The rover wasn’t equipped with weapons, but it was four tons of bulletproof metal. He threw the vehicle into gear, the tires leaving patches of smoking black rubber on the garage floor as he peeled out and spun in a crazy circle, fighting with the steering in his haste.

  He careened into a pile of crates, sending the heavy metal boxes flying. He spun the wheel and stomped on the accelerator. Ignoring the agonizing jolt of pain as his wounded left leg bumped against the side door, he headed straight for Kahlee and the others.

  Along the way he plowed through the containers providing cover for the remaining two slavers on the ground, mowing them down under his wheels before bringing the rover to a skidding halt, only inches short of running over Hendel.

  Lemm threw open the door and the biotic clambered up into the backseat of the vehicle, the still unconscious girl gripped tightly in his arms while Kahlee lay down another stream of cover fire at the last two surviving slavers atop the landing. They returned fire, the sound of their bullets ricocheting off the armored roof and hull in a metallic, staccato symphony.

  “They’re loading up a rocket launcher!” Kahlee shouted, tossing Lemm’s bag into the back with Hendel as she leaped into the front of the vehicle. “Get us the hell out of here!”

  “You better drive,” Lemm panted through clenched teeth as he tried to slide awkwardly over to the passenger seat.

  She glanced down at his mangled leg, then shoved him out of the way as she slid behind the wheel, causing him to scream in pain.

  “Sorry!” she shouted, slamming the door shut and throwing the rover into reverse.

  She pinned the accelerator and they took off backward. A fast-moving projectile appeared on the nav screen: an incoming missile fired from the rocket launcher. Lemm thought they were all dead, but Kahlee wrenched the wheel to the right at the last possible second. Instead of blowing the rover apart, the missile struck the ground beside them. There was a deep boom as it detonated, and the vehicle bucked hard from the explosion, the wheels on the near side lifting high into the air before crashing back down to the ground.

  Somehow Kahlee kept control, using the nav screen to steer as they raced in reverse across the length of the garage, quickly building up speed. Lemm was horrified to see she was about to send them full tilt into the garage’s heavy metal loading door.

  “Everyone hold on!” she warned them. “This is going to hurt!”

  They hit the door with enough force to wrench one side partially off its rails, the metal twisting in its frame. The back end of the rover crumpled, absorbing the brunt of the impact. Everyone inside was thrown against the rear of their seat as the sudden deceleration of the crash brought them to an immediate stop.

  Lemm’s leg slammed against the dashboard as he was bounced around, and he screamed again, struggling not to lose consciousness. He glanced over at Kahlee, who was lolling to the side in her seat, momentarily dazed from the crash.

  “Kahlee!” he shouted. “You have to drive!”

  His voice seemed to snap her back to full awareness. Sitting up with a shake of her head, she slammed her foot down on the accelerator once more. The vehicle lurched, still traveling in reverse, and slammed into the door again. Kahlee kept the engine revving as they tried to force their way through the twisted metal sheet blocking their escape.

  “Come on, you son-of-a-bitch!” she swore. “Give me all you’ve got!”

  The door bent and buckled under the relentless push of the rover’s six churning tires, but it refused to give way completely, leaving them sitting ducks for the next inevitable assault from the rocket launcher.

  This is NOT happening!

  Pel had been thinking this one thought over and over, ever since he’d heard the first of the shotgun blasts down in the barracks.

  Screaming at his team to get out of their bunks and over to the warehouse to cut off that avenue of escape, he and Shela, the only other member of his crew not already in bed, had grabbed their weapons and raced upstairs. They’d arrived to find the guards dead and their biotic prisoners gone.

  Racing back down to the landing that overlooked the warehouse, they’d taken a high point above the battlefield, firing down at where the woman, Kahlee, had taken up a defensive position. There was a half-assembled rocket launcher on the landing; a new addition to the warehouse’s defenses. He briefly debated slapping it together, then decided against it; he still wanted to try and recapture one of the biotics alive so they could sell them to the Collectors.

  It wasn’t long before he regretted that decision. From his vantage point above the action, Pel had a perfect view as the rest of his team was slaughtered by a mix of Kahlee’s gunfire, Hendel’s biotics, and one of their own rampaging rovers.

  This is NOT happening, he thought once again. Out loud, he shouted to Shela, “Get that rocket launcher operational! Take out the vehicle!”

  She scrambled to put it together even as he fired in vain at the prisoners piling into the rover, the position of the vehicle preventing him from getting a clear shot. There was only one way to stop them now, and it didn’t involve taking any of them alive.

  “Armed and ready!” Shela cried out as the rover began to speed away from them in reverse.

  “Fire, damn it!”

  The rocket shot toward the vehicle, but the target swerved at the last second and the missile exploded harmlessly into the floor of the garage. The rover continued to accelerate, then crashed into the reinforced-steel loading door with a deafening crash. The door buckled, but held.

  “Finish them!” Pel shouted, and Shela took aim with the rocket launcher for a second, and final, shot.

  Grayson wound his way through the unfamiliar halls and stairwells for nearly ten minutes, hopelessly lost.

  Maybe all that red sand over the years messed up your sense of direction.

  The only thing that kept him going was the fact that the sound of gunfire was getting steadily closer, and the knowledge that whoever had broken the others out had taken Gillian as well.

  He was on the verge of slamming his fist through another wall in frustration when he heard an incredibly loud explosion, like a grenade or rocket launcher, followed by a tremendous crash coming from beyond the corner just up ahead. Moving quickly but quietly, he rounded the bend to find himself standing on a small landing overlooking a large, two-story garage.

  Crates and containers were strewn about on the floor beneath the landing, along with several bodies. At the far end a vehicle had obviously just slammed into the garage’s door. And on the landing not ten feet away, their backs to him, stood Pel and a woman he didn’t know. The woman had a rocket launcher braced on her shoulder.

  The vehicle’s engines began to rev as it tried to force its way through the door. Given the situation, Grayson was almost certain that Gillian and the others were inside.

  “Finish them!” Pel shouted, and the woman aimed her weapon.

  Grayson opened fire with the assault rifle; he had no hesitations about shooting a woman in the back. The stream of bullets ripped through her shields, shredded her body armor, and turned everything between her shoulder blades and belt into hamburger. The rocket launcher fell from her nerveless hands and she staggered forward against the landing’s waist-high railing. Another burst from Grayson sent her flipping over the edge to the floor below.

  Pel was already spinning around, trying to bring his own assault rifle to bear, when Grayson fired again. He concentrated on Pel’s right arm, the spray of gunfire nearly severing it from his shoulder as it blew the rifle from his grasp and sent it hurtling over the railing.

  His former partner fell to his knees, his eyes glazing over in shock as sprays of arterial blood spurted from his maimed limb. He opened his mouth to speak, but another burst from Grayson silenced him forever. It was the first time in almost twenty years Pel hadn’t been able to get the last word in.

  The horrible shriek of wrenching metal from the far side of the garage drew his attention. Glancing over, he saw the rover had managed to push itself against a corner of the loading door so that it bent up and out. Grayson watched, motionless, as the vehicle squeezed through the opening, the rover bursting forth to the other side as if the garage were somehow giving birth to it.

  For the next sixty seconds he didn’t move, listening carefully for sounds of other survivors. All he heard was the rover’s engines growing ever fainter as it raced off into the night.

  SEVENTEEN

  Inside the rover, Kahlee heard the metal door screeching across the armored roof as the vehicle forced its way past and out into the dark streets of Omega. Still driving in reverse, she went half a block before locking the brakes and turning the wheel, sending them into a 540-degree spin. It ended with them heading in the same direction, but they were no longer traveling backward.

  They had escaped the warehouse, but their getaway wouldn’t be complete until they’d left Omega well behind them.

  “Do you have a ship?” she asked, directing her question to the quarian in the passenger seat.

  “Head to the spaceports,” he answered. “Right at the end of the block. Take the third left, then the next right.” His voice sounded strained and thin from behind his mask.

  Kahlee pulled her attention away from the nav screen to sneak a quick glance at his injured leg. The wound looked bad, but not life threatening.

  “Hendel,” she called out to the backseat. “See if you can find a med-kit back there.”

  “There’s medigel … in … my backpack,” the quarian managed to pant out, struggling against the pain.

  Kahlee didn’t dare stop while they treated the injury. Fortunately, Hendel had basic medical field training; fixing up a bad leg while bouncing along in the rover would be easy enough.

  Following the quarian’s directions, they quickly cleared the close-packed buildings and emerged on the outskirts of the district’s docking bays. Racing along the open ground, the nav screen picked up three small starships clustered together at the far end of the spaceport.

  “Lemm, which shuttle is yours?” Kahlee asked.

  “Whichever one you want.” His voice sounded stronger now. She noticed Hendel had splinted his leg and wrapped it in sterile bandages to minimize germ exposure, and the medigel would have dulled the pain even as it began to heal and disinfect his wounds.

  She brought the rover to a halt a few dozen feet away from the closest vessel’s airlock and hopped out, then turned back to help the injured quarian. He slid gingerly across the seat to the door, then leaned on Kahlee for support as he stepped out of the vehicle with his good leg. Hendel emerged a few seconds later, carrying the still unconscious Gillian in the crook of one arm and clutching Lemm’s bag in his other hand.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, staring through the station’s viewport at the shuttle docked just outside. Kahlee couldn’t help but smile when she realized what he was looking at: they were about to steal Grayson’s ship.

  The quarian set to work on overriding the vessel’s security system. It took just over a minute before the airlock opened with a faint click and the landing ramp descended with a soft whoosh of hydraulics.

  Inside the ship, Hendel set Gillian down in one of the passenger seats. He reclined the seat and buckled her in as Kahlee helped Lemm hobble his way up to the cockpit.

  “Can you fly this thing?” she asked him.

  He studied the controls for a few seconds, then nodded. “I think so. Everything looks pretty standard.”

  The quarian settled into the pilot’s seat and reached out toward the console with a gloved, three-fingered hand. Kahlee was suddenly reminded that, though quarians might look vaguely human, under their enviro-suits and filtration masks they were definitely aliens. And this alien had risked his life to save them.

  “Thank you,” she said. “We owe you our lives.”

  Lemm didn’t acknowledge her gratitude, but instead asked, “Why were they holding you prisoner?”

  “They were going to sell us to the Collectors.”

  He shuddered, but didn’t say anything else. A second later the display screens came online.

  “No sign of any immediate pursuit,” he muttered.

  “Cerberus won’t give up on us that easy,” Hendel warned him as he entered the cockpit.

  “They aren’t working for Cerberus,” Kahlee explained, remembering that Hendel hadn’t been part of the conversation in Grayson’s cell. “Not anymore. I guess they figured they could make more by going freelance.”

  It was only then she realized Hendel hadn’t yet bothered to ask why Grayson had been left behind. He must have hated him even more than I thought. Given how things turned out, she couldn’t really blame him.

  “You were right about Grayson,” she told him. “He was a Cerberus agent. He must have been working with Jiro the whole time.”

  The ship trembled slightly and there was a low rumble as Lemm fired up the engines.

  The news of Grayson’s true identity didn’t seem to surprise Hendel at all. To his credit, the security chief didn’t take the opportunity to say “I told you so.” Instead, he only asked, “Did you kill him?”

  “He’s still alive, as far as I know,” Kahlee admitted. “They were holding him prisoner, just like us. I left him in his cell.”

  “If they turn him over to the Collectors, he’ll wish you had killed him,” Lemm chimed in.

  Kahlee hadn’t thought about that, but the idea brought the hint of a grim smile to Hendel’s lips.

  The quarian made a few final adjustments and the thrusters engaged, lifting the shuttle slowly into the air.

  “What course should I set?” he asked.

  Good question, Kahlee thought.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Hendel said, giving voice to her own concerns. “Cerberus will still want to get their hands on Gillian, and we still can’t risk going to the Alliance. Grayson and his former friends may be out of the picture, but Cerberus has plenty of other agents.

  “No matter where we go, they’re going to find us sooner or later.”

  “Then we have to keep moving,” Kahlee said. “Stay one step ahead of them.”

  “It’ll be hard on Gillian,” Hendel warned her.

  “We don’t have much choice. For all we know, they could have someone stationed on every human accessible world, colony, and space station in the galaxy.”

  “I know one place you can hide where Cerberus is guaranteed not to find you,” Lemm said, turning in his seat to join the conversation. “The Migrant Fleet.”

  In the aftermath of the battle Grayson made a thorough exploration of the warehouse from top to bottom. For a moment he had debated racing down to the second rover on the garage floor and trying to chase after Gillian, but he knew the other vehicle would be long gone by the time he got there. If he wanted to find Gillian, he had to be patient and smart.

  An examination of the warehouse floor revealed several bodies, including the woman he’d shot in the back. Two more had been shot, two had been run over by the missing vehicle, and one woman lay crumpled against a wall, her neck broken. Grayson recognized the corpse as a telltale sign of biotics, and he suspected it was Hendel, not Gillian, who had inflicted the damage.

  He also found a shotgun sitting in the middle of the floor. It appeared to be of turian manufacture, but the mods on it were of an improvised yet effectively cunning design that was the hallmark of the quarian species.

  Recognizing the value of the weapon, he picked it up and carried it with him as he left the garage and went to explore the remainder of the base. He became lost several times in the confusing halls, but eventually he found himself back on the main floor, in a room that had been converted into a barracks.

  There were twelve bunks, but only nine showed signs of use. Grayson had found seven bodies in the warehouse; adding these to the two guards in the hall near his cell explained why he hadn’t run across anyone else during his search. With all the occupants of the warehouse accounted for, he was able to relax his guard.

  On any other station or world he would have been worried about law enforcement responding to the sounds of the battle. But Omega had no police, and gunfire and exploding rockets generally encouraged the neighbors to mind their own business. Someone would come to investigate the premises eventually—probably whoever had been renting the location to Pel and his team. However, Grayson didn’t expect anyone for at least a few days.

  The barracks led down a short hall to several offices Pel had set up as intel and command posts. Looking through the computers and OSDs, Grayson found the reports from their original assignment. They were coded, of course, but only with a basic Cerberus cipher, and Grayson had no problem making sense of them.

  Pel had been sent to Omega to try and find a way to infiltrate the quarian fleet. Unfortunately, the reports were incomplete. They mentioned a ship they had captured called the Cyniad, and a single prisoner that had been taken for interrogation, but the results of the interrogation weren’t recorded. Pel had obviously given up keeping the logs once he threw his lot in with the mysterious Collectors, and he wasn’t stupid enough to keep any records, electronic or written, of his plan to betray the Illusive Man.

  The mention of the quarian ship and prisoner, combined with the discovery of the quarian modified shotgun, left little doubt in Grayson’s mind as to who had busted the others out. A quarian rescue team must have come for their compatriot, and for some reason they had decided to take Gillian, Kahlee, and Hendel with them as they shot their way to freedom.

  Satisfied he had learned as much as he could from the files, he resumed his slow, careful search of the premises. In another office, this one located near what he guessed to be the center of the building, he discovered a small door built into the floor. It was primitive in design; rather than sliding on rails it simply swung upward on a pair of metal hinges. It was closed and locked with a simple deadbolt latch.