A/N:
Enter Archangel. I warned you he was a little ... off.
Reviews are always welcome.
'He killed nine krogan in thirty seconds - in melee. Fuck the money. I'm not staying another day on this spirits-damned deathtrap of a station with that lunatic on it.'
- Valfaran, turian slaver, to a pit boss, ten minutes before he was killed by Archangel at the Omega Lower Docks.
Runners was feeling lucky tonight.
Which wasn't something he felt very often, so he figured it was a good omen. It put a left-wards tilt to his head, and a slight spring to his step, as he moved along the crowded environs of lower Omega – of course, keeping a wary eye out for trouble.
Runners – his nickname was a sneering admission of his foot speed – had never really struck it big. All batarians knew they were eventually going to do so, of course – why else would the Dark Gods have given them so many advantages over the malhai, or non-batarians, after all? But like many other batarians thrown into the upheaval of the Emperor's Purge, his fate wasn't to make it big in the new Batarian Empire.
He'd fled his home colony of Guta on a food freighter when the high-caste running his farm section had been killed in a riot, selling his labor to the turian ship captain in return for passage – and that had been the luckiest day of his life, since not a week later the Imperial Guard had burned Guta and everyone on it to the bedrock in retaliation for the uprising.
And he'd ended up on Omega.
With little else to his name but his ability to run fast, he'd put that skill to good use, becoming a runner for the Shadows. He'd run things for them for almost two years before getting this chance. Low-caste batarians didn't get much of a break, as most saw them as weak and shifty. So he'd made ends meet where he could – running data slips, hustling in the exchanges, doing a few side deals here and there. Never much more than enough to get by.
He knew that most of the Shadows though he was a bit of an idiot, but Runners was more savvy than they knew. He was quick and sneaky. He'd lost a finger to a vorcha, been knifed and shot a few times, and had some ugly scars on his scalp – but he still had all his eyes. He'd never had any education but had managed to pick up more than a few minor technical tricks from the show-off salarians in the gang.
Four weeks ago, that had paid off – listening to some guards of a big-shot merchant, he'd heard about some kind of nasty piece of polymorphic VI they were putting in the security systems. He'd bided his time, snuck in to the security shack of the merchant's warehouse, and managed to overhear the merchant's quarian tech giving an extremely detailed rundown of how the security systems worked – including passwords.
He'd given that into to his quad-boss, who had put in for a data-hack – and the Shadows had scored big. He'd only been given a tiny cut of the loot, but it was more credits than he'd had in his life.
He grinned to himself, as scratched his chin, the grayish skin flaking under his touch as he did so. Damned water in Omega wasn't worth crap, and made his skin dry. But with his creds he could afford a better place to stay. And soon he would have even more.
He was going places. This run was the culmination of that. Yeah, his quadmates laughed at him now, but Runners was set. He'd been picked to run something really dangerous, really valuable – and if he did it right, he'd be laughing at them by morning.
His luck was hanging strong. As he entered the Lower Runs, he overheard the gossip from a pair of food vendors. A riot had taken out most of the greensuits, Aria's security people, in the Lower Runs below Venom. That gave him a free run towards Grifter's Circle and Fushela's, and towards the path down to the secondary rings – and his destination.
Still, he was cautious. He moved with the crowd, eyes peeled for gangs. He didn't have on his gangleathers, instead wearing an old, ratty jumpsuit, carrying a beat up old toolbox and a half-functioning pad. He wasn't Runners to anyone right now, just old Mithka, headed to do some maintenance for his boss. That was the story.
He needed a story. The run was extremely risky. The Shadows wouldn't be paying him so well if it weren't.
The danger of trying to pull a fast one on Aria were well known, and the Shadows didn't want to take chances with her anger. In the aftermath of the Burning of Omega, she'd obliterated more than fifteen smaller gangs and three rebellious warlords, and had given the rest a stern warning – disobedience is death.
The Shadows had been involved in hacking the GTS defenses during the Burning of Omega two years back, but so had the Blue Suns, and by luck or oversight, Aria's wrath fell on the Suns for that debacle. It helped that the Shadows themselves had come under heavy attack during the Burning, and they simply told Aria they'd been too beaten up and busy defending themselves to be much use. It also helped that the GTS defenses had been brought back online before the Broker's dreadnought could close in on the station. The Shadows claimed they'd helped with that.
To the gang's surprise, Aria had bought it. She'd put them in charge of rebuilding the station's mechs and security systems, and they'd done so in rapid time. When the Shadows had deflected a probe by Broker tech-teams to bring down the station's environmental systems, Aria had rewarded them lavishly.
Backing Aria and catering to her whims had paid off, and the Shadows had expanded their territory and duties by doing so, even picking up bases in three outlying star systems.
They were now often employed by Aria's people to oversee and manage security software, lockouts and mechs. It paid well enough – not great, but better than nothing – and made them one of the few trusted gangs. The greensuits didn't hassle them the way they did the Blood Pack or the Blue Suns, and they'd been allowed access to things they didn't even know existed about Omega.
Still, the Shadows were hungry and wanted more. Even Runners knew that if you just sat on your ass and hoped for the best on Omega, you'd end up dead. Aria was as capricious and random in her affections as she was dangerous, and she could decide tomorrow to turn on them.
So the Shadows had been looking for opportunities...and one showed up.
A mercenary outfit of some kind from the Black Rim, the Wind Daggers, had shown up a few weeks back. There were many such groups being formed – the Council was paying ridiculous sums for private units brave enough to penetrate the Perseus Veil and go after the geth on their own turf, and a lot of these units based themselves out of the Black Rim, Traverse, or Omega itself.
The Wind Daggers were all turians, and the only widely known thing about them was that they'd been involved in a few actions against the geth and had come out victorious. Details on the actual funding behind the Daggers were sketchy, but they were clearly rolling in cash, as despite only having one ship, it was a very heavily armed and armored salarian combat pinnace that had just come off the lines.
The Wind Daggers mostly dealt, according to the few people who seemed to know anything about them, in wet-work missions. But on the side, they also hustled contraband of various kinds. Weapons. Software. Critical medications. Drugs.
Runners didn't know all the details – he was far too junior for that – but someone from the Wind Daggers had struck a deal with the leader of the Shadows, Mr. Hands. Ninety crates of trade-purity red sand and fifty turian lance cannons was what they put up as trade for information. As a 'gift' they'd fronted five such cases, and the red sand was beyond trade-purity, almost pure-grade.
It was too much for the Shadows to turn down, even with the danger. While they were making money, they were still reeling from the damage they'd taken in the Burning (not to mention being hammered by Archangel more than once). They could use every credit they could get, and the Shadows mostly dealt in theft, data-hacks, electronics and the like. Nothing that would give them massive amounts of cash at once. Getting a score of drugs and eezo of that size would be more than the Shadows brought in all year.
Enough, maybe, to let them expand off of Omega in a bigger way than tiny outposts. That was all above Runners head...but with the Archangel out there, getting the hell off this station wasn't such a bad idea, in his opinion.
In any event, the Wind Daggers wanted something dangerous – detailed information on Aria's security, layouts, and defenses – but the Shadows could obtain most of the information with almost no risk, as they were running Aria's security. Still, 'almost no' risk wasn't the same as no risk, and Mr. Hands decided to make some prudent opening moves to lower the odds of being caught.
Their drug-glazed hackers had gotten to work laying false leads, setting it up where it looked like outside influence and getting the bits and pieces about the security they didn't know. The really clever part, in Runners mind, was that he'd overheard the sector bosses using an independent to hire up a pack of Blue Suns mercs to run an assault on the main Shadows data-center.
The assault had only killed a handful of the Shadows – ones not in on the plan, and who'd pissed off the leader somehow – but it had been done to establish a reason and method for someone else having security details about Aria's defenses, in case she found out about the breach. And given that the Wind Daggers probably weren't asking for the info for benign reasons, the Shadows had to be ready for Aria's displeasure.
In two days, the Shadows had all the information. But handing it off – that would be tricky. The data included floor-plans, guard schedules, a run down of Aria's armories, bolt-holes and backup defenses, GTS system codes, door security codes, mech overrides, VI bypasses, and more.
It was too big and dangerous to transmit, especially given that they were hardly the only people on the station with the ability to hack and decrypt. Even if they used a one-time pad and the best encryption possible, it would raise eyebrows by the size alone. The files were also far too large to just stick on one or even a few OSDs. They'd need almost eighty of them.
Sticking it on case of OSDs was suicide if it fell into the wrong hands. One OSD of data could be passed off as someone hacking or the like – the entire set would point the finger right at the Shadows if something went wrong with the deal.
The leader of the Shadows, a rogue salarian named Mr. Hands, had come up with a better idea. He'd taken some of the lower ranking members of the gang – the numbers runners, the rat boys, the data-scam hustlers that no one important cared about – and had his handful of cyberdocs make a few modifications.
Runners was one of those lower ranking members.
Runners had a customized datajack in his chest, and the storage equivalent of thirty OSDs in his back, all covered by a patch of synth-skin they'd salvaged from some asari and dyed to match his back. The cyberware was wrapped in a thin mesh of lead, blocking remote scans. It couldn't be seen at a casual glance, and really the only danger was greensuits randomly shooting him and revealing the cybernetics, or meat-cutters – scavengers who attacked those with cyberware – looking to score some new tech.
He was pretty sure he could talk his way out of anything, including some meat-cutters looking to steal cyberlimbs – he'd pass the silver off as a corrective spine implant. Not much demand for those. Slipping around the greensuits would be harder, since they'd been on edge and more aggressive than usual recently. Still, the chances of them shooting him up were almost nil.
The rest of the plan was pretty simple. Mr. Hands had explained it to each of his chosen runners himself.
Three runners would each converge on the meeting point with the Wind Daggers. Each runner had a third of the information mixed in with garbage data on the OSDs installed in the cyber in their bodies. Without the other two pieces, nothing of use could be extracted from the OSD-paks.
The custom data-jacks that would connect the paks to any external data-port could only link up to specially-coded draw-down boxes – boxes they'd sent to the Daggers the night before. Anything else trying to access them would trigger the real data to wipe itself, leaving behind junk data.
The cybernetic rig would also wipe the data if his life-signs flat-lined, or if he hit a panic button on his cobbled together omni-tool. Once all three runners made it – and if one didn't backups were ready – then the data could be recombined into a final file format that would decrypt once the Shadows were paid.
The Wind Daggers had agreed, and the deal was on. One runner should have already reached the meeting point by now, and the other runner was taking the tubes. Runners would probably be the last one there.
He could almost taste his payday now. He was cautious, but excited. Halfway to his goal, and no one even paid him a second glance.
Aria knew the data was missing, and was having her people tear the station apart to find it, but her suspicion was on the Blue Suns, not the Shadows. Most of her greensuits were up-station, fucking Tarek's day up. All he had to do was keep his head down and make it to the rings.
And pray the Archangel wasn't hunting tonight. He shivered.
The Archangel was so much bullshit at first. Then the urban legends had turned into ugly, horrifying reality.
The Angels had been on Omega for years – bunch of two-bit wannabe vigilantes. They fucked with gangers, boosted stuff from the merchants, and helped out the no-account scabs at the bottom of the pit. They were smart enough never to mess with Aria's people, or any of the big gangs. The people of Lower Omega supported them, which was the only reason that they hadn't been wiped.
They kept the riff-raff from violating the lower Districts too much, which was useful in preventing the down-and-out from trying something stupid, and thus they were allowed to live. But they weren't that dangerous.
That had all changed about a year and a half ago.
The Talons had been seriously fucking with the poor bastards in the Vefu District. That whole area had revolted against Aria in the Burning, and she'd withdrawn her protection from it, saying it was free to anyone who could hold it. The Talons had won that fight and ran the place into the ground. The only safe people there were the couple of merchants who had the money to buy the Talons off, and the old cranky turian cyberdoc – some veteran soldier named Ripper – that some of the Talons knew and got some minor cyberware from.
Everyone else was game. Those who could leave did. Those who couldn't...suffered. They'd looted and raped and burned and pretty much tortured the entire district for three weeks.
That's when the shit started. First, single Talons vanishing, with no trace of the bodies found. Then, entire patrols were gone. Those, they found. Sort of. Torn off limbs. Shots from a sniper rifle that had killed two or three of them at a time. Ambushes in dark alleys where nine men had fought one enemy and been literally butchered, cut apart into jumbles of arms, legs, and chunks.
The Talons didn't take that lying down, of course. They'd gone into the public tube-ways and had shot twenty people dead, demanding answers. The same night, every one of the gunmen had been found dead, throats torn out and a winged shape splayed over the walls or floors where they died in their own blood.
That shape – the turian common-glyph for vengeance beneath an outstretched pair of wings – had become the embodiment of fear itself on Omega.
Rumors flew as the weeks passed – the Talons stopped fucking with people, too angry to care about that anymore. They wanted blood, they hunted and tracked and finally thought they had their culprit. They firebombed some old warehouse, killed about a dozen bums.
The Talons had found out the hard way they'd missed their target when in a single night, sixty of them had been executed in their beds, or at their gambling houses, or on the shitter. A winged shape cut into their faces.
Several months of this sort of carnage decimated the Talons, and in a risky move, they decided to rush the Vefu District. They would start shooting the place up, draw out Archangel, and then pounce on him, relying on their numbers to mass fire power and take him out.
That didn't work either. Only a handful of the Talons made it back, all of them wounded or dying, and when their leader demanded to know what had happened, they told him the truth – they'd walked into a massive ambush, full of traps and explosives, and Archangel had killed the rest of them off, tearing apart the quad bosses before they could even get organized.
The leader of the Talons, Torsk, took his heaviest hitters and went right back in. That was the last time anyone saw him alive.
They found Torsk the next morning, cut open in front of Afterlife. Someone had sawed up him up real good, and then marked his body up with black markers, and notes like 'fold here' and 'glue here'. Torsk was well known for cutting up the dancers in some of the poorer clubs, and everyone figured it was Aria sending a message.
But Aria had simply scowled when she saw the corpse. It wasn't her people doing this. She sent her own greens into the Vefu District, forty strong, to find the culprit behind this mess.
Three came back out, babbling, crazy, begging for help. Nothing they said made sense. Buncha crap bout 'coming out of the shadows' and 'angry glowing eye' and claws and blood. Aria said whoever challenged her rule was a dead person.
The next night, the new leader of the Talons was flung through Aria's bedroom window, sixteen stories above Afterlife and secured by a dozen security systems and cameras. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. The new leader had been batarian, and a well known smuggler of red sand. Whoever had killed him had done it by pushing his face into red sand until it ruptured all four eyes, then stuffed his corpse full of it.
The body had a note with it, a note everyone on Omega knew by heart now.
'My fight isn't with you, Aria. If you like living, don't make me change my mind – Archangel'.
The months since then had been horrific – if you were in the gangs.
Archangel had pretty much taken the Talons apart. They'd been killed in a number of very ugly and often mocking methods. Many of the turians in the gang had been killed by having their own talons driven into their throats or eyes. The slaves the Talons traded in had been set free, spreading tales of their rescuer.
A gigantic figure in super-heavy armor, with some kind of powerful claws and a black-metal face mask or helmet, with a single glowing blue eye and some kind of tracking visor. He struck from the shadows, from the air – it sounded like a Raptor jump pack of some kind was used – or from a distance, with powerful sniper rifles.
Aria's people couldn't gather too many more clues from the scenes of butchery the Archangel left behind. The sniper rifle used was some custom work, possibly a Widow. Archangel always used explosive rounds, leaving no firm ballistics behind to find, and never left any trace of where he came from.
No one ever saw the Archangel face to face and survived, it was said. A single Talon survivor claimed to have shot him with a lance cannon and the huge figure just laughed at him before clawing his body nearly in two – he'd only survived by a fluke of luck and heavy cybernetics.
The next day, the Archangel had gotten into his secured hospital room and torn the survivor's head off. There was no where to run or hide.
The Talons had met a fiery and ugly end, when one of the ships they used to smuggle eezo had been hijacked and crashed directly into their headquarters, on the lower rings. The explosion had killed over five hundred Talons and wrecked the area, which wasn't a place civilians or innocents tended to wander in.
Aria had been furious, until a large part of the smuggled eezo shipment aboard the ship had arrived in six hacked air-cars the next day, along with another note. No one knew what it said, but Aria was said to have smiled when she read it.
Runners didn't even want to know what would make that crazy bitch smile. The rumor was the Talons had been skimming from Aria, and it was a common enough rumor that Runners figured it was true.
The Archangel struck indiscriminately. The bulk of his fury fell upon the bigger gangs. The Twelve Bells were taken apart in months, sniped and bombed into a wreck. But even the small fry wasn't safe. A rapist was found with a power draw cable from the main power lanes shoved up his ass, fried to a crisp. A famous saboteur was found dead in a life support suit that had been itself sabotaged.
The big-shot merchants weren't safe, either. Gus Williams, one of the biggest gun smugglers on Omega, had been shot to death inside his own secured compound, with one of his own smuggled weapons. A clone-organ seller had been found hung from his spurs, his vault of cash and valuables looted and his own organs harvested.
Archangel was untouchable and unstoppable. They said Archangel had to be a group, but the scenes of the assault always indicated a single person. The tactics never indicated that anything more than one killer was involved.
The kills themselves were terrifying. People shot at incredible distances with a sniper rifle, or else torn to shreds up close. Sometimes the person would be killed in a manner mocking their style of kills, or their trade. Other times, Archangel just seemed to go berserk, leaving nothing behind but smears of blood and chunks of flesh, or one member of the Suns who'd been shot seventy eight times at point blank range with some kind of shotgun or heavy flechette pistol.
No security system stopped him. No plot was hidden well enough to hide from him. He'd hit the Shadows several times, the most recent ending with the half boss – Mr. Hands' second in command, a giant krogan with cybered-up arms and eight hundred years old – found literally beaten to death INSIDE the Shadows most secret hacking sanctum.
The note left behind had been taunting them. 'Cute décor. Unless you want to be called Mr. Stumps instead of Mr. Hands, you'd best leave my station. - Archangel.'
Archangel tormented the gangs, the more crooked and vile merchants, and the slavers. As long as Aria didn't interfere, he left her alone, and every time she tried to have him stopped, more of her people died, then Archangel would send her some smuggled good or data that showed the gang in question was defying her in some way.
People were waiting for the inevitable, the call for a Hunt, or Aria to go to war herself, but after a year and a half, Aria had done nothing. Now the rumor was Archangel was working for Aria all along, or they'd struck a secret deal, or maybe Archangel was Aria's lover.
The rumors went on and on. The common people walked around the station, less fearful. The merchants nervously started using a bit more circumspection in their dealings. Slavers stopped trying to hawk slaves on the station itself, relying on deals on their ships.
As crazy as it sounded, the murder rate on Omega had dropped fifty percent in the last six months, open gang warfare had almost come to a stop, and you could actually feel like you weren't going to be shot or killed just walking the streets for the first time in years.
That didn't suit the gangs very much at all. They liked the fear, without it people might get ideas of fighting back.
It was obvious Archangel wasn't going to stop – and it didn't look like Aria was going to stop him. The reason was clear, the gangs were too busy trying to find and kill Archangel, or defend themselves, to pull anything against her. Runners suspected Mr. Hands wanted to make a big enough score with this deal with the Wind Daggers to expand off the station more out of fear of being killed by Archangel than greed alone.
None of that mattered to Runners. He just had to get to the deal site, offload his data, and make it back, and then he'd be fifty thousand credits richer. He planned to get his skin-tone shifted and take up some other kind of work after that. Any kind that didn't involve gangs.
All he had to do was complete this run.
He cursed as he saw a patrol of Blue Suns in the lane ahead, and ducked down a side passage that ran around the back of Fushela's brothel. The alley was dirty, but no one was in it – the asari's bouncers probably made sure of that. Fushela called herself Omega's Consort, and her brothel was one of the most popular on the station, with chipped-up turian girls, eager asari maidens, hanar 'specialists' and all kinds of pleasure within the heavy metal walls.
Fushela didn't want violence or gangers scaring off her clientele, so it was a pretty safe area.
He loped along at an easy pace, smiling and thinking about how he'd spend his money, until the black metallic fist the size of his head came out of nowhere and struck him hard enough to knock him silly. He staggered, back hitting the wall, eyes blinking against the pain and impact.
An ugly looking Talon pistol shattered his teeth as it was crammed into his open mouth, driving his head back against the wall. His eyes widened in agony, as he looked up.
And up.
And up.
The figure towering over him was something out of a nightmare.
The face was simply ...metal. Black metal, some kind of helmet, a single glowing blue cybernetic eye or eyepiece piercing the faceplate, and some kind of visor thing on the other side. Hard red lines were painted on along the sides, like some kind of mockery of turian face markings. The figure was huge, bulked up by heavy, angular armor, and a faint smell of machine oil along with the clear scent of a turian wafted over the alley's own smells.
Carved into the heavy armor was the sign of the Archangel.
A hard, angry voice spoke, modulated into a growling bass. "This isn't your lucky day, Runners."
Runners mind was on automatic, as panic seized him. He scrabbled for his omni, before red pain smashed into his mind. His forearm was gripped in an armored gauntlet, thick and tipped with metallic claws, the bones of his wrist broken, his omni-tool a sparking, ruined and splintered mess.
He felt pain again as the gun was pulled out of his mouth, spilling his broken teeth over the filthy metal floor of the alley. The gun came around, smashing him in the face and knocking him to his knees, and as he fell, he was kicked over onto his back. A sharp pain in his neck from some kind of needle made him jump, even as he lost control of his bladder and soiled himself.
And then he realized he couldn't move.
The heavy, armored feet of the thing above him were all he could see, face down on the ground, but he could feel his jumpsuit being shredded and the synth-skin being ripped from his back, painfully. The growling voice spoke, but it was quieter, like the figure was talking into a commlink. "Yeah, this is the one. Extracting now. Keep the link open, but cut it if the data feed spikes."
Runners knew the data couldn't be extracted by anything but the special draw-down box the Wind Daggers had. He said nothing, though – he was dead, no matter what he did, and at least this thing that had killed him would not get anything from him. Mr. Hands would find him, because he was smart, and –
The cyberware in his back made a gentle ding, and the figure standing over him chuckled. "Alright, clean extraction, transmitting now."
Runners couldn't understand. The data couldn't be used except with the draw-down box. What was happening?
The big turian knelt down, turning Runners' face to look at him. "Maybe you're lucky tonight after all. You get a chance to live past this. You're paralyzed right now, but you can still speak. Answer my questions, and maybe I won't splatter your brains all over the alley."
Runners' throat was so dry he could hardly do so, but he spoke. "W-whatever you want."
The blank metal face plate bobbed. "Good, smarter than the other two. I want you to carry a message back to Mr. Hands. Tell him he wasted the warning I gave him. I've cut the Shadows a bit of slack because your filth hasn't done a whole lot to hurt the people of Omega, but I found out that it was your gang who turned off the GTS defenses during the Burning. That got a lot of innocent people hurt."
The figure gave a raspy, vile laugh. "If I don't get him, Aria will, especially when she finds out that the Shadows just handed me the key to her defenses."
Runners mind gibbered as he tried to think of something to say, and came up blank. He didn't want to die, but he couldn't see how he could live through this. Even if Mr. Hands didn't have him shot for failing, Aria would be ruthless in wiping the Shadows out. Anyone who'd ever flown their colors would be dead.
The hard, ugly pride he never gave up flared, and he coughed. "I'm a dead man either way. You can tell him yourself. But someone will bring you down."
Archangel tilted his head to the left. "That's your problem, not mine. You should have thought of that before you threw in with these parasites. The law isn't optional."
He couldn't help himself as he began to laugh. "The law? What law? This is Omega!"
Archangel bent lower. "And on Omega, I am the law." He straightened, hand going to the side of his head, a commlink making some kind of sounds. "Alright, good. Start recombining the files now."
Runners laughed again. "You're a fool. They're encrypted. I don't know how you got a hold of the Wind Daggers boxes, but you'll never get the password – Mr. Hands won't give that until he's paid."
Archangel tilted his head. "Oh. That changes things." He tapped his commlink again. "We're hitting the Shadows in an hour. Be ready."
And then the Talon pistol came up and fired once, before Runners could say anything else.
Archangel smiled coldly behind his armored mask, and reached for the knife on his boot.
O-TWCD-O
Six hours later, the broadcast began.
It went out across all the many vid-screens on the station, across the extranet taps, and across the main comm systems. A flickering image in blue and black, the symbol of the Archangel.
And then a single message.
"You laugh."
"You laugh at the law – the people who torment this station. The rich ones who buy and sell lives, and twist the law to their whims. The gangs, who have nothing to lose, who don't care about themselves, or other people. All the ones who think they're above the law, or outside it, or beyond it."
"You all think the law is good for a laugh. Maybe to keep good people in line. And you all laugh. You laugh at the law. You think it can't reach you, that you can do whatever you like."
"But you don't laugh at me."
"I've warned you. I've threatened you. I've killed you. And now, I'm done playing around."
"You think Aria will protect you from me, when you do nothing but cheat her? Think again."
And at the end of the message, a signal went out. Aria's mechs all went mad, storming out into the streets and obliterating every ganger they saw. It took Aria's people three hours to get them under control.
In the chaos, the Twelve Bells ceased to exist, killed down to the last member. Over six hundred Eclipse sisters died, and the Blue Suns fought off the mechs only by a hair, losing half their number. Information was dumped into Aria's system, fingering the Eclipse for covering up the presence of two rogue ardat-yakshi who'd killed one of Aria's lieutenants, and the Suns for being involved with the original hack of the GTS defenses that made the Burning of Omega worse.
In the chaos, someone shot Garm, lead them on a chase through the city, and then when the vorcha pack Garm relied on arrived, detonated the section of hull they were in. Garm and his vorcha were dropped almost three thousand feet into the huge exhaust pipes that burned off Omega's waste. Files were sent to Aria – recorded comms between him and the leader of the now destroyed Twelve Bells, plotting to strike against Aria herself and take her out in revenge for her not stopping Archangel.
In the chaos, Aria's GTS defenses were hacked, blasting sixteen slaver ships out of the sky. Information was dumped into her systems, showing they'd been misstating profits and robbing her of half her cut.
Aria sat in Afterlife, teeth gritted, as her station was racked by destruction. She read the dispatches coming in, the damage assessments, and said nothing.
Bray stood by her side, monitoring the comm relays. "Another one. Archangel just took out Tonius, the human who ran that eezo conversion shop on the mid rim. Looks like he was swapping good eezo for depleted and charging us full price for it."
Aria glanced up at him, then looked away, her features tense. "And your people haven't found anything? No witnesses? Nothing?"
He shook his head. "Nothing. We went over Vefu and Tazo Districts with our best varren and came up empty. The places where we suspected the Angels to be hiding out at over the years were all abandoned. We've got tons of rumors...none of them seem to pan out to any real leads."
Aria stood, looking out over the balcony at her nightclub. Inside, the richest and most successful of Omega's criminals danced and drank, or were coyly led to the side rooms by dancers. Down below in the VIP section, deals were still being made, contracts being bought and sold.
But there was an edge of fear in the celebrating, a sense of unease she could feel.
Aria hated not having control. She hated looking weak. She knew the snap-fish in the deeps could live a long time if it bit anything coming after it, but if it weakened, its own kind would turn on it and bring it down.
The worst part of the situation was Archangel was mocking her. He acted as if he was working with her, exposing those who tried to cheat her. Her own profits were up. Her people told her everyone was terrified of offending her, more than ever, because she would have the Archangel come after them.
It was a hustle. She couldn't go after him with her full force, or call a Hunt – because then everyone would realize the truth. She'd look weak. They would turn on her.
"Everyone still convinced he's my secret enforcer?"
Bray nodded grimly. "Yeah. Still split fifty-fifty on whether you're his lover or if he's someone you brought in from outside the station."
She almost found that amusing. "And the Wheel Priest we brought in?"
Bray's eyes shifted to the ground. "He says all he sees is a pair of gray eyes. And the same image as before."
Aria's eyes narrowed. "Me, bleeding, begging for my life." She exhaled. "There has to be some pattern to his strikes."
Bray shrugged. "The only thing we have found is the dead Broker agents. We're almost certain the Broker's people don't even make it a full week before he finds them. And the kills are brutal – way worse than anything he does to gangers or even slavers. We had to ID the last one by skin fragments – nothing else was left, really."
Aria winced as Bray's padd beeped again. "Looks like it's winding down...the big vorcha breeder Kitgash just got tossed into his own pit of vorcha. GTS systems were just released...traced the hack back to a Blue Suns building, but the Suns inside were dead for hours." He frowned. "The only people who had access to all this data were the security lieutenants...and the Shadows."
Aria narrowed her eyes. "I see. Take Old One to pay the Shadows a visit, then. And Bray?"
She smiled. "Once you get there, I don't see a need for Old One to have his regulator turned on. Report back to me when its over with."
Bray sighed as he walked away, and decided he might as well get his goggles for this mess – Old One made messy kills.
High above, on the roof of the stack of high-end apartment habs across from Afterlife, a slender salarian took down his spy beam emitter and began folding up the various pieces, while the kneeling batarian next to him kept watch. "Time to get the Pillars out of here, I hope, Erash?"
Erash nodded. "Yeah, Vortash. Quick and quiet. The boss needs to know they're going to find out what we did to the Shadows sooner than expected."
O-TWCD-O
In the hideout, buried almost fifty feet below the surface of the lower-ring rock foundations, an asari started unhooking armor from the turian sitting down on the armory bench.
"You took a lot of fire tonight, Garrus." She pulled off the heavy black helmet, revealing the face underneath. "You had us worried. I can't believe you just stormed into the headquarters of the Shadows like that. And if you'd taken another ten minutes, the Old One would have caught you."
Garrus Vakarian flicked a mandible. "Then I would have killed that stupid krogan, too, Melenis. I wasn't in any real danger – the Shadows were clowns. Stupid hackers happy to ruin people's livelihoods and steal." He looked at his claws, still caked with blood, and his voice softened. "I've...been through worse."
She snorted, using a tool to begin the arduous process of pulling off the heavy armor plates over the shoulders. "I know, I'm the one who found you in the trash pit, remember? Goddess, that was a mess."
Her mind flickered back to that night, the night everything had changed, then she sighed, and continued to remove the shoulder armor. Nothing was said for a few minutes, and when she had both shoulders and the chest piece removed, she winced as she saw more bloody wounds in his arm and torso, and began applying medigel to his wounds.
"I just wish you'd be more careful." Her voice was full of worry, and she had a small, upset frown on her delicate features.
His voice was cool, solemn. "When I'm killing them … I can forget about everything else. The pain, the memories...everything." He watched her work, as she finished patching the wounds, then removing the gore-encrusted claw-gauntlets over his hands.
The SkyTalon armor he wore couldn't be put on or taken off by its pilot past a certain point. For reasons Garrus cleanly understood – and never mentioned – Melenis always took that duty, combining it with fixing up the wounds he always took in the fights. The armor mitigated most of them, only a few lucky shots or the heaviest of firepower would penetrate the armor to any degree, and most of his enemies only had time for one shot before he took them out – if that.
It gave him time to cool down, and think back.
Before he'd come along, the Angels were no real threat to anybody except the weakest punks.
The Angels were an irritant to the gangs and criminals of Omega, a group of mostly down and out nobodies who shared a sense of outrage and a desire to protect their district. Their leader was an older human, an ex-Marine named Angel. He said he had another name but had given it up. A big, strong man, with hard eyes and hard morals, he'd lead them and kept them safe, and it had been him who started the entire mess.
Angel had come to Omega to kill the turian who'd killed his family, a pirate and slaver who'd retaliated when a raid gone wrong had ruined his chance at quick loot. Angel had found him and avenged his family, and after that was done, had nothing to live for and nothing to do. He had money and no wish to go back home to an empty, bloody house and try to rebuild the shards of his life.
Looking around Omega, he'd seen people with no where to go, and no one to help, and in a flash of empathy, decided he would be the one to help them. He'd ended up spending his credits on helping the old turian cyberdoc who'd patched him up after his fight, named Ripper, sinking those credits into expanding Ripper's clinic and lab.
For seven years, Angel and Ripper had done what they could. Healed the injured and sick. Angel killed a few lower ranked gangers here and there, scoring what he could in terms of guns, and trying to prevent the innocent people of the District from being abused – but it was like trying to stop a tsunami with a towel.
Still, the sheer gall of what he tried to do had won him admiration. People helped him, with food, with hiding places. They gave him tips, rumors, sightings of gang members. Anyone living on Omega had to be a survivor, and the people of Vefu had slowly become a primitive information network for Angel.
Over the years, a few more people had joined up, despite the crazy of their cause. Some had come and gone, others had died, but a few had always remained.
Melenis was the first, the sister of an Eclipse ganger who'd failed her initiation. She was medically trained as a nurse and had done work on drug rehab, another thing Ripper added to his clinic. She worked hard, helping clean up the wreckage left behind that red sand, dark-smoke and other drugs made of people's lives. Slender, beautiful and empathetic, Melenis always brought out a smile in the people she helped, and those in the Angels as well. She never killed, she only healed, but she never tried to rein in the need for vengeance in others.
Others had joined, following Angel. Some, like Weaver and Sensat, were mostly non-combatants – techs, hackers. Sensat, a mid-caste batarian who'd left the Hegemony in disgust at its ways, hacked vending machines and 'mislaid' shipping orders, siphoning credits and gear in his hustles, always parting with a few to help Ripper. When his best friend had come down with an organ disorder, and Ripper had replaced the organ free of charge, he'd started using his skills full time to help Angel and Ripper. He'd since become a more accomplished hacker, specializing in security systems and mechs.
Weaver was another hacker, a human survivor from another gang, wiped out by the Shadows, who was angry because his own wife had been shot and paralyzed from the waist down by thugs looking to take him out. He was better than Sensat at getting into secured comm systems, and a genius at encryption and decryption. He'd joined up when Ripper had made it possible for his wife to walk again and charged him nothing, and used his skills to build the Angels a secure data network and comm system, piggybacking on, of all things, the powerful transmission equipment used by the angry batarian preachers in the station who railed against all other beings as blights.
Others had joined when Angel had taken down the petty gang boss of the Blades, the small gang that terrorized Vefu District for years. That had been a bloody fight, ending in Angel nearly losing an eye, but it had solidified people's support of the Angels, and freed a pair of very useful supporters.
Erash was a Lythari salarian, a former STG agent disgusted by something he'd discovered in his service. He'd been working with Doctor Solus as security, but had fallen afoul of a powerful merchant and been beaten and sold as a slave to the Blades. Angel had freed him, and he'd put the group in contact with Solus, as well as adding his own skills in drone creation, spying and sneaking around to the group.
Vortash was high-caste ex-SIU, a hard-charging fighter who found a distaste for the direction of his people due to his hobby of studying ancient history, entranced by the stories of an earlier, more peaceful batarian culture. Despite his high-caste status, he was perhaps the most tolerant batarian any of Angel's people had ever met, although he had a razor sharp and cutting sense of sarcastic humor and a nasty streak a mile wide for those who wronged him.
Montague and Butler were humans, who'd come to Omega to find Butler's sister and Montague's wife, taken by turian slavers in a raid. They'd found the woman – dead – and went on a rampage of revenge, almost being killed before Angel and Vortash saved them. Both were tough, strong ex-Marine – Montague was a master at explosives and traps, and Butler was a skilled mechanic.
The Angels began patrolling Vefu, offering help to those who needed it – fixing up broken equipment, helping watch over kids at the local school run by a pair of asari maidens, helping scavenge hydroponics from the trash pits to help feed people. Things had slowly gotten better. People began to believe they could actually not just survive, but thrive. Vefu had gone from a battered wreck that was where the down and out went to die, to slowly becoming a better place to live.
More joined up – a krogan female, Krul, having left her people after killing another female – a infertile one, who'd attacked her out of jealousy and hate for being able to have children. She couldn't take Tuchanka anymore, and would return in a century or two – after she found her own peace at having to kill another krogan female due to events beyond her control.
Krul was a fierce fighter, but in a surprise, also good at talking things out. She claimed the krogan females were the only reason the krogan hadn't already destroyed themselves, and was often at the school, teaching the children survival skills. And when a few slimy types had tried to steal some kids for no doubt disgusting ends, Krul had crushed their skulls by herself, and then gone right on teaching.
Angel liked to flirt with her, mostly to get laughs out of the team, but he was deeply impressed by her teachings of how violence had to have a reason to make it pure and worthy, or one simply became a monster.
Sidonis, a turian mercenary, had joined up when his mate Mierin had. Mierin was an asari, a former Republic soldiers who'd been hurt in a strike against slavers gone bad, left for dead on a battlefield, and Sidonis had nursed her back to health. Mierin was a gentle, wounded soul, but Sidonis was aggressive and hot-headed – he'd nearly gotten killed protecting her from a pack of batarian slavers when Angel and his people shot the slavers dead, and considered helping Angel a debt of honor. The two were young and and naive about a lot of things, but they meant well – and seeing them in love was always something that lighted the darkness always at the edges of Angel's soul.
They all knew what they were doing, in the long run, was hopeless. Omega never changed. It never got better. It only waited for the weak and vulnerable to make a mistake, then destroyed them. But Angel couldn't turn his back on these helpless people, and the rest followed him, slowly becoming as outraged as he had been.
They'd done what they could. It was never enough. They boosted and stole from the gangs and the slavers, trying to assist the people of Vefu. The people, in turn, protected them. More than one had died at the hands of some enraged slaver or angry ganger, looking to hit back at the Angels.
None had sold them out – yet. On Omega, that was some kind of miracle. Angel figured it was only a matter of time before someone's greed or fear outweighed their sense of duty to his little band, and laid up arms and armor for the day when they were sold out. The cybernetics clinic was moved here and there, built up and defended, but they'd end up pissing off the wrong gang one day, and it would be over.
The best they could do was keep the light going a little longer, until Omega put it out.
That was until they'd been scavenging in the trash pit at the Lower Pits one day, and a certain turian had fallen into their hands in the aftermath of the Burning.
The Lower Pits were the place were trash of all kinds ended up. Anything that couldn't be cleanly processed into omnigel found its way here. Most of it was useless. Sometimes, they found some good stuff. Cases of out of date meds, which they could break down for the active ingredients. Trashed armor, they could try to repair. Whatever. Lots of people scavenged here, but few had the equipment to go deep into the pits – Butler had rigged up a lift platform to take them away from the edges, towards the middle, where few could get to.
That day, it had only been Angel, Melenis and Weaver on sludge patrol. They'd already scored a good haul – most of an omni-foundry, almost a ton of scrap iron, and a set of intact casings for eezo molds. They were about to turn and head for home when the Burning had erupted around them, and Angel had decided to stay put. None of them were heavily armed, and from what Erash was picking up over the net, the entire station had gone up.
After the worst of it had passed, they'd heard something banging up above. And then the turian had fallen out of one of the many routing pipes that moved trash from up-station down to the pits, and landed in a pile of sludge. Melenis had been the first to reach him, and gasped at his horrible wounds.
His arm had been torn off, one of his legs was so shattered that the plates had actually splintered, and somewhere during his fall, a piece of metal had sliced into his face, gouging out his eye. Half of the plates on his body were scorched, and many were broken.
Broken bones and cuts littered his form, and his armor was so wrecked as to be unidentifiable. What remained of his face-paint was smeared and unrecognizable, and he was clearly unconscious as he began to sink into the filthy sludge.
Melenis, using her biotics, had gotten him out. They'd cleaned him up and patched the worst of his wounds as best they could, but Ripper said he was beyond the skills or equipment at the clinic for him to save. After arguing, they'd taken him to Doctor Solus in Gozu, with Erash tagging along to help convince the eccentric doctor to help out. Ripper had brought along a case of some cyberware he'd never found a user for, the best he could put together on short notice.
Solus had saved his life, installing the cyberware that Ripper had put together, but it had been touch and go for weeks. The cybernetic arm was top of the line – scavved from a Blue Suns turian mech – but the leg was only basics, and the replacement eye was very crude. The scarring on his facial plates wouldn't fade, and his body was weakened and battered. For weeks he'd lingered on the line between life, and death.
The turian wavered in and out of lucidity, sometimes screaming, other times moaning in agony. Infections tore at him and had to be fought down with third-hand antibiotics. Plates had to be stripped, debrided, cleaned and then fastened back with medigel and flaps of omnigel to reattach to fight off plate rot.
Melenis and Ripper had both been determined to save the turian. Ripper thought he could be a Vakarian, from the remains of the facial marks. He had served, in his legion days, with the forces of Regilus Vakarian, and owed the family a debt of honor. Melenis was simply upset someone had been nearly murdered and tossed into the trash tubes to die. Privately, she admitted to herself it didn't hurt the turian was handsome – even scarred as he was.
Almost three months after he'd been found, his fevers broke and was lucid. What he told Angel changed everything.
Garrus had seen what had caused the Burning – that the Broker had tried to buy Shepard's body from P. , and that somehow the deal had gone bad. He told them bits and pieces of how he and his friends had gotten to Omega, his fight, and how they fell. How his bondmate and all his friends had been killed by the Broker's right hand, Tetrimus.
And he told them wanted to strike back. At the Broker.
Angel let him use their extranet connection, confirming some things. Garrus found that he, himself, had been marked as dead. One of his distant cousins had bonded with his sister, and was now the heir to the family. Liara and Shields were dead. Joker and Tali had survived but were thrown out of the Alliance and vanished. General von Grath was disgraced, Commodore Anderson had gone crazy.
Tetrimus had gotten away.
Telanya was dead.
Angel had spent hours talking to the embittered, broken C-SEC agent. At first, Garrus wanted to transmit the truth – that the Broker had been attempting to sell Shepard's body to the Collectors, with the backing of P. He wanted to go after the Broker's people and kill them.
Angel told him that was pretty much a fool's dream, giving him hard words. "Your friends and wife are dead, turian. Going after the Broker isn't even suicide, it's impossible. No one knows where he is, and he has eyes everywhere. Transmitting something like that in the open would get everyone in this district killed."
With no leads, no gear, no money and owing his very life to the people who'd rescued him, Garrus couldn't argue. Instead he'd worked hard at recovery. At first, broken and wounded, he simply laid in the makeshift medical bed in the Angel's hideout. Erash and Butler had fixed his visor, and Garrus was doing some more repairs to it while he waited for the cybernetic scar tissue to finish healing so he could walk.
Over the next month he'd struggled to adjust to his cybernetics. He'd worked, as he could, helping fix weapons for the Angels, or sit at the comms panel they had, listening for news, rumors, and targets. He worked his body, trying to gain back his strength, and spent hours piecing together bits of an older model Widow rifle so he could at least have a weapon to his name.
And he'd argued, with Angel, trying to convince the man to let him go after the Broker. Surely, someone had information, a lead. Angel dissuaded him. He told him of the many outrages of Omega, and Garrus had seen some of them first hand.
And Angel had said something else: that they were trying to fix it.
Garrus still remembered his words. "If you want to do something, then pay us back for saving your life. Join us, help us save these people. The downtrodden and forgotten of Omega. It won't bring back your wife. It won't bring back your friends. But it might keep someone else from losing their lives, or the lives of their loved ones – and give you time to build up your strength again."
Garrus had joined them, albeit reluctantly. He wasn't unwilling to kill the sort of trash that plagued Vefu District – far from it. But his spirit was broken, that was clear to see. He had nothing to live for. He was a dead man, and nothing roused his energy or fire.
He trailed after the duo of Sidonis and Vortash, and his sniping skill stood out. He could hit targets at ranges none of the rest of them could even dream of. After only a week, he'd made nineteen clean kills, and began helping in the planning of the targets they were going after.
His C-SEC experience, his hardened outlook, and his keen mind had brought more than enough to the table that Angel let him take the lead in designing many of the hits they made. He wasn't very good at scavenging, or the delicate back and forth that Melenis and Krul did in convincing people to help.
But he was very good at killing.
It was a month later they found something important. A smuggler had been operating out of the Niftu District when something went wrong with a trade deal, and he'd fled. He'd been shot down and crashed into a warehouse in Vefu, and by luck Butler and Weaver were in the area, scavenging.
Most of the smuggler's pinnace was a wreck, and so was most of the cargo – except for one thing. A customized set of SkyTalon battle armor. The suit was slimmer than the usual make, with a built in infiltrator cloak that lasted for almost a full minute, the usual omni-axe replaced with powerful mono-edge claws, and low-emissions coverings to aid in stealth assaults.
Such a suit of armor was worth millions of credits, but very few could pilot the thing. Against normal infantry, a single SkyTalon would wreak untold havoc. It was missing the usual SPEAR mini gun that went with it, but even so, the suit could still outmatch almost any non-military equipment a pirate or slaver was likely to get his hands on.
The wreck of the pinnaces' computer gave Weaver enough data to hack the smuggler's warehouse, allowing Angel's people to simply walk in a day later and help themselves to the armory within. Powerful sniper rifles, cases of mini-missiles and grenades, and more. Krul and Erash managed to sell a lot of it to the gangs outside of Vefu, reinvesting the cash into buying a small warehouse near the cybernetic clinic to store their loot. Angel figured they could use the warehouse as a shelter for the homeless, or maybe storage.
Garrus had a different idea. With the smuggler dead and the codes to his secured warehouse, they could use that as a hideout. It was certainly isolated, and more importantly, it was out of Vefu District – if their enemies traced them back to it, the Vefu District wouldn't pay for harboring them. It took a week to move most of their guns and computers there, along with most of the loot from the gang members they hit.
Ripper continued to operate his cybernetic clinic, and Krul continued teaching, but the rest of the Angels now operated out of the warehouse, and eventually dug a secure hideout under it for additional security. With that handled, Garrus turned his attention to the suit of armor.
The SkyTalon suit was something none of the Angels knew how to fly – except Garrus, who'd operated one for part of his service duty with the Hierarchy. It took him a few weeks to get used to it again, but he was able to do so a lot faster than it would have taken Sidonis or another turian to learn to pilot it from scratch.
The SkyTalon's stealth cloak and near invisibility to electronic scanners opened up possibilities. The SkyTalon was serious military hardware, almost immune to most of the small arms the gangers of Omega used. The suits were rated to take a direct hit from everything up to a lance cannon, after all – a shitty Batarian State Arms rifle had no chance to stop him.
Erash, Butler, Garrus and sometimes Montague tinkered with and improved the suit, and once Garrus felt strong enough, he took it for a test drive. He stumbled upon a pair of slavers beating the shit out of a drell, and came down, invisible and lethal, cutting the two batarians down with a single, scything slash of the suit's mono-edge claws. Driven by the powerful myomer muscles of the suit, the results had been gruesome.
The battered, shocked drell had stammered out his amazed thanks to his rescuer. Garrus, pressed for an answer as to who he was, remembered the story Angel had told him about his name. One of the names translated well into turian, and so he used that.
"Call me Archangel."
That had been how it started.
The past year and a half had sort of fallen into place, from Garrus's point of view. The strike against the Talons, who'd begun to terrorize the Vefu District, had been Garrus' idea. His assaults were bloody, fast, and came out of nowhere.
When Garrus had torn apart an entire patrol of Talons as easily as he took apart a single soldier, Angel had begun to see new possibilities. The beauty of the SkyTalon was that few people on Omega thought to look upwards. There was enough electronic emissions that most scanners only functioned in narrow checkpoints, and these could be avoided by the simple expedient of going outside the hull of the station and daring the vacuum – something that was little problem for the sealed suit to endure.
Sniping and then cloaking was so easy to do that it was almost unfair.
When Weaver, in his data trawls, had uncovered a poorly secured data-port for Aria's own security monitoring and communications system, Angel had wasted no time in taking advantage of it, using it to spy on the gangs and inform Garrus of where the Talons would be. Garrus had begun to plan the raids and assassinations with the suit in mind, becoming inventive and cruel in his plans, and the Talons became more and more desperate as nothing they did even slowed him down.
The more they took the Talons apart, the more opportunities they found. As Weaver, Erash, and Sensat continued to grow in skill, they found more openings. The gangs had gotten lax in pure data security, and even the Shadows were hardly the match for ex-STG like Erash. No one really protected against the kind of listening devices and spy-beams Erash could put together, and it didn't take long for them to figure out most of the different gangs communications protocols.
Combined with the SkyTalon's stealth, Archangel seemed to know everything and be everywhere.
The rest had been nothing more than the endless pit of Garrus' rage venting itself upon the filth of Omega. He reveled in their fear and terror, and lost himself in tearing them apart with the SkyTalon. He flashed out of the blackness of the dark spaces in the station, invisible, soaring above the targets and coming down with no warning, or sniping them from far away before they could react. Sometimes, he set ambushes with the other members of Angel's band, but he was the one exposing himself.
Angel had slowly become worried about Garrus' mental stability, and while he had zero sympathy for the gangers, slavers, and other criminals that had made Omega a hellhole, wondered when Garrus would bite off more than he could chew. But again, Garrus surprised him.
When they found information that implicated the Talons as planning on turning on Aria, they sent it to her, along with the haul from some of the Talon's off-the-books activities. It was a pattern he continued. From what Garrus had learned, Aria wasn't responsible for the mess that had claimed the lives of his friends.
She was in a low-level shadow war with the Broker. And as long as Aria was the Broker's enemy, Garrus wouldn't go after her. He had the inklings of a plan, though, one he explained to Angel.
The Broker wanted to take Aria down, but Omega was too strong for that to work conventionally. Garrus figured the more gangs he took down, the more chaos he caused, the more the criminals feared his very name, the more chances the Broker would see to infiltrate his own people on the station. And if Garrus could catch them and interrogate them, he could have a shot at either finding more of the Broker's people he could hit, or maybe drawing out someone who could lead him to the Broker.
Given the gangs were always plotting, Garrus figured they could keep Aria off their back by just giving her the information of what stupidity the gang, merchant or slaver had done that would offend her. And it had worked. Aria made attempts to find them, but they all failed, and eventually she semed to give up.
Archangel's siege on Omega continued. Sooner or later, Garrus was going to get his revenge. He read everything he could on Tetrimus, studied the stories, legends, and hard facts. He knew he'd only get one shot at taking the rogue turian out.
The assault on the gangs had continued, unabated. Every success gave them more funds, more access. Taking down the Twelve Bells had won them the admiration of thousands of Omega's people, and more Districts began seeing the mark of Archangel spray-painted on walls. The extranet was alive with the rumors, the story of the dark vigilante somehow taking on all the gangs and evil of Omega – and winning – becoming a hotly debated topic both on and off Omega.
Garrus had been sadly amused to see his own father, in an interview with the turian state media, give his opinion. "Whoever the turian is doing this, he's acting beyond the law. And yet, Omega itself is beyond the law, or at least, any law but Aria's. He's fighting to protect the weak. I'm not sure I agree with the methods...but the ends? Those I can't argue with."
He wished he could tell his family he was alive, but that was dangerous. And a mess in its own way. It would disrupt Solana's life, and derail the life of his family, who by now had gotten over his death. You couldn't just walk back into people's lives, after all.
Garrus was dead. Only Archangel remained.
Angel's small band did what they could to help Garrus, both in his attacks and in his downtime. His body hurt at times, the damage from his many wounds in the fight with Tetrimus and P. not healing cleanly in some cases. Sidonis constantly cheered him up with sarcastic rejoinders, reminding him a lot of Joker. Krul would keep him informed of what his family was doing. Angel made a point to funnel some of their credits towards helping pay for the treatments Garrus' mother needed, anonymously.
Melenis, in particular, tried to get closer to Garrus, but he didn't let her – or anyone else – in too far. There were times he wondered if Telanya would be angry at him for not just moving on with his life instead of living some kind of half-life of revenge and sorrow. And he admitted to himself he was attracted to Melenis. Her kind spirit, her outrage at the way the people of Omega were hurt, her dedication to healing – these were all good things.
But he couldn't bring himself to let go of the pain.
And sooner or later, he knew, they might be sold out, or found out, or come under assault due to sheer bad luck. He couldn't endure losing someone else the way he'd lost Tel. He didn't even know, technically, if he was sane any more.
A sane being wouldn't do some of the things he'd done. There were times he'd come to himself in the middle of some red slaughter and wondered if his father would look at him in disgust. If Shepard would shake her head at him. If Pallin would call him a murderer.
But the pain drove him on. Pain, and the need for vengeance.
When Angel's information had come up with the lead on the Wind Daggers, it revealed the group was probably a front for Broker agents. That had been what Garrus had been waiting for. Garrus had hit them hard, the group having discounted the rumors of Archangel, thinking their heavy JOTUN mechs would protect them.
Weaver had hacked the mechs and turned them on their masters, and then Archangel had torn the survivors to pieces. They'd captured the Daggers ship, stuffed with eezo and weapons, and the haul was enough to even stagger Angel.
He'd wanted to focus on keeping the fact the Daggers were out of commission quiet, but Garrus had been more interested in what he found in the ships computers – namely, that the Daggers were here because they'd struck a huge deal with the Shadows, for all the information on Aria's defenses. They'd been hoping to find something they could use to assassinate her, probably.
But the draw-down boxes they had in their possession, as well as the hoard of wealth on their small ship, was too much to overlook. Angel had made the call to see if they couldn't recover the data the Shadows were offering, and turn it to their own purposes. And it had gone as perfectly as every other operation to date.
The results – the commandeering of the mechs, the message, taking advantage of the chaos to wreak havoc on the gangs, the hack of the GTS defenses to blow up the slavers so secure in their off-station ships – it had been deeply satisfying to Garrus, and to the rest of the Angels. But Garrus was more interested in the tiny bits of data the Wind Daggers had gotten from the Broker.
The Broker was waiting for an opening to invade Omega. The Daggers were actually commissioned by the Broker, one of several units, to slowly built up reputations and infiltrate Omega. When the time was right, these units would sabotage Aria's defenses and open the station to another Broker-backed invasion. Garrus had laughed when he realized that he'd been right – the Broker was taking advantage of the chaos.
The plan was working. Sooner or later, as Archangel tore the gangs apart, the Broker would have no tools to work with on the station, and would have to commit to sending his own operatives to the station to do anything. Operatives who could be captured and interrogated.
Garrus was close, he could almost feel his long-burning need for revenge blossoming. All he had to do was keep his shit together a little bit longer.
They had the Wind Daggers ship, and a huge hoard of eezo. They had crippled the gangs, the slavers, and most of the more disgusting merchants. Six districts clandestinely supported their efforts, and no one had a clue of the existence of their real base, the warehouse in Niftu, or their hidey holes in various places across the station.
They were secure, and all he had to do now was be patient. He sighed, as Melenis finished removing the leg armor.
"Thanks, Mel." His voice was tired, flanging more than usual as he stood, his back aching from the slightly cramped stance the suit forced on him as he stood.
She smiled up at him, and then bit her lip. "It's nothing. Have you eaten yet?"
He shook his head. "I'm … not that hungry. I think I'm going to get some rest, instead." He turned away, heading down the narrow corridors of the small base towards his own quarters, and Melenis sighed.
The door on far side of the room opened, and Mierin stepped out, folding her arms. "You never give up, do you?"
Melenis shot her a look. "He's hurting. I help people who are hurting."
The younger asari woman sighed. "I know that, Mel. But I also remember what happened when my sister's bondmate was killed. She was never the same again. She just slowly withered away and didn't wake up one morning. Garrus isn't … he isn't seeing you. All he's seeing is his dead wife, and his dead friends. That's all that's driving him."
Melenis stood, picking up a piece of the armor to carry it over to the ultrasonic sink in the wall. "That isn't true. He's a good person, I can see that. He's upset and worried about the people in the District."
Mierin nodded. "I don't doubt that. But that doesn't mean he's going to let anyone else into his heart." Her voice softened. "You know what Sidonis is the most scared of?"
Melenis smiled wryly. "Not hearing the sound of his own voice?"
Mierin laughed at that, then shook her head. "No. He's scared he's not strong enough to protect me. Turians...they can't handle the idea of their mates being hurt or killed. It messes them up, badly. Garrus didn't survive losing his wife, I don't think. A part of him died, and it's not coming back."
She placed her hand on Melenis's shoulder. "And it's not fair to him to expect him to risk another part of his soul trying to open up to you … when this could all go wrong tomorrow. You think he could take it if you died on him too?"
Melenis put the piece of armor down, nodding. "I know. Goddess, I know."
Mierin gave her a hug, and then smiled. "I can't blame you though. That is one good looking turian."
In his own quarters, Garrus lay out flat on his small sling-hammock, thinking, until the door opened and Sidonis stepped through. "All hail the conquering hero, Vakarian!"
Garrus flicked a mandible. "Jealous again, Sidonis?"
Sidonis' own mandibles flickered. "Hardly. You want to run out in a flying deathtrap and have half of Omega shooting at you, feel free. Still...I got twenty four head-shots today, old man. Beat you by two."
Garrus felt himself smiling. "And that would be almost impressive...if I had not also dropped sixty eight of them in hand to hand. Nine with the pistol. And one with the crate of dark-smoke."
Sidonis laughed. "That kill was beautiful. I particularly liked the part where the krogan's flesh was melting right off, but he was so fucking high he was singing a song from Fleet and Flotilla. Who knew krogan were fans?"
Garrus sighed, and Sidonis sat down. "Came to make sure you weren't having another panic attack. You know how you get after the big fights."
Garrus waved his hand. "I'm fine."
Sidonis rumbled in his chest. "Tork-shit. If someone killed Mierin, I would never, ever be fucking fine again." He hesitated. "I know Angel is still not down with this suicidal plan to chase the Broker. But ...when you go, bring me with you. You'll need back up."
Garrus sat up. "I can't." He held up a hand before Sidonis could say anything. "You said it yourself – it's a suicidal plan. I don't think I'll survive it, even if I find his location and get there somehow. I've seen Tetrimus fight. Even in the suit...my chances of killing him are almost nothing."
His eyes met Sidonis' gaze squarely. "I'm not going to put Mierin through feeling what I am, or what I saw Liara go through when Shepard died. She needs you, not more pain."
Sidonis sighed. "I know. But … spirits...the dishonorable bastard has to pay! Bad enough he did what he did to your friends, but he betrayed the Hierarchy and the Primarch!"
Garrus chuckled. "And you're out here on Omega because you're a fine and upstanding example of the meritocracy?"
Sidonis leaned against the wall. "No. Too much aggression, not enough wisdom. Too irresponsible to show the proper duty and sacrifice. Just never resonated much with me...but that doesn't mean I'd turn on my own fucking people!"
Garrus sighed, laying back in the sling. "I know, Sidonis. But take my advice. Grab all the living you can, while you can. When it's gone...there's nothing left to keep living for."
Sidonis folded his arms. "I don't know that I buy that. I would rather die than lose Mierin, but I know she wouldn't want me giving up on life if she died in an accident, or something. How long are you going to let Mel throw herself at you before you sit her down and give her a firm no?"
Garrus winced. "I've never met anyone even less tactful than I am, Sidonis. How do you do it?"
The other turian waved his hand airily. "Charisma, my talon brother. Look it up on the extranet. But seriously – "
Garrus shook his head. "Maybe it's because she's had two relationships go bad on her already? I'm not the most sensitive soul...and my mind isn't right most days. But I'm not blind either. She's built me into some kind of hero complex, and no matter how gentle I am in letting her down, it's going to hurt her bad."
Sidonis pushed off the wall. "Not any worse than it will hurt her when you go off and get killed by Tetrimus. Just think about what I said. I doubt your wife would want you suffering like this, and you like her – any fool can see that."
Garrus looked up at him. "It isn't that. It isn't even that she might die and I'd be left alone again. It's that she's … she thinks I'm something I'm not. She thinks I'm a good person, that I'm just in a bad place, that she can heal me."
Something about his tone made Sidonis's plates rise. "...and you aren't a good person?"
Garrus closed his eyes. "A good person doesn't feel joy in butchery, or make his victims suffer. He doesn't toy with their remains and kill them in a way to insult them. What I'm doing isn't about justice, or protecting the weak. It's about hate, and a need to kill to quiet the pain in my soul."
Sidonis sighed. "And when it's over?"
Garrus smiled. "I'll be dead."
