet me so we can think of where to go next. It will need to be away from any populated worlds in case the enemy is watching for your arrival anywhere."
She was choosing her words carefully. If the enemy had hacked my comm, then there was a good chance that they were listening in as we spoke, and Liara was making sure that they would know where to go as well.
"I have a remote base, or a safe house if you want to be more specific, which would be perfect for us to meet in," Liara said.
"Just tell us where to go and we'll be there," I replied.
"Where we first met, Scott. Where our story began."
"Therum," I said, loudly and clearly so that there was no mistaking what had come out of my mouth.
"Yes," Liara said, "when you arrive, Feron will alert me and I will come and meet you. Fly to the Prothean dig site where you found me all those years ago, and we can plan to get Tali back."
Liara's choice of worlds was a good one. There were no habitable planets in Therum's system, and no one cared enough about the system to keep an eye on traffic in that area. Before the Reaper War, the area might have seen a few pirates hiding out in that region of space as it was part of the Attican Traverse. But since the devastating war with the Reapers, life had virtually ceased to exist there. If Feron and I were followed, then it would be exceedingly easy to track anyone else entering that space. Soon after the call finished, I grabbed my Harrier and Black Widow, placed Churchill in a more respectful place in my bedroom, rather than leave him in the hall, then went out to the shuttle.
Feron and I flew side by side until we were more than halfway to the Mass Relay, where I put on my space suit and set the timer on a bomb inside the shuttle. I opened the side of the shuttle and pushed myself in the direction of the open airlock on Feron's ship. Once the air lock pressurised and I could safely take off the suit, Feron and I stayed to watch the bomb go off. I had sealed the door of the shuttle closed again so that the explosion would have maximum effect on the bodies of the terrorists that it sat beside. The explosion engulfed the shuttle before the vessel was ripped apart, and when the flames died because of the vacuum of space, bits and pieces of it were simply sent flying in every single direction. I felt no pity for the terrorists, as they deserved none for aligning themselves with such a sickening doctrine.
Once I was satisfied that there was no trace of the enemies left, I nodded to Feron who flew us to the relay. On the way we passed Admiral Gerrel's ship and saw the damage that the kamikaze shuttle had done to it. A full hit to the side of the hull had not breached the armour, but I sensed that it very nearly might have. Had the shuttle been flying at FTL speeds then the damage would have been far worse, and a good number of Quarians might have died in the process. Soon I felt that familiar shudder as the Mass Relay interacted with Feron's ship and sent us firing through the Milky Way to the Artemis Tau Cluster, where we would then fly to the Knossos System. With a little laugh to myself, I could not help but feel a bit nostalgic at the briefing inside my head. I was still distraught at losing Tali, my pregnant wife. Yet I did feel better now that I was actually doing something about it. If all went according to plan, then we would soon be on the hunt for the bastards that took Tali from me and put an end to their vile plans.
While Feron's ship flew towards the Knossos System, I tried to have a rest in the back, but sleep eluded me. Instead, I ended up sitting with my head in my hands for hours trying not to think of what Tali might be enduring at that very moment.
"Commander? Are you ok?" I heard Feron ask. I opened my eyes to look up at the concerned Drell and realised for the first time that there were tears in my eyes
"I'm going out of my mind here, Feron!" I was too upset to even try lying. "Tali and I could have made it out of there, but I had to go back like an idiot!"
"You were going back for a friend, Scott," he said, "there's nothing wrong with that."
"But it didn't work, Feron," I shrugged my slumped shoulders. "I've lost both of them now. Church is dead because he was at my house at the wrong time, and Tali is a prisoner to those bastards because I left her."
Feron continued to watch me, but seemed unsure if he should say anything.
"I'm sorry, Feron," I said to him, "it's… it's still raw, you know?"
"We're gonna get them, Commander," he told me in an assertive tone. "Liara's on the case and all of your old team from the Normandy are going to want to help! Tali did serve all three times on the Normandy, so they all know her. they'll all want to help their friend."
I nodded in agreement as I knew he was right. Feron chucked me a bottle of water which I chugged down in a few seconds. Feeling the smooth, cooling liquid run down my throat was like being cleansed and I realised for the first time how dirty, thirsty and hungry I was. My mouth had been bone-dry and my stomach grumbled at me for not filling it up. If I was going to get Tali back, I had to make sure that I was in a decent enough shape to do so.
Slowly, the planet of Therum began to get larger as we closed in on our destination. The volcanic planet was exactly as I remembered it from when we had gone there on the Normandy SR1. At least this time I would not have to drive the Mako over its ashen surface while trying to avoid rivers of lava everywhere. This time there would not be any Heretic Geth waiting for us either.
"What if the enemy is already waiting for us? Or what if they weren't listening to my conversation with Liara in the first place?" I asked Feron. The Drell shook his head,
"No, they're following us. I deployed a sensor about halfway between the relay system and Knossos to pick up any ships that might be coming behind us. I got a ping about two hours ago, so they'll be here shortly."
"And Liara? Where will she be waiting?"
Feron looked at me and a cocky grin slowly grew as he chuckled to himself.
"Liara won't be there, Commander."
"What?"
"When I send the signal to let "Liara" know we've arrived, a transport with a full platoon of Liara's private army will drop in and overwhelm the enemy. Hopefully they'll surrender as soon as they realise what's going on, but there's no way they're going to win this fight. I suggest you gear up."
Clever. Very clever. Doing Feron's bidding, I readied my kinetic barriers for action and made ready the four weapons that I was carrying; my Paladin, Black Widow, Harrier and Tali's Wraith shotgun.
Feron took the ship down to Therum's surface, burning our way through the atmosphere of the excruciatingly hot world and down almost right on top of the Prothean dig site where my team and I had rescued Liara from Saren's Geth. Even though it was only seven years ago, it seemed like an entire lifetime ago.
"This is so weird being back here," I said to Feron as I looked around. He had landed the ship right next to the walkway which went up to the entrance to the dig site, and I half expected to see the bodies of the Geth that we had killed that day to still be lying around. However, they were nowhere to be seen. I knew that the Prothean ruins were no longer accessible, as the place had collapsed on our last visit. Turns out using a mining laser to bypass the containment field was not the wisest of choices.
"I feel like its 2183 again," I muttered to myself as the stifling heat really began to hit me.
"Liara's told me about how you rescued her here and what happened. You fought a Krogan Battlemaster, right?"
"Well," I went through my memories of Therum to try and tell him the truth. "As I remember it, Urdnot Wrex fought with him, but I jumped in at the end to help him. It was a pretty hairy fight to be honest."
"I would have paid money to see Liara hanging helpless in that energy bubble though," Feron laughed as he grabbed his custom Avenger assault rifle from his shuttle, "sounds funny."
"It was, now that I think about it," I shared the laugh with him. "She was a very different woman then to how she is now. Very innocent and naïve."
We stood together, our eyes constantly watching the skies for any sign of our pursuers.
"Hard to imagine how Liara ended up as the stone-cold Shadow Broker she is now," Feron said. I thought about how Liara had told me what had happened to her in the aftermath of my death when the Collectors took down the SR1. She had fought so hard, and put herself in the way of danger in her campaign to stop my corpse from falling into the hands of the Collectors. She had allied with Cerberus and ended up fighting the Shadow Broker for possession of my body. It must have been during this time that the almost child-like Liara must have faded away, and the outwardly cold woman that we knew today had been born.
"She went through a lot after I died," I said. "First, she lost me, then she had to fight an extremely dangerous enemy and ended up losing you as well Feron. With all she's been through, I'm surprised that she's as held together as she is."
"True enough," the Drell agreed. However, it was soon back to business as he brought out the beacon that would signal "Liara" and flicked the switch. The beacon blinked away for a while as Feron and I patiently awaited the arrival of our enemy. While we stood there, Feron chuckled to himself. At my questioning glance he said,
"I've heard a lot about what being on a mission with you is like, now I'll get to see first-hand."
Some time went by and all was still. The crushing heat of Therum was slowly wearing on me, and I longed to get off of this forsaken rock. One visit had been enough. Yet we had to wait. Through the smoke that hung around in the air, there suddenly emerged a shuttle, gliding slowly towards us and I instinctively reached for my Harrier before I was stopped by Feron.
"Wait… it is them, but they're going to see how we react. We're supposed to be waiting on Liara, remember?"
Trying to make it seem like I was visibly pleased to see the arrival of the shuttle, I continued to stand there calmly beside Feron, who gave off such an aura of cool despite our heated surroundings. As Feron suspected, another five shuttles soon came swooshing in to catch up with the first and they began their approach in a V formation.
"Ok, now we go for weapons!" Feron yelled and we ducked for cover not far from each other.
Feron had his heavily modified Avenger out, and when the shuttle began deploying their troops, he opened fire. My Black Widow was out and I already had my scope zeroed on one of the shuttles that was just about to land. I aimed for where the pilot would be sitting and released all three bullets in quick succession, resulting in the shuttle suddenly veering off course and plunging down into one of the boiling lava flows down the hill from us.
"Nice!" Feron shouted to me as I loaded my next thermal clip.
"When do our friends arrive?" I yelled back as bullets kicked up the ashen ground around us.
With a quick check of his Omni tool, he then replied,
"Thirty seconds!"
Feron said that like it was a good thing. But an experienced soldier knows only too well that a lot can happen on the battlefield in a seemingly short space of time.
I sprayed an enemy with my Harrier as he tried to make a move and he fell face first into the ground. I was counting down the seconds in my head as they passed by at a snail's pace. Finally, as the incoming fire intensified, there came a great rushing noise as a ship hurtled into the battle area at high altitude, and drop pods began hitting the ground all around the enemies. From each pod, four soldiers would emerge with their assault rifles and submachineguns ready to go straight into the action. One of the pods contained a pair of sniper teams and they hit the ground on the ridge above the ongoing fight and set themselves up.
Soon, they were using their rifles to deadly effect. Liara's men were a well-trained force of special operatives and very quickly the enemy numbers were plummeting to dangerous levels. As Feron watched another terrorist get mown down by a machinegun, he got on his comm to talk to the unit,
"Remember and try to leave some of them alive! Any prisoners could give us answers with enough… persuasion."
"Roger that!" A soldier replied. "Identifying targets for none-lethal shots everyone, watch your HUDs."
If I had a HUD like Liara's soldiers, then I knew I would be seeing a few of the enemies light up a particular colour as the Officer-In-Charge pinged them with a laser designator. The enemies were dropping so quickly and were completely pinned down, so I just stopped firing. I simply let my allies whittle them down until there were only a few terrorists left, all of them with debilitating leg wounds.
When all resistance had been brutally beaten out of the enemy, Liara's troops began to move in to take those enemies that were still breathing as prisoners. However, one of the terrorists put up one last effort at denying us the information we needed and shot himself in the head. The pace of Liara's men quickened, and I jumped to my feet when I saw a wounded terrorist reaching for their own pistol. Before the barrel of their pistol was put to his temple, I gave the Human a swift crack about the jaw with my fist and stamped down on his wrist when he tried to grab the gun again.
"You're not getting off that easy!" I growled at him as he whimpered under my boot.
I surveyed the scene in front of me and could not help but feel a sense of belonging. From the time that Liara's Drop-Troopers arrived, it had taken no more than a couple of minutes to subdue and eliminate the enemy forces. I counted over thirty dead terrorists, and now we had four prisoners to take for interrogation. With a slight feeling of remorse, I also wondered how many enemies had been on the shuttle that I had sent diving straight into the lave flow when I shot the pilot. This kind of military feeling of speed, efficiency and lethality was something that I did not realise I had been sorely missing for the past few years. I was definitely happy with my life, but this had been how I was raised by the Alliance from being a do-nothing, lazy teen to the lifestyle I had come to thrive in.
"Commander Gardner, a pleasure," the leader of Liara's soldiers approached me with an extended hand, which I promptly shook.
"Good to meet you, nice work! You guys serve time in the military?"
"Well, to be honest, I think everyone became a bit more military when the Reapers were blasting our worlds to bits," the man answered with what I thought to be a German accent.
"I am Ludwig Von Engel, joined the resistance on Earth when the Reapers invaded and fought in the Battle of London when you brought the whole galaxy with you… much appreciated by the way."
"You wouldn't believe the crap I went through to get the whole galaxy behind me in the first place," I laughed. "So how'd you become one of…" I had to stop myself from saying Liara's name, "uh… the Shadow Broker's soldiers?"
A grim look appeared in Ludwig's eyes as he answered,
"While in the resistance, I sneaked into one of the containment camps where the Reapers were keeping everyone that they managed to capture before they were… turned into those cursed Husks. I took cameras and saw a lot of disgraceful things. Things I still see when I close my eyes at night. I got the information back to the resistance and we used it to spur everyone that we could get the footage to into joining the fight. I found I was quite good at getting around unseen and obtaining information or items, as well as firing a rifle… I guess word got to the Broker and I was hired about two years ago. Everything I loved on Earth was wiped out… no reason to stay there anymore."
There it was. The scar. The one that was invisible to the eye, but also the one that cut the deepest. Every single person in the Milky Way that had come out of the Reaper War alive carried one. When Ludwig said "everything I love", I had a good sense of what he was referring to. Friends, family, home, loved ones, hopes, dreams. All cruelly ripped away from him by the onslaught of the almost unstoppable machines. I did not pry any further and returned to the job at hand. Some of Ludwig's men were searching the corpses of the terrorists while others readied their drop pods for recovery by the transport ship that they had come on. Ludwig walked with me and explained the next steps,
"We'll search the enemy shuttles for anything that might help us, and if we find a location then we have to take you there and the Shadow Broker will come and meet you. If there's no navigational data, then we just have to take you to the Broker's main base."
"Good," I said, "after what these guys have been doing, they need to be brought down as soon as possible. And I need to find Tali."
"I heard about that, Commander," Ludwig said, "I'm sorry. I want you to know that if you need my aid again, you shall have it. I have already told the Broker that, should you find the nest where these vermin are crawling out from, I will have my unit ready to go at a moments notice. You saved us all once, Commander. The least I can do is help you get Tali back safely."
I looked at the soldier as we walked through our little battlefield. He had the commanding aura of an officer and when his soldiers addressed him, they did it with respect. The kind of respect that Ludwig had earned himself. People often referred to the Normandy and I as the ones who had paved the way to the Reaper's destruction, but I did not always agree with them. It was the billions of ordinary souls that stood up in that great time of need and dedicated themselves to fighting and resisting the Reapers, no matter what the cost was. People like Ludwig had come out of the Reaper War stronger and braver than ever before, with a better sense of how the galaxy worked and were prepared to do anything to safeguard it. Now he was offering his aid freely. Something I would not forget.
The soldiers of Liara's special operations branch were very thorough in their exploration through the data drives of the enemy shuttles. As expected, the dead enemies had no form of identification on them, and even analysing samples of their DNA and comparing them against the databases of their respective species revealed nothing. This in itself revealed that the terrorists had support either from people high up in the Council governments, or people attached to them. However, it was the shuttles that told us the next step in our search for Tali.
"Sir," a soldier reported to Ludwig with the readings on his Omni tool, "the last logged location for the shuttles were in the Tasale system."
"Tasale?" I knew that system well, "they came from Illium?"
"Looks that way, Sir."
"Ok. Inform the Broker about the news and tell them that we're heading to Illium straight away."
"You got it," Ludwig moved off to the transport which had now landed. I watched the flurry of activity and Feron strode up beside me with his Omni tool open,
"I got this from Liara," he said as he showed me the open message, "she's told everyone from your Normandy teams and says that they will all come to help once they know where to go."
"Then there'll be a hell of a reunion on Illium then," I replied. I was incredibly grateful that all my friends were willing to come to help Tali and I, but at the same time I could not shake the feeling that every second that passed by meant that Tali was in ever greater danger.
Once aboard the transport ship, there was little else to do than settle in while we flew through the expanse of space back to the Mass Relay before we jumped to the Tasale system. I was uneasy and fidgeted a lot as I tried to pass the hours. I tried to reassure myself that we were on our way to fixing this awful situation. Our baited trap on Therum had worked a treat, and Liara's soldiers had done a great job to find out where we should be heading next, even if it was not an exact location. Illium itself could hide anyone who wanted to disappear, but there were other planets in the system, not to mention an asteroid belt. I hoped that we would not have to spend a great deal of time aimlessly searching for our next target, but my hopes were dashed somewhat. Perhaps I still felt guilty for Tali being captured. I blamed myself over and over and it was wearing me down, so I slapped myself around a little and told myself to stop dwelling on what was in the past and focus on moving forward. I had to focus on rescuing Tali.
We had to reach Illium and meet up with Liara, who would hopefully have a target for us to go after. As well as that, all my old friends would be on their way to Liara's coordinates. As our team gathered together, we would be equipped to tackle any situation. My primary goal was to get Tali back safely, but there was no way that I was stopping fighting these terrorist bastards until their whole organisation was a smoking wreck. I owed them that much, and I had to take them down for the good of the galaxy and all the innocents who might be caught in their crosshairs in the days to come. I managed a smile as I thought of what Garrus would say at a time like this: Just like old times.
