Spectres 2
The second thing Shepard noticed about Eden Prime was the people. The spaceport they'd set the shuttle down in was filled with teeming crowds of passengers, flight crew, porters and technicians. Most people who lived on Eden Prime rarely if ever left, but almost everyone who did had to pass through this spaceport to do so.
Shepard couldn't remember seeing this many humans together in one place for a long time. Maybe she never had. It was strange - unsettling - to see so many faces that were so like hers all at once. She wondered if her grandparents' generation on ancient Earth had felt like this all the time.
The first thing Shepard noticed about Eden Prime was the smell.
To be fair, all planets smelled terrible. That was something you only realised after you'd lived in space for a while. Only when your nose had had a chance to get used to breathing in clean, sterile air did it start to realise what air was actually supposed to smell like. But something about the air of Eden Prime smelled uniquely horrible. She wondered briefly if it affected Vakarian the same way; a turian's sense of smell was notoriously hard to compare to a human's.
Jenkins, standing beside her, took a deep breath and grinned happily.
"Feels good to be out in the fresh air, doesn't it ma'am?"
She was pretty sure he wasn't joking. Well, she thought, He did spend most of his life on this planet.
"It's certainly a change, Private," she said mildly.
"Not a lot of alien faces, ma'am." said Komarov. Shepard nodded agreement silently. There weren't many decorated human faces, either. Maybe Komarov should stay with the shuttle, she thought.
"Well, what now, Vakarian?" she asked the Spectre. He looked around the spaceport curiously.
"Well," he began, "I think, uh." He cleared his throat, flexed his mandibles slightly. Maybe that answers the question about the smell, she thought.
"The dig site's a few klicks away from here, out in the hills," he said. "We lost contact a while ago, so there's no point rushing in there guns blazing now. Whatever happened was probably long over days ago."
"Still," he said, his voice becoming less sure, "I'd rather not draw too much attention to our arrival."
The Spectre's eyes flicked up and to the right. Shepard realised he must be looking something up: a map, most likely. Although the primary purpose of electronic visors was to augment sight, most models tended to throw in extra features like extranet access or in-built databases. All of which was probably useful for a Spectre on a strange alien world or unfamiliar ship. She hadn't noticed him doing it earlier, but this must have been how he managed to check her service files back on board the Resolute.
"There's a maglev train that stops close by here and will take us most of the way," Vakarian said. "We can call the shuttle over once we've arrived."
"Lead the way, Vakarian," she said easily.
"Ah, actually Commander," he said, "I thought it might make sense to split up on our way to the train station. You know, try to pick up some local background on the way? You and Private Jenkins might overhear something I wouldn't. We'll stay in radio contact throughout, of course."
Shepard shrugged. "Works for me," said. "You okay waiting here for a bit, Komarov? We'll signal you once we've secured the dig site."
The shuttle pilot nodded quickly. Vakarian strode away to the north, and - at a signal from Shepard - Jenkins led her along a different route in the opposite direction. They'd made planetfall sometime late in the afternoon, local time. The concourse was bathed in the light of the setting sun. They walked in silence for a few minutes, Jenkins intent on remember the route to the maglev station while Shepard looked curiously at the people around her.
"Did you grow up around here, Private?" she asked, curiously.
"Near here, ma'am." Jenkins voice was oddly subdued. "Grew up on a farm, actually."
She stayed quiet, waiting for the younger man to continue.
"After First Contact, my friends and I used to come out into the fields most nights," he said. "We'd try to kid ourselves that we could pick out the turian ships in orbit, or that we could see the redshift of the batarian ships retreating back to Khar'shan. But mostly we'd just look up and wonder what else was out there. Or who else, I guess."
He shook his head, slowly. "When they realised what I was spending my evenings doing, my parents tried teaching me the names of the stars, the constellations. They gave up pretty fast: these weren't the stars they knew, and most of the constellations in our sky still don't have names. But I told them it didn't matter what they were called. They were breathtaking. Beautiful."
That was probably the longest speech Jenkins had given in the year or so she'd known him. Shepard wondered what had inspired it. I guess going home for the first time is a strange experience for all of us, she thought.
"The stars look pretty good up close too, Jenkins," she said softly.
Shepard thought briefly of her own childhood, back on Mindoir. She'd grown up on a farm too. Had her parents tried teaching her the names of the local stars? Surely they must have done. The truth was, she couldn't remember. Although she thought about her family a lot, she couldn't remember much about her life before First Contact. She'd been happy though. She thought she'd been happy.
Shepard shook her head, annoyed at herself for dwelling on the past when she was meant to be focused. They were walking through a series of narrow alleyways and side passages, where the crowds were thinner - the ideal place for an ambush, unlikely as that sounded. She hoped Jenkins knew where he was heading.
He seemed confident at least, picking a deliberate path through the network of passageways. Shepard was surprised by how clean the area around spaceport was. She'd always thought of cities as being unclean, somehow. Full of people and their possessions and their waste. But the buildings here looked almost brand new, even along these side streets.
After heading south for a few minutes, they started to swing towards the right, until by Shepard's reckoning they were heading almost directly due west. Then they turned through a narrow gate and were back on the main concourse, in an area full of people.
"Not far to go now, ma'am." said Jenkins. Shepard was about to answer when she heard a distant high-pitched voice.
"Look, mommy! More soldiers!"
A small girl - perhaps nine years old, if Shepard had to guess - was standing by a middle-aged woman on the other side of the concourse. Spying Shepard and Jenkins, the child tried to run towards them, only to be pulled back by her mother.
"Any good with kids, Jenkins?" asked Shepard, hopefully. Well, Vakarian did want us to interact with the locals, she thought.
The girl broke free of her parent and ran up to them.
"Are you soldiers?" she demanded, standing a few feet away and looking at them both curiously. "Are you with the Spectre?"
Shepard nodded warily. She felt awkward around young children - she'd never had much experience of it. No younger relatives when she was growing up. Except for a few rare early-developers, like herself, the training camp had mostly been a mixture of teenagers and adults. Being stared at by turian children on Palaven probably didn't count as preparation.
"Well, what's she like?" the girl demanded.
Shepard looked at Jenkins, nonplussed. She? But before she could try to answer, the girl's mother reached them, apologising and pulling the girl away.
"I hope she wasn't bothering you," the woman apologised. "She's just crazy about soldiers these days, it's all she seems to talk about. Well, of course you know how children get at this age."
Shepard didn't, not really. At the girl's age she'd probably been in biotic training for a year, spending most of her time trying to get small objects to levitate off a desk or pouring water from glass to glass without moving her hands. She'd been fitted for her first biotic amp by the time she was eight. She hadn't dreamt about being a soldier; she'd always known she'd become one.
"No problem at all, ma'am," she said, as smoothly as she could. "Your daughter mentioned something about a Spectre. Did you see her?"
"Yes, there was a Spectre here earlier," the woman admitted. "An asari. Wandering around here like she owned the place. Owned it and was embarrassed by how run-down she'd let it get."
Shepard nodded. Definitely sounds like an asari, she thought. One of her instructors, when she was older, had been an asari. She'd taught her a lot about biotics, but they'd never been close.
"I didn't like her," the woman confided. "I know it's not the sort of thing we're meant to say, but I just find the asari rude, you know? How can a whole species live for centuries and yet never bother to learn some basic manners?"
Shepard nodded again, fighting back the beginning of a grin. That did sound a lot like what she used to think about her old instructor.
"To be honest," said the woman, lowering her voice, "I've been worried about my little girl, traipsing after the Spectre like she's been all morning. I mean, the government says children can't catch biotics that way, but .. well, they would, wouldn't they?"
Shepard's small grin froze in place.
"She's been healthy enough so far," the woman said, looking down at her daughter fondly. "Still, you can't always tell, can you?"
"No," Shepard agreed stiffly, "I suppose you can't."
The mother and child walked away, the girl looking back at them as they left. Jenkins looked at the Commander nervously. For a minute she thought he was going to say something, but he seemed to think better of it. They walked a few more minutes in silence, until they found themselves at the entrance to the maglev station.
The wall was covered in fresh white paint, leaving only fragments of the messages that must have decorated it before: TERRA … REMEMBER … MUST NOT. Shepard stared at them curiously, but that was all she could make out.
On the opposite wall, drawn in even fresher orange paint, was a strange looking pair of nested hexagons. Looks like some sort of tag, she thought. She didn't recognise the design, but doubted it was anything official.
She was about to ask Jenkins about it, but as she turned around to address him Vakarian strode up out of the crowd.
"The train leaves in five minutes," announced the turian Spectre bluntly. "Let's move."
"An asari?" Vakarian demanded. "You're sure?"
Shepard shrugged. She didn't understand why their news had rattled Vakarian this much. "The woman we spoke to earlier seemed pretty sure there was an asari Spectre in town," she said. "And I can't think of a likely reason for her to lie about that. Of course, we have no way of knowing if the asari she was really is a Spectre, but ..."
Generally, lying about being a Spectre was something people only did if they were very desperate or very stupid. Almost all planetary authorities had access to verifiable and comprehensive lists of active Spectre agents, so you wouldn't be able to fool anybody with influence for long. And the Council took a very dim view of people who tried to impersonate its agents.
Vakarian shook his head, reluctantly conceding the point.
"Let's just hope we don't run into her," he said. Shepard had the impression he wanted to leave it at that. Tough.
"But why would the Council send two Spectres?" she pressed. Two Spectres to investigate one missing archaeological team? Something didn't add up. What else could a Spectre be here for?
The turian's eyes flashed angrily at her question, but he remained silent.
"Is there something you're not telling us, Vakarian?" Shepard demanded.
"There are a lot of things I'm not telling you, Commander." he snapped. "Because you don't need to know."
"Now," he stood up, mandibles flexing, "Unless there was anything else?"
Shepard shook her head wordlessly and stalked away to the far end of the carriage. Jenkins followed her, nervously looking back at the Spectre.
"Commander," he said awkwardly, "I'm sorry. About that woman earlier…"
Shepard looked at him without speaking.
"Jennifer," - he coughed, corrected himself - "Nicollier told me a bit about what she went through, growing up here. About her family, and what they did to her. It's not…" he trailed off, looking down at the floor of the train carriage.
"It's not fair, I know." said Shepard, as gently as she could. "The thing is: life isn't fair, Private. Not always. Not often, if I'm being honest. But you don't need to apologise for every idiot you share a planet with."
Jenkins looked unhappy.
"I always thought we were lucky, ma'am," he said. "Because the batarians never attacked Eden Prime, I mean. And of course, we were lucky. But maybe that's why we're not like the other human planets in the Traverse."
That was probably a large part of it, thought Shepard. Humans from the four worlds attacked in the First Blitz - Mindoir, Tiptree, Horizon and Dobravlaski - had something in common that wasn't shared by those from any of the other colony worlds. They knew what a difference the protection of the Hierarchy meant to their lives. Only people lucky enough not to know could entertain any fantasy of humanity surviving in the galaxy on its own.
"I always figured I'd come back here, once my tour was over and I'd got my citizenship," said Jenkins. "But these days … I'm not so sure."
Shepard had never asked Jenkins why he was so relaxed around biotics, given his background. There's not exactly a delicate way to ask somebody why they're not a bigot, she thought. Still, Jenkins was making her curious. Had somebody in his family been a biotic, perhaps? She asked him, but he shook his head in reply.
"First biotic I ever met was Private Nicollier, ma'am," he said. "First day on board, fresh out of boot camp. Figured she was a pilot or a tech specialist. She was so small I couldn't understand how she'd made it on board. And I said so."
He grinned, his face lighting up at the memory.
"She offered to demonstrate, next thing I know she's thrown me twenty feet across the ship. Caught me at the other end, too. It was … awesome."
Shepard smiled too, even though she suspected the story had been exaggerated or edited in the telling. She couldn't really imagine Nicollier using her biotics on a crewmate without a lot more provocation than Jenkins had described. Still, she thought, I guess it all worked out well in the end.
"Oh, by the way," she said, remembering the question she'd meant to ask him earlier. "I noticed something strange when we were approaching the station earlier. Graffiti, I guess, only the rest of the space port was so clean it stood out. Thought it might be some local gang thing."
She described the symbol she'd seen as best as she could, but Jenkins looked blank.
"Can you describe that again, Commander?"
It wasn't Jenkins who asked the question, but the Spectre. He'd walked back towards them, their earlier brief argument apparently forgotten, and now stood close by wearing a concerned look. Shepard wondered briefly how much of the previous conversation he'd overheard. As she repeated her description, the turian's face grew darker.
"That symbol's been flagged by other Spectres," he said. "It's linked to a human terrorist group. They call themselves Cerberus."
Shepard swore to herself softly. She hadn't recognised the symbol, but she'd heard of Cerberus. Most humans had. They called themselves a pro-human group, but that didn't stop them blowing up human-owned buildings, or attacking turian vessels with humans on board.
Most infamously, they'd tried to murder the President four years ago, right before the start of the batarian's Second Blitz. They'd failed, but the bomb they'd planted on his shuttle had taken one life: the President's teenage granddaughter. Shepard was sure that they'd been acting in concert with the batarians - the timing was too suspicious otherwise. But Cerberus's usual defenders on the extranet had denied this vehemently, and Hierarchy intelligence had never been able to find any definitive proof.
Still, it was odd to see them active on Eden Prime. One thing Cerberus wasn't was traditionalist Their public extranet supporters also advocated for pursuing research into creating biotics and better exploiting the secrets of the Prothean ruins. They insisted that this was the only way that humanity could protect itself without the Hierarchy. The fact that both those things were very much illegal under Council law were, naturally, merely cited as evidence that the Council could not be trusted to protect human interests. They must be here for the dig site, she thought.
If Cerberus was behind the missing volus expedition, then the mission was going to be a lot more complicated than she'd hoped.
"Oh, Spirits," said Jenkins, "What happened here?"
The archaeologists' camp had been ransacked. Equipment smashed, digging machines overturned. And a now-familiar logo sprayed over the walls of the few prefabs still standing: two orange, overlapping hexagons.
Cerberus.
There was no sign of the archaeologists themselves. Privately, Shepard feared the worst.
"Be careful," said Vakarian, as they fanned out to explore. "We don't know who did this, when they did it, or where they are now. Don't touch anything that looks suspicious."
The sun had fallen below the horizon while there were aboard the maglev. The flashlights built into their suits cast long, strange shadows over the remains of the camp. Shepard thought she could hear a faint moaning sound in the distance. Probably the wind, she told herself. Or maybe some native animal. Planets were strange places.
Without speaking, she'd taken point, leading Jenkins and Vakarian in a slowly widening spiral path. Fragments of broken glass shattered underfoot as they stepped carefully over broken machine parts and the pits and troughs that littered the ground..
The smell that Shepard had noticed on making planetfall was back now, stronger than ever. It smelled like something rotten, like something left and abandoned in an unsealed storage unit. It smells like death, she thought, grimly.
"No sign of any combat. Didn't this camp have any defences?" she asked Vakarian, turning to look back over her shoulder.
"Security mechs, I'm told," he called back. "Looks like they were deactivated somehow."
They hadn't seen any signs of security mechs, active or otherwise. Shepard suspected the Spectre was right. In theory, top of the line security drones were unhackable. But reality and theory didn't always agree. Shepard had heard rumours of hackers taking control of mechs and marching them miles away from their intended location. Or altering their IFF protocols to identifies their employers as enemies.
Those rumours didn't stop people using security mechs in place of genuine trained professionals, of course. They weren't used by any respectable military force, but corporations and private citizens used them throughout the galaxy. People used them to cut corners and to cut costs, especially when they didn't really believe any security presence would really be needed. Mechs didn't eat, didn't sleep and didn't demand overtime pay. But they didn't think either, not really. Council law was very strict about this.
Centuries ago a Council species called the quarians had developed genuine thinking machines. When those machines had risen up and taken control of the quarian's home world the Council had simply shut down the quarian embassy and refused to speak to their ambassadors. The surviving quarians had been left to fend for themselves, as best they could. No Council race since had ever dared to develop anything close to true artificial intelligence.
But that meant that security mechs were almost laughably stupid. Capable of following limited orders, just about, but incapable - by design - of showing any sign of resourcefulness or originality. Incapable of feeling curiosity, loyalty or determination. Shepard, like most of the galaxy's military, would never trust her life to something less intelligent than a hamster.
With the right preparation, most experts would always bet on a smart organic being able to bypass or subvert a mech's internal system. The archaeologists, it seemed, had bet the other way. It was a bet they'd paid for with their lives.
They'd been exploring the camp for about half an hour before Vakarian found the bodies. Two turians and five volus, lying together at the bottom of an excavation pit. The turians had both been shot in the back at close range. The volus's pressure suits had been ruptured, flooding their bodies with a poisonous mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. Death would have come for them within minutes.
The faint moaning Shepard had heard earlier was louder now. One of the volus was still - just barely - alive.
"Easy, Vol-clan," Shepard said soothingly, bending down to inspect the volus's injuries, applying medi-gel to the broken and bleeding skin. She knew it was a futile gesture. However minor the physical injuries, there was no way a volus could survive for long outside the high-pressure ammonia atmospheres of their native planet Irune. All the same, the volus fought hard for consciousness, struggling against the pain to speak.
"She …" the dying volus wheezed, looking up at Shepard and Vakarian desperately. "... she killed … everyone ..."
The volus coughed again, eyes closing, and spoke no more. Shepard whispered a short prayer to the spirits of the area. She wished she knew more about the volus's beliefs. The Vol-clan, as they called themselves, had always been steadfast allies of humanity. They'd defended them in internal Hierarchy politics, advocated for their causes in the Citadel, sold them crucial technology and medical supplies as they rebuilt after the Blitz. And they'd never asked for anything in return.
Shepard hadn't been able to protect these people from whoever had murdered them. But she would have liked to be able to at least give their families the comfort of knowing that the fallen had been granted the proper burial customs. Assuming that the volus even have burial customs as we understand them, she reflected. Or families.
The turian Spectre brought her back to the moment. He peered into the pit, then turn his flashlight back to some of the wreckage they'd walked past earlier.
"This is wrong, Commander," Vakarian said urgently. "Look around. There's sign of heavy rainfall on the soil that's been torn up, but it's been dry here since we arrived. Some of the broken machinery is starting to rust. And there are weeds growing up in places that must have been covered by those prefab modules, before they were overturned."
He gestured with the light as he spoke, pointing out the evidence he was describing.
"This site must have been hit days ago, right around the time the Council first lost contact." he said.
"But those people we found must have been shot only minutes before we arrived. That volus wouldn't have been able to talk otherwise. So where were they in the meantime? And where are the people who shot them? What happened here?"
Shepard frowned, trying to piece the puzzle together. Somebody attacked the camp, then came back later for the survivors, maybe, she guessed. But then why didn't the survivors manage to get a message out? Or did somebody find them somewhere else and bring them back here to kill?
"Do you think somebody is trying to blame this on Cerberus?" she asked, almost to herself. "A third party we don't know about?"
The Spectre shook his head. "I don't-" he started.
"Commander, I found something strange."
It was Jenkins' voice, calling from further down the slope. Damn it, Jenkins, thought Shepard. You weren't supposed to wander ahead.
They found him standing a few yards down a spiralling path that led into a large cavernous space. Shepard couldn't tell if this had been dug out of solid rock by the archaeologists' machines or if it was something older.
The object of Jenkins' attention was certainly something new. A large metallic device, arranged on a tripod, about as high as a human and wide enough to block the path down. The device was covered in plastic screens, flashing with green-tinted texts and numbers. Jenkins was peering at once of those screens as Shepard and Vakarian arrived.
"I think it's some sort of transmitter," he said, turning around to look back up at them. "It's broadcasting-"
As Jenkins turned, the screens also suddenly flashed red, then shut off entirely. Half a second later, without any further warning, the device exploded. Flames and shards of broken metal shot out in all directions.
Instinctively, without time to even shout a warning, Shepard threw up a biotic barrier, shielding herself and Vakarian from the force of the blast. Jenkins - standing closer to the exploding device - wasn't so lucky. The blast sent him flying backwards, his head crashing against the cavern wall with a horrific cracking sound. He fell to the ground, twitched briefly, then lay still. Even as Shepard ran forward, she knew that she was much too late.