She peers at you from the shadows of the building, the small, child eyes unblinking in the blazing sun. They are like tiny, like yellow marbles set in a sea of dark green scales and leathery skin, and they shine with an intellect that belies her bestial appearance. In your heart, you feel an odd, motherly affection for this alien, and you think it incredibly strange that you would feel anything for such an ugly creature. She is, after all, krogan.

She easily reaches your chin when standing even though she is but a child. Her body is covered in a thick hide of olive scales, and you remember how easily that tough flesh turns away your blade. Her golden eyes are set far apart on her face and a crest rises proudly from her squat head. Despite her youth, she is heavily built, the powerful muscles in her arms and legs rippling under the cloth robes she wears. You realize that she wears no armor, and so you guess that she can be no older than a decade, for that is when the krogan perform their coming of age ceremonies.

The krogan ducks back into the rockcrete building, a structure as nondescript as the other habitats stretching across the barren and rocky landscape. There are dozens of such habitats, and they form a grid that stretches for hundreds of meters. The ant-like forms of krogan and other workers scurry back and forth between habitats. You return to your work. Even though you were spotted, you do not worry because you trust in the active camouflage cloak supplied to you by the Citadel Council. It is constructed from the most recent technology and it hides you from all forms of visual, infrared, and other types of surveillance. As long as you move slowly and deliberately, light bends around your form without so much as a shimmer. And so, you are not bothered.

Actually, that is a lie; you are slightly concerned. Your mission is far too important to be compromised by a simple mistake. Even as your fingers deftly splice the wires together, your mind toys with the idea of removing the krogan witness. You briefly run through possible scenarios: snipe her from your perch, smother her while she sleeps, or poison her food. All of these options are possible, but you strangle your wavering mind with a vice-like grip; daydreaming on the job is a sin with deadly consequences.

You connect the small vial to a string of wires and you secure the parts by tightly wrapping them with tape. The chances that she was actually looking at you are quite slim, you tell yourself. You are hanging several hundred meters in the air, clinging to the side of the ferro-ceramic cooling tower of the anti-matter refinement plant. The plant is the largest structure for kilometers; the refinement complex consists of dozens of prefabricated buildings. Kilometers upon kilometers of pipelines and roadways string the buildings in an intricate web. The cooling towers stretch hundreds of meters into the air, as if their creators had attempted to build a staircase to the heavens. Each individual stack is as large as frigate, and you are nothing more than a tiny speck upon its dull, concrete surface.

Your stealth suit hides you well, and the steam clouds bellowing from the gaping maw of an exhaust port form a veil from prying eyes. The gaseous water is dense enough that your form is will obscured, and the heat carried within the molecules shield you from any infrared sensors that might be turned your way. Your body glove insulates you from the harsh environment, but even the air scrubbers built into your mask cannot completely filter the stench of sulfur and chlorine.

This device is ready. The piton is firmly secured in a seam in the wall, and you slowly lower yourself fifty meters. You are sweating from the sauna-like conditions but you focus your mind on the task at hand. This is the last device, and it is the culmination after months of preparation. Some heat and humidity will not cause you to slip up now. You thread one of the insulated wires through another vial, making sure that the copper strand is firmly planted against the silver contact. The tube is glass and inside is a viscous gray liquid that sloshes like warm spittle and carries an almost imperceptible glow. The vial and wires are then connected to a small, black box that is made of hard plastic and sealed against the weather. Individually, the parts are inert, harmless, but together they form a powerful shaped charge. Like the other device, you place this contraption against the tower and cover it with light spray of adhesive foam. The foam is gray like the tower, and from below you know no one will notice the addition.

There is movement below, and you turn and glance downwards. You see her again, the krogan child, but this time there are other children with her. They number approximately two score, and their hunchbacked-forms are gathered in a square formation. An adult male is at their head, his scarred and battered face stretched into a hideous frown. He is shouting and speaking harshly, but over the roar of the cooling towers you cannot understand his words. His body language is plain enough and the meaning is clear. Synchronized like a well drilled troop, the cohort performs a series of calisthenics. As they stretch and jump and exercise, the motherly instinct in your heart that is as alien to you as these creatures are returns, and a smile creeps across your face that is hidden behind your infiltration hood.

Even though they have been training how to fight and survive the harshest of environments, these krogan children are cute. Their enthusiasm reminds you of your adolescence, decades ago, when you decided to follow the path of the huntress; you were as eager as these young warriors to learn the tradecrafts of war. Down below, oblivious to your watching form, the krogan continue with their exercises.

The charges are set and the pack is fastened smartly to your equipment harness. You turn away from the krogan school and grab the rope with a firm grip before unclipping the karabiner from your harness. Without a second thought, you kick away from the tower and plummet like a rock and disappear into the fog like some ghostly wraith.

-+-+-

The peace of the tranquil dawn is shattered by a shockwave that roars across the dusty plains. Buildings, constructed of stone, concrete, and steel, are ripped from their foundations and thrown into the winds. A searing flash of white-blue flame erupts from erupts from the anti-matter refinement facility and consumes the stacks of cooling towers. The firestorm reaches into heavens and overwhelms the rays of the rising sun with the intensity of its flame.

Secondary explosions detonate within the facility as the stores of anti-matter are destabilized. What habitats and buildings survived the initial blast now full prey to the aftershocks. What had once been dwellings for krogan workers and their families are now reduced to rubble. Sympathetic eruptions bring down the gutted cooling towers, and they collapse like rotted trees of rotted wood. A veil of dust, smoke, and ash hangs over the factory complex like a dense, morning fog.

The devastation is so complete and full of malice, as if a god had thrown a tantrum in the middle of the settlement. Within the span of several heartbeats, the landscape is riddle with death and destruction. Some krogan miraculously survive the meltdown of the facility, and they are now gathering in the rubble of their town. They are shocked, dazed, and wander the grounds looking for other survivors. They find many buried beneath the fallen houses, schools, and offices, but no remains are found in the streets, having been vaporized by the blast.

You watch from afar, through the view port of your shuttle as you escape into low orbit. The explosion is so great that you are able to see a flash of blue-white as you glance through the reinforced glass. The intensity is so strong that you blink away the afterimage burned into your eyes. The force of the explosion is to be expected: anti-matter refinement plants are highly volatile structures.

As you sit back against the form-fitting couch, you let out a sigh of relief. Mission accomplished. A burden is lifted from your shoulders as you realize the success of a months-long operation. So many things could have gone wrong, but in the end, you were able to fulfill the objective. The unnoticed tension in your body suddenly releases in a flood of endorphins, and you collapse back into the couch, a groan escaping your lips. You tremble in giddiness.

But, even as you revel in that after-glow of success, a twinge of remorse creeps its way into your heart. You remember the krogan child and her cohort as they exercise in the school yard. You remember her small, yellow eyes and the child-like innocence of her smile. You imagine that when she looked up at those cooling towers emitting clouds of water vapor, she was looking at you. You don't imagine because you know her youthful exuberance of her age, that curiosity about the world, that hope to see the universe.

The exhilaration of a mission well-done is now gone, and you mutter a curse. The krogan be damned, you think. They brought this on themselves. If they hadn't begun to attack Citadel planets, this wouldn't have happened. Those yellow eyes would not have been extinguished.

You pour yourself a glass of liquor.