Carbon Life

by HR Ringer

  The shuttle wasn’t large enough to include kitchen or toilet facilities, so Sam had been frequenting a nearby tavern for her personal needs – the facility was run through a shell corporation by the Alliance for its operatives. With no clandestine monitoring capability, the occasional raid by Aria T’Loak’s gangs never caused any major disruption in services.

  It took less than a week of searching to determine the Krogan systems had, as expected, held no data of value, to this search, at least. She had found hints about the stolen figurine in several databases maintained by the batarians, the salarians and the Blue Suns; after cross-checking the reference points in several other databases maintained by both species and the Suns, she managed to connect all the loci to a batarian pirate, Kryllê Ghydgryz.

  An expanded search of every batarian database she could find indicated Ghydgryz had suddenly become wealthy beyond any rational measure of the term when applied to a typical pirate, and the Blue Suns on Omega had remained exceedingly quiet about purchasing or possessing anything remotely connected to ancient asari history.

  Her breakthrough came from recent Extranet records on Omega, which hinted at some involvement by the Salarian Special Tasks Group. One of their agents, recorded only as ‘W.P.’, had saved a young batarian female from a possibly fatal encounter with a turian Blue Suns enforcer named Sevrius Ennilus. If known, the level of this female’s involvement was undocumented. Salarian records hadn’t simply been redacted – the information had not been recorded in any database she could access. Neither the operatives’ name nor that of the female had been recorded, an apparently deliberate omission to insure their safety through anonymity.

  As Traynor was unable to speak with Captain Kryllê Ghydgryz regarding the illegal sale of an ancient artifact, she decided to arrange a meeting with this unnamed batarian female in order to learn firsthand exactly what had happened to the now-missing figurine. The easiest way to achieve this would be to contact the STG agent directly, but first she needed his name. She reset her search parameters, narrowing the criteria to search for a salarian operative, identified only as ‘W.P.’, that had been on Omega for only a short time and had left in a hurry. There was a lot of data to run through, even with the criteria narrowed down to just one person.

  There was one last thing she needed to do before she left Omega – she needed to go to the bar where the sale had been arranged. She began digging through the digital records of all the low-rent-district bars that catered to batarians and turians. The search took longer than she had guessed it would. ‘Just goes to show how many batarians there are on this bloody station.’ Traynor let the program crunch the data while she ate some lunch.

  * * *

  Padok Wiks had relocated K’ath Din’sari to a small, cheap apartment in the ‘foundations’ of Echo Ward; in size, it was even smaller than the one she’d inhabited on Omega, but it was cleaner, and the rent was only a few creds more than what she formerly paid. The main batarian enclave was located immediately above this area, which was where Din’sari had found a job as a waitress at Krieger’s Tavern, a moderately sized bar & grill near the main passenger elevator to and from foundation level sub-alpha, its main door somewhat shadowed by the three story building across the boulevard.

  The job, while quite similar to the one she’d left on Omega, had one distinct advantage – the clientele was generally nicer; the majority were batarians, none of which ever complained about weak drinks – fewer still attempted to get ‘handsy’ with her. The few turians and salarians she encountered were by and large just looking for a bit of relaxation before going home for the evening. Many of the bar’s patrons lived in the foundations out of financial necessity. A modest apartment on this part of Echo was still considerably more expensive than most of the tavern’s minimum wage earning regular customers could afford, thus they lived ‘below’.

  K’ath worked the evening shift six nights a week; her start time was when many of the people buying drinks were on their way home from work. She quickly learned who the ‘regulars’ were, what they did for a living, their likes and dislikes; as she became better known, the tips became larger and more frequent. She wasn’t getting rich, but she was doing better than she had on Omega. More importantly, she felt relatively safer here on the Citadel. There was a certain amount of crime here, of course. It wasn’t something that could be escaped, but she didn’t have the same feeling of always being followed, either.

  Wiks final words to her once she had a place to live and work were, ‘stay beneath notice’, meaning ‘don’t attract attention… from anyone’.

  * * *

  After an exhaustive search of the salarian databases, Traynor still had not discovered the name of the STG agent she was searching for – for all intents and purposes, he was a ghost. She did have a list of all the ‘low-rent-district’ bars catering to turians and batarians, but the sheer number of such places would make a physical search of each one an impossibility, so she reset the criteria once again, this time to search for any batarian females (a rarity on Omega) that may have recently left their current job without going to work elsewhere on the station. She added a date range of three weeks, then sat back and waited for the search program to work through the data. Samantha was totally unprepared but pleasantly surprised when it produced positive results in less than an hour.

  There were about two dozen females that had recently left their jobs in the three-week time window. After eliminating the fifteen that weren’t employed as waitresses, Traynor was left with five murder victims that had worked as waitresses; another three had been assaulted and were still in hospitals. The last one on Traynor’s list had simply not reported for work… no apparent problem or cause, just hadn’t called or gone to work.

  Traynor’s research on this did not indicate any problems at work, no confrontations with customers, no impossible demands being made by her employer. She had simply not gone to work, and was not visiting elsewhere on Omega. It was as if she had simply vanished into space.

  Samantha next ran a search of low-rent apartments within walking distance of all the ‘low-rent-district’ bars she had discovered in her previous search, then cross-referenced the results with the lone female left from her initial group of twenty-four, and found something that garnered her interest. Despite the caution employed by the STG agent that had spirited her off Omega, he had left a trace, as clear to Traynor’s eyes as if there was a harshly lit sign pointing to it! The non-descript entry in the financial records of a certain Huoth Realty group showed that, after usually paying her monthly rent on time each month, she had inexplicably pre-paid three months’ rent, or more probably, had been given the credits to make the payment, as her prior payment record suggested a person always living paycheck-to-paycheck. The paid-up rent would give anyone looking for her the impression she was still living in the apartment, or, if her absence was noticed at all, that she had intentions of returning, since few people in this area of Omega could afford to simply walk away from that many credits.

  Samantha decided to personally visit the apartment in order to look for clues as to the identity of the young female. Learning her identity might enable Traynor to uncover where she had gone after leaving Omega.

  Traynor stripped off her SDU and armored up. Deciding to go light with weapons, she clipped a model 10 Stiletto with silencer to the pistol dock, then strapped her Butterfly Swords (hybrid 23 cm. long knives, actually) to her upper calves. She checked the power cells on her combination kinetic barrier / cloaking generator and her personal ME generator before docking them to her backplate, which she placed on her back and hooked to her chestplate before installing her bracers and shoulder pauldrons. For hand protection she pulled on the pair of specially designed sparring gloves her lover had given her after banging up all of her fingers during a training session with their white wax wooden staves.

  To finish, she pulled on a knee length, deeply hooded dark grey leather cloak, sized to allow her free movement with her armor in place. S
he put on (but did not energize) an infrared viewfinder – anyone looking at her face would simply see an amber-tinted visor across her eyes.

  Leaving the one search program looking through the data for the STG operative, she dimmed the overhead lights, opened the hatch and stepped out on the shuttle’s port side. With a quick look around, she set off for the apartment district nine levels below.

  Exiting the passenger elevator on the lower habitat level, Traynor quickly checked her coordinates and hummed in satisfaction – she was less than half-a-klick from the apartment she needed to inspect. Looking around confirmed there was no one close enough to notice her, so she energized her cloaking generator as she began walking.

  After several minutes she was outside the door of the windowless abode; couching to one side, she energized her night-vision visor, readied her omni-tool to fire a hira shuriken, then hacked the door lock. As it changed from red to green, she initiated a five-count hold while the door segments retracted. When her count reached four, a heavy shotgun was fired once from inside – the blast going over and past her head.

  She quickly rose from her crouch, moved inside and crouched again at the far side of the door. A shadowy figure on the far side of the room slowly stood from behind a chair and said, “Human. I can smell you. Show yourself.” At least, that’s what he meant to say.

  Traynor could tell from the flanging tone and echoing sub-harmonics she was facing a turian… since he had already attempted to cut her down with a shotgun, she felt no remorse as she brought her arm up and flicked her wrist twice to launch two ceramic discs of spinning death at the ghostly figure. The first shuriken struck him in the soft folds of the skin over his throat, just below his jaw – this cut off his voice before he could finish saying ‘yourself’. The second spinning disk buried two of its blades in the muscles of his upper arm; the neurotoxin on the edges caused total relaxation of his arm and hand muscles, allowing the shotgun he had been holding to fall to the floor with a loud clatter.

  The turian’s knees buckled and he quickly followed his weapon to the floor as the synthetic neurotoxin from each bladed disk rapidly paralyzed and killed him. Traynor waited for a few moments for anything else to break the deathly silence in this place. As it appeared the unfortunate turian was in here alone, she closed the entrance door and stood up with her back to the frame. Changing her combo generator to deploy her kinetic barrier, she cautiously approached the big turian sprawled across the floor.

  She placed two fingers on the skin just behind the left frontal faceplate and mandible support – no pulse. She sighed as she reached around to her backplate, detached her mass generator and clipped it on the turian’s utility belt; activating the device, she easily moved him to the door, where she placed him in a sitting position against the door frame. After retrieving her mass generator, she looked him over in the IR light from her omni-tool. ‘Big bastard. Blue Suns tattoo on his neck. Hmmm. Wonder if this is the same one that made the attempt on the life of the waitress.’ Traynor activated his omni-tool and downloaded all the information it contained, then wiped it’s memory clean.

  She carefully inspected the small apartment, beginning with the small lounge / dining combo area adjacent to a really small kitchen. The refrigerator and food storage cabinet were both empty, as were all the cupboards above and around the two-burner stove. Moving to the small bedroom and bath area, Traynor carefully looked at everything, even lifting the bed for a look underneath. She finally got lucky in the bedroom’s closet; there was a waitress uniform – a dress and tights – hanging off to the side in the shadows.

  Sam slid the hanger towards her and found a fabric nameplate heat-fastened on the front, just right of the centerline – Kath?… No! K’ath. Different pronunciation! Sam took several vid-photo stills of the dress with the name before looking it over again. The name of the bar or tavern she worked for wasn’t on the dress anywhere, so she decided to do a quick search in the area for any bars employing a waitresses named ‘K’ath’.

  She remotely logged her omni-tool into the research computer aboard her shuttle, entered the name and waited. Traynor was at the entryway reexamining the dead turian when her omni-tool trilled softly; the bar truly did not have a name, but at least she now had a location, and it was within walking distance. After a final quick look around inside, she stood to the side as she activated her cloaking generator, opened and stepped through the door, then closed it behind her and locked it using a different encryption. She smirked as she thought, ‘That turian will probably be pretty ripe by the time anyone comes looking for ‘im or the batarian female. My new lock code will slow ‘em down a bit, but not forever. Need to get this mess wrapped up.’

  Traynor waited in the shadows for the few people in the area to get further away before uncloaking; with the deep hood of her leather coat pulled over her head, her face would be deeply shadowed, her eyes virtually hidden. It had taken her only twenty minutes to walk here at a casual pace from the apartment formerly occupied by a waitress named K’ath – she could have made it in fifteen if necessary – as she expected K’ath had done many times by waiting until the last minute to leave her apartment. Samantha couldn’t imagine having to wait tables for a living, or even for an operation such as this. She had seen how males in bars, of every race, treated the waitresses. ‘Don’t expect I’d have a job for long – have to rip the arm off the first bastard that grabbed my ass and beat ‘im to death with it.’

  She walked across the narrow alley to the entrance of the no name bar; pausing in the door for a moment, she glanced around to get a sense of where everyone and everything was before walking over to a table in a far corner and taking a seat with her back to the wall.

  A batarian waitress approached her table – reluctantly, it seemed to Sam – and asked in a voice totally lacking in enthusiasm what she’d like to drink.

  “Whiskey, with a twist,” Traynor answered.

  “That’ll be five creds, in advance.”

  Traynor flipped the chit on the table; the waitress snatched it up before it had a chance to even bounce, turned and sauntered to the bar. After a few moments, the bartender set a heavy glass on her serving tray, which she brought back and placed in the center of the table. Sam slid the glass a bit closer before picking it up and tossing the liquid down her throat. She sucked air through her teeth as she set the empty glass on the table upside down. “Refill,” she ground out in a husky voice.

  The waitress remained standing beside the table, obviously waiting for Sam to throw another five creds on the table. Sam never moved – knowing her eyes couldn’t be seen with the hood over her head, she growled, “Five creds for one shot is about twice the going rate. Way I figure, you’re taking your gratuity as if it’s something I owe you.”

  The waitress had started to back away from the table, a bit of fear showing in her eyes. “You don’t get to set the prices in here, human! You want another drink, you have to pay.”

  “You must not have heard me,” Sam’s voice had taken on a dangerously hard edge. “Do you want to disappear like the one that used to work here – K’ath?”

  The waitress’s mouth fell open as her eyes went wide. “You… you’re responsible for… K’ath Din’sari’s disappearance?”

  ‘Finally!… a surname!’ “I’m aware of it… didn’t cause it. Now, my drink?” Traynor could see this batarian knew nothing of K’ath’s disappearance, but she was committed to her charade, at least until the second drink appeared on the table.

  The waitress backed away from Traynor several steps before turning towards the bar. When she returned with the drink and set it on the edge of the table as far away from the mysterious human as she could, Sam produced two credit chits and slapped them on the table. “Five for the drink, five for information.” Looking at the batarian’s nametag, she added quietly, “People don’t just disappear for no reason, Sy’Efetin. Tell me what Din’sari was involved in.”

  Remembering the lessons taught by Dhevile Creg’falak o
n Mars, Samantha slowly tilted her head slightly to her left, all the while carefully observing Sy’Efetin’s body language as she waited for an answer. The female was obviously nervous – she kept dropping her eyes to look at the creds, than back up to where she imagined Sam’s eyes were watching from under the edge of her hood.

  After looking over her shoulder twice, Sy’Efetin sighed and answered in a soft voice, “Turian, big one, came in here one night, looking for K’ath. She was working the bar, spent a lot of time talking to a salarian that came in afterwards. The turian left after a few hours; the salarian right before closing.” Sy’Efetin shook her head sadly as she finished, “Last time anyone around here saw K’ath Din’sari.”

  Traynor nodded slightly, more to herself than to the waitress… the big turian had undoubtedly been the one she’d encountered in Din’sari’s residence, and the salarian had probably been the STG agent. “Why do you think that turian was interested in a tavern waitress way down here?”

  Sy’Efetin lifted one shoulder momentarily in an approximation of a human’s shrug. “May have had something to do with a pirate and a materials broker she encountered here a few days before,” she responded, then added to the unspoken question, “both batarians.”

  Traynor spoke softly. “Kryllê Ghydgryz… your pirate. Word in the Traverse is Ghydgryz is now a wealthy… very wealthy… individual.”

  The waitress nodded as she continued. “They appeared to be brokering some kind of deal, but I never got close enough to discover anything about it. K’ath was selling the other guy uncut ale after this… Ghydgryz… fellow left.” The waitress smiled in spite of her nervousness. “This other guy?… he was really juiced when he finally managed to get to his feet and leave.”