A Second Chance

Chapter 7

Normandy SR-2

"Let me get this straight," Feron said on the other end of the line. "You're telling me that a thresher maw single-handedly killed a Reaper?"

"Not just any thresher maw, the biggest one of them all!" Liara replied enthusiastically in front of her terminal. "The Guardian of Tuchanka. Kalros, the krogan call her. I still don't know how we managed to escape from that encounter with our lives."

"Then the krogan are officially cured of the genophage?"

"That's right. Unfortunately, the price for that was the life of Doctor Solus. Shepard is rewriting history," she said with a hint of wonder in her voice, as if reflecting aloud. "What news do you have from Kahje?"

"The tip from your contacts was good. We located the man and questioned him."

"And what did he tell you?" Liara noticed Feron pause. She had a bad feeling.

"We couldn't get him to tell us anything. He invoked his diplomatic immunity and demanded that we release him immediately. When we asked him, he neither acknowledged nor denied that the bombs were his doing, he just looked at us silently with a cynical smile on his face."

"Feron, why are you speaking in the past tense?" Liara feared she knew the answer, but she needed to hear it.

"We had just asked him about the location of the Cerberus base on the planet," Liara saw Feron's holographic image lowering his gaze. "He said something like 'What can't be seen can't be found', and suddenly he began to convulse heavily until ... Well, he died in a matter of seconds right before our eyes."

"Did you hurt him when you captured him?"

"No, we just drugged him. He must have been carrying some hidden mechanism to provoke his death in an extreme case. We are analyzing his body."

"I'm afraid of that level of fanaticism, being willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of the organization," Liara commented aloud. "That call for diplomatic immunity may explain why the hanar position seems too passive while the drell are being held hostage in their own home," Liara reflected. "I keep thinking about the last thing he said. Could it be a subterranean base, perhaps underwater? If so, it could take years to find it."

"Anyway, we haven't given up hope yet. We also captured a Cerberus agent we're interrogating, and we have Markus' omni-tool. I'm sure when we decrypt the data files we'll get valuable information. Clearly there is something we are not seeing, and it seems to be right under our noses."

Feron let out a sigh that sounded like frustration through the line.

"Feron? Are you alright?" Liara asked, and immediately imagined him crestfallen.

"I can't help but think about my parents, that's all," her friend said, dryly.

Liara noticed the bitterness in his voice.

"Kepral's Syndrome alone is responsible for slowly killing us without any extra help. This bio-terrorist attack against my people ..." Feron let out another sigh and Liara wished she could be there with him to comfort him. "I don't know what Cerberus is up to. Why us? Don't they have other targets far more important than a handful of drell to attack? There are fewer and fewer of us. We cannot leave Kahje, our debt to the hanar prevents it. Even if Rakhana were still habitable ... We don't have the means or technology for a self-managed exodus. Life on Kahje is responsible for this disease, and now Cerberus is determined to erase us from the galaxy for good. Why?"

Liara closed her eyes, aching for her friend. They still couldn't figure out the reason for Cerberus' presence on Kahje. All they knew was that the bombs they had dropped on the drell dome cities had triggered an epidemic of a type of Kepral's far more aggressive than what was known so far of the syndrome. She understood Feron's frustration. His countrymen were dying without reason or cure. It was an act of war.

"You never told me about your parents," Liara commented tentatively.

"They died a couple of years ago," Feron said. "When they were diagnosed with Kepral's, I insisted they move off Kahje. They had never left the planet, but through the Shadow Broker I was able to arrange a place for them on Terra Nova, the human colony. The planet has an arid zone very similar to our native Rakhana, they managed to acclimatize quickly, and for the time they lived there, they contributed their knowledge to the local mining activity. Both of them were engineers."

Liara pondered the significance of this information. Suddenly the unexpected alliance Feron had offered her when she had met him in search of Shepard's body took on another dimension. Not only had he betrayed his employer, but also the one who, with his influence, had managed to get an escape from Kahje to his parents to delay Kepral's advance.

"Are you telling me that it is possible to stop Kepral's progress in an environment devoid of humidity?"

"That is what happened in the case of my parents. Had they remained on Kahje, they would have died within a few years of being diagnosed. On Terra Nova, they managed to gain about ten more years of life. The human community welcomed them well, which reassured me at the time. They died when they were both in their sixties – for a drell suffering of Kepral's, a more than acceptable age to die."

Silence fell on the line. Liara wanted to offer some word of comfort, but found none.

"In a way, I'm glad they're gone. With the Reapers committing genocide left and right across the galaxy, and Cerberus dropping chemical bombs on my people, I'm glad they died before suffering all this. I know they are well on the shores under the protection of the goddess Kalahira."