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Not for the first time, he missed the feeling of shooting at batarians - a human pastime that had become a sacrosanct duty, ever verging the edge of becoming a birthright.

The last four years of Jackson Pulliam's life had been spent amid the relative, if spartan comforts of the Systems Alliance's black ops squadrons. From the fringes of Alliance space into the Attican Traverse, with even a few toes illicitly dipped into the Terminus Systems, he had served as one of humanity's sterling tools, tasked with strenuous jobs along the frontiers humanity had not yet sucked dry. Between those jobs his arrangements were caring and careful alike, stored properly and maintained often the way a master craftsman would store and maintain the unique set of tools he had bonded with. 

He found solace in that definition of care. He had tried other definitions in his life and found them all unsatisfying. 

In the weeks between his assignments, the ships or backwater ghost towns he was posted to offered him a form of solace, too. He found something of the ragged old pioneer spirit in the horizons of empty worlds, barren planets freckled with only the occasional Alliance prefabs across the face of what was otherwise a seamless, unending vista. Space was beautiful in the same way, a blank canvas dotted with more history and chemistry and quirks of existence than Jace could ever understand. He had given up on understanding it all as he grew up. Now he preferred to just look out at it from an observation deck and find silence in his mind, where once he had churned with questions. 

Tayseri Ward offered none of those comforts. The Citadel was the great cardiovascular system of the galaxy, its relays connecting to the home clusters of almost every political presence in the galaxy, asari and salarian and turian and hanar and elcor alike. Its Wards were all multicultural, some to greater extremes than others. But it was the asari that functionally ruled the galaxy, and it was the asari who ruled Tayseri. Tayseri Ward was a beacon of asari culture tertiary only to Thessia and Ilium. Concert halls bearing the names of Matriarchs who had been old when the first nations of Earth were young, nightclubs that teemed with maiden dancers and mercenaries, and most of the streets and lights were aglow with the famous asari color palette - purples and oranges like the lips of sunrises, and [i]blue everywhere.[/i] It saturated every level of Tayseri Ward and clawed its way through any surface with a hint of translucence. When Jace looked at his hands, sometimes he caught himself shocked that they had turned blue too. It was only the lights - and the asari.

He didn't like the idea of meeting any contact here - especially with the sparse intel he had been given in his briefing from the brusque [s]Rear[/s] Admiral who had assigned him this mission. Tayseri was a known destination for parties and cultural events alike throughout the Citadel, but it had been struck hard by the geth attack. Concert halls, biotiball venues, and entire city squares had been obliterated by wreckage from Sovereign and the assorted Citadel ships that escorted that monster to Hell. If this extraction became heated in a hurry, it would become difficult to move his contact anywhere with any degree of speed - let alone get a viable route to the Presidium, which was only barely habitable even months after the battle. He could see the wisdom of meeting in an asari dominated Ward, at least; after all, it would be easy to pick out other humans like him, discern who was there for partying and who was there with a goal in mind. But it was humanity's fleet that had rescued the Citadel and it was humanity that was starting to dominate many walks of life on the Citadel. Citadel Security, embassy staff, transit authority, even the cleanup crews working district by district...Sovereign's apocalypse had forced gentrification upon many of the Wards, and that bell couldn't be unrung. 

It also made his job of parsing the threats out of everyday new arrivals that much harder.

At least he found the doctor where he was supposed to be. Sometimes contacts liked to get a little loose where brokered meetings required strictness; it was a whiff of uncooperativeness that would never quite waft away, and usually led to jobs gone wrong. He sat down across from the scientist and took the man's measure. The aliens liked to make a big deal of humanity's genetic diversity, but the doctor seemed particularly nondescript to Jace. Older man, anxious and uncertain of himself. He got the feeling that even if he was a necessary presence to the doctor, he certainly wasn't a welcome one. 

He ran a lazy finger along the bottom rim of the doctor's cup, feeling the slickness of condensation on glass beneath his fingertip. A drop pooled on his nail. He waited for the code phrase - one the doctor had suggested, likely with far more pomp in the face of the admiral than he seemed capable of delivering it with now.

[i]A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.[/i] If those weren't the first words out of the jittery man's mouth, Jace was leaving.