Mass Effect: The Complete Novels 4-Book Bundle (38 page)

“Don’t move or I blow your head off.”

Knowing the shotgun he’d seen earlier could literally decapitate him from this range, Golo froze.

“Turn around, slowly.”

He did as instructed. As he’d suspected, the young quarian from inside the shop was standing in the center of the alley, pointing the shotgun squarely at his chest.

“Are you Golo?”

“You wouldn’t be holding a gun on me if I was someone else,” he answered, seeing no hope in trying to lie his way out of the situation.

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. Over the past decade he had committed dozens of acts that might have caused another quarian to hunt him down in search of vengeance. There was no point in trying to guess which one had set off this particular young man.

“A scout ship from the
Idenna
was brokering a deal here on Omega last week. The
Cyniad.
They disappeared. I think you know what happened to them.”

“Who are you? Are you part of the
Idenna
crew?” Golo asked, stalling until he could come up with a plan.

“My name is Lemm’Shal nar Tesleya,” the other replied.

Golo wasn’t surprised to get an answer to his question. Even on the flotilla, quarians tended to wear their enviro-suits at all times: an extra layer of protection against hull breaches and other disasters that could befall their rickety ships. As a result, exchanging names at every meeting was a deeply ingrained habit. He’d been counting on this, and knowing his adversary’s name gave him something to work with.

He didn’t recognize his Shal clan name, but the nar in Lemm’s surname marked him as technically still a child, which meant he was most likely here on his Pilgrimage. Furthermore, he was associated with the vessel
Tesleya,
not the
Idenna,
which meant he didn’t know the crew personally. He must have heard about them secondhand, possibly from another quarian he had run into during his recent travels.

Golo quickly formed a likely scenario in his head. Someone had mentioned the disappearance of the
Cyniad
to him in passing. Now Lemm believed that if he could locate the missing scout ship and its crew—or at least discover their fate—then he could give this information to the
Idenna
’s captain. In return, he would be accepted into the
Idenna
’s crew and his Pilgrimage would be over.

“What makes you think I know anything about the
Cyniad
?” he asked, hoping to bluff the young man into backing down.

“The Migrant Fleet doesn’t do business with Omega,” Lemm answered, not lowering the barrel of his shotgun. “Somebody must have initiated contact with the
Cyniad
to propose the deal that made them come here. Only another quarian would know how to do that. And you’re the most infamous quarian on this station.”

Golo frowned behind his mask. The kid was simply playing a hunch; it was only dumb luck that it happened to be right. He briefly considered denying his involvement, then realized he had an easier way out.

“I guess my reputation proceeds me,” he admitted. “I contacted the
Cyniad,
but I was only the middleman. The individual actually behind the deal was a human.”

“What human?”

“He told me his name was Pel,” he said with an indifferent shrug. “He was willing to pay me to contact the
Cyniad,
and I was happy to take his money. I didn’t really want to know more than that.”

“Weren’t you worried he was setting the crew of the
Cyniad
up? Luring them into a trap?”

“The Fleet turned its back on me. Why should I care what happens to any of them as long as I get paid?”

It was the best kind of lie; one spun with a thread of unpleasant truth. By honestly owning up to his callousness and greed it made his denial of direct involvement seem more believable.

“You sicken me,” Lemm said. If he hadn’t been wearing his visor, Golo suspected he would have spit on the ground. “I should kill you where you stand!”

“I don’t know what happened to the crew of the
Cyniad,
” Golo said quickly, before Lemm could work up his anger enough to actually pull the trigger, “but I know how you can find out.” He hesitated, then added, “Give me five hundred credits and I’ll tell you.”

Lemm brought the shotgun up so he could sight down the barrel, then stepped forward until it was pressed hard against the other quarian’s mask.

“How about you tell me for free?”

“Pel’s renting a warehouse in the Talon district,” Golo sputtered out. Lemm took a half step back, lowering the shotgun.

“Take me there. Now.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Golo snapped, emboldened now that the weapon was no longer pointing directly at him. “What if he has lookouts? What do you think they’ll do when they see two quarians strolling down the street toward their hideout?

“If you want to do this, you have to be smart,” he said, his voice slipping into a slick merchant’s patter. “I can tell you where the warehouse is, but that’s the easy part. You’ll need to scout it out. Figure out what’s going on before you try to get inside. You need a plan, and I can help.”

“I thought you didn’t care what happened to the Migrant Fleet. Why do you suddenly want to help?” Lemm asked, clearly suspicious.

“I could pretend it’s because I feel guilty that I might have accidentally led the
Cyniad
into a trap,” Golo explained, spinning another half-truth. “But honestly, I just figure this is the best way to keep you from shoving that shotgun in my face again.”

Lemm seemed satisfied with the explanation. “Okay, we’ll try it your way.”

“Let’s get off the street,” Golo suggested. “Find somewhere more private. Like my apartment.”

“Lead the way,” Lemm answered, collapsing his shotgun and slapping it once again into the clip on the small of his back.

Golo smiled under his mask as he led the young man from the alley.

Pel and his team will rip you apart, boy. Especially when I warn them that you’re coming.

FIFTEEN

“Are you ever going to tell us where we’re going?” Kahlee asked, startling Grayson from a fitful doze.

With the adrenaline rush of their escape fading, his body had crashed and he’d fallen asleep in the pilot’s chair. Not that it really mattered; once the course was plotted there was nothing for him to do during FTL travel. Knowing an alert from the ship would wake him once they got within range of the mass relay that would take them from Council Space into the Terminus Systems, he had simply let his mind drift away.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his mouth dry and his tongue thick and woolen, “guess I drifted off.”

Kahlee sat down in the seat beside him, and he saw her nose wrinkle as if assailed by a pungent odor. Grayson looked down at his shirt and realized he was soaked in sweat; the sour perspiration of a duster going into the first stages of withdrawal. Embarrassed, he did his best to lean away from her without being obvious about it.

“I was just wondering where we’re going,” Kahlee said, tactfully pretending not to notice the smell.

“I was wondering that, too,” Hendel added from behind him.

Twisting in his chair, he saw the security chief standing at the cockpit doorway, his broad shoulders almost completely blocking the view into the passenger cabin beyond.

“I thought you were watching Gillian,” Kahlee said, pointedly.

“She’s sleeping,” Hendel replied gruffly. “She’s fine.”

“I have a contact on Omega,” Grayson said, turning his attention back to Kahlee.

“Omega?” Her voice was a mixture of alarm and surprise.

“We don’t have any other choice,” he said grimly.

“Maybe we do. I have friends who can help us,” Kahlee assured him. “I know Captain David Anderson personally. I trust him with my life. I guarantee he can protect you and your daughter.”

To Grayson’s relief, Hendel actually shot the idea down. “That’s not an option. Cerberus has people in the Alliance. Maybe we can trust Anderson, but how are we supposed to get in touch with him? He’s an important man now, we can’t just show up on the Citadel and walk into his office.

“Cerberus probably has agents reporting on every move people like the captain make,” he continued. “If we send a message, they’ll know we’re coming long before he ever will. We’d never reach him.”

“I never thought you’d take my side,” Grayson said, studying the other man carefully as he tried to figure out what angle he was playing.

“I just want what’s best for Gillian. Right now, that means getting her out of Council Space. But Omega wouldn’t have been my first choice. There are plenty of other places to hide in the Terminus Systems.”

“We can’t go to any of the human colonies,” Grayson insisted. “The Alliance has people stationed there, and they track all incoming vessels. And we’ll stick out like sore thumbs on any of the alien-controlled worlds. Omega’s the one place we can go to blend in.”

Hendel considered his arguments, then said, “I still want to know who your contact is.” It appeared to be the closest he would come to admitting Grayson was right.

“A customer of mine named Pel,” Grayson lied. “I’ve sold him almost two dozen vessels over the past twenty years.”

“What kind of business is he in?” Kahlee asked.

“Import, export” was his evasive reply.

“Drug runner,” Hendel grunted. “Told you he was taking us to his dealer.”

“How do we know he won’t turn us over to Cerberus?” Kahlee wanted to know.

“He doesn’t know anything about Gillian being biotic, or why we’re really coming,” Grayson explained. “I told him I was caught with a stash of red sand during a trip to the Citadel. He thinks I’m on the run from C-Sec.”

“And how do the rest of us fit into this?” Hendel asked.

“He already knows I have a daughter. I’ll tell him Kahlee’s my girlfriend, and you’re the crooked C-Sec officer I bribed to get me off the station.”

“So he’s expecting us?” Hendel asked.

Grayson nodded. “I sent him a message when we left the Academy. I’ll log into the comm network when we drop out of FTL at the next mass relay to see if he sent a reply.”

“I want to see the message he sends you.”

“Hendel!” Kahlee objected, offended at the violation of Grayson’s privacy.

“I’m not taking any chances,” Hendel answered. “We’re putting our lives in his hands. I want to know who we’re dealing with.”

“Sure,” Grayson said. “No problem.” He took a quick peek at the readouts to get a sense of where they were on the journey. “We should reach the relay in another hour.”

“That gives you time to take a shower,” Hendel told him. “Try to wash the stink of the drugs off before your daughter wakes up.”

There really wasn’t anything Grayson could say to that. He knew Hendel was right.

Sixty minutes later he was back in the pilot’s chair, cleaned and wearing a fresh set of clothes. He’d stopped sweating, but now there was a slight tremble in his hands as he adjusted the controls. He knew it would only get worse the longer he went without another hit.

Kahlee was still sitting in the passenger seat, and Hendel was once again standing behind him, leaning on the cockpit’s door frame. Gillian continued to sleep peacefully in the back; Grayson had checked on her before and after his shower.

A soft electronic chime from the navigation panel warned them a second before the ship dropped from FTL flight. They felt the faint surge of deceleration, and then the navigation screens came alive as their vessel began picking up nearby ships, small asteroids, and other objects large enough to register on the sensors.

The enormous mass relay showed up as a blinking blue dot near the center of the monitor. Despite the muscle tremors, Grayson’s hands moved with a quick confidence over the controls as he plotted their approach.

“You going to check the messages?” Hendel asked, the question a none-too-subtle reminder of his suspicion.

“Just need to locate a comm buoy … okay, got one. Linking in.”

There was a short beep, and one of the monitors flickered to indicate a new message had been downloaded from the interstellar network of communication buoys used to transmit messages across the vast expanse of the galaxy.

“Play it,” Hendel told him.

Grayson punched a button, and Pel’s face appeared on the screen, his voice filling the cockpit.

“Got your message. Sorry things fell apart, but I warned you about getting sloppy,” he said, raising one eyebrow. “Lucky for you I think I can help. I’m sending the coordinates for a landing pad near my warehouse on Omega. I’ll be there with some of my crew to meet you when you touch down.”

There was a brief pause, and then Pel laughed. “You understand this is going to cost you, right? You know how much I hate cleaning up someone else’s mess.”

There was another beep from the monitor, and the image froze, the message ended. In his mind, Grayson breathed a sigh of relief, though he gave no outward indication of how he felt. He’d expected Pel’s message to be discreet; Cerberus operatives were well versed in the art of ambiguous double talk when using non-secure bandwidth. But with Hendel looming over him, he’d still felt a tingle of apprehension when he’d pushed the playback.

“Pretty vague,” the security chief muttered.

“This is a public channel,” Grayson snapped back at him, his nerves still on edge and begging for a quick hit of red sand. “Did you really think he’d admit to being a drug baron?”

“I think that’s as much confirmation as we’re going to get,” Kahlee told her partner.

Hendel considered for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay, but I still don’t like it. Take us through the relay.”

Grayson bristled at being given what sounded like a direct order; this was his ship, after all. But he did as he was told, initiating the course he had programmed before picking up the message.

“You look like you need some sleep,” Kahlee said to the security chief. “You go lie down. I’ll keep an eye on Gillian.”

And on me, I’ll bet,
Grayson thought. But he wasn’t about to try anything now. He could simply wait until they landed at Omega, and Pel and his team would take care of everything.

As their ship shot forward to be snatched up by a twisting, shimmering bolt of energy unleashed from the mass relay, he couldn’t help smiling at how well things were going to work out. He noticed Kahlee, unaware of what he was really thinking, smiling back.

Lemm peered through the binoculars at the nondescript warehouse. He’d been watching it for several hours now, perched atop the roof of a tall, four-story building on the next block. So far, he’d seen little to indicate anything unusual was going on, though all the windows were made of tinted one-way glass, making it impossible to see inside.

“I haven’t noticed any guards on duty,” he muttered.

“They’re there,” Golo assured him. “Heavily armed. Pel doesn’t trust nonhumans.”

Lemm didn’t bother to ask why a xenophobe would set up operations in a place like Omega; greed could overcome almost any prejudice.

The warehouse, like most of the surrounding buildings, was a short, squat structure only two stories high.

“If I can get close enough to scale the wall, maybe I can sneak in through one of the second-story windows,” he said, thinking out loud.

“They’ll have security cameras on the street,” Golo warned him. “You’ll do better coming in from above.”

He realized the other quarian was right. From their current perch he could leap over to the neighboring three-story building, dropping down one floor to land atop it. With the way the block had been laid out, he could continue on from there, hopping from rooftop to rooftop until he reached the warehouse.

“Good idea,” he admitted.

He still didn’t like the other quarian; Golo would always be a despicable traitor in his eyes. But he had to admit that he had been extremely helpful in planning Lemm’s assault on the warehouse. It was almost enough to make him start trusting him; almost, but not quite.

Golo seemed determined to prove himself, however. He’d even managed to acquire architectural plans for the warehouse’s interior: a mind-boggling mess of twisting halls and stairwells that doubled back and forth, seemingly in an effort to confuse and disorient anyone inside. Despite the convoluted layout, Lemm had already memorized the blueprints. In simple terms, the front half of the building was divided into two floors. Offices had been converted into barracks on the ground level; the second story consisted primarily of small storage rooms. The rear of the building was an open, high-ceilinged garage large enough to hold scores of shipping crates and several vehicles.

As he watched, the garage door rolled up and a pair of rovers sped out, heading toward the nearby spaceport. He didn’t bother moving; there was virtually no chance they would spot him lying flat on a rooftop hundreds of yards away.

“What are they doing?”

“Picking up a shipment, maybe?” Golo suggested.

Lemm briefly considered his chances of trying to sneak in to have a quick look around before they got back. Golo had told him there were five men and three women working for Pel—nine humans in total. He had no idea how many had gone off in the vehicles, but it was likely only a few had been left behind to guard the building. If the crew from the
Cyniad
were being held as prisoners inside, as he suspected, this might be his best opportunity to rescue them.

“I’m going in.”

“Don’t be stupid!” Golo hissed, grabbing him by the shoulder as he tried to stand up. “It’s broad daylight! They’ll see you coming!”

“There’s probably only two or three people in there now. I like those odds better than nine against one.”

“Those vehicles could come back at any time,” Golo reminded him. “Then you’d still be outnumbered, and they’d be the ones catching
you
by surprise.”

Lemm hesitated. His gut was telling him to make his move, even though everything the older quarian was saying made logical sense.

“Stick with the original plan. Go in tomorrow night. You’ll have more time to prepare. Plus, it’ll be dark and most of them will be asleep.”

With a sigh, Lemm settled back down and resumed his vigil. He didn’t like sitting around doing nothing, but Golo was right yet again. He had to be patient.

The vehicles returned less than thirty minutes later. They disappeared into the garage, the heavy steel door slamming shut behind them.

“We’ve seen all we’re going to see,” Golo told him. “Let’s go. You need to get some rest so you’re ready for tomorrow night. You can sleep at my apartment.”

Clearly sensing Lemm’s hesitation, Golo added, “I know. You still don’t trust me. Just keep your shotgun under your pillow if it makes you feel safer.”

Grayson brought the shuttle in to land with a long, slow approach. The sensors picked up two vehicles parked just beyond the wall separating the docks from the interior of the station; he assumed they belonged to Pel and his team.

They landed with the softest of bumps. He shut down the controls, killed the engines, then made his way from the cockpit back to where the others were waiting.

Hendel and Kahlee were standing on either side of Gillian, the three of them waiting for him in the ship’s airlock. Gillian had changed out of the hospital robe into one of her old sweaters and an old pair of her pants they’d found in the back of the ship. She’d obviously grown since she last wore the clothes—the sleeves stopped halfway down her forearm, and the pant cuffs stopped several inches above her ankles. She was still wearing the sandals from the hospital.