Mass Effect: The Complete Novels 4-Book Bundle (41 page)

Grayson wound his way through the unfamiliar halls and stairwells for nearly ten minutes, hopelessly lost.

Maybe all that red sand over the years messed up your sense of direction.

The only thing that kept him going was the fact that the sound of gunfire was getting steadily closer, and the knowledge that whoever had broken the others out had taken Gillian as well.

He was on the verge of slamming his fist through another wall in frustration when he heard an incredibly loud explosion, like a grenade or rocket launcher, followed by a tremendous crash coming from beyond the corner just up ahead. Moving quickly but quietly, he rounded the bend to find himself standing on a small landing overlooking a large, two-story garage.

Crates and containers were strewn about on the floor beneath the landing, along with several bodies. At the far end a vehicle had obviously just slammed into the garage’s door. And on the landing not ten feet away, their backs to him, stood Pel and a woman he didn’t know. The woman had a rocket launcher braced on her shoulder.

The vehicle’s engines began to rev as it tried to force its way through the door. Given the situation, Grayson was almost certain that Gillian and the others were inside.

“Finish them!” Pel shouted, and the woman aimed her weapon.

Grayson opened fire with the assault rifle; he had no hesitations about shooting a woman in the back. The stream of bullets ripped through her shields, shredded her body armor, and turned everything between her shoulder blades and belt into hamburger. The rocket launcher fell from her nerveless hands and she staggered forward against the landing’s waist-high railing. Another burst from Grayson sent her flipping over the edge to the floor below.

Pel was already spinning around, trying to bring his own assault rifle to bear, when Grayson fired again. He concentrated on Pel’s right arm, the spray of gunfire nearly severing it from his shoulder as it blew the rifle from his grasp and sent it hurtling over the railing.

His former partner fell to his knees, his eyes glazing over in shock as sprays of arterial blood spurted from his maimed limb. He opened his mouth to speak, but another burst from Grayson silenced him forever. It was the first time in almost twenty years Pel hadn’t been able to get the last word in.

The horrible shriek of wrenching metal from the far side of the garage drew his attention. Glancing over, he saw the rover had managed to push itself against a corner of the loading door so that it bent up and out. Grayson watched, motionless, as the vehicle squeezed through the opening, the rover bursting forth to the other side as if the garage were somehow giving birth to it.

For the next sixty seconds he didn’t move, listening carefully for sounds of other survivors. All he heard was the rover’s engines growing ever fainter as it raced off into the night.

SEVENTEEN

Inside the rover, Kahlee heard the metal door screeching across the armored roof as the vehicle forced its way past and out into the dark streets of Omega. Still driving in reverse, she went half a block before locking the brakes and turning the wheel, sending them into a 540-degree spin. It ended with them heading in the same direction, but they were no longer traveling backward.

They had escaped the warehouse, but their getaway wouldn’t be complete until they’d left Omega well behind them.

“Do you have a ship?” she asked, directing her question to the quarian in the passenger seat.

“Head to the spaceports,” he answered. “Right at the end of the block. Take the third left, then the next right.” His voice sounded strained and thin from behind his mask.

Kahlee pulled her attention away from the nav screen to sneak a quick glance at his injured leg. The wound looked bad, but not life threatening.

“Hendel,” she called out to the backseat. “See if you can find a med-kit back there.”

“There’s medigel … in … my backpack,” the quarian managed to pant out, struggling against the pain.

Kahlee didn’t dare stop while they treated the injury. Fortunately, Hendel had basic medical field training; fixing up a bad leg while bouncing along in the rover would be easy enough.

Following the quarian’s directions, they quickly cleared the close-packed buildings and emerged on the outskirts of the district’s docking bays. Racing along the open ground, the nav screen picked up three small starships clustered together at the far end of the spaceport.

“Lemm, which shuttle is yours?” Kahlee asked.

“Whichever one you want.” His voice sounded stronger now. She noticed Hendel had splinted his leg and wrapped it in sterile bandages to minimize germ exposure, and the medigel would have dulled the pain even as it began to heal and disinfect his wounds.

She brought the rover to a halt a few dozen feet away from the closest vessel’s airlock and hopped out, then turned back to help the injured quarian. He slid gingerly across the seat to the door, then leaned on Kahlee for support as he stepped out of the vehicle with his good leg. Hendel emerged a few seconds later, carrying the still unconscious Gillian in the crook of one arm and clutching Lemm’s bag in his other hand.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered, staring through the station’s viewport at the shuttle docked just outside. Kahlee couldn’t help but smile when she realized what he was looking at: they were about to steal Grayson’s ship.

The quarian set to work on overriding the vessel’s security system. It took just over a minute before the airlock opened with a faint click and the landing ramp descended with a soft whoosh of hydraulics.

Inside the ship, Hendel set Gillian down in one of the passenger seats. He reclined the seat and buckled her in as Kahlee helped Lemm hobble his way up to the cockpit.

“Can you fly this thing?” she asked him.

He studied the controls for a few seconds, then nodded. “I think so. Everything looks pretty standard.”

The quarian settled into the pilot’s seat and reached out toward the console with a gloved, three-fingered hand. Kahlee was suddenly reminded that, though quarians might look vaguely human, under their enviro-suits and filtration masks they were definitely aliens. And this alien had risked his life to save them.

“Thank you,” she said. “We owe you our lives.”

Lemm didn’t acknowledge her gratitude, but instead asked, “Why were they holding you prisoner?”

“They were going to sell us to the Collectors.”

He shuddered, but didn’t say anything else. A second later the display screens came online.

“No sign of any immediate pursuit,” he muttered.

“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.