Mass Effect: The Complete Novels 4-Book Bundle (7 page)

“You could’ve made a lot of money in my line of work, Skarr.” He made no attempt to hide his grudging respect.

“I make a lot of money in this line of work. And I get to kill people as one of my perks. So let’s stop screwing around and make a deal.”

Edan gave a slight nod and blinked all four of his eyes at once, signaling the mercs to lower their weapons. They weren’t happy that Skarr had killed three of their comrades, but loyalty meant less to them than money. And with the three dead, their cut just got larger.

Only the young human closest to the krogan, the one with the pistol, didn’t comply. He looked around in disbelief at the others, his weapon still aimed directly at Skarr.

“What are you doing?” he shouted to the others. “We can’t just let him get away with this!”

“Don’t be stupid, boy,” Skarr spat out. “Killing me won’t bring your dead friends back. It’s just bad business.”

“You shut up!” he snapped back, focusing all his attention on Skarr.

The krogan’s voice dropped to a menacing whisper. “Think hard about your next move, human. Nobody else is going to step in. It’s just you and me.”

The merc was trembling now, but he managed to keep the pistol aimed at his target. Skarr didn’t seem concerned.

“You’ve got to the count of three to drop that gun.”

“Or what?” the merc screamed. “You make one move and you’re dead!”

“One.”

Edan noticed the krogan was suddenly surrounded by a faint aura, barely visible even with the benefit of two pairs of eyes. There was a subtle waver around the bounty hunter, as if the light in the room were being ever so slightly distorted as it passed through the surrounding air.

Skarr was a biotic! The krogan was one of those rare individuals capable of manipulating dark energy, the imperceptible quantum force that pervaded all the so-called empty space in the universe. Normally too weak to have any noticeable effects on the physical world, dark energy could be concentrated into extremely dense fields by biotics through mental conditioning. With their natural talents augmented by thousands of microscopic amplifiers surgically implanted throughout their nervous system, biotic individuals could use biofeedback to release the accumulated power in a single directed burst. Which was exactly what Skarr was doing; stalling for time as he gathered enough power to unleash it against the young man still foolishly holding a gun on him.

But the merc didn’t realize what was happening. Humanity didn’t have any individuals with latent biotic abilities; Edan suspected he wasn’t even aware such a power existed. But he was about to find out.

“Two.”

The merc opened his mouth to say something else, but he never got the chance. Skarr thrust a clenched fist in his direction, and the air rippled as a wave of invisible dark energy surged out and over his adversary. The unsuspecting human was picked up off his feet and thrown backwards several meters. He landed heavily on the floor, knocking the wind out of his lungs and sending the pistol flying from his hand.

He was stunned only for a second—plenty of time for Skarr to cross the distance between them and wrap his three-fingered hand around the merc’s throat. He raised the human to the ceiling, easily holding him with one arm as he slowly crushed his windpipe. The merc kicked his dangling heels and clawed at the scaly forearm choking the life from him to no avail.

“Your death comes at the hands of a true krogan Battle Master,” Skarr casually informed him as his victim’s face turned bright red, then blue. “I hope you appreciate the honor.”

The rest of the Blue Suns stood by and did nothing, watching the whole affair with cold disdain. From their expressions Edan could tell they weren’t enjoying the spectacle, but none of them was willing to step in and put a stop to it. Not if it meant offending their employer … or incurring the krogan’s wrath.

The merc’s struggles grew weaker, then his eyes rolled back up into his skull and he went still. Skarr shook him once then gave a final squeeze, completely collapsing his trachea before dropping him disdainfully to the floor.

“I thought you said he had to the count of three,” Edan remarked.

“I lied.”

“An impressive display,” Edan admitted, nodding his head in the direction of the bodies. “I only hope you have similar results with Kahlee Sanders. Of course, you’ll have to find her, first.”

“I’ll find her,” the krogan replied with absolute conviction. “That’s what I do.”

Jon Grissom woke to the sound of someone pounding on his door in the middle of the night. Grumbling, he rolled out of bed and threw on a tattered housecoat, though he didn’t bother tying it closed. Any visitor rude enough to get him out of bed at this hour could damn well suffer through seeing him in his boxers.

He’d actually been expecting something like this ever since he’d heard Sidon had been attacked. Either someone from Alliance brass showing up to try and convince him to make some kind of public appearance or official statement, or some reporter looking to get the reaction of one of humanity’s most recognizable icons. Whichever it was, they were out of luck. He was retired now. He was done being a hero; he was sick of being some kind of symbol for all of humanity. Now he was just a cranky old man living off his officer’s pension.

He flicked on a light in the hall and winced at the brightness, still trying to shake off the last vestiges of groggy sleep. He plodded his way slowly from the bedroom—tucked away in the back of his small, single-story dwelling—toward the front door. The pounding continued, growing more insistent and frantic.

“Goddammit, I’m coming!” he shouted, but he didn’t bother to pick up his pace. At least the noise wouldn’t wake the neighbors—there weren’t any. Not close enough to hear, anyway. As far as he was concerned, that was the main selling feature of the house.

Elysium had seemed like a good place to retire. The colony was far enough away from Earth and other major settlements to dissuade people from making the trip out of simple curiosity. And with a population of several million, Elysium was large enough for him to just disappear among the masses. Not to mention it was safe, stable, and secure. He could have found somewhere even more remote, but on a less established colony he’d run the risk of being looked at as some type of savior or de facto leader whenever something went wrong.

It wasn’t perfect, though. When he’d first arrived on Elysium five years ago, local politicians had pestered him constantly, either wanting him to run on their party’s behalf or looking for an endorsement of their own candidacy. Grissom chose to remain completely fair and unbiased: he told every single one of them to go to hell.

After the first year people stopped bothering him. Every six months or so he’d still get a short video message from the Alliance encouraging him to come back and help serve humanity. He was only in his fifties: too young to sit around and do nothing, they’d say. He never bothered to reply. Grissom figured he’d already done plenty to serve humanity. His military career had always come first; it had cost him his family. But that was just the beginning. There was the five-year media circus that had followed his pioneering journey through the Charon relay, thousands upon thousands of interviews. Things only got worse after his efforts during the First Contact War: more interviews; public appearances; private conferences with admirals, generals, and politicians; official diplomatic ceremonies to meet with representatives of every freaky mutant species of alien the Alliance ran into. Now he was done. Let someone else take the banner and run with it—he just wanted to be left the hell alone.

And then some jackasses had to go and attack an Alliance base right on Elysium’s doorstep, galactically speaking. It was inevitable somebody would figure this was a good enough excuse to resume bothering him again. But did they have to do it in the middle of the goddamned night?

He was at the door, and the pounding hadn’t let up at all. If anything, it had gotten more urgent and intense the longer he took. As he unlocked the door, Grissom decided he would tell the visitor to piss off if they were from the Alliance. If it was a reporter, he’d punch him—or her—right in the mouth.

A terrified young woman stood at the door, shaking in the cold darkness. She was covered in so much blood, it took him a second to recognize her.

“Kahlee?”

“I’m in trouble,” she said in a quavering voice. “I need your help, Dad.”

SIX

“Citadel control says we are cleared for landing” came the helmsman’s voice over the shipboard intercom. “ETA to docking, seventeen minutes.”

Through the
Hastings
’s primary viewport, Anderson could see the Citadel in the distance, the magnificent space station that served as the cultural, economic, and political center of the galaxy. From here, several thousand kilometers away, it resembled a five-pointed star: a quintet of long, thick arms extending out from a hollow central ring.

Though he’d seen it many times before, Anderson still marveled at its sheer size. The middle ring was ten kilometers in diameter; each arm was twenty-five kilometers long and five kilometers in breadth. In the twenty-seven hundred years since the Council was established on the Citadel, great cosmopolitan metropolises known as the wards had been constructed along each arm, entire cities built into the station’s multilevel interior. Forty million people from every species and sector across the known galaxy now made their homes there.

There was quite simply no other station to compare it to; even Arcturus would be dwarfed in its presence. But it wasn’t just its size that made it so amazing: like the mass relays, the Citadel had originally been created by the Protheans. Its hull was formed of the same virtually indestructible material used to construct the mass relays—a technological feat no other species had equaled since the Protheans’ mysterious extinction fifty thousand years ago. Even with the most advanced weaponry it would take days of steady, concentrated bombardment to do any significant damage to the hull.

Not that anyone would ever consider attacking the Citadel. The station was located at the heart of a major mass relay junction deep inside a dense nebula cloud. This gave it several natural defenses: the nebula was difficult to navigate—it would slow any enemy fleets and make it difficult for them to launch any sort of organized attack. And with several dozen mass relays in the vicinity, reinforcements from virtually every region of the galaxy were only minutes away.

If anyone did penetrate these exterior defenses, the station’s long arms could fold up around the central ring, drawing together to transform the Citadel from a five-armed star into a long cylindrical tube. Once the arms were closed, the station was all but impregnable.

The final layer of protection was provided by the Council Fleet, a joint force of turian, salarian, and asari vessels that was always on patrol in the vicinity. It only took Anderson a few seconds to pick out the flagship, the
Destiny Ascension.
An asari dreadnought, the
Ascension
was more than just a majestic symbol of the Council’s power. Four times the size of anything in the human fleet, and with a crew approaching five thousand, the
Destiny Ascension
was the most formidable warship ever constructed. Like the Citadel itself, it was without peer.

Of course, the ships of the Council Fleet were not the only vessels in the area. The Serpent Nebula was the nexus of the galaxy’s mass relay network—all roads eventually led to the Citadel. Traffic here was constant and crowded: this was one of the few places in all the galaxy where there was a real threat of crashing into another vessel.

Congestion was particularly heavy at the free-floating discharge stations. Generating the mass effect fields necessary to run at FTL speeds caused a powerful charge to build up inside a ship’s drive core. Left unchecked the core would oversaturate, resulting in a massive energy burst being released through the hull—a burst powerful enough to cook anyone on board who wasn’t properly grounded, burn out all electronic systems, and even fuse the metal bulkheads.

To prevent such a calamity most ships were required to discharge their drive cores every twenty to thirty hours. Typically this was done by grounding on a planet or dispersing the buildup through close proximity to the magnetic field of a large stellar body, such as a sun or gas giant. However, there were no astrological bodies of sufficient size in the nearby vicinity of the Citadel. Instead, a ring of specially designed docking stations allowed ships to link in and release the energy in their drive cores before continuing on using conventional sub-FTL drives.

Fortunately, the
Hastings
had discharged her core when she’d first arrived in the region over an hour ago. Since then she’d been in a holding pattern, patiently waiting for the clearance they had only just now received.

Anderson didn’t need to worry about the crew’s performance on a routine approach like this; they’d done it hundreds of times before. Instead, he just shut his mind off and enjoyed the view as the Citadel drew slowly closer, looming ever larger in the viewport. The lights from the wards twinkled and shone; their piercing illumination a counterpoint to the hazy, swirling brightness of the nebula cloud that served as the backdrop to the scene.

“It’s beautiful.”

Anderson jumped, startled by the voice coming from right behind him.

Gunnery Chief Dah laughed. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

Anderson glanced down at the bandages and walking brace that encased her leg from the upper thigh all the way down to her ankle.

“You’re getting pretty good on that thing, Chief. I didn’t even hear you sneaking up on me.”

She shrugged. “Medic said I’m going to make a complete recovery. I owe you one.”

“That’s not how it works,” Anderson replied with a smile. “I know you’d have done the same for me.”

“I like to think so, sir. But thinking it and doing it aren’t the same. So … thanks.”

“Don’t tell me you came all the way up here from the infirmary just to thank me.”

She grinned. “Actually, I came to see if you’d give me another piggyback ride.”

“Forget it,” Anderson replied with a laugh. “I nearly threw my back out hauling your ass out of there. You really need to shed a few pounds.”

“Careful, sir,” she warned, lifting her braced leg an inch off the floor. “I can deliver a pretty good kick with this thing.”

Anderson turned back to the viewport, grinning. “Just shut up and enjoy the view, Dah. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir.”

It only took a few minutes for Anderson to clear customs after they landed. They had touched down at an Alliance port, and military personnel were given top priority whenever they came in from a mission. The Citadel security officers checked his Alliance ID and verified it by scanning his thumbprint, then gave a cursory check of the pack carrying his personal belongings before waving him through. Anderson was pleased to see they were both human; last month there had still been a few salarian officers assigned to the Alliance ports due to species staff shortages. C-Sec had promised to recruit more humans into their ranks; it looked like they’d been true to their word.

Leaving the ports behind, he stepped onto the elevator that would bring him up to the main level. He yawned once; now that he was off duty the fatigue he’d been holding at bay during the entire mission began to wash over him. He couldn’t wait to get back to his private residence in the wards. Considering how much time he spent on patrol, it could be argued that paying rent for an apartment on the Citadel was an extravagant expense. But he felt it was important to have a place he could call his own, even if he was only home one week out of four.

The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Anderson stepped out into the pandemonium of light and sound that was the wards. Throngs of people filled the pedways, individuals of every species coming and going in all directions. Rapid-transit cars zoomed by overhead on the monorail, each one filled with commuters, students, and general gawkers taking the high-speed tour. The lower streets were packed with smaller ground-transport vehicles weaving in and out of the designated thoroughfares, each driver in more of a hurry than the last. It was always rush hour on the Citadel.

Fortunately he didn’t need to flag a driver down or head to a transit stop. His apartment was only twenty minutes away by foot, so he simply hiked his gear up over his shoulder and fell in with the mob, jostling and shoving with the rest of the maddening crowds.

As he walked, his senses were under constant assault from an endless stream of electronic advertisements. Everywhere he looked there were flashing holographic images, futuristic billboards promoting a thousand different companies on a hundred different worlds. Food, beverages, vehicles, clothes, entertainment: on the Citadel, everything was available for purchase. However, only a handful of the ads were geared specifically to humans; they were still a minority on the station, and corporations preferred to spend their advertising dollars on species with a larger market share. But with each passing month Anderson noticed more and more of his own kind among the hustling, bustling masses.

Anderson knew that it was important for humans to integrate themselves with the rest of the interstellar community. What better place to do it than the Citadel, where all the disparate cultures in Council space were on display? That was the real reason Anderson kept his apartment in the wards. He wanted to understand the other species, and the quickest way to do that was to live among them.

He reached his building, pausing at the main door to speak his name so the voice recognition system would let him in. His apartment was on the second level, so he eschewed the elevator and lugged his pack up the staircase. At the door to his personal quarters he again gave his name, then staggered into the room and dropped his gear in the center of the floor. He was too tired to turn on the lights as he made his way through the small kitchen to the single bedroom at the back; barely registering the faint whoosh as the apartment door automatically closed behind him. When he reached the bedroom he didn’t even bother to undress—he simply collapsed on the bed, exhausted but glad to be home.

Anderson woke several hours later. Night and day meant little in the perpetual activity of the Citadel, but when he rolled over to check the clock by his bed the digital readout said 17:00. On human colonies and out on patrol the Alliance still used the familiar twenty-four-hour clock based on Terran Coordinated Universal Time, the protocol established in the late twentieth century to replace the archaic Greenwich Mean Time system. On the Citadel, however, everything operated on the galactic standard of a twenty-hour day. To further complicate things, each hour was divided into one hundred minutes of one hundred seconds … but each second was roughly half as long as the ones humans were used to.

The net result was that the twenty-hour galactic standard day was about fifteen percent longer than the twenty-four-hour day as calculated by Terran Coordinated Universal Time. Just thinking about it made Anderson’s head hurt, and it played havoc with his sleep patterns. This was to be expected, given that he’d been preconditioned by several million years of Terran evolution.

Three more hours and the day would roll into tomorrow, when he was supposed to present himself to the ambassador for a debriefing on Sidon. He didn’t have to be there until 10:00, however, which meant that he had plenty of time to kill. He’d probably need to catch a few more hours of sleep before the meeting, but he wasn’t tired now. So Anderson rolled out of bed, shed his clothes, and tossed them into the small laundry machine. He had a quick shower, changed into fresh clothes—civvies—then logged on to his data terminal to check for news updates and messages.

Communication across an entire galaxy was no simple matter. Ships could use mass effect drives to exceed the speed of light, but signals transmitted through the cold vacuum of space by conventional means would still take years to travel from one solar system to another.

Transferring information, personal messages, or even raw data across thousands of light-years expediently could only be accomplished in one of two ways. Files could be transported by courier drones, unmanned ships programmed to travel through the mass relays network by the most direct routes possible. But courier drones weren’t cheap to produce or operate: fuel was expensive. And if they had to pass through several relays it could take hours for them to arrive at their destination. The solution wasn’t practical for back-and-forth communications.

The other option was to transmit data via the extranet, a series of buoys placed across the galaxy that were specifically designed to enable real-time communication between systems. Information could be sent by a conventional radio signal to the nearest array of communication buoys. The buoys were telemetrically aligned with a similar array hundreds or even thousands of light-years away, connected by the tight beam projection of a mass effect field; the space-age equivalent of the fiber-optic cables used on Earth in the late twentieth century. Within this narrow corridor, signals could be projected several thousands times faster than the speed of light. Data in the form of radio signals could be relayed from one array to the next virtually instantaneously. Once the arrays were properly aligned, it was even possible to speak to someone on the opposite end of the galaxy with a lag of only a few tenths of a second.

However, while the extranet’s buoy arrays made communication possible, it still wasn’t exactly feasible for the vast majority. Trillions of people on thousands of worlds were accessing the extranet every second of every day, overloading the finite bandwidth capabilities of the com arrays. To accommodate this, information was sent in carefully measured bursts of data, and space in each burst was parceled out in a highly regulated priority system. Top priority in each burst was given to organizations directly responsible for preserving galactic security. Next came the various official governments and militaries for each and every species in Council space; then the assorted media conglomerates. Anything left over was parceled off and sold to the highest bidder.

Virtually all of the unused space on every burst was purchased by extranet provider corporations, who then divided their allocated space into thousands of tiny packages that were resold to individual subscribers. Depending on the provider and how much an individual was willing to pay, it was possible to get personal updates from hourly, daily, or even weekly bursts.