DISCLAIMER – I do not own Mass Effect franchise, the story, or any of its characters. All rights go to Bioware.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
A bit delayed chapter, unfortunately. Like I said, the coworker is still on sick leave and the workload is still quite high. The Andromeda is fast approaching, so I'm not entirely sure AT ALL when the next chapter will be posted. There is every chance that there will be quite a great-ER delay before the next chapter is posted.
With that in mind, I'm gonna wait and see the people's verdicts for the game before I acquire it. Most of the videos I've seen don't give me confidence. Too many things about it just seem way off to me.
Chapter posted on 16.3.2017.
Main Tags: Action, Sci-fi, Adventure, Friendship building, Love.
Additional Tags: Slowly turning AU, Technology-heavy, Geopolitical themes (to an extent), Economic themes (there are some), Intrigue (a bit o' that, too)…
Rated M – for mature and adult content.
Enjoy…
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Chapter 21 – Old Scars
...
The main entrance airlock of the station opened, and Marcus and his seven teammates entered into the main corridor. The lights from the powerful flashlights eliminated the dark, empty corridor. Marcus looked at Tali and nodded.
The quarian girl activated her omni-tool, and several Ping-Pong ball-sized drones popped from her belt and hovered up into the air. The holographic matrix activated around each of them, forming a basketball-sized glowing holographic orb before each of the orb-drones zoomed off down the corridor and breaking off down various intersections.
Marcus monitored Tali's omni-tool together with her for a minute or so as drones scoured the station, forming an interactive map.
"It's done," Tali said at last. "The station is completely empty and vented of atmo. The layout matches the Normandy's penetrative scan by ninety-eight percent. Synching your omni-tools now."
There was a chime from all remaining seven omni-tools.
"Have the drones picked up anything else?" Jaina asked from Tali's other side.
"There are no active electronic devices or booby traps," Tali said. "The drones' mass effects were emulating all spectrum of physical interaction as they passed. Something would have been tripped by now."
"Then we spread out, seek out the points of relevance – the same drill and disposition," Jaina said, priming her SMG.
"I agree," he said, then made the call, "You know the drill, folks, get to it."
The team broke off into smaller groups. Tali went together with Kaidan toward the engineering while the rest separated and scoured the small station chamber by chamber.
"This is Tali," the quarian called a few minutes later. "The main generator is reactivated. I'm connecting the power back on."
"Garrus here," the turian called. "I'm at the main life support systems. I'll be switching them on as well."
Lights came back on a second later, followed by a whoosh of re-pressurization, and the teams shut off their flashlights as they began scouring it with greater efficiency. There was not much to see, though. The station was small and abandoned. Fifteen minutes later, everyone had congregated in what was station's main operations room.
"Anything?" Jaina queried.
"Nothing," Tali replied from where she was scouring the computers. "This is the third Cerberus station we've checked, and it's the same as it was in the previous two cases. The hardware was scrubbed with an external program designed to delete every errant scrap of data, like in the previous two locations. Very professional."
"They were also very efficient in cleaning up everything that could leave so much as DNA traces," Garrus said. "No personal terminals, clothing, space suits, and that goes for anything that was for personal use – soap, food, you name it. But the lower level below us also shows evidence of heavy objects of some kind being recently moved."
"I think that it must've been lab equipment," Liara said. "They didn't want us to know what was being done here."
"And this place smells like chemicals," Wrex added. "They were trying to scrub any fleck of DNA that might have been in the air or on any surface so that they cannot be traced. I've seen this before."
Marcus, now bareheaded and with his gauntlets removed was walking around the place silently. The new and unnamed Prothean sense that he had acquired through the Cipher was calling to him. Ever since Illium, it was becoming stronger.
His hands were passing searchingly over the consoles and over any other place that might have been frequently touched in seeming casualness. The sense of the chemicals that the Wrex talked about was clear under his fingertips. The chemicals were hiding something beneath them – an echo that was trying to pass into his mind and form images. But it was a no-go. Blurry shadows and impressions were all that he was seeing, the true sense of residual images destroyed by the chems.
"Any indication what was this place used for?" Marcus asked after a while.
"Maybe," Liara said as she worked her omni-tool. "I've detected elevated levels of re-sequenced eezo particles in the section we think might have been a lab."
"Element zero experimentation?" Ashley asked.
"This is a too small of a station for that," Marcus replied. "You'd need a lot of very large machinery to perform proper eezo tests."
"How about the application on humans?" Jaina ventured.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
"I don't see the purpose of it," Garrus said uncertainly as he looked around. "Trying to find how to prevent the appearance of eezo-induced cancer, maybe?"
"Actually, I think I know the reason," Kaidan said, his expression dark. When he saw that everyone was looking at him, he continued: "Controlled deliberate eezo exposures for the sake of inducing biotics in a human."
"Wait a minute, Lt," Ashley said, raising her hand. "I thought that biotics in humans can only develop if the eezo exposure happened while they were in the womb?"
"Exactly," Kaidan stated.
A deathly silence followed as everyone looked around uncomfortably.
"The requirements for maintaining such a lab would fit perfectly with a station such as this," Garrus said grimly. "The lab's size, storage it'd need, personnel housing, engineering and operations… the scrapes and indentation markings we've found in the lab would be consistent with the size of various biological containers and pods, lab beds, experimentation tables…"
"Alright, alright, alright," Ashley raised her arm, looking green in the face. "We get it."
"Let's not jump to conclusion," Jaina stated. "We're in no position to say anything at this moment. Tali, have you made any progress with the computers?"
"No concrete shred of data whatsoever," Tali replied. "All I've managed to extract is the rough estimate of how much the machine was used and when copying was done to external memory banks from the chipset itself." She shrugged. "Not much good that will do. I'd need heavier equipment dedicated to salvaging corrupted data, but there's no point in lugging that with us."
Marcus sighed as he walked slowly around the control consoles until he reached one office desk that was to the rear of others, separated, and in an elevated position. There was a comfortable work armchair behind the desk. An overseer's, or director's position.
Wanting to put himself into the station's director's eyes, Marcus sat into the chair and leaned back, placing his hands on the armrests. A flash of images surged into his mind in an instant.
"…full purge, second level of preservation," a muffled voice spoke, a blurry shade of a man in a lab coat in front of him.
"Dammit," another voice growled, the emotions of extreme fury washing over Marcus. "Copy the data, purge the local banks. Transfer all subjects and equipment onto the transport, and prepare the tridelax to flood the station with it."
"Even the failed fetuses, Sir?"
"Don't worry, even those can be used for further study. Their brains are riddled with eezo nodes. Remember, we can use this to map the progression of absorption."
"And what about Subject 17? If we stop the treatment in this phase, both she and the infant she carries will die."
"She doesn't know that. We will isolate her and sedate her so that she dies without disturbing others; we don't need the hassle. We still have Subjects nineteen through twenty-four. Now, go."
"Yes, sir."
The images passed without lasting even a second, and Marcus looked down to where his bared palm was touching the armrest; they had missed a spot during the chemical purge.
The ability was advancing. The images and sounds were still murky and muffled, but they were becoming more pronounced as opposed to before. And he was getting the idea how it worked. The fact that Cerberus had used tridelax in a liquid state and sprayed it all along the equipment provided the clue. That compound meant to degrade both organic and chemical traces; he hadn't felt a single thing throughout the entire station. But they obviously missed a spot, right here where he sat, thinking that nobody could find any clues from a chair. But that director had been sitting in this chair every day for months, years maybe, and the chair had absorbed his essence, sending it out powerfully for him to pick up.
An organic-chemical trail. That's what it was. That's what his ability was picking up.
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, taking that fraction of a second to let the images settle into the back of his mind.
"I have a gut feeling that this station really was used for the things Kaidan said," Marcus declared at last.
Garrus hummed pensively. "I have to say I feel the same way," he said. "No way to know for sure, but we can, at least, point whoever would come this way at what to look for."
"We'll send for an alliance cruiser, like in the previous two cases," Jaina said. "They'll have the needed gear to sweep this place through and through."
"That's all they can do," Marcus said. "The Alliance is still stretched thin as they are rallying their resources from the Eden Prime attack." He nodded then. "Tali, this station is in a decaying orbit toward the star, right?"
"True, though I don't know why Cerberus bothered to set it up that way," she said with a shrug. "It will take another year until it impacts the sun."
"They probably thought nobody was going to check this wayward system in a long while," Garrus offered. "Why bother with using a demo charge?"
"Regardless," Jaina said, "Tali, can you reestablish a stable orbit?"
"Sure," she said and tapped out a few commands onto her omni-tool and popped out a small system-on-a-chip from one of her compartments. "I'll set up a portable SOC, so as not to disturb any traces that might be left on the original computers."
There was a sense of gentle vertigo as the station's mass effect and inertial field established a bubble of reduced mass, and the station's positioning engines went to accelerate the station into a new orbit.
"Aaand… there," Tali said as she turned off her omni-tool. "The station is in stable orbit again."
"Good," Marcus said. "The Alliance cruiser will pick it up from here on when they get here. Move out."
"And so, another dead end," Ashley said in annoyance as they shuffled out of the operations room.
"Actually, that's not the case at all, chief," Liara spoke up. "I can correlate a lot of what we had found here together with the other two places. It's only traces and assumptions, sure, but I can use it to send out feelers along my network to find out the most plausible explanations. There are only so many scenarios that fit the description."
"Huh, kinda like one of those equations with multiple solutions that…" Ash started, then shook her head. "Ugh, never mind! Was never good with math."
"Math?" Garrus queried. "There's no need for math. It's all pretty much elementary, chief."
"Don't go all Sherlock Holmes on me, Garrus," she groaned, to what there were a couple of chuckles.
"Ahem. Sherma-what?" Garrus asked back in even greater bewilderment.
"Nothing," Jaina said with a smirk, slapping him on the shoulder and directing him to move on. "You'll see it sometime, perhaps."
Marcus smirked with her, but out of the corner of his eye, he kept a close eye on a somber-looking Kaidan. He shared a look with Jaina; she had noticed it too. Something had bugged him out more than usual.
.
Half an hour later, Marcus, Jaina, and the rest of their team were sitting in the comm room, with Pressly speaking on the comms:
"We've just jumped out of the system, Commander, and heading toward the Han relay. The transit to the Voyager Cluster will take approximately fifteen hours, and the travel from Amazon to Yangtze system will take additional twelve*."
"Keep us posted," Marcus said and ended the comm.
"So – Binthu?" Ashley queried.
"The last location we have on the list," Jaina said with a nod. "Apparently, it's the largest installation of the four listed.
"Cerberus seems to be pretty spread out across the entire Skillian Verge," Garrus said. "Judging from what we've seen in all three of the bases, I'm pretty sure we're dealing with only one single cell of the organization."
"Cell?" Ashley asked, raising her eyebrows. "Like a terrorist cell?"
"Pretty much," Garrus said with a nod. "But this begs to question just how big they are. A terrorist cell is small – a few individuals at most, operating at only one location. This, however, is big and is spread across several systems in several clusters. Terrorist cells just don't operate on that level of organization. Whoever they are, Cerberus is big business, and they know what they're doing."
"And it makes you wonder just what the heck were they doing in those outposts if they've picked them clean like that," Wrex growled.
Marcus and Jaina shared a look before they turned to Kaidan.
"Kaidan, you mentioned something about deliberate eezo exposures back on the station?" Marcus asked.
Kaidan sighed, leaning with one elbow against his knee. "Sorry, Commander, but I was just speculating. It really isn't based on any facts."
"Well, right now, even speculation can provide a potential piece of the puzzle that can help us view the whole thing," Jaina said.
Kaidan chuckled. "If you say so, Commander," he said, then turned serious. "Well, about this whole thing – it made me remember all of those deliberate element zero exposures back during the early sixties."
"Yeah, I remember reading about that," Marcus said as he shared a look with Jaina. "The conspiracy of the heyday was that the corporations were deliberately crashing eezo transports over populated centers so that they could cause biotics in unborn children."
"Not so much of a conspiracy, I'm afraid," Kaidan said. "It was never proven, but it had happened."
"I don't understand," Tali spoke up in distressed confusion. "Why were they doing that? Element zero exposures can cause severe cases of cancer!"
"It does, but they did it purposefully in order to develop biotics in humans," Kaidan said. "The most efficient way for the eezo nodules to form in your brain is if it happens while you're a fetus. That's why they were trying to expose pregnant women to eezo while trying to make it look like an accident."
"D-did this happen to you?" Tali asked in shock.
"No, I was not a product of a deliberate exposure, if that's what you meant," Kaidan replied. "My mother was downwind of one of the first mass effect ships that crashed; that's how many of the human biotics came to be. You need to understand that this was back in '51 and '52, just a few years after humanity discovered mass effect and long before we ever came into contact with the rest of the Galaxy. Back then, we didn't even know that such a thing as biotics was possible. Hell, it took a few years just to link biotics with element zero.
"But when they did, that's when things started to get iffy. What I'm talking about started somewhere around 2163, some twelve years after the first accidental exposures, when we really started exchanging knowledge and history with the rest of the Galactic Society. That's when they started figuring out what had happened to us, and that's when they started realizing the potential that the biotics have. And, of course, the foremost of the questions was – could those individuals be used as supersoldiers?"
"What was the name of the firm that performed the search for biotics kids again?" Jaina asked. "Kinetics-something?"
"Conatix," Kaidan corrected. "Yeah. They were backed by the Systems Alliance at the beginning. They chased after biotic kids all over, both Earth and Colonies. A bunch of guys in suits would appear at your door after school, saying things like they could help and doing what's good for the advancement of humanity, and the next thing you know you'd be shipped off to Jump Zero – Gagarin Station. To kids they hauled in, it was just brain camp."
"They could do that?" Ashley asked incredulously. "Was that even legal?"
"Grey zone," Kaidan said. "There weren't a lot of regulations back then. Everything that Conatix did was gold."
"Wait," Garrus stopped him, raising a hand. "Commander, what about you? Were you there?"
"No," Marcus said, sharing a look with Jaina. "Both Jaina and I had slipped through Conatix's fingers for a couple of reasons. Me – I was almost a street urchin on Earth and was never around my foster families enough for them to notice – and it was your family noticing the weird phenomena around you that got you flagged because they'd seek out help. As for Jaina, she was on Mindoir, far off from the big happenings, and when BAat began, we were both nine; too young and too low-key for them to notice us. Kaidan was – what was it? Twelve? In any case, BAat ended not even a year later, so we never got there."
Kaidan picked up: "Yeah, not all of the kids were 'caught' so to speak. And that was the problem that led Conatix to purposefully cause eezo haulers to crash over populated areas. They were running out of accidentals. They needed more test subjects."
"Are you kidding me?" Ashley asked angrily.
"Wish I was, Ash," Kaidan said.
"Was there any proof of this?" Garrus asked intently.
"None," Kaidan replied. "Somebody did a very good job at covering it up. A lot of money must've gone into it. Conatix did sink down a year or so later, right after BAat program was dismantled, but the thing is that big corporate heads don't disappear just like that. Conatix was funded by the Systems Alliance. Which got me thinking: what if some secret branch of the Alliance scooped all those scientists up and placed them in some project that dealt with biotics?"
Marcus and Jaina shared a grim look of understanding.
"Cerberus was linked to the Alliance shadow organizations," she said.
"Exactly," Kaidan said heatedly, pointing a finger. "That's why I remembered all this when we were back at the station and we considered if it might be human eezo experiments." He raised his hands over the sides of his face, pointing at his head. "I mean, all of these things that I told you about had flashed in my head in a blink of an eye! It's just a speculation, I know, but damn me if it doesn't shed light on this whole thing Commander!"
"No, you're right," Marcus said, looking grim. "This thing is like a beacon."
"It's not just a wild conjecture," Jaina agreed, her tone incredulous as she looked at Marcus. "Cerberus was a shadow organization. Still is. Virtually no one knows what they do. But it's not a wild thing to guess that they could have obtained research data that Conatix made. It's just that nobody except us is looking into this. Alenko, you're virtually the only one that was in the position to make this link!"
"A stroke of luck, nothing more," Kaidan said.
"Hey, don't talk like that, Lt," Ashley spoke up, nudging him shoulder-to-shoulder. "You were in a position to do something about this whole thing, and you did it."
Garrus then spoke up:
"But if these people are ruthless enough to experiment on pregnant women in order to stimulate biotics in children, risking all kinds of cancers and mutations, then they need to be struck down. Permanently."
"I agree," Wrex said. "Krogan are not the ones to coddle their kids, but every child is important to us. This is just a crime against nature. The thing is, though, that I am a strategist. I think long term, so I believe I understand this Cerberus, Shepard. This eezo exposure experimentation would not be the only thing they would do."
"You're right," Marcus said. "Kahoku said that Cerberus did all kinds of things. If you take into consideration how their bases are spread out, then that means they have both funding and strategic vision. If we were to come upon their base, we should expect anything."
"Does anyone else have anything to bring to court right now?" Jaina asked.
When nobody said anything, Marcus spoke up:
"Very well then. I will now go down to the cargo bay and finish main gun modifications for our Hover-Mako. Anyone interested in joining in?"
"I will," Garrus stood up readily.
"So will I," Wrex said.
Tali spoke up: "I want permission to remove the wheels and suspension of the second Mako as well, and set it up with the hover system."
"Can you make it in time until we reach Binthu?" Marcus asked.
"If I use Miller and his men to help, I'll be done in half that time," she said. "We already know 'what, where and how' from calibrating the hover system of the first Mako."
"Count me in your team, Tali," Kaidan said. "A biotic to lift things will serve you good, and I figure a little bit of work will serve me good right about now."
"You're welcome," Tali chirped.
"Alright then," Marcus said. "Dismissed."
.
"How does it look?" Marcus asked as he looked down from where he crouched on Mako's rooftop near the vehicle's rear end.
"Fits like a glove," Garrus replied from below, his face obscured. "I'll do some calibrations later, but it already serves its purpose perfectly."
"Good," Marcus said and hopped down to the floor, walking to join Wrex, who stood at the side.
Garrus walked out from under the structure and stood side by side with Marcus and Wrex, marveling at what they had achieved.
The old, 1 x 2.2 caliber standard main gun that was previously on the Hover-Mako was gone – its entire turret completely removed and replaced with fabricated hard armor. The new turret mount that they had just finished installing was mounted all the way at the rear end of the Mako, its double-axis joint designed in such a way to not only enable a 360-degree turret rotation but also to enable turret to swivel from its default 'over-the-top' to 'under-the-belly' firing position for when Hover-Mako was airborne.
"Will be one beautiful piece of weapon platform once it's done," Wrex rumbled with a big krogan grin.
"I sure hope so," Marcus said. "I designed it to outperform any vehicle the Alliance – or any other species' military has."
"That much is obvious," Garrus said. "It's five times as expensive as anything else of its mass category. It's not a tank anymore, it beats a gunship when it comes to maneuverability, and with the new heat sinks it doesn't even overheat!"
"You really think you'd be able to install an FTL module onto this thing?" Wrex queried in bewilderment, turning to Marcus.
Marcus sighed. "Well, I've thought about it – no denying it…"
"Shouldn't be too hard," Garrus pointed out. "Just use Kodiak's FTL arrays; they're of compatible size. You just array them along the inside of the outer hull and you're done."
"True, but Mako is different structurally," Marcus said, shaking his head. "You'd need to calculate the mass and center-of-weight ratios. Not quite as simple; you might end up with FTL causing a several-percentage off-axis drift. It could be deadly. Perhaps after a couple of months of dedicated R&D, but with us busy chasing Saren, well…"
"Hmm, shame," Wrex rumbled pensively as he looked back to the morphing vehicle. "If outfitted with an FTL module, this vehicle could even beat a Kodiak when it comes to FTL speed, the way I reckon."
"Not by crew capacity, though, that's for sure," Garrus added.
"Who cares!" Wrex countered. "Let Kodiak remain the transporter. This beast will be the heavy hitter that clears the ground of enemies for the Kodiak to land in the first place!"
"I'll say," Garrus agreed, smiling. "This new main gun is a 2 x 7-cal. It'll make it hit almost as hard as a secondary corvette gun – the turreted ones."
"And let's not forget those smaller machinegun turrets you plan to install on its sides to the front of it," Wrex said with a predatory grin. "Were they supposed to carry missiles, too?"
"Yep," Marcus said, not being able to keep the smirk off his face, either, before he turned to look at the large ship's fabricator. "How far have we got with the main gun, anyway?"
"The fabricator popped out the rails just a minute ago," Wrex said. "They need some time to cool off."
Marcus nodded, looking at the rails, before walked a couple of paces around the Mako, casting a look toward the other side of the hangar bay where Tali, Kaidan, and Miller's men were helping with replacing the complete suspension of the other Mako with hover drive. Kaidan was crouching next to the vehicle, holding some tools as he looked underneath it, while Tali had popped a side hatch and had her top half buried in the chassis. It made her voluptuous, and arguably very attractive posterior stick out quite conspicuously, and two of Miller's young marines were already staring mesmerized at it – until Miller himself passed and gave each of them a strong slap on the back of their heads with a rolled up rag, sending them scurrying to continue working and looking chastised enough. Nobody else seemed to notice anything, and Marcus chuckled.
"Hey, you guys need any help over there?!" he called. "We have some time over here until the gun rails cool off!"
"Nah, Commander, we already have too many hands," Kaidan called as he straightened out from where he was crouching. "Any more and it's just crowd."
"Alright, but call if we're needed," Marcus replied.
"Will do!"
Marcus moved back to where Garrus and Wrex were checking some systems and sat on a nearby crate. "Well, we might as well take a short break until the rails sufficiently cool down."
"I'm up for that," Wrex said as he sat on another crate and took out one of his krogan beers from the container mounted on the side of his armor.
"Do you always go around carrying a pair of beer cans?" Garrus asked exasperatedly.
"Do you always go about calibrating stuff?" Wrex countered pointedly, and then he popped the can and took a big slurp.
Garrus started to protest. "I'll have you know that the job I do is important for the sake of maintaining –"
"Garrus," Marcus interrupted him with an amused shake of his head.
"Ahem… point taken," Garrus acquiesced.
"Heheheheheee," Wrex chuckled, his meaty throat jumping up-and-down. "You're learning, kid."
Garrus chuckled. "Don't worry, Wrex. I'm sure even old dogs can learn some new tricks."
Wrex narrowed his eyes and grunted. "Wiseass."
Garrus laughed back, and then he sighed. "Though I gotta say, Shepard, this quest against Saren is teaching me a lot already."
"Oh?" Marcus prodded.
"Yeah," Garrus said, then trailed off. "The Galaxy at large isn't what they taught you at C-Sec, or the military, isn't it?"
"Hmpf," Wrex grunted. "You got that right."
"I figured as much," Garrus said. "Both the army and C-Sec teach you one thing, and one thing alone: that there is the good way – their way – and that there is the bad way – which is any other way. The black and white. That the rules exist for the reason of distinguishing such things. But it's not that clear cut in the real world, isn't it?"
"No, it isn't," Marcus agreed, then was silent for a moment. "I know you had wanted to look the world through the eyes of the law when you went after Saren on your own, Garrus, but I cannot look you in the eyes and lie to your face telling you that that looking the world as 'black and white' is the right way of looking or doing things; my conscience wouldn't be clear otherwise. The C-Sec's mandate is to maintain order, and there's a great difference between maintaining order and actually stopping the real bad people. I'm not talking about petty criminals, I'm talking about the big shots, the ones that roll the blood money – money off of which even the most powerful industrials and politicians profit. But neither can I look you in the eye and say 'the hell with it, kill 'em all'. That would be a whole range of wrong as well. And that's what a Spectre faces – making the fucked up choices, and being aware of what he's doing. That's a whole special kind of hell for you."
"It is, if you allow it to pick at your conscience," Wrex spoke up. "But the world doesn't give a damn about you and your conscience. It's what Shepard here says. It's how the real evil is stopped. Real evil thrives on rules, because it knows exactly how far the 'good guys' are allowed to go, and uses it against them. How do you think Saren got away with staging all of those things he did right in front of the Council's noses?"
Garrus chuckled. "My father would have had a thing or two to say about that," He said. "'Do it right, or don't do it at all' – that's what he'd often say to me. The thing is, much of it sounds bland when it gets confronted with stuff like what we've witnessed in these couple of weeks."
"What did your father do for a living?" Marcus asked.
"He was a C-Sec officer as well, one of the best," Garrus replied. "I suppose that's why I became one, too. I'd always see him on the vids after a big arrest, always appearing so imposing, on top of things… He's not too thrilled about me being a part of a Spectre operation. He's worried I'll become just like Saren."
"And you could, very easily," Marcus deadpanned. "The potential is always there. Spectres have killed innocents for the sake of preserving peace, just like N7 or STG has, and all of them will kill even more in the centuries to come; no way around that. There will be a hundred situations where you will need to choose: do I save one life now and condemn thousands on the long run, or kill that one innocent man so that I can save a thousand. But it's a slippery slope. Do that often enough, and there'll come a moment when you'll pull the trigger to nuke a whole city and not feel a god-damn thing. After that – well… there is no going back."
"Yeah," Garrus nodded grimly after a moment. "I have faced such a dilemma once before while I worked in the C-Sec. Not that big, but still…"
"What was it about?" Marcus asked.
"A case that was fifty shades of 'Disturbing', truth be told," Garrus replied with a mirthless chuckle. "This whole thing with Cerberus potentially doing tests on humans? Well, this thing was similar to that in a way.
"You see, there's a very lucrative black market trade on the Citadel: illegal tech, weapons and mods, rare and exotic animals – you name it. It's virtually impossible to stop it. You can only mitigate it. So, every now and then, one of us would be assigned to investigate it deeper. I pulled the short straw. During my investigation, though, I've noticed an increase in the trade of body parts – organs, for the most part."
"Strange to see something as mundane as cloned organs being traded on the black market in this day and age," Marcus commented.
"Yeah, but black market cloned organs usually go to criminal groups – when one of their own gets shot or badly injured, they cannot just go to the local hospital," Garrus clarified. "And they can't wait for the new organs to be grown for them – they need a readily-available new organ stat, or they die. We usually get a few illegal organs appearances every now and then, but not in the quantities that I was seeing. We didn't know whether we were dealing with a new black market lab, or if some freak was harvesting organs from citizens."
Marcus looked at him in surprise. "Wait, you get that? Why the hell would someone hack organs from citizens in order to sell them?"
Wrex spoke up: "You'd be surprised at how easy and profitable it is, Shepard. All you need is a canister of ice and an unlucky alley passerby. These kinds of acts are done by the desperate kind. It's a common occurrence on Omega, believe me."
"Yeah, but when I was on my first year on the job with C-Sec, we caught an elcor diplomat killing people, hacking their organs out and selling them," Garrus said. "That guy was simply a maniac, a serial killer. But this case of traded organs wasn't that clear cut. Like I said, we didn't know what was going on. So, we took a DNA sample from one of the organs we had confiscated and traced it through the system to find the victim. Now, at that moment, things started to get really weird. You see, the trace led us to a turian, who was very much alive, and was obviously very convinced he'd never lost his liver."
Both Marcus and Wrex had leaned forward in their seats now, listening to what Garrus was saying with increasing interest.
"After a bit of digging," Garrus continued, "I discovered that the turian had worked briefly for one Doctor Saleon, a salarian geneticist. The link made enough of a reasonable doubt for us to get a warrant and to search Doctor Saleon's lab in order to find evidence of unlicensed organ cloning. But, when I got there, there was nothing! No salarian hearts, no turian livers, not one krogan testicle."
Marcus's eyebrows shot up. "Testi – you're kidding, right?!"
"He's not," Wrex grumbled, shaking his head. "There's a whole bunch of idiots amongst krogan who believe that quad transplants can increase your virility and counteract the effects of the genophage."
"Yeah, it doesn't work, but it doesn' t stop them from buying," Garrus said. "They'll pay upwards of ten thousand credits each – that's forty thousand for a full set."
There was a pause.
"Somebody's making a killing out there," Garrus said in stark realization.
"Yeah, well they're not getting mine – no way, no how!" Wrex declared, then spoke up proudly: "A man's quad is what defines him! It is a man's sacred duty to be able to spread his progeny and to protect them, and having the quad is the very definition of it!"
Marcus chuckled mirthfully, shaking his head before he turned to Garrus nodding at him. "So, anyway, what did you do about that salarian geneticist?"
"Right," Garrus got back on track. "Well, I decided to bring in some of his employees for interrogation, to see if I could make 'em talk, you know?"
Wrex chuckled. "Wanting to make a minion squeal? Smart. They are always more liable to let something slip which you can use against them."
"That was the idea, but that's not what happened," Garrus said, spreading his mandibles in a grin. "Even before I began the interviews, one of the detainees started bleeding profusely! We immediately went about arranging for medics to patch him up, but as soon as he heard that, the guy started freaking out, trying to decline medical assistance. You can't do that when you're detained, though, so I ordered a full exam to find out just what the heck was going on. What medics found was that he had incisions all over his body – some of them fresh! When I ordered for an examination of the other detainees, we found that they had the same condition! That was our big break. These people were not just Dr. Saleon's employees. They were test tubes – living, breathing test tubes!"
"Are you telling me he was growing parts inside of living people?" Marcus asked.
"That's ingenious!" Wrex exclaimed. "Sick, but ingenious none the less."
"I'll say," Garrus said. "Interior of a living body is naturally the perfect environment for organ development. So, when organs would mature, Saleon would harvest them and sell them off."
"How desperate would you have to be to put yourself under knife over and over again while risking your own body by ingesting all those hormone-based organ growth drugs?" Marcus wondered.
"Most of Saleon's victims were poor," Garrus gave the response. "Saleon would pay them a small percentage of the sales, but only if the organs were good. Sometimes an organ wouldn't grow properly and he'd just leave it there. Some of these people were a mess!"
"Did you have enough evidence to catch Saleon?" Marcus asked.
Garrus sighed. "We did, but we never caught him."
"What?!" Wrex barked in utter surprise. "Why not?! Don't tell me that C-Sec was that incompetent!"
"Maybe, maybe not," Garrus said with a shrug. "This is where this whole story links to what Marcus was talking about earlier – of being forced to kill innocents and the dilemma behind it. I'll let you be the judge of what happened.
"Essentially, Saleon caught wind of the C-Sec detaining his employees. The smart bastard didn't risk waiting. He blew his lab, grabbed some of his test subjects, and ran for the space docks. By the time we found out what was happening, his ship was already leaving. He threatened to kill all of the poor wretches that worked for him if we tried to stop him."
"Let. Me. Guess." Wrex spoke in exasperated annoyance. "The C-Sec let him go."
Garrus sighed. "I ordered the Citadel Defenses to shoot him down, but C-Sec headquarters countermanded my orders. They were worried about a ship being destroyed so close to the Citadel. A valid point, but I still pleaded with them to at least disable his ship somehow. But it was a no-go. They were afraid what would happen to the hostages, and they were afraid that Saleon would make a ship self-destruct or that he perhaps had a bomb."
Wrex grimaced in annoyance.
"There are so many implausible assumptions in there that I don't have enough fingers to point them all out!" the krogan growled. "Civilian ships don't have self-destruct mechanisms! Their cores can't even be overloaded – they have hard-rigged safeties for that! You either need at least a ton of XDX explosive compound just to shear off your average transport-hauler's main structural chassis or a micro-nuke to destroy it completely. Now, I'm talking from experience here! You want to tell me C-Sec thought a geneticist had either of those in his possession in the middle of the Citadel?"
"Exactly what I was trying to explain to them," Garrus said animatedly. "But they wouldn't listen. They argued that Saleon would just shoot the hostages. They wouldn't even listen when I tried explaining that they'd be condemning those people to a fate worse than death at Saleon's hands." He sighed. "I realize now that what I wanted to do back then is kill a lot of innocents just so that I could stop a madman from killing more. Was I in the wrong?"
"As far as I'm concerned, the C-Sec was in the wrong, not you," Marcus said. "It was probably the higher-ups protecting their own hide from the public backlash. If I had the trigger in my hands, I would have shot that ship down without hesitation. That doesn't mean I wouldn't feel conflicted about having to kill innocents, but you don't have the luxury of hesitating and worrying about the consequences. Sometimes in life, you just gotta act first, and then deal with the consequences later. Otherwise, all we are left with is 'what if', and 'what if' hurts the most."
"Marcus is right," Wrex rumbled. "Let me tell you something, kid. There is no such thing as right or wrong. There is only action and the consequence. And whatever you do, no matter how hard you try to do good and help people, there will be a whole bunch of others that will hate you for doing it. That is life. You just gotta be stronger than it inside your own head and punch your way through to success. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you don't, but you gotta be aware that that's how life is."
Marcus nodded with his chin toward him. "Sounds like you're speaking from experience, Wrex."
The battlemaster rumbled pensively, his face looking as if he had just swallowed something sour. He looked to the side, where the new Mako main gun rails stood.
"Come on," he said as he motioned with his head toward the rails. "The rails must've cooled off by now. I'll tell you all about it while we're installing them."
Marcus and Garrus followed him, and the three of them picked up the long rails on their shoulders and carried them off next to the Hover-Mako. They slowly and carefully began mounting them into their sockets on the main gun's cradle.
"This goes back some… hahhh, I can't remember anymore… several centuries at the very least," Wrex started. "I was a leader of a small tribe. I was very young at that time, too – younger than any other krogan in my position had ever been."
"If you were so young, how did you manage to secure the position of a leader?" Garrus asked as he began installing mass effect array nodes along the length of the first rail. "Were you the strongest?"
"I don't like thinking that my brawn is what got me to the position of the leader," Wrex said. "I was stronger than most other krogan, yes, but the chief difference between me and them was that I used my head. And I'm not talking headbutting. Though, reputation certainly played its part. During my rite of adulthood, I had killed a thresher maw with my krantt on foot."
Garrus looked at him slack-mandibled, and Marcus whistled.
"What did you do as a tribe leader?" Marcus asked as he worked on integrating the fire-control system.
"Finding the krogan that would be willing to work with me for the most part," Wrex replied as he lifted the armor panels onto the roof of the Mako. "That is why my tribe was small. There were damn few krogan that wanted to actually work toward a greater cause. There still is too few. But because I built my tribe by seeking out the ones who thought like I did rather than just finding dumb grunts, our tribe was strong. They couldn't bring us down. Our voice had weight."
"Sounds to me like you were fighting for something other tribes didn't want," Marcus noticed.
"You could say that," Wrex growled. "We were trying to restore some semblance of order on Tuchanka. The Rebelions had ended eight hundred years earlier, and krogan were still nowhere near beginning to rebuild. It felt like an insult to my kroganhood to just accept that way of living – just fighting in a ruined pile of radioactive rubble like some rabid varren. I wanted to make things better. But many other tribes didn't."
"Hold on," Marcus called as he paused working and leaned over the unarmored turret to look down at Wrex. "Sorry to divert the tale, but you keep speaking of tribes; I thought that krogan were divided into clans and confederations of clans."
"They are," Wrex said. "Krogan clans form greater confederations that may constantly change depending on how the wind's blowing, but clans themselves are formed of tribes. Some tribes are small and temporary – a few bands of warriors or hunters – while others are big and can trace their roots for thousands of years, but a tribe will never change clans. My clan, clan Urdnot, had never had less than twenty tribes at any given moment, seven of which were quite big and influential. But all tribes follow one leader, the one that leads entire clan. You can only be a leader as long as the tribes like following your way."
"So, who did the tribes of clan Urdnot follow?" Garrus asked as he finished mounting mass effect arrays on one rail and switched to another.
"They followed Jarrod, one of the few warlords that had survived the war with the turians," Wrex replied. "But he was old, and so were his ideas. In fact, 'old' doesn't cut it. Jarrod was plain and simple – a fucking idiot! The lunatic was claiming that the war against turians was never really over. He wanted us to keep fighting, and it didn't matter who it was – turians, salarians, asari, each other… To him, fighting and winning was all that mattered, and it didn't matter against whom or what the cause for the fight was – so long as we fought, and so long as he won. Even if the fight was inside your own clan."
"And what did you want?" Marcus asked.
"I just wanted Jarrod to shut up!" Wrex growled, striking against Mako's armor with a wrench for emphasis. "The krogan had had their spirits crushed after the Rebellions, and Jarrod manipulated the tribes by speaking of some misbegotten glory, by stroking their bruised egos. He was a destructive person, leading the tribes astray. I wanted him to stop doing that. I wanted him to understand that the old ways couldn't work. We didn't have the ships to go to war, we didn't have the weapons to go to war, we didn't have factories to support the war. Hell, we didn't even have numbers to go to war, and genophage made sure that we stayed that way! So, I tried making the old fool see that we needed to focus on breeding, at least for one generation."
"Did you even manage to achieve any of the things you wanted?" Marcus asked.
"Surprisingly, I did," Wrex said. "A few of the tribes started following my ways, ignoring Jarrod's calls to war. Two of the larger tribes were among those, which made it hard for Jarrod to stop everyone outright. And for a little while, we started to pull through. Some of the tribes were starting to come around from losing numbers. Genophage killed just the same, yes, but less fighting meant that more pups were being born than adult krogan were being killed!"
Krogan faces were hard to read, but Wrex's face seemed to have light up for a bit there.
"It must've made you real popular," Garrus commented. "Something tells me Jarrod didn't appreciate that."
Wrex's face darkened again. "He didn't," he admitted. "I knew he wanted me dead, but my small tribe was strong and, like all krogan, we were always well armed and ready to fight. So, the bastard arranged a crush. A meeting on neutral grounds. He wanted to talk. He chose The Hollows, a place where the graves of our most hallowed ancestors are. It was as sacred as any krogan place can be. Violence is forbidden, and so are firearms. The only thing that would be allowed at the place where we met were daggers – a symbol, nothing more."
"Something tells me you accepted the call, even though you yourself suspected it was a trap," Marcus said.
"True on both accounts," Wrex said.
"So, why did you do it?"
"Because despite whatever the rest of the Galaxy might think, the krogan have a very high sense of morality values, some of which even the worst of the bunch will hold sacred. And when your own father invites you to a crush, well…"
"Your father?" Garrus asked incredulously, his mandibles spreading wide and low.
"Jarrod?" Marcus asked in turn.
"Yes," Wrex replied. "He was my father until that day; because he did one of the most amoral things amongst my kind that day, and I owed nothing to him anymore. Nobody in their right mind would think they did. We met and talked that day, but we didn't get anywhere. When it was clear that I wouldn't join him, he gave the signal.
"His men leapt from the graves of our ancestors like the krogan undead! A whole two dozen of them; maybe more. And they were armed with much more than just ceremonial daggers. Suffice it to say, those few men that were loyal to me who followed me there had died quickly.
"I escaped with my life, but not before I sank my dagger deep into Jarrod's chest, all the way into the lung neural cluster. He died choking, unable to take a breath, knowing in his last moments that he had failed to kill me.
"When I reached my tribe's stronghold, however, all that waited for me was a smoking ruin. Jarrod had planned his betrayal long before he attacked me at the Hollows, obviously. Only a handful of my tribesmen and women that had happened to be away from our stronghold had survived. Everybody else was killed – my fellow warriors, our females, and even our pups."
There was a moment of silence.
"You had a child?" Marcus asked.
"No," Wrex shook his head. "But it was a small comfort. I cared for every single of my tribe's pups like they were my own. The Urdnot tribes had gathered for a Great Crush because of what had transpired, and I had confronted Jarrod's commanders and the men that did the betrayal. I wanted the rest of the tribes to do something. But the laws had stated that I had already dispensed revenge by killing Jarrod. Conveniently, the deaths of pups were not defended by our laws, because the laws were written when we could breed by the hundreds, and when loss of a generation of pups meant nothing. And the other tribe leaders had the gall to say it to my face that those laws knew what's best for our species."
There was a snapping sound, and Wrex looked down in surprise to where he had unconsciously snapped a titanium wrench in half with his bare hands. He threw the pieces away and sighed.
"That is why I left," Wrex finished. "And that's why I'm never going back. The rest of the krogan had clearly demonstrated that they do not care whether our species lives or dies. Why should I?"
There was a moment of silence.
"No," Marcus spoke up from where he was leaning against the unarmored turret, shaking his head gently as he scrutinized Wrex with a discerning gaze. "I don't believe that."
Wrex looked up at him. "Don't believe what?"
Marcus straightened up, standing to his full height on Mako's rooftop, not losing the eye contact with the huge krogan.
"I refuse to believe that you don't care what happens to your species," he stated with cold anger. "Everything you said and everything you did proves that you have had a vision for the krogan that surpasses everything that your entire species has done for the past two thousand years. And you mean to tell me that you are going to allow that one single event to determine the course of the rest of your life and that of your species?"
"And what the hell do you want me to do about it, Shepard?!" Wrex growled in angry exasperation.
Marcus stepped off from the ledge of the Mako's rooftop and dropped down firmly on his feet with a solid thud, right in front of Wrex.
"I want you to go back there to Tuchanka and grab all of the clans – not tribes, but clans – by their noses, twist them down so it hurts, and then pound some sense into their thick skulls with your own fist!" he said.
"So, you want me to kill more of my kind as an excuse to save them?" Wrex countered. "How different is that from what Jarrod did?"
"And how many of them have you killed as a mercenary?" Marcus shot right back.
"I'm a fighter. That's what I do!" Wrex growled.
"No, that's not what a fighter does," Marcus countered. "A fighter fights for what matters to him! You may be a krogan, and you may love to fight, but you're not Jarrod. You ask me what's the difference between you and him? I'll tell you. The difference between you and Jarrod is that krogan like Jarrod kill pups; krogan like Wrex, however, kill Jarrods – those Jarrods that kill those pups."
Wrex sighed in annoyance. "Are you trying to make me cry, Shepard?"
"I'm trying to make you act, Wrex," Marcus replied. "Look at the Galaxy right now. They all play at some Galactic unity and harmony when, in fact, it is far from the truth. Keeping everyone divided and weak is how the great powers have always kept their power. The genophage did nothing to kill the krogan; it's the krogan that are killing the krogan, and unless someone appears and stops them, they really are going to go extinct. Are you going to just sit back and allow the krogan to be destroyed or are you going to do something about it?"
"And you think that someone to unite the krogans is me?" Wrex asked skeptically. Or… didn't that sound more like acquiescence, Marcus's inner voice called.
"A man that managed to force several tribes of Urdnot clan to do as he thought was best, not for his own sake, but for the sake of everyone else – and he was only a couple hundred years old?" Marcus pointed out and then spread his arms. "Do you know of any other krogan like that? And guess what? That very same krogan had spent some time honing his skills out in the Galaxy, using his head to earn credits, and I'm not talking headbutting. You go back on that planet, Wrex, and believe me when I say that all the other krogan together won't stand a chance."
There were a few moments of tense silence as Wrex and Marcus stared each other up.
"There's just no way I am going to just drop back down to Tuchanka and say 'here I am'," Wrex growled. "If I am going to do anything, I am going to do it right, or not do it at all. Because there are some things that are left unfinished that need to be taken care of first."
"Such as?" Marcus demanded.
Wrex was silent for a couple of moments, measuring Marcus up with a steely gaze.
"Before I left, I swore an oath to my father's father that I would reclaim the ancient battle armor of Urdnot clan," Wrex said at last.
"Some kind of ceremonial artifact?" Marcus guessed.
"In a manner of speaking," Wrex said. "It was worn by five generations of my Urdnot leaders, which means it was made before krogan had developed gunpowder. Useless junk, as far as the modern combat is concerned, really. But that armor was worn by the very founder of Clan Urdnot, 6700 years ago. It is rightfully mine."
"Where is the armor now?" Marcus asked.
"It was confiscated by the turians when the Rebellions ended. We weren't allowed any weapons or armor back then, but them confiscating that particular armor – one that was worthless in modern-age battles and used only in leadership ceremonies – well, that was only meant to humiliate us.
"Today, that armor is in the hands of one Ton Actus, a turian who's involved in a whole variety of illegal activities, all of which are served to fuel his thirst for rare artifacts and antiquities. He has a chain of hidden bases throughout the Attican Traverse through which he moves his goods. Most of the bases are empty and abandoned at any given moment, being leased to various illegal groups during that time. I'd have struck already, but I don't know where my armor is at the moment, or where it will be tomorrow. If I strike and miss, Ton Actus will know who I was and why I came there, and I may never see my armor again. The birdbrain is spiteful enough to destroy my armor and send me the vid of it being done."
"I'll take care of finding your armor," Marcus said coolly. "I have the means now."
Wrex was looking at him searchingly. "Alright. I'll trust you to do it. But, Shepard… I want to be there when you find him."
"Deal," Marcus said and offered his hand, which Wrex took in a firm handshake.
Wrex rumbled pensively as they separated their hands, and then looked sideways and up to where Garrus was leaning against the main gun's barren rails and looking down at the two of them, waiting for them to finish.
"Well, what are we waiting for?" Wrex barked. "This AAC won't rebuild its gun on its own!"
"AAC?" Garrus asked as Wrex clambered up on top of the vehicle.
"Armored Assault Craft," Wrex replied.
Garrus shared a look with Marcus, and the human shrugged.
"It's as good a classification as any," Marcus said, and then climbed onto the Mako as well.
.
I appreciate all the positive reviews you've given me, everyone! I hope that, in this time of the new challenges - of which the Andromeda will be the foremost - you won't forget about everything that the Original Trillogy stands for. And if you look around all these amazing stories that exist on this site, you will see what I'm talking about. The Andromeda will never be able to recreate all those awe-inspiring Alternate First Contact War stories - the scale, the political struggle, the vast armies. Not even Self-Inserts can be the same. The Andromeda will herald a completely new storm of Fictions. And despite being eager to read them, I cannot help but feel a sudden punch to the gut at the thought that all these AWESOME ME1-2-3 fictions might be abandoned. Call it nostalgia at its worst, but I simply cannot leave the Originals. They are simply too amazing. Let us all hope that doesn't happen.
Geralt out!