A/N: As with the asari, the very nature of the Cerberus Files means some things are not touched on, while others are looked at in the filter of what is important to Cerberus. Any out of character notes will appear here. Just as with the asari, I've tried very hard to make the salarians more than cardboard cutouts. Just as asari are more than ass-shaking sex fantasies, salarians are more than for-the-evulz researcher types.

Albeit, not by much. :D

This concludes the salarian section, which was probably the hardest thing I've ever written. The Turians should be much, much easier by comparison, although the military section is going to be very, very long.

Salarian Social Interactions

Salarians stress efficiency and direct speech in their interactions with one another. Introductions are done quickly, conversations proceed rapidly, and logic usually trumps emotionalism.

Salarians love to argue and debate, but only when they can do so based on facts, not opinions. Shades of gray and the like bore them rapidly, as does 'small talk'. They dislike formalism in any fashion, and prefer organic free flowing talk.

The salarian love of order and the salarian dislike of symmetry results in a curious dichotomy in most interactions. Usually one party is 'senior' and the other is 'junior', even in a casual talk. The senior is expected to lead the conversation in terms of topic, and the junior to question and probe the senior's intentions.

Salarians love to try to interpret and predict the actions of others, especially other salarians, often playing a sort of verbal fencing game called thorus, or 'seek-thought'. Thorus is accomplished through subtle hints in otherwise straightforward statements.

Dalatrasses

The dalatrass is a position of power, regardless of social level. Even the poorest family mother of a small clan recently evolved from a yindo is given a great deal of respect from all salarians. The pressures and near constant political maneuvering required to lead a clan of any size is a challenge, one that males are more than happy not to have to deal with.

Due to both their upbringing and as a side effect of dealing with years of breeding heats, dalatrasses develop iron-like mental control and the ability to focus on what is truly important. Unfortunately, this ends up making them abrasive or domineering at best. They are incapable on some levels of truly seeing the importance of events beyond their own family's best interests.

A dalatrass relies heavily on both her brothers and sisters for advice and assistance, but her word is law and final when it comes to family affairs. The only time this is not true is when the dalatrass's actions would jeopardize a breeding cycle to such a degree that further cycles might not have enough impact to resolve the damage. In such cases she can be challenged by any fertile female in the clan for her role, a challenge decided in ancient fashion by male champions who fight with mêlée weapons.

Most dalatrasses are not physical, some becoming almost bloated with fat as they age. Many spend the bulk of their time resting when the events of the day are completed, sleeping more than twice as long as the average salarian.

Salarian Nobility

Salarian noble families are hard to compare to human, asari or turian nobility. They are nobles by dint of their blood relationship to the Six and to Shego, but also due to their prosperity and ability to adapt to changes. They are however, not treated significantly differently by society, and tend to see their nobility as more of an extended job title and burden than a reason for entitlement.

That being said, noble families share one trait with other noble types, and that is a more extensive level of inbreeding. The dalatrasses of these families must manage such carefully, to avoid recessive or unwatned traits, and also to avoid homogenization of their breeding stock and traits. A noble family that becomes too specialized can no longer command high breeding fees, which are a major source of income.

The Six Families and Salarian Society

By contrast, the members of the Six Families are seen by the average salarian as being to be avoided at all cost. They are, to the last, cunning, brutal, and merciless, and most salarians see them as both superior and dangerous.

The Six rarely interact with normal or even noble society, living in a mostly self-contained world. Only the newer blood leaves home in any numbers to mingle with others, and even then they are standoffish, coolly calculating figures.

A few salarians, like Mordin Solus, are more approachable, but that is more due to their rejection of salarian culture than anything else.

Aliens are not seen as below the Six, but are also not given much attention aside from threat analysis and a sneering sort of pity. The Six find most alien races all too easy to predict, manipulate and outmaneuver, with the exception of the asari matriarchy and elements of the Hanar Priesthood. They are particularly amused and derogatory towards turians and batarians, which they see as blood-thirsty animals ruled by emotion and tradition rather than logic.

The Six have an outsized impact on all aspects of the direction of salarian society, but they never touch anything directly, preferring to work through subtle influences, intermediaries, and popular culture. For a member of the Six to directly take a hand in day-to-day operations is almost unheard of, with the exception of the Solus dalatrass.

Breeding Priorities and Views

Salarians do not see eggs or even newts as 'people', but as resources. They have a cavalier view on life at the early stages that is partly due to the high mortality rates of eggs and hatchlings, and partly due to their lack of any meaningful ethical framework.

That being said, salarians are more likely to treat 'natural' eggs with a bit more respect than mass bred eggs from breeding projects. They focus their breeding tendencies on intelligence first, followed by reactions, health, and learning ability.

They see the reproductive systems of other races as terribly inefficient, although the ability of asari to directly control DNA output fascinates them and has been a source of more than one dark research project. The ability to directly tinker with the building blocks of life, rather than relying on retroviral therapy and nanotechnology, is the holy grail of salarian bio-science.

Salarian Foods and Drinks

Salarians still subsist primarily on fish, kelp, grains, and a type of legume. They eat meat sparingly, as their digestive systems are no longer capable of extracting the maximum nutritional value from it, and many poorer salarians subsist on vitamin fortified pastes and small amounts of self-caught fish.

Salarians employ a staggering array of spices, mostly from custom-bred kelp or coral farms, to liven up their foods. The most common food is sersan, a fish casserole with kelp wrappings on a bed of cooked grains. Another common food is bruel rolls, kelp-wrapped shredded squid-analogue with bean paste mixed in.

Salarians do not eat fruits, but make a selection of sweet wines and cordials from such, including several that are popular in turian markets. They delight in asari fish and seafood products, and are rapidly becoming addicted to human coffee and drell sarzhe, both strong stimulants.

Salarians often like odd food items as well. Batarian b'grha, a type of hot pepper, is popular as a snack. So is the human candy known as Pocky.

Salarians have an attraction towards krogan narcotic leaves, mostly smoked in slender cigars. They find human nicotine 'too strong' but a few salarians indulge anyway, mostly poorer classes.

Salarian Romance and Sexuality

Despite popular rumor, salarians are capable of expressing their sexuality, although this is rare. Salarian breeding instincts are mostly triggered by certain biochemicals produced by females during their heats.

What is not commonly known is that air filtration systems in salarian families can and do fail, exposing some males to such pheromones without an outlet for breeding. These salarians, frustrated by urges they have no outlets for, often end up experimenting with asari. The asari ability to share physical pleasures with their partners is often a sensation that is overwhelming for the highly tuned salarian nervous system, resulting in salarians indulging in such on a regular basis.

Salarian yindos are also a source of casual sexuality, with both males and females being driven to repeated sex by pheromones. These fade with time, as tolerances build up, but the duality of such relationships often result in relationships that are more dually balanced than the traditional dalatrass-breeder-elderboy structure of formal families.

Salarians are not by any means 'romantic' in terms of the human ideal of flirtation, but they are most definitely attracted to feats of prowess and daring, and many a lonely and uncertain female has dreams of some dashing STG type being her first partner. Salarians (both male and female) are avid consumers of pornography and lurid turian romantic dramas, a fact that surprises most people.

The primitive nature of salarian sex organs is often off-putting to non-asari sexual partners, making such pairings extremely rare. That being said, salarians can perform sex acts with humans, turians, and drell females with no issues aside from sanitary concerns with salarian females.

Salarian Literature

Given that Sur'kai is not a written language, most salarian literature is written in cant. Some cants are for fictional works, and others for nonfiction. The most popular genre in salarian literature is, unsurprisingly, speculative hard science fiction. The second is historical dramatic fiction, usually of the pre-Shego era.

The older root language, Kurki, did have a written form, and is used in much the same fashion as Latin is on Earth, in Wheel ceremonies and in scientific nomenclature. A few novelists have experimented in Kurki, as it has a wide array of concepts that neither Sur'kai nor cant embraces.

Many novels are interpretive visual works instead of traditional written interfaces, utilizing Sur'kai and an array of voice actors and limited haptic video to tell the tale. These often blur a line between traditional visual entertainment, art, and literature.

The only truly unique salarian genre is tu'thorsai, or "dancing-thought". It is a combination of mystery, logical puzzle, and choose-your-own-adventure novel, mixed with diluted Wheel mysticism. Often centering around events in salarian history, these encourage imaginary alternative history interpretations of events designed to invoke critical analysis of why things happened as they did, and if the people of that time took the best actions. Tu'thorsai is almost impenetrable for non-salarians to read – one asari described it as trying to understand six hundred years of history from nine words and a single question.

Transsalarian Issues

The salarian fascination with improving their bodies has led to some very unpleasant side effects. The first and most dire of these is that egg and newt mortality is increasing, from 35% to 40% in recent decades, and climbing at a tenth of a percent each year. Most of this is due to the complexity of the changes in salarian DNA reaching levels that spawn uncontrolled cancers, but some of it is due to the slow incorporation of asari DNA strands, which has lengthened lifespans but also destabilized the corrective mechanism of salarian reproduction.

Cancers and the like are on the upswing as well, among children and adults. The strong salarian immune system can suppress many of these for some time, but eventually the salarian equivalents to leukemia and lymphoma overwhelm even that defense. This strikes disproportionally at the poorer segments of salarian society, who don't have access to the medicines and viral therapy to fight such cancers.

The salarian improvement of reflexes and sensory abilities has cost them in more ways than one as well. They are far, far more vulnerable to the aspects of indoctrination, having very little ability to resist such. They also have poor reactions to some weapons that attack sense perceptions, such as flash-bangs and sonic grenades. The over-tuned nerves also can result in nervous salarians opening fire on seeming threats that are not actually a threat.

Salarian experimentation with developing their neural tissue to be able to understand hyper-dimensional physics is fraught with danger. Unlike the stronger minds of the Protheans and Inusannon, the salarians simply do not have enough mental stability to truly grasp the universe in such a fashion. Most of the loss from the project has come from salarians understanding the mind-breaking impossibilities involved and going quietly insane. Worse still, those who survive the process have even less moral concerns or empathy for life than regular salarians, and the power offered by the ability to tweak the laws of physics will lead them down paths better left unexplored. At least one salarian has already tried to play with superluminal manipulation and only succeeded in tearing himself and the entire research facility apart by inadvertently turning them all into dark matter.

Mystics

The ability of the mystic to see the future is partially based on the complexity of the salarian mind. Unconsciously, they can model multiple outcomes at once, in the rough manner of psycho-historical predictive analysis. The far-reaching salarian senses and a subconscious mind that can analyze the smallest details and extrapolate logical results aids in this.

But the true source of the mystics ability is a subtle adaptation programmed into them by the aliens who manipulated salarian development long ago. Much like the Protheans, the salarians who possess certain recessive traits can somehow see echoes of other possible time lines. They cannot visualize these ghostly images, but their minds put together the flashes they do receive and incorporate them into manifested visions.

The mystics have begun to see the coming Reaper invasion, which has driven many of the more perceptive to suicide or insanity, as the visions are even less clear than the mess of images from the Prothean Beacon. Those who have endured have tried to warn others that something bad is coming, but they have neither a time-line or a sense of scale of how bad is. At least a few alternative visions have revealed the Darkness to the mystics, resulting in those mystics completely losing their minds at the horror of what they beheld.

Salarians and Alien Races

Generally speaking, salarians see themselves as more evolved than other species, but not necessarily 'better'. They are dismissive of anything requiring more force than brains, and admire alien cultures that encompass any aspect of salarian thoughts.

Asari are seen as a natural counterpoint to their own kind, but many salarians find them tiresome and too fixated on social games and sexuality to be friends with. Asari are clever but not brilliant in the hard sciences, and their focus on social rather than informational manipulation is seen as useful but not elegant. On the other hand, salarians value the asari for being trustworthy, and their shared submission to females make them more familiar than other species. Asari and salarians will often share friendships that persist with one asari and a long series of salarian descendants, a trend they see as somehow comforting. Above all else, the salarians and asari both see themselves as two races against the galaxy, and only the asari have earned what passes for trust in salarian popular culture.

Salarians find turian focus on honor and tradition understandable but pointless. The old honor-based culture of salarian males still has a few echoes in modern society, enough to allow the salarians to comprehend the turian, but not enough to tolerate turian inflexibility or love of following orders without question. Turian reliability is seen as gullibility, and turian moral frameworks as hilariously hypocritical. The dismissive sexism turians show towards females is also off-putting. Salarians and turians work well together on an individual basis, but often clash on many fronts – turians are staid, salarians reactive; turians value directness, salarians love manipulation, so forth. This gives some of their interactions a duality that is often mocked in movies.

Batarians are seen as domineering and brutal thugs, but the hints of a deeper and richer culture under the Fist of Khar'shan are fascinating to some salarians. The artistic ability of batarian musicians and sculptors does draw the admiration of salarian artists, and the batarian's ruthless nature when it comes to research is refreshing to most salarians. Unfortunately, batarian views on females and their revolting sexual and moral framework is off-putting even to salarians, and their near worship of raw power is seen as childish. Very few batarians are close friends with salarians, and very few salarians want to be close friends with batarians.

The quarians irritate the salarians, because the two races are so similar. Like salarians, the quarians are naturally brilliant and innovative, and willing to risk anything in the furtherance of science. Like the salarians, they had a brutal brush with death at the hands of their own creations, and are survivors in the most ultimate expression. Most tellingly, the quarian form, especially the legs, is the closest to that of the salarians. The salarians dislike these comparisons because the quarians rely more on intuition than hard logic for their innovations, and the quarians stunning engineering prowess outstrips even the salarian ability. Many salarians privately wonder if the salarians had created the geth could they have survived the aftermath, and find themselves unsure of the answer, giving them a rare sense of inferiority. Given that the two races almost never interact, the rare meetings between the two usually devolve into angry bickering.

Salarians hae a complex relationship and view on the krogan. On the very surface, salarians are dismissive and scornful, calling the krogans stupid brutes who were the perfect tools. But salarian historical documents speak tellingly of the rich wisdom and insightful thoughts of the old krogan shamans and warleaders before the Rebellions, and how the krogan were making good progress at civilizing themselves until the rachni destroyed much of their elder culture and almost all of their calmer leaders. Salarians did not want to use the genophage, and resent deeply that they are blamed for the weapon when it was turians who launched it without permission. Salarians wish, secretly, that they could do the Uplift all over again, this time being more careful and cautious with how they treated the krogan. Of course, they would never admit this, and the more generations pass from the time of the rebellions the more scorn salarians feel towards the krogan.

Salarians see the volus as both dangerous and useful. They have, along with the asari, begun manipulating the little aliens to pull away from the turians, which would further cripple the Hierarchy and make them utterly dependent on salarian and asari financial aid. The volus' ability with money is a source of jealousy for some salarians, but their military developments, small scale as they are, lead the salarians to think they may be useful for more than business. Volus fear and greed are easy handles for salarians to manipulate, and the lack of any real intelligence organs in the Vol Protectorate makes penetration very easy. Volus are so submissive in most stances that salarians have no problems with them on a personal level.

For salarians,the hanar are confusing and irritating. The hanar focus on their Enkindler religion, their irritating humility, their rejection of science in the preference of faith, and their incessant moralism all rub salarians the wrong way. Their own far more successful uplift of the drell brings out jelous envy, while their more than capable intelligence services , bolstered by their drell servants, has thwarted STG attempts to determine what the Hanar have hidden away in their temples for centuries. The salarians have blocked hanar access to several critical galactic markets and poisoned the asari opinion on the aliens, but the hanar seem amused by such, as if that was expected and unimportant, a stance that only makes salarians more angry and unsure of themselves. Most of all, hanar disruption of research into Prothean ruins is seen as absolutely intolerable. The hanar's drifty, relaxed nature means few salarians will even converse with the floating aliens, much less pursue friendships.

The salarians dislike the drell for different reasons. The drell memory, superior to even salarians, is seen with an eye to perhaps obtaining the same, but the drell focus on mystical religious figures of supernatural origin makes the salarians sneer. Drell intelligence and espionage capability is a near match for the STG, a source of irritation, and the drell are capable of the same kind of focused analysis and planning as the salarians, making long term manipulation difficult. The salarians are researching Kepral's Syndrome as a possible lever to pry drell and hanar apart, but this is made difficult by the fatalistic outlook of many drell, who seem content to die in coughing heaps rather than seek an ally who's homeworld won't kill them.

Salarians find the elcor, with their slow, careful thoughts and almost fanatically pre-planning, more agreeable, if tiresomely ponderous to react. The salarian love of speed and reaction are obviously not big in elcor culture, and elcor scientists are more practical than experimental types, always grating on salarian views. The elcor disdain for espionage (their language does not even have words for spying or betrayal) is astonishing, and the elcor's focus on merely seeking contentment rather than some fixed goal of grand importance as laziness. That being said, elcor are so easy going that even salarians find them friendly and easy to talk to.

Salarians see the vorcha as someone's experiment with planarian worms gone wrong and think that a good orbital bombardment or two would clean up the entire mess, one of the few times where the salarian answer to a question doesn't involve manipulation. Vorcha are too stupid and violent to even understand salarian intentions, too violent to be useful in operations, and live even less time than salarians, giving them a rare insight into how longer lived races view them. The vorcha only respect raw might, something salarians find distasteful at best, and seeing as the term 'vorcha scientist' is usually a joke involving someone mixing chemicals they should not have, salarians have a dim view on the race as a whole.

Finally, salarians see humans as extremely dangerous. They find many figures in human history, particularly Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Ardiente, to be almost salarian in outlook. Humans have shown ruthlessness, drive, energy and flexibility, all salarian values. But human moral and ethical frameworks are maddening to salarian values, and the sexual focus of humans is almost as bad as the asari's. Humanity's tendency towards suspicion and their own powerful intelligence organs draw some level approval from salarians, but they value force and power too much for any true partnerships to form in most cases.

Up Next: the Turians, and the Transitional Story Piece

Pel leaned back in the long couch, smiling his thanks at the Illusive Man for the cigarette as he lit it, exhaling with a sigh of pleasure. The form-fitting Cerberus armor he wore highlighted his barrel chest, chiseled abs and powerful arms, and he noted with an internal smirk that both Lawson and Cannin had been eying him up since he'd arrived.

Look all you like, ladies. But I wouldn't touch either of you skanks with a ten foot pole.

Dr. Minsta sat on the far end of the couch, muttering to himself as he went over something on his info-pad. The man's normally neat appearance was a bit ramshackle, the frenetic doctor more absorbed than usual in his work.

The Illusive Man ignited his own cigarette, and sent a stream of smoke into the air. His pale white suit was offset by a dark black shirt with diamond cufflinks, and the white slacks met a pair of silver-tipped pale white boots. As usual, Rachel Florez stood at the doorway, leaning against it casually, her own armor gleaming dimly as she examined her fingernails.

Richard Williams stood, towering over everyone, his cold features motionless as he glanced about. The dark black suit he wore only emphasized his gigantic, superhuman frame, and Pel idly wondered how much of the man was man and how much was machine. Half? Seventy five percent? More?

Gotta be some kind of nutjob to go past fifty percent. Who wants to live with no dick and needing to bathe in WD-40 for the rest of your life?

With a quiet click, the door across the briefing room opened, revealing the form of Matriarch Trellani. She wore a long black dress with a gray and orange shawl over it – Cerberus colors, along with tiny Cerberus pin on her collar.

She's got guts if she wore that shit in salarian space. Then again, she's an alien who joined the Dog. Bitch has balls of iron for that alone.

She gazed around the room a moment, her face set in a gentle smile. Pel couldn't help but compare her figure to that of Lawson, and found it funny at the look on the human agent's face, one that was all jealousy. Trellani ignored her, and bowed her head to the Illusive Man, whose expression never flickered.

"Matriarch Trellani. I trust your trip ended safely?"

She gave a shallow movement, the asari version of a shrug, the motions slightly wrong in Pel's eyes. "I am unharmed, if that is what you are asking. More inept assassins from the Matriarchy, nothing I was unable to handle."

He nodded, tapping his ashes into the ashtray set in the arm of the chair. "Excellent. No doubt you've all seen the trideo reports about the events on Therum. Shepard was able to rescue Liara T'Soni from geth forces, and my primary question is : why?"

Trellani shrugged. "Liara is … well, a figure of no import. A shy little wretch, pureblood trash born to two matriarchs who thought a love child would heal a breach a thousand years old. She's been fumbling about for decades now, digging after the Protheans."

Richard Williams raised an eyebrow. "That is of concern, given what Saren's objectives are supposed to include. The question is, how important is she? We could obtain her from Shepard's ship with ease."

The Illusive Man shook his head. "I'd prefer not to derail Shepard just yet. Until we are sure of Saren's motives, an ace in the hole is of considerable value. And if we plan to recruit Shepard, attacking her for the asari girl seems counterproductive."

Pel tuned out the discussion, not even sure why he'd been summoned. They argued and talked about it for a good ten minutes before finally deciding to do nothing at all. In Pel's eyes, the answer was simple. Saren was a turian, you played along with his crazy ass until he lead you to how he managed to control the geth. Then you sold him out to Shepard. Bam. Humanity gets respect, the Dog gets control of the geth, and a turian gets his head blown off.

Of course, no one asked him. He was on the verge of actually dozing off when the voice of Trellani drew him back into focus.

"And the little research project you have going? I see both Mr. Pel and Dr. Minsta are here, so I presume you called me in regards to that?"

It was Florez who spoke, her mouth twisting into that smirk that always made her face go from icy to kinda hot looking. "Indeed, Matriarch. Your impressive results in salarian space have overcome my doubts about the usefulness of a grand tour of the aliens we contend with. Our next target is the Turian Hierarchy."

Trellani smiled. "A good goal, but I am not very familiar with the turians. I have made a few trips into turian space, but nothing like my centuries of dealings with the salarians. A pity we don't have a turian specialist in the ranks of Cerberus."

Pel felt his stomach sink, even as the Illusive Man gave a smile and puffed on his cigarette.

"As it happens, we do. Before he decided to work with Cerberus, Agent Pel was a Systems Alliance Marine working closely with Janus on Project Handshake, the SA effort to heal the breach caused by the First Contact War. He spent eight years in the Hierarchy, and has contacts throughout it's space. I believe he even speaks several turian dialects."

Pel grimaced. "With all due respect, bossman, that was a decade ago. Most of my knowledge is way out of date, most of my contacts have moved on, and I don't know shit about the kinda stuff that goes into these reports."

The Illusive Man tilted his head. "Pel, I am aware you are not a trained psycho-historian like Dr. Minsta, nor a .. renaissance lady like our fair Matriarch here." Trellani gave a trill of laughter, while Minsta scowled and adjusted his glasses. "But you have three things that make your particular skill set vital."

He lifted his cigarette. "First, you know the area better than any other Cerberus operative. Minsta spent time in asari space with his work with the University of Serrice, and the Matriarch spent many years living in salarian territory. You are the natural fit for an excursion into the turian territories."

"Second, you are a very dangerous man. I don't need to send an entire Centurion unit with you, attracting unwanted attention and leaving a trail a mile wide. You're known, trusted by the turians, and capable of holding your own. With the … chaos occurring in the galaxy now, we are trying to keep as many resources close to home as we can."

He smiled. "Finally, Pel, you are wasted as a clean up man for fixing Kai Leng or Richard's little fuckups." The hulking form of the Shadow Hand shifted as he grimaced, but the Illusive Man continued. "For this assignment I plan to pair you with the Matriarch, to see if her charm and your own ability to … persuade others … will lead to insights as critical as your work with the salarians did."

Pel sighed. "You're in charge, bossman. But I can't promise the blue won't get cacked if the Blackwatch sniffs us out."

Trellani gave him an amused look. "I assure you, I am not a defenseless maiden." She tapped a long elegant fingernail on the form of her warp-sword, belted at her side. "Besides, turians are hidebound creatures of habit, and who would expect an asari to be working for Cerberus?"

Pel shrugged. She was wrong about the turians – spikes had a stick up the ass, but they were neither gullible nor easily fooled, with their ability to pick up on human lies by hearing and smell alone. But this wasn't the place to argue with her.

"I need a day or two to get in contact with some people. Captain Theo Pellam has been dead in the SA records for ten years, resurrecting myself will need a little hacking and some greased palms."

The Illusive Man nodded. "Send me the bills, Pel. Rachel, can you put together appropriate transport?"

The Iron General tapped her chin thoughtfully. "That depends on the requirements for the mission. Do you have a preference, Pel?"

The heavyset man blinked, and took a puff of his own cigarette, thinking. "Light transport. NO guns, the turians tend to overlook unarmed ships but anything with even a peashooter gets a look-see. Make it comfy – staying in turian hotels is a pain because the stupid spikes can't figure out how to make a toilet for human OR asari asses. Make sure I have at least two shuttles, and a selection of transponders."

She nodded. "No ship armaments...will you need personal equipment?"

Pel snorted. "I'll take a few of my boys, independents with no connection to the Dog. I can put together some weapons and armor that don't scream 'Cerberus is here' on my own. The whole trip should take at least a couple of weeks if we do it right, so just make sure the transport has a kitchen. If I can, I would prefer to avoid Palaven, goddamn place is a radioactive shithole, but if we can't we'll need some kit for that."

Florez nodded a second time. "I'll get some exposure suits and anti-rad drugs for you, just in case."

She left the room, off to get things moving, and Pel glanced over to Doctor Minsta."If I need to send some spikes your way for T&I, can you handle it from Minuteman, or do you need to come along?"

The doctor sniffed. "I would prefer to handle such actions in a secure location. Field interrogation is messy and, after the salarian mess, I shudder to think how hard turian blood is to get out of the field armor."

Pel stood. "Alright, then, bossman. I'll be ready to go ASAP, I'll OT you when I got my people in position. Until then, I'm off to finish my drinking." He put out his smoke and left the room, and Trellani glanced over at Harper, waiting until the door shut before speaking.

"Are you sure this is wise? He is hardly subtle, unlike Agents Lawson and Cannin."

The Illusive Man stubbed out his cigarette. "He is a very reliable agent, and more intelligent and subtle than he lets on at first glance. He has a number of rough edges, but they will only cut the enemy. Is there anything you can think of that will be required for this trip that he didn't mention?"

Trellani sighed. "Any turian dictionaries and historical documents we can lay hands on, and an up-to-date translation suite that can handle both text and graphical information." She folded her arms, giving him a cool glance. "And a few days to recover from my last trip would be appreciated."

He looked up. "You have two days. Time, sadly, is of the essence. Your trip may find information on Saren we need to make some critical decisions regarding sharing certain .. information with him."