Vector
Kaidan lingered in the back of the crew section as long as he could after a quick shower, trying to collect himself. In truth, he didn't want to risk crossing Shepard alone in the middle of the ship. He wasn't sure he could look her in the face at the moment.
Wickham had set to the data from the batarian ship as soon as it had come in, and Shepard had ordered a debrief as soon as everyone had had a chance to change. Kaidan briefly considered abusing the ever-available migraine excuse, but quickly dismissed the idea. Lying to his commanding officer, whatever the circumstances, wasn't going to make him feel any better.
When he arrived in the comm room, he was glad to see Garrus already there, datapad in hand and talking to the commander in a low voice. Kaidan sank into his seat and studiously examined the floor. Within a minute, Nayar and Wickham also arrived. The chief's left forearm was encased in a new stabilizing cuff, and blue bruising showed over the edge up to her elbow.
"Let's start with what we know," Shepard started once they were seated, her tone all business. "Two batarian ships, scout class frigates, on the scene. At least a dozen batarians on the ground, but no formal insignias or uniforms."
"Pirates," Nayar stated.
Shepard nodded, her expression hard. "Clear evidence of slaving from the captured ship, though the only slaves on board appeared to have been owned by the captain and were not... being taken for sale."
Kaidan suppressed a shudder. The memories of the ship were still very fresh, and he could tell from the tautness of Shepard's voice that just talking about it in plain terms was difficult. Sympathy and a desire to do something to help clawed at him, jostling with the anger.
"So..." she continued, "the question is what they were doing throwing an asteroid at Terra Nova. The motivation for the attack seems to be some kind of terrorist action."
"I overheard the batarians talking in the second bunker, Commander," Garrus said. "They seemed to be at odds with Balak's mission. They were complaining that it wasn't profitable."
Shepard nodded. "That's more in line with what I'd expect from them. Balak's behavior was... unusually rabid. But they've been behind their iron curtain for twelve years now, who knows what kind of propaganda their government is feeding them."
"I bet Torfan features prominently," Wickham said with a smirk.
Nayar rolled his eyes. "How can they still be whining about a raid on a pirate base?"
"It wasn't just a raid, Nayar," the chief retorted hotly. "It was a massacre."
Nayar shrugged and lapsed back into sullen silence. The young marine seemed surly and withdrawn since the return from the batarian ship, but Kaidan could hardly fault him for it.
"The important question," Shepard cut in, "is if this is an isolated incident by one extremist or if it's the start of a new wave of attacks. Unfortunately, the geth attack has destabilized the Citadel to the point where we're more vulnerable than ever."
After a moment of silence, Chief Wickham spoke up. "It's the perfect opportunity, strategically. Decreased military presence, looser security…"
Kaidan felt a flush of irritation, tempted to thank her for pointing out the obvious. But he kept his mouth shut, keenly aware the turmoil in his head wasn't going to help anything. No one in the room was in a good mood, and the last thing this situation needed was pettiness.
"What company was funding the asteroid move?" Shepard asked.
Kaidan shook off his annoyance and tapped a few commands into his datapad- he'd looked up the information as soon as they'd gotten back on board. "It was a joint venture between Khore Mining and Tanaka Heavy Industries, with a sizable incentive from Terra Nova's government."
"Khore... why do I know that name?" Nayar asked.
"Their processed metals division is one of Hahne-Kedar's main suppliers," Kaidan said. "They made huge profits from the early stage of Terra Nova's platinum rush. But they weren't doing the move, they were just major investors. Tanaka was handling the logistics of the move."
Shepard shifted, looking pensive. "So, in order for the batarians to even find the asteroid, information had to have been leaked to them. It doesn't seem likely they happened to find one rock in the middle of an entire system by sheer happenstance."
Garrus cocked his head curiously. "How secure is an operation like that?"
There was a moment of silence. "I don't know," Kaidan said finally, "but my guess is, Tanaka was going to be more worried about rival companies snooping around than pirates. They wouldn't have any reason to think pirates would attack them; it's not a traditionally profitable target. You can't steal an asteroid."
"From a hacker's perspective, how secure does that make it?" Shepard asked.
"Not very, I don't think," Wickham ventured. "There's too many people involved, across multiple companies. There's an awful lot of opportunity for leaks in a situation like that... and we're not talking about torch specs or anything, all the batarians needed were the travel plans."
"That reduces the probability of an inside job," Shepard said. "All right. What did we get from the Enyo'Kan?"
"Their data is a mess," Wickham said with a grimace. "There aren't any crew logs to speak of, just a lot of disparate files."
"I can't imagine pirates are big on accountability and data trails," Nayar said.
"Any black box logs?" Kaidan asked. Most species included such a device on their vessels in one form or another; a secure, purpose-built server that saved all engineering data for a given time.
"Yes sir," the chief replied. "I dumped that first, but I don't know how much use it's going to be. Someone blanked the tracks that recorded travel vectors. We've only got burn times and engine output."
Kaidan nodded, feeling disappointment. "Let's see it."
Wickham tapped a few inputs into her datapad, and an array of numbers appeared on the holo-display. "I derived estimated distances for each engine burn, but like I said, no direction data."
"I guess a trail of breadcrumbs was too much to hope for," Nayar muttered.
"What about anything that looks financial?" Garrus asked.
"Not a whole lot, at least nothing obvious," Wickham replied. "But... I've never dealt with anything like this before. There could be extensive obfuscation at work."
Kaidan knew the pirate economy relied on a dizzying blend of currencies and barter for goods and raw materials, the kind of cutthroat supply-and-demand economy that favored shrewd opportunists like the batarians. There was no formal system that could easily be traced. He wondered absently if they had contingency protocols that wiped sensitive information off of their network in case of capture... He knew for a fact the Normandy did, but that was expected of a top-secret military vessel.
"This is what seems suspicious to me so far." Wickham uploaded more data to the holo-display.
Several file names flashed by.
"Wait, stop," Garrus said suddenly. "What's that one?"
Wickham highlighted the file name the turian had pointed out, a string of numbers with a long alpha-numeric prefix. Once opened, the file displayed more numbers which Kaidan immediately recognized as coordinates and travel vectors.
"Yes, that's it, that's like what I found. It's a Citadel comm tag," Garrus announced, a note of triumph in his voice. "The file name is the comm batch number, and the prefix denotes the company that owned the sending data port. Are there any more with that prefix?"
Wickham entered a quick search string and let the computer scan the database. A few seconds later, five results came up.
Garrus let out a small hiss. "Two of those match my evidence exactly. The contents are obviously coded, but they refer to the Asgard system and various money transfers."
"Hmm... they're just numbers, it isn't much," Wickham said.
"What it is, is probable cause," Garrus pronounced. "One match might have been a coincidence, but two is pushing it. With this, I can get warrants for the full communication logs that my data comes from."
"That's going to cause a diplomatic stink," Kaidan mused.
Garrus shrugged. "Probably. But companies operating on the Citadel are beholden to C-Sec where internal security is a factor- it's in the contracts they sign to operate on the station."
"But we're no closer to where the pirates came from..."
Kaidan skimmed over the drive data again, brows furrowed, as the others continued to talk. He felt like he sometimes did when faced with a batch of ornery code- there was something there, just out of reach. Programming was all about patterns, logic that as it got more complex, gave off the illusion of randomness. Coming at it from the other direction meant penetrating the illusion and finding the pattern. He absently drummed his fingers on his leg as he tried to force the picture to come into focus.
"Lieutenant," Shepard said, almost making him jump. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm... not sure yet," he answered distractedly, reflexively avoiding looking at her. The single, impersonal word of his rank sounded like an accusation, and the acidic tension in his stomach made it hard to think.
He stood up and crossed to the holo-display, trying to force everything else out of his head. Touching a few controls, he re-oriented the data display into columns and hid everything but the distance extrapolation Wickham had derived from engine output and burn time. He realized in the noise of numbers, he kept seeing the same batches of two repeat themselves. Each pair wasn't exactly the same, but close enough it didn't feel like coincidence.
One of Joker's random comments occurred to him then, something about mass relays. The huge and inscrutable machines 'listened' on certain sub-space bands- all a ship had to do to activate one was broadcast a signal on the right band while within a minimum distance of the relay, at which point the mass relay would spin up and hurl the ship across space. But something in the mass relay's incomprehensibly powerful field caused a brief yaw in a ship's element zero core output. Joker had some convoluted theory about what caused it, but it wasn't the cause that mattered in this case.
"Wickham, do you have core output data?" Kaidan asked.
"Yes sir. I didn't think it was relevant, but it's there." The chief turned and tapped a few inputs into the display.
Her assumption made sense, given that core output didn't translate into distance or vectors the way engine output did. But that wasn't what he was looking for. Kaidan correlated the two sets of data, isolating the suspicious pairs.
"What is it?" Wickham asked curiously, peering over his shoulder.
"Look, these blips in core output are mass relay jumps," Kaidan said. "If you look at the engine output, they perfectly bracket these two burns of nearly identical distance."
"That's weird..." Wickham said. "Jump in, go somewhere, turn around and go back, jump out."
Kaidan nodded. "Right. It's a short distance with a layover time of under two hours, no charge dumps, no side trips. And it keeps cropping up, the same pattern with nearly the same distance. Eleven times in the last six months, which is as long as this data goes back. And the last time was a week ago."
"I tried extrapolating where they'd come from by backtracking distances, but the further we get away from Terra Nova the more possible paths there are, and it goes exponential really fast." Wickham squinted at the display.
"Show me," Kaidan said. He imagined he could feel Shepard's gaze boring into his back.
Wickham chewed her lip as she rapidly called up files from the Normandy's server. The drive data disappeared and was replaced with a map that looked like a simplified version of the panoramic display of the CIC. Green blips indicating mass relays popped up, followed by a nest of lines of various colors linking them.
"The lines fade to red as they approach the most unlikely path," Wickham explained. "And once they get into the Terminus Systems, well..."
Kaidan examined the pathways curiously. "Okay, eliminate everything that isn't this data pair." He highlighted the most recent pair.
The mass of lines diminished dramatically, but the short hops were dispersed over the map. The calculations had pegged the most likely areas of travel as trending toward the Attican Traverse, a bias that would be easy to assume given the nature of the ship and its occupants. But an entirely different possibility nagged at Kaidan.
"What about this?" He zoomed the display in, pulling up the Serpent Nebula and the Citadel. The lines were dark red, but they showed what he suspected- a jump into Citadel Space via one of the several relays that peppered the area, a burn toward the station, then back out again.
Wickham looked doubtful. "Even if a pirate vessel would go anywhere near the Citadel, why would they fly halfway there and then turn around and go home again?"
"They would if they had a rendezvous," Shepard said from behind him, her voice flat.
"It would explain why they wouldn't linger in-system, too," Garrus put in.
"Wouldn't they get blown away by sentry sats at the Citadel-side relay the minute they didn't have the right authentications?" Nayar asked.
"Not if someone sold them good codes," Garrus said in a low voice. "Anyway, thanks to the geth, the sentry network is in shambles right now."
"Pirate trade on the Citadel itself," Shepard murmured. "If this pans out, Executor Pallin is going to have kittens."
"Isn't this kind of a long shot?" Wickham asked. "It's all circumstantial evidence. Those numbers are just as likely to have come from somewhere else entirely."
"That's true," Garrus said, tapping his taloned fingers against the side of his chair. "They'd need a strong motivation to take such an enormous risk."
Kaidan turned and went back to his seat. "What would they want there? The Citadel doesn't produce anything they can't get somewhere else."
"Except... information," Garrus mused. "The Citadel produces and consolidates economic, governmental and military intel from all corners of Citadel space."
"Information like, say, a certain asteroid's location and crew compliment," Nayar suggested sourly.
"Among other things," Kaidan said. "Imagine how much information like that is worth, even to the batarian government. It wouldn't surprise me if they were secretly funding Balak... or at least 'encouraging' him."
"All they'd need is a willing fanatic to lead the charge," Wickham said with a smirk. "They maul us, pirates get blamed. Nice and neat."
Shepard's arms were folded, her brow furrowed in thought. All of their information was all still conjecture, but Garrus' original intel had also been circumstantial as well. It was up to her to decide what was the best guess.
After a moment, Shepard turned and tapped the internal comms. "Joker, set course for the Citadel, all possible speed."
"Aye aye," the pilot answered.
"Garrus, as soon as we're in comms range, get those warrants," she continued, turning back to them.
"Yes, Commander." Garrus nodded, standing up. "I believe I can also get assistance from C-Sec."
Kaidan absently swiped his sweating palms over his pants. The end of the briefing meant an opportunity to talk to Shepard, but he had no idea what he even wanted to say. He was exhausted, and everything was still all sharp edges in his head. Just remembering what had come out of his mouth down on the asteroid sent a sharp stab of guilt knifing through him. But the side of him that was an Alliance officer demanded accountability, justification for the lives of the engineers. She'd seemed to almost enjoy killing the batarians, and he couldn't help but feel a line had been crossed.
"Commander, if we're done, could I speak with you?" Nayar asked suddenly.
Kaidan looked up, catching the faint tightening that flickered across Shepard's face. He wondered what it meant. She looked as exhausted as he felt.
"Yes, Corporal," she said evenly, then addressed the rest of the team. "Dismissed."
Kaidan felt a rush of something like relief as he walked out of the comm room. He overheard Garrus ask the chief if they could go over the files from the batarian ship some more, but found himself quickly retreating downstairs into the depths of the empty crew section.
The relief swiftly curdled into disappointment. There would be no resolution tonight, only the misery of a long night curled up in his pod, alone with his turmoil.