C H A P T E R 2
Outside the large plazas and wide, yet crammed, connection sections Omega was an anthill, a seemingly infinite labyrinth of tunnels of varying sizes and forms, of stairwells carved directly out of the asteroid's rock, of patchwork levels showing the marks of dozens of different constructors over the ages. Bulkheads shut off each section, even though most of them stood open. Some of them were tall enough for him to ride through on the back of an Elcor while a few others seemed to be no more than crawlspaces. Again others were marked with the remnants of some script he had never even seen. They looked ancient.
Omega was rumoured to have been first established by the extinct Protheans, the race that had built the Citadel and the mass relays and who had in some form of cataclysm vanished fifty thousand years ago. There were persistent rumours within the military community and from more dubious sources that the Protheans' end somehow was linked to the Geth attack on the Citadel, but evidence was sparse and inconclusive, and the official version of it all carried more weight with the newsies anyway.
If the atmosphere on the plazas and in between the beehive-like buildings which shot up from the ground and 'hung' from the ceiling in Omega's centre was that of adventure and of fully alien impressions, here in the small tunnels, many of which were sparsely lit by flickering lights, was one of danger. One never knew what could be around the next corner or down the nearest stairwell, and it seemed as if the shadows in the corners of his eyes were playing tricks on him, showing him movement were there was none. More often that not they had come across people from almost all species sleeping in the corridors, the smell of puke or excretions clinging strongly to them. Gangs were common place, as were the Vorcha.
Amos had never seen a Vorcha before, and he was definitely certain it had not been worth the experience. They looked a bit like goblins from those fantasy novels that were still so popular with the alliance, and they were just about as clever as that stereotype would have suggested. But they compensated their stupidity with an extra of aggression. Luckily for everybody, even Vorcha were intelligent enough not to bother people who packed as much heat as Amos and Magnus did. Kenyon now had his second pistol plucked between his belt and his stomach for everybody to see, and the giant walking with him wore a pistol and a milspec shotgun both in leg holsters.
"I feel like I'm being watched," Kenyon muttered as they turned around a corner in a rust-covered metal tube that looked like it had been installed by a plumber around the same time the Greek burned Troy to the ground.
"Mate, somebody's always watching you on Omega," Johanson snickered but took a quick glance over his shoulder himself. "There are just too many people on that blasted rock, that's the problem. It either drives you paranoid or you adapt. That," he shrugged, "or you leave soon enough. Either way, being cautious is never wrong in this place."
Johanson slid down a steep, narrow metal frame stair into a corridor doused in the twilight of two flickering light-emitting diodes. Kenyon followed him down there with a last glance over his own shoulder. Magnus Johanson was almost ten years younger than himself. Of remote Scandinavian ancestry, the jovial giant had been rather forthcoming about himself over two of those gut-burning drinks they served at the Afterlife. The man was a freelancer, and apparently had been some kind of engineering prodigy. That was until he had gotten himself into a bit of a gambling and loan-shark situation during his time at the academy. Dishonourably discharged from the Navy and burdened with a bucketload of debts he had set out for the Terminus systems and had worked here ever since. The way Magnus Johanson had talked about his life's story had sounded quite amusing, but Kenyon knew the signs of old pain in someone's eyes.
"I wish the quarters were not so far off my ship's docking bay," he mumbled. "I hate not being able to check on it more often."
"You never mentioned you were the one with the ship for, well, the 'job'," Kenyon remarked curiously with a raised eyebrow.
"Because I'm not," he responded without turning to face him. "I own a ship, not the ship," he explained. "But it's probably for the best to let the boss explain it all. So, here we are."
They stopped in front of a grey bulkhead door at the end of a rocky corridor. Johanson punched in a code, and the two parts of the door slid aside to gave way to a large room filled with furniture, electronics and crates of supplies.
"Time to introduce you to the boss and the rest of the motley crew, I guess."
Besides him and Magnus, there were five more people in the room.
An older couple which he soon found out to be married, Franklyn and Melissa Antweiler, owned the Mercury Star, a freighter. Frank had the looks and habits of the favourite uncle of the family to him, and Melissa had a motherly streak in her round face. Both seemed out of place at first glance, but the way they moved and the way they clothed and took everything in made it clear once more to Amos that looks could be deceiving.
The second man to shake his hand had a darker complexion than himself and wore a well-trimmed beard. He introduced himself as the navigator and pilot of a ship called Chimaera and went by the name of Nidal Amin.
Kenyon stopped when the third man, a hooded, tall and broad-shouldered figure rose from the set of crates he had been working with. From a greyish-brown face four dark eyes looked at him with rows of sharp, black teeth flashed a short, mirthless smile. Magnus introduced the Batarian as Marak, a dissident and their local 'key' to all matters regarding the Hegemony. Despite that, Marak either held the common disdain most of his species seemed to hold against humanity or simply did not care about social interactions too much as he settled down on the opposite end of the room again, working with a set of electronics he unpacked from one of the crates while Kenyon had the distinct feeling that at least one pair of his eyes was very much watching the rest of the room.
The last person, an attractive dark-haired woman approximately of his age and clad in paramilitary spacer garb, introduced herself.
"I am Captain Janina Craster," she stated in a rather pleasant and deep, yet feminine voice. "Welcome aboard, Lieutenant-Commander Kenyon."
Amos snapped to attention and saluted, waiting until the woman repeated the customary military gesture.
Captain Janina Craster. The name was no unknown to scuttlebutt, the armed forces' rumour mill. Ambitious, capable and arrogant where the three adjectives that described the woman. Stationed with 5th Fleet, she had been in command of a cruiser in the Battle of the Citadel when the Geth had attacked. She had been awarded quite some medals, first by the Alliance, later by the Council, but so had many of the surviving officers of that fight. Coming from a rich family, Craster had enjoyed a life of fame, but unfortunately for her, that fame had gotten to her head, enough so that she had taken her mistress, an Asari, with her on a tour of duty. Her superiors weren't too happy about that, and they were understandably outright pissed when Naval Security found out that her 'mistress' was, in fact, a member of the Asari secret service: a spy with almost unlimited access on an Alliance cruiser. A remarkable shitstorm would have ensued would it not have been for the patronage Craster had been under. Her family posed a dynasty of influential politicians. She had been taken out of active service quietly, her files blackmarked, with Levenworth apparently waiting. And now, a year later, she was here. That told Kenyon a lot more about the whole Corsair project than he had wanted to know.
"Well, now that we've all found the way here, let's get things started, shall we?" she began in a fake, lighthearted voice and started to operate a console embedded into the round table. The lights dimmed and a holographic plot materialized over the tabletop.
"An Alliance stealth recon drone shot these four weeks ago. It's a sublight system, so we did not get the full data until the SSV Tuscany picked it up a week later and brought it back home a week later."
The images in the holographic projector precise recon shots overlay with computer-generated, high resolution representations of ladar readings, accompanied with navigational 'stamps' and a progressing date ticking in the upper right corner of the plot.
"These were made in Methollo, on the edge of the Omega nebula," Craster explained while pushing the fast forward button on the presentation. "The system is in no way remarkable except for the fact that it's completely uninhabited. No refueling station, no mining activities, not even any pirate retreat we know of," she frowned. "Only two dust balls and one methane-helium giant three times the size of Jupiter. For all intents and purposes, it's off everybody's ladar."
"Except ours."
"Except ours," Craster nodded. "Though that also was through sheer luck. Here's what the drone recorded, ladies and gentlemen."
Against the backdrop of a large blue B0 class star the silhouette of a starship hung suspended in space. The point of view slowly changed as the drone adjusted its course until a dull grey hull was clearly visible. It was an ugly vessel, more than three hundred and fifty metres long and spotted with short antennas and sensor domes that made it look like a face with stubble and warts. The hull itself was not quite round, too flat to really constitute a tube, with engine blocks protruding in a circular arrangement from its aft section. Kenyon discerned the inverted bulge so prototypical for large mass drivers from the wireframe model the drone overlay on the optical scan results. Sunken deep into the hull on the ship's starboard bow it was paired with quadruple missile tubes on the port side. The resolution was less than optimal against the blue giant's background radiation as the stealth drone could not have risked active scans, but Kenyon would have known that kind of ship in his sleep. Every academy cadet did.
"That's a Batarian light cruiser!" he burst out, and saw others around the holographic projector nod.
"Quite correct, Mr. Kenyon. I see the downtime has not made you too rusty after all," Craster flashed her teeth, but the smile did not reach his eyes. "It's a Pride-class light cruiser, and if the markings and registry have not been tampered with this one is the Mokasha. But this here's where it gets really interesting," he pointed to the plot.
Another ship approached the warship from outside the system. It was a smaller craft, one often seen out in the Traverse or the Terminus systems, with short delta wings and powerful engine blocks. This one had a light khaki paintjob over which the name of the ship was written in red block letters. It manoeuvred under the light cruiser, dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and composites, before being grappled by magnetic docking clamps. Only know did Kenyon realize that two more ships like that already were docked with the Mokasha.
"The ship you just saw dock is a Wayfarer class, a versatile small freighter built in the Vol Protectorate. It can be easily armed, is fast and fuel-efficient. And this one matches the description we have from witnesses of one of the attacks," Craster triumphantly drummed her fingers on the table.
"But if the Alliance knows it's the Batarians what are we doing here?" Karina Buckley interrupted him. At Craster's stare she bit her tongue and added a belated 'Ma'am' to the question.
"That's because officially," she air-quoted the word, "the Batarians are washing their hands off the affair." She took a deep breath. "The Hegemony has stated that they lost the Mokasha some eight years ago when it vanished from a fleet reserve yard during a solar storm when communications and sensors system-wide were down." She rolled his eyes, showing how much he believed that particular version of the story. "Anyway, the little we know does confirm the Hegemony did strike the ship from its list of combat units, but did not confirm that what you can see here actually is the Mokasha. Aside from that, the Batarian government is maintaining their usual uncooperative attitude."
"They have nothing to gain by working together," Marak, the Batarian explosives' expert spoke for the first time. "If they publicly admit they lost the ship, they loose prestige. If it turns out somebody in the Hegemony's involved while they cooperate with you, its a scandal," he shook his head, briefly closing all his four eyes. "The last thing anybody in the Hegemony's government will do is allow the state to look weak, or appear as a second rate player. If they do their best to withhold information from you, they can blame any trouble on you as outsiders meddling in Batarian affairs. And no matter what any dissident group may bring to the light of the day, in the end the state's propaganda will prevail," he sounded genuinely sad about that last part.
Craster gave him an irritated stare.
"Be that as it may," she continued after a pause, "we have a lead. We will start our search in Methollo, then head into the adjacent systems. Let's pack up our gear. I expect everybody to be onboard their vessels in four hours station time!"
The projector image faded and the lights on the ceiling flickered back to life, with everybody slowly gathering their thoughts, getting into action until Franklyn 'Frank' Antweiler spoke up.
"Wait a minute, everybody, wait a minute. This seems like a big waste of time and effort to me, Captain," the stout privateer objected. "Now, I've never served with the Alliance, but you just said yourself that Methollo is pretty much dead, and the pictures we just saw? They're from a month ago! What lead do you expect to find there? Anyone who's been there is most likely long gone by now."
"Well, Mr. Antweiler, do you have a better option?" Craster asked in a polite voice that barely hid her anger about being questioned in his decision making. Janina Craster was even more the officer than Kenyon still was, and she truly had the chain of command bred into his genes. In the military, you did not openly question the orders of a superior officer. Problem was, they were no longer in the military - at least not formally - and as most here seemed to be volunteers there was just so much discipline one could expect.
"As a matter of fact, I do. I say we go to the one person who has the biggest chance to be in the know about what happens in this corner of space. I say we go to Aria!"
Heading all the way back to the Afterlife so soon after they had left it was probably the only thing that pissed Amos off about the whole idea. Again, he and Magnus went on their little odyssey through the tunnels, levels and stairs of Omega, silently suffering their fate. Frank Antweiler was not quite so modest. Huffing and puffing and muttering curses under his breath the sturdy North American tried to keep up with Amos and Johanson, squeezing himself between too narrow handrails of stairs or running on shorter legs to not loose the two younger man who covered the distance in a brisk walk.
"I've been travelling through the Terminus Systems for the past thirteen years," he told them between taking deep breaths. "Been doing business on Omega and jobs for the Alliance for most of that time. Courier work, most of the time. The Mercury Star's not a combat ship," he frowned. "Well, not really, but she's a tough girl, and easy to handle. Got just two more crewmembers besides me and Mellie."
"Did you ever have trouble on Omega?" Amos asked over his shoulder, and Frank snorted.
"Son, there's always some kind of trouble waiting for you on Omega. The only way to avoid it is to know the right people and the wrong places. Search the former, avoid the latter - and at any time, carry a gun!" he patted a polished wooden grip that protruded out from beneath his jacket on the left side of his belly.
"Hell, what should happen to three mad hombres like us?" Magnus grinned boyishly and slapped Amos on his shoulder. It looked a bit as if a grown man was patting a child on the back.
Frank rolled his eyes and quickened his pace to shove himself between the two younger men.
"You listen to me, Kenyon. That big Swedish lout here," he nodded towards Johanson, "is a class one troublemaker. There's a reason the Alliance only calls him in when most other people deny a job."
"Now I'm deeply offended," the giant responded with a mock grimace. "And I thought it was because the Dragonfly was one of the fastest and most powerful ships for her size in the whole sector!" he chuckled. "Old Frank here's still pissed off because of that little affair back in the day on Korlus."
"That 'little affair' almost got my wife and me killed, and all because you couldn't keep your nose out of other people's business!" the older man snapped.
Well, there certainly was a history between those two, Amos thought wryly. They passed through the outer doors of the Afterlife, and the air immediately filled with music and the low murmur of the voices of hundreds of people.
"And don't think Craster doesn't know what kind of a loose cannon you are," he continued. "She's probably the most stiff-necked arrogant bitch this side of the Traverse, but she's not stupid. Doubt she'll have much patience for your little antiques!"
"Then I suppose it's a good thing that most the time there'll be several thousand kilometres and a hole lot of nothing between us," Johanson growled impatiently, yet with an underlying defensive tone. "And maybe we'll find some nice Asari ass for Craster to tap. Wouldn't be the first time for her..."
"Cut it off, both of you!" Amos snapped. He had stopped in front of the inner door. It opened, and two obviously drunken Salarians faced them. Looking into three pairs of glaring, hostile eyes, the two aliens did their best to scram. "Craster's the commander of this mission. Show some respect!" He took a deep breath. "I'll handle this. Just be there to cover me, will ya?"
Both men gave each other a last, adverse look, then nodded almost simultaneously.
Amos Kenyon straightened himself and started for the private lounge Aria T'Loak resided in. Right after the first few steps a Batarian holding an assault rifle slid out of a dark corner and blocked the stairs.
"What do you want, human?" he growled dismissively.
"I have business to do with Aria," Kenyon stated levelly while his eyes mustered every little detail about the guard in front of him, a pal called Anto if you went by the tag on his suit.
"Nice try," he flashed his sharp teeth. "I know the partners of the boss, and the schedule, and you aren't on it. Get lost before you 'accidentally' get injured and-."
He stopped mid-sentence, one hand reaching for his ear, and his face hardened.
"Aria wants to see you," he snarled. "Go ahead. But one false move, human...!" he left the rest of the threat unspoken.
Climbing up the rest of the few stairs, Amos found himself in a darkened lounge area where a few people sat in cushioned chairs at low tables. Asari dancers moved fluidly in front of fluorescent screens in skin-tight clothes that left little to the imagination. Stairs led to an elevated platform that formed a single, large couch on which, flanked by bodyguards, the unofficial ruler of Omega was waiting for him.
"That's close enough, human," she said without looking up from the notepad in her hand when he had reached to top of the stairs. Two Batarians stood at the ready, eight eyes watching him without any emotion.
Not wanting to test his luck, Amos slowly pulled the side of his vest up and motioned one of them to take his gun.
"A wise decision. Quite a nice distraction you and your big friend pulled here earlier today," she stated in an amused voice. "There are so few good fights these days in the Afterlife. But then, most people who have been here longer know not to fuck with me," she added in a suddenly much harder, mirthless tone.
As far as threats went, Amos had heard better ones during his time as an active officer, especially considering that he still had his silenced pistol and two armed men waiting outside. Still, he was not here to oppose Aria, but to try to make a deal, and he supposed someone in her position needed to make clear where she stood with unknown newcomers that just happened to walk into her personal domain.
"My name is Amos Kenyon," he began, but she interrupted him with a voice like silk wrapped around steel.
"Oh, I know who you are, Lieutenant-Commander Carl Amos Kenyon," she chuckled when he visibly stiffened. "Not much happens on Omega that I don't know of," she pointed to a camera in the back of the lounge. "Amazing what good facial recognition software and some extra credits can get you nowadays," she mused. "So, what does the Alliance want from me?"
"I'd be interested in whether or not you know something about the series of attacks on human colonies a month ago," he told her, trying to keep his calm.
"And if that was the case?"
"We'd be willing to pay for that data," he shrugged.
"Mr. Kenyon, I'm not interested in your credits," she told him in a bored voice. "What I am interested in are favours," she smiled. "You do something for me, I do something for you. Quid pro quo, as you humans would say. And it just so happens that I might have the information you seek."
Amos did not like the direction the conversation was taking one bit, but he knew if he wanted to get results he had to play along.
"And what would you want in return for your, ah, services?"
"There's a scientist in the Orieste star system, a Salarian archaeologist. He convinced me there were Prothean ruins on the star's sixth planet and secured financing for his dig in return for 'sharing' his findings with me. However, to good doctor hasn't been very productive in what he's been doing, and a few days ago I even lost the comm connection with him. I need you to go there and bring the fool back here with you," she frowned. "If there's anything worthwhile, I want that, too, but primarily that doctor! He owes me. So, are you in?"
Amos tried not to sigh. Craster would definitely love this, but what other choices did they have except blindly stumbling through the long night? He nodded.
"You have a team. We'll do it."