Mass Effect™: Retribution (16 page)

The Reapers nodded on Grayson’s behalf.

“Take us back to the Citadel,” the commander called out to the turians up front. “And send a message telling them we rescued a prisoner. Looks like he needs medical attention.

“Better transmit a retinal scan,” she added. “He’s too dusted to remember his name.”

The engines fired up and the mass effect drive engaged. The pilot punched in coordinates, and then Grayson felt the familiar surge as the ship accelerated to faster than light speed, heading toward the nearest mass relay.

Until the shuttle dropped back to sublight speeds, they were completely isolated, undetectable by any
scanners or tracking equipment and incapable of transmitting or receiving messages—the perfect time for the enemy within to strike.

Grayson could feel the Reapers gathering their power, and he fought to resist in any way he could. He had no great love for turians, but he didn’t want to see any harm come to his liberators … especially if he was going to be the one to take the blame.

Everyone on board the shuttle was armed and armored except for him. It might be possible to eliminate two or even three of the turians, but the others would make short work of him. In the close confines of the shuttle, firing weapons was dangerous; they might resort to knives or simply bludgeon him to death with the butts of their assault rifles. It would be ugly, violent, and messy. He didn’t want to go out like that.

The Reapers were too focused on the turians to lash out at Grayson with another debilitating bust of mental agony, but his efforts to stop whatever it was they were planning succeeded only in causing his face to twist into a grotesque mask.

Glancing over at him, the turian commander’s eyes went wide with alarm.

“Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

In response, Grayson’s fist slammed into her face, shattering the visor of her combat helmet and caving in the hard carapace protecting her features, killing her instantly. Grayson’s mind let loose a silent howl of agony as the bones of his hand shattered from the force of the blow.

Oblivious to his suffering, the Reapers unleashed a
powerful biotic wave at the three turians sitting across from them before they could react to the gruesome murder of their leader. The impact lifted them out of their seats and slammed them into the wall of the ship behind them, knocking the wind from their lungs and leaving them curled up on the floor gasping for breath.

Using Grayson’s undamaged hand, the Reapers ripped the pistol from the belt of the commander’s corpse, stood up, and delivered three kill shots execution style to the helpless turians on the ground.

Caught completely off guard by the unprovoked assault, the two turians up front were just now getting out of their seats to try and help their brethren. Grayson dropped the pistol and closed the distance between them, moving so quickly that everything around him became a blur.

His good hand wrapped itself around the wrist of the nearest turian and yanked him off his feet, tossing him to the back of the shuttle, where he landed with a heavy thud atop the bodies of the others.

This provided just enough time for the second turian to bring his assault rifle up. But as he squeezed the trigger Grayson slapped the nose of the weapon down. A stream of bullets deflected off the floor of the shuttle and ricocheted wildly around the reinforced walls of the cabin.

Several rounds ripped through Grayson’s flesh: one through the shoulder of his damaged hand, another through the knee of the opposite leg, two through the thigh. There was a cry of pain as the stunned turian lying in the back of the shuttle was hit as well.

Grayson yanked the rifle from his opponent’s grasp
with his one good hand, taking it away as easily as an enraged parent might snatch a toy from a petulant child. Then he swung the rifle like a club, slamming it into the side of the turian’s helmet. There was a muffled grunt and the unconscious body went limp.

Ignoring the pain from the rounds in Grayson’s knee and thigh, the Reapers spun him around and sent him leaping through the air to land on the turian at the rear of the vessel as he tried to get up, knocking him back to the floor. Then the Reapers had Grayson lift up one of the heavy boots and bring it smashing down on his back again and again and again, cracking vertebrae, severing the spine, and causing him to spew frothy indigo spittle across the floor as the internal injuries caused his dark blue blood to seep into his lungs.

When the turian beneath Grayson’s boot had been reduced to a lifeless, pulpy mass, the Reapers stopped. Moving with purpose but without hurry, they piled all the bodies—including the still unconscious turian who had been bashed on the side of the head—into the airlock.

Had Grayson been in control of his body, he probably would have thrown up in reaction to the brutal assault. As it was, however, the Reapers kept him from having any physical reaction at all.

The most horrifying part was the cold, efficient way the savage attack had been planned and carried out. Grayson had sensed no anger or rage on the part of the Reapers as they had used him as an instrument of wanton slaughter. The massacre wasn’t motivated by hate or even a sadistic desire to destroy organic
life. The Reapers had analyzed the situation, determined a course of action, and followed it without any emotion whatsoever.

This, more than anything else, terrified their human host. It seemed to symbolize an inevitability about the Reapers, as if nothing could stop their relentless, passionless pursuit of their goal.

Once all the bodies were secured in the airlock, the Reapers had Grayson take a seat in the pilot’s chair. Using his good hand, they punched in a series of commands that first disabled the vessel’s transponder, then brought them out of FTL travel.

Grayson was an experienced pilot, but he had never been trained on a turian vessel. Alone, he probably could have fumbled through the process, but the Reapers moved with precision and certainty. They had an intimate knowledge of turian technology, and he could think of only one reasonable explanation.

The Reapers were gathering knowledge about him and his environment, recording everything they came into contact with. He didn’t know how many of the aliens were in his head; sometimes it felt like a single entity, other times it felt like billions of individuals. In either case, however, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume they shared whatever information they collected with others of their kind. Following this train of thought, if the Reapers had ever possessed a turian in the past for a long period of time, they could have learned virtually everything there was to know about that species. And now they were using Grayson to learn all they could about humanity.

The Reapers hit the eject button on the airlock, jettisoning the bodies into the cold vacuum of space.
Then they plotted a new course—too quickly for Grayson to catch the final destination—and made the jump to light speed again. Finally, despite his heroic struggle to oppose their will, the Reapers closed his eyes and made him fall asleep.

As she ran on the treadmill, Kahlee remained intently focused on her technique. She didn’t believe in simply putting one foot in front of the other until she was out of breath and dripping with perspiration. There was an art to running; function followed form. She maintained an optimal stride length, kept her breathing under control, and focused on pumping her arms with each stride. Her pace never varied, and the kilometers—and minutes—rolled past.

The turian strike teams had left roughly twelve standard hours ago. Four hours after that, C-Sec had swooped in and arrested key Cerberus operatives for interrogation, including many high-ranking Alliance officials. As soon as the arrests were complete, Orinia had gone to oversee the interrogations. She had yet to return.

Anderson was gone as well, swallowed up by a maelstrom of meetings with representatives of the Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy in an effort to avert a political catastrophe. That left Kahlee alone in the turian embassy with nothing to do but wait for them to return. She didn’t like to wait.

Patience had never been her strong suit. She was
used to tackling multiple tasks at once. Whenever she felt bored or restless, whenever she felt the world dragging itself too slowly for her liking, she would throw herself into her work and occupy her mind with difficult, complex problems.

In that vein, she had tried reviewing the Cerberus data one last time, but there really wasn’t any point. Not with the turian strike teams already deployed. She had employed a number of other methods to distract herself—surfing the extranet, reviewing data collected from the children of the Ascension Project, even watching a romantic comedy vid—but nothing helped. Knowing the plan to destroy Cerberus had been set in motion made it virtually impossible to concentrate on anything else.

In the end she’d resorted to a crude but effective therapy to vent her frustration: physical exertion. The turians had been gracious enough to offer her access to the fitness facilities of their embassy, and for the last three hours she had engrossed herself in a punishing cardio workout while waiting for an update on the strike teams.

She noticed a small ache building in her left knee, and she reluctantly reduced the speed of the treadmill to a walking pace. As a classic type A personality, she had a habit of overdoing things. After suffering many painful repetitive-stress injuries in her youth, she’d finally learned to pay attention to the warning signs her body gave her.

With the slower tempo, however, her mind began to wander back to the very things she was struggling to avoid. Could the turians really bring down Cerberus? Was it possible they might actually capture the
Illusive Man? Would they ever find Grayson? And if they did, would he still be alive?

The questions gnawed at her, forcing her to pick up the pace again. But now that the ideas were firmly entrenched in her thoughts, even her run couldn’t drive them back into her subconscious. After another twenty minutes she shut the treadmill down.

She’d promised to stay out of the way until the missions were over, but she’d reached a breaking point. It was time to march into the turian ambassador’s office and demand answers!

Now that her mind had been made up, even taking the time to shower seemed like an unbearable delay. Wiping her neck and brow down with a towel, she marched over to the door, flung it open, and stepped right into Anderson and Orinia as they were coming in from the other side.

“Whoa, Kahlee,” Anderson exclaimed. His hands instinctively reached up to wrap themselves around the biceps of her bare arms as he tried to catch her and absorb her momentum to keep them from crashing into each other.

His grip was firm, but not rough. Suddenly aware of the layer of perspiration covering her skin, Kahlee took a quick step back, breaking free of his grasp.

“We were just coming to find you,” Orinia explained. “The strike teams have all reported back.”

Unable to decipher the expression on the turian’s unfamiliar features, she glanced over at Anderson to see if she could get a quick read on how things had turned out. She caught him rubbing his hands on his hips, trying to subtly wipe away the sweat that had transferred to his palms when he’d grabbed Kahlee’s
arms. She flushed with embarrassment, and hoped he would think her color was simply a result of her recent physical exertions.

“Udina was pissed,” Anderson explained, and she could tell he was just as embarrassed as she was. “Says I created a political shit-storm that’s going to take months to clean up.”

He was avoiding the details of the mission, and she could tell by the expression on his face that things hadn’t gone exactly as planned.

“Tell me what happened.”

“All Cerberus bases were neutralized,” Orinia informed her. “Unfortunately, turian casualties were almost twenty percent—nearly double what we anticipated. And we failed to apprehend the Illusive Man.”

“What about Grayson?” Kahlee asked, fearing she already knew the answer.

“Dinara’s team found him on a space station in the Terminus Systems,” Orinia said.

“He was still alive,” Anderson interjected quickly. “They sent us a retinal scan to confirm his identity.”

She should have felt relief at hearing his news, but something about the way he said it gave her pause.

“Why a retinal scan? Why couldn’t he just tell them who he was? Something went wrong, didn’t it?”

“Dinara and her team took Grayson aboard their shuttle and transmitted a message they were returning to the Citadel. That was three hours ago. We haven’t heard anything since.”

“They’d need at least three mass relays to make it back to the Citadel,” Kahlee offered, refusing to give up on Grayson. “That could take longer than three hours.”

“Each time they pass through a relay they’d need to drop to sub-FTL travel,” Orinia explained. “Standard turian military procedure would require them to transmit an updated ETA and flight plan each time. We’ve had no contact since the initial message.”

“What do you think happened?” she asked, her mind struggling with the implications of what she was being told.

“We don’t know,” Anderson admitted. “It’s possible they could simply be having comm issues.”

Kahlee knew spaceships were designed with too many redundant backups for something like that to happen. Any mechanical failure that kept them from at least sending out a distress call would have to be catastrophic. If it was a technical issue, the chance of their still being alive was almost zero.

“There are other possibilities,” Orinia reminded them. “The Terminus Systems are a haven for slavers and pirates.”

“Would any of them be stupid enough to attack a turian military shuttle?” Kahlee wanted to know.

“Probably not,” Anderson conceded. “We have to consider the option that their disappearance has something to do with Cerberus. Maybe some type of retaliation for the attacks.”

“We found no indication they had the ships or resources to strike back so quickly,” Kahlee objected. “Even if the Illusive Man is still out there.”

“Unless they had an asset on the shuttle itself,” Orinia said darkly.