A/N:
I've been out for a bit. I will probably be out for a while longer. However, I am not dead and neither is the story. I had some time this weekend to work on this, and while I'm not 100% happy with the result, it gets the job done. I'd like to thank everyone who PM''d, reviewed and messaged me with uplifting words.
Liethr didn't beta this one so blame me for any goofs. Reviews are always welcome.
THE SECOND ARC: ASK OF THE LESSER, LEST THE GREATER NOT WISH TO ANSWER AND TURN AGAINST YOU
'The problem with monsters is that they rarely start that way. The forces that shape them and turn them into such rarely leave them capable of realizing what they have become, and make the immune to the sort of hesitancy of conscience that restrains the rest of us. Turning them back from the path is therefore only possible when you know why they became a monster in the first place.'
- Benezia T'Soni, 'No Single Raindrop Blames Itself For the Flood'
Shepard stood behind Joker in the cockpit of the new Normandy, silently watching as the pilot's hands moved rapidly over the haptic console in front of him, cap down and his expression focused. The ship was moving carefully through an extremely dangerous and narrow flight path, one risky enough that normally it would be left to a computer to control.
She kept quiet as she ran her fingers through her hair, absently wondering if it was going to grow or if it was as synthetic as most of the rest of her body. She never felt tired physically anymore, but she was almost weary of the rapid pace of events she'd undergone in the time since her transmission to the galaxy.
The past two weeks had been a hectic mess.
Her assault on the slavery networks that compromised the Traverse borders had gone better than she ever could have expected. Vigil was more than up to remote-piloting most of the ships Cerberus had given her to play with, after a few more modifications by Tali. If the boastful silver sphere could be taken at face value, it was originally designed to manage trillions of war droids and millions of ships, after all, so this was hardly as surprising to Shepard as it was to Miranda.
They had hit eleven targets in two weeks – pirate moorings, slaveholder stations, fueling stops – and torn apart the entire spinward border of Aria's domain. The pirate stronghold at Umlor had been completely annihilated, the only survivors the freed slaves. In every battle they'd routed the pirates and slavers, so far not even loosing a single ship in combat. And when they'd assaulted Umlor, they'd not only broken the back of the slaver's fleets, they'd torn out the beating heart of its finances.
Umlor had been the first large-scale testing of the war robots, and that had gone just as perfectly as she had planned.
She let a small, grim smile cross her features for a moment at the memory. Without any oversight from the Alliance, and with Vigil certainly not giving a damn about atrocities, she had no one stopping her from executing the slaving, pirate filth. She'd gone down in person at the end, testing herself against living enemies instead of computer generated simulations.
The landing drop had been a bit rough, and her position had been hit by nearly a dozen krogan in heavy armor. It took her all of nine seconds to kill them – seven of them with her ODIN, one with a omni-tool slash to the face, two more with kicks that snapped their spines. The last one she took a full hit from the krogan's energy maul without even staggering, before tearing the maul – and the krogan's hand – away and killing him with his own weapon.
That's when it hit her that she wasn't even close to a normal human anymore.
She'd run down a fleeting pirate on a hover-bike while she was on foot, torn the man's head off along with his armored helmet, and laughed as she leapt away, falling thirty five feet and landing as if she'd hopped down off a short step. She'd stopped a punch from a krogan with a single hand before crushing his fist like tinfoil, tearing his arm off with a tug a moment later before punching through his combat armor and splattering his primary heart.
She'd taken a direct hit from a lance cannon and skidded back fifteen feet, only to leap up, barely feeling any pain, and dash forward before the turian slaver who'd shot her could recover. She'd dodged incoming fire as if it was moving in slow motion, and she could fire her sniper rifle with one hand and still hit targets in the eye at five hundred feet – while running.
The sheer terror and incoherent panic the slaving bastards had felt helped mute the pain in her heart, and she had found herself laughing as she literally walked through the ineffective and pitiful fire of her enemies to butcher them. Gunships were too slow to hit her, and the light armored vehicle that was the last line of defense before she tore into the command center was nothing more than an irritant – she shattered the armaglass cockpit with a biotic-enhanced punch and hurled a shockwave into the cockpit, turning the interior into a blood-splattered abattoir.
There was no mercy, no surrender, just annihilation. But after the last foe was dead, when she'd returned to the base and looked over her armor, the second half of her ugly realization had hit her.
She'd taken a direct hit in the thigh from some high-ballistic rifle and didn't even feel any pain, or loss of movement. She'd melted a gunship out of the sky with nothing but hurled warpfire and her nerves didn't hurt. She'd run over forty miles an hour on foot and torn apart a durasteel security door a good three inches thick with her bare hands – and she wasn't even tired.
She wasn't sure how to process how to feel about that. Chambers had warned her that the realization of her current state was something she still hadn't faced fully yet, but in the days since the assault she began to wonder if she was even human anymore.
It didn't help there weren't very many real people around. Shepard was still waiting for Miranda's people to bring her some more flesh-and-blood soldiers, but the augmented combat robots under Vigil's control were nasty enough that she didn't really need any more backup. Each one was so heavily armored that anything short of heavy weapons would only do minor damage, and they could use the sort of heavy weapons that a human soldier required a tripod to use.
They didn't hesitate to execute the slavers they encountered, and Vigil could at least be counted on to make her laugh with a quip or two as it mockingly killed off the slavers. But they were hardly going to rein her bloodthirsty impulses in battle in. On the other hand, it was a relief in a way to not have to worry about losing soldiers or getting her friends killed – the robots used some of Vigil's strange living metal, and unless the power source of the robot was destroyed would slowly regenerate and repair itself.
The attacks had gone well, far better than Shepard had expected. The slavers had gotten sloppy and lazy, fattened by being able to prey on poorly defended borders with most of the normal patrol ships of the Alliance and Hierarchy busy fighting the geth. They had never really expected to face down the kind of heavy ships and firepower that the Illusive Man had put into her hands.
Shepard was careful to free slaves and let a few fleeing slave ships get away, knowing they would spread the terror and fear. Her forces tore apart the border slave worlds, then took down the more important ports, and finally crushed the backbone of the slaver shipbuilding facilities. And at last, after two weeks of raiding, they'd finally identified the real target she'd been looking for.
Chresi V, the Last Stop.
Chresi V was a borderline habitable world, clinging to the ass-end of the western Traverse. A pirate port, it had grown from a mere set of hab domes to several sprawling bases clustered thickly around a ring of fortified modules and prefabricated towers. Its docks were open to all, far from the police frigates and snooping eyes of Citadel forces, while its slave market was the largest in the galaxy – it dwarfed even the batarian markets, and rivaled that of Omega itself.
Chresi V was known as the Last Stop because it was traditionally used by smaller slaver rings to drop off captured slaves and take payment, and for bigger slaver operations to buy up slaves en masse for delivery. It boasted its own HE station, and the 'lord' of the system, an aging mid-caste outcast from the Hegemony called Rythek, was friendly with many of the smaller pirate outfits. It had evolved over the years – starting out at little more than a hiding hole and place to dump charge, it had grown powerful under the chaos of the collapse of the Batarian Hegemony and the fracturing of Aria's control over her warlords. With the advent of the Geth War, many trade lanes once patrolled by turian, human or asari ships went without protection.
The pirates and slavers had done well. Chresi V boasted everything raiders needed – repair facilities, slaveholding pens, clonelegger salons, and enough raw materials to provide both repairs and slowly build new ships or overhaul those taken as prizes. Increasingly, as it sent out specialized raiders that did little else but attack resource transports, ore haulers, and the like, and more such specialists that raided supply depots on poorly guarded frontier worlds, it had become the center of pirate attacks in the entire eastern sectors of the galaxy.
The Alliance had never managed to locate the exact system the world was in, despite looking. Rythek was cunning and smart, and the only known way to get to the system was through a nasty FTL route that dipped between a binary black hole system. Pirates wanting to do business on Chresi V had to meet in the Vendra System and be approached by some of Rythak's pilots with specialized navigation software.
But when Shepard's war robots had put Umlor to the torch, they'd found one of Rythak's message boats on the world, capturing it intact. Vigil was easily able to hack the boat's systems and extract the needed piloting instructions, and now Joker was carefully guiding the fleet single file through the FTL lane.
Due to the black holes, the 'shape' of FTL space in this region was warped. No existing ship could make the FTL trip the 'long way' around the coreward approach – charge build up would have reached critical levels only half way there.
Shepard pondered on the utility of the position Chresi V held as a base of operations for her own needs, assuming she was willing to have Cerberus tow the asteroid base she had there. After thinking about it, she discarded the idea as unworkable and probably dangerous – the FTL corridor was too narrow for such a thing to work.
She refocused as Joker exhaled, his voice mostly steady. "Past the primary gravity fields. Breaching the solar wind envelope in five minutes, ma'am."
She nodded, reaching down to pick up the bone-white helmet of her battle armor. "Vigil..."
From a nearby console, a shimmering silver orb erupted into being. "Yes, primitive?"
She nodded at the cockpit windows. "Prepare the fleet. Once we're done, drop beacons so the Alliance can find this place. They'll have to handle the slaves we free today."
The sphere bobbed. "Very well. Orders for the fleet?"
She smiled behind her helmet. "You know, the usual. Leave nothing alive but the slaves. And when you find Rythek... let me know."
O-TWCD-O
"Admiral Branson, Captain Shearsi has arrived."
Branson glanced up from the reports scrolling across his screen – more news from the Geth front at Nodaxis – to nod at the ensign in front of him. "Very good, send her in, please."
He sat back in his chair, glancing around the circular room and the many haptic screens on the walls, the stations of data analysts, and the other admirals in the room. The atmosphere was tense, and despite the comfortable leather high-back chair he reclined into, he felt stiff and uneasy.
Officially styled as Alliance Naval High Command, the room was informally known as the War Pit. It was the nerve center of the Alliance military machine, tied in to the fleets, ground forces, comms systems and forward operations of most of the Alliance armed forces. For most of its existence, it performed few functions beyond coordinating large fleet movements. Certainly there had never been a need to assemble the fleet admirals and fleet master in one place to discuss strategy.
When the Geth War broke out, though, that had changed, and now the NHC was used almost weekly. The war had gone very well in Branson's opinion, despite the loss of a dreadnought and almost half a dozen heavy cruisers. More and more technology was being adapted from asari base tech packages, while the salarians had begun to market powerful computer and ECM systems. The AIS suspected the more powerful of these systems were derived from the Reaper technology they'd salvaged from Nazara.
The Alliance had made its own strides in that regard, having been given the engines – or what they assumed were the engines – of the massive war machine. While the jump drive was incomprehensible, having driven nine Manswell-Nobel scientists to madness and making a mess of physics and hyperdynamic field theory, the FTL drive was more comprehensible, and as a result the newest line of Alliance capital ships could keep pace with a frigate of a few years back.
It gave them a decided edge over the geth, whose lines had finally broken not long back, although at a heavy cost in ships and lives. Now, with the Geth War beginning to wind down and the collapse of the Hierarchy, Branson had hoped things would calm down.
Unfortunately, with the chaos in the Traverse, it was unlikely to so in the near future. And thus, the assembled officers within its walls and the knowledge that the High Lords were expecting action and answers soon pressed down on Branson's shoulders with a heavy weight.
The past few weeks had seen enough anomalous actions on the frontier to justify the High Admiral calling for a meeting of the Fleet Command, to discuss what was going on in the Traverse – namely, the actions of this Butcher – and determine if she was a threat. The Alliance had sent in multiple scout and recon teams to the area, often arriving just after they got mysterious messages from the Butcher, to find yet another pirate port blown to smithereens, horrific scenes of carnage and death among the slavers, and crowds of freed slaves that needed repatriation.
The Alliance was getting increasingly nervous about the Butcher – estimates of her fleet strength varied wildly, but just by the number of wrecked hulls and dead slavers they'd found in her wake, her fleet had destroyed over two hundred ships and slaughtered over thirty thousand pirates – not counting the hundreds of thousands dead at Umlor. There was a great deal of worry that the Butcher was the cats-paw or front of a more dangerous or antagonistic group, and the fact that the AIS had been unable to determine anything about the Butcher – or her fleet, finances, or ultimate goals – made more than one Senator from the border colonies nervous.
He cleared his thoughts, refocusing on the faces around him – fellow admirals, all well schooled in keeping their thoughts and expressions neutral. As he finished glancing around, a dark skinned woman appeared in the entrance of the room, her Indian features set in a mask of discipline and calm.
"Captain Shearsi, Fifty-Third Scout Battlegroup Typhon, reporting, sirs."
Brandon nodded, gesturing to a chair on the inside of the circular table the admiral sat at. "At ease. Be seated, Captain. I presume you have the initial scouting report from what we're seeing in the Traverse?"
The woman nodded, pulling out a data-padd before sitting down. "I do." She glanced around the table at the faces of the admirals. "I'm not sure what to make of what we have found, but at least we have some hard data now on the Butcher."
Admiral Ahern sat to the far left, flanked by Admiral Dragunov and Admiral Okuda. To Branson's right was Admiral Tyrson and Admiral Hackett, flanked by Sixth Fleet's Admiral Rogeti.
Branson glanced over his notes. "That is good news. Very well, Captain. Proceed."
Captain Shearsi tapped her padd, bringing up her own reports. Her voice was cool but firm, with only a hint of a British accent to it. "Yes, sir. The Fifty-third scout battlegroup Typhon was dispatched on long-range reconnaissance to the Western Traverse to scout and find information on the Butcher. We were in the process of examining FTL wakes in the Jakona system, a slaver fueling stop that appeared to be destroyed by her forces."
She took a slow breath. "We broke this investigation off after my forward scouts began receiving broken transmissions from the Rythek Pirate Group. They claimed that the Chresi V system, a known pirate operational hub, had been destroyed."
She glanced up at the admirals. "My scout group had already identified four other sites hit by the Butcher in the past week, but as you all know the exact location of the Chresi system was not known to us. Shortly after finding a handful of severely damaged pirate ships barely functioning and taking the few survivors into custody, my science officer picked up a homing beacon near a pair of black holes. The homing beacon was standard Alliance surplus stock, available on any one of a dozen black markets – it had been modified by a very skilled technician, but we couldn't determine anything else of note about it."
She exhaled. "We were told by our captives that this beacon was marking the only path to the Chresi system. Following the beacon lead us to a small star system."
She tapped her padd again, bringing up images on the far haptic screen. "Chresi V has – well, had – two HE3-rich gas giants and a single borderline habitable world, which was the site of a failed batarian colony. The pirate lord Rythek set up his base there, managing to maintain profitability and his rule for the past eleven years. Rythek was funded, we think, by both certain turian separatists and by the Blood Pack – we know he was engaged in smuggling krogan off Tuchanka, in weapons running to Facinus, and in pirating some turian merchant traffic."
"Six months ago, Rythek – or slavers answering to him – hit the colony of Hadley's Hope very hard, making off with over eight hundred slaves, killing two thousand civilians and destroying a pair of Corsair ships. Given the size of his fleet – it included at least ten older model turian heavy cruisers and a dozen batarian light cruisers, with more coming in since the fall of the Hegemony – he was probably the strongest of the 'border lords' in the Traverse not answering directly to Aria."
Hackett nodded gravely. "He was causing trouble before the Benezia Incident – some of his men participated in the strike of Eden Prime a year before Saren hit the place. He was also involved with some of the slaver operations that the Second RRU under Kyle destroyed. We never could pin him down and bring him to battle because no one could lead us to the system."
Branson nodded. "Continue, Captain."
The woman nodded, her face turning grim. "We entered the system at full battle readiness, some six hours after the transmissions hit our comm networks and two hours after sorting out our captives. Rythek was known to have at least fifty ships, most of them light raiding vessels, and to have both orbital defenses and a large ground force, so we figured a fight would still be ongoing. When we arrived however, the entire pirate fleet had been completely destroyed, and the planet kinetically bombarded."
The captain glanced at her padd again, clearly gathering her thoughts. "After a quick recon of the system, we were unable to localize where exactly the attackers had struck from. Nor could we concretely pin down the source of their weapons systems. Scanners indicated there were ion discharges similar to some high-performance Alliance engines, but too diffuse to be sure. We attempted to recover scans from the wrecked pirate ships, but every working computer system we found was hit with an extremely dangerous and polymorphic viral VI package that had wiped all data. My science officer attempted to categorize the various weapons signatures in the area, but her findings were … well, mixed."
Ahern frowned. "Define 'mixed', Captain."
She sighed. "The primary weapons used appear to be multi-stage disruptor-sheathed mass accelerator cannons, with a throw weight of battlecruiser class. Impact analysis from a destroyed pirate heavy cruiser indicates a single shot was capable of breaking their shields, blasting completely through the length of the vessel, and out the back of the ship. Targeting patterns and solar wind analysis would indicate there were more than ten such ships in the attacking force."
Admiral Rogeti grimaced. "Ten battlecrusiers? That's a goddamned armada."
Dragunov's harsh accent rang out. "Enough. Continue, Captain."
Shearsi tapped at her padd and images of the surface of the world came up. Its cratered surface was blackened in places by clear signs of heavy kinetic and torpedo bombardment. "From what we can tell, Rythak's 'base' consisted of about thirty to forty colonization modules, arranged in a large circle with a force-shield generator to keep the atmosphere in. A docking and landing facility to the south was not harmed by the bombardment, nor were the slave pens."
She gestured to a ring of debris circling the planet. "Based on the wreckage, Rythek had a heavy battle platform and well over twenty cruisers and at least one heavy battlecruiser in orbit, and more than twice that number of ships in the system. All of them were completely destroyed. Sensors indicated along with the mass accelerator fire that high yield, high performance M/AM torpedoes were utilized, with asari detonation triggers."
She gestured to the planet itself. "When we arrived, the slaves were the only living beings still on the world. The majority of the colonization modules had been kinetically bombarded from orbit, but traces on the outskirts of the landing area show that an assault force landed at some point and engaged in heavy fighting on the planet's surface. Based on the … well, trail of destruction, the landing party was mostly focused on breaching the command center, and then fanning out to slaughter every single slaver on the planet."
The Indian woman sighed. "We were able to recover and rescue the slaves on the surface of the planet, and interviewed them to determine what happened. According to them, the pirates were taken by surprise and bombarded, then suffered an attack by what they describe as very advanced mechs, similar in design to a RAMPART mech but with heavier armor and different weapons. The assault was lead by a small unit of super-heavy mechs. with the overall leader appearing to be an asari wearing white armor."
She paused. "We obtained a single image from a monitoring camera in the slave barracks at extreme distance." She tapped her padd, and the blurry image filled the screen – a tall figure in heavy white armor, with an elongated asari helmet, carrying what looked like a very heavy rifle of some kind.
Shearsi gestured to the screen. "The marines were not able to see much from the slave quarters, but they did see this white-armored leader engage in brief combat with two krogan slavers. They described the figure as tall – based on the terrain and other references, this person stands about 5'10 to six feet – and definitely asari. Based on the powers they described seeing – a blade invocation, and a combination of biotic charge and singularity – we're thinking this was possibly either a rogue member of the Thirty, or a lapsed Priestess of Athame."
Ahern grimaced. "If that's an asari, then it's definitely one of the Thirty based on the height alone. Jesus fuck, this gets worse and worse."
Branson grimaced as well. News that one of the Thirty was involved in this mess would make the High Lords of Sol very nervous. "Continue."
Shearsi consulted her padd again, as the rest of the admirals said nothing. "Several of the slaves were ex-Marines, and their descriptions were more detailed. According to them, the kinetic assault killed most of the slavers on the ground. The slave pens had their own atmosphere and power sources, and were well away from the main habitation to prevent the pirates from 'damaging the merchandise'. The assault was carefully targeted not to harm the slaves."
Branson finally spoke. "Interesting. That speaks of extremely skilled gunnery. Continue, Captain."
Shearsi bit her lip. "The most worrying part about the assault was the savagery, sir. The pirates were...well, massacred. More than half of them had to have been unarmed, and they were shot dead, and in some cases burned alive. Not a single pirate ship was found intact, and I find it very hard to believe none of them surrendered. Every single slaver inside the camp was either killed in battle, or executed."
Ahern snorted. "And nothing of fucking value was lost."
Shearsi nodded. "I'm not really feeling sorry for the pirates, sir. But a strike force capable of completely obliterating a pirate lord of Rythak's strength is very troubling, given that we don't know who it answers to. The fact that a fleet of that size somehow achieved complete surprise in their attack suggests some form of stealth technology was used."
Branson frowned. "Speculate later. How did you proceed from that point?"
Shearsi squared her shoulders. "I advised Alliance medical we had slaves in need of treatment. Medical frigates were on-site within eight hours. I also communicated to the Citadel we had a large number of non-human liberated slaves. Alliance medical and psychological personnel were able to deal with the humans in the group. As per orders, all intelligence was copied to the AIS for analysis."
She paused. "There was also a surviving pirate – or suspected pirate – ship in the area near the entrance to the FTL lane, a converted elcor hauler. They transmitted some images of the ships in the attack, the only hard visuals we have so far that show the enemy in action. I've already transmitted them to the AIS, along with the logs of all interviews with the slaves."
She tapped her padd once, displaying a single, grainy image. A dozen black and gray dagger shaped ships were visible, surrounding a larger ship that had fighters exiting a hangar bay. The ships didn't look familiar, except for the lead ship.
Ahern's eyes narrowed. "Enhance image, sector A-4." The image zoomed in and was cleared slightly.
The ship that was in the lead looked like an Alliance frigate, only much larger, with raked forward wings, larger engine pods, a more aggressive slant to the wingtips and many more guns. Thick armor occluded ports along the side.
Admiral Hackett frowned. "That looks like an Alliance ship design."
Ahern folded his arms. "Except we don't built our heavy cruisers to match a frigate's spec. What in the blue hell is that thing?"
Branson narrowed his eyes at the image. "Was this … suspected pirate … able to provide any more insight or information as to the nature of the ship?"
Shearsi exhaled and looked down. "According to the pirate, sir, they had no scans or emissions data – he claimed the ships hit the system in stealth much like the Normandy's IES system. They didn't pick up any transmissions of any kind – the attackers simply killed everything they could."
"Anything else of note, Captain?" Ahern's voice was wary.
Shearsi hesitated, then nodded. "One more thing, sirs. We were able, as I said, to confirm that someone or something landed at the pirate site. They didn't leave very much evidence behind, but we definitely found Rythek, or what was left of him. Someone literally punched a hole in his chest armor, then pulled his arms off by sheer force, before immolating him by way of some sort of plasma slurry." She bit her lip. "Based on the number of wounds on his body, and the condition of the area he was found in, we think this happened after he was taken captive."
There was an appalled pause in the room, and finally Admiral Tyrson grimaced. "Sounds like this Butcher – if this is her handiwork – is even more gruesome than Shepard ever was."
Branson merely nodded, eyes flickering to meet those of Ahern. "That's a discussion for a later time. If there is nothing else...?"
Captain Shearsi straightened to attention. "All details are in my reports, sir."
Admiral Hackett folded his arms. "Well done. Dismissed, Captain." He waited until Shearsi was out of the room before letting out a heavy sigh. "How many attacks does that make?"
Branson consulted his own padd. "Six, perhaps seven, in the span of four days. That we know of. God knows how many more we don't even know about, and that doesn't count the mess the Butcher has gotten up to in the past two weeks. The High Lords are very nervous and the Council is going crazy. We can't even identify who the attackers are with any certainty, or their fleet strength."
The blond admiral lifted his hand. "So far, we know they have a carrier of some kind, several heavy cruisers – possibly battle-cruisers – and some form of stealth craft. They employ human-style engines and weapons, with asari-style torpedoes, but the weapons they use are very heavy. They appear to mostly rely on some kind of war robots for an assault force. They do not respond to any communications, and have destroyed five of the largest and most dangerous pirate or slaver networks."
Admiral Tyrson snorted. "And the AIS has no clues who these people are?"
Branson sighed. "None. The information from Captain Shearsi is the first hard data we have on their space or ground forces – or this asari leader calling herself the Butcher. We know only the following – she's in command of somewhere between eight and thirty ships, and those ships don't exactly match any known design specs. We have no indications of who built them or even where."
Branson rubbed his chin. "I've had the AIS investigate which asari could possibly be behind this. There are plenty of them who can pull off the biotics necessary, but almost none of them have the needed level of military skill to pull the rest of this mess off. Even if they did – every asari with the needed power and skill is fully accounted for." He grimaced. "Based on the height of the asari in white armor... it must be one of the Thirty, as Admiral Ahern pointed out. Any of them has the money for this sort of thing, but not the motives – and it would be noticed, if not by the AIS then the STG, certainly."
Ahern leaned back. "I've asked the few contacts I have in the Republic for ideas and they're all drawing blanks, too. They don't think it's any of the Houses of the Thirty, although that's mostly due to the fact that asari don't fucking act like that."
Dragunov spoke. "Jona Sederis does."
Ahern rolled his eyes. "And we know exactly where that crazy bitch is. She's not behind this. We don't have any footage of this Butcher fighting, but it's pretty clear if she's flinging singularities about that it's an asari of the Thirty, one who has heavy military training and lots of money. Whoever she is, she has a damned good sense of history. The poor bastards on Enera were shot to bits by something like a high-powered shotgun, using uranium hexafloride rounds."
Hackett frowned. "Why is that significant?"
Ahern sighed. "Before her death, Major Shepard made me a specialty version of her own ODIN shotgun. At the time she mentioned it could load highly exotic substances as ammo in the caster, and that she herself used uranium hexafloride. It's not the kind of detail just anyone would know. Whoever this asari is knew Shepard – perhaps we can use that to narrow our search."
Dragunov spoke, his accent harsher than usual. "Interesting. I'll have the AIS look into it. But that's not all that is strange. Every one of these pirate bases she has hit has conducted raids on Traverse wildcat colonies. Who has the kind of money needed to put together a force capable of cleaning out pirate colonies and doesn't register with any of the big boys intelligence services?"
Branson nodded, eyes narrowing. "The Shadow Broker might."
Dragunov shook his head. "But why? The Broker is involved, at least on some level, with the piracy. We know he makes money off of them and uses them for informal information gathering – he has no reason to go after his own people like this. The attacks are savage but designed both to inflict fear and shatter the ability of pirates and slavers to operate in the Traverse – why? P. and Aria both have pirate and slaving operations, so we know it isn't them. Hades would be crowing if they were behind it, and wouldn't associate with an asari in the first place."
Ahern folded his arms. "And it's not the asari – even their craziest Justicars wouldn't go for this kind of butchery. While they believe in the hardest fucking kind of justice possible, they don't act in concert with others – it's always one on one with them. This is bigger."
Branson rubbed his chin again. "Could they be funded by more … outre interests? Turians? Volus?" When he got no answer, his expression hardened. "We need to know more and to establish some form of official policy on how the Fleet is to deal with this ... asari and her forces if contact is made. "
Admiral Rogeti sighed. "And how, exactly, are we going to make contact? Having a policy is all well and good, but it seems to me this asari is doing us all a very big favor – and isn't interested in talking about it."
Branson shook his head. "No, she really isn't doing us any favors at all. The outer colonies are lionizing the woman, to be sure – but a lot of them are wondering why the Alliance can't do what she did. Questioning if it's worth it to stay in the Alliance or not. The Council is also upset, but that's mostly the asari who can't figure out who this is. Merchants are nervous that if they deal with less-than-legal sources or fuel stops they'll get caught up in the slaughter."
He exhaled. "Our biggest problem is that we don't know what this person's motives are. It's hardly a bad thing she's killing off slavers – on that we all agree – but not only is the political fallout troubling, there's another factor. It is possible – even likely – that some human corporations, or private citizens, had links to these slavers."
Ahern winced. "You're thinking this Butcher person is going to start going after the financiers? Attacking Alliance or Citadel citizens?"
Branson nodded, but his mind was racing. He knew full well that at least some of the slave activity was actually sanctioned by the Systems Alliance as a method to prevent breakaway colonies from leaving the Alliance. If the Butcher found hard proof of that and transmitted it, there would political and economic hell to pay.
Hackett grunted. "With the fall of Rythek, what other major operations for slavers are even operable?"
Rogeti rubbed his cheek. "Omega, some of the ports on Ilium, the Suns 'workforce enablement' on Korlus, and the few batarian holdouts in Ralas. Ralas is a damned fortress with well over three hundred ships of the Hegemony fragment and a half-dozen star-bases. Omega is … well, Omega. Korlus is poorly defended, but most of its industry is in ship-breaking and hazmat, not slavery."
Branson nodded. "If she hits another place, is it likely she'll go after Korlus, or Omega?"
Ahern snorted. "She would be fucking stupid to head to Omega – or Ralas. You'd need dreadnoughts to crack either, and I don't see any evidence of her having that, thank God. And while there's a lot of slaves on Korlus, every one of the targets so far was into active slaving operations, not just having slaves. Attacking Korlus or Ilium makes no sense."
Branson's frown deepened. "Then what is the goal, if not the obliteration of slavery? If we know her goals, we can at least make an attempt at predicting her next target."
It was the voice of Dragunov that answered. "That is obvious. She's going after every slaver port that could be responsible for the abducted colonists. The slaver groups in the Silver Rim on the far side of the galaxy haven't even been touched."
Rogeti shrugged. "I still do not see the problem."
Dragunov's eyes flashed. "The problem, Admiral, is that thus far, we've maintained that these disappearances were caused by slaver raids – despite the troubling lack of evidence to prove this. If another such occurrence happens it will not be so easy to dismiss when all the slavers that might accomplish such a thing have been obliterated."
The Fleet Master steepled his fingers. "That is the troubling thing, in my mind. I suspect that there is some additional reason this Butcher is targeting the slavers. As Admiral Branson mentioned, we are going to have … issues … if the involvement of some parties is known – but we'll have more problems if another wildcat colony goes dark and we have no one to blame for it."
Tyrson spoke. "We've moving off the topic. The concern is the Butcher, who is backing her, where she's getting her ships from, and why. It can't be the Broker, or P., or Aria. Who exactly does that leave with the kind of money to do this?"
Branson leaned back. "Most of the wealthier asari houses. Any of the Six Clans of the salarians. Possibly the Deathwatch. Volus corporations and the Noveria Corporation have the cash. AIS has already been looking through the Lords and found nothing."
Admiral Okuda, silent up until this point, raised her chin. "None of those actors have any reason to want to curtail human slavery or to stop the vanishing of wildcat colonies. I think we're missing a bigger player here, somehow."
Dragunov gave a sour smile. "In what way?"
The smaller Japanese woman adjusted her collar and smiled back frostily. "Let's examine some things. Almost nine months after the death of Shepard, a mysterious attacker on Omega begins slaughtering the gangs, slavers, and eventually Broker agents, calling himself Archangel. No one knows where this person came from, or how they became so powerful. Not long after that, a pair of mysterious asari begin assassinating Broker agents and backers on Ilium – again, out of the blue, no evidence of who is backing them or how they are able to do what no one else has."
She gestured to the monitor. "Now, once again, we have a strange assailant come out of literally no where and in little more than three weeks reduce the equivalent of two full strength regiments and a battle fleet to wreckage – and we don't have a single bit of hard physical evidence. Nothing! I do not believe in coincidences of that nature."
She smiled. "When you change the question from 'Who wants slavers taken out' to 'who profits from the mess on Omega, Ilium and the Traverse' then we only have one possible culprit. The asari hate Aria and want her taken down. They hate the fact that the clanless on Ilium run the place and they have no foothold there. Most of all, they hate the fact that any of their own kind get enslaved and held."
Okuda folded her arms. "These pirate networks were important to Aria AND the Broker as a source of slaves, wealth, and no doubt as a buffer against attack. But no slaver group would need to capture entire planets. We know the asari have encouraged a great deal of human immigration to their worlds, but the AIS is still reporting they are trying very hard to vastly increase the amount of humans moving to asari space. Is it possible the asari are behind the disappearances and are using these various agents to clean up their tracks? That the completely over-the-top savagery we see is designed specifically to make us suspect another culprit?"
Branson's eyebrow rose, but it was Ahern who spoke. "That's pretty far-fetched."
The woman shrugged. "No more far-fetched than any of the other possible solutions we have. These attacks aren't the sort of thing salarians or turians would do. They aren't the work of some random asari who got pissed off at slaving. This is a highly financed and extremely dangerous campaign, and I think we should consider very carefully the possibility that it is designed to cripple the Systems Alliance."
Dragunov's eyes narrowed. "Take captives for their own use in quieting the clanless, while weakening the Broker and Aria. Break clanless power on Ilium, break Aria's power on Omega, make the Systems Alliance look incompetent and incapable of protecting its people and convince wildcat colonies to join the Asari Republic. And reduce markets and operational area for P. to operate out of. It would be a … very brilliant play, if true."
Ahern leaned back. "And I still say it doesn't fucking fit." He held up a hand at the raised eyebrow of Admiral Okuda. "I'm not saying your wrong. I'm saying there's got to be more to it than just this. We need to make a concerted effort at reaching out to this Butcher and seeing if we can get some hard answers before we start throwing wild accusations at the asari."
Branson sighed. "We will have to consult with the High Lords and undoubtedly the Commissariat xenopsychologists before reaching any firm conclusions, I agree. Tentatively, however – we still are left with uncertainty about who is responsible, the asari or another actor. How do we respond to resolve this?"
Admiral Okuda smiled. "Send Delacor to make sure there's no clear link between any large human interests and the slavers, to neutralize our exposure. I'm not cleared on some of the Black Projects but I have enough sense to know we probably were involved on some level – clean that up first. Then, reach out to the wildcat colonies. Pull back Third and Second fleet from the geth war-front for refit and rotate the less stressed units of those fleets into RRU forces on a temporary basis, so we can react to disappearances faster. Extend monitoring to the various wildcat colonies that are willing to work with us."
She folded her arms. "And when the hardliners wildcat colonies hold out or refuse to work with us – and you know they will, at least the older ones like Freedom's Progress – and end up vanishing, fabricate evidence that Aria's slavers are behind it."
Dragunov gave a thin, almost evil smile. "Ah. A trap within a trap. If the asari aren't behind this they'll want to use that to have the Citadel Fleets attack Aria. If they are, though, they know full well an invasion would reveal that they were really behind it and will be reluctant to strike. An elegant solution."
Branson nodded. "I'll draw up the plans and inform the High Lords." He paused. "Admiral Okuda, if it turns out the asari are not behind this...who do you think is responsible?"
The Asian woman's features took on a thoughtful look for a moment, then she smiled thinly. "If it isn't them, then the only possible answer is a player we've overlooked. A group with resources to build a fleet and finance an army of war robots, who are determined to stop predation on human colonies. A group that won't work with or even expose itself to any outside interference."
Branson frowned. "But no such group exists."
The admiral smiled back at him. "Not anymore. But when you look at all the facts, what other groups do we know of that had the kind of capabilities I just described? I can think of only one."
The room was silent for long seconds before Ahern began to curse.
