Mass Effect™: Ascension Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  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

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY DREW KARPYSHYN

  COPYRIGHT

  To my wife, Jennifer.

  I couldn’t do this without your

  never-ending love and support.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is the second Mass Effect novel, and once again I want to thank the entire BioWare Mass Effect team for helping to make all this possible. I consider it an honor and a privilege to work with such incredibly talented men and women. Without their creativity, hard work, brilliance, and passion, Mass Effect would not exist.

  PROLOGUE

  The news report on the vid screen flickered with a constant stream of images capturing the death and destruction Saren’s attack had wrought upon the Citadel. Bodies of geth and C-Sec officers were strewn haphazardly about the Council Chambers in the aftermath of the battle. Entire sections of the Presidium had been reduced to scorched, twisted metal. Melted, blackened chunks of debris that had once been ships of the Citadel fleet floated aimlessly through the clouds of the Serpent Nebula—an asteroid belt born from the bloodshed and carnage.

  The Illusive Man watched it all with a cool, clinical detachment. Work had already begun to rebuild and repair the great space station, but the repercussions of the battle went far beyond the widespread physical damage. In the weeks since the devastating geth assault, every major media outlet across the galaxy had been dominated with the graphic—and previously unthinkable—images.

  The attack had shaken the galactic powers that be to their alien cores, stripping away their naïve sense of invincibility. The Citadel, seat of the Council and the symbol of their unassailable power and position, had very nearly fallen to an enemy fleet. Tens of thousands of lives had been lost; all of Council space was in mourning.

  Yet where others saw tragedy, he saw opportunity. He knew, perhaps better than anyone, that the galaxy’s sudden awareness of its own vulnerability could benefit humanity. That was what made him special: he was a man of vision.

  Once he had been just like everybody else. He had marveled with the rest of the people on Earth when the Prothean ruins were discovered on Mars. He had watched the vids in amazement when they reported on humanity’s first, violent contact with an intelligent alien species. Back then he had been an average man, with an average job and an average life. He had friends and family. He even had a name.

  All those things were gone now. Stripped away by the necessity of his cause. He had become the Illusive Man, abandoning and transcending his ordinary existence in pursuit of a far greater goal. Humanity had slipped the surly bonds of Earth, but they had not found the face of God. Instead, they had discovered a thriving galactic community: a dozen species spread across hundreds of solar systems and thousands of worlds. Newcomers thrust into the interstellar political arena, the human race needed to adapt and evolve if they wanted to survive.

  They couldn’t put their faith in the Alliance. A bloated coalition of government officials and disparate military branches, the Alliance was a clumsy, blunt instrument weighed down by laws, convention, and the crushing weight of public opinion. Too interested in appeasement and kowtowing to the various alien species, they were unable—or unwilling—to make the hard decisions necessary to thrust humanity toward its destiny.

  The people of Earth needed someone to champion their cause. They needed patriots and heroes willing to make the necessary sacrifices to elevate the human race above its interstellar rivals. They needed Cerberus, and Cerberus couldn’t exist without the Illusive Man.

  As a man of vision, he understood this. Without Cerberus, humanity was doomed to an existence of groveling subservience at the feet of alien masters. Still, there were those who would call what he did criminal. Unethical. Amoral. History would vindicate him, but until it did he and his followers were forced to exist in hiding, working toward their goals in secret.

  The images on the vid changed, now showing the face of Commander Shepard. The first human Spectre, Shepard had been instrumental in defeating Saren and his geth…or so the official reports claimed.

  The Illusive Man couldn’t help but wonder how much those official reports left out. He knew there was more to the attack than a rogue turian Spectre leading an army of geth against the Council. There was Sovereign, for one, Saren’s magnificent flagship. The vids maintained it was a geth creation, but only the blind or the foolish would accept that explanation. Any vessel able to withstand the combined power of the Alliance and Council fleets was too advanced, too far beyond the capabilities of any other ship in the galaxy, to have been created by any of the known species.

  It was clear there were certain things those in charge didn’t want the general public to know. They were afraid of causing a panic; they were spinning the facts and distorting the truth while they began the long, slow process of hunting down and exterminating the last pockets of geth resistance scattered across Council space. But Cerberus had people in the Alliance. High-ranking people. In time, every classified detail of the attack would filter down to the Illusive Man. It might take weeks, maybe even months, before he knew the whole truth. But he could wait. He was a patient man.

  Yet he couldn’t deny these were interesting times. For the past decade, the three species seated on the Council—salarians, turians, and asari—had fought to keep humanity at bay, slamming door after door in its face. Now those doors had been blown off their hinges. The Citadel forces had been decimated by the geth, leaving the Alliance fleet unchallenged as the galaxy’s single most dominant power. Even the Council, fundamentally unchanged for nearly a thousand years, had been radically restructured.

  Some believed this marked an end to the tyranny of the alien triumvirate, and the beginning of humanity’s unstoppable rise. The Illusive Man, however, understood that holding on to power was far more difficult than seizing it. Whatever political advantage the Alliance might gain in the short term would be temporary at best. Little by little, the impact of Shepard’s actions and the heroics of the Alliance fleet would fade in the galaxy’s collective consciousness. The admiration and gratitude of alien governments would slowly wane, replaced by suspicion and resentment. Over time they would rebuild their fleets. And inevitably, the other species would once again vie for power, seeking to elevate themselves at humanity’s expense.

  Humanity had taken a bold step forward but the journey was far from complete. There were many more battles still to be fought in the struggle for galactic dominance, on many different fronts. The attacks on the Citadel were just one small piece of the greater puzzle, and he would deal with them in their proper time.

  Right now there were more immediate concerns; his attention needed to be focused elsewhere. As a man of vision, he understood the necessity of having more than one plan. He knew when to wait, and when to push forward. And the time had come to push forward with
their asset inside the Ascension Project.

  ONE

  Paul Grayson never used to dream. As a young man he had slept untroubled through the night. But those days of innocence were many years gone.

  They were two hours into the flight; another four until they reached their destination. Grayson checked the status of the ship’s engines and mass drive, then confirmed their route on the navigation screens for the fourth time in the past hour. There wasn’t much else a pilot needed to do en route; everything was fully automated while a ship was in FTL flight.

  He didn’t dream every night, but almost every other night. It might have been a sign of advancing age, or a by-product of the red sand he dosed himself with on occasion. Or maybe it was just a guilty conscience. The salarians had a saying: the mind with many secrets can never rest.

  He was stalling; checking and rechecking the instruments and readouts to hold what was to come at bay. Recognizing his own fear and reluctance allowed him—forced him—to confront the situation. Deal with it. He took a deep breath to collect himself, his heart pounding in his chest as he rose slowly from his seat. No sense putting it off any longer. It was time.

  On some level he always knew when he was dreaming. There was a strange haze over everything, a bleary film that left the false reality feeling washed out and muted. Yet through this obscuring filter, certain elements would register with exacting precision, minor details indelibly etched into his subconscious mind. The juxtaposition added to the surreal nature of his dreams, yet also made them somehow more vivid, more intense, than his waking world.

  His feet padded softly over the carpeted aisle as he made his way aft from the cockpit toward the passenger cabin. There, Pel and Keo occupied two of the four seats, sitting kitty-corner across from each other. Pel was a big man with broad shoulders and olive skin. His hair was cropped in a tight afro, and he had a thin black beard extending along the length of his jaw. Seated in the chair facing Grayson as he came into the cabin, Pel was swaying gently back and forth in time to the song coming over his headphones. His fingers tapped lightly against his thigh, his perfectly manicured nails rustling softly against the dark material of his suit pants. His tie was still tight around his neck, but his jacket was unbuttoned and his mirrored sunglasses were tucked away inside the right breast pocket. His eyes were nearly closed; he’d lost himself in the rhythms of the music—a peaceful, easy image at odds with his reputation as one of Terra Firma’s top personal protection agents.

  Keo wore the same suit as her partner minus the tie, but she lacked the imposing physical size one typically expected in a bodyguard. She was a full foot shorter than Pel and maybe half his weight, though there was a tautness to her wiry muscles that hinted at the violence she was capable of inflicting.

  Her exact age was difficult to pin down, though Grayson knew she had to be at least forty. With advances in nutrition and gene therapy to reduce the effects of aging, it was common for people to look as young and healthy at fifty as they did at thirty, and Keo’s unusual appearance made it even harder to estimate how old or young she might be. Her pale skin was the color of chalk, giving her a ghostly appearance, and her silver hair was shaved short enough to glimpse the pasty-white flesh of her scalp beneath.

  Intermarriage between the various ethnicities of Earth over the past two centuries had made alabaster skin a rarity, and Grayson suspected Keo’s stark complexion was the result of a minor pigment deficiency she had never bothered to reverse…although it was entirely possible she had undergone elective skin-lightening for cosmetic purposes. After all, visibility was a key aspect of her job: let people know you’re on duty, and they’ll think twice before doing anything stupid. Keo’s odd appearance definitely made her stand out in a crowd despite her stature.

  She was facing away from Grayson, but she twisted around in her seat to watch him as he entered the cabin. She looked tense and coiled, ready for anything—a complete contrast to Pel’s easy calm. Unlike her partner, she seemed incapable of relaxing, even under the most mundane circumstances.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded at his approach, eyeing the pilot suspiciously.

  Grayson froze and raised his hands in the air so they were level with his shoulders. “Just getting a drink,” he assured her.

  His body was charged with nervous anticipation, the tips of his fingers were actually tingling. But he was careful to betray no hint of this in his voice.

  This particular dream was all too familiar. Over the past ten years he had relived his first kill hundreds, if not thousands, of times. There had been other assignments, of course; other deaths. In the service of the greater cause he had taken many, many lives. If humanity was to survive—to triumph over all the other species—sacrifices had to be made. But of all the sacrifices, of all the lives he had taken, of all the missions he had completed, this was the one he dreamed of more than any other.

  Satisfied the pilot posed no immediate threat, Keo turned away from him and settled back down in her seat, though she still seemed ready to lash out at the slightest provocation. Grayson made his way behind her toward the small fridge in the corner of the passenger cabin. He swallowed hard, his throat so dry and tight it actually hurt. He half-imagined he saw her ears twitch at the sound.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Pel remove his headphones, dropping them casually into the seat beside him as he stood up to stretch. “How long till we land?” he asked, his words partially stifled by a yawn.

  “Four hours,” Grayson replied as he opened the fridge and ducked down to inspect the contents, struggling to keep his breathing calm and even.

  “No complications?” Pel asked as the pilot rummaged around in the chilled contents of the fridge.

  “Everything’s right on schedule,” Grayson replied, wrapping his left hand around a bottled water while his right grasped the handle of the long, thin serrated blade he had stashed inside the icebox before the journey began.

  Even though he knew this was a dream, Grayson was powerless to change anything that was about to happen. The episode would continue without variance or alteration. He was trapped in the role of passive observer; a witness forced to watch through his own eyes as events unfolded along their original course, his subconscious refusing to allow him to alter his own personal history.

  “Guess I’ll go check on sleeping beauty,” Pel said nonchalantly, giving Grayson the code phrase for the final go. There was no turning back now.

  There was only one other passenger on board: Claude Menneau, one of the highest ranking members of the pro-human Terra Firma political party. A man of vast wealth and power, he was a charismatic, though not necessarily likable, public figure; the kind of man who could afford a private interstellar vessel, complete with his own pilot and a pair of full-time bodyguards to accompany him on his frequent trips.

  In what had become a familiar routine, Menneau had locked himself away in the VIP room in the aft of the vessel just after takeoff. There he would rest and prepare for his upcoming public appearance. In a few hours they were scheduled to touch down at the civilian spaceport on Shanxi, where Menneau would address a fevered crowd of Terra Firma supporters.

  In the wake of the Nashan Stellar Dynamics kickback scandal, Inez Simmons had been forced to step down from her role as party leader. It was clear either Menneau or a man named Charles Saracino would succeed her at the Terra Firma helm, and both were making frequent trips to the various human colonies to drum up support.

  Menneau was currently ahead in the polls by a full three points. But things were about to change. The Illusive Man wanted Saracino to win, and the Illusive Man always got what he wanted.

  Grayson stood up from the fridge, shielding the knife from view with the bottled water in case Keo happened to be looking his way. To his relief, she was still seated facing away from him, her attention focused on Pel’s back as he made his way with long, easy strides toward the VIP room in the tail of the vessel.

  The chilled condensation on the water bott
le made his left palm cold and damp. The right was damp, too—hot and sweaty from being clenched too tightly around the handle of his weapon. He took a silent step forward so that he was standing only inches behind Keo, her bare neck exposed and vulnerable.

  Pel would never have been able to get this close to her; not without raising suspicion and putting her on guard. Despite nearly six months working together as bodyguards for Menneau, she still didn’t completely trust her partner. Pel was a former mercenary, a professional killer with a murky past. Keo always kept half an eye on him. That was why it had to be Grayson. She might not trust him—Keo didn’t trust anybody—but she didn’t watch his every move like she did with Pel.

  He held the weapon poised to strike, took a deep breath, then stabbed forward with the blade, slashing at an upward angle toward the soft spot in the skull just behind Keo’s ear. It should have been a quick, clean kill. But his momentary hesitation cost him; it gave Keo a chance to sense the attack before it came. Reacting with a survival instinct honed over countless missions, she leaped from her seat, spinning to face her attacker even as the blade plunged home. Her incredible reflexes saved her from instantaneous death; instead of sliding smoothly up into her brain the knife buried itself deep in the flesh of her neck, where it stuck fast.

  Grayson felt the handle slide free from his sweaty palm as he stumbled backward, away from his would-be victim. He stopped when his back struck the wall near the small fridge; there was nowhere to go. Keo was on her feet now, staring at him from across the seat. He saw the cold certainty of his own imminent death in her eyes. Without the advantage of surprise, he was no match for her years of combat training. He didn’t even have a weapon anymore: his knife still jutted awkwardly out from the side of Keo’s neck, the handle quivering slightly.

  Ignoring the pistol on her hip—she wasn’t about to risk firing her weapon inside a passenger vessel during flight—she yanked a short, savage-looking knife from her belt and leaped over the seat separating her and Grayson.