A/N: No, I'm not dead yet. It has been quite a while, I know, and this is quite a meagre offering for such a pause, but life has been complex of late and has pulled my focus away from this project. Don't worry, I write when I have time. It's simply infrequent.
Caution
Shepard dropped from the formerly electrified fence, his lightweight armour scratched by the barbed wire at its peak, and landed with a near silent roll on the cracked, mud smeared concrete upon which the compound had been built. Behind him, the inevitable signs in the earth that told of his passing were already being erased by the hammering precipitation. Without hesitation, he moved right, into the shadow of the nearest structure, following the wall to its end before leaving it behind to stalk further into the base, practically certain that no-one was within twenty metres of him. Naturally, he had a silenced variant of his usual Karpov in hand, a contingency plan in the event he was wrong. He didn't need it.
The storm, however, had been later than was forecasted, and the cultists would doubtless adhere to their timetable like good little minions, selfless slaves to their indoctrinators. The window of opportunity to avoid them was narrowing, that of an imminent successful assassination narrower still. Too narrow. It would have to wait.
That decided, Shepard abruptly changed course, on a vector that led him out of the open, into an even more heavily shaded gap between two of the bunker-like structures. His timing was fortuitous – moments later, the backup generator was brought online, and the compound was suddenly bathed in harsh artificial light, a harbinger of the soon to be emerging cultists.
The assassin quickened his pace until he came to one end of a network of external piping, channelling the rainforest's precipitation into massive tankers for the cultists' use, and carefully scaled the structure via with the help of the metal tubes, careful both of the noise he caused and the integrity of the poorly constructed guttering, which could quite possibly fall away beneath his weight. Still breathing lightly, he hauled himself up onto the slanted roof and ran for the ventilation outlets. The entrances were guarded by swiftly rotating fans that would make swift work at minimum bisecting him, regardless of his armour.
However, constant exposure to Pragia's hostile environment and the continuing onslaught of the elements had facilitated his circumvention of this difficulty; the fan's fixing had become warped and corroded, making two shots from the Karpov sufficient to render the rotating blades non-functional. Thence, Shepard carefully unscrewed the bolts that attached the outermost grid, the final obstacle to his entry, and eased his way into the confined space, making a painstaking effort to avoid making any noise that could be detected by human ears.
Before him was a drop well over a dozen metres in magnitude. Realising he would be unlikely to be able to retrace his steps and remove signs of his passing, he replaced the grating behind him, sealing himself in, and moved out into the narrow abyss, limbs braced against the confines of the shaft to keep him from falling, his face soon contorted into a pained grimace at the effort, muscles trembling as he slowly allowed gravity to take effect. It took little more than a minute, but by the time Thaddaeus had made the bottom, he could feel the surface of his skin prickling under the ionising influence of his subconscious biotics. Fortunately, the only source of visible light seemed to be directly above him, which made it unlikely that anyone passing a ventilation duct would notice anything that could lead to his detection.
The assassin waited for the dangerous sensation to fade, in the meantime considering his next moves. The optimal window for the assassination had all but passed, and wouldn't reappear for several days, during each of which he would have to evade detection, which would require almost constant movement – even his present location wouldn't be perfectly safe for the duration. That movement, evading the pattern of the timetable the cultists followed with diamond rigidity, would leave marks, and the longer it endured, the greater the probability he would be unable to adequately cover his tracks. Weighing that risk against the risk of detection in a less than optimal assassination scenario, he concluded that the former outweighed the latter, though not by a particularly great margin.
Fortunately, he had already formulated strategies for the top five moments of opportunity over the course of his observation of the compound, and ranked them according to probability of complete success, taking into account the requirement to avoid causing a martyrdom. The second was thirty hours away, and balanced the likelihood of exposure before the kill or during, or leaving signs that would end in the same result. The third was sooner still, but the probability of success was too slight.
His weapons? Aside from his usual precautionary arsenal, the agents he intended to employ in the assassination itself were, depending on the scenario, gravity, electricity, and toxicity. He was disinclined towards gravity; too messy, for one, lacking in subtlety and requiring him to be on the scene at the very moment of death, which, cloaking device or no, had associated with it a serious risk of discovery or at minimum an irrational suspicion – if nothing else, it seemed too obvious, too likely to cause conspiracy theories amongst the herd he was attempting to manipulate.
No, something more mundane would be preferable. A toxic agent from Pragia's hostile tropical wilderness was workable, even readily available, as he'd collected numerous samples whilst inbound, and delivery would be a relatively simple matter, yet having observed the cultists it now seemed likely that this would arouse suspicion; at least one member of the cult's upper echelons had the sense to have their people decontaminating the compound on an essentially constant basis to avoid such a contingency.
Electrocution, however, whilst ostensibly seeming plausible and the most likely to avoid arousing suspicion in principle given the preceding storm that damaged the compound's main power generator, also represented one of the most difficult, and worse, unreliable methods of assassination available to him; there was a reason it had never been a part of Shepard's repertoire.
Shepard settled on the toxin; whilst the system the cultists set up to prevent contamination was surprisingly formidable, it was not impossible to circumnavigate. There was a meaningfully large probability that one of Pragia's smaller indigenous creatures could replicate a skilled assassin's feat.
The next question was how to administer the toxin. Obviously, any delivery system would have to emulate nature's method, meaning it was dependant on the choice of toxin itself, which, Shepard realised, would have to be chosen on the basis of how it was delivered to ensure a lack of suspicion as well as success.
The two indigenous species that could most conceivably infiltrate Cohen's compound and cause his death were an arachnoid creature and a serpentine being. Both were capable of bypassing the low tech conventional security measures and administering a lethal dose of a toxic substance. Both could conceivably wish to enter the building to escape the deluge. But the reptoid creature by its very nature was far more sedate and significantly less aggressive: eyebrows could well be raised if Cohen were found dead with such a creature's venom in his veins, whilst its source was nowhere to be found.
Thus, Thaddaeus settled on the venom of the arthropod. Ironically, this was also the option that required equipment no more specialised than a medical syringe, although this had not been a part of his selection criteria.
A glance at the chronometer on his wrist persuaded him that the time had come to move to another location; whilst there was time before he would likely be discovered where he was, moving silently in the confined environment of the air ducts would take time that had to be factored in. He eased himself forwards through the vents towards an area of the compound that would be sparsely occupied, flitting between the calm certainty of necessity and impatience, less with his current situation than with the scenario in its entirety. He cursed mentally as his armour scraped against the interior of the vent, causing a noise that whilst quiet, could easily travel at such a low frequency. Then he heard a near perfect replica of the noise.
Only this time, he hadn't been moving.
Likely explanation: he wasn't alone in the vent. Shepard froze, and carefully brought his hand into position to activate his cloak, whilst trying to assess the location of the source of the noise. Then it came again, and he noticed a pattern, a slight increase both in pitch and volume, that concerned him far more than the question of whether he was moving towards it or not.
That pattern meant that the source of the noise was moving towards him. Shepard's free hand loosened the silenced Karpov in its holster in preparation for a fast and silent draw: whether a cultist deviating from their schedule or a specimen of indigenous wildlife, Thaddaeus knew that his presence would cause alarm if they became aware of it and were given the opportunity to react.
The noise steadily grew louder, until it was close enough for Shepard to realise the location of the source: behind him. A direction in which he was entirely unable to see. Shepard activated the cloak, wincing at the polarising effect that temporarily emitted light, before continuing on his way, intending to find a place with room in which to turn around and deal with the unknown party. Even if he were so inclined, there was no room for mercy now that it was apparent that they could already have detected his presence. A junction loomed out of the monochrome gloom, affording just enough room for Shepard to successfully reorient himself towards his adversary, who was continuing to follow his course, a peculiar choice if they were aware of another entity's presence, but the assassin was more than willing to believe such a level of stupidity from a member of any religion, let alone a cult.
The cloak endured as the other entity grew closer, untaxed as it was by an inert user without shields to further strain the power source and cause it to overheat. Shepard finally picked up the shape rounding the corner through the infrared filter on his reconnaissance hood, and found that it gave him a moment of pause. It was too small to feasibly be a cultist, but too large to be any indigenous species that would wish to enter the vents or would be able to do so unnoticed. As the being shuffled closer and closer, apparently oblivious to his presence, the N7 perceived the reality of the situation, one that would doubtless give others pause.
His fellow resident in the vents was a child. Age and gender were difficult to discern, but irrelevant. Its movements showed no indication of the unease one might have expected had it seen him, only the eagerness of an immature explorer, yet one might also have expected that a child wouldn't want to wander alone in a dark, cramped network of tunnels alone. Children were almost invariably more irrational and unintelligent than most people, and given that notably intelligent people were by definition in the minority it was entirely possible that the child could have decided to follow the large, dark, sometimes invisible entity it saw within the vents. And even if it didn't understand the danger now, at a later date an unfortunate flash of enlightenment could conceivably result in an outburst that would cause the failure of an objective essential to the success of the operation.
The child reached the assassin, who carefully withdrew into the perpendicular duct as if to allow it passage, before carefully reaching out, careful not to touch-
Then swiftly, all but silently, contracting his arms in two perfect vices, one crushing the little human's throat, denying its breath passage in order to cry out, or respire, and simultaneously pinning its arms to its head, immobilising both, whilst the other restrained the organism's legs in a like fashion even as they began to thrash in panic.
Even as the child strained weakly to act out its death throes, Shepard's mouth creased in distaste as he considered the action required to deal with this latest complication. Strangulation precluded the possibility that he could deploy the arachnoid venom, which unfortunately would only have strengthened the credibility of the chosen scenario, and meant that he couldn't afford to allow the body to be found. Thence, the only option was to remove the corpse from the compound to a location that wasn't swept by cultists.
The infant grew still within less than a minute, and its core body temperature began to drop to the ambient temperature, whereupon Shepard sourly, painstakingly, continued his departure from the vents, now pushing the inconvenient bystander's expired remains before him.
Having reached his destination, no longer willing to leave his machinations exposed to the fouling of anomalies, Thaddaeus swept his planned route briefly but thoroughly during the short window of sanctuary his cloak afforded him. On his return, he went through the awkward process of extricating the cadaver from the air duct and finally got a look at the entity that had introduced such disorder to another of the assassin's schemes.
It was an infant male, perhaps slightly older than a toddler, round face a rictus of agony and terror. Shepard didn't glance at it twice, a thought flitting through his mind momentarily on its course to more important issues.
You picked a poor day to explore, boy...