[Tasale, Exarch Station] Bad Medicine

Ana flipped up a card from her console and tossed it to the blurry krogan standing next to him.

"I'm very, very sorry."

"You…" he looked at the krogan, he was so tempted to do a point by point list of where the krogan was mistaken but he restrained himself.

"make sure nobody disturbs us…" it was a weak command but he couldn’t bring the energy.

"Ana, Jil, how long?"

Well, if they were going to frame Jorgal Dwick, they may as well go big on it. It was what he would've wanted.

A fabricated turret unit kept the entrance to the security checkpoint covered for the moment, while another waited outside the entrance to the stairwell, just in case security tried to flank them. The stairs were fairly critical to the current escape plan, and even though Shirin was quickly improvising a backup in case things went further south, it'd be in their best interests to hold the entire area for the moment.

The security forces, while well-trained and competent, seemed to be under the impression that 1) there were more of the attackers than them and 2) their attackers were packing significantly more heat. The latter was debatable, but the suddenness with which explosions and lockdowns and gunshots had broken off (all over the facility at once, even) gave the impression of a much larger-scale assault than, say...a five-man heist gone mildly sour.

This was to Shirin's, and by proxy Jil's, advantage, as they seemed very tentative about trying to breach the hail of turret fire coming from the security checkpoint. She took a couple blind shots once in a while, to make sure they knew there were multiple sources of gunfire, and sure enough, they seemed content to hang back and occasionally fire off a shot. Probably waiting for station security to come - that'd probably be in five minutes at most, given the noise they'd made, and if the Band was still there when that happened, the situation would become borderline unrecoverable.

Seven seconds?

She glanced at the stairwell, weighing her possibilities, as one turret fired a smoke grenade into the lobby.

...Nah. We can pull this off.

Her eyes flicked over to the quarian. "Any luck yet?"

Quam who finally got his head wrapped around the situation picked up one of the passes and slit it through the security system. Followed by the entry code.

"Dwick… take the card and do you thing… please."

"Yeah, yeah."

Still chuckling, Kirok brought out his key card and slotted it in.

"There. Done. Whut next?"

"You have to say the words... Dwick. C'mon, you can do it. It's the only thing in our way now. We have faith in you. Be strong."

Jil'Korah was pretty sure he was going to pay for that later.

She couldn't resist. Ana looked at Kirok with big, sad eyes and pouted her lips hard.

"Well, 'hon? Anything you want to tell me?"

"Passcode? Wait, y'don't mean--"

Mount Kirok rumbled. Seismographs went off. Men in sensible white shirts and mustaches panicked, screaming that this was going to be the big one.

Kirok's eyes narrowed. Somewhere, deep inside his barrel of a chest, things that sounded like words formed.

"I'm. Very. Very. Sorry."

The knuckles of his right hand popped like fireworks as a mighty fist was clenched.

...And just like that, the three-foot blast door slid upward.

"Okay we grab that chimeric thing-a-ma-bob and get the hell out of here. Where is it Chid?"

“Wait, you want what?!” Chid’s exclamation we met with a choir of tired groans “No, seriously, you can’t just take that out, it’s untested! We have no ide how virulent that strain—”

Ana poked him with a pair of fingers in the back and shimmered blue. Well, more blue than usual. Chid backpedaled hard.

“…Wellllll, I mean, not…without…a parting gift from us! Uh, here—”

He scrambled forward and grabbed a trio of portable incubators and dived toward the machine in front of them, stuffing them into a hatch, closing it, and slamming about forty buttons on the processor’s display panel. A series of pneumatic valves sounded in the background as Ana and Quam exchanged looks…and a few seconds later, the hatch burst open, with Chid gingerly pulling three heavily-sealed vials out of it.

“Here you go!” he said, overly cheerfully, handing one each to Ana and Quam. “Don’t, uh, don’t spend it all on one pop..u…lation! Anything else I can...er…”

He held out the last vial to Kirok with a shaky hand.

From about five yards away.

"...help you with?"

"All right. Now we move."

The situation was starting to look reasonably better, which was to say it was mostly a disaster instead of completely a disaster. Shirin kept an eye on the lobby in case anybody tried to get into the security checkpoint; Exarch was half the size of the Citadel, and there was no way special response wouldn't be showing up within the next couple minutes.

Still, she was a little more qualified to draw fire, and so Shirin popped out and unloaded a heatsink's worth of rounds on the open doorway, just to make sure they stayed down for a few seconds. "Jil! Stairs!"

Hopefully he'd be able to zip through the security checkpoint and into the stairwell before she had to reload.

"Retrieval team, meet us in the east stairwell at floor B1, there's a maintenance hatch there. We're en route."

The doors to outside the lab finally opened up. If Ali made a sigh of relief he didn’t show it.

"Dwick, Aria go outside I’ll cover the retreat." He looked at Chid. "you stay put."

Kirok just narrowed his eyes at Chid.

"Loose end. Take care of 'im."

The krogan cocked his shotgun and made for the door. At least the job was almost over. Lord, the things he'd had to put up with today.

Chid’s eyes were the size of dinner plates as he backed away from Ana and Kirok.

“B-b-b-but I helped you! I-I did everything you wanted! Doesn’t that c-count for any—aren’t they loose ends too?!” he shrieked.

He pointed a wild finger at the other lab techs, who winced hard.

“Thanks, Chid,” one of them muttered.

"Stop standing in the hot labs with your thumbs up your asses," snarled a familiar voice on the comm, "and fucking get to the rendezvous point."

“Works for me, ‘hon!,” said Ana. “Oh, and, uh, Chid? I’m very, very, sorry.”

“Wait, wha—”

Without warning, Ana grabbed Chid’s cheek and smashed his head against the wall. If he were human, it would have made a sickening CRACK as his skull made contact with titanium; as it was, he dropped to the floor like a stone. A still-breathing stone, but considering the heat of the moment, Kirok would hopefully be hard-pressed to notice.

“C’mon, kid!” she shouted, grabbing the third vial off him and loping forward, “let’s go!”

Kirok and Ana left Quam as the only guy still inside the lab… still he was pretty much in control of the situation.

"Thanks for your co-operation, it’s all over now…" He stepped through the airlock. He sighed it was a complete fuck-up way to many deaths… still what had to be done had to be done and there were witnesses, and manifests and other annoying evidence. So he threw a live grenade right inside the still cold storage unit just as he stepped outside.

The grenade exploded, shattering the glass containing the samples of unknown number biological nastiness. The rest was pretty predictable. First off twenty inch thick metal plate fell down and separated the hot lab from the rest of the station, with everyone of the team on the right side of the doorway.


”Breach Detected in Quarantine Level 2 … Sanitation Protocol 9 Has Been Initiated … ” the VI spit out. Ali had already joined the rest of the team as the hot lab was flooded with chlorine tri-fluoride, eating away at everything and everyone. The module itself was jettisoned into space, where, if you bothered looking, you could see how the CIF3 melted it completely and turned it in a ball of highly toxic residue best thrown into a local star.

"Moving to the rendezvous point now."

Yeah, get all the Milk Sheik stuff, he's got another movie coming out.
Acknowledged. Illium Transit Board subdirector Kreyna T'Shalsa?
Leave it unless there's an interesting rash or something. We need celebrities, not politicians.
Acknowledged. Neil DeVore, human musician?
Nah, nobody gives a shit about him.
'Blue Volus'?
Wait, Blue Volus was here? Fuck yes, get everything you can of him!
Acknowledged.

"...and fucking get to the rendezvous point."

Oops, guess we're out of time. That'll have to do. Hopefully we can make some money on the side with these.
Acknowledged. Withdrawing.
Aren't you forgetting something?
I am incapable of forgetting.
The cameras?
Wiping the cameras is included in the withdrawal process.
Uh-huh.

With what he was going to treat as the last word (even if Ensemble continued to disagree), Jil'Korah finally stood and made for the exit. A short burst of gunfire reminded him that this was indeed a dangerous thing to be doing, and with a few quick taps the quarian deployed a combat drone. There was no such thing as too much cover, after all, and any distraction was a good distraction if it meant less shooting (at him).

"En route now."

He dashed for the stairs.

There was a disappointing lack of armed response in the stairwell. Kirok sneered at the rotating alarm lights, the blaring klaxons, and the little runner lights that appeared on the floor, guiding everyone to the exit. The same, irritatingly maternal voice blared "PLEASE MOVE TO THE EXIT IN AN ORDERLY FASHION" every five seconds, raising his ire further.

Even worse? He'd caught a sniffle

"Ah swear, I ain't never hittin' 'nother hospital after this," Kirok said to no one in particular as he reached the rendezvous point. Man, it'd be good to get out of he -

Oh, wait. He had one more thing to do.

Drawing out his Carnifex, he took careful aim at a distant wall and started plugging it with holes. There wasn't any target there, nor any reason for it. He was just... spending off shots.

It wouldn't be until the smoke cleared and the team was gone that the words DWICK WUZ HERE would be spelled out amongst the bulletholes.