Beauty Behind the Mask: Tali x Male Reader

Chapter 11: Noveria Part 1

"Got all of gear ready to go?"

"Think so." You respond to Garrus as you stuff some thermal clips in your back pouch. "Going to be pain in the ass dealing with some the people down there."

"Everything is covered up in order for companies to conduct whatever shady activity that they want. Will be hard to find out what Saren is or was doing there without getting our hands dirty."

"Can't imagine that this is going to be the last time that we will have to crack a few skulls to get our way. I imagine a former C-Sec officer such as yourself has had to do that before?"

"Spent more time sitting in an office trying to cut through bullshit red tape than out in the field, but I did have to from time to time." He responds.

"Oh really? What is the worst criminal you took down?" You ask, taking a seat on the floor and leaning up against a Mako tire as Garrus rests on a pile of crates.

"Well....the worst criminal was one that I never got the chance to take down." He replies, his voice turning cold.

"What do you mean? Did he get away or?"

"Few year back I got assigned to investigate the black market on the Citadel, specifically an increase in body parts selling. Trouble is this was not some simple lab taking organs from corpses and selling them nor was it some serial killer slicing out people's hearts and making a profit, it was a lot worse."

"How can it get worse than a serial killer on the loose?"

"We will get to that (L/N) just give me a few minutes." He replies. "So I did what any good agent would do and ran some tests on the recovered parts. The lab reports came back and the owner of a certain turian liver caught my eye, specifically because she was still alive. Little bit more digging found that she had been working for a doctor named Saleon. Took a few other officers down there and raided his lab. Guess what we found?"

"I...I would say piles of dead bodies but if she alive still then I have no clue."

"We found nothing. Saleon was a geneticist so we expected to find cloning of organs in test vessels or freezers full of body parts, but there was nothing there not even a single krogan testicle. So next thing I did was bring in some of his employees, see if they had seen Saleon cloning someone or knew of a sublayer to the lab. Few minutes into the third interview and this guy starts bleeding, just leaking blood from all these different cuts on his body. Due to the severity of it, he bleeds out before we can get him to any help, but from that came the answer. Autopsy comes back and the man had an extra heart, liver, and kidney in him and all of them were failing."

"Wait...Saleon was using his employees as...as human test tubes?"

"Bingo. He employed poor saps that would do anything for money. They get a cut of the black market sale in exchange for growing organs in them. Only issue is that if the organ growing fails then they are basically dead."

"So how did Saleon get away? You had all of this evidence against him?"

"When we went go arrest him his entire lab was cleared out. We chase him to the docks and he has his ship ready to take off. Small arms fire did nothing so I called for on of the turrets to take down the ship. Command told me the risk of casualties were too high since there were hostages on the ship. Bastard had brought his workers along to shield himself."

"Those people were as good as dead anyway since they were just going to continue to be experimented on by him."

"That is what I told them, but they didn't listen to me. He is still out there somewhere, and I know where he is. After a lot of digging I found his new ship and its transponder codes. Once I get the chance I am going to take that bastard down." Garrus growls.