Chapter 9 – A Krogan Commrade

The din of the morning rush hour saturated the corridor as Garrus wound his way through the marketplace crowds. The three Alliance soldiers followed closely in tow – no easy task, as Garrus' long strides carried him out of their sight more than once. Only his bright blue C-Sec armor distinguished him from the sea of commuters that scrambled to board the nearby Citadel Rapid Transit.

They had all left the med clinic in a hurry, but not before securing the assistance of one Garrus's trusted co-workers to help a shaken Dr. Michel deal with the aftermath of the morning's excitement. His contact would help her with the clean-up and disposal of Fist's thugs, Garrus assured her, discreetly and efficiently. As the team began picking their way through the crowded Ward, Garrus had wisely suggested a rendezvous at the C-Sec Academy to formulate their offensive against Fist. Fist would surely know by now that things had not gone his way in the med clinic. Word traveled like wildfire in the Wards and the failure of his lackeys to report back made for an obvious conclusion. He would undoubtably be expecting retribution and taking full advantage of his newfound business partner to shore up his defenses in the meantime. With the element of surprise now lost to them, preparation and planning would be essential.

"Do all turians walk that fast, or just this one?" whispered Alenko as they stood outside the facility entrance, waiting for Garrus to swipe his credentials. His breath exited in quick puffs and a thin layer of sweat on his upper lip glinted in the light.

The door opened with a whoosh before either woman could reply, revealing a buzzing hive of blue on black. Officers and detectives strode purposefully up and down the hallways, several clutching datapads and skirting around the formations of recruits smartly marching from one training event to the next. Turian, human, asari, salarian – a variety of species seemed represented in the Citadel's primary peace-keeping force.

And working together too, Ashley noted with surprise as another formation of mixed-species recruits passed by. Blame it on too many bedtime stories from her grandfather about the First Contact War, but she had a hard time believing that you could throw together a hodgepodge of species in battle and expect them to show the same respect and loyalty to the outsiders as they would their own species. Must be some political bullshit to look nice on the recruitment vids, she dismissed as she followed Garrus up another flight of stairs and into the main Academy lobby.

"My office is just here, down this corridor," Garrus gestured with a flick of his taloned hand.

"Hold up a minute, guys."

Garrus, Shepard and Williams halted simultaneously, turning back toward Alenko curiously. Alenko stood still a few feet away, staring intently across the lobby floor and squinting at something in the distance. Retracing her steps, Shepard came to stand beside him. "What is it?"

"Isn't that…," he squinted again, perplexed. "Yes, I think so! That's the krogan that I saw arguing with the bouncer in Chora's Den last night. The one that was trying to get in to see Fist."

"Think it could be related?" Williams posed, exchanging a quizzical glance with Shepard.

"The timing seems to be a little too perfect for it to be a coincidence," Shepard answered thoughtfully. She shrugged. "Worth checking out."

The krogan was engaged in a heated conversation with a C-Sec officer as Shepard and her team approached, his rough baritone carrying across the room. He didn't appear to be under arrest, his large hands hanging at his sides and a black shotgun still secured in its holster, but the two armed turians on each of his flanks made it clear that he wasn't visiting C-Sec under his own free will, either.

"You keep threatening him and causing problems in his bar, Fist will have you arrested. Understand?" The C-Sec officer squared his shoulders and fixed the krogan with a reproachful glare. One had to admire his confidence, openly threatening a fully grown male krogan. This one had to be at least eight feet tall and easily over four hundred pounds. The three deep gashes scored across his forehead plate and extending down the right side of his leathered neck added yet another, clearly unnecessary, layer of ferocity.

But the krogan only laughed. "I'd like to see you try, human," he grinned, his wide maw a field of sharp white teeth.

The confidence cracked and crumbled as the officer took a subconscious step backwards, averting his eyes. "Just…get out of here, Wrex," he forced out.

"Yeah, yeah," he grunted, roughly shouldering past him. Finally, a request with which he was happy to comply.

Wrex didn't get far, however. He could feel their eyes on him even before he noticed them standing there, blocking his route to the exit. A little band of humans, and a turian too, regarding him with that look of naïve inquisitiveness that he had begun to associate with their kind. His large red eyes took a rapid account of the important things first – their weapon loadout, their armor quality, their stature –until finally scanning their faces. He didn't recognize any of them, though with roughly four hundred years' worth of faces to remember, he could easily be mistaken.

The humans seemed to at least know who he was, their expectant expressions making it clear that a conversation was unavoidable. He huffed impatiently. This had better be important. Humans were like flies today, he thought sourly. He just couldn't seem to get rid of them.

Squaring his jaw, he marched directly up to the fairest one. A woman, but she appeared to be the leader, the way the others fanned out behind her and tossed side-long glances in her direction as he closed the gap between them. "What do you want, human?" he rumbled.

She cocked her head at the hulking krogan, unphased. "What do you want with Fist?" she said simply.

Straight to the point, at least, making it all the easier to swat this particular fly. He shrugged her off with a shake of his head, already making his way past her toward the elevator that would take him back to the Wards. "Mind your own business," he grumbled over his shoulder.

"He wants to kill him." The subvocals so distinctive to turians easily identified the speaker.

Now that did sound familiar. And also, accurate. Turians all looked pretty much the same to him, minus those colors they splashed on their faces, but their voices were at least varied enough to pick an old acquaintance out of a crowd. He stopped and turned to face who he now recognized as C-Sec Officer Garrus Vakarian, dipping his chin once in begrudging acknowledgement.

"Wrex is a mercenary," Garrus explained, glancing knowingly at the krogan. "The only reason he ever comes to the Citadel is to complete his contracts and then leave us with the mess."

"Gotta keep you and your friends busy somehow, Garrus," Wrex shrugged nonchalantly. As far as C-Sec officers went, Garrus was one of the less-annoying ones. Unfortunately for him, he was also a turian, so that always knocked him back down a notch in Wrex's book. How he'd found himself in the company of these nosey humans was anyone's guess.

"You two know one another?" the darker woman asked, eyes flicking between the two aliens.

"Wrex is one of our, ah, repeat customers at C-Sec," answered Garrus with a derisive sigh.

The pale woman was eyeing him again. Her light coloring made her seem even more soft and vulnerable than humans already were, and that was saying something. "You should be careful, then," she warned him. "Fist is going to be expecting you. It won't be as easy as you think."

Wrex's red eyes narrowed. After completing over a century's worth of bounties, he was certain there was nothing this spineless dog could throw at him that he couldn't handle. Humans, both Fist and present company included, always underestimated the power of a good blood rage. It would be the last mistake Fist would make. Still, his curiosity was piqued. Blood rage or not, Wrex wasn't ignorant enough to turn down information that might help him in the fight. "That so?" he prodded. "And what would you know about that?"

"Fist has something he knows we want. And he knows we're willing to do whatever it takes to get it from him."

There was a certain fierceness behind her words. Not in her voice, no. More something about her stance when she said it, and Wrex found himself believing them. Perhaps this one wasn't as fragile as her outward appearance projected.

"We may have common goals then, human," he mused. His calculating gaze swept over her again, this time appraising her in a different light. Human female, wearing Alliance N7 armor, running around the Citadel with C-Sec looking for Fist. Or, better yet, looking for something that Fist currently had in his possession. His suspicions stoked into a flame as the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

This was Commander Shepard of the Alliance, and Wrex knew exactly what she was looking for.

"You want the quarian," he stated matter-of-fact.

A look of complete surprise flashed across all of their faces. Wrex heaved an exasperated sigh. Humans, turians, salarians – why did they all assume krogan were dumb?

"I know who you are, Shepard," he continued, "and everybody on the Citadel knows what you've accused Saren of. The only reason someone like you would waste your time with a low-life like Fist is if you got wind of what this particular quarian might be holding on to."

"So it's true then," said Garrus. "The quarian has information connecting Saren to the geth."

Wrex nodded in confirmation. "So I hear."

"And Fist still has her? She's still here on the Citadel?" the other human, the male, prodded earnestly from behind Shepard.

"Yep."

It felt like the winds were finally shifting in their favor, and a ripple of renewed hope and anticipation passed unbidden through Shepard and her companions. But, for Shepard, the sentiment was short-lived. Her logical side would always push her emotions out and, as much as she wanted to believe they were closing in on the information needed to unmask Saren in front of the Council, the reality remained that the only thing they really had was heresay from a stranger. Shepard wasn't sure if she could trust this krogan and, if his current occupation was any indicator, she probably shouldn't.

"How do you know all this?" asked Shepard warily. "Who hired you?"

On any other day, such an intrusive question would earn anywhere from a laugh in the face to a headbutt, depending on Wrex's mood. Any mercenary worth hiring would never drop the name of a paying client, unless he wanted to be the victim of the next contract. But this particular case happened to be an exception.

"Normally, I wouldn't give away the name of my employer. Professional courtesy," he divulged, "But this one just so happens to want everyone to know. A cautionary tale to anyone who tries to cross him in the future, I guess." He shrugged. "I was hired by the Shadow Broker. Got a coded message with the details of the job. Then one of his agents sought me out. Told me he wanted Fist dead. Willing to pay a handsome fee for him too."

"Do you know what happened? What made Fist turn?"

He shrugged. "All I know is that Fist was supposed to set up a meeting between the Broker and the quarian to trade the information. Instead, he contacted Saren and offered him the quarian. Saren paid a small fortune for her. Greedy little bastard."

"Fist never was all that bright," acknowledged Garrus with a shake of his head.

"Well, what do you say, Shepard? You help me get to Fist, and the quarian is all yours," offered Wrex, albeit grudgingly. Every bone in his body protested against a partnership, even temporary, but Fist's newfound collaboration with Saren likely came with hefty financial support, meaning he could now afford to outfit Chora's Den with lots of new toys in the way of defenses. Make no mistake, Wrex had no doubt he could still handle it alone as he would have preferred, but it would be a slow and painful process. He was already behind schedule as it was after Fist eluded him at his apartment just yesterday. He could share the fun just this once, for efficiency's sake.

Shepard, for her part, didn't hesitate this time. The stakes were getting higher and they were facing what would likely be a tough fight at Chora's Den. Having a krogan on their side was a tactical no-brainer. Whether or not he could be trusted….well, she would have to take that risk and pray that the consequences were worth whatever information the quarian had.

Pushing away her misgivings, she extended her hand. "You've got a deal."

Shepard's second introduction to Chora's Den couldn't have been more opposite than the first. So much in fact, that she would have sworn they had taken a wrong turn somewhere, if it wasn't for the garish sign above the doorway. Now devoid of the steady rise and fall of boisterous voices and the pounding cadence of electronic basslines, Chora's Den was completely silent. Even the twin neon asari crowning the entrance had been extinguished, the bright icons reduced to tepid grey shadows.

The abrupt change was almost eerie, and Shepard could feel the goosebumps rising on her arms as they stacked up on the near side of the door.

"Looks like they've shut the place down." Garrus tapped the back of a talon lightly against a flyer plastered on the wall where he had taken up position. A red swath of bold letters read CLOSED TEMPORARILY diagonally across the weekly DJ lineup.

"Looks like your informant came through then," Alenko whispered as he positioned himself against the wall next to the turian.

Garrus nodded approvingly. "Yeah, Jenna's good." He had taken the liberty of tapping into C-Sec's best resource inside Chora's Den, warning her of the impending raid and requesting that she use whatever rapport she might have with First to get as many civilians out as she could. He could only hope that she'd received his hastily encrypted message before their arrival. From the looks of things, she had, and now, thanks to her, civilian collateral damage would be one less thing they had to worry about.

With the team settled in a line against the wall, Shepard extended a gloved hand behind her where she felt the weight of Williams against her back. At Shepard's gentle squeeze on her upper arm, Williams knelt and withdrew several breaching charges from the sustainment pouch around her thigh. Practiced hands began priming the explosives for deployment.

Wrex watched the humans impatiently from his position at the rear of the stack. Things were all going according to plan so far. Humans were meticulous planners, as it turned out (or maybe that was only Shepard…he wasn't sure). Not a moment had passed after his recruitment before they had whisked him away to the turian's office deep within the bowels of the C-Sec Academy. They had spent the last half hour there, pouring over blueprints of Chora's Den and formulating the details of the assault – their positions, their responsibilities, their sectors of fire. Wrex could appreciate the value of a solid plan, sure, but time was money in his line of work. Tactics and strategy weren't exactly the forte of krogan.

He tossed another glance toward the dark-haired human as she continued to fidget with the breaching charges, heaving an exasperated sigh. Patience, similarly, was also not a forte of the krogan…

Wrex didn't leave the others time to protest before he was sauntering up to the door and swinging a meaty leg in a powerful kick. The door to Chora's Den crunched and groaned under the force, giving way completely as he delivered a second hearty blow.

"What the hell, krogan!" swore Williams hotly, hastily shoving the charges back into the pouch. But her words were drowned out in the immediate barrage of gunfire coming from inside the doorway.

"Just go!" Shepard yelled, surging her body forward.

Alenko's palms pulsed with energy as he erected a barrier in the doorway. The blue sheet absorbed the concentrated firepower of Fist's mercenary army just long enough to funnel Shepard and her team inside the club before flickering out with a sharp snap.

Then the fight was on, more than delivering on all the assumptions Shepard and her team had made about the intensity of Fist's greed-fueled last stand. The formerly posh club was a veritable battleground – the raised stage a sniper's nest, the bar a trench, the overturned tables hasty bulwarks. Shepard counted at least ten enemy embedded around the room's circular perimeter. Fist had even splurged on a krogan. She could hear him before she could see him, his battle cry penetrating even through the firefight.

A quick glance to her right revealed Alenko and Williams crouched behind a cluster of strewn furniture just a few feet away from her own position. They fired in quick succession, Alenko with his heavy pistol and Williams with her rifle, ducking down in turn to exchange heat sinks while the other zeroed in on a new enemy. She crossed the narrow distance swiftly under cover of their fire and knelt behind them, clamping down on the nearest of their shoulders with a steady hand and firm shake.

"Get the krogan!" she yelled over the noise, pointing at his hulking form almost completely obscured by the dim lighting. They nodded in unison as they refocused their sights.

The biggest threat now addressed, Shepard took a moment to survey the unfolding action. Wrex was off to her left, running haphazardly from enemy to enemy with his shogun held loosely against his hip. He seemed to alternate between pumping Fist's men full of slugs and pumping them full of talons. She had heard the stories about krogan and their ferocity in combat, but witnessing it in person was surreal. She wasn't sure if she should label it fearless, or just stupid.

As if aware of her thoughts, Wrex charged head first at a mercenary armed with a heavy pistol, the force of the collision catapulting the human's body into his unsuspecting comrade at least six feet away. They both crumpled in a heap of tangled limbs.

Fearless, stupid. All labeling aside, she could certainly call it effective…

With Wrex making quick work of the foot soldiers and Alenko and Williams chipping away at their main threat, Shepard began to snake her way across the room in search for a better vantage point on the sniper she had glimpsed perched on top of the stage. He would be distracted now, his focus on the two opposing krogans who were most likely to turn the final tide of the battle. She spotted a promising corner nestled against a partition and positioned herself against it, balancing her rifle on the adjacent ledge and scanning for the sniper in her sights. Finally, she spotted him. He had chosen his location wisely, and she could just barely make out the back of his head and his left shoulder in the shadows.

His head only provided a sliver of surface area from her angle and would be an impossibly lucky shot, so she centered his shoulder in her crosshairs. An injured sniper, while not as good as a dead sniper, was still better than a healthy sniper. She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and squeezed the trigger. A spark danced off the far wall as her shot went wide. Fortunately, the sniper hadn't seemed to notice and she lined up another shot, adjusting her sight picture just slightly to compensate. But it was another miss, this time low and the bullet embedded itself harmlessly into the stage's platform.

"Dammit!" she swore, gritting her teeth in frustration.

A flash of movement from her left caught her eye as Garrus made his way toward her, his lithe body transitioning smoothly from cover to cover. "Going after the sniper?" he asked breathlessly as he reached her position, cradling his own sniper rifle in the crook of an elbow.

"Yeah," she said tersely, "but this spot's no good. We can't get him from here and—"

A crack rang out, the rifle's echoed report cutting her sentence short, and Shepard watched the sniper's body crumple as spray of bright red exploded from the back of his skull. She blinked at Garrus, her lips parting in disbelief at the impossible shot.

"I…," she started, but the words died on her lips. She simply shook her head, speechless, looking at Garrus with raised eyebrows.

"We should go," he said as he lowered his rifle. "I think Lieutenant Alenko and Gunny Williams have gotten the upper hand on that krogan." His tone was all business, but Shepard could have sworn she saw the corner of his mouth twitch upwards in what she assumed was a turian smirk.

"Coast is clear, Commander," announced Alenko as she and Garrus approached the remainder of the squad. Fist's krogan lay motionless a few feet away, several other bodies sprawled on the floor around him.

Wrex grunted, shaking the krogan corpse roughly with a clawed foot. "Ha, nice try," he sneered before leveling his shotgun just inches from the krogan's chest. There was a sickening thud as the round impacted and left a gaping hole in its wake. The krogan exhaled a rattling gasp, thick, orange liquid oozing from his chest and pooling on the floor beneath him.

Wrex holstered his shotgun. "Now it's clear."

"Oh come on, was that really necessary?" Alenko wrinkled his nose, taking a step backward to avoid the expanding orange puddle.

"My dad once told me that the only way a krogan was really dead was if his head was no longer on his body or if you could see through the bullet holes to the other side," Williams said with a shrug.

"What she said," Wrex agreed, tossing his head in Williams' direction. Then, turning to Shepard, "Fist is this way. He'll be holed up in the back room behind the bar."

Shepard nodded and her team fell in silently behind his lumbering form.

Fist stared hard at the console monitor in front of him. His fingers drummed an impatient cadence against the polished wood beneath his palms, mentally urging the progress bar to fill faster. The number ticked up again – 87% complete.

"C'mon, c'mon, C'MON!" he growled, frustrated knuckles impacting the desk. He turned away from the screen and strode across the expansive space of his office. His fingers threaded through his hair, coming to rest interlocked at the back of this head as he continued to pace. A muffled crescendo of shouts and gunfire oozed through the walls, hinting at the current bedlam taking place in Chora's main bar. It was an unwelcome soundtrack for his restless mind.

All this over a damn quarian! In hindsight, perhaps the staggering amount of credits Saren Arterius had offered him for the girl should have been a red flag that she came with some serious baggage. It was nearly double what his previous employer, the Shadow Broker, would have paid. With that kind of money on the line, though, Fist could really care less why the quarian was so valuable. That, coupled with Saren's promise of future enterprises equally lucrative, made the decision to realign his business allegiances a no-brainer.

He had expected the Shadow Broker would be angry at the double-cross; that It might retaliate, even. But an assassination contract? That certainly seemed a bit dramatic. Fist had simply sold his services to the highest bidder. Wasn't that exactly what the Shadow Broker itself did every single day?

As soon as he had gotten a wiff of the bounty on his head, First had immediately dedicated a sizeable chunk of Saren's generosity toward upgrading Chora's defensive capabilities. Turrets, trip alarms, manpower, weapons, equipment – he added it all to his already formidable arsenal with every intention of digging in his heels and waiting for this whole overreaction to blow over.

But that had been then – before the full magnitude of the swell left in the quarian's wake was truly realized. Now, not only did he have a bloodthirsty krogan hot on his trail to collect on his bounty, but he had two more headaches in the form of a rogue C-Sec officer poking into his affairs and a handful of bleeding-heart Alliance crusaders sniffing into his whereabouts and killing his men in the process. The multi-front assault had forced him to re-evaluate his objectives. Relying on Chora's defenses, despite all the augmentations, no longer seemed like the wisest course of action.

So he had decided to skip town. He needed a place where he could lay low, unseen, unnoticed, while he surreptitiously constructed a new enterprise. Omega, the Terminus System's central haven for extralegal entrepreneurs like himself, would be his new promised land. No more webs of regulatory restrictions labeling his goods 'illicit.' No more petulant C-Sec officers intimidating his clientele. It had taken but a couple quick audio messages to call in a few favors from his smuggling contacts before he had secured a primed transport off the Citadel, and a new place to lay his head already established. The only thing left now was to compile his ledgers, transfer the data onto a disc, and wipe the console.

His eyes flicked over to the monitor. 93% complete now. And another, significantly less welcome, change. Gone were the turbulent echoes of a firefight, replaced by the softer, muffled tones of several voices just outside his office door.

If his aspiring adversaries had already muscled their way past his security detail in the bar, all that stood between them and himself were a couple of warehouse workers he had contracted to pack up some of his storeroom goods for shipment. Fist had armed them with a couple pistols, more so as a bribe to get them to work quicker than an actual layer of protection. Did they even know where the safety was on those things? Likely not.

"Yeah, screw Fist. I never liked him anyway," floated a familiar deep voice from the other side, growing quieter as its owner receded.

Fist's heart sank as his last wisp of hope for an undetected escape disappeared on the heels of his former employees. Sudden anger and indignation welled in his chest. The Shadow Broker's overreaction, Saren's under-representation of the quarian's value, the incompetence of his hired guns and defenses – it had created a storm and now he was caught outside in the rain.

It was time for Plan B. He would have to fight his way out. "Why do I have to do everything myself?" he growled as he unholstered his pistol. _

Compared to the melee that had been Chora's Den, confronting Fist and his two defense turrets was merely an inconvenience. Shepard's team dispatched the machines in quick succession, leaving Fist with dwindling shields and no place to go.

"Wait! I surrender!" Defeated, outnumbered, and in pain, Fist's former frustration morphed into something unfamiliar and far more potent – fear. He remained frozen on the floor of his bullet-ridden office where he had landed after a particularly powerful biotic throw. His breath came in short, labored gasps, and he could muster only a plea for his life as his dignity and bravado melted away with the last of his shields. "Please, don't kill me!"

"This is Fist?" Williams scoffed, looking genuinely surprised by the sniveling man on the ground before them.

"If so, this is the smartest move he's made in a while," remarked Shepard. She approached Fist's prone figure, the muzzle of her rifle trained steadily on his chest. Her eyes flickered around the room. It was practically sterile, save for a couple pieces of hastily overturned furniture and a single glowing console situated on a desk. Fist had clearly been busy emptying the place out. If the quarian was ever in this office, any evidence of such had since been purged. She turned her attention back to Fist as her squadmates fanned out around him. "Tell me where the quarian is," she demanded.

Fist winced as he struggled to inch himself backward and create distance between himself and Shepard's crosshairs. It was a futile endeavor. He counted three pairs of polished boots and two pairs of clawed feet surrounding him. His decimated shields and what felt like probably a broken rib or two only further added to the formidable odds against him. His only hope for salvation now lay in verbal damage control. Swallowing his pride, he held up his open palms in a gesture of submission. "She's not here anymore, and I don't know where she is," he forced out.

"Bullshit."

"He's lying."

Both Williams and Alenko asserted their objections simultaneously and without hesitation. It was clear from the rolling of Garrus' eyes and the bemused grunt from Wrex that the entire party was in agreement.

"Explain. Now." Shepard's tone was even and calm. Only the subtle clenching of her jaw and slight narrowing of her eyes betrayed her thinning patience.

"I…" Fist hesitated, his tongue scrambling for purchase on the magic words that would see him through this alive. What he had said was technically true. The quarian had been there, yes. He recalled it vividly – the feeble way she had limped into his office sandwiched between two of his bouncers, her body sagging against the wall for support as she listed her demands. As if she was anything other than a wounded little bird in his hungry snake den. She was so naïve, so weak, so pathetic. How fortunate, he had thought at the time, for such a treasure to fall right into his lap. Saren had paid quickly, and it was laughably easy to convince the ingenuous girl that he had done exactly as she'd asked. She had left of her own accord after that, over an hour ago. Fist truly had no way of knowing where she might have gone in the meantime.

Now if only his pain-addled brain could find a way to wordsmith that to the gun barrel currently trained on his head. But his second attempt was just a parrot of the first. "I…"

"He's no use to us. Let me kill him." The deep Krogan baritone was punctuated by the unmistakable metallic rack of a shotgun coming from somewhere behind Fist's head.

The imminent threat seemed to loosen Fist's tongue immediately and the words tumbled forward unbidden. "Wait, wait! I don't know where she is…but I do know where she's going."

"We're listening," Shepard replied tersely.

Having exhausted both denial and technicality, Fist was left with one remaining and unavoidable option – the truth. Honesty had never had a place in his repertoire, and he grimaced in disgust at the notion. He exhaled a heavy, reluctant sigh. "The quarian came here wanting a meeting with the Shadow Broker. Said she would only meet with It directly," he began.

"Impossible," interrupted Garrus. "The Shadow Broker only works through its agents. No exceptions."

Fist nodded. "Sure, you and I know that. But she didn't know that…and I had an agreement to uphold." He paused, licking his lips nervously. They would not like this next part. "…So I set up a meeting for her, like she asked," he continued tentatively, clearing his suddenly parched throat. "Except that, when she gets there, it will be Saren's men waiting instead."

There was a split second of silence, and Fist swore the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

Finally, Shepard's voice, solid ice. "Give me the location."

Fist released the laden breath he had been holding. "The back alley by the markets, here in the Tayseri Ward. 1800 hours," he rushed out.

With a sharp flick of his wrist, Alenko's omni-tool materialized. "That's only fifteen minutes from now, Commander."

"The alley isn't too far from here." Garrus was already turning toward the door, urgency tipping his words. "We can make it if we hurry."

Shepard nodded in agreement. "Let's g…"

The beginnings of the command had scarcely left her lips when a flash of metallic crimson crossed her periphery. Her reaction was immediate and decisive, the heel of her palm jetting out and contacting the barrel of a shotgun simultaneous to the weapon's deep report. A beat of utter stillness passed as several pairs of widened eyes focused on the blackened spread pattern now speckling the manicured carpet approximately six inches from Fist's left ear.

Shepard recovered first. "What the hell was that?!" she shouted, whirling furiously on Wrex.

Wrex met her challenge with an indignant fury of his own, narrowing the gap between them until she was close enough to smell the rank remnants of his Citadel lake trout lunch between his barred teeth. "Fist is my mark," he snarled. "I don't leave jobs half done!"

"That wasn't the deal," Shepard countered. She pushed an accusatory finger into the center of his chest. "You said you'd help us get the quarian. Well, she's not here. You can get him later, but the quarian will be dead if we wait!"

The two were nearly nose to nose now, eyes locked in a mute battle of wills. The tension-laden air silenced all but the steady breathing of those in the room. Even Fist muzzled his whimpers.

It was Wrex who moved first, ever so slightly, as his slitted eyes slid from Shepard's gaze to Fist's slumped form. He worked his jaw as he calculated, weighing his options and tossing the potential consequences around in his mind. "Best hurry then," he growled finally, though the tightness in his posture clearly indicated that the conversation was anything but over.

Shepard exhaled a frustrated sigh as the krogan shouldered past her. "Follow him," she said, jerking her head toward his retreating form, and watching as her remaining companions fell in step in response.

"And you…" She directed her hard gaze at Fist, who was currently making a shaky attempt at standing upright. He began a tentative shuffle toward the console where the message "100% Complete" flashed across the screen, his right arm wrapped tight around his midsection.

"No. Leave it. I just kept an angry Krogan from killing you. It's a fair trade." Fist backed away gingerly as Shepard swiftly popped the OSD out from within the computer console and placed it in a pouch on her armor. "Now go. I had better never see you on this station again."

After the events of the past ten minutes, Fist found he could scarcely muster up the will to care about the OSD. The data contained in the ledgers was a bonafide museum of Citadel corruption and incrimination, but somebody else would pay the price for that, not him. He would only be a distant memory on this station by then. "You won't. I'm a ghost," he replied wearily.

But Shepard was already gone, jogging to catch up with the others. Fist could only hope that the quarian would be as much trouble for them as she was for him.