AN: For those wondering, there's a six month time-skip accounting for the beat-cop phase of Delkatar's and Tela's time with C-SEC. This chapter begins with their first "milk-run" case as junior detectives, which is anything but.
Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect or the various X-COM games. They belong to their respective copyright owners. This story is not written for profit. I make no money from it. It is not for sale or rent.
Chapter 7: Citadel Blues
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Part 1
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15 June 2177 CE
Insight Cyber-Solutions Warehouse
Zakera Ward
The Citadel
I should have known better than to taunt Murphy. Six months of boredom, PR stunts and classes at the C-SEC Academy – I should have taken that as a paid vacation with some strings attached and enjoyed myself. Sometimes it was even funny – no one wanted to mess up with a short-tempered Spectre and Psychic X-Commie, which made for some hilarious encounters.
Instead, I had to bitch about how boring the whole gig was. Tela too, for that matter. She took this whole retirement but not quite going on with her bad, bitched even more than me, so I'm blaming her about this too!
This, was our first case as junior detectives attached to more experienced C-SEC agents, and it went south almost immediately. It was supposed to be a simple raid for suspected illegal drugs. Six C-SEC agents, one ERS Unit – the local equivalent of SWAT; that was more than enough people to secure one not too large warehouse for the forensics techs.
It went to hell ten seconds after we breached. We got in overconfident because all our sensors and my gift claimed that the front of the warehouse was empty and once we were all inside we ran right into an ambush. Flash-bangs, concussion grenades, overload charges – they were stuffed in crates covered by something that negated all our scanners. The initial explosions were enough to drain our shields and break our cohesion. It was only training and experience that allowed me to dive for cover the moment my senses got overloaded by external stimuli. If we were in full armour, it might have been different, however the only people in proper kit were the ERS folks. The rest of us relied on whatever could fit under plan clothes along with shields, biotic and psionic fields.
I hit the ground, rolled and froze when a stasis field slammed into me. That left me a few moments to curse my luck while maintaining a thick psionic barrier around myself as concealed hostiles poured gun and laser fire into my frozen form. The later was a nasty surprise – the Citadel wasn't supposed to have infantry scale laser tech yet, the mutual defence treaty with them was yet to be ratified by Parliament on Arcturus Station and all Citadel governments.
The more concerning part was that I couldn't feel the minds of our attackers. Mechs? We didn't detect any and that was a rude surprise, because we had top of the line Spectre gear thanks to Vasir. We should have been able to detect at least some signs of trap, but by that same logic, we should have found the improvised minefield we walked into. A few months playing cops made us fat and dumb – we wouldn't have walked into such an ambush before that. We wouldn't have breached the warehouse from the front before either.
The hell I was rambling about in the middle of a shoot-out? Did I get a concussion or something? Huh. That was actually likely after taking a face full of flash-bang and concussion grenades. In fact I was feeling too damn calm considering that people were shooting at me and my team.
I focused on my gift and opened the floodgates. Power rushed through into my mind and flared through my implants. My perception sharpened and I bristled. There was a very subtle psionic field levelled over us. I'm sure it wasn't here before the mines detonated but now I could feel it clearly.
"Hostile Psionic!" I shouted. It was the only other thing I could do while under stasis beyond using my own gift.
Whoever the bastard was, they didn't appear to be particularly strong, however they were very, very skilled and insidious. It wasn't until now that I noticed that half the ERS team was down, one of the Detectives was gone – Merrek, a young Turian I met just yesterday, and another down for the count – Chelik, another Turian and Vakarian's newest protégée.
Vasir and the rest were pinned down and trading shots with our illusive assailants.
"Psionics!?" The Spectre cursed something in a dialect my translator didn't catch. "We need to break the ambush, our cover won't last. Can you take them out?" Tela shouted. She traded her SMG for a heavy pistol and her biotics surged around her leather clad form.
The stasis surrounding me finally broke, just in time for multiple Biotic attacks to fly my way. I glared at the dark interior of the warehouse and surged my gift in a tunnel then jumped in it. It was a bastardized, psionic version of a biotic charge that I came with after a particularly long night of drinking with Vasir during our second week as beat cops. It wasn't subtle, it wasn't beautiful but it worked. For a split second a purple tunnel formed between me and my destination. The purple surge of my psionics sheared everything they touched and I shot through the funnel made of my mind's energies. Just in time too, because the enemy biotics tore my former position apart a moment after I left.
The tunnel followed me and compressed around me in a raging sphere of untamed psionic might before it detonated and disintegrated everything in a two meters radius. The distinctive thunderclap of biotic charge came from the left and Tela splattered a humanoid form wearing some kind of adaptive camouflage over a tall stack of metal crates.
Finally, adrenaline kicked in as my gift shed the last traces of foreign psionics in my head. My enhanced eyes caught a hazy blur and all I could do was to summon a psionic wall between us. The hostile shot a stubby weapon at me and a ruby beam splashed over my purple shield. My response came without conscious thought. I dived out-of-the-way while summoning psionic spears which I threw at the figure. I was already rolling away before it dawned to me that even when it was just a few metres from me I still couldn't detect their thoughts. It had to be a Mech, right?
At least one of the psionic lances hit it and the distorted scream it bellowed simply had to come from someone alive.
I got up on one knee and slammed down powerful psionic field around me, while my arm pulled my Spectre issue heavy pistol and I levelled it at where I thought the enemy was. All I saw was a torn off arm with five fingers, red human blood and a trail leading deeper in the warehouse. The hell!? Even X-COM didn't have mental shields that could fully hide someone's presence at this range!
The unknown Psi-operative made their presence known again and a wave of unease flooded the warehouse and I was sure that terror would follow soon. I let the wounded hostile run and focused on the enemy Psion. They were very good in masking their presence and if there was anyone besides my team I could detect in the warehouse they might have been able to fool me. However, their buddies were invisible to my gift right now and when I focused more power in a search for a foreign mind, it became obvious where they were. Second floor, back end, where there was a dark office overlooking the warehouse. Very conspicuously no one was shooting at us from that nice elevated position.
"Vasir, make me an entrance in that office!" I shouted at the Spectre.
A glance confirmed she was very much alive and slinging biotics and a pair of ghostly figures that darted in and out of sight. Tela's only answer was to hurl an overpowered warp at the office that disintegrated a hole in its wall. I tunnelled right inside and the resulting backslash sheared walls and furniture around me leaving only the floor intact. Laser beams slammed at the dissipating psionic field around me and I tunnelled deeper in the office further wrecking it. Walls, rafters and document bins along with a leather couch tore apart around me and I finally located my prey.
She was a pretty young human girl wearing simple blue blouse and skirt. Her eyes shone with psionic energy and she had a laser pistol very similar to those we used back in the war aimed at me.
"Freeze!" I ordered and reinforced my words with psionic might that I crashed into her mind.
My mental attack tore through her defences using brute force. I was barely able to register their complexity before they simply unravelled and was in her mind. Her index finger froze just as she was about to squeeze the trigger again. All she thought about was fear and terror of failure. Searing light shattered her awareness I staggered from the backslash of being connected to a dying mind.
A lance of pain slammed into my head as the mental connection disintegrated. The girl collapsed to the ground like a puppet with her strings cut. Steaming blood leaked from her ears, eyes and nose confirming what I felt – her brain got fried by some kind of counter-measure. I shook my head to chase off the dizziness that came along the pain from the feedback and headed back into the fray. I could hear approaching sirens so backup was on the way. Below me, Tela got her heads on one of the cloaked people and tore their arms with her biotics before knocking them out with a biotic punch. I could see another nearby – that one missed a large chunk of their head courtesy of a warp I think. I scanned the warehouse from my vantage point but couldn't see any more of the apparitions who ambushed us.
"Tela! I wounded one and they ran that way!" I pointed to the left.
Vasir looked up, nodded and charged in the shadows. I surrounded myself with the power of my gift and jumped over the nearest stack of crates. The chase was on.
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Part 2
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15 June 2177 CE
Executor's office
C-SEC HQ
The Citadel
It was nice, calm and most importantly boring day on the Citadel. Crime was down a percent over the previous quarter, two whole months went by without any notable corruption scandals, no one got caught sleeping with the wrong people or... things...
For Executor Palin that was the closest he might get to the human concept of heaven before his day to join the Spirits was up. He liked boring. It meant there was no crisis to give him headaches, no politics messing his nice and orderly station and even the Spectre and crazy human shoved down his throat somehow managed to behave and not cause an intergalactic incident.
Life was good. He even finally caught up on all his paperwork for a change and might get to go home to his intended in time.
Entirely predictably, that's when alarms echoed all over the place. A heartbeat later, his Omni-tool lit up with a message.
Palin warbled a curse on his native Palaven dialect and accepted the call.
"Sir, trouble. Vacarian's calling backup and medics."
For a moment Palin's mind screeched to a halt. Vacarian was one of his most experienced and reliable people. A good and dependable Turian. This had to be serious indeed. Then he remembered that Vacarian was babysitting their potential headaches today.
"Get ERS rolling to their location now!" The Executor snapped. He paused just long enough to grab his pistol, which he had on a magnetic clamp below his desk and he ran out of the office. If either the Spectre or the human got themselves killed on his watch, he wasn't going to hear the end of it – to his shame that was the first thing that ran through his head. The next was concern, not only about Vacarian and whoever else was for them but over the situation. There shouldn't be anything on the Citadel that the grizzled C-SEC veteran, a Spectre, X-COM operative and their overkill of a backup couldn't handle. They had an ERS unit with them, didn't hey? Palin recalled giving approval for it last night.
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15 June 2177 CE
Insight Cyber-Solutions Warehouse
Zakera Ward
The Citadel
It wasn't hard to follow Tela even if I had to use my Gift to keep up. In her anger, she wasn't particularly subtle and after six moths working together, the feel of her mind was familiar enough that I couldn't help it but be aware of her location at all times as long as I was accessing my power.
Currently that was unsettling. It was clear she had a bead on our quarry, yet hers was the only mind I could sense in our immediate vicinity. Oh, there were the odd signatures farther away, with vague sense of a lot of minds beyond the range I was concentrating on, yet I still couldn't sense our target. That was unsettling. The only people I knew of who could pull of such a stunt were the Ethereals when they ambushed us on the Cat's planet. If they had operatives on the Citadel...
That thought made me stumble. Why did I just assume that they didn't have agents here all-together? Perhaps they have been around lying low long before they attacked Earth. That was a chilling thought. Now that it occurred to me, it was obvious really. It was all but guaranteed that X-COM was aware of the possibility, nevertheless I would be raising that point in my next report, both to them and C-SEC.
But first, we had a one handed bastard to catch.
I went through a tunnel leading into a nearby building a few seconds after Tela dashed inside. This wasn't on any of our maps and our scanners didn't pick it up. Not good. Another ambush? Traps?
Vasir had similar idea and when she neared the end of the tunnel she released a massive biotic shock-wave in front of her. It was the prudent thing to do, because a moment later the mouth of the passage lit up in a deafening explosion that shook the floor. Instincts took over and I raised a psionic barrier in front of me but that soon turned out to be superficial – Tela had the same idea and her biotics were up to the task; the explosion still echoed when she vanished in a biotic charge.
I followed suit using my bastardized version and found myself in another warehouse. This one was mostly empty barring whatever held the booby trap and a bunch of old trucks parked in the far corner, near the exit. Vasir's mind was to the right moving fast and I took a moment to check the other side for any nasty surprises. I could see nothing – just empty space and stairway leading to a dark office similar to the one I wrecked earlier. Detecting no threats there, my head snapped in the opposite direction. Vasir was nearing the exit and gaining on a blur. A single armed one too.
This one wasn't going to get away. I focused, the world around me flashed purple and I channelled more and more power into a tunnel until its exit stood in front of the warehouse's door. Once that was done, all I had to do was to will myself forward and I shot through a vortex created by my own mind and imagination. It felt like taking a long step and being squeezed through a vacuum cleaner's tube. Then I was standing at the end of my purple tunnel and it collapsed around me before the power detonated into a cascade of psionic fury.
The hostile managed to skid to a halt just before he ran into my dissipating technique and for a moment he was out of balance. That was all Tela needed. She flashed forward carried by her biotics and tackled him into the ground. Vasir slammed a biotic encased fist in the back of his head and once she was pretty sure he was out could flash-forged heavy duty restrains.
"This could have gone better. You all right?" I made a sweep with my gift and then let settle into a barrier around me. I wasn't taking any chances until we got some proper backup.
"Just banged up. I'll live. You?"
"Head hurts, otherwise good."
"The psionic?"
"Some kind of safeguard fried her mind when I attempted to capture her." I winced. Experiencing someone die while in their mind was still one of the worse things I've been through and a hundred years of psionic knowledge and research did little to mitigate the side effects.
"This little fish might talk." Vasir picked up her captive and slung him over her shoulder.
"Let's hope so. I'm eager to figure out how he still hides his mind from me." With him, and now that he was in custody it was clear it was a him, knocked out, his mind should have been more or less open book, yet as far as my gift was concerned, it was just me and Tela.
"We'll figure it out." Vasir sighed. "We got sloppy."
I grimaced and nodded. That we did.
"Now we have to explain this mess too." I added.
"Killjoy."
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Twenty minutes later, the whole place swarmed with C-SEC personnel and medics. We delivered our captive to one of the waiting ambulances and got it to wait for proper ERS escort just in case. Meanwhile we got ushered for a check-up by a bunch of irritated looking paramedics.
"How many didn't make it doc?" I asked a young Asari who got the short stick of treating me.
"One of the detectives is dead, another is in critical en route to Zakera General, and a third got his shoulder shredded but is otherwise stable. The last got lucky – only concussion and burned crest. Two of the ERS were dead when we got here and another two are en route to the hospital in critical conditions. The other two have light wounds and concussions but are otherwise all right."
"God-damn it." I spat. It was bad and it was only pure luck it wasn't worse.
"Vasir, Veil, get your assess over here!" Palin's distinctive voice cut through the noise of sirens. "By the Spirits, what happened here!?"
Yeah. How the bloody hell were we supposed to explain this one when we had no idea what happened!?