CHAPTER 31: HEARTS
The Normandy approached Saleon's ship with the IES engaged. The stealth ship's barriers were engaged, but the weapons were not spun up. Saleon's ship was a modular design commonly used by shipping companies, fully automated but unarmed. Some wealthier transportation conglomerates equipped their ships with armed security mechs, but most vessels did not possess external defenses. The best defense was to use well-traveled routes that were patrolled by Council or Council-affiliated warships. PMCs in Alliance space secured a few of the trade routes, but the Turian Hierarchy possessed institutional mistrust towards companies that possessed armed ships, even if they could barely be called corvettes.
Several things had tipped Garrus off that this was likely the ship they were interested in. It was far away from any trade routes, in a system with no presence of sapients, in orbit around a rocky planet with no atmosphere. The ship only possessed two of the modular container units, which was highly unusual, as this design could support a total of eight without any additional structural booms, reactors, or thrusters.
Shepard suited up with Garrus, and both Tali and Liara got prepped as well. Alenko would lead the second fireteam if needed, consisting of Williams, Wrex, and Emerson. They would guard the "breach" point on the ship, which was one of only two docking ports, and could provide additional support if needed.
The commander fastened the barrier ring around her neck, connecting its power and data interfaces to her armor's computer. After several seconds, the status light blinked green. The barrier ring functioned as an emergency helmet in case of a decompression – it could erect an airtight mass effect barrier around the user's head that could provide the wearer with a breathable atmosphere in lieu of a helmet. Many soldiers and marines preferred the three-quarters or full helmet when boarding ships, but Shepard didn't like the price in greatly reduced visibility and the painful headaches that occurred after only a couple minutes of using a normal helmet, despite the additional protection it offered.
She took only her sidearm and a shotgun, as the area would be so confined that taking her new DMR would be useless. Tali had the same kit that Shepard was taking; the commander had seen the quarian in during a training exercise - they had made a series of obstacles in the Normandy's cargo bay that could be used for rudimentary practice, which had been used while the ship was at FTL and while they had been patrolling for geth activity. Shepard wasn't surprised that Tali had been able to extract data from geth troopers. The quarian preferred getting in close and dropping enemies at close range, and was quite proficient at quickly navigating battlefield terrain, utilizing jumps and rolls from cover to cover to close and eliminate the enemy. If her tech bursts didn't drop the hostiles, her accurate shotgun fire would. Liara took only her sidearm, and she had drastically increased in proficiency with its use since being tutored on its effective use by the rest of the squad. Since it wasn't anticipated that Saleon would have many defenses due to the ship size, Shepard wanted to use the opportunity to take non-Alliance squad members.
Garrus had an assault rifle and a shotgun in addition to his sidearm. He grumbled momentarily about not being able to use his high-powered sniper rifle he had appropriated on Tuntau. "You ready for this?" she asked.
"Of course, Commander," he replied with a nod. "Thank you for bringing us here."
She reached up to give him a quick pat on the shoulder, then she turned to address both fireteams. "Listen up. Dr. Saleon looks to be holed up in this ship. Garrus, fill everyone in on just what this sicko has been up to."
The turian did, and the commander saw the universal disturbed looks from everyone present, with the exception of Tail since her face was hidden – though what the Spectre had learned of quarian body language the last few weeks, she looked to be just as disgusted as the rest of the team. Even Wrex scowled in disgust.
Shepard nodded. "Thank you, Garrus. When we get in, we'll clear both storage containers, then move forward to the helm. We don't know what kind of resistance to expect, but judging by the foodstuffs ordered, we estimate just a couple of organics, plus any possible mechs. There's no way to enter stealthily once we dock. We can assume that Saleon has a couple people present as his 'experiments' that may or may not be cooperative. Provide any first aid needed to his subjects, but be careful. We don't know what physical or mental state they are in. Remember, calm and reassuring, even if their bodies are a bloody mess," she finished solemnly.
Everyone took extra first aid kits, and Chakwas and the corpsmen waited to receive any casualties.
"Lieutenant Alenko will remain to guard the airlock from any threats that attempt to enter the Normandy. If needed, Alenko and Wrex can come up and provide support. Williams and Emerson stay at the breach point. Any questions?" No one had any.
"Five minutes out, Commander," Pressly said over the comm.
"Thank you, Pressly," she replied into her Omni-tool. She then turned to Liara. "Remember to avoid biotic detonations. We shouldn't have to worry about one of the containers bursting and leaking medical chemicals unless there are powerful biotic explosions, but it's better safe than sorry."
The 'young' asari nodded, and both teams performed final checks on their gear as they headed up the stairs to CIC. The squad walked towards the helm and starboard airlock, inadvertently walking in a V formation with each fireteam, with Shepard walking at the front.
"Huh. Prolly should get a picture," Joker said as he turned slightly in his chair. "You all walking together looks too much like one of those superhero team up vids that are constantly in the theaters – hey! What was that for?"
Williams had knocked the SR-1 ballcap off of his head.
"You're going to make me get that? I have to dock the ship, remember?" the pilot asked her.
The chief plucked the hat off the ground and dropped it in his lap. "You need your cap to dock the ship?" she asked skeptically.
"Chief?" he scowled.
"You need your cap to dock the ship, sir?" she asked with a smirk.
"That's better," he replied with a smirk of his own as he turned to face forward. He placed the cap back on his head, and he idly watched readouts for a minute as the Normandy approached her target. Then his terminal became a beehive of activity.
Joker's hands flew from panel to panel in a blur of motion, constantly tweaking and adjusting parameters at such speed that the commander couldn't even begin to keep up. Shepard watched the pilot go through the rendezvous procedures with such ease that she wondered if he could do it while drunk, and grinned a bit to herself as she found herself wondering if he ever had.
"Thirty seconds out," he said. Shepard then looked out the window and noticed she didn't even see their target out the forward viewscreen. "Twenty seconds out." Still she could see nothing out the viewport…there…a speck of reflection. "Ten seconds." The speck reappeared, and over the span of about three seconds, the tiny speck had nearly filled the forward viewscreen. The commander suddenly wondered whether the Normandy was about to plow into the Saleon/Heart ship at a couple thousand meters per second of differential velocity. There was a small gasp from Liara, the asari staring wide-eyed out the forward viewport. "Five seconds."
The target ship then nearly stopped in the forward viewport then snapped to the side and out of view as the pilot expertly aligned the docking ports. Shepard then noticed that she hadn't even felt any motion – normally even with the inertial dampeners, and even by using the mass effect core to maneuver, she would have expected to feel some acceleration from the maneuvers they just performed.
Shepard felt an almost imperceptible jolt from the ship. "We're docked," the pilot said.
"Equalizing external airlock pressure," the NCO at the systems console said. "Pressure equalized. The other side has an atmosphere of 75% N2, 25% O2, 0.9 atmospheres, 0.8 gees. Scanning for any particulate matter…"
"Nice work, flyboy," Williams smirked at the pilot.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Hey, I gotta earn my pay somehow!"
Shepard gently patted Joker on the shoulder and moved into the external airlock proper, waiting for the word on the atmosphere from the chief, who answered fifteen seconds later. "No dangerous particulates found. You're clear."
"Thanks, Chief," Shepard responded, then turned to her fireteam. "Ready?"
She got three nods of affirmation.
The commander took a deep breath as she charged her barrier to full power, then pressed the haptic button that unlocked the external door.
Acting purely on training, she selected a piece of cover, in this case a set of crates, and immediately dove behind them, leveling her pistol for any hostiles…nothing. She could see next to nothing in the near darkness, only the vague outline of stacked crates lined up in random patterns, with indistinguishable markings…she had boarded ships before, and she always wondered why they all had crates strewn about at random. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, but visibility was still poor, and her projected HUD from her earpiece switched to low light mode.
She ducked behind cover and looked behind her, seeing that the rest of her team had taken cover behind various crates as well. She listened for any sounds…just the soft hum of the ventilation system. The ship was in orbit, a continuous freefall, so no sounds of reactors, engines, or thrusters…wait…
She heard quiet hissing sound from somewhere ahead and to the right, then again from the left. She gestured to the source of the sound to her squad, which was then replaced by some sort of latch clicking loudly and hydraulics moving.
Shepard strengthened her barrier and drew in dark energy for a potential pull or throw as she leveled her pistol, sweeping between the two sources of noise. The light from her corona would visually alert anyone to her presence, but she wanted the protection. She heard another latch click, then another, and next came a sound that sent a chill down her spine.
A guttural growl came from the location that she had first heard the noise, then there were footfalls that seemed…strange. Soft, like the person – or thing – wasn't that heavy, but it almost sounded like wet, bare feet on the metal floor. Next was a grunt that sounded almost human. It sounded female, and the footsteps got closer…
Shepard suddenly found herself face to face in the near-darkness with a naked human woman only five meters away. The woman was hunched over, her gray-white hair thin over a shrunken, misshapen skull, the matted strands of hair falling to her shoulders, dripping wet with a thick, viscous fluid. Her skin was unnaturally pale, appearing translucent in some places even in the greatly reduced lighting, showing the blood vessels underneath and dotted with red lesions and scars that showed up on the HUD's low light projection. The left arm shriveled in across the woman's chest, noticeably shorter than the right; the left arm was also thicker than the other, and the stubby fingers were curled in on themselves.
The first human Spectre had seen many horrible things in her career, but she hadn't expected to see this. Layla had a quick intake of breath.
The nude woman noticed the faint corona glow, and then the gasp. She turned to face Shepard, and the eyes narrowed as she let out a primal screech that echoed through the container as she sprinted towards the Spectre. Shepard was stunned into inaction for a second, hesitating to aim her pistol at the woman in front of her. A blue flare from charging biotics flickered around the woman as she jumped and lunged at Shepard, who used her biotics to quickly dash out of the way.
"Stop!" Shepard shouted. "We're here to – "
The rest of the commander's plea was cut off with the impact of a biotic attack. As before it did nothing to Shepard, the dark energy harmlessly merging with her own corona, and the woman in front of her screeched in apparent anger. The nude woman lunged at Shepard almost on all fours.
The Spectre again dodged out of the way. "Stop! We're here to help!"
After missing Shepard again, the woman turned towards Tali and growled, charging her biotics and lunging at the quarian. This time the Spectre pulled the trigger to fire a single shot.
The round impacted just above the eyes, and the back of the head exploded outward that painted the two containers behind in a pink mist. The woman's momentum carried her forward for another two meters as both Layla and Tali jumped out of the way of the corpse, as the charging woman fell on her back as she clutched for the missing part of the head.
Soon another screech, then another, echoed through the room. The Spectre heard two more sets of feet running, and just a moment later two asari entered into view, both with similar abnormalities to the human. Both charged the nearest person they saw. Tali dropped one with a well-aimed shotgun blast, and Shepard threw the third into a crate. Or, rather, she tried to; the biotic throw did little more than stagger the charging feral asari.
The asari charged biotics, and was less than four meters away from Shepard as the Spectre fired a trio of quick shots into the chest, all three impacting the heart. The primal scream was cut off abruptly as the third attacker was dropped.
No other sounds echoed through the chamber, and no one in the fireteam moved or spoke for several seconds as they looked for any more hostiles. It was Shepard who finally quaked out, "K-k-keep me covered." She moved towards a terminal, and slowly brought up the lights in the room, which revealed little more than another row of crates.
The Spectre advanced slowly to the next row of crates. She had her shotgun out now, and kept her biotics primed for use on any more attackers. She spun around another row of crates to see four humanoid sized cylindrical silver chambers elevated about a meter off of the ground on their sides, spaced about three meters apart. Trails of the thick, clear fluid came from three of them, but the fourth…
Shepard crept slowly to the fourth chamber, shotgun pointed straight at the open top of the chamber. Her finger on the trigger, she never realized she had been holding her breath as she viewed what lay inside the tube.
It was a human woman, this one smaller than the others, with a large bulge in the left temple, swollen to nearly the size of an apple and with the same color, in contrast to the pale, almost translucent skin covering the rest of the body. The bloodshot eyes were fixed on a point in the ceiling, the mouth limply hanging open.
Shepard took a step back and activated her Omni-tool, scanning for any lifesigns…none. She exhaled the breath she had been holding in as Garrus came up beside her.
"Garrus," she said quietly, followed by a long pause, "Was…Saleon doing this to victims on the Citadel?"
The turian remained speechless for several moments before finally responding. "No."
Shepard said nothing for what seemed to be an eternity, staring at the corpse in the chamber, only glancing once at one of the hostiles they had shot dead. Finally she spoke again, her voice quiet and concerned. "We need to clear out the port side of the ship."
The fireteam was entirely silent as they cleared the other half of the ship. They found nothing living there, only stocks of medical supplies and a myriad of chemicals identified only by lengthy alphanumeric designations in flasks and vials.
Shepard peered out from the entrance to the container in both directions, but nothing was seen nor heard. She spoke again, her voice anxious. "Saleon will probably be at the front of the ship, but he could be hiding from us in the engine room."
The fireteam kept their weapons out and leveled as they advanced down the narrow, coverless, and surprisingly clean corridor. Twenty meters down, at the helm of the ship, was a locked door, which Tali immediately began to hack. Layla and Liara had their weapons and biotics pointed at the other side of the door, while Garrus kept his rifle sighted down the narrow corridor.
It only took the quarian tech whiz several seconds to break the lock. The door immediately swished open, and immediately a salarian appeared from behind a console.
"Thank you! Thank you for saving me from those freaks!" the salarian quickly exclaimed.
Liara and Tali turned to cover the corridor, and the former C-Sec officer turned to face the perpetrator that had eluded him years ago. "Commander. That's him. That's Saleon," Garrus said confidently.
Shepard couldn't read salarian expressions well, but it seemed the one in front of her just wet himself. His eyes widened to the size of saucers and his jaw dropped open before regaining his composure a moment later. "What? My name is Heart. Doctor Heart!" he exclaimed.
The commander wondered just what the salarian was thinking in trying to play innocent. He stood in an isolated ship, far from any trade routes, with the bay chock full of illegal and hazardous chemicals, and twisted experiments occurring on the people in the other room. "Are you sure it's him?" Shepard asked Garrus.
"Positive. After what he's done, I'd recognize his face anywhere." The turian's face meanwhile broke into a satisfied grin. "There's no escape this time, Saleon," he said as he leveled the rifle at his chest. "I'd harvest your organs first, but you don't deserve the effort."
"You're crazy! He's crazy! Please, don't let him do this to me!" the salarian pleaded, raising his hands in supplication.
"We'll take him in for questioning," Shepard said quietly after a moment to Garrus.
"What!?" Garrus exclaimed in half-shock, half-horror as he spun to face her. "We can just kill him here! What if he escapes again, or he trades his research in exchange for immunity!? Unethical researchers escape punishment by sharing their data!"
"But I haven't done anything wrong!" the salarian exclaimed. He was ignored by everyone present, and he took the opportunity to put his hands underneath the console.
Shepard turned to face her turian teammate. "If he dies, we'll never know what he's been up to, or how he did it. You saw what he had done in there. I'll use my Spectre authority to make sure he only sees the inside of a tiny jail cell for the rest of his life."
"But…if…" the turian closed his eyes and let out a long sigh and remained silent as he glared at the salarian. "You're right. You're a very lucky salarian."
"Indeed I am! But I'm not going to prison," the doctor exclaimed. Before anyone could react, his hands rotated a shotgun from underneath the console a quickness that was exceptional even by salarian standards. His finger depressed the trigger and the weapon splattered the front of his head on the ceiling above.
Shepard jumped slightly as her biotics instinctively flared, then she watched the soon to be lifeless corpse collapse to the ground. She closed her eyes and hung her head.
Garrus stared at the lifeless, partially headless body for a couple moments, then his gaze fixed on Shepard as he exploded with anger.
"And so he dies anyway! What was the point of that!?" Garrus yelled at the commander.
Layla kept her head down for what seemed to be a minute, before finally raising her gaze to the angry turian in front of her. When she did speak, it was in the exact opposite tone of Garrus, soft and sad. "You can't predict how people will act, Garrus. But you can control how you'll respond to their actions. In the end…that's what really matters," she said.
He looked back to Saleon's corpse, then back to the commander. A moment later he stormed out of the helm, not saying another word.
Shepard watched the former C-Sec officer depart, and she sighed as she opened up a comm link back to the Normandy. "Doctor Chakwas, this is Commander Shepard. We…found some things you need to see."
Shepard had informed the Normandy's comm officer what they had found, and the basics had been reported to Fifth Fleet using a one-time pad that could not be decrypted by the geth. They had to send the message to the comm buoy twice, consuming a second one time pad, since the original transmission had been garbled due to the extreme distance and distortion of the signal when sent at FTL speeds. It took a while for the response, again due to the comm buoy being in a system many light-years away. A quartet of frigates would be carrying a small team of biomedical engineers and geneticists to investigate just what Saleon had been up to. They were still a few days out, since it would take some time to round up the personnel; skilled engineers and scientists were not simply available at beck and call to deploy, as Joker put it, "to the ass end of the galaxy."
Tali was able to hack into Saleon's research files almost immediately. Shepard first thought his computer security was just that poor, as if he had apparently never expected to have been found here. It turned out that his security was actually very good, but Tali was just that much better. The amount of data was enormous, and several copies were being downloaded to several OSDs, and it would take an extremely long time to sort through it all. But the commander wanted to see the highlights immediately.
The quarian engineer brought up what looked to be a summary file to the large display screen. Unfortunately, the language was salarian, and Shepard could pick out little more than a handful of words. "Tali, can you please run a translator to put this in the trade language? It's not much, but it will give us a sense of what he was trying to accomplish." The Spectre knew that precise scientific wording and phrases translated very poorly, regardless of both the original and translated language, but it would give her a sense of what Saleon/Heart was doing.
"Of course, Commander."
The translator program showed the name of the original salarian dialect, and Shepard forwarded that data to the comm officer. Their follow up message would recommend that a couple skilled translators in that dialect accompanied the researchers.
As suspected, the standard translation software mistranslated many phrases, but it was good enough for the two women to see just what Saleon had been up to.
"Oh, keelah…" Tali said quietly.
Shepard was speechless as she tried to impassively read the summaries. Saleon had gone from growing organs inside of living people - exploiting sapients for use as an organ farm – to growing entire persons. Currently he was experimenting on female humans and asari, trying to grow an embryo to an adult in just a few weeks. He was testing changes to the genome, and had been exposing some embryos to eezo, which had caused their significant deformation. She continued reading, her stomach contracting into an icy knot, not realizing the worst was yet to come.
Finally she had read enough, and she stepped away. Tali had stopped reading long ago, and had returned to copying, decrypting, and translating files.
"Commander," Chief Greico's voice came over the comm. "Pressly had us energize the active scanners to see if we could detect any resupply shipments or discarded trash. We didn't find that, but…we found something else instead. It'll be easier to show you."
Shepard didn't know what Greico had found, but she could tell from his tone that it wasn't good. "I'm on my way."
It took her just over a minute of walking to get from one ship bridge to the other, and she took off her barrier ring in the process, setting it in the Normandy airlock. She stopped next to Chief Greico's console, and his expression was one of grim disgust.
"What did you find?" Shepard asked.
"We energized the active scanners, and we found some objects in orbit around the planet. What happened here is worse than we thought." He brought up a hologram and it showed several dozen points, small objects about a meter and a half in length. "The high frequency, high power pulses provide the detail." He selected one of them from the haptic interface and zoomed in on the object. Despite the distance to the objects, the radar and follow up lidar image was clear.
Layla's eyes widened in disbelief. "He was spacing them?"
Greico nodded grim agreement. "It looks that way, ma'am. Maybe they didn't meet his expectations…or he got the data he needed from them."
"How…how many have you detected?"
"Twenty-seven, so far. Judging by the ship's orbit, the dispersion of these bodies…statistically, there are probably another forty in orbit that are blocked from our scans by the planet."
She looked away from the radar image of the body, silent for several moments as she calmed her churning stomach, wondering just what could be going through a person's mind to do such things. She turned her head to the communications officer. "Add that to our next message to Fifth Fleet. Make sure the ships that come are equipped for recovery of bodies in space," she said quietly.
"Aye aye, ma'am."
The commander left the Normandy without another word, heading back into Saleon's ship. She walked slowly through the container, spotting Alenko and Wrex staring in disbelief at the dead clones. The lieutenant spoke up first, his voice quiet. "Just what happened here?"
"Saleon had moved on to growing people. Trying to grow them in just a few weeks. He looked to be working on asari and female humans at the moment," Shepard replied.
"This is what you'd expect the collectors to do," Wrex muttered.
"Saleon was a salarian, not a collector," Alenko replied.
"Have you ever seen a collector?" the krogan retorted. "I haven't. For all we know, they aren't a separate species, just some guys out there making up requests for turians with three arms, or quarian triplets, or whatever rare trait they're interested in."
"And the collectors are just a rumor, a boogeyman to scare people," Alenko responded.
Shepard said nothing, pondering both Saleon's research and the collectors. There was no concrete evidence that the Collectors existed, at least in Council space, but there was evidence that persons with rare genetic traits had vanished. But since the numbers of vanished were very few, and nearly all occurred in the Terminus Systems, it was not something the Council species or the Alliance concerned themselves with. Not in a galaxy of hundreds of billions.
Shepard looked again to one of the corpses, looking at the misshapen skull, the lifeless eyes of a person that was never given a chance to live, to laugh, to experience anything. Just a test subject, a thing to the doctor who lay dead in the front of the ship. The commander found herself happy that Saleon was dead, but part of her wanted him to still be alive so they could find out why he did what he did, and a bit of her simply wanted him to suffer for what he had done. She wondered just how many other people like Saleon were in the galaxy, doing these same things…
"Commander?" Alenko asked.
"Yeah," she responded quietly. "It's…at least he won't be hurting anyone else."
The lieutenant nodded solemnly in response. They had known Saleon was engaging in unpleasant work, but none of them had expected this.
"Have either of you seen Garrus?" Shepard asked.
"He went back into the Normandy. Seemed pretty pissed," Wrex said."
"Can't really blame him," Alenko said quietly. "Saleon escaped the Citadel, and has probably been doing this for years."
Shepard didn't know if the best thing to do would be to talk with Garrus now or give him a bit of time to cool off. She found herself wondering to the bridge of Saleon's ship, where Tali was still at work poring through files.
"C-c-commander," she stammered. "I-I found something in his records. He was e-ejecting them into space!" she exclaimed in horror.
Shepard nodded slowly, closing her eyes, saying quietly "The Sensors crew found corpses when scanning for any automated transports drifting. They've found twenty-seven so far."
"Oh keelah…" Tali said. The commander couldn't see her face, but her tone said that she was sick. The quarian did nothing for several moments before turning back towards the console. "Here…is a video from a hull cam. He must have…wanted to make sure that they were ejected, and dead." The engineer brought up a video from an exterior hull camera. It showed an airlock open and a rush of air was expelled from the ship, along with a…
Shepard gasped as her hands shot up to cover her mouth. "T-they were alive! He spaced them while they were still alive!" She watched in revulsion and shock as someone was ejected from the airlock. Saleon's subject flailed about and kicked in futility as she floated away from the ship, then became motionless several seconds later.
"It...it seems that being ejected into space was the first time that most of them reached consciousness," Tali added quietly, as if what they had already learned wasn't enough.
Layla shuddered at the thought, suppressing a momentary urge to vomit, imagining herself as one of those subjects. Waking up for the first time: alone, confused, lost, cold, nude…then suddenly being ejected into space moments later. Gasping for air, flailing for something, anything, to make the searing pain go away …
"I-I've seen enough. I've copied all the data, Commander, but I'm not…I can't look at any more files. I'm done here." She removed the OSDs from the console, placing two in her suit and handing two to in her palm to Shepard.
The commander took the drives from Tali, and the quarian turned and quickly left the room. Shepard remained quiet for almost half a minute before quietly stating, "Yeah. Me too."
Karin Chakwas had been studying the samples for an hour, with a corpsman aiding the procedures. She had retrieved tissue and blood samples from each of Saleon's test subjects, running examination after examination on each of them. "Commander, Doctor Chakwas. I have preliminary results to show you."
The commander appeared in the medbay less than two minutes later, still in her armor minus the barrier ring, as she and several others had been cataloging everything they found in the ship. "What have you found?"
"Amongst these four subjects, there are only two genomes. One for the asari, and one for the humans," the doctor said.
It only took Shepard a second to realize the implications. "These…these are genetic clones."
The doctor nodded. "Both genomes looked to possess pronounced differences to the baseline genome, mainly related to growth-related hormones and biological processes. While these subjects are adults, they appear to have grown to adult size in just several weeks, hence the abnormal appearance."
Layla, like the rest of the crew that had investigated Saleon's ship, had been disturbed since first encountering the test subjects in the ship. This information only increased her uneasiness, and she hesitated a moment. "What…what do you think he was trying to do? Why would he run experiments like this?" she asked quietly.
Chakwas shook her head slowly. "Commander, I am a trauma surgeon, not a geneticist. I do not want to make any definitive conclusions. We know what he was doing, but not the why. I have a couple friends in the biomed department at my alma mater. They're cutting edge geneticists, and they have Alliance contracts. With your permission, I will make arrangements to forward the data to them, through Alliance channels."
Shepard hesitated for several moments before nodding approval.
"They also have security clearances with appropriate accesses in place for their genetics work. I'll wait until we get in proper range of the comm buoy. I presume we want to keep this tight-lipped for now."
This time Shepard quickly nodded approval. She did not speak for several seconds, and finally asked, "We saw that they could create a biotic flare, but it was minimal. I guess they hadn't been fitted for implants yet."
"Correct, Commander, though these specimens have extensive eezo nodules throughout their bodies. From looking at this data, he exposed some of his test subjects to eezo, while others he didn't. It is likely that the subjects were in considerable pain from his experiments. It is also likely that these people never had any prior contact with any other life forms. Encountering your fireteam was the first time that these people were awake, and their brains little time to properly form. That appears to be his biggest struggle: he could not properly grow the brain out at the speed of the rest of the body. Due to their brain state, and their highly modified processes, their lifespans after awaking would likely be less than a month." The doctor sighed solemnly. "Unfortunately, members of every species have, and continue to engage in, unethical medical research."
Shepard said nothing as she turned to stare back at the screens showing a myriad of data from Saleon's research.
"I'll have my preliminary report done in a few hours."
Shepard stared at the data for several moments before finally saying quietly, "Thank you, Doctor." She headed up to CIC to wait for instructions from Fifth Fleet. The Normandy undocked but remained in formation with Saleon's ship. The second message had been sent a while ago, and the stealth frigate awaited the reply. It was unlikely the Alliance would want the Normandy to wait for several days while the recovery team arrived, and Shepard wanted to leave this system behind as soon as possible.
The commander sighed, knowing she needed to talk with Garrus, but she had to calm her nerves about what she had seen before she could have any sort of serious conversation. She didn't feel like sitting, so she returned to the crew mess, but having zero desire to eat anything . No one was there fortunately, and she paced around the room before heading down to the cargo bay.
As usual, the bay was quiet, aside from some noise at a workbench on the right side, coming from Garrus' favored spot for tinkering with weapons. She quietly approached despite the sound of her armor's boots on the metal floor, the boots' inserts making little noise when stepping on hard surfaces. She heard a turian grunt as a clank came from the other side of the Mako.
She walked around the vehicle and saw the former C-Sec officer hunched over the workbench. "Hey Garrus," she said softly.
There was another clank from the workbench, then silence for several moments. "What do you want?" the turian asked. The commander didn't have much experience determining vocal expressions from turians very well, but she didn't need to now.
"I just wanted to talk," she said quietly.
"There isn't much to talk about. You said we'd take Saleon in, but he killed himself while we just stood and talked about what to do. He died anyway," the turian responded.
"We needed to learn what he was doing, and why he was doing it. Look at what we saw. After what he had done, there was no way the Alliance, Hierarchy, or Republics – or even the salarians – would have ever let him loose. I'm a Spectre now; I would make sure of it."
"People like him are too dangerous to be kept alive. Just like Saren. When you get a shot, you take it. Always. It's not worth the risk letting them escape," Garrus scolded her.
"If there's no other choice, absolutely," Shepard agreed. "But while we have figured out some of the what Saleon was doing, with him dead we will probably never know the why. If they leave you no choice, then yes, always pull the trigger. But only if there's no other option. It's better to take them in and learn the why of what they are doing. It's the same thing with Saren. We know…well, some of the what. But we know very little of the why, and the why can often be difficult to determine from intelligence. Often, only conversations with the suspect will reveal the why."
"You mean torture?"
Shepard shook her head quickly. "No, not torture. Torture often leads to bad data, as the suspect will say anything to make the suffering stop. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar," she told him.
The turian was completely confused by the last sentence, so the commander explained the human idiom.
"It's…" the turian started to say after several moments of contemplation. "Just…let me think about this for a while. Not stopping Saleon was my greatest failure at C-Sec. He continued his research for years probably, we didn't even get any information from him, and…I'm not the one to put the bullet in his head."
"You were the one to find him, Garrus. His experiments have stopped. No one else will need to suffer."
The turian remained silent for a while. "I guess…yeah. He's…done hurting people."
Shepard nodded. "He is. But Garrus…if you ever need to talk, you know where to find me," she replied softly, placing a hand on his shoulder.