Omega 5
| Two Days Ago |
"Vakarian," she said, "You're bleeding."
Shepard sounded worried. He turned to look back at her: gray eyes round and wide, unplated skin creased with a frown. She looked small, helpless; it was hard to believe he'd just seen her go toe to toe with two krogan at once.
He was about to say something flippant when some sixth sense warned him of danger behind him. Smoothly, without even pausing for breath, he spun around, pistol raised and - almost without thinking - fired a single shot, right between the red flat eyes of the krogan Battlemaster who had just crawled up to the top of the stairwell behind him. The krogan fell backwards, a stunned look on his face. Vakarian sauntered over to the edge, looking down at the krogan's lifeless body below.
"It's not quite orbital bombardment," he drawled, "but-"
He wasn't ready for the sudden blast of biotic energy the struck him in the back, pushing him inexorably towards the edge, feet slipping and sliding until his legs buckled and he dropped to his knees, still sliding forwards.
His pistol and his rifle clattered over the side, one after the other, metallic echoes filling the air as they bounced off concrete walls and fell down through the black space below. Faster than he could have believed, he was hanging over the edge himself, talons scrambling for purchase on the edge of the stairwell.
Looking back up he saw Shepard, hand still extended outwards, wreathed in blue energy, staring down at him contemptuously. Her dark hair fluttered in the breeze that blew up from the stairwell shaft, and the long scar down her face seemed to glow blood red beneath her skin. She grinned at him humorlessly, pale face breaking open wider than he could have imagined to reveal a set of sharp, yellowing fangs.
"Now we're even," she growled as she stamped on his hands with a heavy boot, hard enough to shatter bone.
He fell for a long time, down into the darkness.
Everything was black. In the silence, he could hear his heart, pounding wildly.
Oh, right. Memory returned a few seconds after consciousness. That's not what happened.
He was still in the same dark room he'd been left to fall asleep in. Still cuffed to the same hard metal chair he'd been sitting in since he arrived, legs twisted around awkwardly in a way they weren't supposed to bend. And Shepard was still - he didn't let himself finish the thought. You never saw a body, he told himself firmly. He wasn't going to think about Shepard.
A door opened, dim red light spilling into the room.
"Turian," a voice growled. "We have questions."
He didn't recognise the speaker. A krogan, of course, but not the Battlemaster.
"Can it wait for a bit?" he asked, as nonchalantly as he could force himself to be. "I'm in the middle of som-"
Garrus didn't see the krogan move. One minute he was sitting down, legs bent unnaturally, hands chained behind his back. The next minute he was lying on the floor, still chained to the chair, staring up at the ceiling, a blinding pain in his jaw. I think that broke a tooth, he thought, feeling around the inside of his mouth carefully with his tongue.
"Don't try to be funny, turian," the krogan warned. "I've never laughed at a live turian before, and you won't be the first."
Garrus didn't say anything in response to that. Hard to trade wisecracks when your mouth's full of blood. The krogan seemed to approve. With a grunt, he picked up Garrus's chair and hauled it - and Garrus - back upright.
"There's no point trying to play tough," the krogan rumbled. "Shadow Broker will be picking you up soon."
The Shadow Broker. He remembered warning Shepard about the Broker. It seemed like a long time ago. Nihlus - his old mentor on the Spectre training program - had warned him that the Broker had eyes everywhere, even at the highest level of the Council. Even among the Spectres.
Nihlus had been determined to one day learn the Shadow Broker's true identity - to expose him, to disrupt his networks of blackmail and bribery, to break his influence over Council space. He'd not made any progress in all his time as a Spectre, as far as Garrus knew. Even the Shadow Broker's species was still a mystery. Given his long tenure, the Broker could have been a krogan or an asari, or course. But his behaviour - plotting and hiding and acting only through intermediaries - wasn't what anybody would expect from a krogan. And he didn't act much like an asari either: captured agents of the Shadow Broker, despite not having met him in person, were all insistent that the Broker was male, short-tempered, and largely indifferent about the fortunes of the Asari Republics.
That left the more oddball theories: there were people who insisted that the Shadow Broker was really a rogue AI, or that 'Shadow Broker' was a ceremonial title that had been passed down by a clan of volus for generations, or that the Broker belonged to some exotic alien species previously unknown to the galactic community.
Nobody really knew for sure, just as nobody knew anything about where the Broker was based or how he'd managed to elude capture for so long. Nobody except the Broker himself and (perhaps?) the Broker's closest confidantes. But Nihlus had told Garrus that one day, he'd face the Shadow Broker and unmask him.
It seemed that Garrus might be meeting the Shadow Broker himself before that happened.
Somehow he doubted it was a meeting he'd survive to tell anybody about.
He wondered if Nihlus had been able to confirm their suspicions of Vasir since the last time they'd spoken. Wondered if she was the reason the Shadow Broker was after him. She'd been on Eden Prime, after all, knew what had happened with the Prothean artefacts uncovered by Shol's team of archaeologists. But why me? That was the part that didn't make sense. If Vasir was behind this, then surely she'd have pointed out Shepard as the target of interest. It was Shepard who had touched the artefact; Shepard who had seen the beacon's visions; Shepard who -
He remembered that he was trying hard not to think about Shepard.
"We were just paid to hand you over," the krogan continued. "No questions asked. But that asari we found waiting for you-" - he grinned unpleasantly - "-well, she was full of stories, that one."
Probably not best to dwell on that too much, Garrus thought. From the state of the body, Rana Thanoptis had not met a kind end.
"Stories about Prothean artefacts, alien messages, … and you were right in the middle of it all. With a head full of Prothean secrets our asari friend was just waiting to unlock."
They think I'm the one who activated the beacon. He was confused. It was - well, it was true, in a way, of course. He had been the one to … turn it on, he supposed. To trigger it. But he wasn't the one who'd been exposed to the strange burst of energy it released. Not the one who'd been afflicted with visions of fire and premonitions of doom.
"I do hope the asari wasn't a close friend," the krogan said with a crooked grin that made clear he hoped the opposite. "She tried to be brave. At first. A shame that the asari have grown soft over the last few centuries. Weak."
Garrus's father had told him about a particularly bad case once. A mercenary visiting the Citadel had been hired to find some stolen corporate secrets. Somehow she'd picked up the idea that the thief was hiding out among the Citadel's resident quarian population; nobody had ever really been able to work out why.
C-Sec had only had any idea something was wrong after the mercenary had been on the Citadel for several days. By that point she'd abducted and 'interrogated' several of the station's transient quarian population: it was hard to know when she'd started because normally C-Sec didn't keep track of all its undocumented residents and those residents weren't in a hurry to file missing person reports.
It was only after one of the hanar diplomats had reported rumours of someone preying on the quarians that anybody in authority took action. C-Sec officers managed to catch the mercenary in the act a few days after that first report. By this point she'd only become more convinced of her theory - after all, every single one of the quarians had confessed, after sufficiently vigorous 'interrogation'.
"Though she did admit," his father added wryly,"That it was something of a mystery why the quarians insisted on subsiding on nutrient paste and sleeping in emergency shelters when they were hoarding billions of credits worth of industrial espionage."
So Garrus didn't doubt that the asari had told the Blood Pack everything they'd wanted to hear, whatever she thought would make the pain stop. Just like the quarians his father had told him about. Just like I would, he thought. He didn't have any illusions about his abilities on that front, at least.
"Well, please yourself," the krogan shrugged, when several minutes had passed without Garrus speaking in response. "You're heading for the Broker either way. Just wanted to give you a chance to make your last few hours on Omega comfortable."
With that, the krogan stalked back out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him. Garrus was left in the dark. Alone with his thoughts. Hard to think of worse company right now.
They'd all had to learn to recite the words in boot camp. Never give up. Never lose faith in your unit. But of course, Spectres didn't have a unit. Spectres were on their own.
| Eleven Years Ago | Palaven |
It was the last day they'd all be together as a family.
If he'd known that, he might have let his sister win their shooting contest. Or perhaps not: she'd come back from her first real tour full of stories of boarding captured pirate ships and of firefights with krogan mercs. They'd been peers when she'd left for boot camp over a year ago, equals; he was still trying to work out the parameters of their new relationship. Despite his bravado when he'd issued his challenge, he'd been secretly shocked, and (less secretly) delighted that he could still beat her.
"Impressed?" he asked, not for the first time, as they were leaving the firing range and heading back to their parents' home.
"You're not a bad shot," she admitted with obvious reluctance. "But-"
"I'm a great shot, Sol" he said firmly. "And I'm only going to get better."
It was a warm summer day, the afternoon sun hanging heavy in the lower half of the sky. Walking through the streets of Cipritine he felt oddly energised, almost invincible. He and Solana followed the wide paved thoroughfares of the city, winding past ornate colonnades that fronted the half-submerged entrances to ancient air raid shelters. They were just passing under the shadow of the old basilica when Solana finally asked him if he'd decided where we hoped to serve once he became a full citizen.
"I was thinking of applying for the Spectre recruitment program once I've completed basic," he admitted. He hadn't told anybody else yet; it felt oddly daring to say it out loud.
Officially, of course, there were no Spectre training programs as such. 'Spectres are not trained, but chosen,' as the Council liked to put it. Unofficially, though … well, the Hierarchy ran a number of training programs for likely Spectre applicants, and most of the turians who became Spectres had been on one of those programs. He was pretty sure the salarians had a similar approach: after all, they'd effectively invented the whole Spectre concept. And even if they didn't formally have one, their Special Tasks Group was a Spectre training program in all but name.
And as for the asari, well - like the saying went, you could only start to understand the politics of the Asari Republics once you'd reached your fifth century. Who knew how the asari prepared their Spectres candidates, if they even did? Maybe they were the one Council race who really were content to sit back and let Spectre candidates appear on their own accord. It would explain why there were so few asari Spectres.
Garrus had been thinking about this for a while, checking the extranet, speaking to his instructors at the academy. He knew it wouldn't be easy: even getting onto the program would be the biggest challenge of his life. He thought though, that he had a chance.
He'd hoped his big sister - third tier citizen now though she was- would have been more impressed.
"Pretty sure there's more to being a Spectre than a knack for shooting down plastic targets, Garrus," she said, mandibles flexing sceptically.
"I know that," he snapped back. Obviously he knew that. "But-"
"And Dad would never go along with it anyway," she said. "You know what he thinks about Spectres."
He did know. Their father was not the sort of person who saw the world in shades of grey. Do things right, or don't do them at all. He didn't like Spectres: didn't think that the Council should give that sort of authority to anyone, and didn't trust the motives of anyone who sought the position. He'd been saying so for as long as Garrus could remember. If he was honest with himself, maybe that was part of the appeal.
The crenellations along the city walls cast geometric patterns of light and shade along the ground. He looked at them without really seeing them, lost in thought.
Yes, he admitted to himself, Dad is going to be a problem.
"Maybe Mother can talk him around," he suggested after a long pause.
"I'm not sure Mom's quite forgiven me for not going for the unit historian position," Solana said dubiously. "I'm not sure how happy she'd be about you applying for the Spectres either."
Their mother had served as one of her legion's historians, while she was in the military. When her mandatory service was up, she'd moved from that into a full time research position at the University, specialising in the study of the ancient history of Palaven. These days Tullia Vakarian was the head of Cipritine University's history department, though she'd also found time to pick up more than a few medals for the University in Palaven's bi-annual intercollegiate team shooting competitions. She'd bought Garrus his first rifle, when he was only six, and taken him to practice regularly for most of his childhood.
Maybe his sister didn't think he could, but he wanted to do something that would make a difference. Something that would matter. He didn't want to waste time sitting in an office filling out forms while the galaxy was growing ever more unstable around him. They were still arguing when they came back to the family villa on the outskirts of the Old City, where the silver facades of the public buildings began to give way to more traditional steel and clay tiles.
"Saren was twenty when he became a Spectre", he said, turning back to Solana as they stepped into the shade of the vestibule, "So I've still got-"
"-a lot to learn, if you think Saren Arterius is any kind of role model."
The voice was instantly familiar, though far from expected.
"Father," he said, suddenly self-conscious. "We didn't know you'd arrived."
In fact they hadn't even been sure he'd be stopping off at Palaven. Castis Vakarian had spent most of his working life on the Citadel: first as an officer of C-Sec and then ultimately as its head. His trips back home to his family on Palaven had grown rarer and rarer as he moved up the ranks; over the past few years he'd only been back about a dozen times in all, most recently when Solana had first left for boot camp.
That didn't mean that his family never saw him, exactly. But it meant that when they saw him, they were normally on the Citadel or speaking via vid-com. It always felt slightly strange to see him in person, here. He seemed to belong on the Citadel in a way that he didn't quite manage on Palaven.
"Was I interrupting something?" he asked, after his children had both greeted him.
"We were just talking about Garrus's plans for the future, Dad," said Solana easily.
"Oh?" Castis asked. "And what plans are those?"
"Well," said Garrus, suddenly nervous. "There's a lot to think about, of course. Reconnaissance, maybe, or military police? Maybe something else. I guess I'll have a better idea once I've started my formal training next year."
He wasn't sure his father was convinced. It was hard to convincingly dissemble when talking to the head of Citadel Security.
Dinner that night was a slightly strained affair. Garrus didn't talk much. He chatted with his mother about how the shooting contest with Solana had gone, and about some recent archaeological work her team was doing to investigate pre-Hierarchy monuments on Menae. He spoke politely to his father about his upcoming conference on Kahje, and about the impact on the Citadel of the increasing number of human arrivals. Otherwise kept his head down and focused his attention on his food. But he listened to Solana's stories about life in the military and promised himself that his time was coming soon.
Early the next morning, Castis Vakarian said goodbye to his family as usual and boarded a shuttle to Kahje. None of them ever saw him again.
I guess there are worse things than paperwork after all, Dad, Garrus thought to himself.
He was still in the dark room. Still on Omega. He'd been dreaming again, he realised. He seemed to have spent a lot of time dreaming recently.
He'd been left here for - as far as he could work out - almost two days. Maybe three. He hadn't eaten anything since he arrived. Not since just before meeting Ish. Somehow he doubted the Blood Pack would have much in the way of Galatanan cuisine. Suspected they wouldn't have any dextro-rations at all.
That could be a problem, he admitted to himself. He was starting to feel very hungry. At least there was water to drink, though he was trying very hard not to think about where that water came from.
I'm going to die here, he thought suddenly. He'd faced the possibility of death before, but this felt different. Sooner or later, the Shadow Broker was going to tell the Blood Pack that they'd made a mistake, that they'd picked up the wrong person, probably killed the one they were meant to be after. At that point, he'd be worthless to them. Just another turian. And he knew what krogan mercenaries did to captured turians.
He didn't feel afraid, oddly. Just disappointed: in himself, in what little he'd been able to do. He found himself wishing that he'd been a better brother to Sol, that he'd achieved something more as a Spectre than getting everyone involved in his first mission killed. Not much of a career, really, he thought. Not much of a life.
It was almost a relief when the door slammed open again, and a krogan lowered in the entrance. Garrus had been expecting his former interlocutor, but after a moment he realised this krogan was taller. Familiar. Garm.
"Turian," smirked Garm. It was the first time Garrus had seen him since the fight. The first time since - no. Garrus forced himself to make eye contact, stared back at him evenly. You may not have been a very good Spectre - oddly, it was his sister's voice he heard now; a voice he hadn't heard in reality for months - but you can at least act like a turian.
"I've been thinking," began Garm.
That was almost too easy. Garrus opened his mouth, but didn't say anything. What's the point?
"Whatever the Shadow Broker's paying us for you," the krogan continued. "Maybe it's not enough. Maybe we'd be better off getting the information we need out of your head now and seeing how much it's worth to Aria, or to the Overseer, or the clans back on Tuchanka. Or maybe it's something we can make use of ourselves."
Garm stroked his chin thoughtfully, red eyes never leaving Garrus's face.
"Weapon blueprints, lost treasure … doesn't seem right that Broker gets the rewards after we do all the work."
He suddenly just wanted to get it over with. Let Garm know that he was wasting his time. Better a quick death than rotting in this cell.
"You've got the wrong person," he said, voice cracking and frail after so much time without speaking. "The artefact you're talking about … I never touched it. The one who did, you -"
He forced himself to stop speaking. Even if Shepard was … gone, she'd been part of his team. His responsibility. He wasn't going to give her up to the Blood Pack now.
Garm sighed theatrically, looked up at the ceiling. Belatedly, Garrus realised that there was a camera blinking silently, almost invisibly, in the corner of the room.. "You see?" said Garm, addressing the camera. "Turians always underestimate us. Even now, he thinks he can fool us with these blatant lies."
"Don't bother, turian," he continued, turning back to face him "There's no mistake. The Shadow Broker mentioned you by name. You're the only one he wanted."
But… He didn't understand. He wasn't sure he had the energy to try to understand.
"My father fought in the Rebellions," the krogan continued. "I grew up on stories about fighting turians. Hurting turians. Killing turians. And sure, I've shot a few turians in my time, but I've never really had the chance to get … creative. I've always wanted to try to re-enact some of the old man's tricks; see if they really worked they way he said they did."
Fuck you, arsehole, he thought, wearily. Not the most memorable last words, he supposed. But it wasn't as if anybody was going to remember them, even if he'd spoken them out loud. He thought Garm looked a little disappointed at his lack of reaction. Yeah, well, he thought, He's hardly the only person I've disappointed, is he?
Then the pain hit and he didn't think anything at all for a while. Afterwards, it was mercifully hard to recall what had happened. He remembered screaming at one point. Or maybe more than once.
When the pain stopped he was alone again. Alone, but somehow still alive.
He thought his right mandible might be broken, thought that the krogan might have managed to permanently damage his face plate. He couldn't move his hands to feel it, but that whole side of his head felt numb. The spurs on the back of his legs had been twisted out of position as well; trying to bend his legs hurt. Not that he was in a hurry to move.
Lying on the concrete he could hear the distant rumbling of far-off explosions. The explosions seemed to be getting closer. He thought that was vaguely interesting, but it didn't seem to matter much.
He noticed idly that he was still bleeding: bright blue blood dripping from the wound on the side of his face to form a sticky pool on the concrete floor. That didn't seem to matter either.