Mass Effect™: Ascension

by Drew Karpyshyn

  “Cerberus won’t give up on us that easy,” Hendel warned him as he entered the cockpit.

  “They aren’t working for Cerberus,” Kahlee explained, remembering that Hendel hadn’t been part of the conversation in Grayson’s cell. “Not anymore. I guess they figured they could make more by going freelance.”

  It was only then she realized Hendel hadn’t yet bothered to ask why Grayson had been left behind. He must have hated him even more than I thought. Given how things turned out, she couldn’t really blame him.

  “You were right about Grayson,” she told him. “He was a Cerberus agent. He must have been working with Jiro the whole time.”

  The ship trembled slightly and there was a low rumble as Lemm fired up the engines.

  The news of Grayson’s true identity didn’t seem to surprise Hendel at all. To his credit, the security chief didn’t take the opportunity to say “I told you so.” Instead, he only asked, “Did you kill him?”

  “He’s still alive, as far as I know,” Kahlee admitted. “They were holding him prisoner, just like us. I left him in his cell.”

  “If they turn him over to the Collectors, he’ll wish you had killed him,” Lemm chimed in.

  Kahlee hadn’t thought about that, but the idea brought the hint of a grim smile to Hendel’s lips.

  The quarian made a few final adjustments and the thrusters engaged, lifting the shuttle slowly into the air.

  “What course should I set?” he asked.

  Good question, Kahlee thought.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Hendel said, giving voice to her own concerns. “Cerberus will still want to get their hands on Gillian, and we still can’t risk going to the Alliance. Grayson and his former friends may be out of the picture, but Cerberus has plenty of other agents.

  “No matter where we go, they’re going to find us sooner or later.”

  “Then we have to keep moving,” Kahlee said. “Stay one step ahead of them.”

  “It’ll be hard on Gillian,” Hendel warned her.

  “We don’t have much choice. For all we know, they could have someone stationed on every human accessible world, colony, and space station in the galaxy.”

  “I know one place you can hide where Cerberus is guaranteed not to find you,” Lemm said, turning in his seat to join the conversation. “The Migrant Fleet.”

  In the aftermath of the battle Grayson made a thorough exploration of the warehouse from top to bottom. For a moment he had debated racing down to the second rover on the garage floor and trying to chase after Gillian, but he knew the other vehicle would be long gone by the time he got there. If he wanted to find Gillian, he had to be patient and smart.

  An examination of the warehouse floor revealed several bodies, including the woman he’d shot in the back. Two more had been shot, two had been run over by the missing vehicle, and one woman lay crumpled against a wall, her neck broken. Grayson recognized the corpse as a telltale sign of biotics, and he suspected it was Hendel, not Gillian, who had inflicted the damage.

  He also found a shotgun sitting in the middle of the floor. It appeared to be of turian manufacture, but the mods on it were of an improvised yet effectively cunning design that was the hallmark of the quarian species.

  Recognizing the value of the weapon, he picked it up and carried it with him as he left the garage and went to explore the remainder of the base. He became lost several times in the confusing halls, but eventually he found himself back on the main floor, in a room that had been converted into a barracks.

  There were twelve bunks, but only nine showed signs of use. Grayson had found seven bodies in the warehouse; adding these to the two guards in the hall near his cell explained why he hadn’t run across anyone else during his search. With all the occupants of the warehouse accounted for, he was able to relax his guard.

  On any other station or world he would have been worried about law enforcement responding to the sounds of the battle. But Omega had no police, and gunfire and exploding rockets generally encouraged the neighbors to mind their own business. Someone would come to investigate the premises eventually—probably whoever had been renting the location to Pel and his team. However, Grayson didn’t expect anyone for at least a few days.

  The barracks led down a short hall to several offices Pel had set up as intel and command posts. Looking through the computers and OSDs, Grayson found the reports from their original assignment. They were coded, of course, but only with a basic Cerberus cipher, and Grayson had no problem making sense of them.

  Pel had been sent to Omega to try and find a way to infiltrate the quarian fleet. Unfortunately, the reports were incomplete. They mentioned a ship they had captured called the Cyniad, and a single prisoner that had been taken for interrogation, but the results of the interrogation weren’t recorded. Pel had obviously given up keeping the logs once he threw his lot in with the mysterious Collectors, and he wasn’t stupid enough to keep any records, electronic or written, of his plan to betray the Illusive Man.

  The mention of the quarian ship and prisoner, combined with the discovery of the quarian modified shotgun, left little doubt in Grayson’s mind as to who had busted the others out. A quarian rescue team must have come for their compatriot, and for some reason they had decided to take Gillian, Kahlee, and Hendel with them as they shot their way to freedom.

  Satisfied he had learned as much as he could from the files, he resumed his slow, careful search of the premises. In another office, this one located near what he guessed to be the center of the building, he discovered a small door built into the floor. It was primitive in design; rather than sliding on rails it simply swung upward on a pair of metal hinges. It was closed and locked with a simple deadbolt latch.

  Grayson took aim at the door with his newly acquired shotgun and used the toe of his boot to slide the deadbolt aside. He waited for several seconds, and when nothing happened he leaned forward cautiously and threw open the door, ready to fire if a target presented itself.

  The cellar beneath was completely dark. A rickety wooden staircase descended into the blackness. Grayson flicked on the flashlight built into the shotgun’s barrel, using its powerful beam to pierce the gloom as he made his way slowly down the stairs.

  When he reached the bottom he cast about in a quick circle, sending the illumination into every corner. The room was square, maybe twenty feet on each side. The walls were finished with brick and mortar, the floor was bare cement. It was completely empty except for a motionless figure lying on its back near one of the walls.

  Training the beam of his flashlight—and the muzzle of the shotgun—on the body, Grayson approached. He was within a few feet before his mind finally recognized what he was seeing; he had found the quarian captive.

  Running the flashlight slowly from head to toe, he saw that the prisoner was bound hand and foot, and had been stripped completely naked. Grayson had never seen a quarian without its enviro-suit and helmet before, though he doubted this individual could still be called anything close to a representative example of his species. His face was a deformed mess of lumps, bruises, cuts, and burn marks—clear evidence of the torture he had endured. Someone had knocked out all his teeth and caved in one cheekbone. The other cheek gaped wide, as if someone had slit it lengthwise from lip to what passed for the quarian version of an ear.

  One eye was swollen completely shut. The other had both upper and lower eyelids missing, the ragged edges of the flesh left behind attesting to the fact that they had been savagely torn off with a pair of pliers. Grayson recalled with distaste how much Pel had enjoyed that particular method of torture: in addition to the excruciating pain of the brutal removal, the victim would go slowly and agonizingly blind as the exposed eyeball became dehydrated.

  The rest of the body showed similar signs of abuse. The fingers and toes were all broken, and several had been yanked from their sockets. Every inch of exposed skin showed signs of being beaten, cut, burned or dissolved by acid. However, there was something even
more unusual about the body that caused Grayson to crouch down for a closer look.

  There appeared to be some kind of loamy, gray growth spreading out from the quarian’s wounds to crawl slowly across the skin. It took Grayson a moment to realize it was some kind of bacterial fungus; in addition to the sadistic torture, the quarian must have contracted a strange alien disease.

  He gave a grunt of disgust and stepped back from the body. To his surprise, the quarian reacted with a short yelp of fear.

  Jesus Christ, the poor bastard’s still alive!

  He was actually trying to talk, saying the same phrase over and over in a shaky, raspy voice. The words were distorted from his missing teeth and misshapen face, and it took Grayson’s automated translator several repetitions before it could decipher what he was trying to say.

  “Frequency 43223…. My body travels to distantstars, but my soul never leaves the Fleet…. Frequency 43223…. My body travels to distant stars, but my soul never leaves the Fleet….”

  He kept repeating the same phrase over and over, his voice rising and falling in a trembling, terrified warble. Grayson crouched down close to him, though he was careful not to touch the infected flesh.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly, knowing his translator would repeat the words in the quarian’s own language. “Nobody’s going to hurt you now. It’s okay.”

  The quarian didn’t seem to hear him, but continued babbling, his words coming more and more quickly as his broken mind spewed out the information in a desperate attempt to avoid continued torture.

  “It’s over now,” Grayson shushed, hoping to calm the frantic captive down. “It’s over.”

  His words seemed to have the opposite effect, as the quarian began to thrash against the bonds holding his wrists and ankles. He let out a cry of frustration, then began to sputter and cough. A fine mist of black, foul-smelling ichor spewed from his lips and the gash in his cheek, causing Grayson to jump back to avoid the spray.

  The fit ended with the quarian letting out a series of hitching, gurgling sighs, and then he finally went still and silent. Steeling himself against the fecund stench that was now emanating from the body, Grayson got close enough to verify that the quarian had stopped breathing.

  He left the body in the blackness of the cellar and climbed the stairs back to the ground floor. Closing and bolting the door behind him, he then scrounged up everything of value he could carry. Fifteen minutes later he was behind the wheel of Pel’s second rover, making his way down the unfamiliar streets of Omega with a pack full of supplies and the shotgun resting on the seat beside him.

  Staying focused on his true purpose allowed him to ignore the little voice in the back of his skull telling him to track down a dust dealer for a quick hit. Instead, he set off to locate a transmit station so he could link into the comm network and send a message off to the Illusive Man, telling him everything that had happened.

  Pel had turned his back on Cerberus, but Grayson was still loyal to the cause…and he knew they could help him find Gillian again.

  EIGHTEEN

  Six hours had passed since Kahlee and the others had escaped the warehouse on Omega.

  Lemm had managed to find the current location of the quarian flotilla by linking into the comm network and scanning the news updates. The Migrant Fleet was passing through a remote volus-controlled system near the edges of Council Space. According to the news reports, several volus diplomats were petitioning the Citadel to do everything in its power to hasten the quarians’ departure.

  Kahlee doubted their political appeals would have any noticeable impact. The Citadel was still coming to grips with the changes wrought by Saren and his geth army. Their primary focus was on eliminating the few remaining pockets of geth resistance scattered across the galaxy; an objective being pursued by an emergency coalition force headed up by humanity and the Alliance. Once the geth were pushed back beyond the Perseus Veil, she suspected the next order of business would be to address the restructuring of the Council, along with the massive political fallout that would entail. The last thing anyone on the Citadel wanted to deal with was the Migrant Fleet.

  Kahlee knew that even during the long period of interstellar peace that had preceded humanity’s arrival, the various species of the galaxy tended to view the activities of the Fleet as little more than a minor inconvenience or nuisance…until they passed through one of their systems. Then the most effective course of action was to offer unwanted resources in the form of decommissioned ships, raw materials, and spare parts to the quarian Admiralty.

  The quarians allowed themselves to be bought off with such gifts, with the understanding the flotilla would quickly move on to become a thorn in someone else’s side. Kahlee hated to pass judgment, but she couldn’t help but see it as the interstellar equivalent of panhandling.

  And in another forty hours we’ll be hoping to join up with them, she thought, shaking her head in disbelief at the course of events over the last few days.

  Lemm had plotted their course into the navigation, then gone to lay down in the sleeper cabin in the back once they’d made the jump to FTL flight. Kahlee still had plenty of questions for him—like how he knew who she was—but in light of all he had done for them, she could afford to be patient. She’d give him a few hours to rest and start recovering from his injury before she began peppering him with questions. Besides, she was anxious to check on Gillian now that the girl had woken up.

  The first words out of her mouth upon gaining consciousness had been, “I’m hungry.” Hendel had easily solved that problem by preparing a double-portioned serving for her from the ship’s rations.

  With the ship’s navigation following the preprogrammed course, there was no need for anyone to keep an eye on the helm. So the three of them—Kahlee, Gillian, and Hendel—had gathered in the passenger cabin, the two adults seated side by side facing her, while the girl ate from the hard plastic tray of food on her lap.

  She was just now finishing the last of her meal. As she had done back at the Academy, she chewed with focused determination, never pausing or breaking rhythm as she steadily consumed her food one methodical bite at a time. Kahlee, however, noticed she didn’t stick to her normal pattern of taking only one single mouthful from a dish before moving on to the next item on her plate. In fact, she didn’t even touch the apple crumble dessert until everything else was gone.

  Once she was done she carefully set the tray on the seat beside her and spoke for the second time since regaining consciousness.

  “Where’s my dad?” There was no emotion in her voice; it was flat and monotone, like the primitive speech synthesizers from the twentieth century.

  There was no simple answer to this question. Fortunately, she and Hendel had discussed what to say while Gillian was still sleeping off the drugs their captors had given her.

  “He had some business to take care of,” Kahlee lied, figuring the truth would be too much for the girl to handle right now. “He’s going to catch up with us later, but for now it’s just you, me, and Hendel, okay?”

  “How will he find us if we took his ship?”

  “He’ll find another ship,” she assured the girl.

  Gillian stared at her and squinted her eyes slightly, as if she suspected deception and was trying to peer through her to the truth. After a few seconds of this she nodded, accepting the situation.

  “Are we going back to the school?”

  “Not yet,” Hendel told her. “We’re going to meet up with some other ships. Quarian. Do you remember when you studied the quarians last year in history class?”

  “They made the geth,” she said simply.

  “Yes,” Kahlee admitted, hoping this wasn’t the sole fact she associated with the species of their rescuer. “Do you remember anything else about them?”

  “Driven from their home system by the geth nearly three centuries ago, most quarians now live aboard the Migrant Fleet, a flotilla of fifty thousand vessels ranging in size from passenger shuttles
to mobile space stations,” she answered, and Kahlee realized she was reciting the entry verbatim from her history e-book.

  “Home to seventeen million quarians, the flotilla understandably has scarce resources,” the girl continued. “Because of this, each quarian must go on a rite of passage known as the Pilgrimage when they come of age. They leave the Fleet and only return once they have found something of value—”

  “That’s okay, Gillian,” Hendel said gently, cutting her off before she gave them the entire chapter.

  “Why are we meeting a quarian ship?”

  Kahlee wasn’t sure how much Gillian remembered about the violent greeting they had received upon landing at Omega, so she was intentionally vague in her answer. “We met a quarian named Lemm while you were sleeping. He’s going to help us hide from some people who are trying to find us.”

  “Cerberus,” she said, and the adults cast a nervous glance at each other, uncertain where she had picked up the name.

  “That’s right,” Hendel said after a moment. “They want to hurt you, and we won’t let that happen.”

  Gillian frowned and bit her lip. She was silent for several long seconds before she asked the same question that had been bothering Kahlee. “Why is Lemm helping us?”

  Neither of them had a ready answer for that one.

  “I guess we’ll have to ask him when he wakes up,” Kahlee finally admitted.

  Fortunately, they didn’t have long to wait. Less than an hour later she heard the uneven, clumping steps of Lemm coming down the hall. His leg was covered by a hermetically sealed, hard-shelled boot that protected and supported everything from the tips of his toes up to the joint of his knee. He was still wearing his mask and enviro-suit, of course; Kahlee suspected he wouldn’t take them off again until they reached the flotilla.

  “Lemm,” she said as he entered the passenger cabin and stopped. “This is Gillian. Gillian, this is Lemm.”

  The quarian stepped forward and bowed slightly, extending his gloved hand in a gesture of greeting common to both species. To Kahlee’s amazement Gillian reached out and shook it.