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Ah yes, that modern venture capitalist buzzword, AI, which does indeed belong in air quotes, given that the term as it is presently being used is woefully inaccurate. It was appropriated as a marketing term, lifted from the classic science and science fiction understandings of the term as it had been established for decades. These software programs being unleashed upon the world at present, while certainly artificial, can at best only simulate the appearance of intelligence. They are not sentient, self-aware beings with wills of their own. Though adaptable to a point, they cannot act upon anything other their own programming and directives. However, calling these programs “AI” sounds more advanced, exciting, and certainly more legal than calling them what they really are: plagiarism software.

It started off seemingly innocent enough, right? Programs were written to suggest ways to automatically complete and/or spell correct your sentences. Programmers, engineers, or even just video making enthusiasts figured out how to digitally impersonate actors like Tom Cruise for a gag. Soundboards were created with samples loaded from various celebrities or voicealikes, used for laughs in online games or forums. Stuff like that might have been good for a momentary chuckle, or in the case of the first example, could be seen as useful tools. However, I’m not laughing and neither should you. It took little time at all for the implication of video and audio impersonation to sink in to public consciousness, and to become a major threat to creative livelihoods. The recent SAG-AFTRA strike involving a multitude of writers and actors is but one example of a response to how quickly major corporations seized upon chances to use AI to steal the likenesses and voices of creative talent, in order to more cheaply exploit said likenesses via software replication. Corporations will spend billions of dollars on programs that can run on prompt generation just to avoid having to pay actual humans a decent wage and some modicum of benefits. If that isn’t modern America in a nutshell I don’t know what is.

It feels like this all came up so fast as to nearly be overnight. Drum machines all but replaced drummers like me. Now I can hardly make use of any website or application that allows text communication, without being bombarded with attempts at predicting what I want to say or trying to finish my sentences for me. Websites like Feebay now push you to use AI when describing items you want to sell, and even if you write one of your own descriptions, their AI is still forced into the listing, presenting consistently terrible writing and false information. Social media statuses are now being generated by prompts. Whole emails are written out by software suggestion. Programs that used to be helpful writing tools, Grammarly being an example, now take part in coaxing would-be writers to let their software write for them based on a set of prompts and general intent. That’s all without me even getting started on AI-generated visual art, a nightmarish landscape of stolen styles. Some of you may point to these generated pieces with a laugh, as many of us savvy to these programs can spot where they laughably fail, but the thing is, the programs are getting better at faking it at an alarming, exponential rate, and the number of people being duped is only growing; it will eventually stop only infecting the most gullible and naive of us.

These AI programs are not sentient beings capable of making quantifiable judgments, of having rational thought, or generating ideas of their own. These programs are farmed and trained to seek out and copy the words, voices, animations, and all art of real artists, to break it down and interpret it according to a set of programmed values, then redistribute these digitally digested fragments according to what a prompt generator is inputting. That’s what the human end of this whole process is. We become the entity initiating the prompt, then we surrender all control, creativity, and thought to the machine, which seeks out and steals then repackages the art and creation of other humans. Eventually even the “prompt engineers” will be unnecessary, as the programs will be set loose to generate on their own, according to some set of sculpted guidance. Social media, already beset as it is by bots and fake art, is about to be absolutely flooded by content that generates itself, using the collected thoughts and media of real people and endlessly churning it into a gigantic, server-based blender of procedural generation.

“I say your civilization, because when we started thinking for you it became our civilization…” Agent Smith to Morpheus, The Matrix

I realize that I am in something of a minority here, and that my criticism of this “advancement” in technology will have me being called a Luddite, or someone who hates progress, or even a technophobe. Here’s the thing: I am a nerd raised on Star Trek who thinks technology can be cool. Advances in technology pertaining to medicine are amazing, and what has been accomplished in improving the quality of life for people with missing limbs or physical disabilities is awesome. However, just because technology becomes in some way more powerful or more capable, doesn’t automatically equate to progress. The original gatling gun may have been a better killing machine than almost any firearm before it, but that doesn’t signify that we as a culture or civilization became better or more advanced. Nor did using the atomic bomb. While not as extreme an example, you’re still going to have a hard time convincing me that things like social media or smartphones have actually made the world a better place, or played any part in uniting humanity rather than dividing it further. Technological advancement does not automatically equal progress. The people who say otherwise almost certainly have either money or social status to lose if technological advancement were to slow or halt.

There is a trope, a cliche even, that older folk tend to be scared of technology and remark how everything is changing too fast. In trying to be as fair as possible, I do think a small part of that comes from aging, from not being as adaptable with the ol’ neuroplasticity to as readily keep up with the newest generation. Some of that sentiment can sometimes come from unintentional or willful ignorance, the latter of which tends to be inextricably linked to some sort of primitive religious belief. Overwhelmingly though, I think the idea is correct: the world is moving too fast. There used to be a chance for cultures and civilizations in general to come to grips with some new technological breakthrough, to fully absorb its social implications, the way it affects how we do business, and to get the most benefit out of the invention before we throw it in a landfill to be replaced by the next hot item. I’m still relatively young, but even in the time I’ve been alive, I’ve seen what should’ve been multiple generations of careers, opportunities, and life skills thrown into the toilet because of reckless technological upheaval. The careers I almost pursued in my twenties are either already gone now or have changed so much as to be nightmarish to consider entering these days.

Think back to the invention of the printing press, and how much that changed the world. It lifted the veil of ignorance separating the elite few, who hoarded literacy and knowledge, from the general common folk. We as a race had multiple generations to come to grips with the upheaval of social change that followed, and as well, livelihoods that sprang up surrounding the implementation of this new technology were allowed to mature, granting social and economic stability for a variety of peoples to build careers, families, and homes, without the constant threat of their income and way of life being completely upended by new technology. Well-regulated technological integration encourages social and economic stability. Yeah, constantly cashing in on new developments may make a handful of entrepreneurs and corporations lots of quick short term money, but it’s akin to a runaway ship smashing through a dockyard; there is nothing left in the wake but destruction and a smattering of survivors clinging to debris, barely keeping their heads above water. We haven’t even come to grips with how social media and the original iPhone changed civilization, and we’re already looking at virtual reality goggles that want to replace everything you see with a smartphone-in-a-headset. Lawmakers and politicians are hopelessly, embarrassingly behind the curve at even understanding new technology and the companies creating it, much less doing anything to keep it properly in check. We’re going to need a new Congress to represent us to the corporations.

Also in the interest of fairness, I concede that the internet and the advancements that have sprung from its implementation, have created business opportunities for individuals or small local companies that might have been difficult or near impossible previously. A single person can run logistics, shipping, marketing, and all of that not so fun backend stuff feasibly on their own, whereas that was unthinkable years ago without hiring help. Here’s the problem though… for every person or small business that has managed to establish themselves with technological aid, how much damage had to be done to get there, and how much is yet to come? I’ve already spoken about the unbelievable, heartbreaking amount of damage our modern way of life, especially in North America, is destroying our planet’s ecosystem. That’s not even factoring in the human suffering and exploitation required to harvest the material needed to constantly be pumping out new computers, servers, phones, tablets, et cetera. Consider some of the companies investing the heaviest into AI, such as Amazon, and the overwhelming number of bookstores and various smaller, regional or community-based businesses they shoved out of existence because they preyed and capitalized on human laziness and a compunction to give in to reckless convenience. Consider how much the biggest tech companies are harvesting our data, our location, biometrics, our very expressions and thoughts, to sell to their marketing partners. We as consumers have become a new kind of corporate currency, and companies are spending billions upon billions of dollars to replace human thought with a machine prompt. We’re being molded into conduits of profit generation, our income spoken for by subscription services, auto refills, software sculpted adverts, and an overwhelming social programming to keep up with “progress” or be considered an outdated laughing stock. The entirety of thousands of years of human creativity and critical thinking is being pureed, digitized, and harvested by software programs (to say nothing of malicious hackers, dark web merchants, and identity thieves) explicitly designed to replace human thought with profit generation and maximum convenience. The ideal persons these corporate entities want us to become are the thoughtless, useless blobs of former humans depicted in films such as WALL-E, endlessly consuming entertainment and food, always subscribed, always paying, never thinking, never moving, constantly destroying their environment to the point where it takes another machine, one that can actually think and feel, to try and fix the mess.

I don’t care how much you want to call me old, outdated, or against progress because of my thoughts here. This is my hill to die upon. At least I will die still human, still capable of my own creativity and critical thinking, that is not filtered through a software program of pure dystopia which is pantomiming the act of sentient existence.

FIN

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It is difficult to swallow one’s pride and admit that you are part of the problem, even if it was never intentional or a conscious entry. It is difficult to include yourself in the metric of those responsible for perpetuating said problem. I am no better than anyone else I am potentially about to cast stones toward, save that I am aware of the problem and am trying, in my admittedly meager and small scale ways, to stop being part of the problem.

As someone born in the 1980s America, I have been in a position to have seen what the world was like just before the mass adoption of the Internet, to then witnessing the most incredible and substantial exponential leap in technology in our known history. Even in the 80s, it could have been argued that technological progress had already exceeded humanity’s societal evolution and ability to keep up, as well as responsibly integrate new technology into civilization. The invention of powered flight? Almost immediately weaponized. Radar? That tech was created during war. Nuclear fission? Rushed into existence in order to kill humans en masse as fast as possible. The automobile? Pushed into mass market production with no thought or foresight into what effect that would have on our culture, or the environment. Then we run into planned obsolescence, and the sick, twisted, frankly evil notion of disposability, the idea that it’s okay to make something out of convenience that you can just throw away and forget.

This is the legacy of capitalism, particularly the variant that is technologically empowered and scarcely restrained by any meaningful regulation or ethical consideration. The plastic and garbage filling our oceans, the exploitation of less privileged nations for profit and resources, the landfills stuffed with trash, the nuclear waste seeping from the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads created by world leaders with tiny brains and even smaller cocks, this and more is the price the world is forced to pay in the name of our privilege and convenience.

The United States alone produces a staggering amount of food waste (133 million pounds, if the USDA estimates are still holding up), and while one can argue that at least some of that is compostable, that’s not factoring in the incredible wastes of fuel, energy, and labor to produce that much food, and the environmental damage from factory farming and excessive meat production. All of that, so people in states like mine, which are nowhere near tropical, can have bananas and avocadoes year round, and have access to fast food on demand at any given time, sometimes even 24/7. Do you even remotely comprehend the amount of energy and material that needs to be expended, just to keep your local Burger Monarch stocked with beef patties at any given time, all so one of us lazy slobs can go through the drive thru any time we want and be served food in two minutes or less? Do any of you realize how much waste just ONE fast food restaurant creates in a given day? Now multiply that by thousands upon thousands, and compound it with fine dining, grocery, buffets, pizza joints, cafes, and you have millions of pounds of plastic, paper, styrofoam, grease, and food getting shoved into dumpsters every single day, all so we can be spared the inconvenience of cooking our own food or doing what our ancestors did, and acquire our food directly from farmers, hunters, and fishermen, only consuming as much as we need.

No one ever died because they didn’t get next day shipping with Amazonian Primus. Modern corporate entities have become filthy rich by “meeting customer demands” that they themselves created. They are the salesmen selling the cure after dosing you with the poison to begin with. China and many other Asian countries are where the overwhelming majority of goods that us Americans and Westerners use are made, and it’s no coincidence at all that a substantial portion of our ocean trash comes from places like China, Thailand, et cetera. Western companies were unwilling to accede to restrictions potentially imposed on them by entities such as the EPA, and they certainly were unwilling to pay their fellow countrymen and women the fair wage the workers knew the work deserved, so over the last few decades the mega corps have been allowed to outsource their operations to Asia, to exploit cheap labor with limited human rights oversights, and with no consideration given to what their excessive mass production would do to the environment. Go to any store, flip over almost any product, and you’ll see that it was made in China. Think about how much crap gets produced, every single day, to fill every store in America at any given time, to have Amazonian’s product listings always a click away, all so you don’t have to wait long on whatever your latest impulse purchase is. Consider how much gets destroyed or wasted along the way. Consider how much crap ends up in a landfill just because you decided you didn’t like it and initiated a return, because Amazonian makes it way too easy and shields you from any repercussions of being too impulsive or frivolous.

Not even my favorite arts and hobbies have been spared from this privilege paid for at dear cost. Video games and movies have certainly been gears in the mass production machine, but the push to make everything all digital is not so clean and friendly an alternative as the digital apologists propose. Consider that America alone has been burning around one hundred quadrillion btus of energy per year, and you might catch on that we waste a lot of power, on keeping lights on all night every night, on all of the gadgets and not-so-smart phones we’re supposed to have to stay socially relevant. This is particularly acute when pondering on the servers that need to stay running around the clock all of the time in case, you know, Chad decides he wants to buy and download a copy of Call of Madden at two in the morning, so he can play with his coworkers in deathmatch every night on demand. Those servers need to stay running so Suzie can ask ChatGPsomething a question at any given time. Those servers gotta be on so Jimbob can watch Survivor on demand. The servers have to be on because you have to be able to shop on Amazonian or Feebay at all hours of the day and night, at any conceivable time and from any place that can possibly field any sort of Internet connection. How dare any of us not be able to watch Vectrextube or look for Tweets to trigger us from a decade ago, at any time that our boredom and impulse insists? That’s before I even mention the sheer amount of effort, labor, waste, and impact on real human beings that takes place just to make your next day shipping possible, because believe me, someone, somewhere is paying a dear cost for the sake of your convenience. That’s before I even mention light pollution, which is hugely detrimental to us and life on this planet, and cuts us off from being able to see our very place in the universe.

So what do we do about this? How do we as a civilization put a dent into this terrible, wasteful machine that powers the lifestyle we take for granted? I don’t have a one size fits all answer to that question, and I don’t think there can be one. We can each of us take what actions are within our means to reduce the damage. We can be more mindful of our power use. We can cut back on impulse buying and be more deliberate with how we shop. We can recycle and reuse everything that we reasonably can. We can buy food from farmers’ markets or plant our own food if the space is available. We can put the phones away and entertain ourselves without the Internet. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Enough people, over enough time, with enough voices being expressed and enough wallets voting intelligently, might be able to crack the corporate machine, and might get the people who had the power to stop this to begin with, to listen.

FIN

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Life of a Mercenary

Garrus’s dextro rations were low. Wrex had supplied him with something he likened to the Tuchanka equivalent of seaweed, “one of the few plants around here that doesn’t bite,” he’d said. Garrus found it was nasty. His angsty stomach dominated his thoughts, instead of the krogan whose head he’d just destroyed with a high explosive round from his Mantis.

Garrus and Dash were hunkered down atop a destroyed bunker, effectively secluded from the clan Gatatog onslaught taking place on the plains below. Garrus continued to take precision shots from his excellent vantage point, enough to help Wrex but not quite so much as to draw excessive unwanted attention. When he dropped back down into cover to allow his Mantis time to cool, Dash was there next to him, plugs stuck into her ears that he assumed was for listening to something like music.

“Another headshot?” she asked while surveying the latest carnage.

“Yeah,” Garrus said, with little satisfaction. “I have to think at some point they’ll get tired of this and flee the field. Wrex’s forces already have the upper hand.”

“That’s real special, soldier. Can’t say I’ll be too sorry when we get to leave.”

Garrus set his rifle aside, looking over at her with some thinly masked annoyance. “You’re the reason we’re involved in this, in case you forgot. Spirits, how’d you even get mixed up with a character like Wrex to begin with?”

She let her head slump over onto her right shoulder as she rolled her eyes, something Garrus had seen human teenagers do quite often in their vids. “I don’t wanna get into that, really.”

Garrus mockingly coughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Fiiiiine. The whole point of this was to find Urek, the big fuckin’ bastard we killed on the ship. He killed my partner. Wrex knew how to find the guy. Enough said.”

“That doesn’t explain how you even knew Wrex. After the Battle of the Citadel, he wasn’t exactly easy to find.”

“Why you so curious, now of all times? All I wanted to do was talk when I first bumped into you. You decided to be an uptight asshole about everything. Now that I’m mindin’ my own business when you should be blasting heads, you want to gab? Make up your mind, Vakarian!”

He slumped back further against his cover, a battered slab of concrete. “I don’t have much fight in me right now. Maybe I would rather be back in that bar on Eden Prime, talking… about… opinions, feelings. Things you humans obsess over too much.”

“Come on, like you don’t care about those things too. Or does ‘turian honor’ trump that as well?”

“We just tend to see the bigger picture.”

“Tell that to the Council.”

Garrus went to speak again, but stopped himself. “You… have a point.”

She looked back over at him, her eyes softening with sympathy. “Okay. I met the big guy on the Citadel, the last time Normandy was ever docked there. I was one of those kids tryin’ to push through the crowd to see Shepard before she left. None of us knew it was the last chance anyone would have.”

He frowned.

“So I stumble around the wards, pissed off, bored. And who do I find slumped over in some random casino? Wrex. So I want to go up and talk to this guy, I mean, the stories he could tell! But he looks so fucking pissed, and at the same time like he’s gonna pass out and take the table down with him. Then I notice some junkie run an omni-tool behind his belt, and I know somethin’s up. He does too, but he’s too drunk to do more than swipe at this guy.”

“Sounds charming.”

Dash finally smiled again. “Oh yeah. So I says to Wrex, ‘I’ll be right back.’ Twenty minutes later, I’m back with the stolen credits, and there is video of this guy bangin’ an asari prostitute all over the net. Turns out he was cheating on his wife. So Wrex, he brings me in close afterward, he’s almost squeezing me to death, he says ‘kid, you’re alright. I owe you one. I would’ve had to kill for my next ryncol, C-Sec frowns on that.’ It kinda devolved from there, but he still remembered all of that when I looked him up again.”

“Interesting how you, a human, managed to ‘look up’ the legendary Urdnot Wrex.”

“God damn you’re dense sometimes, Vakarian. Every big player in the galaxy is obsessed with Commander Shepard and her crew. The Spectres, the STG, Cerberus, they’re all tryin’ to keep tabs on what her friends are up to. A friend of a friend helped me hack into some Cerberus dirt on the Normandy crew. Found out how to reach Wrex that way. Then I stole my way across Citadel space, ripping off one drug dealer and mercenary after another until I got here.”

“Impressive. I’m sure that made you a lot of friends with the mercs.”

“Not any different than you splattering their brains all across the Traverse.”

He chuckled. “I suppose. They were all scum, the galaxy is a safer place with them gone, but I’m not done yet.”

“I know. Look soldier. I don’t know how long I wanna hang in this life. I did what I had to do. Urek killed my partner. Probably ate her too, he was a sick fucking bastard. Now that justice is done, I wanna maybe put my skill into some legit work for once.”

That’s what I’m fighting for. So kids like you can go about your lives, do some good in this galaxy without being harassed, murdered, sold into slavery, turned into junkies… or left as sitting ducks for the Reapers.

“Cover those ears better, Dash. It’s about to get loud.” Garrus stood on a tired knee, steadying his rifle once more on the barricade. He activated his incendiary mod, and trained his scope on the next target down range. He pulled the trigger.

“Scoped and dropped!”

by on

Like Old Times

Once, on an assignment during his mandatory military service, Garrus had been to Tuchanka. It was not among his more pleasant memories, and he hoped to do what needed done planetside and be gone as fast as possible.

Following instructions passed along to Dash, she and Garrus purposely crash-landed the Boundless Courtesy in the wastelands nearest the Urdnot settlement. The ship made it past the Citadel patrols in the Krogan DMZ by running dark most of the way, letting Tuchanka’s gravity do much of the work.

The crash went as well as such a thing could given what Dash and Garrus intended. The ship’s engines and primary systems were utterly ruined, but the landing spared the cargo hold. Once freed from the emergency restraints, Garrus emerged from the cargo ramp with a bold arrogance, his Mantis rifle propped up over his shoulder. The party of krogan waiting for him, all armed with spike throwers, shard launchers and other improvised krogan weapons, snarled at him in greeting. All that is, except the one at their head, the unmistakable Urdnot Wrex, his scarred, flaming crest reflecting the fierce Tuchanka sun. His wide lips curled into a smirk. “Why if it isn’t Garrus, you sneaky little pyjak.”

“Good to see you too, Wrex,” Garrus said, slipping back into the cool, professional tone he kept with the Normandy crew. “Funny though, I thought you said once you’d never come back to this place.”

Wrex drew in a long, baritone breath. “Sometimes, when you save the galaxy, your perspective can change. Traveling with someone like Shepard also has a way of making you re-evaluate your situation.”

“She did have that effect on us. So I’m here, and behind me is a cache of weapons that I’m sure you’ll find to your liking.”

“Straight to business that fast, eh? Still walking around with a stick shoved firmly up your ass. Don’t come here and talk about all this like it’s just some other mission.” Wrex slapped Garrus hard on the shoulder, enough to throw him off balance. “Hah! Come on, we’re gonna have a nice, long chat. The rest of these friendly krogan warriors you see here will take care of the goods.” He looked over at Dash, who stood there literally twiddling her thumbs behind her back. “You too little one. Don’t pretend that you’re not happy to see me.” She beamed a smile at him through her breather mask and waved.

The three of them left the ship behind and traveled through the blasted ruin of concrete and steel that clan Urdnot called home. To Garrus it was a seemingly random mess of what used to be buildings or fortifications, but Wrex knew it as if it were some kind of neighborhood. “So Garrus, you finally had enough of C-Sec, huh? I thought Shepard talked you into going back. Then you could take long walks, hold hands, and talk about hard your life is with everyone else on the Citadel.”

“I did go back, for a time,” Garrus said. “When it became clear to me that they weren’t taking the Reapers seriously, I left.”

Wrex let out another of his deep groans, the kind Garrus could feel buzzing through his armor. “Bunch of fools. Shove a big metal monster into their face and they’ll still deny that it’s real. Hmm. What’s the term you humans use for that, Dash?”

“Fuck ’em,” she offered with a smile.

“Haha! Not sure if was that, but I like it.” Wrex kicked a piece of broken truck wheel out of the way, the Tuchanka equivalent of holding a branch so others could pass. “So here you are now, a mercenary. How are you enjoying this wonderful life?”

“I prefer the term vigilante. To answer your question, it’s, uh, not what I thought it would be.”

“That’s called reality, kid. Better get used to it. I was living off of merc jobs since before you were shoved out of your mother. I have scars from that life that are older than you. But I know you, Garrus, you’re someone who sees a problem and wants to fix it, you don’t give a damn if rules or policies get in the way. Take that whole thing with Saren. You and I both saw a big, fat problem with his name on it. We did what had to be done. So did Shepard.”

“Somehow Wrex, I’m always surprised by your insight and how quickly you can break down a situation. But Shepard is dead, now it’s up to me to clean up this galaxy’s messes.”

Wrex stopped, looking back at Garrus with a subtly crestfallen, sideways glance. “Hmm. I heard about that. She’s really dead, huh? Figured that story was just a pile of shit.”

Garrus frowned, his mandibles flexing back to show most of his teeth. “I wish it were. The Alliance and the Council both declared her KIA in the Terminus systems. They sent her out there, trying to hunt down geth, and hasn’t been heard from for months.”

“She wouldn’t have been beaten by a bunch of those synthetic bastards.”

“I don’t know all the details, but whatever happened took the Normandy down with her. Only some of the crew survived.”

“Well Garrus, and no offense little one, I don’t think the humans will make another one like her for some time. I’ll raise my next drink to her.”

“Yeah.” Garrus powered his visor down, feeling as though suddenly he was at a funeral. “So what am I doing here? What is all of this? I just smuggled a ship full of weapons, red sand, and blast through the Krogan DMZ for you.”

Wrex chuckled. “Red sand? Blast? We’ll use those as seasoning on thresher steaks. The weapons are all I care about. Since you turians decided to go and disarm us, remember? I need some extra firepower to help take this place back. More than that, is keeping those weapons away from rival clans, the ones too stupid to think about the future.”

“Really, take this back?” Garrus looked around, expecting that he must’ve missed something besides the piles of rock around him.

“I mean Tuchanka, not just the territory surrounding Urdnot. If Saren proved one thing, it’s that the krogan will only continue to be exploited if we keep living like this. We’ll die out, slowly. I have a plan to unite the clans and kick the krogan species in its ass, to focus on breeding instead of killing each other or living as hired muscle.”

“So that’s why you hired Dash?”

Wrex shrugged. “More or less. She’s one of the best hackers I’ve come across, and little one, she knows who else to look for in her circles to get a job done. And look at what she found: Garrus Vakarian, vigilante. She tells me that you’re on the hunt for some rather unlikable characters.”

“Yes.” A morsel of hope emerged in Garrus’s mind. “You know who I’m looking for?”

“Not directly, but I know someone out on Omega who owes me a favor. Or maybe she just owes me a drink. Either way, you’re going to be talking to Aleena. She knows how to find every scumbag on her side of the galaxy. Since you’ve helped me out with my little problem, once we’re done here I’ll go with you in person to cash in what she owes me.”

Garrus rubbed his chin. “Aleena… if she’s well connected in the criminal underworld I figured I would at least have heard that name before. Who is she?”

Wrex cracked a big smile. “You probably know her better as Aria T’Loak, ruler of Omega. Of course, since the ship you rode in on is now our latest pile of rubble, we’ll need to get you another ride off-world. Just so happens that the Gatatog have a few shuttles parked and ready to steal in their home base. You and the little one help me in the coming battle, and they’re all yours.”

Great, Garrus thought, just what I needed. Getting involved in a krogan clan war. But, damn it… Wrex has connections with Aria? That could really get me somewhere. He crossed his arms. “Okay Wrex, I’m in. Just, tell me something please. Do you have anything I can eat here?”

A thoughtful look washed over Wrex’s face. “…you like salarian liver?”

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Unwelcome Space

Matt was startled out of a feverish, nonsensical dream. He expected to be in his bed back home, but his burning eyes beheld something quite different. Rather than a bed at all, he was on a silver, cushioned table. It was one of five that were lined up along the back wall of the rectangular, long room, which looked clean, neat, and belonging to a higher tech than any he was familiar with from other spaceships. The white ceramic floor gave way to metallic silver walls, which were broken up every few meters by crimson beams. The place hummed with gentle vibration, and a few friendly blips came from a computer desk off to his left.

            Matt shifted himself off the table. He looked down at his body, realizing that while his pants were still on, his shirt was missing. A collection of bruises and scrapes colored his exposed chest and arms. Huh… I don’t feel all that sore. From the looks of things, shouldn’t I?

            He moved his way toward the door ahead of him. To his surprise, it wasn’t locked and swished open when he approached. Motion detectors? That’s a fancy thing to have in a hospital. He was so thoroughly used to the rough and tumble clinics out in the Crops, with their bevy of manually operated equipment and usually locked doors, that this seemingly benign and open environment was anomalous.

            With trepidation, Matt peeked his head through the open door. He looked from side to side and beheld nothing but empty, gray corridor. The lighting outside the room was dim, coming only from small panels along the ceiling. He observed a holographic diagram once he stepped out, written in multiple languages. In the two that he could recognize, he noted that the bow was indicated to his left, and the stern to his right. Hmm… guess I’ll go right.

            He expected to find someone, or at least a notion that someone lived or worked here. Nothing, save the steadier now hum through the floor that was unmistakably coming from an engine. Okay… okay. So I’m on a ship now. But, where is the crew? Everything looks so clean and new. Where is everyone? As he came to an intersection, the lights in the corridor went pitch black. “Oh cra—” Matt was interrupted as he was tripped to the floor. Then he felt a kick in the ribs, which sent him rolling toward the nearest wall. He felt along it to regain his footing. He’d managed to stand halfway when he felt something grab his neck and pin him against the wall.

            Obed had provoked Jessie’s ire when he knocked on her door in the middle of the night cycle. He heard a torrent of profane language, then a loud crash, followed by more foul utterances. Switching to English, he dared follow this with, “um, Jes? There’s something goin’ on in the junction nearby. I think our visitor is up and causing trouble!”

            The little shit is hearing spooks, Jes thought as she slid some pants and her pistol belt on, chagrinned. And he’s too scared to check it out himself. If this turns out to be nothing I’m going to shoot him. Or kick him in the balls.   

            Obed nearly jumped back as Jes’s door opened. Much like her, he was only half-dressed for the occasion. His jacket was off, and his vest was only partially closed around his slim abdomen. One of his pant legs was rumpled over the calf. Vids were still playing on his wrist devices. Obed gave her a quick once-over; she knew that he never passed up an opportunity to ogle her. He gestured to the rifle she’d picked up on the way out. “Which one is that, Olga? Or was it Fredrik? I can’t keep up with the names of your children.”

            “It’s Fredrik, duh. Olga was on board the Akkad when it was… you know.”

            “Ah, shit. Yeah, I’m sorry… so were you, um, you know? Taking care of yourself? Just now?”

            Jes glared at him. “I really could just about kill you. I was so close to cumming, you stupid bastard, then you bother me with… you know, just shut up. Let’s get this over with.” The quips Gunther had been making recently, about Ob and Jes bringing out the snarkiest immaturities in each other, gnawed at her brain.

            Still, Obed persisted, now with an all-too interested smirk. “But weren’t your, um, accessories, also on the Akkad? What were you using to—”

            “I said: Shut. Up. Move it.”

            Ob nodded, secured his mouth, and led her to the junction he mentioned. They approached the door separating it from the mess. It swished open to reveal nothing initially but total darkness. Once Ob crossed into the junction, the ship’s computer system recognized the presence of his devices, and brought the lights online to his desired specification.

            Jes snapped her rifle to attention, fixing its sights upon two figures, one of which was pressed against the wall to her left. There was a woman who had the rescued cropper pinned to the wall, her left hand around his throat, her right hand pressing the pinpoint of a dagger to his chest. Her hair was long, black as space; her face, a pale, Europan ice tone. Her body was covered in a slinky mesh of matte gray synth-leather and metallic plating.

            Without a sound, she let go of the cropper, her dagger cutting into the slightest portion of his skin. Jessie opened fire on the strange woman, but despite her controlled, expert aim, she only succeeded in hitting bulkheads. The woman was fast and dodged every attack with apparent ease, then disappeared under cloak. A few seconds later a door opened up in the hallway adjacent to the one from which they entered.

            “Shit, shit, shit! Another Shadow. Bitch must’ve stowed away without us seein’.”

            Obed stayed well clear. He had a schematic of the entire ship displayed by hologram on one device, and a computer systems menu running on the other. “Hey, hey, not to worry. The ship’s internal sensors are at my command. I am tracking her heat signature… she’s moving toward engineering!”

            “Well don’t just sit there sputtering. Cut her off!” After taking a few steps toward the door the Shadow had gone through, Jes cocked her head back toward Obed. “Hey, talk to me. I don’t know the layout of this tub yet.”

            Obed beeped Jessie a map of the ship, which she immediately opened on holo. “Okay, okay.” The heat signature they followed on the map stopped in the corridor that fed into main engineering. With a few taps, Obed activated some emergency bulkheads and blast doors. “Let’s see, you just need to go past the sickbay, turn right at the next junction, go down the stairs on the next right, then straight through the cross-section. Can’t miss it. I have the stairs cut off, you can trap her there, just make with the quickness.”

            Jes stormed down the corridors according to Obed’s instructions. She let out a triumphant “ah-ha” when she made it down the stairs, only to be let down when there was nothing to aim her gun toward but empty walls.

            Ob, who had stayed well behind, chimed in on unit-to-unit coms. “Um, Jes? Our friend’s heat signature and yours are overlapping, what’s going on?”

            Jes looked around, kicked at every deckplate, looked between all of the pipes, and shoved her gun into each alcove she could see. There was nothing to see or feel but the ship itself. Her heat signature by this time had coalesced with the intruder’s on the map. “Come out, you bitch! Fight me like a woman already.” She felt something move the air behind her and smiled.

            With a quick turn, Jessie swung her rifle around, the end of it catching the Shadow in the abdomen. The sheen of a dagger crossed Jes’s vision, and in a fluid motion she dropped her rifle and caught the Shadow’s wrist. She squeezed with all her might and forced her to drop her blade. Finally, with a sweep to the back of her enemy’s knees, Jes knocked the Shadow down and proceeded to pin their arms using her legs. Jes’s hips rested on her foe’s chest and neck, almost enough to keep her from breathing.

            Jes heard footfalls from behind. She looked back long enough to see Ob and the cropper amble down the stairs. Ob had a taser dart at the ready on his left wrist and had a vid capture program running on his right. “Okay then,” he said with a salacious enthusiasm, “can you hold her there for a few more seconds, Jes? Maybe move your hips a little closer to her face?”

            Jes drew both of her pistols, jamming one into the Shadow’s temple, aiming the other at Ob. “How ’bout you make yourself useful Ob, and go get some knockout juice for this bitch?” She paused to have a brief think, flipped some hair out of her eyes, then decided on a new plan. “Nope, no, wait, this’ll be better.” She dropped one pistol, then used that free hand to punch the intruder. The blow sent her head back into the deck, and she seemed to blackout.

            “Yep, definitely more fun,” Jes said with a grin.

            The emergency bulkhead that had cut off engineering recessed, releasing a little puff of steam. Gunther stood in the restored opening. Similar to Jes, he was only wearing a tanktop and cargo pants, which went far in accentuating his cybernetic nature. His metallic right arm glistened in the soft light and humid atmo, the wires connecting it to his torso and neck looking not unlike part of the ship around them.

            Gun lowered his eyes toward Jessie, glanced over toward Obed, who looked like he was still filming the ordeal, and then finally gazed in the direction of the half-naked cropper, who was clutching the scrape on his chest and looking bewildered, beyond out of his depth. He shook his head. “I did not realize that we were making those kinds of vids now.”

            A short while later, Matt was in the ship’s mess hall, seated at a long dining table a few meters away from the dark-haired woman, who as far as he knew had intended to kill him. Though he was not bound to his chair as she was, he felt hardly less incapacitated. He was nervous to see that his apparent host was the same woman he’d pissed off on the bridge back at the Base, and his apprehension was enhanced each time she flicked a thumb across the hammers of her pistols.

            “So,” she started, leaning against a pillar next to the bar. “Cropper, why don’t you tell me how you’re connected to the Baron? I promise not to hurt you too much if you spill it quickly.”

            Matt fidgeted. “I, uh, I don’t know any, um, any Baron. I don’t even know your name.”

            Her eyes boggled for a split second. “What, have you been living under a moon your whole life? Wait, you probably have. So, that’d mean you’ve never seen the Spacepage for Jessie the Destroyer, have you?”

            Matt snickered, and a split second later he regretted it.

            “What’s so funny?” Jes stepped toward him, getting into his personal space enough so that he had to look up to meet her eyes. In a flash, she produced her knife and aimed it precariously close to his rod and bolts. His bruises seared now as he let out a nervous chuckle.

            “Okay, ‘Destroyer.’ I’ve had my ass kicked since I left home. Might as well add to it. Come on, hit me.”

            Jes’s lips squirmed, as her expression gained some confusion. “Hmm. Maybe you are tougher than I thought. Or maybe just stupid. Stupid people don’t end up on the Baron’s employ. Unless… hmm… unless you’re just playin’ stupid.” She feigned stepping away, then slapped him across the cheek backhanded. Then she put a blade underneath his right ear. “How ’bout I take an ear off?”

            “Hey, Jes, take it easy will ya,” Obed interjected, as he strode up to the side of the table opposite Matt. He held a sloppy, half-eaten sandwich, taking another bite as he sat. “Oh, these sprouts suck. Anyway, check this out.”

            Jessie’s device received a beep. “The fuck’s this? I didn’t know we could get on the net this far out.”

            He grinned. “Yeah, you already thought this ship was badass? It has the most sophisticated com system I’ve ever seen. She’s already picking up broadcast from Logos, and—”

            “I don’t care about the tech stuff. You’re telling me that I can still get on the net, even out here?”

            “Well. Yeah. But before you go updating your page, check out the burst.”

            “Huh. A wanted list. They were pretty quick to get this out. Aw, and look at who is at the top.” Jes flashed a mocking smile in Matt’s direction, and she brought the list up onto a holo for him to see:

            Matthew Andrew Garrison

            Height: 1.87 Meters

            Weight: 85 Kilos

            Wanted on Gravin’s Base for accessory to theft, accessory to murder, and trespassing on High Commander Gravin’s property.

            Reward for capture: 1000 credits

            Reward for confirmed death: 200 credits

            Matt’s picture accompanied the wanted ad; it was quaint, making him look like some manner of an innocent teenager.

            “Nice picture, dork,” Jes said, “I guess you’re just an ordinary, back-orbit nobody after all. The Consorties don’t let their employees into the spotlight like this. They just kill you, quietly, if you fuck up.” She rubbed her chin. “Just one thing though. What the fuck’s with the three names?”

            “Huh,” Matt said with meekness. “What do you mean?”

            “Who has three names? Kinda stupid, if you ask me.”

            Matt shrugged. “I figured that some folk just get a middle name. What’s so weird about it?”

            “Sounds like whoever squeezed you out couldn’t make their soddin’ mind up. And then you decided to keep it when you passed your gover—the test thing that you take.”

            “Anyway, it ge’s be’er,” Obed added, his speech distorted by his full mouth. “Keep readin’.”

            Jes scrolled on. Matt could see pictures and dossiers for his new hosts. In the same data burst from Neptune, there were other bounties for them, attached in the file with Matt’s:

            Gunther Derstag

            Height & weight unknown

            Wanted for willful destruction of High Commander Gravin’s property, theft, accessory to murder, sabotage, trespassing.

            Reward for capture: 1000 credits

            Reward for confirmed death: 200 credits

            Obed Samarah

            Height: 1.70 meters

            Weight: 75 kilos

            Wanted for theft, accessory to murder, sabotage, and trespassing.

            Reward for capture: 1000 credits

            Reward for confirmed death: 200 credits

            Jessie (surname unknown; given nickname in Moto circuitry is “The Destroyer”)

            Height: 1.72 meters

            Weight: 71 kilos

            Wanted for murder, theft, accessory to sabotage, and littering.         

            Reward for capture: 2000 credits

            Reward for confirmed death: 500 credits

            Jes’s face contorted with all manner of annoyance. “Are you shitting me? Littering? Really!? That’s what it takes to be worth more of a reward?” She closed the list. “Blow up a door, steal a spaceship… you all run up a regular ol’ bounty. But oh no, litter the streets, and now you’re most wanted. Fucking unbelievable.”

            Obed sloshed out an unintelligible sentence.

            “How about you swallow that shit first?” Jes groaned out.

            Ob complied, then continued, “you know what I meant. But check this out. I hacked into her device after you tied her up. Really outdated security on the thing. Get this: she doesn’t have a public profile. I’m talking, nothing. Sounds like one of their employees, right? No accessible past, no publicly available identity, blah blee you get the point.” He ran a finger across his left sideburn. “But, I did a trace on all of the programs this thing has run recently, and I was able to look through every picture and video file on it. Unless she’s spinnin’ the biggest tall tale, um, ever, then she is an ex-employee. An ex-Shadow, to be exact. Notice how she didn’t even bother to cover her face? They never do that. Point is, all signs tell me that she escaped her old company by force.”

            Jes chuckled. “Yeah right. As if that could happen. Nobody quits any of the Companies and gets away with it. They always get caught in the end. Haven’t we brought a few runaways in for a big fat reward before?”

            “Sort of. Anyway, you probably didn’t notice in all of the excitement, I am the one with the eye for details, you know. Check the back of her neck. You’ll probably have to brush that thick, lustrous hair of hers aside…” Ob trailed off, his face taking on a ravenous expression.

            “Hey.” Matt chimed in while he had a moment. “You’re speaking English. You weren’t before.”

            Excitement flushed Ob’s face. “Oh hey. Yes, you’re right. You don’t even have a device on you, you poor sod. So I figured I’d better speak your language if we were gonna, I don’t know, interrogate you. It’s a harsh word. Plus I like to speak other languages when I’m bored. So there you go.”

            “So,” Matt said, “you guys are wanted, and she’s a runaway. From what?”

            “Correction, crop boy,” Jes said as she inspected the back of the Shadow’s neck. “We are wanted. You’re on the list too. And they didn’t throw kidnappin’ charges into the lot for us. So, you’re not as all innocent-like as you want us to think.” She paused as she saw the tattoo on the Shadow’s neck. “Son of a bitch. She really was with them. Should be worth a lot of money to someone on Logos, at least.”

            Dismissive, Matt waved his hand in front of his face. “Hey, hey. I didn’t do anything to piss anyone off. All of my credits were stolen, handed over to some weirdos in black hoods. I couldn’t see their faces, but they wore outfits kind of like hers.” His head drooped as he recalled what happened back at Little Neptune’s.

            While shoving the Shadow’s head aside, Jes swung back toward Matt. “Oh yeah. Credits. You’d muttered somethin’ before about having ten big blues stolen.”

            He nodded. “Yes. One thousand… gone. My whole life savings.”

            “Now, hold on a sec. Shadows don’t make deals with anyone, ‘less a bullet is what’s being exchanged. You must’ve had someone brokerin’ whatever deal you had goin’ down. That’s how the companies all work.”

            “At least out here,” Ob added.

            With some renewed vigor in his voice, Matt offered up the name he’d never forget: “Geoff. Geoff Masterson. He set up the whole thing. He arranged to get me a transport out to Neptune. Said he could keep everything secret so that my family wouldn’t even know I had ever left. No chance of that now.”

            “Don’t much care about that part. But Geoff?” Jes laughed. “You got caught up with that sheister? Heh. That guy is about good for only one thing, that’s target practice.”

            “You know him?”

            “I’ve run across the name a few times. He used to be one of the worst used shuttle salesmen in the System. Now I hear he calls himself some kind of big ent—enter—shit, what was that word?”

            “Entrepreneur,” Obed offered.

            “Yes, that thing. You must be one gullible little bastard to fall for one of his scams.”

            “Thanks. A lot. That really helps.” Matt held a palm to his forehead.

            Jes paced about. “Did he say which of the companies he worked for?”

            “He said he worked for Rostov Supply Corp. But, what does that have to do with anything? The Solar Consortium, it’s not some kind of secret. I’ve seen ’em on the vids, it’s a business partnership, right?”

            She laughed. “Wow, you’re dumb as an asteroid. They call the shots out here. You don’t cross the companies if you wanna live long. The Baron runs the whole show out on the fringe, cropper.” She put her dagger away. “Shit. This got us just about nowhere, and in a hurry. If Geoff’s workin’ for the Consorties now, then he and those creds are long gone by now. This boy’s been a waste of time.”

            “Not neceshesharily,” Obed chimed in again, with the last bite of his sandwich occupying one side of his mouth. He swallowed before continuing. “Ahem. At least the waste of time part. There is the little matter of our cargo, no?”

            Her eyes lit up. “Oh yeah.” She turned to face Matt again, this time with a devious smirk. “You’re still of some use to us. Now, I’d just as soon drop you at the nearest port and never see you again, but you’re goin’ to help us finish our job.”

            Matt dropped his hand from his head and shot an incredulous look toward her. “Even if I wanted to, how could I possibly help you? I have nothing left to my name, and up ’til now you’ve not exactly been quiet about how useless I apparently am.”

            “Pains me to admit it, but there’s one thing we need you for. It’s complicated, techy stuff—”

            “That’s her way of saying she doesn’t get how it works,” Obed interjected.

            “Shut up, you. Anyway. You do what we say, keep your mouth shut, you help us finish this job, and we might be nice enough to take you back home. Might even get a few creds back to your name.”             The notion of going home struck Matt right in the heart. With renewed confidence he said, “tell me what I need to do.”

<—Chapter Four

—>Chapter Six

This story was not created by or with the assistance of any AI.

by on

Scoped and Dropped

The sizzle of an EMP overload marked Garrus’s arrival in the CIC of the starship Boundless Courtesy, a former hanar vessel commandeered by a Blue Suns hit squad. The two mercs nearest to Garrus lost their kinetic barriers instantly. Before they could recover from the shock, he stepped through the door, taking each out with expert headshots from his Thunder rifle. His visor added the shots to his tally, one he’d started since leaving C-Sec.

24 headshots as a vigilante. I must be slipping. Shepard would’ve had more, I’m sure.

Garrus ran a quick thermal scan of the room. No one else was in the CIC, but he could hear the report of weapons fire below deck. He tapped on his omni-tool. “Dash, do you read? What’s your status?”

A brief crackle preceded her reply. “Just shiny here soldier! Though I could do with a little more firepower if ya care to join in!”

“I think I’ll take you up on that. Hang tight.” He hustled back to the ship’s central confluence. Skipping the laboriously slow elevator, he opted for the stairs, hastily installed for humanoids during the ship’s refit. Running over the dead or incapacitated bodies of other Blue Suns mercs, mostly human and batarian, he joined the fray in Courtesy’s cargo hold. Dash had held her ground by directing a pair of hijacked LOKI mechs against the Blue Suns from behind a stack of heavy crates. To Garrus’s amazement, she worked two omni-tools at once, using the second one to fire EMP and thermal spike mines at the mercs.

There were three of them that Garrus could see: two humans and a krogan. They hadn’t spotted his approach, so he took an extra second to ready his Mantis rifle. Knowing the krogan would laugh off all but the most perfect shot through the eye, Garrus opted to blow away the human on his left. With his shields already fried, the merc’s helmet and head exploded into a mess of blood, bone, and plastic.

Garrus didn’t have time to admire his work, as accelerated metal flew toward him. He hit the ground only in time to avoid what would have been a return headshot. A few rounds still hit the top of his shields’ perimeter, sending an unpleasant feedback through his armor. Damn, they’re pretty good shots to have hit me back that fast, or just lucky.

By then armless, the LOKI mechs still brazenly closed with the mercs, oblivious to the fact that they now posed no significant threat. Even so, the krogan took his chance to indulge some aggression, charging at one mech crest first, pulverizing its torso. Then he grabbed the second mech by the head, ripping it in two with gusto. He let out a war cry even as Garrus took a few decent potshots at him from cover. Dash leaned out long enough to fire a neural shock probe at the krogan, only to have it deflect harmlessly off of his shimmering blue armor. He smiled through his yellow teeth as he charged into the crates protecting Dash; Garrus winced when the stack buckled but held, for the time being.

Garrus’s visor still had the other human’s position pegged. He took a gamble on his shields holding out and popped out of cover. As Garrus anticipated, the merc opened fire, and as he had hoped, his shields held out just enough for him to scope and drop the merc.

The krogan shifted all of his attention to Garrus. Knowing there wouldn’t be a chance to fire another shot before being forced into a melee, Garrus threw his sniper rifle to the side. He grabbed a talon dagger from the mag-clip on his back, where human troops kept their shotguns. He full-on charged the krogan, leaping dagger first toward his huge brown crest. The blade missed its the krogan’s left eye, instead scraping against armor and tough scale. They crumpled to the ground. He heard the krogan laugh again as he smashed Garrus in the cheek with an armored fist. A human would likely have had a bone broken from that kind of punch, but Garrus’s tough turian face stayed intact. He couldn’t reach back for his assault rifle quickly enough as he reeled from the blow, but he did launch another EMP from his omni-tool. The blast took the krogan dead center in the face, forcing him to roll away as many of his armor’s mechanical enhancements malfunctioned.

Dash leapt in as Garrus recoiled from his quarry. With two shock darts readied on each hand, she climbed up the krogan’s hump, sticking both neural paralyzers into his thick neck. The beast of a merc shook and thrashed as he desperately tried to fight back. Even with his redundant nervous system, he was reduced to a crawl. That was enough time for Garrus to unfurl his assault rifle, put it to the krogan’s head, and pull the trigger until it overheated.

Back in Courtesy’s CIC, Garrus grimaced as he inspected his Thunder rifle. The heat sink was blown out and the barrel had taken significant damage.

“You oughta use thermal clips, ya know,” Dash offered as she glanced over at him from the main communications console. “Keeps you away from nasty problems like that.”

“I’ll have you know that I helped Shepard stop Saren with guns just like this, thank you.” His mandibles twitched. He then remembered that Shepard had access to top of the line weaponry from both the Alliance and the Spectre stocks. They fared better in the field than the run of the mill weapons from the Traverse and Terminus that Garrus was using.

“Whatever, big man, just tryin’ to be a help. Could be that I want to say thanks for coverin’ my ass back there.”

He didn’t look back at her, instead returning his attention to the cargo manifest, which had finished downloading to his omni-tool. “Anyway, you were right about the red sand. I’ll put out a beacon to your contact, after he comes through with those credits he promised.” He groaned under his breath. He needed credits more badly now than any other time in his life. He hadn’t eaten more than a few turian-friendly protein packs since leaving Eden Prime.

“Sounds cool soldier. What else you got over there?”

“Hmm, mostly boring lists of weapons and mods, most of it legal. I still don’t see anything about eezo.”

“I figured that’d probably be it. Can’t make it too easy.” Dash giggled. “I’m surprised you ain’t put two and two together yet, Vakarian.”

He glanced over at her. “What do you mean? Why should I put two numbers together right now..?”

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, you turians can be so damn stiff, even when you go rogue. I figured when I dropped Wrex’s name back planetside you’d have reacted more. Everyone not living under a moon knows you two were with Shepard.”

“So?”

“He’s the one who hired us, special! Well, me. He doesn’t know you’re involved. I mean, not you, the one and only Garrus. Far as he knows there’s some asshole turian heavy along for the ride to get some credits.” She brushed a lock of hair back under her cap.

“Interesting.” Some gears began to turn in his head, but he kept his outward expression stoic. “And somehow Wrex knows who I need to look for, who will lead me to my… targets?”

“Yep. I mean that’s what he said. He figured what he knows might make some good currency in your circles. I might’ve fibbed a bit before, me spacing your last contact wasn’t just self-defense, ya know? Wrex hired me to shake him down for the info on this ship and its cargo. Some of his rival clans have been usin’ old repurposed junkers like this one to bring shipments they ain’t supposed to past the krogan DMZ, givin’ em an edge in firepower. Wrex wants it stopped.”

She beamed up at him with big eyes. “Funny how small the galaxy can be, ain’t it?”

Garrus’s stomach gurgled to remind him how empty it was. His jaw and cheekbones stung with fierce heat from the punch. Though he begrudgingly liked the notion that he might get to meet Wrex again, he didn’t care much about sentiment then. He wanted only a few things: a new gun, some hot food, a cozy place to sleep for at least one night cycle, and the location for Jaroth. He frowned at Dash when he knew that none of those things were immediately available. Closing out the cargo manifest on his omni-tool, he started playing with the helm controls in front of him. The ship had been refit but was still hopelessly built with hanar in mind. The helm controls were a tall and impractical set of levers and holographic dials on a silvery pedestal. Working them as well as he could, Garrus limped the ship toward an orbit of the nearest planet, Tuchanka.

<—Chapter Three

—>Chapter Five

by on

Escape

Seconds after the alarms went off in the drydock, bullets were tearing through the air, meant for Jessie and Obed. They dove behind some other cargo that was awaiting transfer to the large cruiser. Jes listened to the report from the attackers’ weapons. They’re using forties. No armor piercers, just vanilla rounds. Pistols only, sounds like Dragoon auto-mags. Bunch of fucking amateurs!

            Once she heard enough incoming fire dissipate to indicate mass reloading, Jes popped up and brought her pistols to bear; one was loaded with tungsten-coated armor-piercing ammunition, the other with phosphorous incendiary rounds. The enforcers took cover behind support beams and other unprocessed cargo, but most of these improvised barricades failed to protect against the specialized ammo in play. Blood and bone exploded out where Jes fired. Her barrage suppressed what little oncoming fire that remained, and she pressed her advantage, easily finishing off the few enforcers that hadn’t succumbed to her initial counterattack. “Okay, talk to me,” she called back to Obed, who had resumed his attempts to crack into the cruiser’s cargo hold. “Bastards didn’t stand a chance, but you can bet they’re sending more mooks soon.”

            The first reply she received was a crash, then some intelligible words crept through. “Oh, well that’s good. I managed to get the cargo door open, but I’ve made a bit of a mess inside. You’re going to have to buy me some time.”

            In her peripheral vision, she saw more enforcers entering the bay, and from their silhouettes they seemed to be better armed than the last batch. “Oh lovely! Just don’t be late to the party!” Though aware that she was about to be in serious danger, she still spared a few seconds to update her social media status from “bored” to “in combat.” Then she grabbed a matte black combat rifle—which she named Fredrik—from her back, racked out the base ammo for hollow points, and dug in for the coming onslaught.

            By Matt’s reckoning, Gravin’s Base had seemed uncomfortably warm and humid. That same heat became blissful when his chilled body emerged from the recyc vat. His mind raced to figure out how to fix his next problem: I’m alone… no money… He felt around in his pockets, realizing that he did have one leftover yellowtape; it was five credits, effectively loose change. Five creds… might get me some food or a ride to another nearby station, but won’t get me beyond Neptune for sure. Crap.  Can’t even log on to the local net anyway, so I’m lost.

            He took a moment to check the contents of his backpack, hoping nothing had been lost or yoinked along the way without him knowing. There was no food, as he’d eaten the last of his portable meals on the voyage here. He also had two extra sets of clothing, mostly identical to what he had on. Finally, he did have one piece of armament: a vintage Terran pistol, a black thirty-eight semi-automatic that was far from its prime. Across one side of the pitted and beaten slide, the word “Ruger” could barely be made out. It was a gift from his dad, a relic that had ostensibly lost its collectible value because it had been partially rebuilt and rechambered to use different caliber rounds.

            He’d seen the security patrols on the streets, and reasoned that the best recourse was to wander about until he came across another one of them. Then, with help from the law around here, I’ll get my money back from Geoff.

            It hardly took a few minutes for Matt to indeed find another squad of enforcers, but they paid him no heed, and indeed were scurrying off in a particular direction with serious hustle. He couldn’t see their faces through their dull, gray armor, but their collective body language suggested danger. Then he could hear the alarm klaxons in the distance.

            Curiosity and desperation conspired, compelling Matt to follow the enforcers. Their flight led them to a bridge, a brown-gray metallic structure that had loops of green neon lights running its length. A kiosk was affixed to the bridge’s halfway marker. What is that… some kind of, security system? Never seen anything like that. A tall, armored door lay beyond, a giant slab of metal that Matt guessed to be at least twice as tall as himself.

            Matt unintentionally skidded to one knee as he closed in on the bridge. His breath was raspy, the adrenaline rush of escape wearing off and his body threatening again to succumb to shock. Worse, and despite throwing up, he could still feel the sickening effects of Geoff’s “house special” coursing through him.

            When he looked back up, he could see two figures, clad in black coats and matching black hoods, pass undeterred through the security checkpoint under escort. He was certain they were the same two who’d been at Little Neptune’s. But those guys are criminals! They’re in league with the guards? Who can I trust out here now!? I’m… on my own…

            “Geh aus dem weg,” a low, gravelly voice spoke from behind. Matt turned his head to see massive male figure bearing down on him. The man spoke again, with much greater force: “Ich sagte: geh aus dem weg!” The man grasped Matt’s shoulder with a broad, powerful hand and shoved him aside. What Matt heard next was the report of a rocket leaving its chamber and impacting somewhere close by with a tremendous explosion. He clutched the sides of his head in a vain attempt to blot it out.

            Gun’s rocket breached a hole into the drydock entrance as Jessie and Obed were closing in on it. Seeing the way cleared, and that there were more enforcers on the other side, Jessie fired through the new opening. Caught off guard from having to dodge the rocket, the smattering of Gravin enforcers on the bridge died quickly. Only two men in black coats managed to avoid the slaughter. As the smoke cleared, Jes realized that the two men in black had disappeared without no trace.

            “Oh fuck me running,” Jes said to Gunther once they were all within earshot of each other. “There were at least two Shadows on that bridge! Get your IRs on!”

            Gun stowed his rocket launcher, then fetched a pair of lenses that he snapped onto the bridge of his nose. “I am picking up faint heat signatures heading away from the bridge. It would appear that they are retreating.”

            “Oh, beautiful. They’ll be back once they realize it’s just us three.” She sighed. “And now I have to walk around wondering if these cloaked bastards will come up behind us and slit our throat,” she said with flippancy as she rolled her eyes. “Fucking perfect.” Jessie kept one pistol in hand as she and Obed crossed the bridge, finishing off the enforcers left who were still twitching.

            Obed was a spry fellow but was burdened by carrying a heavy, rectangular crate across his left shoulder. With his free hand, he was busy fiddling with the crate’s mag-lock. All this while trying to keep up with Jessie, something that seemed to vex him. “Jes, if you would kindly stop being a bitch for two seconds, I might be able to focus on getting this lock open!”

            “We’re not getting paid to open it, asshole, we’re getting paid to deliver it.”

            Obed continued picking away at the mag-lock, and with a loud ping, the thing popped out of place, revealing a small access panel. It only had a flat screen, with five lit points across it. “Ah! What we have here is a gene lock. Very nice, very sophisticated one at that. The trick with these, of course, is figuring out whose deena it’s coded to, or if it’s even been coded yet. This should be fun.”

            Jessie waved a pistol in dismissivity. “Will you stop fucking with that thing?”

            “Don’t you even want to know what’s inside? What you just killed… how many mooks was it? Fifteen? What you just killed at least fifteen people to acquire?”

            Jes stopped to think for a second. Maybe it’d be good to know what it is we’re stealin’. “Alright, sod it. Let’s crack it open on the ship. By the way, that little program of yours’d better work, or it’s going to be—” Her eyes drifted over toward Matt, slumped on the ground nearby. He was an oddity, not being an enforcer yet seemingly having stuck his neck into the thick of the action. “Who is that?”

            Gunther offered a shrug. “Just some spectator that I had to throw clear. He was in the way of my ideal trajectory.”

            Jes walked over to him. Once she was close, recognition set in. She yanked him up by the scruff of his tattered shirt and held his face close to hers. He was conscious but incoherent. Veins were throbbing across his temples. His eyes, a similar deep, emerald color like her own, briefly locked onto her face.            

            “You! I told you to watch where you step, you little bastard, and here you are in my way again! You in league with the Shadows? Speak up!”

            “Stole… stolen… creds. They took… my creds,” Matt stammered out.

            Her eyebrows perked. “Okay now sweetheart,” she said, switching to a soothing tone, “take it easy. How many creds did the big bad men steal?”

            “My box… one… creds…”

            “Jessie!” Obed tried to interject.                                                       

            “Shut up! I’m busy over here.” She snapped her head back toward Matt. “You were talking about a box. It had creds. How many were there, one what?”

            “One… thousand… I worked my whole life for that box,” he said, flustered. “You know… how many keepsakes that I—”

            “Stow it, sweetheart. You’re coming with me.” She hoisted Matt up and then slung him over her right shoulder.

            “Jessie, what in the name of luck are you doing? We’re kinda busy right now, you know? Who cares about that little punk? Drop him and let’s go!” Obed pleaded.

            “This little dipshit cropper let slip that one of those Shadows is carrying a cred box worth ten big blues,” she retorted, after giving Matt’s posterior a pat with her free hand. “If we drop one of them, I call dibs on the loot. Plus there might be more where that came from.”

            Gunther shook his head in resignation.

            Obed’s eyes widened with interest. “But Jes… Shadows don’t just mug people in the street and take their creds. He must’ve had contact with them…” Ob trailed off, his face relaxing into an “ah-ha” expression. “Ah, you sly girl. He’s had contact with the Baron’s men. He could possibly make for some excellent collateral. Maybe the Consortium would pay to have him silenced. Or returned to them, if he ran away.”

            “New heat signatures, from our right flank,” Gun said.

            Jes pulled a Uranian forty-four magnum—which she named Krukov—out from her chest holster. On the self-defense market it was considered an antique, but this one had been modified to fire specialized rounds which set off highly localized EMPs at randomized frequencies. “Alright, all of our asses are hanging out here, let’s get moving.”

            The trio and unwitting guest arrived at the shuttle docks without any further noteworthy incident. This kept Jes on edge, her tension ratcheting further up with every moment she expected a new ambush and was proven wrong. They ran down a docking platform, which at its end offered a partial view out into space.

            With an accompanying sigh, Obed let the crate drop from his shoulder, and he raced up to the flexiglass window nearest the main airlock. He brought up one of his devices and used it to project a holographic control panel large enough for all to see.

            “Now it’s time for the real show. I have perfected this new revolutionary remote flight program, lady and gentlemen, and we will make our escape as smoothly as I would slide myself into—”

            Jessie held up a hand, interjecting, “oh please. You are about as smooth with your very unimpressive hardware as a rock hitting Jupiter.”

            Obed smirked. “It’s not the size of the ship, it’s the efficiency of the stabilizers.”

            Gunther groaned.

            “That doesn’t even make sense,” Jes said, scratching the side of her head.

            Their ship, Akkad, slipped into their view. The retrofitted Hydra-class frigate swung hard to port, then her maneuvering thrusters eased her over toward the docking clamps.

            Obed’s eyes were alight with glee. “You see? Sheer brilliance. This is going to be the biggest breakthrough in flight control since—”                                                                                    

            A white-hot, magcelerated slab of metal tore through the void of space, flew in between the docking clamps, and ripped a chunk of hull from Akkad’s ventral section. The ship’s trajectory was spoiled and it slammed into the station. The trio all recoiled from the airlock; Matt fell off Jes’s shoulder in the process.

            Roused briefly from delirium, Matt looked about, able to see the ruckus outside but unable to crystallize his ability to make sense of it all.

            A second, a third, and then a fourth round of slag metal struck the helpless Akkad, each one breaking apart more of the hull, and each one venting more of the ship’s precious atmosphere into space. After a brief delay, one scant enough for the trio to get back up to their feet, a fifth round punctured the scene. It tore Akkad in twain, leaving only twisted metal and burning wreckage.

            Flabbergasted, Obed then asked, “does… does anyone have a, um… back-up, plan? By chance?”

            Jessie wrenched him around by the shoulder. “Come on genius, think! Our fucking ship is out there in pieces. You’re the one who improvises, remember? Now soddin’ improvise.”

            “I’ve always been able to improvise because—because no one has ever blown the fuck out of our ship before.” Obed slipped out of her grip and started pacing. “Okay, okay, just… give me a minute! Guards haven’t caught up to us yet. Let’s, um… why don’t we head back to the drydock?”

            “What, so we can steal a shuttle? No wait, how about a soddin’ cargo transport? That’d be beautiful, somethin’ that’d be flagged the moment we even step one foot on it.” Then Jes remembered the drydocked cruiser. “Ooh, even better, you figure on hijackin’ a ship that isn’t even finished yet? She may’ve looked ready but you can bet she ain’t tested yet.” The way Ob smiled as soon as she said that confirmed her suspicion. “Great plan, yeah, just great.”

            Ob got huffy. “You asked for an idea. You got anything better, dumbass?”

            “I would be content for you two to stop bringing out the worst of each other’s immaturity,” Gunther said.

            As Jessie considered how to retort, she jumped back as Gun was struck from behind, the impact knocking him down flat on his chest. A scarcely visible shimmer distorted the air where he’d been standing.

            “Shadow! Get clear!”

            Gun crawled clear as Jes opened fire. The first round pierced the air with a long blue tracer and exploded in mid-flight near the distortion. The impact threw out a small, concentrated burst of electromagnetic energy. Shimmers briefly melted away to reveal a figure in a black coat and hood, who dodged shots from Jes and Obed alike.

            With a few sparks, the Shadow’s refraction field reactivated. A knife came flying out from where he was last seen. The blade took Obed in the shoulder, and he stumbled backward into the nearest wall.

            “Alright you asshole, I’m sick of your shit.” Jes dropped her magnum and reached for one of the two weapons on her back, a shotgun. She unleashed a torrent of lead pellets down the hallway that no amount of dodging or acrobatics could evade. Impacts to the Shadow’s armor decloaked him once more. Jes kept firing until she had her target flat on the ground. Then with a boot on what was left of his chest, she blasted more shells into the Shadow’s head pulp until her chamber clicked empty.

            Gunther slowly returned to his feet, while dislodging a taser bolt from a crease in his armor. “Jessie?” he asked when no one had spoken long enough for awkwardness to begin.

            Jes exhaled a long-held breath. With the flick of a switch, her shotgun’s stock and grip folded up into the gun frame, and she put it back in place across her right shoulder blade. “I’m soddin’ fine,” she said, kicking at the fresh corpse. She nodded back toward the far wall. “What’s Ob’s problem?”

            Gun walked over to check on Obed.

            Ob groaned when prodded, and his eyes snapped open. “Ah, ah! Ow… my ass,” is what he had to say as he stood, to a disapproving Gun grunt.

            Gun grabbed the knife out of Obed’s shoulder, taking almost nothing but cloth with it; turned out the knife had punctured mostly the padding in Ob’s coat, while only barely cutting into his skin. He threw the blade away and turned back toward Jessie.

            “We do not have many options left. There is at least one more Shadow out there. The enforcers are confused and uncoordinated, but will be on us soon. Stealing a shuttle may be our best chance right now.”

            Jes nudged the Shadow’s corpse over onto its side. No creds, no loot worth havin’. Fuckin’ cheap bastard. “Fuck. Why not? Let’s just get our asses shot off inside a shuttle. I love this plan!” Jessie walked over to retrieve Krukov and then eyed the stolen crate. “Gun, how about you grab that thing, so that I don’t have to hear someone bitch about carryin’ it, and I’ll take the cropper. At least he has a nice ass, so I won’t be totally miserable along the way.”  

            The only advantage that the trio had left was the confusion that they wrought. Chatter on the local net delivered conflicting reports, so most of the enforcers seemed unsure of whether the trespassers were still in the cargo port, the drydocks, or both. The three encountered the occasional guard on the way back to drydock, but dispatched each one with relative ease.

            While Jessie and Gun did the lifting and the shooting, Obed ran several programs on his devices. Jes caught glimpses of him running applications that looked like nonsense to her. They had made their way back to the docks when Ob let them in on his machinations. “Hey! Hey. Guys. I have a third plan. You really will love this one.”

            “Spit it out, genius. They’ll be on us before long.”

            “We’re going back to the far end of the drydock. To the ship that the crate was on.”

            Fuck it. Jes thought. If we’re gonna go down might as well make it interesting. “Shit, I was only kidding about that before. This’d better be good.”

            Once they returned to the cruiser, Obed punched a few lines into one of his displays, and life hummed from the ship’s port cargo door. He ushered everyone inside once the way was open. “I had a chance to scan the ship quite thoroughly. This is no partial construction my friends; she is fully operational.”

            The three stepped through an airlock door, through its adjoined cargo bay, and quickly emerged through a connecting hall into a large lobby, a fully furnished mess that combined a bar with a dining area. Everything was brand new; the room was clean, shiny, and sleek, not unlike a fancy hotel. The bar was fully stocked. There were lounging areas in the far-right corners of the room, complete with tables and plush corner couches of a velvety purple. The air in here was fresh, cool, and devoid of the humidity which permeated Gravin’s Base.

            “I’ve never seen such a lovely getaway vehicle.” Obed’s excitement was almost adolescent. He sent a beep to Gun. “Alright big man! I just sent you the ship schematics. The security systems are old, but the main computer has the, uh, thing, that you can talk to. Would you kindly head down to engineering and get us fired up?”

            Gun’s face made toward a grimace, but he quickly buried his derision. Gun dropped the cargo crate, and without a word he jogged off toward the ship’s engineering deck.

            Jes threw the unconscious Matt onto a nearby couch; he barely stirred. For a second, Jes considered that he might be dying from poison. Eh, as long as he lives long enough to spill what he knows, who soddin’ cares, she thought.

            After this, she and Obed went to the ship’s highest deck, which contained the main bridge. Most of the lights and consoles were already working by the time they stepped inside.

            The cruiser’s bridge was twice as big as anything Jes had seen. It was slick and efficient, a silvered graphite room with angled red support beams separating the control stations from one another. Each station was furnished with black snyth-leather seats. Obed plopped himself into the pilot’s chair at the front of the bridge, while Jes took over the ship’s tactical console on the starboard side. Seconds later, the main fusion core roared to full life, sending surges of raw power coursing through every plate, panel, and bulkhead. Life support systems fully kicked in and the room’s lighting went from dim to vibrant. Momentarily, the throbbing power of the ship’s core settled down to a gentle vibration, a sensation that made Jessie feel pleasant in her nether bits. She moaned lightly, then laughed.

            Ob pointed at the viewscreen that came to life and showed them nothing but an armored slab of metal. “Jes, if you would be so kind as to blast a hole into that drydock door directly ahead?”

            “Wasn’t gonna wait for you to ask, Ob,” she said, caressing the edges of the tactical station. She couldn’t wait to see how much power the cruiser’s railguns packed. “But even with this sexy weapons system, it’s gonna take a few minutes to punch through that kind of armor.”

            “Not to worry babe, I have a plan for that.”

            With a few button presses, Jes activated the forward weapon systems.  She aimed the railguns at the point where the two sides of the bay door met, and opened fire. Hot slabs of metal impacted the door. With each shot it twisted, groaned, and folded a bit more out into space, but at a pace too slow for her liking. Just how long can we keep this shit up?

            Jes watched as Obed activated the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. Oblivious, he didn’t disengage the moorings; the various hooks and cables were violently ripped off, parts of them still hanging onto the ascended as it ascended from its cradle. Ob activated the ship’s aft engine at full power, ramming the cruiser into the damaged space door. In its weakened state, it gave way. The cruiser’s internal stabilizers were not engaged in time, however, causing Ob to fall out of his chair. Jessie only held on by grabbing a safety restraint at the last second. The aft engine stayed on at full strength, and within seconds the cruiser was clear of Gravin’s Base, much to Jessie’s nausea

            “Well… this was certainly one of the more interesting days that we’ve ever had.” Obed slumped himself down on the side of the couch opposite Jessie. While Gunther kept the ship running from engineering, Jes and Ob raided the robust store of alcohol onboard. Ob had fixed himself a dirty vodka martini and gulped half of it at once to punctuate his statement.

            “Hmph. Sure. We got caught lifting merch from the soddin’ most powerful man in the system. I killed one of his mooks. And our ship got blown to fuckin’ bits. Just a brilliant display of thievery, I have’ta say.” Jes kept a cigar lodged in the left side of her mouth as she spoke; she purposely allowed it to exaggerate her accent. She resumed cleaning her guns on the big, softly lit white table before them.

            “Yeah… not our finest hour, I grant you. But hey! Gunther says that the top speed of this sweet new ship is better than anything we’ve ever seen. It’ll probably only take a few days to reach Logos. In the meantime we can kick back in the lap of luxury.” Ob put his feet up on the table. “It’s a short trip, auto-pilot programs will handle us just fine. Gravin isn’t gonna pursue us outside of his territory. We can relax for a bit.” He took another swig of his martini. “So…”

            “What?” Jes asked with a puff of cigar smoke.

            “I noticed this ship has some pretty swanky crew quarters. Nice beds. Soft, clean.”

            “Uh-huh.”

            “How about we sex one of them up? I’m sure you have a lot of tension to work out. I know that I do.”

            Jes grabbed her almost-spent cigar, eyeing the lit end of it as she entertained the thought of putting it out in Obed’s face. The idea made her chuckle. “I told you already. You’re not big enough, and you’re too squishy. You wouldn’t last five minutes, remember? We’ve been through this shit before.”

            “Would you care to put that to a wager?”

            “Piss off.” Jes flicked what little was left of her cigar at him, then started stowing her guns into a nearby pack. Ah… the little bastard is right about this much. I’m fuckin’ tired. Sleep sounds awesome, she thought as she got up to leave, having already called dibs on a nice room on the ship’s port side.She stopped briefly on the way out, turned her head sideways toward Ob, catching him as he snickered. After noticing her gaze in the corner of his eye, he waved his fingers toward her and then sucked down the rest of his martini.

            She shook her head and moved on. She stepped inside her new residence as the doors swished open with a hiss. She tapped on a panel beyond the inner frame, locking the door behind her, then she slumped back against it to catch her breath. She slung her pack onto the nearby bed and started the long process of unbraiding her hair. What a fucking lovely day…

<—Chapter Three

—>Chapter Five

This story was not created by or with the assistance of any AI.

by on

Eden Prime

Life was still far from normal for the residents of Eden Prime. It was close to the one year anniversary of Saren’s attack, and it was still fresh in the local community’s collective memory, that if not for Commander Shepard and the crew of SSV Normandy, Saren’s plan to annihilate the colony would’ve succeeded.

Garrus found it amusing that the first establishments to be back up and running in the colony’s capitol city, Constant, were the taverns. The farms were operational again, mostly, but in the city, unless one needed to use the spaceport or get drunk, there wasn’t much to do. Garrus felt keen on the latter option upon arrival, though he feared there wasn’t enough turian-friendly alcohol available to do the job.

While he waited for the flustered and overly unfriendly human barkeep to get him his second shot, Garrus flipped through some data on his omni-tool. He’d put together an interactive hit list, with threads of data connecting one target or dossier to another. In between his prime suspect, Jaroth, and the various lowlifes Garrus had killed in his first few months as a vigilante, there was a wealth of dead-end leads, cronies, and unknowns. The questions seared his mind: where did Jaroth operate? Was he getting his eezo from Omega, from batarian space, or somewhere else in the Terminus? Who were his cohorts? Who could actually help him infiltrate the network of these shipments? These questions pestered him every day. Sure, maybe I could just barge into Omega and start shooting everyone who might be remotely linked to this guy. But how far would that get me?

Through his thick skin and armor, Garrus barely noticed a slap on his back. Then there was a plopping sound as someone sat in the stool next to him. Through the glow of his visor, which he’d switched to orange in an attempt to obfuscate his identity, he gathered that it was a human. Female. No one he recognized. Or should I? Maybe this swill is actually working. He grunted some form of acknowledgement to her, then re-focused on his hit list.

“Ya know, round these parts people still say hello to each other.”

Garrus didn’t look over, but the cheerfulness in her voice suggested that she was smiling. “Sorry human, I don’t think you’re the person I’m here to see.” He wondered now what was taking so long with his next drink.

“Did it occur to you that maybe this person, let’s just call him a friend, might not be joining you, Vakarian?”

Now she had his attention. He turned around his stool, an awkward thing to do when it wasn’t meant to accommodate turian legs. “I don’t know that name, but we need to have a discussion. Not here.” He called up his open tab via omni-tool, tapped “pay,” then grabbed the human by the arm, leading her outside. Once out in better lighting, he took a second to reconnoiter her appearance. Her complexion was youthful, mixed in coloration as many human colonists were, her hair a sloppy, tangled mess of black that asymmetrically covered part of her face. She had on some kind of beige cap, made of a nebulous cloth. Her light, petite spacesuit looked like a pastiche of different manufacturers’ armors, with a mismatch of reds, browns and purples. She didn’t have any obvious weapons that he could see, but he wouldn’t take any chances in the event she was a biotic.

“Easy there, soldier. The First Contact War is over.” Her tone remained cheerful, playful even.

When he was satisfied that no one could overhear, he let go of her arm. There was enough ambient noise outside to put him more at ease against curious ears. “Where did you hear that name?”

She snickered. “Oh come on. Any dolt with half a wit could recognize your face paint. And just cause you changed your visor color, mixed your armor up a bit, you think no one could tell that you’re Garrus Vakarian?”

He groaned. He wasn’t too fond of his current suit, an orange Devlon Industries set of light turian armor. He missed wearing his favorite cobalt blue color, but he wanted to deflect attention away from his identity until news of his disappearance cooled off on the extranet. That it was apparently so ineffective annoyed him. “So you have me at a disadvantage. Now tell me why my friend won’t be making it?”

“Oh he’s dead, Garrus. Spaced.”

“That’s a shame. I was hoping my friend might be delivering me some good news.” Truth was, Garrus didn’t care that this “friend” was dead. He wasn’t much of one, having been a courier for the Shadow Broker and an unsavory one at that. All that mattered to Garrus was the information he possessed.

“It’s okay, soldier. I have some good news for you too, but it’s on a datapad, you see. Locked up tight, nice and secure, off the net so that no one can spoil it for you, see? I can take you to where that is.”

Garrus’s caution was overridden by impatience. “Fine, let’s go.”

“Nah. Not yet. Meet me at nightfall. At a special place.”

“What, no hint? No coordinates? What special place?”

“The Shepard monument, of course. What else about this droll little colony is special?”

“I don’t know about that. What’s your name, friend of a friend?”

“Dash. Nice to meet ya, Vakarian. I’ll be seeing ya later, I’m sure.”

Later, as the star, Utopia, disappeared from Eden Prime’s sky, the verdant green horizon melted away from Garrus’s sight. He walked through the grass, alongside an incomplete monorail leading away from Constant. The unfinished expansion to the rail system was what led the humans to uncovering the prothean beacon, and what set in motion the events that brought about Saren’s attack. The original prothean excavation site, as well as the area where Sovereign landed, were now off-limits, under around the clock guard by the Systems Alliance, but the Shepard monument nearby was open to all.

Erected on the cliffside where she and her squad first disembarked from Normandy, the statue in Shepard’s honor overlooked an impressive stretch of Eden. A persistent mass effect barrier kept her detractors from damaging or defacing it. Shortly after the Battle of the Citadel, one would’ve found flowers, dedication plaques, and other tributes left here. Now, there was precious little in memorial beside the statue itself, as if it had been forgotten, relegated to only one brief stop on an Eden Prime tour guide.

Garrus lowered his new Thunder assault rifle for a moment as he glared up at the statue. At about four meters tall, it was an impressive recreation. Still, it pales compared to the real thing. She was a lot more beautiful than that, too. Her, hair, was nicer…

“Right on time, Vakarian!”

He brought his rifle back up to attention. Thermal scans in his visor revealed a shape exactly like that of Dash, and he relaxed a bit. She still had no weapons he could detect. “I’m always on time, and on target. You have what I need?”

“Oh you betcha. But…”

Garrus groaned. “There’s always a but. Why can this never just be simple? What is it you want, Dash?”

He picked up a little sparkle in her eye from the dim moonlight. “A piece of the action.”

“Do you even know what kind of action that is?”

“Oh I do, soldier. You’re after the scum of the galaxy, livin’ just below the surface of ‘civilization,’ feedin’ off us decent folk. The people your old bosses knew ’bout but wouldn’t lift a finger to touch. Too many credits across too many greased palms, you know?”

“Are you… asking to join me?”

“Nah. I mean not for good, you know, but maybe for this one job. You see, our mutual friend was into some worse shit than you knew. I’m the one who spaced him. Some random-ass backwater in the Traverse, no way it’ll get traced back to either of us. I have all the data he did, right here. But if I give this to you, well, the target that’s in here along with the intel, see, I’m going to have to be there when you take him on.” Her smile grew wider as she handed the data pad over to him. “It’s important that we cooperate on this one, because as you’ll see, we have a mutual acquaintance tied into all this.” Dash winked.

“And who is that?”

Dash chuckled. “It’s Urdnot Wrex, silly.”

<—Chapter Two

—>Chapter Four

This story was not created by or with the assistance of any AI.

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Discarded

            Matt squirmed in protest as Geoff shoved him by the arm out the back exit of Little Neptune’s. Before Matt could recover his footing, Geoff grabbed his arm again and pushed his pistol against Matt’s right shoulder blade. “Move it.”

            “Geoff, what in fortune are you doing? Where is the gem!? Why did you let them—” Geoff butted his pistol into the back of Matt’s head.

            “Shut up! You’re just another dumb cropper, thinkin’ he knows how the System works. You were only good for one thing, boy, and that’s come and gone. This is what business is all about.”

            Geoff knew the crevices of Gravin’s Base intimately. He forced Matt down a bewildering selection of back alleys, crisscrosses, and abandoned infrastructure, stopping finally at a dilapidated intersection of two old production plants, where not another person could be seen or heard. There was a rusted access hatch in the confluence that looked like it had once been part of the station’s recycling system. Geoff stomped his foot on a small, recessed pedal, and after some initial protest, the hatch slid open. Matt dared a glance into the open orifice and though he couldn’t see anything but darkness, the rancid stench that greeted him told a quick and grisly tale.

            “I’m not gonna kill you, boy, at least not here and now, since you kept your mouth shut just long enough. You did me a big favor, and you played your part well. In fact you made this one of the quickest and quietest jobs I’ve ever had. But here’s where our business partnership, fun as it was, comes to an end. You know too much for your own good.” Geoff reached around and yanked Matt’s device from its slot on his wrist, then nudged him toward the hatch. “Aaaaand… down you go!” Geoff kicked him down, and before Matt could even yell, the hatch was already closed.

            Matt expected to be dead at any second, however, serendipity dictated otherwise.

            Geoff had taken Matt’s device, but in his haste, he hadn’t bothered stealing his backpack. That backpack’s strap was now the only thing keeping Matt from falling the rest of the way down to the bottom of the giant, abandoned recycling bin. It was stuck on a jutting piece of metal, a wall plate that had been knocked out of position.

            A meager bulb on a power relay box was all that offered light here. Matt dared to retrieve the penlight from his pack, which almost dislodged him. All of the trash is gone far as I can tell… what is that… ugh, that smell, coming from? After a few moments of searching and letting his eyes adjust, he finally saw the source of the stench: human bodies.

            There were at least thirty corpses, most of them twisted and contorted in unnatural ways; their flesh had been partially devoured by means unclear, their bones sundered into inhuman configurations. The sight and the rancid stench made him throw up until his stomach had nothing left, then he fainted into semi-consciousness.

            Is this even real? Please let this not be real…

            In time untracked, he recovered enough of his senses to climb down. Being that much closer to the bodies and the cold, metallic floor was hardly calming, but at least he was thankful there was nothing left in his stomach to expunge.

            There has to be a way out. But I bet everyone tells that to themselves. I bet all of these folk said that before they… before they… Death had never truly occurred to him before. Thoughts of home, of his parents, fought away the panic that wanted to claim him. More than anything else, he thought of Amelia; she was the reason he was even out here at all. All of the money, all the risk, all to acquire for her a ruby that originally came from Terra. Anything that came from beyond the Line—that destroyed planet in particular—automatically had greater value. Saturners in particular found ownership of such relics important to their societal stature.

            Matt grew still as he considered his plight, and recalled what motivated him to even consider this trip. Croppers were important to humanity, yet were often a downcast lot. Unless a food crisis struck, they were often thought of as second-class citizens among Saturners. His family and Amelia’s alike didn’t have the pull and the creds like those who plied most other trades. Matt’s household in particular, while well-liked by its peers, had little in the way of status, heirlooms, or any other notable significance in the System at large. Amelia’s parents were a stubborn lot who were nigh-on impossible to impress. In Matt’s reckoning, that made the chances of getting to marry her slim at best. For months upon months upon years now, he’d told himself that acquiring something like that Terran gem would be enough to wow her and earn the respect of her family at the same time. 

            He always fancied himself the hero type, at least, that’s what he told himself he’d become when someone he cared about needed it most. A book he read as a kid—Tales From the Border War—gave him early notions of heroism against impossible odds that stuck.

            The gem may be gone now…  but for her, I’m going to get out of here. Now, just how do I do that? He looked around the metal chasm, trying not to let his eyes linger too long on any bodies. The only useful thing in sight is that relay box, blinking on that wall… A relay box!

            It looked so much like many other old, outdated systems, such as those on McCarthy’s shuttle. Climbing up to the box also looked easy, at least for someone who didn’t have any broken limbs; no other victims down here seemed to have been that fortunate. Matt started climbing the various pipes and plates along the wall toward his perceived salvation.

            A cold sweat clung to him, a side effect of the shock and throwing up. He knew if he stayed down in the cold for much longer he’d almost certainly become hypothermic. Hypothermia, starvation, dehydration… no shortage of ways to die down here. He hung precariously from the metal wall once he reached the box, with a sweat and sludge-soaked hand and his boots threatening to slip off. He gripped the penlight in his teeth as he worked.

            Stupid… stupid… thing… you know that you want to… come on, just this one time, work! After much initial protest, the little relay program in the box cooperated with Matt’s inputs, and flashed a message, “power rerouted to emergency systems.” His elation was barely contained, and he again nearly slipped off of his delicate perch. He was on the verge of crying out in joy. Then, the light died. The panel went black. For thirty agonizing seconds, Matt hung onto the metal wall, in complete darkness save for his tiny flashlight. Before he could languish too long in despair however, he was interrupted by a synthetic voice declaring: “Patch from master OS accepted. Systems updated. Emergency procedures initiated.” The hatch above groaned open, and light emerged onto his face. It would be a tough climb, but he now had a chance. He silently thanked the “mother of fortune,” an outmoded custom acquired from watching too many action vids on the net, and began his ascent.

<—Chapter Two

—>Chapter Four

This story was not created by or with the assistance of any AI.

by on

Off the Grid

Having one’s ship shot across multiple light years by a Mass Relay was normally a non-event. However, when aboard a rickety, hopelessly outdated passenger liner such as the one Garrus hitched a ride on, it became highly disconcerting. Gravity on the thing was inconsistent at best. It twisted and groaned with each course change and thruster burn. Garrus wondered if saving a few creds was worth the risk to his life.

After the brief yet terrifying relay jump, Garrus was now on the other side of the galaxy from the Citadel, in the Attican Traverse. His credits had bought him passage to Caleston, where he was to meet an old contact. His body had long since switched on auto-pilot as he went through all of the usual motions involved with space travel: decontamination, security screening, weapons checks, one procedure after the next, some of it necessary, to be sure, but by and large just there to slow people down as if by some mandatory decree of bureaucratic red tape. He felt committed now, for better or worse. He figured he couldn’t turn to his father now. He’d burned his bridges with C-Sec. The turian military might take him back in some capacity, but there’d be little in the way of a career future for someone who deserted their assigned duty. Doubt crept into a corner of his mind, but he kept pushing it away when he remembered the faces of the dead in Taysari Ward, as well as the names of those suspected of tainting that eezo. Highest among them was Jaroth, who was deeply connected to the Eclipse mercenary group.

Garrus’s concentration broke when he bumped shoulders with a krogan in the disembarking area. Strange, he thought, that I wouldn’t have seen that coming. The angry look from the krogan’s yellow eyes as he walked past acutely reminded him of where he was, and what he looked like. Garrus remembered that he still had his old blue C-Sec armor on. Of all the things on his checklist when leaving Citadel space, changing armor hadn’t crossed his mind.

The hub of activity on Caleston was centered around mining and energy in its capital city, Syneu. Plenty of jobs were to be had in those fields, or in the security companies assigned to protect the miners. Garrus enjoyed the heat there, it being more comfortable to his tough turian skin than the peaceful but tepid atmosphere in the Citadel. There was a ceaseless wave of activity, with cargo and passengers coming and going around the clock amidst the backdrop of twinkling stars, shining through the city’s oxygen dome. Miners and mercs coming off their shifts raced into this hub to enjoy its myriad assortment of bars and gambling establishments. The law here was not nearly as lax as in the Terminus, but considerably less strict than the Citadel. From personal experience and reputation, Garrus knew the place could get rough.

He refocused himself on his objective, tracking where he was to meet his contact by omni-tool. The rendezvous point was in an alleyway created by accident, between two sets of supply crates stacked meters high on either side. This particular section of shipping and receiving was minimally guarded, and with Garrus himself still looking like some sort of cop, he didn’t draw any unwanted attention from security.

He adjusted his visor. The display in its blue HUD indicated that he was early; he elected to pass the time by listening to a turian battle march, while he pretended to inspect some innocuous looking crates with his omni-tool. As the fierce, percussive music took hold, he allowed himself to slip into memories of his best battles alongside Commander Shepard: Therum, Noveria, Feros, Ilos, the Citadel itself… he’d never known a fiercer warrior than Shepard.

Garrus never had a problem with humans in general, but he also never expected that they could produce someone who could in his reckoning overshadow every turian war hero he’d ever known. On file, she was listed as a hybrid biotic specialist and medical engineer, but that did little to encapsulate what an incredible inspiration she was to her crew and as a representative of the human race to the galaxy. Side by side with a form of survivor’s guilt, he also felt a warmth reach his heart when he thought of Shepard and the Normandy. Now you’re losing it, Garrus. Getting distracted over nostalgia.

He shook away the brief reverie when he noticed three humans coming down the alleyway with a purpose. The way the man in the center was flanked by the others suggested that they were covering him. They were all dressed in civilian clothing, the standard earthen green and brown tunic and pants that most human miners wore. The man in the center had his black hair slicked back into a short ponytail; his harsh, tanned features suggested that he’d spent plenty of time planetside. He carried a datapad in his left hand as he approached Garrus. Without looking up, he addressed him: “Come to collect on that favor now, Vakarian? Thought you’d given up, gone soft back there as one of C-Sec’s lapdogs.”

Garrus didn’t move, though his mandibles did twitch in irritation. “Hardly. Was just trying to keep a promise to an old friend. Now do you have the information I need?”

The human finally deigned to look up. “I do, but you should know that whether you’re really no longer slumming for C-Sec or not, this info doesn’t come without a price.” He flashed an asymmetrical smile.

“I figured as much. What’s this going to cost me?”

“You’re gonna help me with a job. Favor for a favor, if you will. This’ll also help me figure out if you’re really done with the Citadel. You gotta do somethin’ that any C-Sec stiff would never do.”

Garrus crossed his arms. “And what’s that, Tobias?”

“You’re gonna kill some criminals. No arrests, no warrants. If they don’t die, your lead will dry up faster than a suitless quarian.”

“Humans do love their bad analogies,” Garrus said, smiling back. “We’ll see. Just point me in the right direction.”

Tobias’s information sent Garrus to a far flung mining operation in another hemisphere of Caleston. His ride was a cheap Mako knockoff that bounced and bobbed even more than the vehicle it was based on, but at least he didn’t have to pay for it. Riding alone in the cramped, noisy vehicle across the moon’s volcanic landscape gave him plenty of time to think. His thoughts gathered into a storm, building on all of the guilt and frustration he’d accumulated in the past months.

His attention focused when he saw the expected cluster of prefab structures near the mining facility. It all looked so similar to the Prothean dig site on Therum that he was struck by a bit of déjà vu. There were a few cargo trucks parked near the entrance to the mine proper, but there were no signs of any recent struggle. There was no obvious indication that the Blue Suns group had been here at all. Supposedly, some human named Dominic Martinez wasn’t content with the already shady work he did for the Blue Suns, and had taken to forcing isolated groups of miners to smuggle red sand and other nasty substances for him. Garrus had never heard of this guy; he wanted proof before he was going to pull the trigger.

Garrus donned his fully sealed helmet and ventured out from the confines of his Mako-lite, equipped with little more than his omni-tool, his Mantis, and a cheap Banshee rifle he’s picked up in port. He kept the assault rifle out, its scope calibrated to track organic lifesigns by heat signature and waste atmo. He felt the phantom presences of Shepard and Wrex at his flanks; Garrus missed them more than he thought he ever could miss anyone not a blood relative.

The mine followed a predictable course of unremarkable tunnels and the occasional side passage, mainly meant for storage. There was a small contingent of miners here, human, asari, some salarians, all going about their usual business. Garrus was able to sneak past the lot without any trouble. To them, he made no noticeable sound, but inside his helmet, feeding into his ears was one of his favorite “combat mixes,” a variety of tracks from turian battle opera and some old, 21st century human music that Shepard called “heavy metal.” He liked it.

He couldn’t help but be frustrated as he navigated most of the mine without any trace that the Blue Suns were involved. Subtlety and craftiness had worn out their welcome. Garrus thought Tobias was his best lead on the tainted eezo; he didn’t want to think about where else he’d have to turn if he ended up being wrong. Dealing with someone like the Shadow Broker was to be saved as the last resort. When he came across what looked like it might be a foreman’s office, a prefab unit sunk halfway into the deep rock, he decided to be bold.

Mass effect fields kept a reasonably comfortable atmosphere trapped in the mine, so the workers didn’t have to wear helmets all the time. This meant that the look of abject shock on the salarian foreman’s face was crystal clear to Garrus as he barged in. “I hate to interrupt,” he started, “but I need to find someone and I don’t have time for games. Where is Dominic Martinez?” Garrus patted the bottom of his rifle.

“I-I don’t know who you’re talking about!” The salarian shook a bit in his orange jumpsuit. Garrus didn’t like scaring the guy but his patience was on edge.

“The Blue Suns merc that was hired to protect you. Don’t pretend you don’t know.” Garrus moved in closer, so that he could loom over the salarian with his tall frame. His helmet was a blank sheen of black and blue, revealing nothing of Garrus’s true expressions underneath. “I’m waiting.”

A gulp could be seen in the salarian’s thin, scaly neck. “If it’s credits you want, I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

Garrus aimed his rifle at the foreman’s knees. “I’m not interested in credits. I want a location for Dominic and proof of what he’s doing. Don’t make me ask again.”

“No, please, he’ll kill me if–“

“Trust me, if you help me find him, I guarantee he won’t get the chance.”

“The-the datapad. In my desk. I’ll unlock it for you, but you have to promise me you’ll keep Dominic away from here.”

“If he’s involved in what I think he is, you won’t be worrying about him any more.”

One hour and a lot more rough and tumble Mako driving later, Garrus found himself on an ash strewn plain, the middle of all kinds of nowhere. The only feature worth noting was that he was on a plateau, the edge of which was about half a click ahead. He decided to hoof it to the that precipice, hopefully to get a vantage point on a beacon not far away.

Once there, he found a good spot to lay flat in a sniper’s position. Through the scope of his Mantis rifle, he spotted a small, blinking crate tucked away with some rocks on the lower plain. It didn’t register on scanners with either his omni-tool or his visor, but it was right where the datapad had said it would be. That same pad also gave details on how a shipment of red sand was to be smuggled out on an “accidentally” misplaced container of low-yield element zero. It was the very same kind of cheap, tainted eezo that was being found all over Citadel space after the geth invasion. A little way beyond th crate was a parked vehicle, which looked like a modified Grizzly battle rover. There were three humanoids nearby, all decked out in top of the line Blue Suns armor. With their helmets and heavy equipment, Garrus couldn’t be sure which one was supposed to be Dominic.

No turning back now, Vakarian. Without C-Sec looking over my shoulder, it’s time to do things my way. He adjusted some settings on his scope to account for the distance and wind. The built-in VI on his Mantis would help adjust the rounds toward the more vulnerable parts of the victims’ bodies. He had the element of surprise and a clear shot…

“Shepard… I’m sorry to let you down, but I can’t play by the rules any longer.” After one more sharp breath, Garrus squeezed the trigger.

<—Chapter One

—>Chapter Three