Husks
A Few Days Earlier | Dobrovolski
Who was the Illusive Man?
That was the question Tela Vasir had dedicated the last few months of her life to trying to answer.
In one sense, everybody knew who the Illusive Man was. The leader and founder of Cerberus, the separatist group which had spent the last few years plaguing the turians and their human protectorate. The group whose efforts to forcibly sever humanity's ties to the Hierarchy had finally done enough to bring itself to the attention of the Council, who had recognised them as a threat to the galactic stability that Vasir had devoted her life to defending.
And she could guess where he had come from: a disaffected junior officer in the old human military, most likely, or perhaps a mercenary or other form of adventurer. Somebody with military training and unrealised personal ambitions, dissatisfied by the political settlement after the galaxy discovered the human colony worlds and the Systems Alliance became a Protectorate of the turians. Every peace had its malcontents, and every insurgent movement was based on individuals like this. So taught the histories of the Republics, at least, and in this respect the accounts of old Thessia were mirrored and reflected in the classified records of the Salarian Union, in the military chronicles of the Hierarchy and in the tales and legends of countless minor species.
But who was he? Who were his parents, his family, his children? Where did he sleep, where did he hide from the prying eyes of the turian Blackwatch and the Alliance's own security forces? How could he be hurt?
Vasir was sure that the answer to those questions were the key to defeating Cerberus. The organisation was unusually disciplined, but by all accounts much more centralised than it was wise to be. Whether from their founder's excess pride or from a lack of proper resources, they depended too much on him. The Illusive Man was the linchpin that held the group together. Identify him, track him down, and the rest of the edifice he built up would crumble into dust.
After some digging, she'd come up with an initial list of five names. Five candidates, representing her best hopes of unmasking the Illusive Man.
Jon Grissom had been missing since before the first human colonies had been attacked by the batarians or taken over by the turians. After breaking into his daughter's house and doing some further digging in her private computer network, she was fairly sure Grissom had been on Earth when the relay went down. So that was one suspect eliminated.
Alec Ryder and Steven Hackett had both been missing since the launch of the ill-fated Terra Firma project. If they were alive - she didn't think it likely - they were hardly in any position to communicate with the rest of the galaxy. Zaeed Massani had been a reluctant guest of Warden Kuril on the prison ship Purgatory for over five years. Considering what he was being held on Purgatory for, she thought Massani could count himself lucky not to have been shipped to Khar'Shan to face a firing squad. Or worse.
That left one name, albeit a significant one: Oleg Petrovsky. The current President of the Systems Alliance. Unlike the others, he wasn't hard to track down - she'd actually met him herself, finding some pretext to talk to him at some otherwise unmemorable diplomatic function almost half a year ago. But proving any connections to Cerberus had been frustratingly hard.
As a younger man, the young Lieutenant Petrovsky had opposed humanity becoming a protectorate of the Hierarchy, true, but he'd also been a staunch defender of President Williams and a vociferous opponent of Cerberus even before the groups' move into outright terrorism on human soil. Besides, the man's communications were monitored every minute of the day. If by some miracle he was the Illusive Man, then the Illusive Man was much less involved in the day to day running of Cerberus than she'd assumed. A much less pivotal figure than he was believed to be.
No, the Illusive Man had to be somebody else, somebody she'd not initially considered. None of her candidates made any sense.
But that meant she was left with nothing. No leads on the Illusive Man, and no leads on Cerberus. Until she'd picked up a tip about their activity on Eden Prime, anyway. Raiding the Cerberus base on the human colony world had given her her first real, tangible leads.
Now, she had something to work with. A whole new way in. And the key to unlock the mystery was here, on Dobrovolski.
But Goddess knows that there's fuck all else here.
Dobrovolski was one of the smaller and least populated human colony worlds, and that was saying something. She'd been here less than a day and the planet had already worn out its welcome. It was cold, it was remote and it was ugly.
Founded as a mining settlement before the human home world had been lost to the galaxy, Dobrovolski's only claim to galactic fame was that it had been the site of one of the very first Cerberus attacks. Four years ago, the first President of the Systems Alliance, General Williams, had been touring the Alliance worlds with his extended family. A publicity stunt, she gathered, to promote the recent decision to allow non-biotic humans to enlist as auxiliaries in the Hierarchy's forces. Something that the President's eldest granddaughter - Ashley - had even done herself.
While the President toured Dobrovolski, Cerberus agents - who had never been caught - had planted an explosive device in a shuttle that the President had been due to use to leave the settlement. But he'd never set foot on it. Instead, young Ashley Williams had, apparently on a dare, sneaked out of the farewell party to take the shuttle for a joyride. The resulting explosion had killed the girl almost instantly, and her death - along with the attempted batarian invasion of the Alliance worlds soon afterwards - had been one of the reasons the old General had stood down last year rather than seeking re-election.
At least, that was the official story. But only an idiot believed the official story without corroborating evidence.
That was why she was here, on Dobrovolski, almost shivering in the cold despite the thick clothes she was disguised in. Dobrovolski, like any other backwater, wasn't used to seeing alien visitors. She didn't want her visit to draw any undue attention, so she was keen to make sure none of the humans noticed the asari among them.
This was easier than she had any right to expect. All she had to do was wear the same drab robes as they did and shuffle gracelessly along and the humans never thought to look for anything else. She supposed she should be grateful for the planet's dreadful weather, but instead she traipsed unhappily through poorly heated rooms and thought wistfully of the warm climate of Thessia.
The facility she was in now was the medical centre - just a morgue, really - closest to the site where the attack had taken place. There didn't seem to be anybody else around. No patients, no staff. But there was a bell on the information desk, and a sign asking visitors to press it to summon assistance.
She pressed the bell cautiously, going over in her mind once more the cover story that she'd worked on to explain her presence. The story that, it turned out, she'd never need.
"Greetings, citizen!" The voice was instantly grating: full of false enthusiasm and poorly-synthesized charm. "How may I help you today?"
Oh, great, Vasir thought, looking askance at the flickering holographic VI that the bell had summoned. A pop-up.
She thought she recognised the model: an old-fashioned design that been briefly popular on the Citadel twenty or thirty years ago. Perhaps a cheap off-the-shelf model like this was all that Dobrovolski could afford. Maybe they didn't even realise what they'd been palmed off with. Like most asari, Vasir prefered her VI's quietly tasteful and tastefully quiet. Still, at least the VI could be relied upon to be incurious.
"Is this where Ashley Williams was brought after her shuttle exploded?" she asked bluntly.
"That is correct." The VI's bright smile seemed to be a fixture, entirely at odds with her solemn words. "Four years ago, Ms Williams was brought here following an unprovoked attack by the terrorist group commonly referred to as Cerberus. Sadly, Ms Williams' wounds-"
"I know that," snapped Vasir, cutting off the VI's canned speech. Unlike an organic, a VI would not be bothered by being interrupted. Or at least, she thought, If they're bothered they don't show any outward sign of it. It was all the same to her.
"What happened to her body?"
"I'm sorry," the VI said brightly, "But that information is restricted to members of the Williams family. Please-"
"Spectre override," Vasir snapped, "Authorisation code Keph Bastzuda Nephros."
The VI projection seemed to flicker, briefly, as the code was verified.
"Authorisation code confirmed." Whoever had programmed the VI had apparently decided the same saccharine tone would be appropriate for responding to emergency Spectre overrides. "Greetings, Spectre Vasir. How may I -"
"What happened to Ashley Williams' body?" she asked again, not waiting for the machine to finish. "Is it stored here?"
"No, Spectre Vasir." the VI replied.. "The body was stored in this facility for a short time during the initial investigation, but was subsequently cremated and the ashes returned to Ms. Williams' family on Horizon."
"Cremation?" she asked, puzzled. "Is that normal for humans?" It was a fairly common way of disposing of the bodies of the asari - though hanging on to the ashes struck her as perverse, somehow. Once consciousness had departed, and the individual spirit returned to the universal consciousness, why hoard the lifeless molecules of the shell that remained? But she'd thought that humans buried their dead.
"Human beings practice a wide range of funeral customs." The VI's artificial smile seemed to grow even brighter. "To learn more human cultural traditions, please visit the System Alliance's pages on the extranet. Keyword: culture."
Vasir supposed she'd do just that. It was just a little thing, but what she'd been able to salvage from the Cerberus systems on Eden Prime had been oddly suggestive. There was more to the death of Ashley Williams than most people believed. Something that Cerberus didn't want the galaxy to know.
"Who approved removing the body from this facility?" she asked. At least she'd end up with another name to track down, assuming that it hadn't been President Williams himself.
"That information is not available." The VI's voice was flat and toneless, entirely at odds with the rest of its programming.
Now that's interesting...
With her authorisation codes, the VI simply wasn't able to hide any information from her. If it said that information wasn't available, then that information really wasn't available, not to anyone. But surely that would have been logged somewhere?
"Who did the initial autopsy?" she asked, trying to approach the problem from a different angle.
"That information is not available."
"Did anybody try to delete data from this facility's systems relating to Ashley Williams, either before or after her death?"
"That information is not available."
She was almost starting to miss the VI's earlier simulated enthusiasm. Almost. This wasn't going to work. She'd have to track the physical ashes back to the Williams' estate. At least it's warm on Horizon.
"Can I help you with anything else, Spectre Vasir?" the VI asked brightly.
Vasir nodded, as much to herself as to the VI. I'm done here.
"Purge all records of this conversation, including these instructions, and forget that we ever spoke." she ordered briskly.
The VI interface blinked once, suddenly looking faintly puzzled, then made eye contact with Vasir again and smiled brightly.
"Greetings, citizen! How may I help you today?"
The VI had been right. The extranet had more information on how humans treated the remains of their dead that anybody could possibly need. Burial, cremation, mummification, ... . sometimes humans were every bit as primitive as they appeared. A body was just a body. She'd seen enough of them to know. Even the batarians had worked that much out, and they were barely a step above barbarism.
She had plenty of time to read as the shuttle she'd stowed away in made its long, winding way to Horizon. She could have just requisitioned the human's shuttle, but that would be something he remembered. Better that as few people as possible knew that she'd ever been on Dobrovolski. Besides, the man appeared to be smuggling unprocessed eezo out of the colony and she was interested to see who his buyer was.
Her preliminary research had already convinced her that sneaking into the former President's estate would be an altogether different prospect to investigating a half-abandoned medical facility. She was going to need some help on this one.
Even in the solitude of her hideaway in the shuttle's cargo hold, Vasir checked her surroundings carefully before pulling out the next item. Some habits were unwise to break.
She looked at the device carefully. Only a few people in the galaxy would have recognised it as a miniaturised quantum entanglement communicator - definitely not Council-issue. Only enough bandwidth to transmit plain text, but that text would be read instantly by the person with access to the unique communicator this device was paired with.
It almost felt like cheating, really. But she'd not been in touch for a few months.
⟨⟨ Hey, Boss ⟩⟩ she typed. ⟨⟨ Need a favour. ⟩⟩
Looking back she wasn't sure exactly how it started. A few decades ago she'd been a young, freshly-approved Spectre, eager to do her part to help the Council fight for order and stability in a dark galaxy. She'd known almost from the beginning that she needed an edge, something to elevate her above the others. Her biotics alone weren't going to be enough: Spectres were more than soldiers, more than weapons. They were the Council's first and best line of defence against chaos.
She found what she was looking for in the information markets of Illium. Illium was the latest venture of the asari corporations: a world run by asari yet outside the official control of the Republics or the Council. A world where the laws of Citadel space did not always apply, and where goods and services could be traded freely. And on Illium, information was a commodity to be traded just like any other.
That was what she needed, she'd realised: information. It wasn't enough to simply react. Any asari huntress or commando unit could take down an enemy after the Council had pointed them in the right direction. A Spectre - a good Spectre - would know where to strike before the Council knew to give the orders. To prevent atrocities the Council never saw coming.
As she'd worked, she'd quickly realised that one of her regular Illium contacts surpassed all the others. Whatever the topic of inquiry, she found that they knew more than the others, that they knew it sooner, that they were wrong less often. Over time she found herself relying on them more and more, almost to the exclusion of anybody else.
She used their intel to disrupt red sand smuggling rings, to capture quarian serial killers, to crush nascent plots against the Council almost before the conspirators knew what they were proposing. With each success, her reputation among those that mattered grew. She was somebody who got results. And the galaxy got a little bit brighter.
Things had grown naturally from there, she supposed.
A few years later her contact had traded intel on a band of batarian pirates in exchange for her agreement to terminate marriage negotiations between two prestigious salarian clans. She'd smuggled a virus into one of the families' primary computer systems that had corrupted their ancestry records beyond repair. No more records, no more negotiations. She couldn't remember exactly when that had happened. She didn't remember either of the families' names, either.
It was about then that she'd realised just who it was she was dealing with. Not just any information broker, but the definitive article himself. The Shadow Broker. She'd challenged him about it, after putting the clues together, and he'd asked her if that was a problem. It wasn't, she'd realised. After the initial surprise had faded, she'd realised that it didn't bother her at all.
Sometime after that - in exchange for information that had helped her prevent a terrorist attack on Dekuuna that would have resulted in hundreds of fatalities - she'd agreed to take out a krogan Battlemaster who'd been causing the Broker unspecified problems in the Terminus Systems. A krogan with links to criminal gangs on Omega and beyond. She didn't know - hadn't asked - exactly why the Broker wanted him dead, but while infiltrating his hideout she'd found the cages where he kept the slave children he was shipping out to the Hegemony. After that it had been a pleasure to watch him burn.
That was how they continued to operate: trading intelligence, trading favours. Sometimes there were items that the Broker wanted to go missing; sometimes there were engineering projects he wanted to fail; sometimes there were people he wanted disposed of. Nothing a Spectre couldn't handle.
It still didn't bother her. Never had, though she knew that some of the other Spectres gossiped and whispered about her behind her back. That idiot Kryik wasn't the first, and she knew he wouldn't be the last. But he didn't matter. None of them did. She'd never done anything that she thought would hurt the Republics, never acted against the Council's best interests, never killed anybody she knew didn't deserve it. Her conscience was clear.
She imagined that the Broker must have quite a well developed dossier on her by this point. All sorts of incriminating evidence that could prove embarrassing for her if she ever had second thoughts and tried to act against him. A sensible precaution - she'd even be a bit disappointed if he hadn't - but, in her case, unnecessary. She wasn't about to spoil a good thing. The intel the Broker had supplied her with had helped her do more for the galaxy than she ever could have done by herself. Whatever he'd expected of her in return had been a price she'd paid gladly.
The only thing that had ever given her pause was the rumour she'd heard that the Broker was really a rogue AI, She'd never quite credited it, but it had unsettled her all the same. AI - like the geth, who had taken over the quarian homeworld when she'd been a girl of barely fifty years - were a threat to all organic life. They couldn't be trusted, couldn't be negotiated with. Anybody working to further their interests - even unknowingly - was a traitor to all galactic civilisation.
But the harder she thought about it, the harder it was for her to believe. The Broker simply didn't act like an AI. Oh, it was true that he could be both disturbingly quick-thinking and - at times - surprisingly ignorant about how galactic life worked. She'd decided pretty quickly that he wasn't an asari; he simply didn't think like one, or like anybody else she knew. But at the same time, he was often highly emotional: egotistical and prone to fits of sudden furious anger. Those weren't traits anybody had ever associated with the geth. That wasn't how any AI behaved.
In the end she'd just decided it was another baseless rumour and forced herself to stop worrying without evidence.
She'd also heard the rumour that said the Broker was a volus. She actually rather hoped that one was true.
A few hours later, while the smuggler's shuttle was just drifting into Iela System, her QEC flashed a silent acknowledgement. The information she'd requested - security codes, blueprints, schedules - would be waiting for her on Horizon when she arrived. The Broker had even added a personalised postscript.
⟨⟨ Try not to kill anyone this time. ⟩⟩
She'd see where this smuggler was going, first and then … well, after that things might get interesting.
⟨⟨ No promises, Boss. ⟩⟩ she typed.
In the end it was almost too easy. She truly didn't have to kill anyone. She didn't even kill the smuggler, though she managed to ping him with a tracker dart while he was heading off for whatever illicit rendezvous he'd flown here to make. That was something she'd follow up on another day.
The Broker's message led her to a storage locker on the spaceport; inside the locker was an unmarked OSD filled with all the information she'd requested.
General Williams had been a powerful figure in the Alliance, and remained a popular one with at least most of the human species. A war hero, thanks to his work securing the alliance with the turian Hierarchy that had saved Mindoir, Horizon, Dobrovolski and Tiptree from destruction at the hands of the batarians. First President of the Systems Alliance after the human worlds accepted Protectorate status. Even in retirement, his influence on those four worlds was considerable.
It was perhaps no surprise that he'd chosen to spend his twilight years on Horizon. And no surprise either that the people of Horizon had granted him enough land to build a small mansion on the outskirts of their largest settlement ('a city', the locals called it, much to her amusement). The mansion itself was surprisingly tasteful, Vasir was forced to admit, the architecture showing signs of both asari and turian influence. As a human leader, Williams had always been linked with the political factions that argued for greater integration with galactic civilisation; she supposed it was perhaps no surprise that this sentiment was reflected in his personal life as well.
The guards patrolling the estate were well-trained; watchful and alert. By human standards, anyway. Not that it mattered. Not when she had the Broker's intel, picking out the guards' routines and search patterns and plotting them invisibly before her eyes, not when she had the protection of her tactical cloak, bending light and shadow to hide her from view. Not when she had mastered the art of camouflage and infiltration before any of these guards' grandmothers had first drawn breath. She was asari, she was a Spectre - the best of the best - and how could mere humans hope to challenge her?
The target had been right where the Broker's intel said it would be. A small building, out on the outskirts of the Williams family estate. A 'mausoleum', as she knew it was called from her earlier exploration of the extranet. The same building housed the remains of both General Williams late wife and their only son. But the General's granddaughter's ashes were in pride of place: filling a simple yet finely crafted urn that sat on a slightly raised plinth in the centre of the inner chamber.
She'd taken a sample of the ashes and slipped away back into the darkness of the night.
Back in the 'city' - in the cheap hotel room she'd rented under an assumed name, and filled with all the computers and equipment she could scrounge together - she waited impatiently while the basic VI she'd set up ran through its gamut of tests and analyses. If she was older, she might have had the patience to meditate, to reflect on the unchanging flux of the Universe. But she was young yet, so she paced.
When they came, the test results were conclusive.
"These ashes aren't human."
She spoke the words out loud, though there was nobody to hear them but the VI, who only looked back at her blankly.
The faint traces of amino acids left in the cremated remains weren't even levo. Somebody had burnt up the remains of a dead quarian or - more likely - a turian, and handed them over to the girl's grieving family. Given the prominent place the ashes had been gifted, she doubted the family were in on the deception. Superstitious human ritual though it might be, somehow she found that that almost made her feel sorry for them.
It all fit in with the information she'd been able to pull from the Cerberus computers back on Eden Prime. One more piece of the jigsaw.
She turned to the VI, still waiting patiently for orders.
"I don't think Ashley Williams is dead," she told it. "I don't know what happened to her, but I think Cerberus do. And I think I'm going to find her."