Palaven. A silver world inhabited by steel-blooded residents. A fortress planet where every city is a fortified area and a military camp simultaneously. The homeland of the Citadel Knights – the unyielding Turians.
A harsh world that gave birth to a harsh mind. Radioactive radiation bombards its surface daily, causing the flora to acquire its famous coloration, along with metallic shields protecting it from the harmful effects of the local star's light. Only at night, when the radiation flow weakens, do delicate, surprisingly beautiful flowers bloom, deceptively fragile, but in reality stronger than iron. They were in keeping with the local inhabitants, who loved their home so much that throughout history, they never allowed an external enemy to touch even an inch of its land.
"Even the air was created to make us stronger," the Turians joked about their ancestral home.
Today, the capital of the Hierarchy was bustling and more lively than usual. Reinforced patrols vigilantly maintained the already perfect order to prevent the slightest incident. Even by Turian standards, Admiral Veridia, nicknamed the Steel Hand and who had held the post of Primarch for several years, was stern, so the slightest delay during ceremonial events was unacceptable. Today, during the oath-taking ceremony of young defenders, the Primarch was to deliver a speech that the press service had already dubbed fateful for the entire Hierarchy.
Therefore, police forces were further reinforced by the military, and every stranger was searched at every intersection, and the officers carrying out the order did not care about the discontent of some tourists. What did these pampered civilians, especially from other races, understand? They simply could not grasp the all-encompassing meaning of the word "order," while all Turians, without exception, would simply obey silently, without doubts or reasoning…
It was all the more surprising to learn that a threat lurked in the shadows of the roofs of one of the buildings. It had appeared here days and weeks ago, motionlessly awaiting its hour, completely merged with its surroundings. The creature, in a gray camouflage cloak that also projected a holographic decoy, had no need to breathe, sleep, relieve itself, or simply move. It was only waiting for an opportunity to complete its task. One shot – one death. Nothing more was needed.
By the movement of the armored motorcade, the creature understood that its hour had come. The sniper rifle twitched slightly, showing the tip of the barrel with a flash hider. Nothing should prevent the bullet, on which a name was inscribed, from reaching its intended target…
However, the shooter did not pull the trigger at the first opportunity, although the conditions were almost ideal. He waited calmly and was completely at ease, unlike the client.
"Why is she still alive?! That's not how we agreed!" an angry voice, distorted by a decoder, rang out.
"Payment. In full," the shooter replied in a completely synthetic voice.
"How could you..." the speaker wanted to object, but upon seeing a targeting laser in the area of his heart, he immediately backed down. "Alright… spirits, alright! Choke on your credits!"
"I'm waiting," was his dry response.
Upon hearing the notification sound of the transfer and checking the amount, the shooter, feeling the beats of his cold heart, exhaled and smoothly pulled the trigger twice.
Two heavy bullets, covering a distance of five kilometers, blew off the back of the head and tore through the sternum of the Primarch, in front of thousands of Turians and under the sights of hundreds of cameras. In absolute silence, the body of the Steel Hand, first falling to its knees, collapsed, spurting blood. Only the echo of the shots accompanied this.
For another second, the crowd silently gazed at the body of their Primarch before erupting in anger and fury. Before the eyes of the entire Hierarchy, their Primarch was killed, and not just killed, but treacherously… from behind and from a distance!!!
The air was instantly cut by an alarming siren, and drones flew to the scene of the shots, but the sniper was no longer in his hiding spot, nor were there any spent casings…
To the credit of the police, a patrol unit arrived at the presumed shooting location within two minutes, finding the shooter descending the stairs. Without warning, two officers opened fire from their service pistols. The contract killer merely shifted his body slightly, and the shots only pierced the fabric of his cloak. The police did not have time to pull the trigger again.
Instantly covering twenty meters, the killer managed to hit each of them with a boxing "one-two" before the Turians could understand. The blows literally crushed their helmets and knocked them off their feet. One of them was unlucky, and his neck couldn't withstand it, breaking.
However, his partner did not survive him for long. Two finishing shots from a pistol put an end to his life. Stepping over the cooling bodies, the humanoid exited the old high-rise building and went to the parking lot where the car of the murdered law enforcement officers stood, its lights flashing.
The wail of the flashing lights announced the imminent arrival of reinforcements, and the hum of flying transport engines, and the sight of a cruiser entering the atmosphere, flying at full thrust, left no doubt that the Hierarchy was gathering all possible forces to the city. There could be no other reaction after the murder of their Primarch.
The mercenary destroyed another police car rushing directly at him with biotic powers, waving his hand without turning his head towards the threat. A flash of mass effect, and the steel car, twisted with flesh, crashed into the fifth floor of the emergency high-rise building behind him.
Nothing else prevented the shooter from leaving the city through the sewers. Only when he was already in his ship did he contact another subscriber.
"The order is complete," he stated.
"I saw it," the voice, distorted by interference, simply radiated satisfaction. "Excellent performance. Here's a bonus for your troubles…"
Without saying a word of thanks, the shooter broke the communication channel, commanding the ship to leave. Trusting the automation, the shooter took off his helmet. His glassy, once-living eyes were cloudy, like those of a dead man. The former commander of the "Argentum" froze, like a robot into which the program had been forgotten.
He had fulfilled the will of the Sovereign… The ghost was only left to await new orders. From now on and forever, only the command of the ancient machines existed for him. Nothing else mattered to the former hero.
To say that the murder of the Primarch caused a stir is an understatement.
Battle sirens wailed across all worlds of Turian space. These were not evacuation signals, but a call for total mobilization. Ships in dry docks for routine maintenance tore their moorings and airlocks in one go, heading for orbit. Squadrons conducting training flights over colonies turned around and departed without waiting for orders.
The Hierarchy did not weep. It brought every one of its cogs to combat readiness. Whoever did this would die. And if someone was behind it, the punitive fleet of the Citadel Knights would sweep across their land with fire and sword…
However, such a monstrous desecration of the Hierarchy's honor and pride was merely a ruse to gather the council of high-ranking officers in one place. Exactly twenty-four hours later, Turians were shocked by another piece of news. The Primarch's palace, where the meeting was held, simply and unceremoniously blew up. The second consecutive slap in the face to Turian pride drove the Hierarchy into a state of complete fury. Against this backdrop, politicians forgot about their plans. The Primarch was supposed to announce the beginning of cooperation between the Hierarchy and the USSR.
The country of people's power would receive much-needed shipbuilding specialists, who had honed their skills for years, and the Citadel Knights would receive a stable influx of zero element, allowing them to get off the fuel needle, because, as it turned out, doing business with communists was profitable. Alas, the deal fell through along with the death of the Steel Hand, and attempts to blame the Union for the successful assassination, much to the displeasure of the ubiquitous Asari.
Moscow promptly issued a command, and diplomats provided the public with draft pacts, which were the best illustration of the unprofitability of this step. Even more surprising were the accusations made by the new Primarch, who took a sharp course towards rapprochement with the Republic of Asari, to the bewilderment of the high command. The new leader justified his decision by stating that the handwriting of the operation carried out against them was very similar to the methods used by the USSR against the Hegemony.
Indirect confirmation of this was an analytical note provided by the Salarian special services. It indicated that the Union was carrying out large-scale construction work in several border sectors. To the reasonable question of what the communists were doing there, the country of workers remained silent, limiting themselves to perfunctory phrases about internal affairs, but the scale of these internal affairs, according to visual data from GOR, was very impressive.
In any case, the Citadel Council was forced to adopt another package of sanctions against the USSR, pushed through by an enraged public in the form of elites who decided to take advantage of the situation…
It was dusk on Pandora. Free hunters sitting around a campfire were preparing dinner while Lopata enlightened his kin, who had arrived with the latest reinforcements, about the local realities.
"It's not like back home here!" the Krogan waved his giant paw, causing the T-shirt with the inscription "We'll fulfill the five-year plan for meat… We'll grind our enemies into mince!" to creak dangerously, trying to contain his exuberance.
"You must have drunk too much coolant, you puffball…" the young man, who had not yet grown a proper shield, immediately bristled.
"Forget about what you did on Omega," Lopata, in a good mood because he had overeaten fresh meat, ignored the younger one's attempt to provoke him.
Eating local food was risky. After the catastrophe, the local flora and fauna became very rich in narcotic substances, so drinking unboiled water could lead to a very real high. Given that the substances caused a mild relaxing effect, combined with a laxative, several particularly gifted free-lancers naturally fell into a narcotic trip, went crazy, and in the end, drowned to death in the products of their own bodily functions, simply unable to crawl out of the foul-smelling puddle. The seasoned mercenary told the rookies all this briefly and with curses, ordering them to appreciate the "beauty" of this world.
"So listen to me, you greenhorns. Maybe you'll live longer… The locals can eat anything. They're already crazy, and after they eat a lot, they'll get even angrier. So don't show off your food too much. If you take down the weaklings, the face-punchers will take you down."
"Hey, why is everything like this here? The recruiters sang a different song to us," asked a young Krogan.
"Oh, it's as simple as two fingers up your ass," Lopata grinned. "It was all like that, but then they found some crap, and the rumor spread that there was a shitload of loot in it. The only problem was that whoever found this place died and didn't have time to transmit the coordinates. Well, the colonists, they were normal back then, and a daring and cunning folk, they sniffed it out and went with the wind. They struggled for a long time, but found it, to their own detriment. History is silent about what exactly went wrong. Apparently, a woman in the group of four went crazy and messed everything up, or maybe it was supposed to be like that, but it blew up significantly. High-quality, I'd say, making the planet as bleak as our homeland, and blowing the roofs off the survivors."
"Well, we knew that without you… And what now?"
"It's simple," the Krogan shrugged. "Now there's an official overseer on the planet, Jack. One of ours, he used to work under Gul'man…"
"Under whom?" the young one asked.
"Don't you dare mention it in a decent place," the veteran warned him, shaking his fist. "It's a disgrace not to know such a wise person… I'll tell you later how he simultaneously fucked a woman and shot down a cruiser… In short, Jack is a legend. He went to work in a factory, in the world of Vladov, and when everything went to shit here, he pulled himself together and, with the help of the factory workers from that world, got into the administration, gathering people to resettle here. And he doesn't give a damn about this crap, the coordinates of which were lost again. He raised the call. We're not from his trust, but from the Union itself. There's an interesting interest in something like CERBERUS here. They also want to find the Vault. They have a trick to turn shit into gold."
"And is that 'Argentum' really that cool?"
"Damn right. The local captain, Shep, is from there. I once offered to bet with him, and he knocked me out with one blow! But there are things that can mess with even those like him. I didn't participate myself, I only saw the result, but there was a fight in another system with mutants. Killing them was as difficult as getting rid of a bouquet after an Asari port whore. The beasts, which had been made intelligent, were from a test batch. Something went wrong, but they were forced to breathe gas forcibly, which increased their aggression, and then they staged a massacre. When they calmed down, they tried to treat them and put them to work. They formed a squad, but the idea was terrible. My boss told me how they took down one of them when they went off the rails. He blew that bitch up four times, and that's indicative! They seem not so tough, but they're messed up. They somehow found a virus of artificial evolution, which made them regenerate wounds like Asari virginity. You just need to keep feeding them biomass, but with backpacks, spatial manipulation is not a problem. The problem for them was that they couldn't regenerate infinitely. Sooner or later, the cells would become cancerous, starting from the attic. You would become as stupid as a vork, and just as resilient, even stronger. But they also had a girl…"
"Beautiful?"
"As ugly as your face! Shut up, or it'll be like a thresher maw shat! In short… The girl was a scientist. Old, like your virginity, you know! She understood clones, but it didn't help her when her hour came. She didn't want to die of senility and, breaking the law, assembled a body for herself from spare parts, like a puzzle. Cloning is forbidden here, but you can make a spawn from two! The exception is individual parts. So she made them, and wanted to transfer her own brain. She transferred it, but like this. When she was coding the machine, she messed up. The robot transferred her brain about thirty times while she was alive! Of course, she went crazy in the process. They tried to treat her, but it was so messed up… In short, everyone thought she died during the escape… but it turned out to be an illusion. And it can still be an illusion. Specialists are not sure that she is completely dead. She learned to jump between clones without transferring brains, and at the same time mess with others' brains, making them vorky as a result."
The Krogan took a puff of his cigar, which was fitting for him.
"In short, greenhorns… Now sleep, shit. And tomorrow, to battle. It seems like the ones who found the Vault are the ones who blew it up. Six guys distinguished themselves. Shep, the 'Argentum', intercepted them. In the morning, he talked to the chief at the base and they decided to open it, so if you hear explosions before morning – we're fucked!"
As soon as Lopata said this, an explosion occurred. The blast wave instantly knocked everyone off their feet and blew out all the campfires.
"We're fucked…" the seasoned Krogan calmly said, spitting out dirt. "If the Flying Rat bombed like THAT, then it's a disaster!"