Mass Effect: The Complete Novels 4-Book Bundle (20 page)

Goyle turned and made the long walk down from the top of the Petitioner’s Stage, frowning. She had studied every decision made by the Council in the last five centuries in detail. In every case they had acted unilaterally. If there was ever any dissension, they would debate the issue until a mutual accord could be reached.

So how was it possible for the asari councillor to decide on her own to grant this request?

As she reached the elevator and stepped inside, the explanation finally popped into her head. Somehow they had anticipated her request before she’d even broached the subject. They must have known where she was leading them, and discussed it during the brief conference after she had mentioned Edan Had’dah. They had already decided how they would respond long before she ever brought the subject up.

Ambassador Goyle had thought she was in control, driving the negotiations to manipulate the Council to her best advantage, like she had at the previous meeting. She’d caught them off guard last time, but this time they’d been ready for her. They were the ones who’d been in control, walking her through the script like actors in a play, knowing the final outcome all along. And only in the final moment of the scene had they tipped their hand, a subtle revelation of the truth they must have known she would pick up on.

Riding down in the elevator, Ambassador Goyle tried to take solace in the knowledge that she had gotten exactly what she’d wanted out of the meeting. But she wasn’t used to being outmaneuvered, and she couldn’t help wondering if she had made a mistake.

Why had the Council been so eager to grant her request? Did they really think humanity was ready for this? Or were they expecting Anderson to fail, then hoping to use that failure as an excuse to hold the Alliance back?

If nothing else, the experience had given her a whole new respect for the Council and their understanding of negotiations and diplomacy. She considered herself a student of politics, and now she was very aware she had just been schooled at the feet of the masters.

They’d sent her an unmistakable message: they knew how to play this game as well as she. Whatever advantage the Alliance might have had in dealing with the Council, it was gone. The next time she had to face them, the ambassador realized, she’d be constantly second-guessing herself. No matter how prepared or careful she was, in the back of her mind there’d be that lingering uncertainty: was she leading the negotiations, or being led?

And she had no doubt that this was exactly what the Council wanted.

EIGHTEEN

“We’re almost there, Lieutenant Sanders,” the driver told her, shouting to be heard above the engine of the six-wheeled armored personnel carrier as it bounced along the hard-packed desert sand outside Hatre. “Just a few more klicks to the rendezvous site.”

In addition to the driver, five other Alliance marines rode in the APC with her; a security detail pulled together at the last minute to protect her until she was off world. She and the driver sat up front, the rest of the crew were huddled together in the back. Four of the marines had already been on Camala when the orders came, the other two had arrived from Elysium the previous night in response to the instructions issued from Alliance HQ.

Their vehicle was batarian, loaned to the Alliance by local authorities at the “request” of the Council. It was all part of the deal the ambassador had worked out to get her safely off Camala and back to Alliance territory.

The engine whined as they climbed one of the immense sand dunes that stretched across the landscape out beyond the horizon toward the setting sun. In another twenty minutes it would be dark, but by then she’d already be aboard the Alliance frigate coming to pick her up.

“I’m surprised the batarians agreed to this,” the driver shouted again, making conversation. “They don’t normally authorize landings outside the spaceports. Especially not for Alliance vessels.”

She understood his curiosity. He knew something big was going on, but his orders were simply to drive her out to the pickup. He had no way of knowing about her connection to Sidon, and nobody had told him about the shady backroom deals Ambassador Goyle must have made with the Council to make this happen. Kahlee stayed silent: she sure as hell wasn’t about to fill him in.

She wondered how much the Alliance had given up in exchange for this concession. What kind of bargain had they struck? Anderson probably had some idea, but he had barely said a dozen words to her in the two days following her admission in the hotel room.

Not that she blamed him. He’d trusted her and she’d used him, at least in his eyes. Kahlee knew all too well how much betrayal could sting. And now she was being whisked off to some unknown location for her protection, while Anderson was staying behind on Camala to try and hunt down Dr. Qian.

She thought a lot about trying to contact him again after all this was over. At first she’d been drawn to him out of need: she was scared and alone, and she had needed someone to cling to besides a gruff, prickly father whom she barely knew. But even though they’d only been together a few days, she got the sense that there was a chance they could have become more than just friends.

Unfortunately, she doubted he’d want anything more to do with her now. Not after how she’d hurt him. The realization that she’d probably never see him again hit her harder than she would have expected.

“Hang on, ma’am!” the driver suddenly called out, startling her from her maudlin thoughts as he wrenched the wheel and veered them sharply off course, nearly flipping the vehicle in the process. “We’ve got company!”

From his perch on a rocky outcropping several kilometers away, Saren could just make out, against the glare of the setting sun, the silhouette of the APC carrying First Lieutenant Kahlee Sanders.

When he’d received the mission update from the Citadel Council yesterday he’d gone through the full spectrum of emotions. He began with outrage. They were ordering him to work with a human! And all because the Council felt it necessary to reward the Alliance for sharing information about the investigation into Sidon. Information Saren had already managed to figure out on his own!

He knew Edan Had’dah was behind the attack. But because he’d kept that information from the Council, he had to pretend to be grateful to the Alliance for handing it over to him. Now he had to allow one of the humans to work with him as he completed the mission. And not just any human, but that damnable Lieutenant Anderson, who kept interfering with his investigation.

But as he’d continued reading the update, his anger gave way to curiosity. He’d known about the batarian’s involvement, but not about the extraordinary alien technology referenced in the files recovered from Sidon. Though there were few details, it seemed as if the artifact could be a relic dating all the way back to the Prothean extinction.

Saren had always been intrigued by the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the Protheans. What kind of unimaginable string of events, what kind of catastrophic occurrence, could cause an empire that spanned the known galaxy to vanish in less than a century? Virtually all traces of the Protheans had been wiped out; only the mass relays and Citadel survived, the enduring legacy of a once great people.

Hundreds of explanations had been put forward, yet these were all nothing but theories and speculation. The truth about the Prothean extinction was still a mystery … and this ancient alien technology could be one of the keys to unraveling it.

From what he could piece together from Qian’s research notes, he suspected they had found some type of ship or orbiting space station. One with AI capabilities to self-monitor and even repair all its vital systems without the need for organic caretakers like the keepers back on the Citadel.

Delving deeper, it seemed the doctor believed the discovery could one day be used to forge an alliance with the geth … or possibly even control them. The implications were staggering: a massive army of synthetics, billions of troops whose absolute loyalty could be assured if one could somehow understand and influence their AI thought processes.

Then, as he’d continued reading the file even further, his curiosity had transformed into cold, calculating satisfaction. Once he had learned the name of his quarry, the hardest part of his mission became locating Edan. He was probably cowering like an insect, burrowed into an underground bunker beneath one of the countless refineries spread across a thousand square kilometers of rock and sand. Ferreting him out was going to be a long, grueling, time-consuming process.

Or it would have been if he hadn’t received the mission update from the Council. Included in the transmission were the details of the plan to evacuate Lieutenant Sanders from the world. Saren knew that Skarr was still on Camala; he’d had no reports of the big krogan being sighted at the spaceports. He was probably holed up with Edan.

And Edan had hired Skarr to kill the young woman. Saren knew enough about batarian culture to realize Edan wouldn’t want to lose face by hiring someone who failed in their appointed task. If the opportunity presented itself, he’d send Skarr after Sanders again.

Saren had done his best to make sure that opportunity had presented itself. He knew Edan had spies in every level of government across Camala, and particularly at the spaceports. All he’d done was make sure the Council’s request for an unscheduled Alliance landing in the desert was logged in the official government records.

The unusual request was sure to attract someone’s attention. Inevitably it would be reported up through the chain of underlings and lackeys to Edan himself, and Saren was confident the batarian was smart enough to figure out who the Alliance was coming to pick up.

The only flaw in the plan was that it was almost too obvious. If Edan suspected it was a trap, he wouldn’t send anyone in response to the message.

Still watching the Alliance-driven APC through his long-range binoculars, Saren saw the vehicle swerve and nearly spin out as the driver began taking evasive action. Scanning the nearby dunes he picked up the dust trails of four other vehicles closing in; small, quick rovers with mounted guns converging on the slower APC from all sides.

Edan had taken the bait.

“Goddamn!” one of the marines in the back shouted as a shell launched from one of the pursuing rovers exploded close enough to rock the APC’s suspension.

The driver was doing his frantic best to avoid the shells being lobbed at them by the enemy, sending the APC careening haphazardly over dunes and into small valleys to keep the other vehicles from getting a lock on their position. True to its name, the APC was heavily armored. Still, it was only a transport vehicle; it wasn’t intended for combat. They had no mounted guns, and the thick plating on the body and undercarriage was intended to protect the occupants from sniper fire and land mines. Against antitank weapons like those mounted on the pursuing rovers, the only purpose the armor served was to slow them down.

In the back, one of the marines was shouting into the radio, trying to warn the incoming Alliance frigate of their situation.

“Mayday! Mayday! We are taking fire. The landing zone is hot! I repeat, the landing zone is hot!”

“We got at least four of these bastards on our tail!” the driver shouted back to him as the vehicle lurched and bounced over an outcropping of small rocks and boulders.

“Four enemy rovers on site!” the radioman shouted. “
Iwo Jima,
are you reading?”

“This is the
Iwo Jima,
” a voice crackled back. “We read you, ground team. We’re still fourteen minutes out. Hold on!”

The radio operator slammed his fist against the heavily armored side of the vehicle in frustration. “We’ll never last that long!”

“You gotta outrun them!” another one of the men yelled up to the front.

“What the hell do you think I’m doing!?” the driver snapped back at him.

They flew over the top of another dune as a shell exploded just behind them, propelling the vehicle through the air for a full ten meters before it crashed heavily back down to the ground. The high-impact shock absorbers took most of the blow, but even though Kahlee was securely belted in, the force of the landing still caused her to whack her head on the ceiling. The impact drove her teeth into her tongue hard enough to make her taste blood.

The men in the back fared much worse. Crammed into the vehicle, none of them were wearing safety belts. They were thrown from their seats, smashed against the roof, then hurled back down to the floor in a jumble of colliding elbows, knees, and skulls. Cries of surprise and grunts of pain were followed by a string of curse words directed at the driver.

He ignored them, instead muttering, “They’re too fast. We’ll never outrun them,” though Kahlee wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or himself. His eyes were wide and wild, and she wondered how much longer he could keep it together.

“You’re doing great,” Kahlee reassured him. “Just keep us alive for a few more minutes. You can do it!”

The driver didn’t respond but only hunched forward, bringing himself closer to the wheel. Without warning he pulled a hard 180-degree turn, hoping to surprise the enemy with the desperate and erratic maneuver. The momentum of the APC spun them out of control, nearly causing them to roll. For a split second the vehicle teetered precariously, balancing over the wheels along one side before slamming back down with another hard jolt.

With all six wheels back on the ground, the driver slammed his foot onto the accelerator and they took off again, spewing a plume of pebbles, dust, and sand out behind them. From her seat in the front Kahlee could now see the enemy clearly. Two of their vehicles were spread wide, trying to outrace the APC and cut them off. The other two had originally fallen in behind them, firing at them with their mounted cannons as they steadily gained on their prey. With the sudden change of direction, however, the Alliance soldiers were now heading directly toward their former pursuers.

“You bastards ever play chicken!?” the driver screamed, never taking his foot off the gas as he steered the slower but much heavier APC head-on into one of the lightly armored rovers.

Strapped securely into her seat, Kahlee had no chance to stop what was about to happen. The distance between the vehicles was gobbled up in an instant, and all she could do was brace for impact. At the last second the smaller rover tried to veer off, but it was too late and the collision was unavoidable. The blunted nose of the APC slammed into the front left side of the oncoming rover as it tried to peel away from the crash, a glancing blow instead of a direct hit. But at a combined speed of nearly 200 km/h, a glancing blow was more than enough.

The enemy rover practically disintegrated. The force of the impact blew the frame apart. The axles snapped and the tires flew off. The doors sheared loose. Unidentifiable chunks of metal rent asunder and went flying and skipping across the sand. The fuel tank ruptured, sparked, and exploded, engulfing what was left of the rover’s body in flames, reducing it to a molten slagheap. The driver, who had died in the first millisecond of the collision, was consumed by the great ball of tumbling fire that finally rolled to a stop hundreds of meters later.

The other occupants had all been thrown free on impact, their bodies sent whirling and skipping across the ground at over 100 km/h. Limbs cracked and shattered, necks and spines snapped, skulls were caved in. Huge chunks of flesh were ripped from the bones of the corpses as they skidded across the sharp pebbles and abrasive sand.

The sturdier APC held together on impact, though the entire front crumpled in like an accordion. Deflecting off the enemy rover, it flipped and rolled half a dozen times before coming to rest upside down. Kahlee was barely conscious. Stunned by the impact and disoriented by the blood rushing to her head, she felt someone fumbling at her seat belt. Instinctively she tried to fight them off, then heard a human voice shouting at her to calm down.

She tried to concentrate. The vehicle wasn’t moving anymore, but her world continued to spin. The driver was still belted in beside her. The steering wheel had snapped off and the jagged end of the steering column had been driven back into his chest, impaling him. His dead eyes were open wide; the glassy pupils fixed in a frozen stare that seemed directed accusingly at her.

She realized she must have blacked out for a few seconds. One of the marines from the back was outside the vehicle now, reaching in through the shattered window to try and unbuckle her seat belt. She stopped fighting against him and instead reached out with her hands, pressing them firmly against the inverted roof so she wouldn’t fall and hit her head the instant she was loose.