Omega more than lived up to its reputation. As Ashley walked through the station, the acrid stench of uncollected garbage and poorly-ventilated emissions filled her nose even as the squalid chaos of its streets assaulted her eyes. As bad as the place was usually supposed to be, it was clear that the end of the war had made it even worse. Refugees from a double dozen systems had flocked there, and the streets were filled with the poor and desperate, along with those who would prey on them, all blended together into a noisy chaos.
Her dark blue armor and prominently displayed assault rifle worked well enough to discourage the second group, and Ashley was able to make her way to her destination without too much trouble. Unfortunately, Liara didn't have many resources here. Aria had enjoyed only mixed success in rooting out the Broker's agents, but Cerberus during their recent occupation had been much more thorough. Liara had been left with few operatives and no time to rebuild this particular network, which meant Ashley would need to find another source of information on Sha'ira's missing ship and she only knew one place to start.
As the throbbing music of Afterlife filled the Spectre's ears, her gaze was drawn to the asari gyrating on the stages above the dance floor, a pretty purple-skinned maiden with dark eyes and very few clothes. It was almost a cliché, the asari stripper, and one that she was ashamed to admit to herself had influenced a naïve, slightly xenophobic gunnery sergeant. God, she'd been so stupid. Certainly, the shy, brilliant archeologist her commander had come to love was a very different sort of asari, and so too was Sha'ira. Ashley still didn't fully understand quite what it was that the Consort did, but she knew it was far more than the sordid exchange of money for sex.
She should never have suggested otherwise and the memory of their last fight left a knot in the Spectre's stomach as she reached the stairs at the back of the club that led up to Aria T'Loak's office. A grizzled batarian blocked her path, the alien's four eyes narrowing at her. "What do you want?", he grunted, looking questioningly at her rifle and high grade combat armor.
She met his gaze without flinching. This was probably Bray. A tough soldier, but not unreasonable if the reports Shepard had filled on Aria and her people were to be believed. "I need to see Aria. It's urgent."
"And you are?"
"Lt. Commander Ashley Williams, Special Tactics and Recon."
She'd hoped her rank would impress him, but instead it drew a response from the top of the staircase. "Send her up," came from above, and at the sound of his mistresses' voice, the batarian stepped aside, allowing Ashley to enter the Queen of Omega's office. Its self-appointed ruler sat on her famous couch while a couple of turian bodyguards stood at attention on the sides of the room, rifles in their hands.
"Ashley Williams," Aria said, regarding the Spectre with an arrogant stare. "What brings a good little girl like you to my sordid corner of the galaxy?"
She didn't take the bait, staying focused on her mission. "I need your help finding someone."
"And what do I look like, a detective agency? I have plenty of my own problems to deal with right now, as I'm sure you can see from the mess outside."
"Wouldn't you like the Council to owe you a favor?", Ashley asked.
"The Council had little enough pull here before the Reapers came," the old asari replied. "Now, they have next to nothing. Those fools didn't even make it off the Citadel from what I hear, and by the time their replacements get picked, I doubt helping out the Terminus is going to be high on their list of priorities."
Ashley bit the inside of her cheek. Aria was right, and while the asari wasn't the only source of information on Omega, she was probably the best, and the only one the Spectre knew. Every minute she wasted, Sha'ira's trail grew colder and the Spectre couldn't afford that. Swallowing her pride, she tried something else. "Don't do it for them then. Do it for Shepard. She helped you take back this station. You owe her one." She hated leaning on her commander's reputation, wanting to be taken seriously as a Spectre in her own right, but she was short on options right now.
The commander's name, unfortunately, didn't have the magical effect Ash had hoped for. "My recollection," Aria replied coldly, "Is that I paid that debt with the mercenaries, ships, and eezo I sent to help her war effort."
"Our war effort," Ashley snapped back, running out of patience. "You needed the Reapers destroyed as much as she did. Nobody needs you back running this place except you. Besides," she added, thinking of the story Shepard had told her of the final battle against Petrovsky, when Aria had gotten herself caught in the general's trap, "She saved your life. Doesn't that count for something?"
For an instant, Aria paused and then an amused smile started to spread across her face. "All right," she said, "You've made your point. Just who is it that you want found badly enough to call in your bosses' marker?"
"The Consort," Ashley told her, hoping she could keep the depths of her relief from showing on her face. "She came here on a Blood Pack ship called the Attitude Adjustment but I don't know where it went after that."
If Aria was surprised to hear who Ashley was looking for, she didn't let it show, simply entering a command into her omni-tool. Moments later, a dark blue skinned asari in leathers made her way into the office. "Tela," the Queen of Omega asked her subordinate, "What happened to the Attitude Adjustment after it docked here."
The other asari pulled up a data pad and scrolled through a list of ship names. "The Attitude Adjustment docked here the day the Citadel fell. It stayed for two days, and then left, but not through the relay, so it should still be somewhere nearby."
"You can't give me more than that?", Ashley asked. Even the local cluster was too big to sweep without a fleet or at least a very good ship at her disposal.
"According to our intelligence," Tela told her, "The passengers stayed on the ship while it was in port, but some of the Blood Pack members took a number of meetings while they were here. Most of them were fairly standard, purchasing supplies and the like, but one of them was with a batarian named Quelt."
"Quelt? Who's that?"
Aria snorted. "A slimy little worm who fancies himself a fixer. He has his hands in a lot of the sorts of businesses that aren't legal in the boring parts of the galaxy."
"Where is he?", Ash asked. A disturbing thought was starting to form in her mind, but she wasn't ready to give voice to it just yet.
"He operates out of an office just off of the market district, as I recall," Aria told her. "Tela, give our friend the address so she can be on her way."
Quelt's office turned out to be a located in a particularly run-down complex of rooms two blocks away from the markets, but in spite of the garbage on the floors and the flickering lights in the hallways, when Ashley got closer to the door, she could see that it was new, with a quality lock. The rifle carried by the batarian standing outside of it looked new too, and as she approached, his four eyes gazed suspiciously at the armed human.
"What do you want, hairball?", he asked, using a nickname that had become common among some more anti-human aliens.
"To talk to your boss." She was getting tired of having this same conversation, and this guy definitely seemed like a bigger asshole than Bray.
"Well, he's busy now. You'll have to come back later, maybe when your species learns…"
He never finished his sentence. Deciding that the batarian had no intention of letting her in, Ashley made her move. Before the guard could react, her gauntleted hand lashed out, striking him in the throat. He gasped, his own hand moving instinctively to protect his windpipe, and while he did, she brought a foot up to make contact with his groin. He doubled over in agony, and with a crack, her rifle came down on the top of his head, knocking him out cold.
Kicking his gun across the floor away from her, Ashley activated her omni-tool. The lock may have been good, but she had a Spectre-grade cracking program installed, and seconds later, the door slid open. Another batarian was sitting behind a desk, looking at his terminal and haggling with a volus.
"10,000 credits is out of the question, Kar'shan clan," the smaller alien protested, "But perhaps 8,000 if the merchandise…"
It was just then that the batarian noticed her standing there. He reached into the drawer of his desk, but before he could take out whatever it was he was going for, she had her rifle leveled. "Don't even think about it," she hissed. At her words, the volus turned around and the batarian's hand twitched as he did, in fact, think about it. "I'm an Alliance marine," she told him, "You'll never make it."
The batarian pulled his hand back into view and the volus threw his short, stubbly arms up in the air. "Please, Earth clan," he pleaded, "I mean you no harm."
Ashley gestured with her rifle towards the door. "Get out of here."
The volus ran as quickly as his little legs would allow, stumbling over the unconscious batarian outside in his haste, and the man behind the desk placed his hands down on its surface. He looked concerned but not scared by her; clearly he was the kind of person who'd had a gun pointed at him before. "What do you want, human?", he asked. "I assume not to kill me, or you wouldn't be wasting both of our time."
"Information, Quelt. You took a meeting with a member of the Blood Pack off of the Attitude Adjustment. I need to know what it was about."
"Just business," the batarian told her coolly. "They had cargo they needed to unload and I helped them out."
"Cargo?", she asked suspiciously. "What kind of cargo?"
Quelt shrugged. "They didn't offer and I didn't ask."
His evasions were not making her feel better. "Wrong," she snarled. "To help them move their cargo, you would've needed to know what it was." She trained the rifle on the center of his chest. "One more chance. What was the Blood Pack selling?"
"Weapons," he answered. "Perfectly legal in the Terminus Systems," but there was a twinge of nervousness in the batarian's voice as he said it that made her doubt the veracity of his response.
"Where's the buyer you sent them to?"
"If you'll let me access my system," he offered, "I can get that information for you."
"Go ahead, but keep in mind if you're sending me on a wild goose chase, you'll live just long enough to regret it."
"I wouldn't dream of it." He swiveled his chair back to face his terminal and punched in a few commands as Ashley's mind raced. What weapons could the Blood Pack have had to sell? All she'd seen being loaded onto the ship were the refugees, which meant…
Even as she was following her thought to its logical, horrible conclusion, her trained eye noticed a flash of movement behind her. Out of a port in the wall, a combat drone had manifested, a shimmering ball of purple light that loosed a powerful shock at the Spectre.
Ashley hit the floor, letting her shields take the brunt of the impact, and rolled away from the drone. Quelt had taken advantage of her distraction to draw a heavy pistol from out of his desk and, as she leapt up, he fired at her torso. She twisted away from the shot, wincing slightly as it penetrated her shields but glanced off the side of her armor.
She returned fire, aiming a burst at the arm holding the batarian's gun. She needed Quelt alive after all, and when his shoulder exploded in a red mist, she worried she might have done too much damage. There was little time to think with the drone still on her though, and as it fired again, she leapt over the desk, letting the sturdy metal construct and the papers atop it take the hit.
Whirling around, she fired a concussive shot to the center of the drone, shutting it down, before pointing her rifle back at the bloody, screaming batarian. "That was not smart," she snarled. He was too distracted by his wound to answer though and she slapped him hard across the face, refocusing his attention on the Spectre.
"Now," she ordered, "You're going to bring up the real files, or I'm going to let you bleed out on the floor of this fucking hellhole."
With his one good hand, Quelt went to work on his terminal, and seconds later, Ashley's fears were confirmed. After resupplying on Omega, the mercenaries had taken their passengers out to a small mining station in the asteroid belt, where an impromptu market had been set up, a market where…
"They're selling the refugees," she said flatly, horror beating down her emotional response. "They're selling them as slaves."
"I just…", he sputtered, realizing just how much trouble he was in. "I just made the introductions."
"You helped to sell desperate people who barely escaped from the Reapers with their lives! You sold Sha'ira!"
"Please," he begged, too scared to ask about the name she'd just said. "You promised you wouldn't let me bleed out if I told you where they went."
"That's right," she told him, her voice icy with hate as she raised her rifle once more. "You won't bleed out."