Whipping out the Haliat Arms semiautomatic assault rifle from where it clicked into place on his thigh, he approached the building’s entrance. He’d scouted the warehouse earlier; he knew there were no windows and no other doors. Everyone inside was trapped—further proof he was dealing with idiots.
He pressed himself against the door, listening carefully. Inside he could hear angry bickering. Apparently nobody had the foresight to spell out the terms of the exchange before the meeting; either that or somebody was trying to renegotiate the deal. Professionals didn’t make that mistake: get to the meeting, make the exchange, and get out. The longer you’re there, the more chance something’s going to go wrong.
Saren pulled three incendiary grenades from his belt, primed them, and began to count silently to himself. When he reached five he yanked open the door, tossed all three grenades in, slammed the door shut, and ran for cover behind the ATV.
The explosion blew the door off its hinges, sending smoke, flame, and debris shooting out the opening. Inside he heard screams and the sound of gunfire as the terrified men inside panicked. Burned and blinded, they started shooting wildly, each side convinced they’d been betrayed by the other. For a full twenty seconds the echo of gunfire reverberating off the warehouse’s metal walls drowned out every other sound.
Then everything went still. Saren aimed his weapon at the door, and was rewarded a few seconds later when two men came charging out, guns blazing. He took the first square in the chest with a short burst from his assault rifle, then ducked behind the tail end of the ATV for cover as the surviving merc returned fire. A quick roll brought Saren to the front of the vehicle, and when he popped up his enemy still had his weapon aimed at the back end, waiting for Saren to reemerge. At point-blank range the rounds from Saren’s assault rifle sheared off half of the guy’s head.
For good measure, Saren lobbed two more grenades into the open door. Instead of a fiery explosion, these released a noxious cloud when they detonated. He heard more shouts and screams, followed by choking coughs. Three more mercs stumbled out of the shed one by one, each blind and gagging from the poison gas. Not one of them even returned fire as Saren mowed them down.
He waited a few more minutes, letting the deadly fog clear, then sprinted from his position behind the truck to the edge of the door. He poked his head inside for an instant, then ducked back out of the way.
The warehouse was littered with a dozen bodies. Some had been shot, several were burned, and the rest were twisted into horrific contortions from the gas causing their muscles to seize and spasm as they died. Several weapons were scattered about, dropped by their owners in their death throes. The crate they had carried inside on their arrival sat in the middle of the floor, unopened. Aside from that, the warehouse was empty.
Assault rifle in hand, Saren made his way from body to body, slowly working his way from the door toward the back of the warehouse as he checked for signs of life. With the toe of his shoe, he rolled over a charred turian who had fallen near the crate. One half of his face was burned, the carapace crispy and brittle. The flesh beneath it had melted, fusing the eyelids on the left side together. A small moan escaped his lips, and his good eye fluttered open.
“Who…who are you?” he croaked.
“A Spectre,” Saren replied, standing over him.
He coughed, spewing up dark phlegm that was mostly a mix of blood and poison.
“Please…help me.”
“You are in violation of interstellar law,” Saren recited in a cold, passionless voice. “You are a thief, a smuggler, and a traitor to our species.”
The dying man tried to say something, but only coughed again. His breath was labored: the acrid smoke from the incendiary grenades had seared his lungs, damaging them so badly he hadn’t been able to breathe in enough of the poison gas to kill him. If he received immediate medical attention there was still a small chance he might survive…but Saren had no intention of taking him to a hospital.
Snapping his assault rifle back into the slot on his thigh, Saren dropped down on one knee and leaned in close to the other turian’s flame-ravaged features. “You steal weapons from your own people, and then you sell them to humans?” he demanded in a fierce whisper. “Do you know how many turians I saw die by human hands?”
It took a tremendous effort, but somehow the burned man managed to mutter four faint words in feeble protest through his scorched lips. “That…war…is…over.”
Saren stood up and pulled his pistol in one smooth motion. “Tell that to our dead brothers.” He fired two shots into the turian’s head, ending the conversation.
Pistol still in hand, he resumed his inspection of the bodies. He noticed two human corpses near the back wall of the warehouse, noticeably less gruesome than the others. The grenades had detonated up near the front of the building and these mercs had taken less damage. Even the poison would have dissipated by the time it reached all the way back here, explaining why the bodies weren’t twisted and contorted like the others. They must have been killed by friendly fire.
He approached the first one carefully, then relaxed when he saw clear evidence that the man was truly dead: six finger-sized holes in a tight pattern showed where the close-range blast of a scatter gun had torn through the front of his protective vest, creating a single fist-sized hole as the rounds exited his back.
The final corpse had fallen facedown in a pool of his own blood. The scatter-gun that must have inadvertently killed the man beside him lay on the ground…a hair’s breadth away from the body’s limp, lifeless hand.
Saren froze, suddenly wary. Something wasn’t right. His eyes scanned the motionless figure, seeking out the lethal wound. There was a gaping hole in the side of his upper thigh, the likely source of all the blood, but because of how he’d landed, no other injuries were visible.
His eyes snapped back to the thigh: blood still should have been dripping from the wound, but the flow was staunched. As if someone had sealed it with a quick application of medigel.
“Move your hand away from your weapon and roll over,” Saren called out, raising his pistol and holding it in both hands as he aimed it at the corpse, “or I’ll shoot you right now.”
After a second, the hand slowly drew back from the scatter-gun. The man rolled onto his back, gasping loudly for air: he’d been holding his breath as Saren approached, trying to play dead.
“Please don’t kill me,” he begged as Saren took a step toward him, the pistol trained on the spot right between his eyes. “I didn’t even fight in the First Contact War!”
“Some Spectres arrest people,” Saren said, his tone casual. “I don’t.”
“Wait!” the man screamed, scrambling back until he was pressed up against the wall. “Wait! I have information!”
Saren didn’t say anything. Instead, he lowered the gun and gave a short nod.
“It’s another group of mercs. The Blue Suns.”
Every Spectre working in the Verge knew the Blue Suns were a force to be reckoned with. A small but well-known group, their members were both experienced and professional. The exact opposite of this crew.
“Go on.”
“They’re up to something. Something big.”
“What?”
“I…I don’t know,” the man stammered, wincing as if he expected to be shot for the admission. After the second it took him to realize he was still alive, he plowed forward, speaking quickly.
“That’s how we got in on this buy. The Blue Suns were supposed to take the shipment, but they pulled out. I heard they got a major job in the works. Something they didn’t want to risk by drawing the attention of a Spectre with a weapons buy.”
Saren was intrigued. Whatever they were up to had to be big: the Blue Suns almost never turned their backs on a deal they’d already negotiated. If they were trying that hard to keep Spectres out of the picture, it meant he damn well better find out what was going on.
“What else?”
“That’s all I kn
ow,” the man said. “I swear! If you want more you need to look at the Blue Suns.
“So…do we have a deal?”
Saren gave a derisive snort. “Deal?”
“You know…I give you information about the Blue Suns and you let me live.”
The Spectre raised his pistol again. “You should’ve negotiated before you spilled your guts. You’ve got nothing left to bargain with.”
“What? No, please! Don’t—”
The pistol put an end to his protests, and Saren turned and walked calmly back outside, leaving the carnage of the warehouse behind. He’d alert the local authorities once he got back to Phend so they could retrieve the stolen weapons…and clean up the mess.
Saren’s mind was already on his next job. Initially he’d dismissed the news of Sidon’s destruction. He figured it would eventually lead back to some radical splinter group of batarian rebels, a retaliation against humanity’s efforts to push their main rivals out of the Verge. But if the attack wasn’t the work of political terrorists, then the Blue Suns were one of the few private security organizations with the capability to pull it off.
Saren had every intention of finding out who had hired them and why. And he knew just where to start his investigation.
Anderson had spent the better part of two days reviewing Kahlee Sanders’s personnel file, trying to make sense of it.
The physical data was straightforward: age, 26; height, 5 feet 5 inches; weight, 120 pounds. The ID picture in her file showed she had predominantly Caucasian features: complexion, fair; eyes, light brown; hair, dark blond. She was attractive, but Anderson doubted anyone would ever have called her cute. There was a hard edge to her expression, as if she were looking for a fight.
That wasn’t surprising, given her personal background. According to the file she had grown up in the Texan megapolis formed by the union of Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio; one of the poorer regions on Earth. She was raised by a single mother, a factory worker making minimum wage. Enlisting with the Alliance had probably been her only chance to get a better life, though she hadn’t signed up until the age of twenty-two, shortly after her mother’s death.
Most recruits signed up before they were twenty. Anderson had joined the day he turned eighteen. But despite her late start, or maybe because of it, Kahlee Sanders had excelled at basic training. She was competent in hand-to-hand combat and weapons training, but her true aptitude had been in the technology fields.
According to her file she’d taken entry-level computing courses in the years leading up to her enlistment, and once she joined she threw herself into the study of advanced programming, data communication networks, and prototype systems architectures. She finished at the top of her class, completing a three-year program in only two.
Personality tests and psych evaluations showed she was intelligent, with a strong sense of personal identity and self-worth. Evaluations from peers and superior officers showed she was cooperative, popular, and an asset to any team she worked with. It was no wonder she’d been assigned to the Sidon project.
And that’s why none of this felt right. Anderson knew the difference between a good soldier and a bad one. Kahlee Sanders was definitely a good soldier. She may have initially joined the Alliance as an escape, seeking a better life than the one she had on Earth. But she had found exactly what she was looking for. She’d experienced nothing but success, accolades, and rewards since joining the military. Plus, with her mother gone, she had no other family and no real friends outside her fellow soldiers.
Anderson couldn’t come up with a single reason she would turn against the Alliance. Even greed didn’t make sense: everyone at Sidon was pulling down a top salary. Besides, Anderson knew enough about human nature to understand that it took more than simple greed to convince a person to aid in the slaughter of the people they lived and worked with every day.
One more thing bothered him about this. If Sanders was the traitor, why had she disappeared the day before the attack and drawn attention to herself? All she had to do was show up for her regular shift and it would have been assumed that she was one of the bodies vaporized in the explosion. It felt like someone was setting her up.
But he couldn’t deny that her sudden disappearance was too suspicious to be dismissed as mere coincidence. He needed to figure out what was going on, and so far his only possible clue was what wasn’t in her file. Kahlee Sanders’s father was officially listed as “unknown.” In this day and age of universal birth control to deal with rising populations, as well as massive DNA data banks, it was virtually impossible not to know the identity of a child’s parents…unless it was being specifically hidden.
Digging deeper into official files had shown all references to Kahlee Sanders’s father had been purged: hospital records, immunization reports…everything. It was as if someone had actively tried to cut him out of her life. Someone with enough importance to falsify government documents.
Kahlee and her mother both had to be part of the cover-up. If her mother had wanted the father’s identity exposed, there would have been no way to stop her. And Kahlee could easily have gotten a DNA test anytime she wanted. They had to know, but for some reason they didn’t want anyone else knowing.
However, neither one of them had the kind of financial resources or political clout it would take to pull something like that off. Which meant someone else—probably the father—had also been involved. If Anderson could figure out who the father was, and why he’d been expunged from all official records, it might help him figure out how Kahlee Sanders was tied up in the attack on Sidon.
Unfortunately, he’d exhausted all official channels. Fortunately, there were other ways to dig up buried secrets. Which was why he was now standing in a dark alley in the wards, waiting to meet with an information broker.
He had shown up a few minutes early, eager to see what the broker’s search would turn up. Not surprisingly, his contact wasn’t here yet. He spent the next few minutes waiting, occasionally pacing back and forth as the seconds dragged by.
A figure stepped into view just as his watch beeped on the hour, materializing from the shadows. As she approached, it quickly became clear that she was a salarian. Shorter and thinner than humans, salarians resembled a cross between some kind of lizard or chameleon and the “grays” described by alleged victims during the rash of fictitious alien abductions reported back on Earth in the late twentieth century. Anderson wondered if she’d been there the whole time, observing him as she waited patiently for the moment of their appointed meeting to arrive.
“Did you find anything?” he asked the woman he had hired to scour the extranet for any clues as to the identity of Kahlee Sanders’s father.
Trillions of tetragigs of data were transmitted in bursts across the extranet every day; there had to be something useful buried in there. But searching a functionally infinite amount of data for a specific piece of information could be an exercise in pointless frustration. It would take days to collect, process, and scan every burst…and even then the output might be millions and millions of pages of hard copy. That’s where information brokers came in—specialists who used complex algorithms and custom-designed search engines to limit and sort the data. Mastering the extranet was as much an art as a science, and salarians excelled at the art of gathering confidential information.
The salarian blinked her large eyes. “I warned you there might not be much to find,” she said, speaking quickly. Salarians always spoke quickly. “Records from before your species linked to the extranet are sporadic.”
Anderson had expected as much. Archives from the days predating the First Contact War were slowly being added to the extranet by various government agencies, but the input of old records was a minor priority for every administration. Given Sanders’s age, it was likely her father disappeared from her life long before humanity ever came into contact with the greater galactic community.
“So you’ve got nothing?”
The salarian smiled. “That
’s not what I said. It was difficult to track down, but there was something. It seems the left hand of the Alliance is unaware of what the right is doing.”
She handed him a small optical storage disk.
“Make my life easier,” Anderson said, taking it from her and stuffing it into his pocket. “Just tell me what I’m going to find when I scan this thing.”
“The day Kahlee Sanders graduated from your military training academy at Arcturus, an encrypted message was forwarded through classified Alliance channels to an individual on one of your colonies in the Skyllian Verge. It was subsequently purged seconds after it was received.”
“How’d you get access to classified Alliance channels?” Anderson demanded.
The salarian laughed. “Your species has been transmitting data across the extranet for less than a decade. My species has been directing the primary espionage and intelligence operations for the Citadel Council for two thousand years.”
“Point taken. You said the message was purged?”
“True. Deleted and scrubbed from the records. But nothing is ever truly gone once it hits the extranet. There are always echoes and remnants for people like me to track down. The extranet works on a—”
“I don’t need the details,” Anderson interrupted, holding up a hand to cut her off. “What did the message say?”
“It was brief. A single text file comprised of Kahlee Sanders’s name, final grades, and her class standing. Very impressive. She could have a bright future in my field if she wanted to come work for—”
Anderson cut her off again, growing impatient. “This was all in her personnel file. I didn’t pay you to get me her marks.”
“You didn’t pay me at all,” she pointed out. “This is being billed directly to your superiors at the Alliance, remember? I doubt you could afford to hire me. That’s why you came to me in the first place.”
Anderson’s hands involuntarily went up and rubbed his temples. “Right. That’s not what I meant.” Salarians tended to talk in circles, changing topics with every breath. It gave him a headache, and it always seemed to take twice as long as it should to get what you needed out of them. “I hope to God you have something more than this.”