Exposure
The journalist disliked moving around in public. The reason, ironically enough; cameras made his skin itch, as though he could already feel the (metaphoric, such obvious targeting systems had long been superseded) targeting laser through his clothes. He erratically wove his way down the crowded, filthy Cambodian streets, his tired green eyes roving for surveillance devices and then proceeding to move through their blind spots. Admittedly, he made for a fairly distinctive figure beneath the haze of chemical clouds, at the onset of middle age in his early forties, pale, pallid skin almost matching the grey in his hair that he felt certain had nothing to do with his age, amidst a veritable sea of tan and charcoal. However, the man's dislike of exposure was not limited to unnatural environments beyond the bright, sterile metropolises of the Americas, and it was a result of some remarkably specific concerns.
Nearing what passed for the spaceport, in actuality just a patch of farmland that had been smothered in concrete and allowed to remain flat, the Caucasian peeled off into an alleyway. Two rushed figures followed him from within the depths of the throng.
The two young muggers who accosted Simon Ross on his way to board his ship, demanding his credit chits in a language the Canadian dubiously identified as truly atrocious Mandarin, could have picked a better target. They could have picked someone who wasn't currently concerning himself with blowing the whistle on some of the human government's more unsavoury activities, and as a result living in an appropriate state of what some might label as paranoia. Ross' retort to such accusations had always been that said paranoia was what would thwart the people that were out to get him.
As a result, the two muggers found themselves abruptly relieved of their knives and electrocuted with an omnitool tazer blast the moment they entered the appropriate range, and were promptly left writhing on the ground in states compared to which unconsciousness might have been preferable. Ross made sure, however, that there was no risk that the idiots might have been killed. First, the idea was morally repugnant to him. Second, there was no reason to make himself vulnerable to the authorities to such a grievous extent by handing them legitimate felonies on a silver platter. Boarding a commercial transport vessel was a sufficiently hazardous endeavour in its own right; it amounted to being trapped in a highly confined environment for several days during which the ship could simply disappear, and not even necessarily due to the influence of those who would silence him.
As one might sensibly deduce, then, something had lured Simon into entering the airtight steel trap. Something so valuable as to radically upset the balance of risk versus reward. And, considering the nature of the journalist's work, it would be no great leap of reasoning to conclude that he was pursuing a story. The mother-lode, as a matter of fact. A hacker had contacted him, using the alias 'Hex', claiming to have penetrated the defences of the Alliance's most heavily classified database, and to have found something so poisonous to humanity's military and political leaders that those who weren't indicted would be deposed by sheer force of the resultant galactic outrage. He wanted to meet, face to face, on Illium, to ensure that the information got to the right people.
Of course, Ross had been suspicious. Then, he read the 'lesser' materiel that had been forwarded as a gesture of goodwill, and decided that anything that dwarfed it was most certainly worth a certain level of jeopardy. He offset that risk by giving instructions to his solicitor to release the contents of his secure deposit box to the general media should he fail to make contact within a day of his arrival to countermand their disclosure.
However, that wasn't to say that like any number of his colleagues, the journalist was an adrenaline junkie who did what he did precisely because of the danger; more nights than not he lay awake bathing in his own cold sweat. No, he pursued the exposure of the crimes of those in authority because he was a capable and competent investigator, and because it was necessary; he did it because it was the right thing to do. A democracy functioned according to the will of the people, thus the people had to be properly informed. He was by no means naïve; democracy was at best a terrible, indecisive and short-sighted political system, but it was the most preferable option amidst a sea of poor alternatives.
He did take the liberty of checking the passenger records to ensure that there was no-one who screamed 'black-ops', whilst being only too aware that if they were not even he would be able to identify them as such with so little information available. Nothing seemed to be too out of order to him, however, hence he was taking his flight out of one of the most discreet (i.e. dilapidated) port on Earth (whatever people said, south-east Asia hadn't changed much since the turbulent and corrupt days of the twenty-first century, despite the skin-deep industrial revolution), which did on the other hand mean that he had to deal with lesser risks like the whimpering youths behind him.
He moved through the spaceport quickly, partially as a result of his not purchasing anything as he didn't need anything enough to leave a record of his presence, partially due to the fact that the security checks he encountered were as cursory and as lacking in utility as the data in the passenger manifests. The scanners were old, tuned to detect eezo and nothing else, so if anyone decided to attempt to circumvent the system by carrying more archaic weaponry, nothing would stop them-not that they needed to as one could carry any number of offensive programmes on one's omnitool without any scrutiny whatsoever. As deplorable as the situation was, it was also the reason he was using this route, so Ross kept his disapproval internalised. He boarded late, behind the vast majority of the other passengers, and quickly made his way to the relative safety of his cabin.
First came the lengthy sweep for surveillance devices, toxins, explosives; anything more malignant than a dirty bed sheet. As it happens, the rancid excuse for linen tested positive for narcotics, as well as several other things Ross preferred not to consider, certainly not all at once. It went in the disposal chute. Simon had no intention of sleeping, in any case.
Instead he kept himself awake with work; drafting and tinkering with the articles he was developing from the evidence he had already been given, plotting the next moves of the endless game of chess he chose to play against the powerful and influential minority. Assuming the weapon Hex gave him was as potent as was promised, using it would mean life would become exponentially more difficult; he'd have painted a target upon his flesh that neither the current government, nor their successors, nor their allies in industry, could ever afford to ignore. Disposing of him permanently would be difficult whilst he was in the public eye; attempts to discredit him were more probable but easy to defend against, yet the spotlight would fade fast and leave him vulnerable if he ever rested on his laurels.
That in turn demanded new potential targets, new lines of inquiry-
The ship lurched as it dropped out of FTL. Causing Ross to raise his head from the display on his omnitool, brow furrowed. Whilst the transport had already gone through the Charon relay, they were quite some time away from Illium, and had no other scheduled destinations before that. Something was clearly awry – though whether that something was just an innocent technical fault or something rather more sinister remained to be seen.
"Attention. This is the captain speaking. We have made an unscheduled drop from FTL for unknown reasons, and are reading an unlicensed vessel on our sensors. Please return to your quarters as per emergency protocol and await further instructions from-"
"Our representatives, who will be taking possession of this ship momentarily." An obviously synthesised voice interrupted the intercom announcement. "Co-operate with their demands, and you will remain unharmed. Any attempts to resist will result in severe penalties."
Ross could have laughed, had the situation been less serious. All the time and effort he had spent guarding against Alliance hit squads transpired to have been utterly futile – the ship he had chosen had also been selected as a target by pirates. Ironically, he was already fairly familiar with the strategy they had apparently opted for; a hacker working with the criminals would board the transport as a passenger and set the nav-computer to make a rendezvous with the rest of the group, who would then board, steal any valuables, sell the ship or take it for themselves, and auction of the crew and customers to slavers in the Terminus.
Needless to say, such an outcome was unacceptable. Whilst he couldn't vouch for the virtue of his fellow passengers, statistically, most of them wouldn't be criminals deserving of the death penalty in any of the states that allowed it. These people would either be killed or sold into slavery and made to suffer for the remainder of their subsistence. Furthermore, he would never receive Hex's data and so the corruption in the upper echelons of the human government and military cadre would never meet justice – in fact, given his slight level of fame, one of the hijackers would probably recognise him, secure the information he already had, and use it to blackmail those it incriminated, compounding the injustice.
Ross knew that his chances of repelling all boarders and so entirely defusing the threat were slim to none; he had ensured that he was capable in most combat situations and perhaps a match for a single opponent with military training, but weight of numbers skewed the odds too far in the favour of the enemy. On the other hand, if he could wrest control of the ship's computer systems from the hacker, he would be able to do a number of things that would at minimum limit the victories of his opponents, or in the most optimistic of scenarios put the pirates into custody and continue with his intended plans. At minimum, a call for help was viable, and potentially getting a message to Hex to recommend another colleague to contact.
Unfortunately, as his heretofore flawless execution hinted, the hacker wasn't stupid and had immediately shut down the transport's wireless network; there would be no remote access anymore. Ross needed to get to a terminal wired into the secure network in person, and understood all too well the difficulties that such a notion entailed. He set to priming the offensive programmes he had placed on his military-grade omnitool for activation at a moment's notice, then felt the thudthat reverberated all over the ship, followed by painfully brief echoes of distant gunfire. Nerving himself, he approached his cabin door.
Opening it a crack, he observed that the main lighting had been killed, and the corridors were almost completely dark. Hastily, he tuned his cabin's lighting to match, before having the door open fully with a quiet hiss and venturing out, ready to bring up his omnitool at a fraction of a moment's notice. Recalling the vague direction from which the sounds of conflict had been coming, he opted to head in the opposite direction and postpone any confrontation whilst he got his bearings, hugging the shadows at the walls, away from the emergency lighting.
A hiss ahead of him gave him an instant's warning of an unknown party's approach, which he put to use by ducking into the slightly greater cover of the doorway to another cabin. In the subdued lighting, he couldn't see much of the other man, except that he was armed, a pistol held at the ready before him, and that he was thankfully facing away from the journalist, moving in the same direction. Shadows rippling over his body as he moved indicated the bulk of armour beneath a long coat; not a crewmember or guard, then. In all likelihood he was moving to reinforce the hacker's position, or at the very least to secure or sabotage another position which could be used to regain control, which would be fortuitous for Ross if it were likely that he could follow the pirate and then incapacitate both him and his possible colleague. However, he was not so confident, which suggested a necessity to deal with the hijacker before him now and resign himself to difficulties in finding his target.
Stealthily, he leaned out of his cover and followed the other human, rolling his footsteps so as not to make a sound, raising his omnitool as he entered effective range-
And in front of him, the man tensed, raising his weapon and beginning to turn, despite Ross' certainty that he had made no audible noise. Regardless, he primed an overload, choosing it for its obvious capacity to intimidate as well as to disarm the other man, and potentially incapacitate him too, depending on the quality of his shielding. The lighting crackled along the forefront of the omnitool's glowing interface as the journalist brought it dangerously close to the side of the man's face.
"Drop your weapon." Simon instructed softly, no trace of hesitance in his voice. The other man forced himself to relax slightly, bringing one of his hands away from his sidearm and holding them both out before him.
"You're making a mistake." He replied just as quietly, in an English accent. "I'm not-"
Ross unleashed the overload and followed up with a tazer-strength blast, causing his target to drop his pistol and stagger against the wall, hissing in anger and pain. "-Interested? That would make two of us." His foe turned, causing the journalist to raise his arm again threateningly, intending to knock him out, but at that point, the other man looked past him, and decided he had greater concerns than vengeance. One arm shot out and yanked Ross into an arm-bar, the other followed to throw him down. Ross rolled over to see the unknown figure running at a pair of hijackers that had turned the corner behind them, their approach presumably hastened by the discharge of the overload.
As the pair opened fire, one with an assault rifle, the other with a shotgun, the journalist's unexpected ally raised his arms and sent a cerulean biotic pulse back in their direction, oddly enough failing to raise any sort of barrier although it seemed to do the trick and prevent him from being shredded in his unshielded state. The man stumbled as he manipulated the energy surge, then righted himself moments later as he closed with his opponents. Deftly, he twisted around the blast as the shotgun was fired at point blank range, continuing the motion to plant a carbon-ceramic composite blade into the shoulder join of the pirate's armour. The man yelled in pain and was thrown from the fight briefly as his comrade barged him aside to lunge for his assailant.
The stock of his assault rifle bashed into his target's cheek, and the man reeled, stumbling backwards, now on the defensive. A moment later, however, it became apparent that the situation wasn't quite so dire for him as it had seemed. An arm had reached out and got a firm grip on the pirate's firearm even as he struck with it, thence pulling the hijacker back with him lest he lose the advantage of his weapon, and forcing him to sacrifice the lesser advantage of sufficient distance to use it effectively. Trying to regain the advantage, the thug entangled his legs with those of his opponent and sent them tumbling to the ground, landing on top and immediately attempting to extricate himself and regain his feet. His adversary, however, was not interested in facilitating his efforts, instead focussing on flipping the criminal so that their positions were reversed. He received another jarring blow to the head for his trouble.
In the meantime, the wounded hijacker had recovered sufficiently to have clawed successfully for his shotgun and was now attempting to aim it steadily, one armed, from his position slumped against the wall a few metres from his struggling ally. Ross tried to sabotage his efforts with another overload blast from his omnitool, but found that the weapon was insulated from the attack by resilient shields. All that was achieved was that Ross' target was made aware of a more immediate threat. He twisted, wincing, and fired a wild blast in the journalist's general direction, the kick sending most of the projectiles into the ceiling.
Simon flinched away from the detonation regardless, ducking back into a doorway and fumbling with his omnitool to set up something more lethal. In spite of all his training, being under live fire was a new and traumatising experience. Finally having prepared an 'incineration' subroutine for his fabricator, he began to lean out of cover to be greeted by another woefully inaccurate but intimidating one handed shot, whilst the pirate attempted to close to a range where he couldn't miss. Perceiving his peril, Ross blindly loosed the plasma round and fled to an alcove further from the conflict, he desperately sought internally for a solution to his plight, before remembering the pistol that now lay in the corridor between him and the hijacker.
Under the cover of another incandescent projectile, Ross scrambled for the weapon, staying low to minimise his profile as the hijacker still advancing, opened fire and broke into a run. Ross reached the sidearm and snatched it up, raising it to aim down the sights and straight into the muzzle of the shotgun leering at him from point blank range.
On the other side of the battlefield, the other criminal had given up on shooting his opponent and settled for throttling him with his weapon. Unfortunately for him, this had given his adversary an opening to slam a pair of disorienting blows into his ears and topple him from the high ground, before relieving him of his weapon and executing him with a brutal burst to the forehead that left his face unrecognisable as being human. Looking up, he located the other member of the opposition and laid him low with several rounds in the back.
Ross shuddered a sigh of relief as the gaping maw of his death turned away from him, then remembered caution and turned his weapon on his saviour, to see that he had done the same. There was a brief pause as both men caught their breath. It was the stranger who spoke first.
"Simon Ross?" The journalist tensed further, tightened his grip on the pistol. His target took that to be confirmation. "Relax, I've read your work, but it's not why I'm here. I'm N7, posted to this sector to investigate the ship disappearances. Can't say I was expecting to get hit on my way out, but there it is. These people had to be dealt with sooner or later..."
"Am I to understand that you're asking for my help?" The journalist replied, suspicions not entirely quieted. N7s were elite; they were to most special forces what special forces were to grunt infantry. Why would one be risked on an operation like this? It wasn't overkill, but why send an ace to do a job that a small team of jacks could handle? Furthermore, something about the man was familiar; his voice, his face, though that might just have been the distorting effect of the shadows created by the poor ambient light.
"Two guns are almost always better than one, in my experience." The commando confirmed. "Don't worry, you can stay back. I'm just looking for you to provide suppressing fire and the like."
"I could do that..." Ross agreed reluctantly, lowering the weapon and getting up to approach the partner that part of him was still urging him to flee from. The N7 reciprocated, then offered him the assault rifle. Ross took it, returning the pistol, then offered him his hand.
Warily, Thaddaeus Shepard shook with the man he had been sent to kill.
The hacker with control over the transport's computer systems went by many names. In fact, even the identity with which he had been born was just another facade to be used and discarded as it suited him. Whichever persona he wore at that moment, though, was having a good day, and not least because of what he had just seen and heard over the ship's surveillance systems. The journalist was an obvious bonus, given the secrets he doubtless knew, and whilst some might regret attacking a ship with an N7 on board, there were possible benefits for those who moved in the right circles...
Opening a channel of communication with the leader of the gang's muscle, he quickly began to update him; "Listen. This job may just have gotten much, much more lucrative than we originally expected. There are two passengers on board that it is imperative that you take alive..."