[Sur'kesh] Project Rainfall

“A good war is won with but a bullet; the best, before it is fired.”
The Silent Step, att.



This would not be a good war.

Sitting at the Cooiil Café on the third level of the Camati Arcology, a black-suited salarian scratched at his sallow neck as he glanced at the headlines of the Dihrenea Sun vidcast. Flipping past the usual glut of articles in the tech section, he glanced through the local news and took a moment to read the hatchings announced at a local hospital. A particular one caught his eye – Sur’kesh Komari Entish Camati Linron Shepard.

He snorted. Apparently, being a member of the most prestigious clan in the Union didn’t prevent you from being a trend-following cloaca - just a deeply ironic one. He gave that girl’s mother about two days before “founding” her own branch name (and thus cut off from the greatest social and political resource in Council Space). After all, Dalatrass Linron had never been known for forgiveness, and with all the infighting in the wake of the Cure, little Shepard’s mother might as well have been committing suicide.

No matter. As far as he was concerned, Linron was but a name now, doomed forever to be mere footnotes between the Reaper War and the Next Great Age.

The tallow-faced man grasped the briefcase beside him as he scanned the pavilion for his partner. A long, thin finger hovered over the briefcase’s lock, scanning implants in three of his knuckles before glowing green with a faint beep of confirmation. Instead of snapping open, a small cylinder popped itself free from the front edge, glowing slightly before an exothermic reaction popped the seal open.

Inside this seal was a miniscule pill – elliptical, off-white, perhaps 40 milligrams. Glancing through the crowd, first on his left and then to his right, he quietly grabbed the pill and popped it into his mouth, keeping it under his tongue for several seconds before chasing it with a cup of tea.


The sallow-faced man quietly held his head in his hands as the skin on his face, chest and arms twitched and convulsed slightly. Microimplants peppering his skin released their toxins, and his face flushed as a tauter, “greener” tint slowly bled through like ink through paper.

Seconds later, “Ammic Sorkin” sat where he was, a glare on his face and a tic in his hands.

"Shrell of an aftertaste, isn't it?"

He could have been someone's uncle, an elder guardian of hatchlings. Dedicating himself to doting and spoiling the children in his evening years (much to the ire of their mother who would no doubt come back at the end of the day to find them pumped full of sweets and scary movies), a few months from a comfortable retirement. There was an entire story in the way he moved, the way he talked, the way he looked. A carefully prepackaged narrative that neatly fit into everyone's idea of how things worked.

It was the little things that gave it away and even then, you had to look close, look twice, to see the skin that had been scraped clean of scars and marks. To see, really see, his eyes, his smile.

The skin he was wearing could have been the twin of his partner's. His idea of a joke; the brothers two. The older man casually sat down across the table, unslinging a heavy satchel with a groan of relief and resting by his foot.

"Everything's set on my end. Just need you to call it."

“Sorkin’s” response was to take a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and light up with the tip of his omnitool. Taking a quick breath, he winced as the skin on his body seemed to contract in unison, the last particulates of smoke from the paper catalyzing the disguise’s final stages.

“Yeah, they’re foul, all right,” he muttered as he stretched his neck and limbs. “Think I’d kill myself if we couldn’t roll anything else in these.”

He indicated the “cigarette” as he waved it about, and as he exhaled, a mild stench of cinnamon wafted through the air. He sniffed, taking in the scent for a moment, then threw the paper stick to the ground and smashed it with his foot.

“Sorkin” could never understand how easily his partner could dissolve into his personas. He was all right himself, he had a penchant for names, dates and events that rivaled anyone’s within the Project, and that was no small compliment. But when he had to go undercover, there was always a veneer of artificiality with his performance. Little slips, breaks in behavior that he would catch, if no one else. Not so with his partner – no, performances like his were what gave salarians their reputation. Slick as a fish, his persona was one you just wanted to wrap your arms around and hug – an action which, according to several people six feet under, usually turned out to be a mistake.

“Just a final checklist, then. How’s plan A?”

"Mm? Oh, fine, just fine. Schedule was a bit tight there at the end but we got it all put together well enough. Growths're going to be lovely you know." The man withdrew an OSD from an inner pocket and passed it across the table, unremarkable, nondescript.

See, this was the difference between people like...well people like them and everyone else. Ask a normal (for a given value of normal granted) person what they're afraid of and you'll get the usual suspects: drowning, animal phobias, the dark, heights. Usually with one or two weird ones thrown in too like a deep and relentless fear of iced cakes, or an irrational aversion to paper shredders. But it's always something that could happen to them, something that someone or something could do to them.

People like Sorkin and the older man who had been Ugasis Lak on the liner here, who was Yswi Bosan now (a comfortable mask, a familiar life) people who played that great Game, they were afraid of things like that OSD. They were afraid of what it represented; things they didn't know, things they did. See that was the beauty of information. Information was power. The right secret could ignite a war the right document could end it in a night. The correct key could shatter a planet and the right account could breathe new life into a world. Life, death, power, control all of it, all of it came back to whispers, to murmurs, to secrets. To, in a word, information.

The information on that OSD for instance was nothing so grand as the encryptions for a dreadnought's mainframe or military strategy or even a particularly juicy bit of blackmail. Just a few codes in fact but, say, if a few of his old friends in intelligence had seen the little exchange instead of the usual assortment of shoppers and white collars grabbing a quick bite

they would have started running.

And wouldn't have stopped until there was a relay or two between them and that OSD.

"Stuff's in order too," the man who called himself Bosan said cheerfully, "Got 'em in two cases in a couple of storage lockers one level down for the time being, personal requests and all. Lockers are two thirty one aaaaaand one forty four, combo for yours is on the disk too."

“Sorkin” nodded in confirmation, placing the OSD in his omnitool and downloading the information.

“Good,” he said. “Secondaries are in place at the Information Desk. I figure if our first idea doesn’t run by Corporate, we’ll be too busy worrying about our jobs to worry about specifics.”

Such innocuous terms for something as incendiary as Plan B, but it was expected. Once you took the pill, you were supposed to remain in character, after all. To anyone watching “Sorkin” and “Bosan,” the two of them were brothers - twins maybe – having one last SuperPoint presentation before The Big Meeting. No muss, no fuss – walk in, cause chaos, get out with nobody the wiser.

”Speaking of worst-case scenarios, got a car for if we’re fired on the spot?

"Mmmhm. Put a buddy of mine on notice, he said he'll have a couple hours open for us if we need to bail. Pass you his number in a bit." The man leaned across the table and slid the cup of tea his way, knocking it back before getting to his feet. A wink and a grin.

There was actually nothing special about the tea. "Bosan" was just the type to indulge in a harmless bit of teasing. Plus he really did like the blend.

"Good to go whenever you are, just going to be brushing up a few last minute things for my file in the meantime, give me the call and I'll meet you by the lockers in five at the latest yeah?" A quick, jaunty salute and he melted back in steady press of bodies, satchel back over his shoulder. Just another face in the crowd.

A few seconds later "Sorkin"'s omnitool chimed with the location of a shipping container currently stored in the yards adjacent to the spaceport. It would remain there for an additional seven hours before being transferred to another freighter, this one bound for Thessia.

There may have been no such thing as coincidence, but Wheel break them if they weren't good at making it look like there was.

“Sorkin” looked over the new stretch of data with a nod and slid out another cigarette – a normal one, this time, just rather pungent. Popping the OSD out of his omni-tool as he lit it, he took the extra time to burn a hole through the sides and crushed the remainder under his feet. The disc had been wiped, of course; the moment it was done uploading to his ‘tool, he’d put his best data-destroying programs to the task of shredding phantom data – but even today there was no better way to destroy data than to smash the container it was in.

Once the most damaging evidence was reduced to shreds on the floor, “Sorkin” took another look around the café. It was the same as it had been when he walked in. Customers milled about. Baristas poured tea. A square-chested man in the corner glanced at him before arguing university sociology with his friend.

It was all so…civilian. Naïve.

Dumb.

He would have welcomed a narrowed look, a raised eyeridge, even the barest flicker of comprehension before running back to their conversations. If there were more suspicious people in the world, maybe he (no, the Project) wouldn’t have to do this.

Oh well. If that was the way the galaxy moved, then allow him to give it a push.

---

Noltric Dynamics’ central office was a rare sighting in Camati; that is, it was one of the few buildings still sitting on the shoreline. Sitting on the edge of the Jurim Sea, the building borrowed heavily from the aesthetics of Orrim Selcoam – that is, earthy tones, gently sloped walls, lush mixes of tile and plascrete, and an absolute torrent of rainforest plants. With the entire Entish region sweeping into a second year of heat weaves, and with those same plants blooming, the atmosphere felt less “hot air” and more “hot spongy material.”

“Sorkin” had to wonder if Noltric’s location wasn’t at least partly intentional. As he passed through the waterfront entrance’s large double doors, a wave of processed air conditioning washed itself over hiim, digging deep into his processed skin and clothing and seemingly washing the salty sea breeze off of him, leaving him surprisingly refreshed and (he guessed, from a corporate perspective) ready to work. Before he could get a sigh of relief, though, a drone flickered to life at the Information Booth and buzzed over to him, spinning its rings as it attempted to hover over his shoulder.

“Welcome to Noltric Dynamics,” it chirruped, as the company’s logo briefly zipped across its wireframe. “Due to the temporary increase in security, we ask that you hold onto the presented identification OSD at all times while on the premises.”

Another chirrup, another buzz, and a moment later a printed badge popped out of a slot on the side of the drone. “Sorkin” took it without a word, tossing it into a pocket.

“Thank you,” it continued. “Please note that failure to possess your identification OSD is grounds removal from Noltric Dynamics. Have a nice day.”

As the little drone sped away, “Sorkin” dug his hand into his pocket and snapped the device he’d been presented with in two. Damned tracking devices, he thought to himself as he made his way to the elevator, quietly discarding the broken pieces in a convenient trash container. Inefficient, ineffective, stupid. He could only wonder how his compatriot was doing elsewhere.

"Mamma whose that man? Why's he dressed like that?"

"I don't know honey, don't stare."

"Hahaha Uyno come look at this, some old drone's snapped and-"

"What's he doing? Shouldn't someone...you know be-"

"Wheel the nerve of some people".

"Sir, I apologize but I'm going to need to ask you to leave, you're causing a disturbance and this isn't a designated protest zone."

False flag. Oh so many things that could go wrong with them, so hard to get them to go right. Too many "what if"'s too many unknowns. What if the real party was incriminated? Could you ensure no real evidence was left behind? Could you ensure only the right evidence was left behind?

Many ultimately decided that it wasn't worth it, or fucked it up so badly that the mothers themselves couldn't patch it back together.

He loved it. Loved the challenge. Loved the triumph.

"Sir, I'm going to need to you leave. Now."

The security officer was getting annoyed with him and rightly so. Nobody liked it when the old aged gracelessly and this? This was just appalling. A drone with no taste, going a touch soft too early. For Wheel's sake there were hatchlings here, they didn't need to see some codger rediscover the spark of activism in his decline.

Bosan -no Lyi nobody to pretend for here, no role to act now- blinked and smiled, there must have been something predatory in the look, something unsettling because the officer paused in the middle of his increasingly insistent orders. The green skinned salarian rolled his shoulders and glanced around the terminal's shopping center. Food, clothes, souvenirs. The spaceport was at the height of rush hour, the concourse was packed and the old man in the coat patched with SDU icons and regalia was drawing a bit of a crowd.

Loved the spectacle. Loved the tension.

Other officers were making their way here. Best to act quickly.

"You know, I have to say, this is my favorite part."

"Wha-"

The helmet folded out from beneath the coat's collar, slate gray and polished. The segments linking together, walling his face away behind a polarized plate, linking with the neck mesh to form an airtight seal. The officer's eyes practically bulged out of his skull, one long fingered hand scrabbling for his comm. Backup stopped pussyfooting around and started to push through the crowd. The security arcs were supposed to keep this kind of shit out, supposed to make sure that it never got this far.

They had been almost painfully easy to circumnavigate.

The coat opened.

Loved the dawning sense of realization.

In the back of the crowd somebody screamed, high and shrill as they saw the vest glittering beneath the artificial lights set high in the ceiling.

Loved the fear.

Behind his back his omnitool flared to life. The officer was lunging, but too slow, too slow.

Boom.

As an explosion rocked South Entish, and screams poured down the Arcology, Sorkin realized he could really use a cigarette.

Standing in the great glass elevator, he picked at a piece of dandruff and dully listened to a PR spokeswoman (identified, of course, as a member of Clan Narra) extolling the virtues of Noltric Dynamics. No sounds of terror reached him here; the building had been liberally soundproofed, and the cinderblock foundations built around the building’s basement provided excellent vibrational damping as well.

“Recovery is our Number One Priority at Noltric Dynamics,” droned the Narran spokeswoman as images of salarian laborers dug trenches for pipework on a wounded (and more importantly, picturesque) planet. “As Sur’kesh’s greatest minds, it is our responsibility in these uncertain times to ensure the well-being of every member of galactic society.”

The image of salarians in hard hats buzzed before being replaced by a sunset over the Nos Astra Valley, then to the usual video of asari and salarian businessfolks laughing around a table.

“Noltric Dynamics has been a chief contributor to the MIRC since its inception in 2187,” continued the spokeswoman as Sorkin rolled his eyes. “Using a powerful combination of Quantum Entanglement Communications coordination and the very latest in infrastructure management technology, Noltric representatives were responsible for restoring clean water and power to over fifty colonies within weeks of the Crucible Event.”

The elevator slid into a massive subterranean complex, filled with hundreds of researchers milling about over a dozen different projects. Rushing up and down a network of catwalks, none of them bothered to watch the elevator – save one, who looked up, shook his head and clearly muttered ”tourists” before pushing a cartful of plant specimens onto a hovertrolley.

The number of projects was indeed impressive, particularly to the average tourist. Dozens of them filled the hallways, each adorned with its own impressive sign and HUD hotspot for the elevated tourist. A dozen salarians crowded over a repurposed military transport vehicle; several more, milling about before a Galaxy Map that looked like it had been ripped from a starship. Still others were administering chemicals to an indoor arboretum – and in between all of them, a lifeline of supplies and datapads were carted from one end of the building to the other by a group of harried interns.

“Noltric employs over eight hundred thousand workers in Citadel Space, allowing it to operate on many crucial contracts throughout the galaxy. In fact—”

Spokeswoman Narra’s speech cut short as a loud, buzzer-like klaxon sounded throughout the area. The elevator froze in place, and a large vidscreen flared to life in the back end of the complex, showing an aerial photo of the Tevishi Vael Spaceport.

The entire building was in flames.

Sorkin smiled. Phase One had started flawlessly.

As he shoved his ‘tooled hand onto the elevator controls with an override, a sharp, businesslike voice echoed throughout the building.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are on a Stage Three Alert,” bellowed the voice as the elevator zoomed towards the floor. “A military detonation was reported at Tevishi Vael roughly three Galactic Standard Minutes ago. Please prepare for a Stage Three Evacuation at this time. Repeat, this is a Stage Three Alert…”

As the elevator finally slid into place at the bottom of the well, Sorkin tapped a control on his omni-tool, and a flare of sparks spat from electrodes throughout his suit. A faint crinkling sound later, he had vanished from sight. When the doors opened, a pair of scuff marks were the only evidence he had ever been there.

Plink.

The medallion fell, bounced off the floor and rolled past his feet before rattling to a stop on a patch of blackened tile half a meter away. A flash of orange light as the nanotech destroyed it from within, reducing the node to so much grey ash in seconds.

Plink. Plink. Plink. Plink.

Others joined one by one, the security measures consuming each in turn, erasing the weapon piece by piece.

Lyi opened his eyes.

The room was full of black motes, drifts and piles of dust and ash. Charred bone gleamed, red raw and dark roasted meat left to rot on the floor. The walls were decorated with shadows. Here a man turning to run. There another falling. There a group turning. Blue flames licked the metal girders, eating away at the building's foundations, blooming into brilliant orange and crimson as the gas burned off as the flames found a new source of fuel.

A titanic creaking groan and a section of roof paneling the size of a small house fell, crushing a lepio leaf stand and sending the clouds of dust into whirls and eddies. Outside the piercing wail of sirens could be heard; medics and gunships and special response oh my. All here for little old him.

Well, for survivors too technically but given the ah

-the room was gutted, scorched clean, everything outside the ionized sphere's radius burned black and chewed apart by the iridescent lighting, the storm tearing through the crowd like they were so much straw-

decidedly high mortality rates that more or less made it him by default.

The sirens got louder. Time to get moving. Fingers flew over the buckles holding the decaying remnants of the Cisci-Rull Field Generator to his armor. He shrugged the decaying vest and attached power core out from underneath his coat and kicked it outside the perfect circle of white tile, giving it only the briefest of glances to confirm that the security protocols hadn't fucked up, before activating his omnitool.

The function of the quarantine line was twofold: firstly it allowed the authorities to establish a clear line of demarcation from which to evacuate people and thereby contain the fallout from things like biohazards or secondary devices, secondly it allowed to authorities to create a no-man's-land to contain him. Leaving him trapped and cornered before they came swooping in to bag their catch.

A wireframe map emerged from the cluster of screens orbiting his wrist, specks of orange light glowing like embers in the base of the surrounding arcologies, beneath the streets. Five in all

each outside the quarantine line.

A few quick commands and the gridlines were swept away. A few more and the omnitool went dark.

He waited. Listening. Feral pleasure and nervous anticipation blending together as he counted, eyes wide and bright behind the plate.

One one thousand.

Two one thousand.

Three one thousand.

A faint keen, just on the edge of hearing, gently edging up into a hum you could feel reverberating through your skull if you clenched your teeth together.

The noise grew louder.

And louder.

And louder.

One note, single, pure, oscillating up through the frequencies. One note that drowned out everything, that swallowed up everything until there was only it. That sound.

It was the windows that gave way first. Cracks spiderwebbing across, dividing and dividing again fractally as the panes thrummed in harmony.

You could see it, see the sound as they exploded out in waves, sending a hail of brilliant, glittering shards flying across the streets, raining down. First floor to the highest floor an expanding dome of razors.

The pitch changed, deepening, resonating within his chest even from here.

Buildings began to shake. The ground bucking and thrashing, pavement and walkways splitting and buckling, the great towers visibly swaying in their foundations, caught in the grasp of an intangible hurricane. Level upon level whipping through empty space in a rush of displaced air.

The noise stopped as suddenly as it started and for one moment, one precious moment all was silence.

Then the first building started its slow, implacable fall.

Whatever pretense of order disappeared when the vidscreen flashed with a bolt of green. Scientists and security alike howled in agony as resonant feedback rattled skulls and fractured teeth. Lights shattered, steel snapped, and the image distorted hideously until a crack appeared and the emitter lens exploded, shooting out to strike unwitting victims like flechettes.

Amidst the chaos and horror, no one noticed the quiet static of a tactical cloak shutting itself off, or of a black-helmeted silhouette dashing down a hallway.

Ninety seconds.


Sorkin jawed furiously under his pitch-black helmet, thankful for both the timing of the sound bomb he threw and for the damping in his suit. Hoofing it between hordes of howling techs, between catwalks and sparking drones, he beat feet until he reached his prize: a digital sculpture of a spire, shaped oddly like a salarian finger that glowed at the tip as it beckoned towards the sky.

Emblazoned on either side, in emerald letters, hung the words PROJECT ETERNAL SPRING.

”Sixty seconds. Perfect.”

Without any warning – without a sigh or wince, Sorkin thrust his ‘tooled hand into the Shroud’s wireframe. The structure twisted and distorted as it tried to bend around his hand, but the moment Lyi’s authentication codes activated, it disappeared into a wave of plaintext that began downloading into his hard drive.

Fifty-five seconds.

The earth began to rumble. Soon they’d unleash the pièce de résistance.

The Cisci-Rull Field Generator had been impartial, indiscriminate; no direction, no focus just a searing wall of lightning.

The resonance bombs had been a proxy weapon, activated from better than half a kilometer away; the fallout was readily apparent yes but there had been no involvement, no immediate control.

Lyi's boots crunched on shattered glass and pulverized rubble, his tattered, ragged coat trailing behind him, flapping in the currents of warm air thrown off by the flames. A hard metal pack anchored to the strips on the back of his armor. The discarded satchel laying in the sheltered storm drain outside the spaceport where he'd stashed it. Just close enough to be within a moment's reach, just far enough to be clear of the pulses.

Theoretically anyway. It had been a touch worrying for a moment but the hollow was structurally sound and the satchel along with package he'd retrieved from the locker were intact. He'd assembled it there, deftly slotting the pieces together, the flexible pack, the three barrels, the revolving chamber. He held it in his hands now, a meter long mechanism that was, quite literally, made for this moment.

Violence was violence was violence but a poor war it would be if there wasn't at least some opportunity to give events a

shall we say

personal touch?

The quarantine line was shattered, vehicles and personnel and barricades tossed around like a careless child might scatter blocks. Lyi snapped the launcher to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

The segment of the line wasn't so much destroyed as it was utterly annihilated.

The shell followed a lazy arc, reaching an apex over their heads before bursting apart with a teakettle screech. The casing dissolved into a rotating sphere of containment shrouds linked by pulsing threads of blue, in the core a small orb started to glow cyan. Burning brighter. Hotter. Growing with each passing second until it swallowed the shielding and unleashed itself in a thunderclap of burning plasma and radiation.

Lyi walked through the devastation left by the miniature sun, through the flames and cell scarring poison and he didn't even stop, he didn't even slow as he made his calm, thorough, methodical way to the city proper.

Chaos ruled outside as Sorkin performed his own light show, brushing aside gigabyte-level encryption with a wave of his hand. Firewalls fell at the stroke of a finger; with a swipe of the wheel, so did the drones.

Forty-five seconds.

Project Eternal Spring’s data ceased swarming almost immediately, the image of the Shroud collapsing and becoming no more than green static. In a sense, of course, that meant his mission was a success. Of course, with his colleague wreaking such delicious havoc, mere success would be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Forty seconds.

The building itself shook as Sorkin thrust his hand into the datastream again, this time opening links into the rest of Noltric’s MIRC activities. Hungry worms and trojans dug into the network, changing hundreds, thousands of lines of code. Nothing catastrophic, of course – Noltric and the MIRC would survive this accident, assuming the former’s leadership hadn’t been on the top floor when this began. No, it would all be…little changes. Simple mix-ups on deliveries. “Fixes” on part diagrams. Nobody batted an eye when someone stamped nutripaste as levo, right? Or if someone, say, put human metrics on power plant schematics instead of the turian ones?

Thirty seconds.

Simple oversight, really.

Twenty-five seconds.

Sorkin’s internal monologue was sadly cut short as a bullet ripped into his kinetic barriers. He blinked and turned – only to face a single scientist, eyes wide, mouth bloodied, and holding a shaking gun at least eight pay grades above him.

He was short. A nobody. Five foot four, a hundred pounds soaking wet. Blue skin, gray eyes, had the look of a louza someone had dragged through eight hundred miles of sandpaper and who didn't have the sense to stay down.

Twenty seconds.

His face twitched. He took a ragged breath.

He spoke.

”Why.”

The Union military did not solely consist of the STG. There was armor, fighters, ships and soldiers, all the trappings of a hypermodern fighting force. He could see them up ahead, massing across the road behind deployable shields and kinetic pylons. A wall, a diversion, designed to hold his attention and force him back while the snipers stationed in the twin buildings bracketing the elevated road took his head, or the gunships holding steady ten, fifteen, kilometers out to spread his entrails across the city.

They wouldn't take him alive.

They wouldn't let him walk away from this.

He knew it.

He welcomed it. Welcomed their attempt.

There had been a human on Omega, a cell associate back when Lyi still wore Union colors, Carlos something or the other who told him that he was like a shark. Always swimming. Always sharp. Always hungry. He garotted Carlos later that night as part of cleaning house and more or less shuffled those memories away. He was nothing, a nobody. But those words stayed with him. He would sometimes think them over, on shuttle rides, on stakeouts, whenever the quiet crept up and there was nothing to occupy the mind but itself.

He had to say he'd rather come to like it; that idea of the perpetually moving, ever hungry beast. He couldn't stop. He didn't want to. This, this was him.

And he wouldn't trade it for the world.

They had a gauge of his range, of the fusion shells. They thought it would save them.

Lyi had loosed five this time, ugly leaden things that bounced over the cracked and pitted street before exploding into clouds of translucent mist that had dissipated long before he even neared effective range. That got their attention, sent a few of the greener recruits shifting and fidgeting behind their lines. But once nothing happened they settled back in, waiting for him to come to them. He would have no choice soon, they were walling off the road behind him, preparing to force him out into the open, onto the middle expressway where he would be no doubt turned into so much shredded meat by their shooters.

Two shots through the base of the skull to prevent any last minute orders. Open, already evacuated area, minimal collateral from a deadman switch or accidentally breached bomb. Missiles on a hair trigger to put him down if that didn't do it.

A noose so that he might hang himself.

A pair of shots rang out and the air around him deepened into a grey-green smoke the color of swamp muck. More rose up from the street. From the interior of the bridge. Materializing around him. Wrapping around him. He could hear shots, volleys of fire, the dull thumps of missiles that shook the bridge. The deep throated roar of heavy accelerator cannon as the gunships swung in close for concentrated fire.

Nothing touched him.

His omnitool flared to life again and the nanite storm swarmed forward to scour the road clean. He walked forward. Walked down the steps formed from rock and rubble as the bridge decayed. Aging centuries in seconds, stripped to the very bone as the swarm fed and grew fat.

They'd exhaust themselves in half an hour, or the Union would deploy countermeasures, one or the other. But it didn't really matter, he'd played his part.

Now it was time for Sorkin to play his.

Fifteen seconds.

Sorkin glanced at his host, then snorted as he wrenched his hand out of the datastream, the dying plaintext cascading from terminal to terminal in the complex as the access feed was lost.

“Let me guess,” he said, stepping forward, a sneer forming on his face. “Special Tasks. Here to make sure this—”

He gestured vaguely at the pile of corpses surrounding the room.

“—doesn’t happen. Right?”

Ten seconds.

The tech – that is to say, CWKE Emon Spiza – spat blood and shot. The round missed him, barely causing a ripple in his barriers as it buried itself in the wall behind him. Sorkin chuckled as he stepped into position.

Five seconds.

”Well, rook," he said, "I think you’re officially in over your head.”

Time’s up.


Sorkin saluted Spiza mockingly before slamming his helmet visor down. As he did so, the floor below him groaned and screeched – and then erupted into a plume of flame, surrounding the saboteur in an inferno as he dropped into the depths below.

Before Spiza could react, the entire building rumbled, before great seething fissures tore open the walls, ripping apart plasteel and melting it with the strength of a Blood Pack extermination squad. Vines – great, massive, swamplike vines – tore through a hole in the complex before bursting into flame; a great branch fell from the wall, exploding as it hit the floor with the force of a bomb.

Seeing the room tearing itself to shreds before him, Spiza screamed in terror and took the only sane option available – he ran forward, labcoat trailing in flame behind him, and dove into the hole.

The tunnel beneath Noltric Dynamics stretched for four terrifying seconds before reaching “ground” of any sort, surrounding Spiza with a vision of plunging into Shrell’s domain. Twisted, gaping branches reached out, attempting to immolate him as he hurtled towards the ground; it was only through sheer, dumb luck that he hit a gently-curving root that sent him rolling across the ground. It did nothing to stop his speed, though, and without a mass effect field to arrest his momentum, his right arm cracked and seemed to light itself on fire.

There was no time for pain, though. No time for screaming. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that that building above him was going to collapse – and the longer he stayed there, the stronger the chance he’d die alone in the blaze, and that his body would never be found.

What’s more, when he struggled to get up, he dimly saw a shape dashing down the corridor.

Should still able to fire, he thought bitterly. The fall hadn’t destroyed his gun arm, though reloading would be nothing short of agony. Letting his other arm hang uselessly from at his side, Spiza charged forward, dashing through a root maze and hoping to Shrell this man had an escape route.

Sorkin charged ahead, unhindered by the fall. He’d planned this out, unlike the pitiful agent behind him, so of course he’d arranged for a field to kill his momentum.

Of course, now that the entire shrelling superstructure was on fire, he was on a timer. The Project had maintained strict knowledge of the CARGO vine’s layout, and he’d run so many trials on the simulators that he knew where to go, but there was always the niggling 5.3% chance that the main vein collapsed before the his running time was up.

Of course, only 6.7% of those runs also had Special Forces charging after him, and a shot ringing out behind him told him he’d already won one lottery. Sorkin sucked in a breath and charged forward; for the first time, the odds were actually against him. After all, since the only weapon he’d smuggled in was in fragments nearly 150 meters above.

A shame the agent had failed his marksmanship.

Spiza swore as he instinctually tried to absorb the kickback. His useless arm swooped up to grab the Stiletto, and as it fired, it jammed shattered shreds of cartilage together. His inner ears rang, his vision went green, and as it slowly faded back into red, he realized that the figure had disappeared.

“SHIT! SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT!” he screamed, and hauled himself forward again, twisting his omni-tool dial in the process. Reaching a fork in the road, he looked both ways, hoping to catch the terrorist in his sights before he got away. When he failed to appear, the salarian cranked his cryogenic mod up about halfway, spraying a “foam” of BSE around the floor around him.

A set of faint footprints coalesced from the roots. Eyes narrowing, he followed them.

Sorkin knew he was reaching the end when the smoke began billowing towards the ceiling. Rounding a corner, then a second one, he skidded to a halt just before careening over a cliff into the raging coastline below.

Putting a hand up to the side of his head, he hailed Lyi on his comm as he gently brushed a root with a slight scar on it. As he did, a dim holodisplay winked to life from an emitter buried deep within a knothole. With a rumble and an earsplitting crack, the entire ringed enclosure snapped off of the tunnel, drifting upward as a mass effect field enveloped both it and the salarian.

“Plan B? Plan A," murmured Sorkin. "Mission complete – I am at LZ. Repeat, Plan A is waiting at the LZ.”

A rush of engines told him he wouldn’t have to wait long.

Spiza would get no such answer when he rounded the corner thirty seconds later. Instead, barely avoiding falling into the sea himself, he arrived just in time to see an aircar rushing over the horizon. Sucking in fresh air for the first time in five minutes, he slammed the side of his omni-tool, wincing in agony as he did so, and opened a line.

“Hello?! This is Agent Cissel!”

He stood there panting in pain, then slammed the BROADCAST button again.

”HELLO?! This is Agent Cissel, Agent CWKE Emon Spiza! ANSWER ME, DAMMIT!”

A hiss of static was his only answer. A ball of fire gutted out of the tunnel to his side, a painful reminder of what he just survived.

The fight went out of him; he rested his head on a stone in the wall and hit the BROADCAST button one more time.

“This is Agent Cissel. Operation Equinox is a failure. Repeat, Operation Equinox is a failure. Locate, please advise…Again, this is Agent Cissel…”

Sorkin waited quietly above.