Hello again, dear readers. This one is a bit shorter but the next one is not far out. Thanks to everyone who took the time to review, you are the bestest!
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Garrus arrived at Everest Artifics in record time, thanks to taking some notes from Shepard's driving style. He stormed the entrance hall, displaying his C-Sec badge on his omni-tool while downloading the map from the receptionist's VI. Without slowing down he jumped into an elevator and hacked it to take him to the Saleon labs without stopping in between.
He stepped out of the elevator into a quiet hallway, the faint whirring and buzzing of machinery and fume extractors as well as talking, indicating a normal laboratory, undisturbed. A door opened and a human woman in a lab coat with a tray full of small containers stepped out and looked at him, seemingly startled by his presence.
"Vakarian, C-Sec. I'm looking for Frank Johnson and Sarah." He realized that he didn't know Sarah's last name, hopefully Sarah wasn't a common name among humans. The woman in the lab coat recovered from her initial shock and had an expression of annoyance on her face.
"We have five assistants around here with the name Sarah, one of them asari, the rest humans. You'll have to be more specific." No such luck then.
"Human, female, smaller size, slender frame, light-brown hair," he rattled off, hoping that he could narrow down the options fast, "She fainted?"
"Oh yes, Sarah Dillon fainted today, she fits your description." The woman vaguely motioned to some point behind him. "They took her into Dr. Saleon's private lab, he has a special treatment for these cases. What is it with her? Someone from the cleaning crew asked about her too and went into the lab, even though it is strictly forbidden to enter Dr. Saleon's lab!" She looked like that was what had annoyed her the most about the situation.
Garrus didn't waste time with an answer and ran towards the door on the other end of the hallway, leaving the human woman yelling behind him. "It is forbidden! Do not disturb the doctor!"
The double doors displayed a red lock as he approached them and even his C-Sec badge was ignored. That happened more often than he cared to think about, making him turn to his hacking programs with practised ease. In theory, the C-Sec signal from his omni-tool should have overridden the doorlock, but that was rarely the case. C-Sec immune doorlocks were a bestseller in certain circles.
That Dr. Saleon had such an immune lock on his door was very telling and didn't bode well for the legality of his work.
The not-quite-legal personal hacking program on his omni-tool made short work of the block, Dr. Saleon obviously didn't spring for the expensive high quality stuff. The doors parted noiselessly and Garrus entered the lab, contemplating if he should draw his gun. The main room that he had entered was full of typical lab tables, full of glassware, scanners, and all kinds of small machinery that he wasn't familiar with. The long wall to the right was covered with workplaces under fume extractors, sealed with transparent doors in front, with things bubbling or sparkling behind. The other walls had doors and windows on them, showing more laboratories with similar workplaces. It all looked very sciency and normal except for the fact that nobody was there.
The room Garrus stood in and the others he could look into through the windows were void of living beings. All the tiny noises he could hear came from the fume extractors running and other appliances in the lab.
A beep made him snap his head around as some little machinery announcing it's success at whatever it was doing and displaying the result on the attached screen. He looked in the test chamber, some small piece of organic meaty material. The results showed numbers of 'cell-growth-rate' and 'regeneration-rate' and other things that didn't mean anything to Garrus. All he could gather was that they did research on organic tissue and cells in this lab, not really surprising.
But why was nobody here?
Garrus placed a call to Frank, growing more nervous the longer he waited for an answer. His scans showed no complete organs but lots of cellwork of organic tissue. He kept scanning for exits, the people in the lab had to have gone somewhere.
He had made it through every single room of the lab when Frank finally answered his call.
"Garrus? I'm at dock 11, Saleon has taken everyone from his lab on a ship. Sarah is with him, Garrus! I'm going in, I can't wait! I saw them, man, I saw how they were bleeding and he was just herding them on the ship and they stumbled... Sarah... like she had no control... I'm going in, get here, Garrus!"
"I'm contacting Citadel control, if they don't give him clearance he won't get away!" His omni-tool beeped at a closet door, indicating a larger room behind it. When he opened the door he saw the inside of a small elevator, only one button on the panel saying 'roof'. He hesitated for a second and then decided to take the chance. If he was lucky, there would be a skycar on the roof. Such a stroke of luck could have him at the docks much quicker than the slow elevator ride.
When he exited the elevator he was relieved that his gamble paid off in the form of a shiny skycar, which he hacked in three seconds. Citadel control finally answered his call and initiated a lockdown on the vessel in dock 11. The controller hesitated for a second and Garrus growled "C-Sec authority!" with all the aggression he could transport through his voice. He launched the car and programmed the destination.
The skycar moved efficiently through the traffic as he ordered the C-Sec team to the dock. He managed to get it to go even faster when he turned it back to manual control. Again taking a note out of Shepard's book, he dived down towards the dock, coming to a screeching halt in front of a small ship.
Frank Johnson and a salarian were in front of the ship in a shouting match. Through the ships open cargo door he could see people standing around. He saw humans, salarians, and asari, just standing there, slightly rocking back and forth. Their eyes were unfocused, staring out into nothing. Garrus saw the slender frame of Sarah among them, red rimmed eyes staring ahead like the others.
He ran towards the salarian who he assumed was Dr. Saleon and motioned with his head to Frank towards Sarah. His friend took the clue and walked over to her as Garrus involved the doctor in an argument to distract him.
"Dr. Saleon, I presume? We have received some disturbing complaints about your work at Everest Artifics. I'm here to take you to C-Sec for questioning." He said with authority.
The salarian doctor had the audacity to smile at him as he shook his head. "You have no warrant for that. You can't just arrest me, and I don't have to come with you. My assistants and I are leaving and there is nothing that C-Sec can do about it." He kept on smiling and turned around to step into the ship.
Garrus clacked his mandibles tight in anger, the salarian was right. The warrant only covered a search of the laboratory. He stepped into the ships door to prevent it's closing, shouting over the rising noise of the ships engines, "You can't just take all these people with you, we can easily arrest you for kidnapping."
Dr. Saleon kept on smiling, just asking for a punch to the face. Garrus was barely able to keep himself under control. The doctor snarled, "These people accompany me out of their own free will, I'm not kidnapping anyone." He turned around and spoke to the dazed people in the cargo hold. "Does anybody want to go?" The people hardly reacted, but they mumbled, "No". The doctor grinned at Garrus in triumph and the turian couldn't stop himself. He grabbed the salarian by one of his horns and slammed his head against the doorframe.
"I don't know what you did to these people but they are not alright!" He growled.
The doctor whined loudly and began muttering salarian curses. A small trail of greenish blood trickled down the side of his dark face. Garrus wanted hit him again just to make sure but someone held his arm back. The C-Sec team had arrived and to them it looked like he was beating up some innocent civilian. So they stopped him, unfortunately.
Dr. Saleon was screeching, "I'll file a complaint about you! I'll sue you! This is outrageous!" He stomped onto the ship and hit the button to lock the door. "I'm leaving, right now!" He screamed. Just as the door was about to close he looked directly at Garrus, and he saw the salarian pull his face into a self-satisfied grin.
Garrus opened a channel to the Citadel control room. "Do not give departure clearance to the ship in docking bay 11. The ship is under C-Sec investigation," he said with authority, hoping someone would listen to him. He looked around, searching for his partner. Frank had managed to coax Sarah out of the cargo hold while Garrus had his argument with the doctor.
He stood with Sarah a little off to the side, holding her by her shoulders, trying to get her attention. She was swaying, her head lolling backwards. Suddenly her knees buckled and she collapsed. Frank managed to catch her in his arms before her head hit the floor.
"Sarah, Sarah, do you hear me? Sarah, baby, please, open your eyes." Frank desperately tried to get a reaction from her but she hung like a puppet in his arms, barely breathing. "Medic! I need a medic here, help!" Frank called out, his voice breaking. Garrus ran over to him, requesting an ambulance to his position with a code through his omni-tool.
The docking clamps still held the ship in place so it looked like someone was at least listening to him. Suddenly Garrus's omni-tool chimed with a call from Dr. Kaltkan. Garrus accepted the call, a bit confused what the doctor needed to tell him directly instead of writing it in a report.
"Vakarian! I have finished the autopsy of Kerdotus, his body was a science experiment. It looks like somebody used his body to grow extra organs! This is most disturbing, I've never seen anything like this! His body had apparently begun to reject the extras, and he died of internal bleeding where the original organs were severed. It seems as if when the doctor found out the extras wouldn't grow properly, he harvested the good organs, and left the extras to rot. This is the worst use of science I have ever..."
"Thanks for the info, doctor!" Garrus interrupted, feeling a short relieve that his hunch about Saleon had been correct. "We have one of his assistants here with us, she seems very sick..."
"Take her to Huerta right away, I will inform them of your arrival and what I know about the case. Hurry, her body is probably destroying itself from the inside."
Garrus felt nauseous, this didn't look good for Sarah. An ambulance had arrived and medics started to take the woman out of Frank's arms. He called over to them, "Take her to Huerta, they're waiting for her there. Dr. Kaltkan called ahead." Frank jumped into the ambulance, grabbing Sarah's lifeless hand.
Behind him Garrus suddenly heard the docking clamps releasing, and as he turned around Saleon's ship was drifting away from the dock and turned around to fly away from the Citadel. Garrus placed a call to Citadel control and began screaming as soon as someone answered.
"What the futuo are you thinking? I ordered you to keep this ship docked! This is an ongoing C-Sec investigation..."
The turian on the other side of the call answered with an aggressive growl but kept his voice calm. "We have not received a warrant from C-Sec, so we had no legal ground to keep this ship docked. Any further..."
"You're letting a criminal scientist get away, along with the people he experimented on. I want Citadel defence forces to shoot the ship, immobilize it. Do it now, don't let him get away..."
The turian controller remained annoyingly calm, "We can't shoot so close to the station and we can't endanger the passengers on the ship." Finally some kind of empathy could be heard in his subvocals, "I set up a trace on the ship so that we can find it again."
"Every halfway competent criminal knows how to get rid of such a trace..." Garrus growled, rumbling his frustration loudly. He watched helplessly as Saleon's ship flew away from the Citadel and then went into FTL with a short flash of light.
Garrus smashed his fist against another flat surface. "Spirits be damned! With all the stercus around here we have to let this piece of lowlife get away!" He jumped in the skycar and programmed the Huerta Hospital as it's destination. He called on the trace that Citadel control had put on the ship but predictably it had already been lost. His hand began to hurt from smashing it into innocent walls and skycar doors.
A C-Sec broadcast on his omni-tool informed him of an explosion and fire at Everest Artifics. 'Figures.' Garrus thought, losing all evidence in a fire was just what this case needed.
His skycar arrived at the hospital platform, as he jumped out of it he programed it to return to it's point of origin. Hopefully it would burn.
On his way to the reception area he contacted the VI for Sarah's location and got directed to the correct floor. Stepping out of the elevator, he immediately saw Frank pacing in front of a glass wall. Through the glass he could see medics attaching sensors to her, an IV drip let into her arm. She lay motionless, only slight tremors made her hands occasionally twitch.
The gurney was moved into a room with medical scanners and the door closed behind the medics, shielding her from their view. Frank turned around and stumbled towards a bench and fell down on the seat. Garrus sat down beside him, feeling utterly helpless. He had no idea what he could do to help his friend.
"I'm so sorry, Frank." He said, putting his arm over Frank's shoulder. "At least we got her away from that doctor, I'm sure they can help her here."
Frank's voice was rough, "Thanks man, I hope so." To Garrus's surprise he leaned his head against his shoulder. He heard him whisper, "I finally found someone... someone so wonderful... special." Garrus felt him shudder and he realized that his friend was crying, almost inaudible. He was shocked, he had never seen Frank like this.
Garrus had seen humans cry before and he was terrified by it. To feel emotions so strongly that their bodies reacted physically by secreting fluids from the inside, it scared him. He had heard that asari could cry too but he had never seen one do it. Asari only cried in private.
He didn't know what to do so he just kept his arm over Frank's shoulder and told him that things were going to be okay.
Things never got okay.
The doctors had found several extra organs growing inside of Sarah and her body had begun rejecting them. Something in the process made Sarah react differently than the other 'test-subjects', her body changing and fighting at the same time. She woke up shortly and Frank held her hand and told her that he loved her but she only managed to say his name once before she lost consciousness again.
She never woke up again.
After six days of laying unconscious, her heart gave up beating.
Frank had been by her side, holding her hand. He only let Garrus lead him out of the room after the nurse told him that she was dead.
Garrus took him home and made him lie down on his bed. Frank was eerily quiet, lying on his side with his eyes open. Unblinking eyes staring at nothing. Garrus was reminded of old stories he had heard when he had been a child, stories of the night-birds who stole children's Spirits. The next morning the children were alive but empty, a hollow shell.
Just like Frank was now.
Frank had lost his Spirit, his soul as the humans would say.
Garrus didn't know what to do. He had dealt with loss before, that was unavoidable as a C-Sec officer. He had delivered the news of a dead relative before, he had comforted people who griefed. But it had never been a friend, his best friend. There was nothing he could do to stop the pain.
He had a good idea how Frank felt, and he had to push any thought about Shepard far away from his mind. Just thinking if anything like that would happen to her made him keen in grief. He had written another letter to her, queued up for later delivery. It had been hard to tell Sarah's story but he did want her to know about it.
Writing her had become a daily habit for him and he had gotten better at it too. His letters actually resembled coherent writing most of the time. He told her of the things that happened each day, things he liked and disliked. He tried to make it feel like a conversation with a friend. What he didn't write about were his feelings for her. He could only hope that they could continue where they had left off when they would meet again.
The writing had helped him too, putting his thoughts into order and dealing with Frank's grief.
The aftermath of the Saleon disaster had made it clear to him that he needed to get away from C-Sec. He had to answer to an extended questioning how he could possibly order Citadel defence to fire on a civilian ship and why the whole case had turned into such a stercus. After nobody had even touched the case for the longest time and then no one listened to him when they had had the chance to stop the guy! He had a hard time not to smash someone's face in when he got asked the same questions again and again.
Whenever Garrus had to go to C-Sec, he made sure that someone else was with Frank. Nihlus stayed for two days before the Council ordered him elsewhere. Batius and Tinlenus and some other turians from C-Sec came around as well as all of the few humans who worked there. Frank didn't talk much at first but after a short time he started to talk about Sarah. Little snippets of their short time together, things she had said or did.
Garrus was relieved when he saw his friend returning. He didn't expect him to turn back into old Frank and he was right about that. Frank had been broken and he would never be the same. He seemed more fragile. Garrus wondered how many more blows he could take after this one.
Two weeks went by, everyday in the same halted rhythm. Garrus slept on a spare mattress in Frank's living room. He had brought his own pillowroll to sleep on, as human pillows were impossible for turian heads, and that made the bed bearable. It was better than his bed in the barracks back in basic, so that was definitely a plus.
He went to C-Sec every day to answer questions from somebody else. It was internal affairs investigators one day, lawyers the other day, quality control, Citadel defence and control, and even a spectre asked him questions. Questions after questions but nobody actually did anything. Saleon had disappeared, chances of ever finding him again were slim. Not that anybody even tried.
The only thing keeping him sane was the prospect of switching from C-Sec to ANIS as soon as Shepard came back. If he didn't have that to look forward to he might just quit. The labyrinth of rules and regulations that made it almost impossible to actually get some work done at C-Sec frustrated him even more now. Garrus was also suspicious about corruption at C-Sec, way too often lawyers knew way too many things about difficult cases.
He found it especially telling how many well dressed lawyers Everest Artifics had produced to drill him about his investigation. Two of them wore little pins with a strange symbol, yellow, white, and black. He discreetly took a picture of it with his omni-tool and set up an Extranet search for it. These lawyers were different than the others, they didn't ask about the doctor or his test-subjects. All they asked about was the lab, the equipment he had seen, the organs C-Sec had in storage. They seemed to be mostly annoyed that he hadn't copied any files from Dr. Saleon to his omni-tool. Those lawyers made him extremely uncomfortable.
He talked about them with Frank that night and they looked at the results the search algorithm had turned up. The symbol apparently belonged to a human supremacist group called Cerberus. Formerly a special ops branch of the Alliance, they had separated themselves from government affiliations and became privately funded. Their involvement in a human-salarian company like Everest Artifics was unusual, as they normally avoided dealing with aliens.
The work of Dr. Saleon must have been extremely valuable if they managed to overlook their speciesism and work with aliens. Maybe they just saw it as some stupid alien doing all the hard work for them. The turian separatists from the group Facinus had done the same back when they hacked the FTL plotter from a ship so that it rammed into the main city of Taetrus. Despite being turian supremacists they had employed a quarian engineer to supply the knowledge about FTL drives that they had lacked.
Frank started to seriously investigate Cerberus, and Garrus was glad that he had found something to do. He didn't know if this was the human way of dealing with grief, but for a turian, griefing meant to do something. To find a purpose, solve a problem, anything to feel useful. So he could relate to Frank's new obsession and he was glad to help him with it. It also helped himself, due to the fact that he was still suspended from C-Sec work, so he was grateful for the distraction.
Still, after a week of being suspended, Garrus began to feel bored out of his mind. It was also rather hard to stay celibate. Not that he had been jumping from bed to bed before, but now that he actually wouldn't allow himself to do it - he could hardly take his mind off sex. The workout room saw him a lot, he spent at least two hours every day there. He would be in good condition when Shepard came back.
The treacherous voice of his father in the back of his head kept telling him that she still wouldn't be interested in him anymore. That's what humans do, they don't keep their words.
He kept that voice down every day as best as he could by almost destroying the punching bag.
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Emotions, how do I ...?
I'm sorry that Sarah had to die before she could become a real character, poor thing didn't even get any lines. But somebody had to die and it was either her or Frank. Frank Johnson is needed later so poor Sarah got the short straw. Sorry, my girl. (So far this fic doesn't even pass the Bechdel-test, how embarrassing.)
I had written some 4000 words more for this chapter but I decided to make two chapters out of it, so the next chapter is already done for the most part and will be posted very soon. Yay!
And of course thanks to Credete for editing instead of sleeping.