"I don't like the scent of this," Wrex warned. He leaned up against a conveniently placed steam pipe, scratching the last of his facial wounds to heal. The pipe felt nice and warm through his armor, compared to the air-conditioned chill of the hallway.
"Stop complaining," the Captain hissed. Sevvalt was working away at the door blocking their path, omnitool beeping as code after code failed him. "How much longer is this going to take, Specialist?"
"Done. I'm done." He sighed and entered the bruteforce command on his 'tool. "They'll be getting an alarm over this one somewhere."
"Don't care," the Captain retorted. "We haven't seen anyone else alive. Maybe the Blue Suns finally ran out of morons.'
The door groaned open and the salarian cursed and stumbled backwards, lifting his feet to avoid a rivulet of multicoloured fluid that trickled into the door slide. It stretched down the hallway and Wrex didn't need a second glance to tell him what it was. The entire hallway reeked now as stale air tainted with death flooded around them.
"Oh spirits," the turian muttered, covering his mouth with a hand.
They advanced cautiously into the new section, weapons at the ready. A dozen feet down the hall, the blood trickle ended in a large puddle, with smeared drag marks leading further on. Following the drag marks another hundred feet further down brought them to a door set into one side of the hall marked "RECEIVING- HANGAR WEST- WASHROOMS". The mercenaries halted, glancing uncertainly between the blood streaks leading through the door and the hallway that continued on further to the barracks.
Wrex jabbed his shotgun at the door. "I'd wager that whatever's making that stench is down there.'
"I don't get paid to mop floors," Sevvalt sneered.
"You're not very curious, are you? I wonder how many of your past jobs you screwed up by rushing through them."
"Enough!" Chara swept her withering glare over both krogan and salarian. "Sevvalt, Korac, go see what's down that hallway. I don't like how empty this place has become all of a sudden." The salarian grumbled as he hefted his gun and hit the opening pad. Beyond the doorway, only dim emergency lights were on, and they could hear the crackle of live wires off in the dark. Wrex smirked and stared at the two forms slowly vanishing in the dim light.
"Kind of mouthy for such a little guy, eh?"
"You don't know the half of it," Chara groused. "I'd retire him in a heartbeat just for the amount of aggravation he causes me, but he's ex-STG Tech Division. I couldn't find a replacement with his skills in decryption and mechanics in all of the galaxy. Goddess knows I've tried."
Interesting choice of words there, the krogan mused. Retire. Probably not the sort of retirement with a pension either.
Static buzzed in their ears. "Commander, there's, ah- oh spirits, its everywhere- there's something you should see for yourself. Oh I'm going to be si-" Korac's voice was chopped and double-flanged over the poor comms channel.
'Something' turned out to be a charnel house that caused even Wrex's eyes to widen. The turian and salarian stood in the centre of the hallway, legs splayed to avoid standing on one of the many, many bodies scattered around. Neither merc was paying too much attention to the bodies on the ground, however; their eyes were fixed on the two hanging by their feet from the ceiling pipes.
The level of brutality gave the krogan pause for thought. One of the bodies, a turian male just entering middle age, was headless. Neckless, too. Beteween the shoulders of his armour was nothing but a ragged, gaping hole. Korac spun the body around with the tip of his rifle and Wrex could see a huge chunk gouged out of the turian's torso right through his chestplate. It was completely cauterized, as though someone had pressed a burner charge against the chestplate and set it off. He was wearing the armour of a Suns Commander, and the amount of anger it would take to go through the hassle of wrenching a turian's head off suggested a krogan merc band, but that wouldn't explain the other body. Krogan, young adult, not headless but with a skull laid bare to the bone and ruined by a huge hole bored through it. Krogan mercs wouldn't care to hang up one of their own, and why did it look like something had meticulously de-fleshed the head? Some of the other corpses in the room had been moved, but none had received this level of debasement. The senior krogan walked slowly around the scene, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
"In the goddess' name," breathed Chara, invoking a lesser-used and very serious asari curse. "What the sweet elcor-fuck went on in this hallway?" She stooped to roll a human's head to the side, grimacing at the deep purple discolouration around his shattered neck and the horrified look frozen in his dull eyes.
"Looks like there isn't a single hole in this krogan's body except the one in his head. What the hell kind of gun blows this kind of a neat hole through your head?" Sevalt thought for a second and smirked. "And, where can I get my hands on one?"
"No merc group colours on him," the Captain observed. "Probably the bodyguard. Maybe he shot some of these poor bastards, maybe not, but he definitely did not shoot all of them. Someone else was here, which means… goddess-damnit, what if they already have their hands on the data? What if the Eclipse-"
"They don't have the data, " Wrex stated firmly, breaking his silence. Sevvalt and Chara turned to stare at him, brows raised. "This has nothing to do with our assignment."
"Well, that's just a little coincidental. Do you have any idea how much this program is worth, krogan? Can your little mind comprehend how many mercs the Eclipse could send and still be in the black from recovering this?"
"Do you have any idea how long it takes to bruteforce your way into a Level Six-hardened facility?" Wrex raised his voice. "No, of course not. If you did, you'd be planning this mission instead of slogging along in it. How did these Eclipse twerps get in during the solar day cycle? How did they hide their insertion, considering how many it would take to do this kind of damage? Did they find some sort of magical invisibility field to hide their ships as they approached the planet? And once they'd finished using the kind of bladed weapon that would cause these wounds, because these sure as shootin' ain't gunshots, why"- the krogan waved towards the bodies strung up- "would they do this? Just felt like a little turian head would be the perfect souvenir, did they? This is personal. Someone had a serious problem with him in particular."
Korac interrupted before the stunned salarian could invent a retort. "I've found him! I've found Nain!" He shifted the mangled corpse of a batarian off the volus. "Ahh spirits, he's dead. Someone got him a few times in the chest. He doesn't have the case, either."
Wrex ambled over to look at the scene. "Step backward a bit, turian." He looked over the space where the turian had been standing, a C-shaped void where no blood spatter lay. It wasn't big enough to hide a turian, probably not a batarian, but perhaps an asari… or human female. A single bootprint stood out in the pool of blood leaking from the dead volus. Beyond it, another boot print of blood on bare floor peeked out from between a dead turian's legs. The krogan's heightened vision could pick out prints, most partially obscured by bodies, heading off towards the same door they had come through. He pointed wordlessly at the prints, and the turian looked at him and nodded sagely.
"I bet there's at least one person left who might be able to locate it for us."
Jez flinched. The voices were definitely getting louder in the hallway, and she could hear something being said about 'footprints'. An opaque window in the supply closet door would stop her from being seen by passerby, but if they managed to unlock it…. Frantically, she looked around for a better hiding place than behind the empty shelf. Maybe the beings outside were just looking for the case again. If she laid it out for them, maybe they wouldn't bother checking over the room too carefully. She slid it across the floor as though it was on fire and grabbed an empty plastene crate nearby. Folding herself up into a ball, she lowered the crate over her prone form just as the voices reached the other side of the door.
There were several moments of silence as hacking was attempted, then an exasperated shout and a shotgun blast resonated through the room. Jez clamped both hands over her mouth to keep from squealing at the noise. The door beeped and shuddered halfway open, and four separate footsteps entered the room. Two were medium-weight, one was thunderous, and the other lightly pitter-pattered around. Pitter-Patter went to the crate and picked it up, making a relieved expression.
"It's here, thank the Goddess." Medium Two was a woman, judging by the silky voice. "Check it out and make sure we aren't missing anything.
"It's all here, Captain," Pitter Patter responded. He had the nasally voice of those thin aliens- salarians, Jez recalled.
"Fantastic. Now we can get off this rock," Heavy Dude rumbled. "Just have to take care of one other little item of business."
Jez had barely let out the tiniest of sighs when the crate was rudely kicked off of her. She yelped as two meaty hands fastened around her neck and behind and turned her world into a blur. When her vision adjusted, the beady red eyes of a very-large, very serious-looking krogan were right in her face. "Bad hiding spot, human. Who are you?"
"At-tut-tuhh, ah, tech sarge!" Jez stammered. "Tech sergeant! Please just take it and go! Just leave me alone."
"I agree. Let's take off… maybe we should ice the human first, though." The salarian closed up the crate and hefted an odd looking gun. "No loose ends." Jez saw a flash of blue skin out of the corner of her vision. She twisted in the krogan's grasp to see an asari woman in black and green armour (she wondered if 'asari woman' was redundant) giving her a dirty look.
"No," the asari said dryly. "Someone is fucking with us and I want to know who. Human, why are you covered in other people's blood?"
Blinking, Jez looked from the asari, over to the krogan's big hands around her collarbones, up to his face. They did look different than what she'd seen. "I uh, I was there. When they all died. I was on the floor trying not to."
"What happened?"
Jez inhaled deeply. "We were trying to shake down Nain for the program. There was some sort of security breach. He was handing over the case when all of a sudden the krogan's head just… exploded, all over my face, and then the commander exploded, and then I hit the ground and I didn't see much after that."
The krogan released his grip on her and she wobbled under the sudden onslaught of gravity. "Then tell us what you heard and felt," he rumbled.
"Shooting. Lots of shooting. Then screaming. Then, everything got quiet and uh, something… something talked to me. And it came over and took my gun and I guess it left after that.'
"What did he look like?" A turian she hadn't even noticed leaned out from behind the krogan to scrutinize her.
"His hand was really big and beige and scaly. And he was uh… invisible the rest of the time."
All four mercs looked at her with varying degrees of incredulity. "She's cracked. Let's just drop her here and be done with it. " The salarian pointed his gun at her forehead, but the asari knocked it aside.
"No. She knows about the program. We take her with us and ask the owner what he wants done. Find something to wrap her hands with."
Jez groaned.