"You know, staring at the progress bar isn't going to make it fill any faster," said a voice behind Jon, who didn't react. After all, he'd heard that subtle 'whoosh' of the door opening, as Tali came back into their shared bedroom/consul chamber, carrying two cups. Both looked hot, though only one was actually bubbling, thanks to the dextro chemicals in it having an interesting reaction to the air. She placed the non-bubbling one on the desk in front of him, and the Terran nodded in thanks.
"Just because the watched pot never boils doesn't mean you shouldn't watch it anyway, so you can react the moment it comes to that point," he said, sipping on the beverage. It was…Salarian, he believed. Some kind of stimulant they enjoyed. He refused to ask what was in it, however, as he used his other hand to move the display in front of him, slowly zooming through all the data files they'd gathered.
Saren's holdings were…extensive, to say the least, as he'd found out just from gazing at the sheer number of reports on them. Still, he and Tali had worked for over three hours on a sorting algorithm, going through each report and associating it with one of the three known sites of his activities. The thing was shuffling each file around, and the moment it was done, or had enough data, it would throw up a final tally of each of them, with numbers and specifics.
The hope was that, given how Salarian STG tended to operate, they'd find the first solution to any problem, and dig into it from there, stopping when they'd found the answer. It was one of the known issues with them as an intelligence gathering service, in fact. They tended to fixate on the solution they'd already found, and discovering data in support of it, not quite dismissing the stuff that wasn't in line with the conclusion, but no longer giving it the weight it might have deserved.
To be fair, most of the time, ninety-nine percent in fact, they had it on the money, and they came to their conclusions faster than any other intel service in the galaxy. It helped them to keep on the cutting edge of not just tech, but training, deployment, and even just general trends other intelligence services had to adapt to on the fly, if at all, so it was a formula that worked wonderfully for them.
There was still that one in a hundred chance they missed something, however, and so the program was collating the data, shifting it until it found something out of place. It was possible it wouldn't find anything, of course, but Jon was certain there had to be something else there. Saren's 'patron' couldn't exactly dock at just any port in the galaxy, and it wasn't likely it could fly around at all times. There had to be a port of call it used as a home base somewhere.
Now, it was equally possible it was using some kind of ancient building on some world undiscovered, but Saren certainly wouldn't have gone for that, not at first, and it was just as likely the thing had simply slept through most of galactic history to get to this point, meaning it buried itself somewhere instead. Either way, Jon and Tali watched a graphic of pages sorting themselves into files marked with the names of the three worlds investigated, along with a half a dozen others, and one marked 'oddities'.
They could assume anything coming to the Citadel, or going to one of the homeworlds, or even Illium, were just general business dealings, things to cover his tracks if someone wanted to know how he had all these credits to spend. The rest though? You never knew what would come up. Sighing as the task was almost half done, Jon reached over, and held Tali close to him, the young woman having fallen asleep on the couch beside him.
Outside, the Presidium was still. A few people moved about its walkways, tourists and late night deal makers, but not nearly as much as it would during the 'daytime'. Not that one could tell time by the light, given the Presidium didn't darken like some tourists seemed to think. Instead places like the consulate they were in had privacy screens that could be turned up to make them darker inside, with the added benefit of scrambling any attempt to look inside when there was sensitive materials on the screen.
Jon was stroking his fingers through Tali's black hair when a chime went off, and the woman started, her hand going to her hip where her shotgun would normally be, while he smiled at her. Always ready for a brawl. He patted her on the shoulder, and got up, the pair of them walking over to the two sided terminal, and sitting down opposite each other, watching as their program began to display its results, with hundreds of thousands of reports shuffled into categories.
Luckily, those reports that showed payments and shipments to known places were easily dismissed, and those made up the bulk of them. Sorting through lesser ports of call reports was easy enough, as they dismissed them by the thousands, including a few odd shipments to Omega out in the Terminus Systems. What dealings a SPECTRE might have there was anyone's guess, but it was also too open a port to hide much going through. Aria T'loak wouldn't have liked him shipping things through that might bring her trouble, after all.
It took an hour for the two of them to shift through the remaining reports, whittling down the stacks slowly, until it was under five thousand. Then under three when they realized a majority of the remaining were payments to pirate clans, Saren using them as eyes and ears, as well as harassers in certain sections of space, but not the kind of people to trust with your secrets, especially since they'd have reported a ship like his the moment they saw it to everyone to let them know a new power was out there.
Fifteen minutes later, and they were under a thousand. Then under seven hundred, as Tali finally discovered that some of the 'odd' reports were Saren paying…'ladies of the evening' for fun at one of the known houses of that kind of thing here on the Citadel, sent via a shell account. Suspicious, but not actually what they were looking for, and not nearly enough in aggregate to be anything beyond personal.
Finally, as they came to the last five hundred, they found common connections forming. Shipments of eezo, and even some marked as 'special processed goods' that could only be protoculture, not a huge amount, but noticeable all the same, all moving about in systems just outside the Terminus. Worse, there were parts too. Specialized ones. Military grade stuff, never a lot, each report on its own was simply one piece, but when filtered down to this level, you could tell this stuff wasn't going to any of his other projects.
"Hmm, Jon, take a look at this," said Tali, as she flipped one part of her screen, and the Terran found himself staring into the ugly mug of an old Krogan battlemaster. The guy looked, oddly, unscarred for all that Jon, who knew enough about the species, could tell he was ancient. His skin had that paper quality Korgan's tended to get once they passed five hundred, hanging off them in thin sheets, covering the bone plating beneath.
"Warlord Okeer, one of the Krogan who was with Clan Nakmor during the Rebellions back one-thousand years ago," he read the dossier.
"Yeah, and a piece of work he was too. It says here most of his file is sealed, along with all Nakmor's stuff, but we both know what that means," she said, as she plugged in the credentials they'd been given by the Asari Councilor. Really, this was going farther afield than they would normally be allowed, but given the Krogan was prominently mentioned in at least a dozen files, that said there might be something there.
"He's a genetics expert, with studies that range into botany, genetic engineering, even quantum DNA coding stuff that I have never heard of before. Why would he work with a Turian though?" asked Jon, as he read through the quickly decrypting file, and then got to the history section, only to groan, sigh, and rub his eyes, far too little caffeine in his system to deal with what he was seeing.
"Yeah, that was pretty much what I was wondering," said Tali as she scrolled down, forcing her Terran boyfriend to face what they'd just gotten their hands on. Nakmor was one of those 'secrets' that everyone in the galaxy that cared knew. The Krogan Rebellions being what they were, famous, but so dark most people didn't look into them too deeply, it was basically taken as red if you knew that history, you knew the fact that the Salarians had had help when designing the genophage.
After all, one didn't design a targeted bioweapon without reams and reams of current, up to date, genetic data. Data you couldn't get in the middle of a war, with a few random prisoners and corpses. You had to go to the people who would HAVE that data, the Krogan themselves. Clan Nakmor, one of the 'Science Clans', the only one to survive the nuclear winter they'd thrown themselves into, had provided everything the Salarians needed and more, with the understanding of protection when the war was over.
Protection that had not been given. The STG had tried, of course, but the Turian Hierarchy had determined that they deserved the same fate as all the others, adjusting the genophage so it had the same effect on Clan Nakmor as all other Krogan, ensuring that the Clan would hate them forever, which made it all the stranger that one of their former leaders was working with Saren.
"Hmm, check out this manifest too. The numbers on the devices don't match how Citadel Space uses these codes. These are Terran, aren't they?" asked Tali, showing Jon another window, and he nodded. Without a word his fingers began to fly over his keyboard, his hand coming up to move some of the holographic displays around, and even syncing the terminal with his omnitool.
"These things come from some of those old smuggler ports. Look here, one of them came from that moonbase on Torfan," he added, tracing one of the shipments through a scrambled relay, but the only system it could have come from was that base, as it was the only thing in the sector.
"So you think Haliat sold him something?" she asked, remembering the Turian turned Terran they'd faced off with, but Jon shook his head.
"Given the numbers, I think it was more that Haliat was serving as a delivery man, not as a dealer. He got paid too, a lot of credits. Given that, I think the two were running unrelated schemes involving stolen Terran Tech," he said, seemingly undisturbed that two such things were happening at once, even as Tali shuddered at the thought. Still, they kept going, listing out the final destinations for each of the shipments and payments that didn't end up at one of the major ports for Saren.
In time, patterns began to emerge, a system on the edge of this space, a Relay in the corner of this sector. Each one was unrelated, but at the same time, not big enough to hide this sort of influx of goods or materiel. Eventually, they both hit the same button at once, and a map of the galaxy spun to life between them, the Argus Rho cluster highlighted as all the dots where the deliveries ended up were somewhere in there, and as the program spun up with the data, they began to connect, tracing routes and times.
Finally, the lines were like a spiderweb, crisscrossing the whole of the cluster, but they all connected at a single point, one that Shepard pulled up, looking it over, before flipping the window around for Tali to look at, she quickly went to work on it, dialing up every bit of info she had on it, before sighing as she leaned back in her seat, and flipped it back to him, with a glowing point in the asteroid belt.
"Phoenix System, formerly of the Turian Hierarchy territories. The only habitable planet in the system, Intai'sei was marked as too costly to terraform, but the system itself served as a picket system back a few hundred years ago, with a listening outpost built in it to keep an eye on the Batarians and their 'Cultural Committee' ships. It was abandoned almost a hundred years before Terran first contact though," he read out, and then listed out the supplies that had been sent.
"So, he's got the parts to bring it online, at least some of it. But why?" he asked, stroking his chin, and then bringing up the data on the Terran equipment as well.
"No idea. Maybe he wants to try something. Those are protoculture pods, and we know his 'boss' has access to the stuff. Maybe they're trying to make a Protoculture Matrix?" proposed Tali, and Jon shook his head.
"If they are, then things are a lot worse than we thought. For now, let's gather this all together, and in the morning, we'll present our findings to the Council and the Conclave. Hopefully, we can make some sense of this then," he said, ignoring that 'in the morning' had passed a few hours ago, and they would be before the two groups in less than three. Still, Tali said nothing as they put everything together, and then laid against each other to rest on the couch, to await another busy day.