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!”