Hey you, are you trying to be mean?
If you live with apes man, it's hard to be clean

Chapter 22

The Other Shoe

It had been eight hours since Shepard had 'enacted' the first stage of his plan: wait. Something that Sirilia hated almost as much as death itself. To her, being still was the same thing as being dead. It was what her instructor had drilled into his recruits in basic. "Any soldier that isn't moving is a corpse". It was his mantra, and thusly was her own.

What made it even worse was the humans wanted to "get to know her". They kept asking questions, about where she grew up, how she became a Spectre. The only thing the soldier next to you needed to know was how you fight so you don't bite their bullet.

She stopped pacing around the command center, turning her yellow eyes to Shepard. "What are we doing here?" She demanded.

Though he was calm, Shepard had answered the question at least twice an hour. "We're waiting for a confirmed sighting of Kirby. That's what I told you when we started, that's what I told you five minutes ago. So five minutes from now when you ask me, 'what are we doing here', my answer's still gonna be 'we're waiting for a sighting of Kirby'. Understood?"

Sirilia growled and continued her pacing. She loathed sitting around like this.

To a certain extent, Shepard could understand her frustration. Turians by nature were assertive, Spectres even more so. Understanding her situation was no problem, her constant badgering however was getting on his nerves. The impression he had been given was she was a solo-wing Spectre, one who went straight for the guns to get the job done.

Ashley managed to get some interesting information out of her, most notable of which was she grew up in the same city as Garrus. On the other side of it, but cosmically speaking, they were neighbors. But that did bring up the question of why her facial markings were white to Garrus' blue. He knew that turians painted their face to show the world they grew up on and that it changed from colony to colony. But color? Maybe it was something to do with personal tastes.

Re-focusing his attention to the eight monitors in front of him, he strained his eyes looking for someone who might fit Arjen Kirby's build and facial features. After meeting with the gang leaders the word had been spread to keep an eye out for Kirby. Keep an eye out, but not to engage. Rather to report to the leader who would then inform the command center. The cost of the cooperation though had come to a sum of 10,000 credits being wired into the Blue Suns and Eclipse leaders' private accounts along with another 20k should one of their people be the one to find him. Bray meanwhile had merely asked for the public attention once Kirby was eliminated.

Shepard hadn't taken off his Blood Dragon armor since they boarded the station. It wasn't exactly inconspicuous, but it covered his face and he wasn't allowed to wear Alliance armors since he was now technically retired. Ashley was on one side of the command room where she was fine-tuning her S7 Defender armor which sported an ocean blue stripe in place of the N7's red.

Garrus meanwhile was on the other side, all four sniper rifles, two Krysae and two Black Widows, laid out in front of him in various states of disrepair as he attempted to reduce the recoil without sacrificing any of the stopping power. His silver and blue trimmed armor was a near mirror of Sirilia's Terminus Assault which was coated in black and an exotic glowing orange trim. The sides of the face plate had been extended out to account for her mandibles.

As he laid down on the cot he ran through a mental checklist of everything he had done or needed to do. Sonja had agreed to house-sit for him. By now Wrex and Urz had arrived and had volunteered to help. Isabella had left with the White Raven. She still needed to keep her crew fed and help get supplies across the galaxy. There were only a small handful of non-military ships to help with people and supplies. Sonja had agreed to stay at least a kilometer away from Gerrel so he hoped that there wouldn't be any problems. Wrex hadn't hadn't been around Gerrel many times so they hadn't had time to get on each others' nerves. With the incident that happened though, it may not take much should they start getting into it.

He knew Bray would keep the Talons in line, make sure that none of them tried to take Kirby on their own. And with the roll they played in retaking Omega from Cerberus he knew they could follow orders. The Blue Suns and Eclipse however were a complete unknown. The little knowledge he had on the gang's leaders was useless since it was the lieutenants who were operating on Omega. From the brief meeting he had with the lieutenants, it seemed they were sure that he'd try and arrest or kill them all as soon as his mission was finished.

Tali had been checking in every half hour. Despite telling her that he was fine, he could feel it too. Something was wrong. Despite being as inconspicuous as possible and bunkered in the most secured place on Omega, he felt like they had walked them right into a trap as time went on.

His omni-tool pinged with another incoming transmission on a secured line. 'Right on time' Shepard thought as he turned the omni-tool on.

"Shepard, how are thing?" Tali asked. She couldn't explain it, but she knew things were about to go very bad very fast. Of course, she had been having that feeling for the last 8 hours.

"Same as before."

"So no one has seen him?"

"No, not yet. But there's still quite a bit left and banging on doors right now isn't a good idea."

"I just... don't think it's a good idea for you to stay there."

"You want me to promise to be careful?" He asked.

"Could you?"

"I promise sweetie. And don't worry, I got Garrus and Ash watching after me. We'll be fi- ohhh, da-shiang bao-tza shr duh lah doo-tze!" She could hear an alarm of some kind going off on his end of the channel.

"I gotta go." He quickly said and closed the channel. His face was replaced by a glowing orange screen before she could say anything.

She stood there for a minute, then called Cortez then James on her omni-tool, running for the elevator nearly knocking one of the ship's crew members on their butt as she ran.

"We'll be fi- ohhh, da-shiang bao-tza shr duh lah doo-tze!" A warning klaxon started screaming in the control room. He didn't know the specifics of it, but given the fog-horn style of it the only way it could get worse is an entire army started blasting at the doors.

"I gotta go." He closed the channel and ran to the controls in the center of the room.

Sirilia was already there.

"The air is being sucked out of the room!" She said. "Full decompression in under two minutes."

Her helmet was deploying from her chest armor. Garrus, Ashley and Shepard were quickly following suite. The thin air was all the encouragement they needed.

"Well, well, well." A gravely human voice said over the command center's sound system.

The scarred man's face appeared on a holographic projector in the center of the CIC causing the entire Spectre squad to jump. A four foot holographic image of Arjen Kirby's face had replaced the hologram layout of Omega. Though still only showing orange and reds, they could see the greying hair Kirby had as well as a large scar across his nose and from the middle of his right jaw running all the way up to his hairline. Both wounds he had received during hand-to-hand with batarians on Torfan. His left ear was missing. The result of a nearby mine detonating.

"Looks like they're really bringing out the big guns to deal with me. I'm honored. Also severely disappointed. I mean come ON! All you needed was a guy delivering pizzas to you to be more of a walking cliche. Oh and I see you brought your pet mongrel with you! You know I was going to send you a message Shepard. They've been bad. Very, very bad. Yes that's bad birds. Do you know just how many of my men they've killed? Why, it's almost like this is personal or something."

Shepard needed to defuse the tension and find some way to get them out. The metaphorical front door, back door and windows would all likely be set to explode soon as one of them opened.

Shepard stepped 'forward'. In truth it was only about a half-step forward but it was enough to get his attention.

"Come on Kirby, I understand what you're going through but you went too far. This is only going to end one way so just make it easy on yourself; stop waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"Wow. You get that out of the interrogator's field manual? I mean, it's like you were reading it word for fucking word! You ever think about teaching? I mean, you're a pretty shitty intelligence operative. Caught in a surprise attack and spaced? Tsk-tsk. Betting that little diddy cost you a few years pay. Ohhh waait. It did."

"And it seems you're even more psychotic than before." All he needed was to distract Kirby long enough for his omni-tool to charge to full power.

"Me? Nah. I just follow the orders I'm given. And right now, the orders are to eliminate you. Have been for a while. I figured I'd bruise your little spiky protege here and he'd come running to you. Now if it were me, I would have just rigged the landing pad to blow taking you and your little squad out when you landed but the powers that be say they want this looking like an accident."

Shepard checked the power levels as discretely as he could. "You know, I'd love to continue this conversation a little longer, but I'm afraid you're out of time Arjen." It had fully charged.

"No Shepard, you're the one whose out of time. Besides, this is so boring. You're not even trying to figure out my evil plans. See ya." Shepard hit the activation button on his omni-tool as fast as he could, praying that he was just a hair's breath quicker.

A/N:

I'm back in college, so the updates will likely drop down to once a month. This estimate is a guess based off of last year. Classes start Monday and I'll have a better idea of what the update rate might be by the end of next week. Hopefully, I can have something good done by Halloween.