Role Reversal

Shepard was jerked from his incredulous reverie by Katarn's voice from over the base's intercom, and hastily pocketed his ominous discovery.

"Human-have you found him yet?"

"Found. And killed, with a little unrequested help from one of your subordinates, here." Shepard answered testily, having located and activated the microphone with the aid of the surly batarian he had beaten to the ground mere moments before.

"What? When?"

"A couple of minutes ago. Why?"

"We've found another body."

Two murderers? Not as likely as the original suspect being innocent, given his behaviour in his final moments... But really, this is just a distraction from the main issue... and was probably designed to be. In which case, quite a few things start to fit together rather better.

"Where?"

"The internal surveillance hub. The killer shut the system down."

"Can you fix it?"

"Not without replacing the entire damn thing. It's been shot. Did you find anything helpful on the body? Anything to tell you what he was after?"

"No. Your man destroyed the terminal he was working on, and his omnitool, and there was nothing useful on the body. Wait there; I'm on my way." Shepard said, before releasing the button and gesturing to the dissident behind him to lead the way, and following him through the network of corridors, taking care to move silently. At first, the batarian would turn every so often in order to reassure himself that he wasn't alone, but eventually stopped. At that point, so did Shepard, backtracking around the nearest corner before examining the contents of the omnitool chip he had liberated from the corpse with his own microcomputer.

The victim's history did indeed include the readings from the long range sensors, as well as the images from the internal surveillance network. Shepard loaded up the schematics from the batarian's omnitool and copied them across to his own microcomputer, before locating and moving to the nearest terminal that was linked into the network; for obvious reasons, one couldn't gain access to the sensor array via one's omnitool. Shepard hacked the terminal with the batarian's account, which had yet to have its access revoked, and a programme from his own device, and hurriedly brought up both the internal surveillance readouts and the data from the base's early warning system.

Fortunately for him, Katarn had indeed been telling the truth when he said that the base's internal surveillance had been sabotaged; now his disappearance could be passed off as little more than a misdemeanour, when he re-established contact. The readings from the long range sensors were unsurprising, but still highly unfortunate.

A task force of vessels giving readings consistent with ships belonging to the Hegemony's naval forces were in orbit around the planet, and in the process of deploying ground-attack vehicles, as well as troop transports.

The cell's days of resistance were numbered in hours, not days. And Shepard was caught right in the middle of them, along with an Alliance issue stealth shuttle and a shipment of weaponry.

This called for some fairly drastic action. Large scale evacuation was impossible; there wasn't enough time, not enough room in the shuttle for all of the dissidents and Shepard couldn't leave any behind to be questioned. He rather doubted that the batarians would co-operate once he started executing those who had to be left behind. Furthermore, there were still an unknown number of traitors within their midst, one being the minimum.

Resistance was implausible looking at the forces the Hegemony was throwing at them; this was a blitzkrieg, not a force set up for a long siege. Nothing particularly anomalous in that, but Thaddaeus had an uncomfortable feeling that they already knew he was here; they just needed the evidence.

Which made it all the more crucial that he not leave any behind. There was a thermonuclear eraser in the shuttle as a very last resort; however, it would destroy his means of escape if detonated and was set to go off if tampered with. Besides which, nukes were rather expensive, and although Shepard's division had a rather impressive budget, Hogan would most certainly be appreciative, particularly when one considered the disastrous course this operation had taken, if the assassin could salvage as much as possible from the debacle.

Which left the option that quite frankly required the most effort, posed the greatest risk, and also promised to be the most interesting. For all that he had once wished for a quiet life away from people, Shepard had had his fill of such an existence when enjoying Henry Lawson's hospitality-now, he craved the challenge of the contest, and the thrill of the victory, more than anything else.

The irony tugged his lips into a smirk. The detective's investigation had unearthed facts that drove him to join the perpetrator of the crimes in serial murder, albeit with somewhat different motivations. The traitor was working to turn the dissidents' gaze inward, at the same time as softening them up so that their allies would be able to capture rather than kill their foes. Shepard's strategy amounted to a scorched-earth policy, although he did share one interest with his erstwhile quarry; he couldn't afford to let them know about the batarian fleet. Even the most experienced of hunters can be caught by a stampede.

Shepard closed the personnel list he had located and hacked, an oddly imprudent addition to a set of files belonging to a group of insurrectionists, and drew one of his knives from within his coat and headed back towards the rendezvous, for which he was already late. Back towards the cattle he intended to slaughter over the course of the next few minutes, albeit with a great deal of care. A noise alerted him to someone else moving ahead of him, on a converging vector. It was his guide, snarling under his breath about 'the attention span of bi-optic so-called sentients'. Had Shepard not been intending to end his existence in mere moments, he might have found it mildly offensive. As it was, not even using the tactical cloak, aware that he might need it for a more complex situation within a moment's notice, he concealed himself and allowed the batarian to pass him, before sliding out of the shadows to place his knife at the alien's throat.

"You were saying...?" He hissed softly in the dissident's ear, taking a certain malicious pleasure from the way the batarian swallowed tensely and tried to prevent his trembling skin from meeting with the cruel edge of the N7's blade.

"V-very funny, human. Now let me go." The alien uttered quietly, fear obvious in his voice.

"Would that I could, friend," Shepard replied, with vast and obvious insincerity, "would that I could," before, with a practiced, delicate stroke, he rent the batarian's flesh, simultaneously exposing artery, vein and windpipe in one fell swoop, and twisting around before allowing his erstwhile ally to topple forwards into the shadow from which he had struck with a quiet gurgle and expire before him.

"Where the hell have you been? And where's my guide?" Katarn demanded as Shepard appeared around the corner and advanced into the room before them.

"Continuing my line of investigation. Your guide was very forthcoming with some absolutely fascinating information, once I deduced the best way to persuade him." Shepard replied urbanely, his fingers drumming out a quiet pattern against the Karpov on his thigh.

Katarn's cohorts tensed up, those who were armed drawing their weapons, though they lacked the resolve to raise them. "Where is he?" Their leader demanded, his voice noticeably harsher and more hostile, understandably-but he was also acting exactly as Shepard required of him.

"You haven't been entirely truthful, have you, Katarn Dal'rho? Not with me, not even with your men. But then, you have loyalties that preclude such courtesies, don't you? And it was such a little lie of addition..."

"What are you talking about?" The batarian demanded, a very definite edge to his voice. His men's behaviour reflected his tone, although their glances towards their leader were very nearly as wary as those they directed at the human before them. Said human did nothing to defuse the tension by drawing his own weapon, and continuing.

"I'm talking about your claim to be ex-SIU. Its veracity is suspect when you and your late accomplice start murdering your own people to sabotage a deal between the Alliance and dissidents. You were going to frame me, eventually, weren't you? And it would be so much more credible from a human sympathiser, wouldn't it? Word would doubtless spread that the Hegemony's propaganda wasn't quite so dishonest after all. You might even get some new recruits..."

"You lie!" Katarn snarled, snatching a pistol from one of his subordinates and aiming it at the human, before pausing when he found himself on the wrong end of a dozen gun barrels, eleven of whom belonged to his subordinates.

"The human's tale is not as absurd as I would like." One of them said. "Is it true?"

It had all, of course, been a bluff, designed to sow further discord and dissention amongst Shepard's prey and ripen them for the slaughter. The fact that the scenario was one of the most plausible ones (aside from the alien's scheme, which failed to include the incoming task force) only made it more convincing, and the ploy more likely to succeed.

So Shepard was very nearly as surprised, and certainly significantly more pleased, as his temporary allies when Katarn flung aside all pretence of pacifism towards any of them and opened fire. The drawback was that he was firing at the human, as the greatest threat.

The batarian's aim was good, and even if he was limited to a cheap, basic heavy pistol which was neutralised with relative ease by Shepard's shields, it still staggered him and slowed his retaliation, by which time the ersatz dissident had turned his malice on his own followers. He shot the malcontent from whom he stole his pistol in the foot, preventing his flight, before yanking him into the trajectory of the rounds sent at him by his vengeful erstwhile subordinates, using the seconds it bought him to force Shepard to dive away from further shots, then bring up his omnitool and use it to cut the base's power.

He must have had it rigged into the base's network when it was built. Shepard thought disgustedly as he adjusted his recon hood to infra-red; he was fighting on what was far from neutral terrain, which put him at a definite disadvantage. He caught a glimpse of Katarn's flight and was immediately faced with a quandary: chase the SIU down and kill him now, and risk the Hegemony capturing some of the malcontents, or deal with them first and afford the batarian a dangerous lead.

With a snarl of frustration, Shepard opted for the latter, and, having restored his pistol to its place on his thigh, drew a pair of knives from their places up his coat sleeves, strapped to his forearms. He whirled, and slashed two batarian throats simultaneously, sending blood flicking across the room from the tips of his blades, further adding to the batarian's fear and confusion alongside the gurgling sound of two of their allies coming to an ignominious end.

"Someone get the bloody lights on!" The human demanded, knowing that he'd require power if he was to retrieve the dissidents' data and track down their traitorous commander. Furthermore, it added to the confusion, which, from his perspective at least, was all to the good.

In the short term, a few batarians utilised their paltry wits and activated the LED flashlights on their weapons. That was as far as rational thought took them, however, and they were promptly directing the beams erratically in every direction, trying to find their assailant, and instead producing a dazzling strobe effect, reflecting off of the palely iridescent ice from which the base was carved. It blinded those who remained-with the exception of Shepard, which really only made his gory task easier, and more easily justified; with a few notable exceptions, these dissidents really were hopeless. They had encountered a top predator, and were not equipped to survive.

One by one, two by two, the flickering beams of light steadied as the hands that directed them fell, or cut out entirely. A pair of aliens with some sense of prudence and a capacity for rational thought fled once they could see the room ever so slightly-and the whirling, writhing shadows that it contained-moving to restore power to the base and, so they thought, enable the human to end the fratricide. In a rather lateral sense, they were right. The killing of their comrades did come to an end, shortly after they had achieved their goal, when what remained of them, blinking in the suddenly uniform illumination, saw their dead fellows, and the human standing over them, exchanging a pair of bloody, gore-smeared knives for his pistols.

Shepard then hurried to meet the duo on their return and thank them for their efforts on his behalf, quite literally, as a matter of fact, before he shot them. He checked the readout on his omnitool that he'd connected to the base's sensor array, and saw that, as expected, the batarians had prudently dropped their forces out of range of the base's anti-air defences, and were now rapidly making their way towards the base, with unerring accuracy despite the disruptive weather conditions.

His next act took longer than he would have liked, but he set in motion a full wipe of the base's computers (including the software for the base's defences, which ought to have the Hegemony mopping up anything he'd missed for him in collateral damage), having extracted the data that had been offered as part of the agreement as well as data that matched some fairly broad search parameters, just in case Katarn had been holding back.

Moments before the wipe destroyed the programme, Shepard was notified of the usage of one of the base's exits.

Katarn...