Pre-dawn cold bit through his jacket like it had teeth.
Haven's Point at 0200 was a different animal than Haven's Point at noon. The colony's minimal street lighting — half of it broken, the rest running on emergency power — cast isolated pools of amber in a landscape of shadow. The industrial sector on the eastern edge sat beyond even those meager lights, a cluster of warehouses and processing facilities that had been built for a mining boom and abandoned when the ore ran out.
He found Garrus at the rendezvous point — a decommissioned smelter whose collapsed roof provided concealment and sightlines. The turian had changed from his civilian clothes into something more practical: dark armor that wasn't C-Sec issue, a Mantis sniper rifle mag-locked to his back, and a visor over his left eye that flickered with targeting data.
"You brought a sniper rifle to a surveillance op."
"I brought a sniper rifle to a Terminus warehouse investigation." Garrus checked the Mantis's thermal clip with practiced fingers. "There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"Optimism."
"Dry humor. Dead delivery. That's the Garrus from the games. Exactly."
They settled into position. The target warehouse was a hundred and twenty meters east — a squat, reinforced structure with loading bays on the north side and a personnel entrance on the south. No external security cameras, which was itself suspicious. Every other warehouse in the sector had at least basic monitoring, even if most of it was broken.
"Passive scans only," Garrus murmured. His visor threw pale blue light across his scarred mandible. "If they have electronic countermeasures, active pinging will flag us."
His omni-tool ran low-power spectral analysis. The warehouse's walls were standard prefab — but the loading bay doors had been reinforced. New locks. Fresh welding marks. Someone had invested in this building recently, and not for agricultural storage.
Three hours of nothing. Cold seeped through his jacket, through his pants, through the soles of his boots. His knees ached from crouching. His stomach growled at the two-forty mark and he pressed his fist against his abdomen to quiet it.
"This is the part they skip in the games. The waiting. The cold. The cramped muscles and empty stomach. Garrus does this like it's breathing — four hours of surveillance without shifting position, mandibles still, eyes locked on target."
At 0312, headlights.
A ground transport — heavy model, armored sides, no colony registration visible — rolled up to the warehouse's north bay. Three figures exited. Two humans, one turian. The turian moved with military precision, covering angles while the humans worked the loading bay door controls. Fresh thermal clips on their belts. Weapons holstered but unsecured.
"That's new hardware," Garrus said. His subvocals had dropped into a register so low it was more vibration than sound. "Phaeston assault rifles. Current production model. Those don't show up in the Terminus through legal channels."
The loading bay opened. Interior lights flicked on — brief, controlled. Enough to work by, not enough to be seen from a distance. Crates inside, stacked neatly. Dozens of them.
A second transport arrived at 0318. This one carried two more figures and a crate that required both of them to lift. The transfer was efficient — fifteen minutes, no conversation, practiced coordination that spoke to frequent repetition.
"I count five hostiles," Garrus murmured. "Two inside, three at the transports. The turian's running point — military experience, probably Hierarchy-trained. The humans are muscle."
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to see what's in those crates." His mandibles flexed. "And I want to download their shipping manifests. If the data matches what I think it matches, this warehouse is a node in a network that goes all the way back to the Citadel."
"They'll be armed."
"So am I." The Mantis's stock settled against his shoulder. "I'm not planning on a firefight. We wait for them to leave, then we go in."
"And if they don't leave?"
"Then we improvise."
They left at 0341. The transports rolled east toward the colony's perimeter and vanished into the dark. The warehouse lights died. Silence resettled like dust.
Garrus waited another twelve minutes. Counting. Confirming. Then he moved, and moving, he was something else — silent, fluid, every step placed with a precision that bordered on mechanical. He'd done this before. Many times. The body knew the dance even when the mind was churning.
They approached from the south. The personnel entrance had an electronic lock — mid-grade encryption, the kind that said we don't expect sophisticated threats but we don't want drunks wandering in. His omni-tool's decryption suite — Webb's Alliance-issue software, still active despite the desertion — chewed through the encryption in forty-five seconds.
"Slow," Garrus observed.
"Military grade, not spy grade. Sue me."
The door opened. Darkness inside, cut by the amber glow of standby power indicators on equipment he couldn't identify yet. His omni-tool's flashlight function — no, too visible. He switched to the low-light enhancement Webb's combat training had included in the hardsuit HUD. Not as good as Garrus's visor, but enough to navigate.
The warehouse interior was organized with disturbing efficiency. Crates in rows, labeled with codes that matched standard colonial agricultural manifests. Innocent labels. He popped the nearest one.
Inside: Phaeston assault rifles. Six of them, packed in shock foam, serial numbers filed off. Factory fresh.
The next crate: Mantis sniper components. Barrels, stocks, scopes, thermal clip adapters. Enough to assemble thirty rifles.
The next: Something heavier. Thanix-derivative cannon components — miniaturized, modular, designed for installation on frigate-class vessels. This wasn't small arms. This was ship-to-ship weaponry.
"Fleet ordnance," Garrus said. His voice had gone flat. The dry humor from earlier was gone, replaced by something harder. "Whoever's running this isn't arming gangs. They're equipping a navy."
A console in the back office. He activated it — no password protection, which meant the operators trusted the physical security enough to skip digital. Sloppy. Or arrogant. The difference mattered less than the data.
Shipping manifests. Origin codes. Transfer records.
Garrus leaned over his shoulder, reading turian faster than he could process human.
"These manifests." The turian's voice cracked. Not much — a fracture in the composure, quick and deep. "Origin codes... EL-7794. EL-7812. EL-7803."
"What do those mean?"
"C-Sec evidence lockup. Section E, Level 7. That's where confiscated weapons go after processing." Garrus straightened. His hands were on the console edge, talons leaving scratches in the metal surface. "These weapons were seized by C-Sec. Logged into evidence. And then someone moved them here. To the Terminus. To be sold."
"His own people. His own organization. The institution he dedicated his career to is dirty, and the proof is in front of him in neat little rows of filed-off serial numbers."
"I need to copy this." Garrus's omni-tool was already interfacing with the console. Data streaming — manifests, codes, transfer authorizations. "Names. I need the names of who authorized these transfers."
The download counter climbed. Forty percent. Fifty-five. Seventy.
A sound. Outside. Engine noise — familiar engine noise, the heavy throb of the same transports from earlier.
"They're back." He grabbed Garrus's arm. "How much do you have?"
"Eighty-two percent. I need another—"
"We don't have another. They're here."
Garrus's mandibles locked tight against his jaw. He yanked the omni-tool connection, pocketing the incomplete data, and drew the Mantis in a single fluid motion that belonged in a training video.
The south entrance was closest. They moved — fast, quiet, not quiet enough. His boot caught a loose floor panel. The clang echoed through the warehouse like a gunshot.
Voices outside. Sharp. The personnel entrance handle rattled.
"Back door," Garrus hissed. "Loading bay — manual release on the inside."
They ran. The loading bay's manual release was a lever system designed for emergency evacuation — he grabbed it with both hands and pulled. Rusted. Stuck. He pulled harder. His shoulder screamed — the one that had taken the graze on the Fortune, healed on the surface but tender underneath.
The lever gave. The bay door rose eighteen inches — enough to roll under. Garrus went first, the Mantis held against his chest, sliding through with turian flexibility. He followed, scraping his back against the door's lower edge, and they were outside in the cold dark.
Behind them, the personnel entrance opened. Light spilled into the warehouse. Shouting — two voices, then three.
"Move," Garrus said.
They ran. The industrial sector's maze of decommissioned buildings and collapsed infrastructure became an asset — cover, corners, shadows. Garrus moved like he'd been born in darkness, placing each step with a sniper's precision. His own movement was uglier, louder, limited by human night vision and a shoulder that pulsed pain with every stride.
A flashlight beam swept the corridor behind them. Close. Voices bouncing off prefab walls.
Garrus pulled him into an alcove — a recessed doorway in an abandoned processing plant. They pressed against the wall. His breathing was ragged. Garrus's was inaudible.
The flashlight swept past. Footsteps — three sets — continued down the corridor. Fading.
They waited. Two minutes. Three. Five. His shoulder throbbed with his heartbeat. Something warm trickled down his arm — the scab from the Fortune had torn open. Blood soaked through his jacket sleeve, invisible in the dark.
Garrus's omni-tool glowed faintly. He was already reviewing the copied data, scrolling through manifests with a speed that suggested he was looking for something specific. The blue light caught the edges of his mandibles. They were trembling.
"Eighty-two percent," the turian said. "Enough. More than enough."
"What did you find?"
"Authorization codes. Three C-Sec officers, all from the evidence management division. Two names I recognize. One..." He paused. The trembling in his mandibles stopped. Something worse replaced it — a stillness that went deeper than calm. "One is my former supervisor. Executor Pallin's direct appointment."
The silence between them was a different kind than the earlier surveillance quiet. This one had weight. History. A career's worth of believing in a system, shattering against proof that the system was rotten.
He didn't say I'm sorry or are you okay or any of the things people said when someone's world collapsed. Webb wouldn't have. And he was trying to be the version of Webb that people trusted.
"What do you want to do with it?"
Garrus looked at him. In the faint omni-tool light, his eyes were hard and bright.
"I want to burn the whole thing down."
"I can help with that. But not tonight. Tonight we disappear, let them think it was random thieves, and figure out our next move when we're not bleeding in an alley."
Garrus glanced at his shoulder. The blood had soaked through the jacket and was dripping from his fingertips onto the ferrocrete.
"You're hit."
"Reopened an old wound. It's manageable."
"It needs pressure."
He tore a strip from the lining of his jacket and pressed it against the graze. Makeshift, messy, enough to slow the bleeding. His hands were steady. The pain was secondary — a problem to solve later, when solving it wouldn't get them killed.
They moved through the industrial sector's back corridors, angling west toward the colony's residential blocks. The warehouse crew's search pattern expanded behind them — flashlights sweeping wider arcs, voices coordinating by comm. Professional. Organized. These weren't random thugs guarding stolen goods. These were operatives.
They reached the residential sector at 0423. The streets were empty. Garrus ducked into the shadow of a water tank, and he followed.
"They'll know someone was inside," Garrus said. "Console was accessed, data was copied. They'll check their logs, find the download, and know exactly what we took."
"Which means they'll move the inventory. Tonight, probably."
"And they'll look for whoever broke in. A human and a turian, working together, in a colony of two thousand people." He paused. "We're not hard to find."
"Then we need to make sure finding us is more expensive than leaving."
Garrus looked at him sidelong. The assessment was different now — less cautious professional, more something he couldn't name. Respect, maybe. Or the recognition that comes from shared danger.
"You're not what I expected, Webb."
"What did you expect?"
"Another Terminus opportunist. Someone who'd help as long as it was profitable and disappear when it got dangerous." He secured the Mantis against his back. "You didn't run."
"Running from dangerous situations hasn't worked out great for me lately."
The turian rumble again. Not quite a laugh. Close enough.
Blood seeped through the makeshift bandage. His shoulder ached. The data on Garrus's omni-tool was worth more than anything in that warehouse — names, authorization codes, proof that C-Sec was compromised at the highest levels.
And somewhere in the colony's eastern sector, the warehouse crew was discovering that their secrets weren't secret anymore. The clock had started. Whatever happened next would happen fast.
Garrus straightened.
"My room's at the Vagrant's Rest. Terrible name, worse mattresses. But it has a med-kit."
"Lead the way."
They moved. The colony's pre-dawn silence wrapped around them. Somewhere, a child cried and was comforted. Somewhere else, the water recyclers hummed with their new filtration unit, steady and reliable.
And in the industrial sector, the warehouse crew was already on their comms. Already calling for backup. Already starting to hunt.
Dawn was forty minutes away. They had until then to become ghosts, or the colony's newest problem.
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