Vague memories that left a bad taste in his mouth were the only things that Iosif could dwell on for the course of the journey, the turbulent shakiness of the old freighter’s passenger cabin keeping him from grabbing more than a few minutes of sleep before jerking him awake once more. Instead, he found himself thinking back to where the whole damned thing had gone so wrong.

Iosif, the quarian and the salarian. Their freelance crew had a good thing going until the salarian had backstabbed them for a cheque from that damned corporation, and then he’d crossed the line even further by throwing him to the batarians for some extra credits. To shoot a man in the back was one thing, but selling him into slavery? Every time he tried to picture the salarian’s face, he’d end up distorting it until there was a battered pulp in its place. Hell, [i]if[/i] luck somehow favored him anymore these days, he’d do a lot worse if his hands ever coiled around that bastard’s throat, but that was just a start. In the end, it all led back to Siame Industries and the asari bitch who called the shots, Rebekah Siame.

Granted, Siame hadn’t been the ones to put a gun at his back or pass the baton to the slavers, but if it wasn’t for their interference with whatever offer they made to the salarian, he’d have been living well off of all those blackmail files they could have sold to the Shadow Broker. Instead, the quarian was dead, the salarian was anyone’s guess and Iosif was shipping off in the passenger cabin of a rusted old freighter with nothing but bitter memories to keep him company. Most of his credits had been scrubbed from his offshore accounts whilst he’d been labouring away on Aratoht, and the salarian bastard had added insult to injury and sold off most of his old equipment, including the A-61 Mantis Gunship that he’d so beloved. Fortunately, he’d been able to buy himself the essentials with the credits that hadn’t been scrubbed from his ‘untouched’ accounts; weaponry and armour, a few other tools that he preferred to keep in hand and the rest he’d brought with him as spending money.

Sometimes he wondered if it’d been a wise idea to trash the shuttle that he’d jumped out of Aratoht with instead of selling it for scrap, but the slave transport would’ve most likely flared up on any competent slaver’s watch and brought the heat down on him, and that aside it was another unnecessary reminder of his ordeal; he’d already left the tattoo across the back of his neck to keep himself motivated whenever his pursuit of vengeance came into doubt.

Fortunately, his train of thought was interrupted by the sudden judder of the freighter’s engines slowing to a halt, and the automated intercom message which followed was enough of a prompt to let him know the ship had docked at its destination. With a grunt, he climbed out of his seat in the corner of the cabin and made his way towards the exit, throwing a nod to the volus captain who seemed to be taking notes on a datapad as he observed two krogan employees wheeling out a heavy-looking crate labelled with some kind of hazard warning. All things considered, the captain had only requested a slightly-extortionate fare for allowing Iosif a ride on his freighter, not bad for a volus.

As expected, the station was anything but remarkable - tiny and insignificant in comparison to the likes of Omega, with an even higher ratio of batarians than he was comfortable with these days, but with Siame Industries’ PMC investments targeting the criminal underworld where it hurt, Cartagena was a good spot to keep off the map. Unsurprisingly, quite a few people were becoming pissed off with the corporation’s encroachments into their endeavours and so he’d managed to find something of a mutual interest with two other freelancers - a fellow human with service history and some drell who she’d partnered up with in the business. Reliable from what he’d heard, but there was always a difference between hearing of and then seeing someone in action. Time would tell, he supposed.

Having once visited the location of the meeting on a previous occasion several years ago, he eventually came upon the grimy and suspect-as-ever Cartagena Inn, and after a quick encounter with the receptionist and signing off himself off, he stepped into the conference room, pulled out the closest chair and took his seat. For a moment, he glanced across the room to scan the other faces that were either arriving or had already arrived to see if he could get a read on them, before shifting his focus back towards the woman and her drell companion and throwing each of them a cordial nod.