Maelstrom: Betrayal
Jan 25, 2014 21:50:25 GMT -6
Shala'Bekk vas Neema, Eric Lysander, and 1 more like this
Post by Maelstrom on Jan 25, 2014 21:50:25 GMT -6
Maelstrom walked through the filthy passages, lit only by dim red light. While not exactly monochrome, the effect did diminish the vibrancy of the world. In many ways, the environment resonated with him. His world was colored red. And it was without the life it once had. Still, he found his moments of joy.
Damn, he thought, as he walked the corridors towards his contact. I'm starting to think of this place as home. How am I starting to think of a hellhole like Omega as home?
He knew the answer. Over the past months, he docked frequently at the station, though never in the same bay. Still, it was enough that he went to the same kiosks to buy his ammo, food, and liquor. Though he worked with most of the mercenary groups in his attempts to take down Cerberus, he was forming pleasant yet businesslike relationships with many of them. Never close. But familiar.
Blake- he did not know the man's last name- always seemed to be right around the same spot. The human man was an information broker. Most of what he traded in regarded the mercenary activities of Omega, but that did not mean all his information was without interest to Maelstrom. The first time he contacted Maelstrom was not long after his initial raid working with Eclipse. One of the Eclipse sisters was romantically involved with one of the mercs who died in the raid. She wanted revenge and had convinced an infatuated salarian in the gang to join her. Blake's contacts told him all the details. He contacted Maelstrom and warned him in general, getting his fee only for providing the specifics of the plan. With those details, it was easy for Maelstrom to kill the ones waiting for him.
The second time Blake contacted him, he told him that one of the smugglers who stopped in at Omega regularly found an abandoned Cerberus base. When Maelstrom went to inspect the base, he found nothing of value, the place having been stripped clean. The only things that, to Maelstrom's mind, proved it was a Cerberus base were the lingering smells pharmaceuticals in the labs and the emblems painted on the walls.
He was not sure what Blake intended to sell this time, but he had learned to trust the man's information. As usual, he was sitting in the same old place. Maelstrom laughed as he wondered if some people ever really moved or if they just stood in the same place every hour of every day of the year.
The man was as lanky as any Maelstrom ever remembered seeing, though he had more meat on his bones than many of Omega's residents, malnourished either from lack of funds or from spending the funds they did have on drugs. The old-model pistol on his right hip hardly seemed a weapon by modern standards, not even utilizing thermal clips, prone to constant overheating. He claimed it saved him money on thermal clips. Definitely the cheap sort.
The man's face brightened with a smile when he saw Maelstrom walking towards him, even going as far as to set down the bowl of ramen he was eating. Two vorcha guarded him, though they were armed only with knives and clothed only in relatively well designed fabric outfits, not bothering with even light armor. Still, Maelstrom knew it was enough to make most men think twice about harming the information broker. They were not as concerned with the new arrival, focusing on their own bowls of ramen. It was actually humorous watching them to try to figure out how to eat a dish with noodles. Too many slipped through their fingers, and just upturning the bowl wasted too much of the broth.
"My VI tells me you have some information for me, and that you say it's urgent," Maelstrom said with a grin.
"We got lucky," Blake said with a huge smile. "One of my contacts at the docks told me about a shuttle that docked recently. One which looks a hell of a lot like yours, except it has a certain emblem on the side."
I knew they'd catch up with me eventually, Maelstrom thought, though not without a certain sense of disappointment. As much as he detested Omega, it was familiar. "Given up your information without asking a price?"
The man nodded that Maelstrom was wrong. "They're not here for you. Another contact said he saw a group of three men in military outfits talking to Aria about their objective and how to find it. He overheard. That's the information you'll have to pay for."
What could their objective here be? Maelstrom asked. In any case, it's a chance to kill three of their men.
"Name your price," Maelstrom said.
Maelstrom hid just around the corner from the young woman's apartment, in the building hallway. Though he knew the risks of leaving the man alive, he chose to sneak into the apartment rather than take out the Cerberus sniper across the chasm the hovercars flew through. To take him out would risk alerting the men in the apartment to his presence. At least two of them were in the young woman's apartment- the lock showed subtle signs of having been hacked. Most people would not have thought to check. Only someone as worried about being hunted as Maelstrom.
Blake's information said the young woman, Amanda Graves, was an incredibly skilled infiltrator who came to the station almost a year ago. The Cerberus men wanted Aria to tell them where to find her and subdue her without public spectacle. Maelstrom imagined she was either an escaped subject of their experiments or about to be subjected to them.
He heard footsteps, and he drew his Cerberus-modified geth submachine gun from its holster. One thing about the cramped metal halls of Omega that he appreciated, in quieter spaces like this, footsteps were distinct. These were definitely light enough to be an unarmored woman. Or maybe a salarian, but the first seemed more likely.
He heard the quiet beeping as her omni-tool key interfaced with the lock and opened the door. It closed a moment later. That was all the signal he needed. In seconds, he closed the distance to her apartment, and as he waved his omni-tool over the lock, Emily did the rest.
Inside, he found a young woman and two Cerberus commandoes, just as expected. Both men had their rifles trained on the door, and the young woman, heavy pistol already in hand, turned to face him as well.
Maelstrom jabbed with his left fist, knocking one of the men on his ass with a substantial biotic impact, made more potent by the impact of compacted air and its sudden decompression, which sounded in the tight quarters like sudden thunder. With his right hand, he aimed his SMG at the other commando and pulled the trigger. The man was dead before getting off a shot.
The woman seemed frozen in place, her weapon aimed at him rather than her assailants, stunned by the sudden and deadly release of force. Without giving another thought to her irrational actions, Maelstrom turned his gun on the second Cerberus commando and emptied the rest of the thermal clip.
The room was filled with silence and blood.
For the first time, he took a moment to appraise the young woman. She was no older than he. Her black hair was shoulder-length, and her build was slight but athletic. From the stance she held, he could tell she knew how to defend herself.
"Come on," Maelstrom said in a gentle yet commanding voice, as he pulled off his frightful helmet- decorated with a one-way decal of an eye with a red iris and an eerie toothy smile. "We have to get you off this station."
"How...?" she asked, seeming at a complete loss.
"There's no time. I have a shuttle and can get you off Omega, out of Cerberus' grasp, but it has to be now. There's another outside, and I don't know how many more might be elsewhere on this station."
She seemed to run through a thousand permutations of what her options and the potential consequences might be, before merely nodding. With that, Maelstrom put his helmet back on, took her free hand, and began leading her out of the building the same way he entered, a way few would think to check.
"Why was Cerberus after you?" he asked, as they neared the Vengeance. Most of his time since rescuing Amanda Graves was spent fleeing through the back alleys of Omega as fast as they could. She impressed him. Her background obviously included either professional athletics or military training, as she kept up with him without any seeming difficulty.
She was silent a moment. "Cerberus found me in my teens. Took me from my home. Ran experiments trying to turn me into the perfect little soldier girl. Well, more of an infiltrator than a soldier, I suppose. It was excruciating. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I had to get out of their labs, and I took the first chance that came my way."
He could sympathize with her story. It made him want to punish the organization all the more.
Emily opened the hatch to his shuttle as usual. He hopped in, and Amanda followed a second behind him. As the hatch hissed closed behind him, he felt a small circle of cold metal press against the side of his neck. He felt disoriented for a moment. His legs gave out under him. He tried to reach for something to catch himself, but his arms refused to move.
Continuing on in an almost casual tone, she said, "But I appreciated what they made me into. When I took my chance, it was to make the best of myself for the good of all humanity."
Maelstrom wanted to cuss at her, but even his speech would not work. Thankfully, his breathing seemed unaffected.
The woman bent over and removed his helmet. With a grunt of effort, she turned him so he was lying on his back. The smug smile worn plainly across her face made him want to kill her.
"Don't worry, Cerberus doesn't want you dead. Not yet anyway. You've made the Illusive Man very upset. He'll want to tend to you himself. This paralytic should wear off in an hour or so, but I've got a few more doses, and I've got a nice stasis pod waiting back at our shuttle."
He was not worried. She would be dead soon enough.
She kicked him hard in his side, but the armor absorbed most of the impact. Another kick followed, this one to his head. It dazed him slightly and drew blood, but it was nothing serious.
"That was for Ramirez and Grey!" she yelled. "And I'll have plenty more time to make you pay for them after I get this shuttle underway."
"I really should thank you for bringing me here," she yelled over her shoulder as she made her way to the cockpit. "It saves us the job of having to go over this station with a fine-toothed comb to find our stolen ship."
"Stackhouse, you there?" she called over her comms.
"I hear you, Miss Davis," a man's voice answered back. "What's your status? I found Ramirez and Grey dead in the apartment."
"This asshole gunned them down before they could get a shot off, but he's contained now. He brought me back to our stolen ship. I'm going to have to get her off the ground, and I don't know what kind of lockout subroutines he's installed on her yet. I'll meet you and the rest of the team back at the shuttle once I'm done, though."
"Sure you don't want one of us to come assist?" the man asked.
"I've got this, just meet me back at our shuttle."
"Understood. Just be careful Allison. Over and out."
In a more commanding voice, she said, "VI, initialize engines."
He knew what was coming next, even though he could not see her.
"Error. Unknown user. Security lockouts in effect," Emily answered, appearing in her original form and using the same inflections.
At the same moment, he knew, an encrypted datastream started running on a backup terminal located on the aft port bulkhead of the cockpit. It was a sophisticated protocol, but nothing a truly skilled tech would have to think twice to solve. A perfect lure.
"You call this security?" the woman laughed.
He heard a single beep, as she tapped her omni-tool. As soon as the connection between the two systems was made, a sound like a thousand circuits frying at once, not far off from what it was, filled the closed space of the shuttle. In that moment, enough electricity to down a YMIR mech with full armor and shields surged from the panel and into the young woman's body. Then all was silent, save for a soft, moist thud as she collapsed to the ground dead. The scent of singed hair and charred flesh wafted slowly over, making him wish that it would not take the whole hour for the drug to work out of his system.
The first thing Maelstrom had done upon regaining control of his body was to dump the woman's corpse out the side of his hatch. After that, he used the data Emily obtained while the young woman was talking with her Cerberus friends to send a text-only message to the man from the comms, telling him the operative was almost done and would be on her way soon. When he replied back that he was pleased to hear it, Emily was able to use several nearby comms terminals to triangulate the source.
The Vengeance was coming in slow and quiet on the hanger where the Cerberus shuttle was docked. Maelstrom knew his ship was not meant for combat, that he would only have a few seconds once he started the battle to eliminate his foes. His shuttle drifted smoothly into the mouth of the docking bay. There sat a Cerberus vessel almost identical to his, the men lounging around an open hatch. Maelstrom smiled at his fortune.
The men looked up, as Maelstrom adjusted the angle on his craft. At first they seemed unconcerned, having been expecting the ship. They quickly rose to their feet, though, when they realized its angle was wrong for landing. It was too late. Maelstrom pressed the trigger for his secondary weapon. The heavy weapon on his craft, a slightly more powerful version of the M-920 Cain, launched a round into the main compartment of the enemy shuttle. The explosion was twice as powerful as it should have been, the enemy craft's main reactor breaching and increasing the damage. None of the men were left in one piece, much less alive.
Something pinged off his craft's shields.
"Shields at eighty-one percent," Emily replied.
Maelstrom checked his sensors. They were useless at detecting thermal signatures with the blazing heat of the burning shuttle reflecting off every wall in the bay. Another shot pinged off the shields. He searched with his eyes, quickly finding a sniper on an upper catwalk, holding an anti-material rifle.
Maelstrom piloted the shuttle to port as he changed the pitch of his craft and brought its anti-personnel guns to bear. The man fired a third shot and missed. That was when Maelstrom pulled the trigger. The man's shields held up to the first few impacts, but he had nowhere to take cover on the walkway. The next several shots shredded through his suit. A moment later, he collapsed in a bloody mass.
Maelstrom steadied his breathing, as he looked down the scope, adjusting for range. He knew he could not stay on Omega, but he felt secure enough to call in a favor with Eclipse, using one of their docking bays to stow his ship for one last hour. The elcor who operated the kiosk had at first objected to him using the counter to get a clear shot at his target, but a few sharp words and a small number of credits ended his protestations.
It was rare for him to take out targets in such a cool and detached fashion. He preferred being up close and in the thick of things when he fought. It made the killing seem somehow more justifiable to him. Still, there were times when this way served to send a clearer message, and a message was what needed to be sent now.
He checked again to make sure there were no civilians too close. The only parties near the lanky man, sitting atop a metal crate conveniently positioned within a couple feet of his usual spot, were two relatively well-clothed vorcha. Maelstrom adjusted his aim from the man's heart to his head. The head would be quicker. He needed to send a message, not inflict suffering.
"Emily, transmit the message to Blake."
The man looked down at his omni-tool as it registered a new message, and Maelstrom's sights followed him. He tapped a couple quick commands to open it.
Maelstrom had thought the whole situation out. The young woman was operating under a fake name. Aria was smarter than to be fooled by someone like that. More than that, though, Maelstrom had played back the footage Emily collected from the audiovisual device in his helmet. The woman did not seem surprised at all to find the Cerberus men there. There were no personal possessions around the apartment. A further check found that the apartment was rented out only a couple days before. She was no sleeper agent, put in place a year back. A Cerberus team would have had no reason to talk to Aria, and she would not have given them such obviously flawed information. And Blake was a better information broker than to sell such flawed data.
Still, Maelstrom wanted to be certain.
The message was simple. "I'm alive, Blake. And they're not. -Maelstrom"
Blake's eyes grew wide with panic, and he seemed to stop breathing in shock. He looked up. Maelstrom's crosshairs were between the man's eyes. Blake's terror was apparent. If he had not been lying, he would only be surprised, not terrified.
Maelstrom pulled the trigger.
Damn, he thought, as he walked the corridors towards his contact. I'm starting to think of this place as home. How am I starting to think of a hellhole like Omega as home?
He knew the answer. Over the past months, he docked frequently at the station, though never in the same bay. Still, it was enough that he went to the same kiosks to buy his ammo, food, and liquor. Though he worked with most of the mercenary groups in his attempts to take down Cerberus, he was forming pleasant yet businesslike relationships with many of them. Never close. But familiar.
Blake- he did not know the man's last name- always seemed to be right around the same spot. The human man was an information broker. Most of what he traded in regarded the mercenary activities of Omega, but that did not mean all his information was without interest to Maelstrom. The first time he contacted Maelstrom was not long after his initial raid working with Eclipse. One of the Eclipse sisters was romantically involved with one of the mercs who died in the raid. She wanted revenge and had convinced an infatuated salarian in the gang to join her. Blake's contacts told him all the details. He contacted Maelstrom and warned him in general, getting his fee only for providing the specifics of the plan. With those details, it was easy for Maelstrom to kill the ones waiting for him.
The second time Blake contacted him, he told him that one of the smugglers who stopped in at Omega regularly found an abandoned Cerberus base. When Maelstrom went to inspect the base, he found nothing of value, the place having been stripped clean. The only things that, to Maelstrom's mind, proved it was a Cerberus base were the lingering smells pharmaceuticals in the labs and the emblems painted on the walls.
He was not sure what Blake intended to sell this time, but he had learned to trust the man's information. As usual, he was sitting in the same old place. Maelstrom laughed as he wondered if some people ever really moved or if they just stood in the same place every hour of every day of the year.
The man was as lanky as any Maelstrom ever remembered seeing, though he had more meat on his bones than many of Omega's residents, malnourished either from lack of funds or from spending the funds they did have on drugs. The old-model pistol on his right hip hardly seemed a weapon by modern standards, not even utilizing thermal clips, prone to constant overheating. He claimed it saved him money on thermal clips. Definitely the cheap sort.
The man's face brightened with a smile when he saw Maelstrom walking towards him, even going as far as to set down the bowl of ramen he was eating. Two vorcha guarded him, though they were armed only with knives and clothed only in relatively well designed fabric outfits, not bothering with even light armor. Still, Maelstrom knew it was enough to make most men think twice about harming the information broker. They were not as concerned with the new arrival, focusing on their own bowls of ramen. It was actually humorous watching them to try to figure out how to eat a dish with noodles. Too many slipped through their fingers, and just upturning the bowl wasted too much of the broth.
"My VI tells me you have some information for me, and that you say it's urgent," Maelstrom said with a grin.
"We got lucky," Blake said with a huge smile. "One of my contacts at the docks told me about a shuttle that docked recently. One which looks a hell of a lot like yours, except it has a certain emblem on the side."
I knew they'd catch up with me eventually, Maelstrom thought, though not without a certain sense of disappointment. As much as he detested Omega, it was familiar. "Given up your information without asking a price?"
The man nodded that Maelstrom was wrong. "They're not here for you. Another contact said he saw a group of three men in military outfits talking to Aria about their objective and how to find it. He overheard. That's the information you'll have to pay for."
What could their objective here be? Maelstrom asked. In any case, it's a chance to kill three of their men.
"Name your price," Maelstrom said.
###
Maelstrom hid just around the corner from the young woman's apartment, in the building hallway. Though he knew the risks of leaving the man alive, he chose to sneak into the apartment rather than take out the Cerberus sniper across the chasm the hovercars flew through. To take him out would risk alerting the men in the apartment to his presence. At least two of them were in the young woman's apartment- the lock showed subtle signs of having been hacked. Most people would not have thought to check. Only someone as worried about being hunted as Maelstrom.
Blake's information said the young woman, Amanda Graves, was an incredibly skilled infiltrator who came to the station almost a year ago. The Cerberus men wanted Aria to tell them where to find her and subdue her without public spectacle. Maelstrom imagined she was either an escaped subject of their experiments or about to be subjected to them.
He heard footsteps, and he drew his Cerberus-modified geth submachine gun from its holster. One thing about the cramped metal halls of Omega that he appreciated, in quieter spaces like this, footsteps were distinct. These were definitely light enough to be an unarmored woman. Or maybe a salarian, but the first seemed more likely.
He heard the quiet beeping as her omni-tool key interfaced with the lock and opened the door. It closed a moment later. That was all the signal he needed. In seconds, he closed the distance to her apartment, and as he waved his omni-tool over the lock, Emily did the rest.
Inside, he found a young woman and two Cerberus commandoes, just as expected. Both men had their rifles trained on the door, and the young woman, heavy pistol already in hand, turned to face him as well.
Maelstrom jabbed with his left fist, knocking one of the men on his ass with a substantial biotic impact, made more potent by the impact of compacted air and its sudden decompression, which sounded in the tight quarters like sudden thunder. With his right hand, he aimed his SMG at the other commando and pulled the trigger. The man was dead before getting off a shot.
The woman seemed frozen in place, her weapon aimed at him rather than her assailants, stunned by the sudden and deadly release of force. Without giving another thought to her irrational actions, Maelstrom turned his gun on the second Cerberus commando and emptied the rest of the thermal clip.
The room was filled with silence and blood.
For the first time, he took a moment to appraise the young woman. She was no older than he. Her black hair was shoulder-length, and her build was slight but athletic. From the stance she held, he could tell she knew how to defend herself.
"Come on," Maelstrom said in a gentle yet commanding voice, as he pulled off his frightful helmet- decorated with a one-way decal of an eye with a red iris and an eerie toothy smile. "We have to get you off this station."
"How...?" she asked, seeming at a complete loss.
"There's no time. I have a shuttle and can get you off Omega, out of Cerberus' grasp, but it has to be now. There's another outside, and I don't know how many more might be elsewhere on this station."
She seemed to run through a thousand permutations of what her options and the potential consequences might be, before merely nodding. With that, Maelstrom put his helmet back on, took her free hand, and began leading her out of the building the same way he entered, a way few would think to check.
###
"Why was Cerberus after you?" he asked, as they neared the Vengeance. Most of his time since rescuing Amanda Graves was spent fleeing through the back alleys of Omega as fast as they could. She impressed him. Her background obviously included either professional athletics or military training, as she kept up with him without any seeming difficulty.
She was silent a moment. "Cerberus found me in my teens. Took me from my home. Ran experiments trying to turn me into the perfect little soldier girl. Well, more of an infiltrator than a soldier, I suppose. It was excruciating. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I had to get out of their labs, and I took the first chance that came my way."
He could sympathize with her story. It made him want to punish the organization all the more.
Emily opened the hatch to his shuttle as usual. He hopped in, and Amanda followed a second behind him. As the hatch hissed closed behind him, he felt a small circle of cold metal press against the side of his neck. He felt disoriented for a moment. His legs gave out under him. He tried to reach for something to catch himself, but his arms refused to move.
Continuing on in an almost casual tone, she said, "But I appreciated what they made me into. When I took my chance, it was to make the best of myself for the good of all humanity."
Maelstrom wanted to cuss at her, but even his speech would not work. Thankfully, his breathing seemed unaffected.
The woman bent over and removed his helmet. With a grunt of effort, she turned him so he was lying on his back. The smug smile worn plainly across her face made him want to kill her.
"Don't worry, Cerberus doesn't want you dead. Not yet anyway. You've made the Illusive Man very upset. He'll want to tend to you himself. This paralytic should wear off in an hour or so, but I've got a few more doses, and I've got a nice stasis pod waiting back at our shuttle."
He was not worried. She would be dead soon enough.
She kicked him hard in his side, but the armor absorbed most of the impact. Another kick followed, this one to his head. It dazed him slightly and drew blood, but it was nothing serious.
"That was for Ramirez and Grey!" she yelled. "And I'll have plenty more time to make you pay for them after I get this shuttle underway."
"I really should thank you for bringing me here," she yelled over her shoulder as she made her way to the cockpit. "It saves us the job of having to go over this station with a fine-toothed comb to find our stolen ship."
"Stackhouse, you there?" she called over her comms.
"I hear you, Miss Davis," a man's voice answered back. "What's your status? I found Ramirez and Grey dead in the apartment."
"This asshole gunned them down before they could get a shot off, but he's contained now. He brought me back to our stolen ship. I'm going to have to get her off the ground, and I don't know what kind of lockout subroutines he's installed on her yet. I'll meet you and the rest of the team back at the shuttle once I'm done, though."
"Sure you don't want one of us to come assist?" the man asked.
"I've got this, just meet me back at our shuttle."
"Understood. Just be careful Allison. Over and out."
In a more commanding voice, she said, "VI, initialize engines."
He knew what was coming next, even though he could not see her.
"Error. Unknown user. Security lockouts in effect," Emily answered, appearing in her original form and using the same inflections.
At the same moment, he knew, an encrypted datastream started running on a backup terminal located on the aft port bulkhead of the cockpit. It was a sophisticated protocol, but nothing a truly skilled tech would have to think twice to solve. A perfect lure.
"You call this security?" the woman laughed.
He heard a single beep, as she tapped her omni-tool. As soon as the connection between the two systems was made, a sound like a thousand circuits frying at once, not far off from what it was, filled the closed space of the shuttle. In that moment, enough electricity to down a YMIR mech with full armor and shields surged from the panel and into the young woman's body. Then all was silent, save for a soft, moist thud as she collapsed to the ground dead. The scent of singed hair and charred flesh wafted slowly over, making him wish that it would not take the whole hour for the drug to work out of his system.
###
The first thing Maelstrom had done upon regaining control of his body was to dump the woman's corpse out the side of his hatch. After that, he used the data Emily obtained while the young woman was talking with her Cerberus friends to send a text-only message to the man from the comms, telling him the operative was almost done and would be on her way soon. When he replied back that he was pleased to hear it, Emily was able to use several nearby comms terminals to triangulate the source.
The Vengeance was coming in slow and quiet on the hanger where the Cerberus shuttle was docked. Maelstrom knew his ship was not meant for combat, that he would only have a few seconds once he started the battle to eliminate his foes. His shuttle drifted smoothly into the mouth of the docking bay. There sat a Cerberus vessel almost identical to his, the men lounging around an open hatch. Maelstrom smiled at his fortune.
The men looked up, as Maelstrom adjusted the angle on his craft. At first they seemed unconcerned, having been expecting the ship. They quickly rose to their feet, though, when they realized its angle was wrong for landing. It was too late. Maelstrom pressed the trigger for his secondary weapon. The heavy weapon on his craft, a slightly more powerful version of the M-920 Cain, launched a round into the main compartment of the enemy shuttle. The explosion was twice as powerful as it should have been, the enemy craft's main reactor breaching and increasing the damage. None of the men were left in one piece, much less alive.
Something pinged off his craft's shields.
"Shields at eighty-one percent," Emily replied.
Maelstrom checked his sensors. They were useless at detecting thermal signatures with the blazing heat of the burning shuttle reflecting off every wall in the bay. Another shot pinged off the shields. He searched with his eyes, quickly finding a sniper on an upper catwalk, holding an anti-material rifle.
Maelstrom piloted the shuttle to port as he changed the pitch of his craft and brought its anti-personnel guns to bear. The man fired a third shot and missed. That was when Maelstrom pulled the trigger. The man's shields held up to the first few impacts, but he had nowhere to take cover on the walkway. The next several shots shredded through his suit. A moment later, he collapsed in a bloody mass.
###
Maelstrom steadied his breathing, as he looked down the scope, adjusting for range. He knew he could not stay on Omega, but he felt secure enough to call in a favor with Eclipse, using one of their docking bays to stow his ship for one last hour. The elcor who operated the kiosk had at first objected to him using the counter to get a clear shot at his target, but a few sharp words and a small number of credits ended his protestations.
It was rare for him to take out targets in such a cool and detached fashion. He preferred being up close and in the thick of things when he fought. It made the killing seem somehow more justifiable to him. Still, there were times when this way served to send a clearer message, and a message was what needed to be sent now.
He checked again to make sure there were no civilians too close. The only parties near the lanky man, sitting atop a metal crate conveniently positioned within a couple feet of his usual spot, were two relatively well-clothed vorcha. Maelstrom adjusted his aim from the man's heart to his head. The head would be quicker. He needed to send a message, not inflict suffering.
"Emily, transmit the message to Blake."
The man looked down at his omni-tool as it registered a new message, and Maelstrom's sights followed him. He tapped a couple quick commands to open it.
Maelstrom had thought the whole situation out. The young woman was operating under a fake name. Aria was smarter than to be fooled by someone like that. More than that, though, Maelstrom had played back the footage Emily collected from the audiovisual device in his helmet. The woman did not seem surprised at all to find the Cerberus men there. There were no personal possessions around the apartment. A further check found that the apartment was rented out only a couple days before. She was no sleeper agent, put in place a year back. A Cerberus team would have had no reason to talk to Aria, and she would not have given them such obviously flawed information. And Blake was a better information broker than to sell such flawed data.
Still, Maelstrom wanted to be certain.
The message was simple. "I'm alive, Blake. And they're not. -Maelstrom"
Blake's eyes grew wide with panic, and he seemed to stop breathing in shock. He looked up. Maelstrom's crosshairs were between the man's eyes. Blake's terror was apparent. If he had not been lying, he would only be surprised, not terrified.
Maelstrom pulled the trigger.