Garrus's hand closed around his collar and yanked him sideways into a doorframe half a second before the flashlight swept the corridor.
The beam cut through the pre-dawn murk like a blade — white, harsh, methodical. Footsteps behind it. Two sets. Moving in a staggered pattern that spoke to combat training, not street-level thuggery.
"They're running a box pattern," Garrus breathed. His mouth was three inches from Webb's ear, subvocals so low they were more vibration than sound. "Two-man teams, overlapping coverage. Professional sweep."
"How many teams?"
"At least three. Probably four. They called for backup while we were in the alley."
"Eight professionals combing a colony of two thousand people for a human and a turian. In a colony where turians are rare enough to count on one hand."
The flashlight moved on. They waited. Ten seconds. Twenty.
"Maintenance tunnels," Garrus said. "Under the industrial sector. I mapped them during my first day here — back when I was looking for the warehouse from the other direction."
"You mapped maintenance tunnels on your first day?"
"I'm thorough."
"Understatement of the century."
They moved. Not running — Garrus set the pace at a controlled walk, fast enough to cover ground, slow enough to hear approaching threats. The residential sector's narrow corridors connected to the industrial zone through a series of access ways originally built for mining equipment transport. Wide enough for two people, dark enough to hide in, and more importantly — not on any map the warehouse crew would have studied.
Unless they had colony schematics. Which professionals might.
The access hatch was behind a decommissioned ore processor, sealed with a manual wheel lock that hadn't been touched in years. Garrus's talons found the wheel in the dark and twisted. Metal screamed against metal. Both of them froze.
Nothing. No response from the search teams. The sound had been loud in the corridor but the industrial sector's ambient noise — ventilation systems, power relays, the constant low hum of a colony fighting to stay alive — swallowed it.
The hatch opened onto a ladder descending into absolute black. The smell hit first: stale air, mineral dust, and the particular dampness of underground spaces that had been sealed too long. His omni-tool's light function cast a weak amber circle on the walls — rough-cut stone, mining supports, conduit pipes running along the ceiling.
"After you," Garrus said.
"Generous."
"Turians can see better in the dark. I'll cover the rear."
He climbed down. Fifteen rungs. His shoulder screamed at rung eight, the reopened wound pulling with every grip. Blood had soaked through the makeshift bandage and was making the rungs slick under his left hand.
The tunnel at the bottom ran east-west, barely tall enough to stand in. Pipes overhead, cables underfoot, and the kind of darkness that made your brain invent shapes in the periphery.
Garrus dropped down behind him and immediately oriented. His visor painted the tunnel in cool blue targeting light.
"Thirty meters east, junction. The left branch runs under the admin district. The right goes to the spaceport foundations." He paused. "We want left."
They moved through the tunnels in silence. The search above was a distant thing now — muffled footsteps, occasional comm chatter that filtered through the stone as formless noise. Down here, the colony's bones were visible in a way the surface never showed. Patched pipes, jury-rigged electrical junctions, support beams reinforced with materials that didn't match. Kowalski's handiwork, probably. Years of it.
At the junction, Garrus stopped. He sat on a pipe housing, pulled out his omni-tool, and opened the stolen data.
The blue light of the interface made his face look carved from stone. Turian expressions were all angles — mandibles, brow plates, the sharp line of the jaw — and in this light, every angle was sharp enough to cut.
"I filed my first report on the evidence discrepancies fourteen months ago." His voice was quiet. Not the controlled quiet of operational security — something rawer. "Weapons seized during raids weren't matching the quantities logged into evidence. Small amounts at first. A crate here, a shipping container there. I thought it was clerical error."
He scrolled through the manifests. Name after name. Authorization code after authorization code.
"I escalated through channels. Filed with Internal Affairs. Requested an audit. Every time, the response came back the same: 'Investigation pending.' 'Resources allocated.' 'Thank you for your diligence, Officer Vakarian.'" The mandibles pressed flat. "Three months ago, my access to the evidence database was revoked. My supervisor — Pallin's appointment, a turian named Actus — told me the case had been reassigned to a senior investigator. When I asked who, he said it was classified."
"So you came here."
"I traced the shipping routes. The manifests I couldn't access anymore — I had copies. Fragments. Enough to follow the trail from the Citadel to three independent colonies in the Terminus. Haven's Point was the most active node."
He closed the omni-tool. The tunnel went dark except for the faint glow of Webb's amber light.
"I reported my suspicions through proper channels. To Actus. Who is on this list." A pause. "They knew what I was investigating because I told them. Every report I filed gave them time to adapt, relocate, cover their tracks. My own diligence made their operation more efficient."
The silence in the maintenance tunnel was the kind that belonged in confessionals.
"That's not on you," Webb said. "You did what the system was designed for. The system was compromised."
"The system is C-Sec. I am C-Sec." He stopped. Corrected. "Was."
"In the games, Garrus leaves C-Sec because Shepard offers something better. Here, C-Sec pushed him out first. Different path, same destination — a good man in a broken system looking for something worth the fight."
"Come on. Vasquez can get us somewhere safe."
He opened his omni-tool and keyed the administrative channel. Vasquez answered on the second ping — her voice tight with the particular alertness of someone who hadn't been sleeping when the call came.
"Webb. It's four in the morning."
"I need extraction. Me and a friend. We've got hostile elements searching the colony and evidence that connects to your pirate problem."
A pause. Three seconds of Vasquez calculating costs and benefits with the precision of someone who'd been doing that math for six years.
"Maintenance access point seven. Admin district, behind the secondary water tank. I'll have the door open in ten minutes."
"Copy."
"Webb."
"Yeah?"
"You brought trouble to my colony."
"I also brought evidence that the people choking your supply lines have C-Sec protection. The weapons flowing through that warehouse are connected to your pirates."
Another pause. Longer.
"Ten minutes. Don't be late."
---
[Haven's Point — Administrative Bunker, 0515]
The admin bunker was underneath the colony's operations center — a reinforced room originally designed as a storm shelter for the mining settlement's leadership. Concrete walls. Emergency lighting. A table covered in maps and supply projections that told the same story as Vasquez's office, just with more red ink.
Vasquez stood at the table. Arms folded. The circles under her eyes had circles.
"Sit."
They sat. A medic appeared — a young woman with steady hands and no questions — and began cleaning Webb's shoulder wound properly. Medi-gel, pressure bandage, antiseptic that burned like someone had poured acid into the graze. He grit his teeth and let her work.
Garrus spread the data across the table's display surface. Manifests. Authorization codes. C-Sec evidence lockup designations. The weapons inventory they'd catalogued in the warehouse.
Vasquez read in silence for four minutes. Her expression didn't change. When she finished, she looked up.
"How much of this can you verify?"
"Eighty-two percent of the database was copied before we were interrupted," Garrus said. "The authorization codes match C-Sec formatting. I can cross-reference against my personal copies of the original evidence discrepancy reports. The serial numbers on the weapons correspond to items logged into evidence lockup within the last eighteen months."
"And the people who were storing these weapons in my colony?"
"Professional operatives. Armed, organized, using comm jamming equipment. Not pirates — facilitators. They move the hardware from C-Sec to Terminus distribution points. The pirates are their customers."
Vasquez turned to Webb. Under the bunker's harsh fluorescent light, Garrus looked ten years older than he had that evening in the bar. The lines around his eyes — turian stress markers, not age — had deepened into grooves. His mandibles hung at an angle that suggested exhaustion or grief or both.
"The people running this pipeline," Vasquez said slowly, "are connected to the people who've been killing my supply convoys."
"Connected or identical. We won't know until we interrogate the warehouse crew or trace the pipeline further."
"And now the warehouse crew knows someone has their data."
"Yes."
"Which means they'll either run or escalate."
"Professionals don't run from independent colonies," Garrus said. "They escalate. They'll bring in more people, more weapons, and they'll want to make an example."
Vasquez leaned on the table. Her fingers pressed against the surface hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
"I've been keeping this colony alive for six years with nothing. No support, no defenses, no allies. Now you're telling me that the people strangling us have institutional backing, and that by helping you I've painted a target on two thousand people."
"You already had a target," Webb said. "They were already using your colony as a distribution point without your knowledge. Now you know. And now you have leverage."
"Leverage doesn't stop bullets."
"No. But I can build things that do."
She stared at him. The same assessment she'd given him in the operations center — what are you, what do you want, and what will it cost me. But something had shifted. The desperation was still there, but it was laced with something harder now. Calculation. The look of a woman who'd been treading water for years and just spotted land.
She spread a map of the colony's perimeter across the table. Defensive gaps marked in red. Critical infrastructure in blue. Population density in green. Red dominated.
"If you're going to fight these people," she said, looking at both of them, "you'll need to do it from somewhere worth defending."
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