Lemm shrugged. “All I know is that somebody knocked me out with a stunner. When I came to we were sitting here at the Daleon spaceport.”

  “Where’s Grayson? What happened to Grayson?”

  “Gone,” Lemm replied. “We could search for him, if you want. It’s possible he might still be here on Daleon.”

  Kahlee shook her head, realizing what had happened. “He’s long gone by now. We’ll never find him.”

  “So what now?” the quarian asked.

  “Take the shuttle and head back to the Idenna,” she told him. “You’ve got a lot of preparations to make for your journey.”

  “What about you?”

  “Just drop me off at the Grissom Academy,” she said. “There are a lot of kids in the Ascension Program who still need my help.”

  With a smile, she added, “I’m pretty sure I can convince the board to take me back.”

  EPILOGUE

  The vid screen beeped to indicate an incoming message. The Illusive Man looked up from the report he was studying at his desk and noted the call was coming over a secure line.

  “Answer,” he said, and an image of Paul Grayson flickered into view.

  The Illusive Man blinked in mild surprise. He had assumed the mission to infiltrate the quarian flotilla was a failure, simply because two weeks had passed and he hadn’t heard anything. With most Cerberus assignments he could get general updates by watching the news vids, but with no media coverage of what went on in the confines of the Migrant Fleet, it had rendered him as clueless and ignorant as any ordinary, average citizen.

  “Paul,” he said with a slight tilt of his head. “Has the asset been recovered?”

  “Her name is Gillian,” the man answered. The hostility in his tone was unmistakable.

  “Gillian, then,” the Illusive Man conceded, his voice cold. “What happened on the mission?”

  “The team’s dead. All of them. Golo. Everyone.”

  “Except you.”

  “I’m as good as dead,” Grayson replied. “I’m a ghost now. You’ll never find me.”

  “What about your daughter?” the Illusive Man asked. “How long will she be able to survive as a fugitive? A life on the run is no life for her. Bring her in, Paul, and we can talk about what’s best for Gillian.”

  Grayson laughed. “She’s not even with me. She’s on a quarian deep-space exploration vessel out in the middle of some uncharted system beyond the edge of the galaxy. You’ll never find her.”

  The Illusive Man’s jaw clenched ever so slightly as he realized the girl was beyond his reach. The fact that Grayson was willing to taunt him with the information was clear evidence of how impossible it would be to track her down. He relied on a network of Cerberus informants throughout Council Space and the Terminus Systems to supply him with a constant flow of information. Out beyond that network he was literally blind.

  “I thought you were loyal to the cause, Paul.”

  “I was,” Grayson answered. “Then I saw the kind of people who share your vision, and I had a change of heart.”

  The Illusive Man sneered at the screen. “I’m in the business of saving lives, Paul. Human lives. You used to understand that. Now it seems you’re suddenly trying to save your soul.”

  “I think my soul is too far gone to save.”

  “Then why are you calling?” the Illusive Man demanded, the smallest hint of frustration creeping into his voice.

  “I’m giving you a warning,” the man on the other end of the vid screen answered. “Stay away from Kahlee Sanders. If you come after her, I go to the Alliance with everything I know.”

  The Illusive Man studied the image on the vid screen carefully. He noticed the familiar signs of Grayson’s red sand use—the bloodshot pupils, the faintly luminous sheen on his teeth—were missing. And he realized the man wasn’t bluffing.

  “Why is she worth so much to you?”

  “Does it matter?” Grayson countered. “She’s hardly worth anything to you. Not compared to all the dirty little secrets I have. I figure my silence in exchange for her safety is a bargain.”

  “We will find you, Paul,” the Illusive Man promised in a menacing whisper.

  “Maybe,” Grayson admitted. “But that’s not why I called. Kahlee Sanders—do we have a deal?”

  After taking a moment to weigh the offer, the Illusive Man nodded his acceptance. Gillian’s loss would set their biotic research back a full decade, but Cerberus had too many other projects on the go to risk them all for this. On the screen Grayson smiled. An instant later the image went blank as the call was disconnected.

  He didn’t bother trying to trace the call—Grayson was too smart to slip up on something that simple. Instead, the Illusive Man just stared at the blank screen for a long, long time, slowly clenching and unclenching his jaw.

  By Drew Karpyshyn

  BALDUR’S GATE II: THRONE OF BHAAL

  TEMPLE HILL

  STAR WARS: DARTH BANE: PATH OF DESTRUCTION

  STAR WARS: DARTH BANE: RULE OF TWO

  STAR WARS: DARTH BANE: DYNASTY OF EVIL

  MASS EFFECT: REVELATION

  MASS EFFECT: ASCENSION

  MASS EFFECT: RETRIBUTION

  Mass Effect: Retribution is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2010 EA International (Studio & Publishing) Ltd. Mass Effect, Mass Effect logo, BioWare and BioWare logo are trademarks of EA International (Studio & Publishing) Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52206-1

  www.delreybooks.com

  www.bioware.com

  v3.0

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Mass Effect: Retribution

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  To my wife, Jennifer.

  Thank you for always being there for me.

  Because of you, I can follow my dreams …

  and have someone to share them with.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again I want to express my gratitude to the entire Mass Effect team at BioWare for all their hard work. Without your tireless effort and limitless dedication, Mass Effect would not exist.

  I also want to thank all the fans who’ve shown such passion for what we’ve created. Without your support, none of this would be possible.

  PROLOGUE

  The Illusive Man sat in his chair, staring out the viewing window that formed the entire outer wall of his inner sanctum.

  The unnamed space station he used as his base was orbiting a red giant-class M star. The semispherical edge of the burning sun filled the entire lower half of the viewing window, its brightness dominating but not completely obscuring the field of stars behind it.

  The star was in the last stages of its six-billion-year life span. As the grand final act culminating its existence, it would collapse in upon itself, creating a black hole to swallow the entire system. The planets and moons it had spawned in its birth would be devoured in the inescapable gravitational pull of the dark, gaping maw left behind by its death.

  The scene encapsulated everything the Illusive Man believed about the galaxy: it was beautiful, glorious and deadly. Life could spring up in the least likely of places in the most unimaginable of forms, only to be snuffed out in a blink of the cosmic eye.

  He wasn’t about to let that happen to humanity.

  “Viewing window off,” he said, and the wall became opaque, leaving him alone in a large, dimly lit room.

  “Lights on,” he said, and illumination spilled from the ceiling.

  He spun his chair around so it was facing away from the viewing window, looking out over the circular holographic pad in the center of the room he used to receive incoming calls. When activated, it would project a three-dimensional representation of whomever he was speaking to, almost making it seem as if they were standing in the room with him.

  They could also see him, of course, which was why the holo-pad was located so that it looked out over the chair by the viewing window. When the window was active, the Illusive Man would be framed by whatever astronomical wonder the station happened to be orbiting at the time: a bold and powerful visual to reinforce the image he had carefully fostered over the years.

  He needed a drink. Not the synthetic, alien-produced swill that bartenders across the galaxy hawked to unsuspecting humans. He wanted something real; something pure.

  “Bourbon,” the Illusive Man said out loud. “Neat.”

  A few seconds later a door on the far end of the room slid open and one of his assistants—a tall, gorgeous brunette—appeared, an empty glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. Her heels clacked sharply as she crossed the room’s marble floor, her long legs making short work of the distance between them despite her tight black skirt.

  She didn’t smile or speak as she handed him the glass, her demeanor strictly professional. Then she held the bottle out for his approval.

  Jim Beam Black, the label proclaimed, Distilled to Perfection in Kentucky.

  “Three fingers,” the Illusive Man told her by way of approval.

  The assistant filled the glass to just past the halfway point, then waited expectantly.

  As it always did, the first taste brought him back to the simpler time of his youth. In those days he had been an ordinary man, a typical citizen of Earth’s upper class—wealthy, comfortable, naïve.

  He savored the flavor, feeling a twinge of longing for those lost halcyon days: before he had founded Cerberus; before he had become the Illusive Man, the self-appointed protector of humanity; before the Alliance and their alien allies on the Citadel Council had branded him and his followers terrorists.

  Before the Reapers.

  Of all the enemies in the known galaxy and beyond, of all the dangers that might one day wipe humanity from existence, none could compare with the threat that lurked in the void of dark space at the galaxy’s edge. Massive, sentient starships, the Reapers were ruthless machines completely devoid of compassion and emotion. For tens of thousands of years—perhaps longer—they had watched as alien and human civilizations evolved and advanced, waiting for the perfect moment to come in and wipe out all organic life in the galaxy.

  Yet despite the apocalyptic threat they posed, most people knew nothing of the Reapers. The Council had sealed all official records of the Reaper attack on the Citadel space station, covering up the evidence and denying the truth to prevent widespread panic across the galaxy. And, of course, the Alliance, lapdogs of their new alien masters, had followed along without protest.

  The lie ran so deep that even those who’d helped bury the truth had convinced themselves the Reapers were nothing but a myth. They continued on with their mundane existence, too weak and too stupid to acknowledge the horrific destiny awaiting them.

  But the Illusive Man had devoted his life to facing unpleasant truths.

  When the Alliance turned their back on the disappearing human colonies in the Terminus Systems, Cerberus had taken up their standard. They had even managed to recruit Commander Shepard—the Alliance’s greatest hero—to aid them in investigating the mystery. And what Shepard discovered had shaken the Illusive Man to his core.

  The Illusive Man dismissed his assistant with a slight nod; the woman spun expertly on her heel and left him alone with his thoughts.

  Taking another sip of his drink, the Illusive Man set it down on the arm of his chair. Then he reached into the inside breast pocket of his tailored jacket and removed a long, slim silver case.

  With an unconscious grace gained from years of practice, he flipped open the top, slipped out a cigarette, and closed it again in one seemingly continuous motion. The case disappeared into his jacket once more, replaced in his hand by a heavy black lighter. A flick of the thumb and a quick puff on the cigarette and the lighter also vanished.

  The Illusive Man took a long, slow drag, letting the nicotine fill his lungs. Tobacco had been part of Terran culture for centuries, the act of smoking a common ritual in nearly every developed nation on the globe. Small wonder, then, that this ubiquitous habit had followed humanity into space. Various strains of tobacco had become popular exports for a number of colonies, human and otherwise.

  There were those who even had the audacity to claim that several of the salarian brands of genetically engineered leaf were superior to anything humanity had produced. The Illusive Man, however, preferred his tobacco like his whiskey—homegrown. This particular cigarette was made from crop cultivated in the vast fields sprawling across the landscape of the South American heartland, one of Earth’s few remaining agriculturally viable regions.

  The traditional health risks associated with smoking were no longer a concern in the twenty-second century; advances in the fields of chemistry and medical science had eradicated diseases like emphysema and cancer. Yet there were still those who harbored a deep, fundamental hatred of this simple act. Ancient legislation passed in the mid-twenty-first century banning tobacco was still in effect within the borders of several of Earth’s nation-states. Many viewed cigarettes as morally abhorrent: a symbol of the callous and exploitive corporate indifference that caused millions of deaths in the pursuit of shareholder profit.

  For the Illusive Man, however, smoking represented something else entirely. The taste curling across his tongue and down his throat, the tickle of smoke spreading through his lungs, and the warm rush of nicotine spreading through his system brought both the comfort of familiar routine and the satisfaction of physical craving: two essential elements of the human condition. Smoking was a ritual to be celebrated … especially now that humanity’s continued existence was at risk.

  Smoke ’em if you got ’em, he thought, conjuring up an old line from a long-forgotten source. Because none of us is going to see tomorrow.

  The Illusive Man took a few more puffs on his cigarette before stubbing it out in the ashtray built into the arm of the chair, then took another sip of his drink.

  As grim as things might seem, he wasn’t about to give in to melancholy despair. He was a man who tackled problems head-on, and this one was no different.

  Commander Shepard had discovered that human colonists were being abducted by the Collectors, a reclusive alien species that served the will of the Reapers without question. Though trapped in dark space, the massive starships were somehow able to exert control over their hapless minions even across millions of light-years.

  Acting on the orders of their machine masters, the Collectors had been gathering humans and taking them to their homeworld in the galactic core. There the abductees were repurposed: transformed, mutated, and finally rendered down into organic sludge as part of a horrific experiment to fuel the creation of a new Reaper.

  Shepard—with Cerberus’s help—had destroyed the Collector operations. But the Illusive Man knew the Reapers wouldn’t simply give up. Humanity needed to learn more about this relentless and remorseless foe in preparation for the Reapers’ inevitable return. They had to study their strengths and weaknesses, expose and exploit their vulnerabilities.

  Cerberus had salvaged key pieces of technology from the remains of the Collector operation. They were already beginning to set up a facility to undertake the first carefully controlled tests of the strange alien technology. Ultimately, however, there was only one way to gain the knowledge they sought: they would have to resume the Collector experiments on real human subjects.

  The Illusive Man knew full well the abhorrence of his plan. But ethics and morality had to be cast aside for the survival of the species. Instead of millions being abducted, a few carefully chosen subjects would be chosen. A handful of victims had to suffer to protect and preserve the entire human race.

  The plan to replicate the Collector experiments would progress in secret, without Shepard’s knowledge or involvement. The alliance between Cerberus and humanity’s most famous hero had been uneasy at best; neither side had fully trusted the other. It was possible they might work together again in the future, but for now the Illusive Man was only willing to rely on his own top agents.

  A soft overhead chime indicated an incoming message from one of those operatives.

  “Viewing window on,” he said, sitting up straight in his seat and focusing his attention on the holo-pad.

  The lights dimmed automatically as the wall behind him became transparent. The dying sun to his back cast an orange-red glow over the room.

  “Accept,” the Illusive Man muttered, and the image of Kai Leng materialized above the holo-pad.

  Like most of humanity, he was a child of a truly global culture. His Chinese heritage was clearly predominant in his dark hair and eyes, but around the jaw and nose were subtle clues pointing to some Slavic or Russian ancestry as well.