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.