Ignoring the pain from the rounds in Grayson’s knee and thigh, the Reapers spun him around and sent him leaping through the air to land on the turian at the rear of the vessel as he tried to get up, knocking him back to the floor. Then the Reapers had Grayson lift up one of the heavy boots and bring it smashing down on his back again and again and again, cracking vertebrae, severing the spine, and causing him to spew frothy indigo spittle across the floor as the internal injuries caused his dark blue blood to seep into his lungs.
When the turian beneath Grayson’s boot had been reduced to a lifeless, pulpy mass, the Reapers stopped. Moving with purpose but without hurry, they piled all the bodies—including the still unconscious turian who had been bashed on the side of the head—into the airlock.
Had Grayson been in control of his body, he probably would have thrown up in reaction to the brutal assault. As it was, however, the Reapers kept him from having any physical reaction at all.
The most horrifying part was the cold, efficient way the savage attack had been planned and carried out. Grayson had sensed no anger or rage on the part of the Reapers as they had used him as an instrument of wanton slaughter. The massacre wasn’t motivated by hate or even a sadistic desire to destroy organic life. The Reapers had analyzed the situation, determined a course of action, and followed it without any emotion whatsoever.
This, more than anything else, terrified their human host. It seemed to symbolize an inevitability about the Reapers, as if nothing could stop their relentless, passionless pursuit of their goal.
Once all the bodies were secured in the airlock, the Reapers had Grayson take a seat in the pilot’s chair. Using his good hand, they punched in a series of commands that first disabled the vessel’s transponder, then brought them out of FTL travel.
Grayson was an experienced pilot, but he had never been trained on a turian vessel. Alone, he probably could have fumbled through the process, but the Reapers moved with precision and certainty. They had an intimate knowledge of turian technology, and he could think of only one reasonable explanation.
The Reapers were gathering knowledge about him and his environment, recording everything they came into contact with. He didn’t know how many of the aliens were in his head; sometimes it felt like a single entity, other times it felt like billions of individuals. In either case, however, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume they shared whatever information they collected with others of their kind. Following this train of thought, if the Reapers had ever possessed a turian in the past for a long period of time, they could have learned virtually everything there was to know about that species. And now they were using Grayson to learn all they could about humanity.
The Reapers hit the eject button on the airlock, jettisoning the bodies into the cold vacuum of space. Then they plotted a new course—too quickly for Grayson to catch the final destination—and made the jump to light speed again. Finally, despite his heroic struggle to oppose their will, the Reapers closed his eyes and made him fall asleep.
TWELVE
As she ran on the treadmill, Kahlee remained intently focused on her technique. She didn’t believe in simply putting one foot in front of the other until she was out of breath and dripping with perspiration. There was an art to running; function followed form. She maintained an optimal stride length, kept her breathing under control, and focused on pumping her arms with each stride. Her pace never varied, and the kilometers—and minutes—rolled past.
The turian strike teams had left roughly twelve standard hours ago. Four hours after that, C-Sec had swooped in and arrested key Cerberus operatives for interrogation, including many high-ranking Alliance officials. As soon as the arrests were complete, Orinia had gone to oversee the interrogations. She had yet to return.
Anderson was gone as well, swallowed up by a maelstrom of meetings with representatives of the Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy in an effort to avert a political catastrophe. That left Kahlee alone in the turian embassy with nothing to do but wait for them to return. She didn’t like to wait.
Patience had never been her strong suit. She was used to tackling multiple tasks at once. Whenever she felt bored or restless, whenever she felt the world dragging itself too slowly for her liking, she would throw herself into her work and occupy her mind with difficult, complex problems.
In that vein, she had tried reviewing the Cerberus data one last time, but there really wasn’t any point. Not with the turian strike teams already deployed. She had employed a number of other methods to distract herself—surfing the extranet, reviewing data collected from the children of the Ascension Project, even watching a romantic comedy vid—but nothing helped. Knowing the plan to destroy Cerberus had been set in motion made it virtually impossible to concentrate on anything else.
In the end she’d resorted to a crude but effective therapy to vent her frustration: physical exertion. The turians had been gracious enough to offer her access to the fitness facilities of their embassy, and for the last three hours she had engrossed herself in a punishing cardio workout while waiting for an update on the strike teams.
She noticed a small ache building in her left knee, and she reluctantly reduced the speed of the treadmill to a walking pace. As a classic type A personality, she had a habit of overdoing things. After suffering many painful repetitive-stress injuries in her youth, she’d finally learned to pay attention to the warning signs her body gave her.
With the slower tempo, however, her mind began to wander back to the very things she was struggling to avoid. Could the turians really bring down Cerberus? Was it possible they might actually capture the Illusive Man? Would they ever find Grayson? And if they did, would he still be alive?
The questions gnawed at her, forcing her to pick up the pace again. But now that the ideas were firmly entrenched in her thoughts, even her run couldn’t drive them back into her subconscious. After another twenty minutes she shut the treadmill down.
She’d promised to stay out of the way until the missions were over, but she’d reached a breaking point. It was time to march into the turian ambassador’s office and demand answers!
Now that her mind had been made up, even taking the time to shower seemed like an unbearable delay. Wiping her neck and brow down with a towel, she marched over to the door, flung it open, and stepped right into Anderson and Orinia as they were coming in from the other side.
“Whoa, Kahlee,” Anderson exclaimed. His hands instinctively reached up to wrap themselves around the biceps of her bare arms as he tried to catch her and absorb her momentum to keep them from crashing into each other.
His grip was firm, but not rough. Suddenly aware of the layer of perspiration covering her skin, Kahlee took a quick step back, breaking free of his grasp.
“We were just coming to find you,” Orinia explained. “The strike teams have all reported back.”
Unable to decipher the expression on the turian’s unfamiliar features, she glanced over at Anderson to see if she could get a quick read on how things had turned out. She caught him rubbing his hands on his hips, trying to subtly wipe away the sweat that had transferred to his palms when he’d grabbed Kahlee’s arms. She flushed with embarrassment, and hoped he would think her color was simply a result of her recent physical exertions.
“Udina was pissed,” Anderson explained, and she could tell he was just as embarrassed as she was. “Says I created a political shit-storm that’s going to take months to clean up.”
He was avoiding the details of the mission, and she could tell by the expression on his face that things hadn’t gone exactly as planned.
“Tell me what happened.”
“All Cerberus bases were neutralized,” Orinia informed her. “Unfortunately, turian casualties were almost twenty percent—nearly double what we anticipated. And we failed to apprehend the Illusive Man.”
“What about Grayson?” Kahlee asked, fearing she already knew the answer.
“Dinara’s team found him on a space station in the Terminus
Systems,” Orinia said.
“He was still alive,” Anderson interjected quickly. “They sent us a retinal scan to confirm his identity.”
She should have felt relief at hearing his news, but something about the way he said it gave her pause.
“Why a retinal scan? Why couldn’t he just tell them who he was? Something went wrong, didn’t it?”
“Dinara and her team took Grayson aboard their shuttle and transmitted a message they were returning to the Citadel. That was three hours ago. We haven’t heard anything since.”
“They’d need at least three mass relays to make it back to the Citadel,” Kahlee offered, refusing to give up on Grayson. “That could take longer than three hours.”
“Each time they pass through a relay they’d need to drop to sub-FTL travel,” Orinia explained. “Standard turian military procedure would require them to transmit an updated ETA and flight plan each time. We’ve had no contact since the initial message.”
“What do you think happened?” she asked, her mind struggling with the implications of what she was being told.
“We don’t know,” Anderson admitted. “It’s possible they could simply be having comm issues.”
Kahlee knew spaceships were designed with too many redundant backups for something like that to happen. Any mechanical failure that kept them from at least sending out a distress call would have to be catastrophic. If it was a technical issue, the chance of their still being alive was almost zero.
“There are other possibilities,” Orinia reminded them. “The Terminus Systems are a haven for slavers and pirates.”
“Would any of them be stupid enough to attack a turian military shuttle?” Kahlee wanted to know.
“Probably not,” Anderson conceded. “We have to consider the option that their disappearance has something to do with Cerberus. Maybe some type of retaliation for the attacks.”
“We found no indication they had the ships or resources to strike back so quickly,” Kahlee objected. “Even if the Illusive Man is still out there.”
“Unless they had an asset on the shuttle itself,” Orinia said darkly.
It took Kahlee a second to realize what she meant, then she shook her head vehemently.
“No! That’s not possible. Grayson isn’t a traitor.”
“It’s a scenario we have to consider,” Orinia insisted. “None of the other explanations make any sense.”
“Grayson’s the whole reason we got this information!” Kahlee protested. “Why would he help us bring down Cerberus if he was working for them?”
“Maybe he’s trying to overthrow the Illusive Man,” Orinia suggested. “Using the turians to do the dirty work for him would be a masterful ploy.”
“I know Grayson,” Kahlee vowed. “I trust him. He wouldn’t do this.”
She turned to Anderson, looking for support.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“Kahlee,” he asked, his tone grave, “is Grayson a drug addict?”
The relevance of the question was completely lost on her. “Why?”
“The retinal scan Dinara sent to confirm his identity was discolored. Pink. Like he’d been mainlining red sand.”
“Those bastards!” Kahlee hissed, her face twisting up with rage. “He was clean for two years. Two years!
“They must have drugged him while he was their prisoner to try and gain some kind of leverage over him. Sadistic sons of bitches!”
“How can you be sure that’s what happened?” Anderson pressed. “Addicts aren’t always the most loyal people. Maybe he was using again. All Cerberus would have to do was wait until he went into withdrawal and then offer him a fix in exchange for information.”
“He’s not like that anymore!” Kahlee shot back. “He turned his life around.”
Anderson didn’t say anything, but she could tell he had his doubts.
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” she assured him. “So why is this so hard for you to accept?”
“You’re not always the best judge of character,” he replied, choosing his words carefully. “It took a long time before you convinced yourself Dr. Qian’s work was dangerous enough to report him to the Alliance.”
“That was twenty years ago. I was young and naïve then,” she explained.
“What about Jiro Toshiwa?”
Kahlee didn’t realize Anderson knew about her former coworker at the Ascension Project, though it wasn’t surprising the reports had crossed his desk. In addition to being Kahlee’s lover, Jiro had also turned out to be a Cerberus mole inside the program.
“This is different,” she muttered, fixing Anderson with a dark scowl. “Grayson isn’t with Cerberus anymore. He turned against them for his daughter’s sake. He would never start working for them again.”
“Maybe not willingly,” Orinia said. “But we found evidence of medical experiments at the facility where he was being held prisoner. The data is encrypted and very advanced, but we think Cerberus was investigating some form of mental domination or mind control.”
“This is crazy!” Kahlee shouted. “Grayson is a victim, not the enemy!”
“Orinia’s just worried about her people,” Anderson said, trying to calm her down. “She doesn’t want to lose any more soldiers, and we have too many questions without any answers.”
“Then let me help find the answers,” Kahlee said, jumping on the opportunity. “Send me to the Cerberus facility. Let me look at their test results, and I’ll find out what they did to Grayson.”
“We’ll send our own experts to the station,” Orinia said, dismissing her offer.
Kahlee bit her lip to keep from shooting back a reply that would do more harm than good. She wanted to say that she had twenty years’ experience analyzing advanced scientific experiments in everything ranging from artificial intelligence to zoology. She wanted to remind Orinia that she was widely recognized as the most brilliant and accomplished complex statistical analyst in the Alliance. She wanted to mention that for the past decade she had been directly studying the effects of synthetic biotic implants on the human brain and nervous system. She wanted to point out that the odds of finding another individual in Council space with her combination of knowledge, experience, and talent was almost nil. And she wanted to scream that she could do more to help them in one hour than the entire team of turian so-called experts could achieve in a week.
But blowing up at the ambassador wouldn’t help her cause. Instead, she tried to present a rational and reasonable argument.
“I have some experience in this field—.”
“So do we,” Orinia replied, cutting her off.
Kahlee took a deep breath to calm herself, then continued.
“The Cerberus scientists are human. They’re going to think like humans, use methodology and processes common to my culture, but likely very different from what your scientists are familiar with.
“Biology and society combine to create familiar, recognizable patterns in the minds of every individual within a particular species. The way the data is encrypted—even the way it’s organized and categorized—will be more accessible to me than it will be to a turian, no matter how brilliant.”
Orinia didn’t answer right away, no doubt balancing the advantages of sending Kahlee to analyze the data against the risks of letting a human become an integral part of what was still technically a turian mission.
“If there’s any hope of finding Dinara and her team alive, we have to move fast,” Anderson pointed out, playing on the ambassador’s sense of loyalty to her fellow soldiers. “Your people might figure this out eventually, but we’ll see results a hell of a lot faster if Kahlee’s there.”
Orinia nodded, and Kahlee could almost forgive Anderson for doubting her about Grayson.
“My shuttle’s leaving in an hour. How fast can you be ready to go?”
“Just tell me where to meet them, and I’ll be there,” Kahlee assured her.
“So will I,” Anderson added.
&n
bsp; “I thought you’d have to stay here to help smooth things over with the Alliance,” Kahlee said, mildly surprised.
“Actually, I resigned my post,” Anderson said. “Udina was threatening to launch some massive investigation into what he called my ‘inappropriate diplomatic relations’ with the turians.
“The Alliance brass was going to put me on administrative leave until it was all sorted out, so I told Udina to cram his investigation up his ass and I quit.”
“David,” Kahlee said, reaching up to put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said with a shrug. “I’m sick of being a politician. I used to be proud of what I did; I felt like I was making a real difference in the galaxy. Then I became a desk jockey and everything I tried to accomplish got buried in a mountain of political bullshit.
“Maybe this is my chance to do something that matters one last time before I pack it all in.”
“I’ll tell the shuttle commander to expect you both,” Orinia said.
“Don’t be late,” she warned as they headed out the door. “We turians are nothing if not punctual.”
THIRTEEN
The Illusive Man sat in the chair of his private office surrounded by darkness, staring out at the dying red sun that dominated the viewing window. He was letting his mind settle, his sense of confidence and control returning now that he was back in the familiar—and secure—surroundings. The turians may have hit Cerberus from all angles, but thankfully they had failed to strike at the true heart of the organization.
As cautious as the Illusive Man was with his operatives and operations, he was downright paranoid when it came to protecting this one location. Including Kai Leng, who was on board right now, only six Cerberus field operatives had ever set foot on this space station. Each time one of them visited he had the crew relocate the vessel to another system as soon as the guest departed.