The sound of her feet clanging against the metal floor of the landing bay during her quick charge gave the soldier just enough warning to react. He half-turned toward her, bringing one arm up and ducking his head so that the blow landed on his shoulder rather than the side of his helmet. The force of the impact knocked his assault rifle from his grasp, and it clattered to the floor as he was knocked sideways, staggering to keep his balance.
Kahlee swung again, but she was in too close to get the leverage she needed. The blow struck him on the side of his helmet, but not hard enough to knock him out. Dazed, the soldier stumbled away from her, his hands fumbling for the pistol on his hip.
Spinning the assault rifle in her hands, Kahlee repositioned her grip so that she could jab forward with the heavy butt of the gun. She came in low, just beneath the edge of the three-quarter visor, smashing in the front teeth of his lower jaw. His head snapped back and he fell over. Kahlee leaped on top of him, driving the butt of the rifle down on his head with both hands.
Even his helmet couldn’t protect him from the savage force of repeated impacts. After six consecutive blows Kahlee was certain he would never get up again. She gave him two more shots just to make sure.
Rising to her feet, she saw the assault rifle had been bent out of alignment by the attack.
Useless piece of volus crap, she thought as she grabbed the pistol from the dead soldier’s belt.
With her enemy down, she took a quick glance around the rest of the landing bay. When she saw the bodies of the two Cerberus troopers beneath the forklift, she knew the girl had been by.
She crept into the shuttle, moving as quietly as possible. The passenger cabin was empty so she headed up to the cockpit, only to discover it was deserted as well. When she made her way to the sleeping quarters in the back, she was only mildly surprised to find Gillian lying on the bed, her father protectively sitting over her.
Raising the soldier’s pistol, she pointed it at Grayson. “Get away from her, you son-of-a-bitch.”
He glanced up at the sound of her voice, and his eyes widened in shock. It took him a moment to recognize her behind the enviro-suit and mask.
“Kahlee?” he muttered.
She nodded and gestured with the pistol, and Grayson slowly stood up and backed away from the bed.
Kahlee glanced down at Gillian and realized she was unconscious. “What did you do? Drug her again?” she demanded.
“Stunner,” Grayson whispered, and Kahlee thought he actually sounded ashamed of himself. She realized that, despite everything he had done, he truly cared for his daughter. Somehow it made his devotion to Cereberus seem both more terrifying and more pathetic.
Then she felt the hard jab of a pistol digging into the side of her ribs.
“Drop the gun,” a voice from behind her said.
For a split second Kahlee considered shooting Grayson. But killing her father wouldn’t save Gillian, and it would almost certainly get Kahlee killed. Instead, she let the pistol fall from her hands.
“Lay facedown on the ground, hands behind your head,” the voice ordered, jabbing her again with the pistol.
She did as ordered, and then she heard the sound of her unknown assailant walking past her over toward the bed.
“Don’t touch her, Golo,” Grayson warned, the cold anger in his voice causing the footsteps to stop.
Flat on her belly, Kahlee dared to tilt her head to look up. She was stunned to see he was speaking with a quarian.
The world came back to Hendel in a wave of pain. Every bone and muscle in his body ached from being slammed into the wall, and as consciousness slowly returned, he just lay there, trying to get his bearings. After a few seconds, it all started to come back to him. He was on the trading deck, where the quarians had been battling Cerberus.
He could still hear gunfire, but it was coming from far away.
The fight moved to the deck above.
Ignoring his protesting muscles, he forced himself to stand up. There were a few seconds of vertigo before he steadied himself. Looking around, he located his assault rifle where it had fallen on the floor and picked it up.
Gotta go help Kahlee and the others.
Before he could clamber out from behind the desk, however, he heard heavy footsteps running down the stairs. Two Cerberus guards burst into view from the deck above, their attention not focused on Hendel, but rather on the quarians pursuing them.
They’re retreating! Hendel realized. We’ve won!
Biotics were out of the question. His head was still spinning slightly from being thrown, and he suspected he had a mild concussion. But he was feeling well enough to use his assault rifle.
Relying on the weapon’s autotargeting systems to overcome any lingering unsteadiness he might be feeling, he lined up the nearest Cerberus soldier and opened fire.
From this range, the bullets made short work of his shields. They lasted just long enough for him to turn toward Hendel, but not long enough for him to bring his weapon up and return fire.
The second soldier wheeled on him as the first fell to the ground, and Hendel had to duck behind the heavy desk for cover. The first burst from his enemy chewed away huge chunks of hardwood, but the cover held together in time for Hendel to dart into the safety of the stockroom.
He poked his head through the door to return fire, only to see that the Cerberus soldier was about to be caught in a crossfire. Hendel opened fire, as did several quarians coming down the stairs from the deck above. With enemies both in front and behind, the soldier didn’t last more than three seconds.
“It’s me, Hendel!” he shouted out from the stockroom, not wanting to suddenly pop into view and get accidentally shot.
“Hendel!” he heard Lemm shout. “You’re alive!”
He walked out from the storeroom and climbed gingerly over the desk. Lemm, Mal, and four other quarians were gathered at the foot of the stairs.
“Is that the last of them?” Hendel asked, nodding toward the dead Cerberus troopers on the ground. He figured the fight was over, as he didn’t hear anymore gunfire.
“There might be one or two left,” the captain answered, “falling back to the Cyniad.”
“They had us on the run, when all of a sudden they broke into a full retreat,” Lemm added.
“Why would they—” Hendel began, then stopped short. “Where’s Kahlee? Where’s Gillian?”
Nobody answered.
“Cerberus has her!” Hendel shouted. “That’s why they’re pulling out!”
As a group, they broke into a run, heading for the landing bays.
“Should I shoot her?” Golo asked.
Grayson looked at Kahlee, still lying facedown on the ground in her enviro-suit. The quarian had his pistol pointed at the back of her head.
“No,” Grayson said. “Keep her alive. She’s an expert in biotic amp configurations. Cerberus might want her to help with Gillian’s new training.”
“I’ll never help you with your sick experiments,” Kahlee spat out from the floor.
“Quiet,” Golo warned, kicking her hard in the ribs. Grayson winced.
Kahlee grunted and rolled over onto her back, her hands clutching at her side. “Gillian will hate you for this,” she gasped, trying to catch her breath. “She’ll never forgive you.”
The quarian hauled off and kicked her again, causing her to pull her knees up into a fetal position to try and protect herself.
“Enough!” Grayson snapped.
“How can you let them do this to your own daughter?” Kahlee asked through gritted teeth, still balled up from the pain.
“Did you see the forklift out there?” Grayson demanded. “Do you see what Gillian is capable of? That’s because of what Cerberus did!”
“They want to make her into a weapon,” Kahlee countered, panting behind her mask. Grayson guessed several of her ribs were broken. “They’re turning her into some kind of monster.”
“They’re transforming her into a savior of the human
race,” he countered.
“We don’t have time for this,” Golo warned.
“They’re destroying her,” Kahlee snarled, her words filled with pain and anger. “Those drugs made her condition worse. Without them, she has a chance to be almost normal!”
Unbidden, the memory of Gillian actually hugging him outside the airlock filled Grayson’s mind. He remembered her words, and her surprising defiance.
We have to wait for my friends. I’m not leaving without them.
“Gillian was happy here,” Kahlee continued. “Have you ever seen that before? She was actually happy!”
“Shut up!” Golo shouted, kicking her again.
This time he didn’t stop, but continued to beat on her until Grayson snapped, “No more! That’s enough. It’s over.”
Golo looked over at him, panting slightly from the exertion, and shrugged. On the ground Kahlee was rolling feebly from side to side, moaning and whimpering from behind her mask.
Grayson’s eyes flicked away from her and over to Gillian on the bed. She looked so small, vulnerable and helpless.
Salvation comes with a cost, he seemed to hear the Illusive Man saying in his head. His mind flashed back to the mutilated quarian in the cellar of Pel’s warehouse.
Judge us not by our methods, but by what we seek to accomplish.
“We’re almost out of time,” Golo reminded him. “We have to leave now. We can’t wait for the others.”
Grayson was suddenly struck by the similarities between the quarian and his former partner. Both were sadistic and cruel. Both had no compunction about torturing or killing others for personal gain.
And both were traitors to their own people. It sickened him to think about the kind of individuals he had allied himself with.
We take terrible burdens on ourselves for the greater good. This is the price we must pay for the cause.
“Get the engines fired up and get us out of here,” Grayson ordered.
As the quarian turned to leave, Grayson calmly bent over and picked up the pistol Kahlee had let fall to the floor. He stepped up behind the quarian and jammed the barrel against the back of his helmet, too close for the kinetic barriers to save him. And then he shot Golo once through the head, the bullet exiting through the front of his mask and lodging itself in the shuttle’s bulkhead.
As the quarian toppled forward, Grayson let the pistol fall from his hand. He turned and looked down at Kahlee, but he couldn’t tell what she was thinking behind her mask.
“The ship we arrived on is filled with explosives,” he told her. “We have about two minutes before they detonate and rip a hole in the side of the Idenna. I’ll need your help if we want to stop it.
“Can you walk?” he asked, reaching down and offering a hand to help her to her feet.
She hesitated for a split second before grabbing it and hauling herself up with a groan.
“I can damn well try,” she answered.
Hendel and the quarians were running at a full sprint as they burst into the loading docks. The Cyniad was in bay seven, on the far end past all the other ships. The former security chief’s long strides had pulled him slightly ahead of the others, but they caught up when he stopped to stare in amazement at the two figures coming out of the airlock in bay three.
Kahlee, still in her enviro-suit, and Grayson, wearing Cerberus armor, were exiting the shuttle. She had one arm wrapped around Grayson’s neck, and he appeared to be holding her up, as if she couldn’t stand on her own. Neither one of them was armed.
“Hendel!” Kahlee shouted, but her voice was cut off in a gasp of pain and her free hand clutched at her side.
“The Cyniad,” Grayson called out to them. “The ship in bay seven. It’s filled with explosives!”
Hendel, bewildered by the scene before him, could only shake his head. “What’s going on? Where’s Gillian?”
“She’s safe,” Grayson answered, speaking quickly. “But you have to get to the Cyniad. Disarm the bomb before it detonates!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Cerberus. We never intended to escape on the Cyniad. We were going to take my shuttle. The Cyniad is filled with explosives and set to go off on a timer to provide a distraction as we escaped.”
“How many explosives, and how much time?” Hendel demanded.
“Two minutes, and enough to rip a hole in the Idenna’s hull.”
“Watch him!” Hendel said, pointing at Grayson as he turned to go.
“Wait!” Grayson shouted, freezing him in his tracks. “It’s a dual sync arming system. You need two people to enter the code simultaneously or it’ll detonate.”
“What’s the code?” Mal demanded.
“Six two three two one two.”
“Everyone else evacuate the loading bays,” the captain ordered, then turned to Hendel. “Let’s go.”
It took them less than thirty seconds to reach the Cyniad’s airlock. The bodies of Isli, Seeto, and Ugho lay just beyond it. The airlock itself had been sealed.
“Wait,” Mal said, grabbing Hendel by the arm. “What if it’s a trap?”
The security chief had been thinking the same thing. “That’s a chance we have to take.”
They opened the airlock and raced up into the quarian shuttle. The cargo hold was filled with enough explosives to blow apart a small asteroid. At least fifty drums of liquid rocket fuel, each as high as Hendel’s shoulder, were clustered in the center of the floor, held together by a mess of wires. From somewhere in the middle of the canisters, completely inaccessible, he heard the rhythmic beep-beep-beep of a timer counting down.
“Find the overrides!” Hendel shouted, and the two of them split up, one going clockwise around the ring of explosives, the other counterclockwise.
Hendel tried to sync the high-pitched beeps with the imaginary clock ticking down in his head. He figured they had maybe thirty seconds to spare when he finally found what he was looking for: a small keypad attached to the side of one of the drums. Two wires ran from the base into the cords woven around the explosives. Hendel had no doubt that detaching either of the wires would set the whole mess off.
“I’ve got mine!” Mal shouted from the far side of the canisters.
“Me too,” Hendel called back. “Enter the code on three? Ready? One…two…three!”
He punched in the numbers, knowing there was a lag of only a couple seconds for Mal to do the same. If they weren’t in sync, if either one of them hesitated or made a mistake, they’d both be instantly vaporized.
The steady beep of the timer suddenly changed to a single long, shrill whistle. Hendel instinctively closed his eyes as he braced himself for the boom…
And nothing happened.
The shrill whistle slowly faded away, and Hendel reached up to wipe the sweat from his brow, only to have his gloved hand bump against the mask of his enviro-suit.
“Hell of an all-clear signal,” he muttered to himself. And then he began to laugh.
TWENTY-FIVE
In the aftermath of the battle, the quarians had taken Grayson into custody. For nearly a week his fate hung in the balance as the Admiralty, the Conclave, and the civilian Council of the Idenna weighed in on what was to be done.
He had saved dozens, possibly even hundreds, of lives by warning them about the explosives. But Kahlee, along with everyone else, knew that the only reason their lives were ever in danger was because of what he had done. And there was still plenty of blood on his hands to be accounted for. Over twenty of the Idenna’s crew had been killed in the attack, along with eleven Cerberus soldiers and Golo, the quarian traitor. The cost was high, but it was far less than it could have been.
Mal understood all this, and he took it into account while passing the final judgment on Grayson, as was his right as captain. Kahlee had feared there could be consequences for her and Hendel, as well; none of this would have happened had the quarians not taken them in when they first arrived. However, she had underestimated the value
quarian culture placed on community and crew. They had been accepted as guests on his ship, Mal had explained to her. They were part of the Idenna family. He wasn’t about to cast them out now, and he wasn’t going to hold them accountable for the actions of Cerberus.
In the end, the captain even agreed to allow Kahlee to take Grayson back to the Alliance as her prisoner, giving them Grayson’s own shuttle for transportation. Lemm agreed to accompany her as the pilot, and to help her keep an eye on their captive.
Hendel and Gillian, however, would not be going with them.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked Hendel as they stood in the landing bay, saying their good-byes.
“Gillian needs this,” he said. “You saw how far she’s come since we’ve been here. I don’t know if it’s the ship, the enviro-suits, the lack of drugs…all I know is that she’s happy here on the Idenna.
“And soon she’ll be beyond the reach of even Cerberus,” he added after a moment.
Kahlee nodded, accepting the fact that she couldn’t change his mind.
The news of an enemy force infiltrating the Migrant Fleet had shaken the quarian society to its very core. Faced with the shocking realization that they were vulnerable even within the flotilla, many of the ship captains had changed their views on the idea of sending exploratory vessels out into the depths of space on extended missions.
The Conclave had fiercely debated the matter, but in the end those who favored the exploratory missions, like Mal, were the majority. The Admiralty could have overturned the Conclave’s ruling, but they, too, seemed to have had a change of heart. They acquiesced to the decision, though they did impose strict rules and restrictions on how many vessels could go, and when they could leave.
Not surprisingly, the Idenna was chosen to be the first of those vessels. In three weeks it would set off through a recently activated mass relay in an uninhabited system, heading into parts unknown. Even now it was being refitted with new technology to allow it to survive on its own for up to five years without any outside contact or resources. To make such a journey feasible, however, the crew would have to drop from its current population of nearly seven hundred to just over fifty, all handpicked by Mal himself.