A/N: If you aren't familiar with Pel, he's a Cerberus wet-work type that appears in the books. If you are familiar with him, you will of course note that he does not match up with the depiction in the books. Pel was boring in those books.
The Dog is a colloquialism used by Cerberus forces to refer to Cerberus. 'Gray' and 'LGM' are slang terms for salarians.
The Cerberus Files: Historical Analysis of Citadel and Terminus Space
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MARS-ZERO-FIVE-EIGHT
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LIMIT TRANSMISSION: ILLUSIVE MAN
Pel here, bossman.
I got no idea what goes on in that head of yours, y'know? You put together crazy plans that have nine thousand moving bits and sixty ways to go wrong and, bam, shit works. Guess that's why you get the big bucks and bang the models while I sift through the shit and put big holes in people's heads.
Most times, your shit works. That lunatic job on Viridian? Worked, to my great shock. Going after the ever-fucking Pope? Wow. Still can't believe we pulled that off. Taking down an asari matriarch in her own estates? Crazy, but doable. So I don't usually complain about your whack-ass schemes.
Still, gotta admit...this last stunt? I don't need more gray hair, bossman. Taking down an entire STG cell was Not Fucking Fun. We lost nineteen men, and I don't think Daniels, Fitzpatrick or Norae are gonna make it through the night.
Johns and Muchalihe are in one piece, but they're so shot up that moving them is going to be problematic. I'll put 'em down before I split, I doubt this lily-livered prick of a doctor you got for the interrogation would bother to do it clean. Probably want to 'experiment' a little first. Sick bastard.
We really need to kick these Shadow Cell fuckers out of the Dog, bossman. When someone like me starts having, what's the word, uh, ethical concerns? You have problems.
Anyway.
We snagged two of the STG fuckers alive, and a random selection of other Grays. Bastards are right squrimy to pin down, and I don't give two shits what your blue says, they fight like a ball of razor wire when you back 'em into a corner. The interrogation was messy – what in fuck's name bleeds green – but told us a lot we don't know.
What we found was …
Huh. My omni-tool's editor recommends I use the word 'enlightening'. Ain't nothing light about the shit we dug out of the Grays, bossman. You probably want a drink for this. Scratch that. You definitely want a drink for this shit. I didn't copy the cyberfreak or the Iron Nutjob because, a) I don't trust 'em as far as I can throw a krogan and b) so I can insult them in my report.
Maybe I'll send you a cleaned up copy with right proper English and all that after I've had a good drink or twelve. Maybe not. You pay me to shoot shit, not write reports.
I'd have let the doc write up the report, but he's too goddamn busy testing his whack-ass theories about the Grays' nerves or some shit to do more than drop off his findings. Sides, I never get to make these fancy ass reports. Might as well enjoy myself before you send me off to kidnap the goddamned Primarch or something else likely to get me killed.
I'll try to get through this quick, so I can shower this green shit off my armor. It's like pulping an avocado.
Cerberus Thought of the Day : A coward hesitates, a hero acts. A man chooses, a slave obeys. A human fights, an alien betrays.
Salarians are hard as nails
Trellly says salarians aren't hard. Trelly, bossman, is either so badass that they aren't hard to her, or she's full of shit.
So we got us two hardcore STG and five civvies. First thing I get straight off the bat is all but one of 'em are talking shit. I don't mean trying to play tough, either. They are seriously hardcore not spilling their guts and daring us to torture them.
I've seen some hard characters, bossman. Turian types who'd laugh at you as you pulled their guts out. Krogan who wouldn't break even if you set them on fire. Hard-ass asari bitches who acted like they were watching Fleet and Flotilla while you peeled 'em like an apple.
But even those types scream like little girls when you put the zatharopine into 'em. I ain't never seen no one shrug off sixteen grams of pain amplification drugs and laugh when we start gouging out eyes. The fourth civvie – some kinda banking type – looked soft as ice cream. We had to break every damn bone in his body and peel off half his skin and muscle to even get the bastard to scream.
Minsta thinks they can cut their pain … what's the word? Receptors? Pain nerves off. They got no sense of self-preservation, bossman. None. You can forget any idea you got about extracting much hard intel from most of them using torture. The civvies would rather die than sell out their family, and the STG guys gave us fucking suggestions.
Salarians are bent as fuck
When torture did jack shit all, we shifted to truth drugs. One of the civvies popped his clogs at that point, bubbling up green shit outta his mouth, and Minsta had to adjust the dosage and something about the acidity.
Scientists. The bastard probably did that on purpose to scare 'em.
Took about twice the amount that would have a human singing like a canary, but eventually they opened up. The civvies gave us some basic info – mostly incomprehensible babble about family shindigs and who was gonna get to breed. Boring. Got some other stuff, talk about that later on.
The two STG types though, spilled a lot of info. Most of it made me wanna lose my lunch. They'd give that crazy Rasa bitch nightmares.
The STG will go off and cack anybody the big-shot Six Family types feel is a threat to the Union, at the drop of a hat. Makes our Commissars look like Mr. Rogers, I tell ya. And this isn't a rare thing either, they do it regular-like. Wiped out whole families, from what I hear. All that bullshit Trelly is singing about the salarians working together – ain't seeing it. You mess up with the Six Families, they put you in the ground.
They told us about some of the experiments the STG monitors for the dalatrasses, too. They got some kind of big breeding world out on the Traverse Rim. Thousands of Grays with tons of genetic work, doing nothing but popping eggs and fucking, 24/7. Tens of millions of eggs. They experiment on 'em, work the DNA, breed up a new generation.
About half the STG is these custom-bred assholes. STG uses hypnosis and drugs to give 'em a fake background, fake family life. Disposables, they're called. Explains how the bastards have the manpower to be everywhere at once.
They also got projects working on their lifespan. Your asari broad is dead on when she talks about 'em kidnapping asari and cuttin' on 'em to figure out how they live so long. They're still doing it, just kidnapping them from batarian slave camps or out on the Traverse now. Ain't much that can make me get all upset anymore, but melting people down for life extension drugs is pretty damned cold.
People give the Dog a bad name, but you don't see us doing no shit like that. Hypocritical bastards.
Salarians are working on something called the Alteration Framework
One of these civvies was some kinda scientist fuck from the Reach Research place Trelly keeps babbling on about. (Thanks for letting me read those reports by the way, bossman. She's a bit posh at times but she's funny as hell.)
Her info on them having some kinda disease to keep people out is accurate. Crazy Grays. Only fucking aliens would infect their own people with a lethal disease to stop spies. He started showing effects pretty quick, too. Yet another reason I'm glad we do this sort of shit in full environmental armor.
The big deal they're working on there, and in a bunch of other places, is something crazy called the Alteration Framework. You know that big talking plant on Feros, the one ExoGeni is working? The Grays got one on Makana. Good luck getting to it, the entire system sounds like a fucking deathtrap. They're doing work in other places too – some on Mannovai. Some on Noveria. Some on Ilium.
Anyway, this plant, whachacallit, Thorian, is givin' the Grays tips on how to make themselves smarter. It's not an easy thing, buncha weird surgery and some kind of cyberware that uses organic compounds. Minsta has the tech babble around it. Long story short, this stuff allows them to understand a new form of math. From what we could understand from the civvie, the math is letting them improve their FTL and mass drives. It lets them shape the mass field as they are moving, which is complete bullshit. I ain't got no PHD but even I know that's like turning a pop fly into a line drive after you hit the fucking ball.
The changes, whatever they are, have to be done after the salarian is born, and a bunch of them die as a result of all the surgeries and gene mods and whatnot. That's another reason why they got that sick ass breeding farm out in the Traverse, they're going through about five or six hundred a week. A week, bossman.
I'll never insult Doc Walker and his crazy ass experiments again. I mean, the very worst shit we've done is the project on poison, and that only killed off about a thousand aliens. These assholes have been at this for five years! That's what...
...damn omni doesn't have a calculator. Cheap piece of shit. Pen and paper says about a hundred and fifty thousand dead Grays. These people are fucked up, bossman. Very.
Salarians are breeding up super soldiers
The doc managed to get another one of the civvies to talk. That one worked for their defense ministry, which doesn't actually run the military, go figure. It just provides logistics and support.
Anyway, the Gray told us he knew about another breeding project, this one run by the Solus. They're doing improvements on reactions and the ability for the Grays to handle cyberware. Been at it for years, and when they figure out a way to make 'em faster or stronger, they sell the information off on the breeding market. That's the real reason why the Solus are so rich, according to him.
I don't have a problem with biowork. It's meddling with God's work, but I figure if He didn't want us doing it we wouldn't be able to. But the LGM's have taken it a lot farther than that. They've started breeding some salarians to be born designed for cyberware. Expanded nerves and shit bred to work better with cyber. Poor bastards are born without arms and legs, and from day one they're gonna end up slotted in a Shieldbreaker suit. Right out of the bat.
From what the civvie told us, this shit has gone on for a while, but they're taking it out a whole new door now. Some of that new turian hyper-printing stuff, the 3D printers they run through superluminal travel to speed up the effects? They're using that to run hundreds of generations of changes through the ringer at once.
According to this guy, average salarian soldier that uses these gene mods will be able to run at thirty miles an hour and dodge subsonic rounds based on reflexes alone in a few years. That ain't natural. Plus, they're trying to cook up some kind of regeneration in their soldiers, too. As if we needed more goddamned wannabe krogan.
Salarian military is not unified
The same civvie told us that their military is spending most of it's time fighting each other. Not literally, but over the direction it should be going in.
Half of 'em, from the War Clans, want bigger ships, more ships, more guns. Sounds like any other navy if you ask me. If I have to listen to Florez go on and on bout how Cerberus needs a dreadnaught (and just how the fuck would we hide that?) I'll slap the bitch myself. Hardly surprising the Grays think the same way.
But the other half is fixed - mostly Solus types, but also a few STG - on pushing the tech limit on their ships. They want damage control five times greater than what they have now, and most of it based on honeycombing rather than preventing hull breaches. They want mag-shields, which is kinda stupid. They want fire control systems that use superluminal sensors, faster speed, and to replace ALL of the computer elements in their command and control systems with optoelectronic or even biological computer systems.
The civvie says it's due to some kind of info they got from the Wheel Mystics. No details, but I got together with General Petrovsky about what it means.
He says the only reason you'd load a ship with magshields rather than kinetics is if you were expecting a physical attack. Big railgun impacts, maybe. By big I mean hundreds or thousands of kilos of material. Mass accelerator slugs are not big enough to be affected. The damage control stuff would only make sense if you expected heavy explosive impacts on your ships, or weapons that could go right through armor. The fire control would only be useful if you shifted your primary weapons to big torpedo salvos. The only thing he could figure out about the computer stuff is they were worried about cyberwarfare, but shit, who is gonna out-hack salarians? Geth?
Mm. Maybe it's geth they're worried about, you think?
Anyway, bottom line is the two camps are in each others shit, and it's turning nasty. The army is staying out of it so far, and STG is starting to take the side of the ones going for bigger guns and ships, so we don't know how it will end up. Might be worth sending in a cell for a look-see, as long as I am not in the lineup.
Salarian Guilds are fighting each other
One of the civvies worked with the guilds. Gotta admit, the stuff he described was pretty screwy. The guilds are having a big tiff because there's only so much business available, and the Service Guilds don't want to keep giving knobjobs to the bigshots just to get their slice of the pie.
The Craft Guilds, on the other hand, are willing to take a loss to drive their competition out of business. It's gotten physical a few times. Bombings and such. A lot of it gets laid on gangs or petty criminals, but it's actually the Guilds going at each other with intent to kill.
Normally I wouldn't give a flip about if Bobby's Hot Dog stand is in a price war with Tony's Burgers, ya know? But the weird part is that the STG is involved in this little fracas. The civvie thinks they're stirring shit up on purpose, trying to flush out some kind of industrial spies or some such.
My first question, bossman, is who in the blue hell spies on the goddamned Grays without getting caught and turned into a modern art exhibit?
My second question, after listening to him babble some more, is who the fuck would spy on the guilds doing work on colony ships and life-support equipment, or on salarian clothing manufacturers? And what makes that important enough not only for people to kill over, but for the STG to be involved?
Nothing adds up. And as my old gunny in the Corps used to say, shit that don't add up equals trouble.
Salarians are fighting the Shadow Broker
The two STG types required even more serum than the civvies, and once we got past the easy stuff, they knew less than I expected. There's a lot of 'need to know' goin' on in the STG, and most of 'em don't need to know.
One thing that stood out is that the only reason our plan worked is that they were expecting the Broker to jump them, not us. (More on them expecting anything at all later on. Creepy shit.) STG has been in some kind of little dust-up with the Broker for about six months now, something to do with their breeding projects and his trying to find out what is going down at Makana.
Broker had the same idea we did, seems. Few weeks back two entire STG cells disappeared entirely. Found the ship stripped on Korlus, found the bodies a week later on fucking Omega of all places.
The Broker is not our biggest fan, I know, but if what Trelly and these pukes are both telling us is right, maybe we'd better bury that hatchet and do something about the Grays right quick, bossman. I know the Shadow Hand has some kind of ax to grind with him...but that dude hates everybody, including kittens and Princess Amanda Windsor. As I said before, bossman, getting the Shadow Cell and Mr. Roboto out of Cerberus before he gets us attacked by everyone from the Consort to Blasto the Spectre can't happen fast enough.
I don't have much more on why the STG is fighting the Broker. Neither of the two we captured had specifics on the situation, but they both knew the orders to kill on sight any Broker agents came down from the very top, the STG Master. They seemed to see that as very unusual, almost scary. From what they said orders didn't come from on high like that very often, much less for all the STG to be rounded up and given briefings on Cerberus and the order given in person.
One last juicy tidbit. The second STG puke also claimed that up until about sixty years ago, the Broker had been a salarian, and was taking orders from the Dalatrasses. Then something happened and all communications were cut. That's the first proof we've ever had that the Broker is a single dude and not a committee of goddamned asari or hanar or fucking undead Protheans.
Salarians really, really don't like the Dog
Trelly wasn't lying when she said that Solus bitch had a hardon for us, bossman. The STG said her estimates of what they had coming at us were way off, though. It's not a cell. It's not a division. It's FIVE fucking divisions, over three hundred STG agents, plus six salarian Spectres and a super-secret division of the Union military.
If what I got told was correct, they don't know much about how we're organized. They think our primary backers are big-name rich people like the Windsors or the Chu. They do know Cord-Hislop is involved, but only on a outside basis – all those applications you keep getting for salarian programmers are STG, every last one of 'em.
What was surprising is they knew the identity of several of our agents and some of our researchers. They knew about crazy-ass Kai Leng, they knew about Doc Walker, they knew about Agent Rasa. They knew about Saracino and they had some images, blurry, of the Shadow Hand. They knew who I was, too.
Worst of all? They got their hands on some of the docs that got away at Project Zeus. They know about Subject Zero. One of our docs is in their hands, working on their biotic projects. Fucking traitor. He's out on Mannovai, if you want him rubbed out. Send Kai Leng. Maybe the stupid bastard will get killed.
STG have kill on sight orders for all of us. That kinda limits our ability to move around in STG space, so it's a good thing we didn't send Minsta in with a Centurion team. They didn't seem to know Trellani was Cerberus, but they still want to capture her for the Asari Bitchocracy, so that's no good either.
Salarian Mystics are fucking strange
Since you wanted more info, we asked all of the captives about the mystics. We didn't get a lot of answers that made sense. What we got sounded like someone watched too much fucking Minority Report while high on weed.
Mystics, if what the Grays said is legit, really can see the future. At least some of it. The fight we had was so nasty because the STG unit knew someone was going to jump them. I can't tell you how creepy that is. They even know when we'd be coming. They didn't know it would be Cerberus, but that doesn't matter much. If you can predict when shit is going to hit the fan, that gives you a pretty heavy advantage.
Mystics are definitely involved in the STG. There's a religious vibe to the whole Wheel stuff, but there's also a real weird sort of … I dunno. The civvies acted like the Wheel dudes were acting stranger and weirder than usual. A bunch of them had committed suicide recently, and some had gone crazy. More and more of them were preaching that dark times were coming, and the STG was listening.
The mystics are the ones behind pushing for the Dalatrasses to make nice with everybody, and urging the other races to start singing kumbaya. They're also behind the push for the navy to invest in those weird changes to their ship layouts and technology. They're not saying why, exactly, but it don't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when people who've seen the future are cacking themselves and screaming that everyone needs to stand together, bad shit is on the way.
One of the STG types said he'd talked to a mystic, who told him that a 'darkness' was coming, one that would end up destroying most of galactic life. That it wouldn't be something you could fight, that a single person – a human, bossman – would end up determining if shit went to hell or we made it out alive. The STG has been going crazy trying to figure out who it could be.
Bossman, right now, their leading suspect is you. Don't let it go to your head.
That's all I've got. We're gonna ditch the corpses into a cargo container and ship 'em to Beltras, then split the vicinity before anyone comes looking. If you want, we can swing by and pick up Lawson. Having her fine ass aboard on the trip back to Minuteman would at least give me something to look at besides Minsta's depressing face.
I'll send two of my less shot-up guys to make sure your blue is gonna be alright. The STG didn't have orders to look for her, so if she's got a tail it's not a full cell, at least.
You know my TTG code if you need a skull ventilated, bossman. If not, I'll be station-side in four days. Have my money ready, please, as after this bullshit assignment I am going to get drunk and hire a dozen call girls to try to forget the shit I just saw.