Presidium Rundown
"Have just confirmed that Donnell Udina is dead."
The air left Thaddaeus' lungs in one long, quiet hiss. "Please would you clear the most efficient route of surveillance?"
"Certainly, Commander. Uploading directions to you now."
Taking the spy's assurances into account, Shepard decloaked, allowing the module to cool down as a contingency plan, and attempted to push himself still harder in an attempt to gain on his quarry. The ignominious scenario he had envisioned a few minutes ago already seemed dangerously close, and now just one tenuous lifeline was all that kept him from cutting his losses. Details of the assassination plot could offer him the leverage he needed, but only if he was the only person they could get them from-
He almost ran square into a pair of turian C-Sec officers as they emerged from an elevator, one that he should have realised was about to open. "Fr-" one managed to bark, before the assassin vented his many frustrations on them, seizing a hold on the muzzle of the nearer alien's weapon to keep him from firing and simultaneously dropping into a skid that transferred his momentum into the floor and, more importantly, the other turian's armoured knee. The impact caused the joint to give way with an unpleasant sounding crack before it bent in a way it had never been intended to, even as the officer was thrown from his feet with a pained yell.
Shepard yanked on his other opponent's weapon, intending to pull himself to his feet to continue his assault, but lurched off-balance whilst still in motion as the turian unexpectedly released his assault rifle and capitalised on the opening by arcing a knee up into Shepard's concealed but essentially unprotected jaw. The human's balance was righted and he rose fully to his feet, tasting blood.
"Poetic justice. Do teeth usually ache?"
"Do you know, I'm really not too sure. No-one's ever been that successful at introducing justice and I." Came the acidic retort, rather more strained than deadpan, admittedly due to the circumstances of the N7 catching the follow-up jab aimed at the diaphragm, bending his assailant's elbow to force him in closer whilst swaying lightly back from the now slightly desperate retaliation, bringing his free hand up to acquire a mandible and, lashing out with both legs, guiding the alien through a headfirst dive into the floor which resulted in unconsciousness.
The remaining turian, after several seconds of pained, desperate clutching, had reacquired his rifle and rolled over to aim it at the human, only to see an armoured boot rushing towards him on a course to reunite him with his partner in slumber.
Unfortunately for Shepard, this was only after he had successfully blurted into his radio a brief description of the suspect and their location, but it couldn't have been prevented without resorting to lethal measures, from which Thaddaeus had abstained in an attempt to conserve what little remaining goodwill his superiors had towards him. Of course, that particular resource had been running dry for years, mostly as a result of his constant attempts to shift the balance of power into his favour, from a skew that was even more firmly against him than most men bound under military jurisdiction – because in the end all he could ever get people to see of him was the stark unflattering light of Torfan, preventing him from slinking back into his favoured shadows.
Distant voices barking orders kept him from doing the same in a more literal sense, as Kheldar barked in his ear "Break left! Plotting new route." Shepard hesitated, considering once again the salarian's angles and wary of betrayal.
That hesitation cost him when another, larger Armed Response team entered his line of sight – and he theirs. One command to stop gave him a split second to reverse his course and do as he was previously instructed before pursuing fire split the air in his wake and his run became a flurry of calculations, both in his earpiece and in his mind, gauging how long until those behind found a clear shot, how long until he would leave their field of fire, how long his kinetic barriers would be able to endure the punishment. Turning a corner, organic and synthetic entities voicing alarms, a stray round kissed the material covering the bridge of his nose and prompted him to flinch back instinctively, the motion warring with his forward momentum such that he stumbled awkwardly and in righting himself, missed much of his ally's next terse instruction.
"-vent."
"Say again."
"Reaching edge of C-Sec controlled zone. Should be able to bypass chokepoints through quick use of vent." The salarian obliged, with mockingly over exaggerated patience. Shepard, having continued running and seeing no access grate before him, staggered to a halt and spun, at once seeing his escape route and hearing the approach of his pursuers. His disappeared with a shimmer as his cloak powered up, but didn't dawdle as he backtracked – invisibility would only buy him a moment or two if the armed response officers noticed the grille being removed by itself.
He emerged back onto one of the main walkways of the Presidium, into an area crowded by civilians being urged to leave by every public access terminal and advertising screen in sight.
"Assassin's last known location approximately fifty metres away, likely destination a group of parked skycars, ETA one minute."
"Well that doesn't leave us very much time, does it?" Thaddaeus murmured rhetorically, slipping through the shifting, morphing veins of the crowd under the cover of his cloak.
A commotion behind him prompted the N7 to glance back over his shoulder, where over the course of a few scattered openings he watched the entrance of a couple of squads of security officers, who began forcing their way through the crowd, checking everyone they passed for weaponry with hastily intrusive omnitool scans. A moment later the emergency displays changed, ordering everyone to halt and sit with their hands placed behind their heads – and the porous flow of people became an impermeable huddle of indecisive individuals, some attempting to continue on their way, others already complying meekly and crouching down, putting themselves and their struggling counterparts in further difficulties.
Shepard forged onwards, trying to make maximum headway whilst causing minimal disruption, but as the civilians ducked out of his line of sight, he sighted his prey, also struggling but perhaps as little as ten metres from an aerial escape route out of the morass of ever increasing viscosity. He was twenty metres away, and as far again was the dogged line of law enforcement, scattering streams of cleared civilians behind them as they progressed. Then, his armour gave a feeble whine that informed him that his cloaking module had scant seconds before it would overheat and begin cooldown procedures, and with an inarticulate snarl directed at the obstructing civilians, the pursuing C-Sec, the fleeing sniper, and the obnoxious salarian spouting quips in his ear, he gave up on his attempts towards subtlety.
A Karpov was whipped from its place against his armour as he placed the sole of his boot squarely in the small of a nearby human's cowering back, his armoured weight forcing the startled man into a more supportive position, before twin shots into the air began the screams and he launched himself upwards and forwards from the improvised stepping stone. He drove into a suddenly resurrected fray, as those who stood fought to flee, and those who sat flailed at any who threatened to crush them in their frenzy, their panic only heightened when further shots caused the exact inverse of the effect intended by the blue-clad men behind him as they battled to restore order.
In their midst, Shepard's eyes cast around for another glimpse of his departing leverage as he exploited every available gap and platform, surgically removing obstacles with jabs designed to be significantly less lethal to his targets than the trauma they were likely to sustain beneath the feet of the mob. Asari and turians in particular were felled with prejudice, simply on the grounds that the latent biotic potential of the former and the compulsory military training of the latter made them the most likely threats in the melee, but Thaddaeus became increasingly indiscriminate every moment he failed to lay hands or eye on the distinctive reinforced fabric of the purple quarian enviro-suit.
And then a gap opened before him, only a slight one as the two killers were not unique in their desire to reach a skycar, but enough to allow him to watch the last one lift off of its pad, sending a few desperate unfortunates tumbling, and bank around, descending to join the skylane running several metres below that was increasingly sparsely populated. An instant's view into the cockpit told the assassin his quarry was gone.
It was the last skycar in the immediate vicinity. Fast movement through this crowd had been empirically proven to be impossible, and as a result, there was no chance of continuing the hunt once he had found a vehicle of his own on foot – something that was far from certain in itself when C-Sec was right behind him and closing in on a distinctive target whose only realistic prospect of going unnoticed had overheated scant moments ago. Stowing his pistol back in its place against his armour, more out of habit than anything else, Shepard vaulted the fence and moved amidst the now less densely populated landing pads, running to the edge to stare out after his salvation as they flew off over the serene, elegant architecture even as Armed Response officers moved to surround him.
"Place your weapons on the ground and put your hands behind your head! It's over!"
"Goodbye, Commander."
Shepard's mind completed one last, bitterly resigned calculation, and finally stilled, as he raised his arms to display hands that held no further tricks. "I think you may be right." He declared aloud.
Then he threw himself into the abyss.
X3M "Skycars" on the Presidium are limited to a legal velocity of 200kmph, with Virtual Intelligence driving assistance vastly reducing the probability of a serious accident and all but negating the requirement for the pilot's organic reflexes to be able to cope with their own speed. As such, any attempt to jump from a point that is stationary relative to the space station onto one of these vehicles whilst it is in flight relies rather more on good fortune than on accurate calculations. From his own perspective, this made Thaddaeus' action as much a suicide attempt as a leap of faith compelled by uncompromising necessity.
As the distance between himself and his selection rapidly closed, the marine tried to assess the accuracy of his split-second timing and determine whether or not he would receive too much of the car's momentum, even mitigated by its artificially reduced mass, sending him tumbling off of what might as well be the mortal coil, or too little in which case his grip would fail, with essentially the same result. This was, of course, assuming that the two objects made contact at all. His plight would have been ameliorated if he were capable of encasing himself in a mass effect field (a number of asari and a few notable humans had been able to produce something not dissimilar from flight through such techniques), but he lacked the refined control necessary to avoid consuming himself with a detonation, and would continue to do so for as long as practice of any kind resulted in him weeping blood-
TOO SOON- The judgement came back, forecasting him to continue accelerating through the aircraft's path before it would glance off him and grant him further downward speed. He snapped his arms and legs out to make his shape as wide as possible in order to maximise air resistance and if not slow him at least reduce the rate at which his velocity increased. His trophy from Torfan finally demonstrated its value as an affectation, bolstering his efforts which in turn brought him towards a more desirable impact. It was only as the distance between him and his goal shrank to a matter of centimetres that it occurred to Shepard that in his current posture he had no way to make the collision more gradual and reduce the force he experienced. Well, not without breaking a few ribs, anyway. As such, his final prediction was that this manoeuvre, successful or not, was going to hurt-
And it did. One side of his body caught the front end of the speeding vehicle, jolting it down and allowing gravity's impartial touch to slide him off again, leaving him hanging from a one-handed grip that had the nerves in his already bruised and wearied muscles lighting up with a tearing agony, in a protest that the assassin had no intention of heeding. Instead he demanded more of them, hauling himself up to secure a second handhold and swing a leg up so his foot could search for purchase.
It was at this moment that the pilot of the skycar recovered from his shock and decided that he wasn't going to cooperate with the hijacking. Once the VI had compensated for the new mass pulling on the front of the vehicle it was forced to cope with a sudden bank to the right, which rotated the aircraft almost ninety degrees about its horizontal axis and left Thaddaeus clinging to the bottom of what was in essence a smooth, narrow rectangular prism, above a drop of such magnitude that surviving it would almost certainly be impossible.
Fortunately for him, the aircraft was not perfectly rectangular, as the design brief of minimising mass and yet maximising the size of the passenger compartment meant that the eezo-powered propulsion element of the vehicle had been separated and placed entirely at the back. This in turn led to weight distribution issues and demanded the addition of a long arm-like stabiliser stretching out along the right-hand-side of the passenger compartment. It would make for a perfect foothold for someone in Shepard's predicament, and so he swung his legs back and forth beneath him in search of it. It didn't take him long to realise that he was in fact too high up on the fuselage to be able to reach the slightly shorter module.
He let go.
Less than half a second later, he pressed his arms hard against the smooth carbon-fibre composite, knowing he would find no real purchase but trying to slow his descent enough to have time to put his feet on the stabiliser. He succeeded, then realised that he was still sliding – without his feet directly beneath him, his position was untenable, and he would fall as surely as if he had never found the foothold at all. He brought his right arm away from the car's underside and lunged with it, as far up alongside his left as he could manage, simultaneously twisting himself around to press himself up against the bonnet, his weight now directly over his feet and matched by the skycar pushing up against him in turn. There, he paused for a second to breathe, his position momentarily secure.
The aircraft began to level out of its turn and the N7 realised that all its pilot had to do was to bank hard in the other direction and he would be in the same predicament, but without the foothold he had used to save himself. He glared at the tinted canopy and quickly brought up his omnitool – the vehicle's VI would be linked up to Citadel traffic control, which meant it could be hacked, and his omnitool's black-ops grade software was more than capable of penetrating the civilian grade firewalls. Just as he felt gravity's pull drawing him forwards, he gained control and quickly gave the command to level off and go after his quarry.
By this time, his prey was once again hundreds of metres away, but hopefully unaware that the chase was not yet over. That would change as soon as Shepard tried to catch up, but with the first smirk that had crossed his face in what felt like quite a long time, the assassin realised that he wouldn't have to. He crawled backwards onto the more level drive component of the craft and, positioning himself to lie prone whilst staring after his target's own getaway vehicle, he deployed his sniper rifle from its collapsed position on his back. The difficulty of the shot did not lie in finding and maintaining sight of his mark in his scope; clearly the murderer didn't know that they were still being followed, and was instead focussing on an inconspicuous and legal flight. No, the difficulty lay with how to force them into an emergency landing when, travelling at such high speeds in a vehicle that was not exactly airworthy in the absence of a mass-effect field, disabling it outright would certainly result in a lethal crash which would probably destroy the assassin's omnitool, and any data that could be used as leverage by the marine, as well.
In theory, the very existence of a standard backup drive core was due to a need to account for this difficulty and allow for a relatively controlled landing, but whilst the two systems were distinct in electronic terms, in physical terms sabotaging one but not the other with a powerful anti-materiel rifle would be a feat that required copious intelligence and skill. Shepard was confident of his shot within fifteen seconds of it occurring to him.
BLAM.
The marine pulled away from his scope and, responding to the sudden roar of an engine above him, resisted the urge to roll from his position, a manoeuvre that would be particularly unwise given the fact that he was hurtling through the air. Ahead of his position, the other skycar had lurched in the air and, smoking gently, begun a shallow but inexorable descent. Behind him was the C-Sec shuttle carrying the marksman who doubtless intended to try a similar shot on Shepard's own vehicle – unless they had finally been authorised to use lethal force. And, of course, immediately beneath him was the actual owner of the skycar who had alerted them to his plight.
Thaddaeus collapsed his own weapon and held onto it in his left hand, before awkwardly scrambling onto his back whilst trying to minimise his profile, mindful of the air slamming into him as it rushed past and trying to carry him in its wake. He quickly took in the shuttle keeping pace with him several metres away and the figure leaning out of its main door, cradling a rifle that looked like it couldn't miss at such short range, and chose not to wait for his attacker to be certain of his aim, instead drawing one of his pistols in his right hand and loosing a barrage in that general direction. It wasn't intended to be lethal, merely a deterrent, yet it became quickly apparent that it would serve as neither as the rounds were halted by a kinetic barrier that surrounded the pursuing craft.
Retaliation was swift – projectile impacts consistent with rounds from a low velocity assault rifle made several clattering impacts around the roof of the skycar, whilst a few more were deflected by the N7's own shielding, prompting a warning on his HUD that the system's heat sink was at 50% capacity. So, they were shooting to kill, but hoping to avoid harming the innocent bystander whose day had already been ruined by the assassins' contest. A couple of quick commands into his omnitool linked the heat dispersal of his cloaking module to that of his shields, which would buy him some breathing room, but not enough by itself for him to be able to catch up to his prey – shuttles of this variety were often used to deploy and extract commandos operating out of ships too massive to land on a planet, and as such were required to be able to operate at speeds that would far exceed the most he could manage.
The marksman disappeared into the shuttle again for a moment and Shepard capitalised on the opportunity, freeing one hand by restoring ELE to its place on his back before the blue-armoured figure reappeared with an altogether longer weapon that he was rather less confident about facing – particularly when it seemed to be intended to replicate his own crippling shot of moments before. Dropping his pistol, he didn't wait to watch it skitter over the edge before securing a proper grip on the aircraft with his right hand, in preparation for the violent motion with his left-
Which, wreathed in his omnitool's orange interface, sent his skycar into a sudden drop and bank to the right that nearly tore the two of them apart thanks to his inertia, and also left the altogether more percussive retort of the enemy's sniper rifle unaccompanied by its intended impact.
The manoeuvre had left Shepard more directly beneath the transport and out of the rifleman's line of sight, a situation he expected his foes to attempt to rectify. What they did instead was begin to follow him downwards – a move that would be counterproductive from a sniper's perspective as Thaddaeus wouldn't have to travel as far to escape the firing line, but one that made sense once they began to accelerate so that they were flying just ahead of him. The intention was perfectly clear: to force him into a landing, or to cook him alive with the shuttle's thrusters.
Naturally, the assassin wasn't overly keen on doing either of those things on his opponent's terms, which meant getting out from under them as quickly as possible, preferably without giving them a firing solution. An experimental bank to the left, and then to the right confirmed their scheme as they mimicked the motions almost immediately. They had him outmatched in terms of firepower and speed, but that left him with one thing in his favour, which he planned to exploit to its fullest.
He braced himself, and then sent the skycar into full reverse.
The sudden deceleration left him lurching forwards with his own momentum, and would have sent him sliding off over the windscreen of his craft had he not prepared. The shuttle, to its pilot's credit, began to slow within an instant, but the vehicle had its own far greater inertia to overcome, as well as a propulsion system that simply couldn't alter its direction of thrust as swiftly or radically as the X3M could.
As abruptly as Shepard hit the brakes, he took them off again, ascending slightly to tuck in neatly behind C-Sec's people and using the reprieve to roll over onto his front and check on his quarry, whose smoking attempt at escape had skidded to a halt on an open section of walkway just over fifty metres ahead and twenty metres below. As he watched, they clambered out of the relatively intact wreck and, dismissing curious and concerned onlookers with the wave of a pistol, staggered off at a surprising pace.
The walkway was too far to jump without a significant risk of impairing his own capacity to keep up on foot, and having a highly mobile sniper constantly looking over his shoulder was likely to prove inconvenient, but about ten metres further ahead was the reason for the murderer's choice of crash-site: a covered bridge occupied the airspace their skycar would otherwise have had to travel through, and was roughly five metres below Thaddaeus' current altitude. It offered the solution to the first of his problems – and as the pilot of the shuttle in front of him gave up on its attempts to outmanoeuvre him and tried a final measure just short of stopping abruptly, causing a crash and killing both Shepard and his impromptu hostage – he saw how to deal with the second.
The pilot angled his thrusters in such a way as to produce a rotation about the vertical axis whilst maintaining forward velocity, resulting in a sideways drift that brought the opened door and its expectant officer around to face him, immediately taking aim at a target that was already moving himself. The movement, however, was of the exact opposite nature to that which you would expect of someone who knew that they were about to be fired upon: the N7 stood up from his prone position and took a couple of running steps along the length of the car towards the gaping, lethal maw of his opponent's aircraft, whilst the one beneath his feet continued to accelerate forwards and upwards, the space between them closing, five metres, two-
Less than a second before the collision, Thaddaeus reached the front of the skycar and threw himself into a leap that, with the added velocity of his craft behind him, carried him over the shuttle-
At which point, midflight, he used his omnitool to cut the power to the skycar's propulsion system and then severed the connection between the two computer systems, just before he hit the hard, smooth roof of the bridge with a roll and a skid that hurt, but considerably less than some of the other injuries he had sustained that day. Behind him, the marksman had dived away from the point of impact between the two aircraft a moment before Shepard made his leap, and an instant after it, the lighter vehicle struck the shuttle with an uppercut that connected halfway up the shuttle's body, the X3M's crumple zones giving way in deference to military grade armour plate. It hadn't been moving fast enough to trigger the kinetic barriers that had made the assassin's earlier salvo so impotent, but it was significantly more massive and had far more momentum than any of the rounds he had fired.
The blow sent the larger craft lurching backwards with an upwards tilt that brought the thrusters out of balance, which started to send the system into a spin – but the two objects hadn't separated yet, and the slight upward component of the X3M's velocity was quickly expended. This left gravity free to reassert its dominance, weighing down one side of the shuttle as it began to drop just as the pilot had began to cut power to the thrusters to compensate for the aforementioned imbalance and bring the spin back under control.
And then, both vehicles were going down. A crash shouldn't be inevitable – Shepard had left the skycar's mass effect core active to reduce the weight it could bring to bear and thus minimise the severity of any damage – but the owner was still locked out of the controls, which meant that the shuttle pilot was not free to fend for himself, and guiding his charge into a semi-controlled landing would be a time consuming task. Which left Thaddaeus free to continue the hunt.
"I wouldn't write me off just yet if I were you, Major."
"...Perhaps not. Service hatch to your right will let you down onto bridge. Streets mostly cleared, C-Sec setting up checkpoints. None separate you from target, but just a matter of time before area is locked down. Realised can't trust surveillance, will seal it then flood it with personnel."
"Then unless you want them to get custody of your evidence even after I've caught our killer, I suggest you start working on which strings you need to pull to have them let me go."
"Will consider."
Having found and made use of the hatch Kheldar indicated, Thaddaeus stepped through a doorway the salarian had unlocked for him in advance, and found himself two storeys above his prey, moving down one of many interweaving paths that linked up a series of ascending terraces lined with competing shops which acted as support for the next level up. For all his accumulated aches, Shepard could still run, if not necessarily at full tilt, which was more than could truthfully be said of the entity he pursued; a quick glance over the side offered him his first proper view of the quarian.
And she was a quarian: it was clear that there could be no subterfuge in that any more than her femininity. Whilst turians had a similar physiology with in terms of those distinctive leg joints, only a female of the species would have been able to don one of those masked hoods – moreover, no male turian was that slight. The species analysis was concluded as the human's keen gaze spotted the scattered trail of red she left behind her – the blood was about as distinct from a turian blue as it was possible to be. And whilst it ought to be relatively easy to pad a suit to alter the wearer's apparent build, there was no reason to pretend to be female: quarians were discriminated against as notorious vagrants regardless of their sex.
Setting his musings aside to watch for any sign of alarm from her and keep his footsteps silent, Shepard hastened to overtake the alien and cut her off from the nearest exit. He drew level, and readied his remaining pistol – and she froze. Over a split second the N7 reviewed the previous moments, wondering whether he or anyone else had made some sort of noise that could spook her, or whether she was just hearing things.
And then she looked right at him, and swiftly raised her weapon.
In one fluid motion, Shepard stowed his own sidearm and brought his empty hands up into her line of sight, holding them on display above his head. Her wounds were clearly getting to her, he realised: one hand nursed at her torso, fussing over a shredded, sparking pouch about the right size to hold a portable kinetic barrier generator, whilst her shoulders and by extension her pistol shook continuously.
"I wouldn't shoot if I were you," He called quietly, knowing that his voice would carry well enough in such deserted environs, but hoping to ensure that it didn't carry too well. "C-Sec doesn't know where we are, and I'm as eager to keep it that way as you, but the moment shots are fired they'll swarm us." The quarian didn't move other than to cock her head, apparently considering his words. After a moment, the human went on "I have no interest in hurting you. My employer wants me to bring you in alive, but if you give me your omnitool you can go." Another pause. The quarian set her shoulders, began to lower her weapon-
Raised it again and fired.
Thaddaeus cursed under his breath, paying the projectiles that came his way no heed as he vaulted the guard rail and dropped onto the next terrace down.
"Just can't take good advice..."
"I did injure her twice, and probably would have done so a third time." He conceded aloud, pulling his Karpov and reconfiguring his tactical cloak as he waited for the inevitable sounds of recommenced flight. "Of course, now I almost certainly will..." Heavy footsteps, not quite covered by the retorts of a pistol being fired as fast as its mechanism would allow, receded to the right, and the marine followed. That is, up to the point at which the panel on the door in front of him turned red and refused to open, just as he heard the one immediately below sigh to a close. "Might I suggest that this is an ill-considered moment for games?"
"Wasn't me. Working to-" The salarian's voice cut off into static. Jammed, probably – which in turn almost certainly meant C-Sec was right on top of him.
"Boring conversation anyway," Thaddaeus snarled as much to the salarian who could no longer hear him as himself, firing several quick rounds of his own into the panel situated next to the malfunctioning device and then using his omnitool to hijack the ruined circuit, powering the door and opening it just long enough for him to slip through before it short-circuited and sealed itself. The manoeuvre had given the quarian a couple of moments to make a head start, but moving was clearly such an effort that Shepard didn't expect her to have gained more than a couple of metres distance from him when he dropped from the second terrace, which would give her nowhere to hide-
Except that she wasn't trying. She was perched precariously on the top of the guard rail, pistol pressed firmly against the omnitool on her wrist with the obvious intention of keeping him at bay. He'd never had any intention of giving her to Kheldar intact, as that would render the omnitool data he would be able to control access to almost valueless as leverage, but if she fired, the data would be lost and he'd be unlikely to escape C-Sec's net twice, particularly not unaided. Without any time for surety on a level above instinct honed with years of experience, he fired twice.
BLAM – BLAM.
The first had been intended to knock the pistol from her hand, the second to cut through her knee in such a way as to bring her toppling forwards into his grasp for the execution. And yet, somewhere in the midst of the double retort, the sidearm going flying and a new wound opening up in one of her legs, a round smashed its way through the translucent glass concealing her face, snapped her head back as it tore a bloody path out of the back of her hood and sending her limp body toppling over the edge.
The penny dropped when Shepard picked out the echo of a far deeper detonation and ducked against the wall, an instant before the roar of thrusters surged to the forefront of his hearing and C-Sec made their move. Three shuttles soared into view and descended around him, swiftly disgorging their passengers before lifting off again, marksmen perched within open holds whilst long rifles protruded to seek their target.
The N7, however, had paid them no further heed other than to monitor their position as he activated his cloak and darted forwards, vaulted the rail to follow his target's corpse-
BLAM.
And felt the path the sniper's shot carved through the air at most a centimetre from his moving and essentially invisible torso, smashing through his kinetic barriers and adding the system's alarms to the cacophony in his ears. The assassin contorted his body in midair, instinctively trying to get as far from the projectile's path as he could in the instant it took for him to fall out of the line of fire and land awkwardly beside the body of the now permanently silenced murderer. A quick connection with her omnitool informed him that a data purge had been instigated remotely, and that it was moving too fast for him to be able to stop it before it ran to completion.
Thaddaeus suppressed the urge to curse again and yanked one of his long, thin blades from its sheath, before tearing into the fabric of the enviro suit to find the omnitool's hardware and quickly, crudely disconnecting the power supply from the data storage unit. The microcomputer's holographic readout went blank, the process halted, and he pocketed the salvaged tangle of components. Around him, the armed response teams were closing, realising that nothing had gotten past them and converging on the only point of interest in the area: the source of the previous shots, and the corpse. Then again, they might already be certain of his presence and aware of his cloaking device, operating under the direction of the unexpectedly lethal sniper.
Only one way to find out...
Shepard watched as the blue-armoured officers closed in to the point at which the slight field of distortion that concealed him would be visible to those who knew what to look for, and saw no hint of a reaction to his presence. That meant they weren't guided by the presumably far-off observer, which meant that entity wasn't associated with C-Sec, and had shot at both the predator and prey of the now concluded chase – a different party entirely, then. The fact that they refrained from shooting at the law enforcement implied a desire to keep their involvement hidden...
The assassin deactivated his cloak and stepped out away from the wall with his hands behind his head, aware of the remote possibility that it would be his last and most grievous mistake. He span to stare up across the terraces in search of the sniper, even as he complied with shouted demands to lay down his weapons, but nothing drew his gaze as he held up his hands to have them cuffed behind his back. Then, the enhanced optics of his recon hood picked up a flicker of movement, allowing his eyes to reinterpret a shadow that resolved itself into a dark silhouette against the stark white background.
A silhouette familiar in posture and build, akin to one he had seen before, a matter of minutes ago. A shape that recognisably became that of a turian male as it turned away, before the he lost sight of it with the forceful impact the stock of a rifle against his skull.
"Pay attention, human."
The blow had sent Shepard onto one knee, and he suppressed the urge to slam a kick into the turian behind him. "Reading my rights, officer? I'm surprised that the murder of an Ambassador warrants such strict observance of protocol." The alien laughed scornfully at that, as did his comrades.
"Murder? Spirits, you wish! But don't worry, incompetence is no defence in court."
That quieted the N7 for a while, as his attention retreated inward to ponder. If Udina was alive – and the guard at least had no reason to lie as he would clearly be delighted to use such an offence as an excuse for greater levels of brutality – and that meant Kheldar had been lying. No great revaluation of the spy was required, but the question of his motivation was one that needed to be answered. Was there a larger scheme, or was he living up to his reputation and seeking entertainment?
"Get that mask off him." The order snapped him back to the present as he was being walked towards one of the shuttles. If that many people saw his face, the data in his pocket and the saving of Ambassador Udina would both be pointless exercises. Neither Major he was working for would have the clout to keep all of C-Sec quiet, and it would be easy for the Council to crucify him in the court of public opinion with some circumstantial evidence loosely acquainted with the facts, making it all the easier for them to go on and finish him off in a more literal sense. For all Kheldar's talk of leverage, if Shepard ever felt the urge to renter the galactic community it would have to be carefully controlled, preferably with far more in the way of leverage, and entirely on his terms.
"You may just want to query that with your superiors, before you make a rash action that will cost you your career. Clearly it hasn't occurred to you that you might be talking to someone else who was occupied with the pursuit of Udina's would-be assassin, one of the people replacing the obviously minimalist uniformed security."
"Ignore him. He'd say anything to save his own skin." A thinner, less resonant voice instructed behind him, probably a salarian, certainly the ranking officer on the ground.
"And you wouldn't? Apparently not if you won't make one call to your CO to verify what I have to say – which is a poor decision on your part considering the consequences if it is true..." A frustrated sigh somewhere behind him prompted a triumphant smirk to flicker across his face beneath the Recon Hood, before the hands pulling him towards the shuttle stilled.
In spite of his general misgivings about Kheldar, Thaddaeus was certain of the outcome of the conversation that was being held somewhere out of earshot – the spy's reasons for keeping C-Sec out of the loop remained valid whatever his angle on the situation, with the death of the quarian the information stored on the hardware Shepard carried became every bit the leverage he had thought he needed to survive his nonexistent failure.
"...Alright, let him go." The officer behind him ordered sourly.
"Much obliged. Although really, you owe me thanks as well, don't you?" He grinned. Judging by the rough movements with which the bindings on his wrists were removed, his erstwhile captors didn't share his amusement. "Very well, I'll settle for my weapons." His pistol, rifle and knives restored to him, he didn't hesitate to stride off, retracing the quarian's route for a few seconds until he passed through the door and left behind those watchful eyes seething with resentment, at which point he ducked into a corner and reconnected to the comm. channel he and Kheldar had been sharing.
"Commander. Reports that the sniper lies dead, corpse desecrated and omnitool components missing. Take it you are responsible?"
"In part."
"Congratulations. I-"
"Your adulation can wait. We have a lot to talk about, preferably in person. Do you have a safe-house nearby?"
"Necessary?"
"I believe so. Someone else killed the quarian, and came rather close to killing me as well. They seemed content to watch me be taken into custody, but as a free man I'd rather stay out of the open for the foreseeable future."
"...Sending you coordinates now."
He took more than two hours to reach the safe-house on Aroch Ward, cloaking intermittently and taking long meandering swerves through the covered routes of the Presidium before he was sufficiently confident of his solitude to take one of the elevators offering pedestrians transit from the central ring to the mammoth station's five arms. Once on the Ward, in spite of its darker atmosphere and the relatively lower class of its occupants, he let himself relax slightly and take a more direct route to his destination, still avoiding wide open spaces or those overlooked by tall structures.
Officially, the property belonged to the Standard Trading Group, a multispecies independent body dedicated to ensuring economic equality in the galactic marketplace, an organisation that ironically enough was what the general public understood by the initials 'STG'. In actuality, it served as a secure location on the rare occasion that teams from the Special Tasks Group were required to operate on the Citadel, and on this particular occasion as Shepard's bolthole. Kheldar was waiting for him inside, without company – which was wise considering that the N7 was feeling especially wary of his supposed allies just then.
"What kept you?"
"Caution. You have some questions to answer before our business can be completed."
"Udina?"
"His survival seems a logical place to begin." Thaddaeus agreed.
"Motivational exercise. Easiest way to drive you was to give you nothing to lose and everything to gain. Intended to correct understanding of situation before you killed the assassin. No harm done as it turns out. Will admit derived some personal entertainment from deception, irrelevant to outcome – but important to enjoy one's work is it not?"
The spy's argument was not unreasonable: had he known that Udina's assassination had successfully been prevented, Shepard might well have calculated that the risks of hijacking a skycar to continue the chase exceeded the possible rewards – a not unreasonable position from his perspective, but one that did not hold true for Kheldar. As such, deceit was required to advance his agenda, something that the assassin understood perfectly – and since the outcome had left him at no real disadvantage there was no reason to pursue some sort of vendetta. Both things were, of course, subject to change.
"I suppose it is," He agreed with a cold little smile. "I can only hope to derive an equal measure of satisfaction from working with you someday. Now, onto more important matters." At last, he allowed his hand to swing loose from its position poised by his sidearm. "The quarian was killed by a sniper, apparently prompted by the likelihood that I was going to capture her. I presumably became a target due to my proximity to the data on her omnitool, most of which I recovered though some was in the process of being erased." He produced the prize with a flourish before throwing it to the Major, who snatched it out of the air with relative ease. "He didn't shoot at C-Sec, though, which left me inclined to believe that he wasn't with them, didn't want them to know he was there, and was content to see them take care of me."
"He?"
"I caught a glimpse. Male turian, maybe our latecomer to the inauguration. Could be an overzealous competitor from another organisation, could be the quarian's puppeteer, but I'd like to know which, on the grounds that he came within a centimetre of picking off a moving target that was to all intents and purposes invisible – which means besides being gifted, he knew what to look for."
"Where?"
"Twelve levels above the quarian's corpse, terrace one-two-seven." He reeled the numbers readily off his tongue: the part of his brain not occupied with not being followed had been looping those few instants of visual stimulus in his mind's eye over and over for the past two hours, occasionally cross-referencing with schematics found via his omnitool for the sake of surety. The salarian input the data into his own microcomputer with several rapid gestures and Shepard mentally prepared himself for the tedium of extensive surveillance footage analysis.
He was about to be disappointed.
Kheldar frowned, waved his hand in several rather more abrupt movements, then dismissed the holographic display with an aggravated hiss. "Footage gone. No trace of turian in apartments or on terraces within relevant time window. No traces of foreign code in system, either – culprit has utilized legitimate authorisation code for purposes of override."
"What sort of security clearance would that require?"
"One way or another must have accessed highest levels of Citadel governmental structure – Councillor's personal guard, perhaps a Spectre... no way to know whether external security breach, insider gone rogue or furthering Councillor's agenda, not without motive for actions."
"I think he was the quarian's backer, making sure to sever any threads leading to him."
"Basis?"
"She saw me when she shouldn't have. Simpler to have one person see through the cloaking mechanism than two."
"Weak, but worth consideration. With remaining data may be enough to cause progress... clear at least that humanity being targeted, unlikely to end here, certain to be collateral. Will keep you informed." The salarian dug into a pouch on his armour and handed the human a miniscule storage unit, holding up an identical one. "Twinned encryption unit, will allow for secure, untraceable communications, should I need favour."
"Or I."
"Pleasure working with you, Operative Thanatos."
"I look forward to that pleasure being mutual, Major Kheldar."
"Skycar on roof can be used to return to Alliance docking, recommend piloting from within this time."
"Your quarian has been identified as Taeva'Mir nar Hyrkan, with whom the Flotilla claims to have had no contact with since she left on her Pilgrimage six months ago." Hogan informed Thaddaeus, several hours later via a secure tightbeam channel to the assassin's shuttle. "It may well be true; forensic analysis indicates she is of the appropriate age, but with pre-existing anti-quarian sentiment and an absence of facts regarding this turian assassin we've little choice but to let them take the hit. It'll hardly affect them in any case, removed as they are."
"It's possible this serves our enemy's purposes." The marine observed. "The chances of the quarian making a clean getaway were always minimal; the Flotilla may have been as much a target as the Ambassador."
"Or the Fleet's absence of political connections may simply have left a young, easily manipulated individual seeming an easily disposable pawn. If the quarians have a share of our attacker's malicious intentions – and it must be a modest one by comparison – better they suffer than the Alliance: they at least have no real standing left to lose in the galactic community." The Major retorted. "Our focus needs to be on protecting our ties to the Council races and ensuring that the next attack fails."
"My next assignment, sir?"
"You're needed to deal with an unrelated matter. Operative Samael has been declared MIA; we have received a ransom note with proof of life and co-ordinates for an exchange. It is contingent upon the Alliance sending one representative only, and I need someone who can find out who we're dealing with and retrieve one of our most valuable assets at the same time."
Why ransom someone months after they have been taken?
"Offer Rawne my regards when you see him-" The hacker had said. Shepard had known he would regret cutting that sentence short.