Free Mass Effect: The Complete Novels 4-Book Bundle by Drew Karpyshyn, William C. Dietz Page B

another second to unlock the other cuff and Kahlee was free.
    Kahlee took a quick look around, relieved to see nobody had stumbled into the alley yet. She grabbed the gun from the man’s holster, checked that the safety was on, and stuffed it beneath her jacket and into her belt. She stood up, then froze.
    She didn’t know who the unconscious man at her feet was working for, but it was obvious he had been specifically looking for her. That meant others probably were, too. They’d have the ports staked out, just waiting for her to try and get off-world. She was trapped. She couldn’t even go back to the main street. Not with her clothes covered in blood.
    There was only one option left. Taking another breath to calm her jangling nerves, Kahlee left her assailant’s body where it lay, moving quickly in the direction away from the busy thoroughfare. She spent the rest of the night skulking through the back alleys of Elysium, careful to avoid detection, slowly making her way toward the house of the only person she could turn to for help. A man she promised her mother she’d never speak to again.

FIVE
    Within a decade of its discovery by batarian surveyors, Camala had become one of the most important planets in the Skyllian Verge. Unlike most colony worlds, where initial populations were small and settlers tended to congregate around a single major city, Camala boasted two distinct metropolitan regions of over a million people each: Ujon, the capital, and the slightly larger Hatre, location of the world’s primary spaceports.
    The two cities were nearly five hundred kilometers apart, built on opposite sides of a wide, inhospitable desert—the source of Camala’s rapid growth. For below the thin layer of orange sand and the hard, red rock underneath were some of the largest deposits of element zero in the Verge. The rich deposits of eezo—the galaxy’s most valuable fuel source—drove Camala’s economy, drawing in colonists eager to seek their fortunes working at the hundreds of mining and refinery operations scattered across the empty desert. The majority of the world’s population were batarians, and only they enjoyed the full privileges of true citizenship under local law. But like any colony world with a prosperous economy, there was always a steady influx of visitors and immigrants from every recognized species across Citadel space.
    Camala was easily the wealthiest of the batarian colony worlds, and Edan Had’dah was one of the wealthiest batarians on Camala. He was quite likely among the ten richest individuals in the entire Skyllian Verge, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. Normally he wore the latest in cutting-edge fashions: asari-designed ensembles made with the finest materials imported from Thessia itself. His preference ran to the opulent and extravagant—flowing black robes highlighted with splashes of red to bring out the hues of his skin. But for the meeting tonight he had donned a simple brown suit covered by a drab gray overcoat. For someone as infamously ostentatious as Edan Had’dah, his plain garb was an almost impenetrable disguise.
    Typically, Edan would be enjoying a soothing nightcap at this hour, sipping the finest of hanar liquors in the den of his mansion in Ujon. But this night was positively atypical. Instead of relaxing in comfort and luxury, he was stuck sitting on a hard chair in a dingy warehouse in the desert outside Hatre, waiting for the Verge’s most infamous bounty hunter to arrive. Edan didn’t like waiting.
    He wasn’t waiting alone. At least a dozen other men, all members of the Blue Sun mercenary gang, were milling about the warehouse. Six of them were batarian, two were turian, and the rest were human.
    Edan didn’t like humans, either. Like his own species, they were bipedal. Similar in height, the humans were thicker in the torso, arms, and legs. They had short, stubby necks and square, blockish heads. And like all binocular species, their faces seemed lacking in