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

why they’d all been dragged to this single location.
    “Check for survivors, sir?” Dah asked, her voice not holding out much hope.
    “Wait,” Anderson said, holding up his hand to freeze his team in place. “Nobody move a muscle.”
    “Oh my God,” O’Reilly whispered, just now recognizing what Anderson had already seen.
    The entire room was wired with explosives. Not simple proximity mines, but countless ten-kilo detonation charges placed strategically around the lab. For Lieutenant Anderson, all the pieces suddenly fell into place.
    There were enough explosives here to vaporize everything inside the room, including the bodies. That was why they’d been so carefully collected here. There’d be no way to positively ID the remains, meaning whoever betrayed Sidon would be presumed dead with all the others. They could assume a new identity and live off the profits of their crime with no chance of repercussions.
    A soft electronic beep made Anderson realize that finding the traitor was the least of their problems.
    “Timer!” O’Reilly hissed, his voice raw with fear and nervous energy.
    A second later it beeped again, and the lieutenant knew the dying merc had lured them into a trap. The detonation sequence was counting down and their fate—survival or death—would very likely be determined by the next order he gave.
    In the split second between beeps his mind analyzed and evaluated the situation. The size of the blast from the explosives would be enormous, more than enough to destabilize the entire underground complex. It would probably cause a cave-in, collapsing the huge natural chamber back by the elevator. Even if they were far enough away to survive the blast, they’d run out of air long before rescue workers would ever find them.
    O’Reilly was a tech expert; there was a chance he could disarm the trigger before it went off. If they had enough time to find it. And if there wasn’t a backup. And if it was a manufacturer he was familiar with. And if there weren’t any built-in fail-safes to prevent manual overrides.
    Too many ifs. Disarming it wasn’t an option, which meant the only thing left for them to do was …
    “RUN!”
    Responding to his order, all three of them wheeled around and sprinted back down the halls the way they had come.
    “Shay, Lee,” Anderson shouted into his radio. “Get to the elevator. Now!”
    “Aye-aye, sir!” one of them shouted back.
    “Wait for us as long as possible, but if I give you the order, you go without us. Is that understood?”
    There was silence on the other end of the radio—the only sounds were the clomping boots and heavy breathing of the three Alliance soldiers sprinting down the hall.
    “Private! Do you hear me? If I say go, you damn well go whether we’re there or not!”
    He was rewarded with a reluctant, “Understood, sir.”
    They were racing through the halls as fast as they could run, slipping and skidding around corners in a desperate attempt to beat out the timer that could go off at any moment. There wasn’t time to check for enemy ambushes; they just had to hope they didn’t run into one.
    Rounding the corner into the room where Anderson had earlier ordered Shay and Lee to wait for them, their luck finally ran out. Gunnery Chief Dah was in the lead, her long legs allowing her to eat up extra ground with every stride, and she had pulled a few meters ahead of her two male companions. She ran full speed into the room … and right into a spray of gunfire.
    The lone surviving merc, a batarian, was waiting for them. He must have stumbled into the room after Shay and Lee had pulled back to the elevator on Anderson’s command. Since then he’d been waiting patiently, just hoping for a chance to extract some form of petty revenge.
    The force of the bullets picked Dah off her feet and sent her crashing to the ground in a heap. Her forward momentum caused her body to somersault across the floor until she stopped, crumpled and motionless in