Broker Terminal: the Shadow Broker's window on a galaxy at war

The Broker Terminal was a message terminal kept in Liara T'Soni's cabin aboard the Normandy SR-2 during the Reaper War of 2186. Through it, the asari who had secretly assumed the identity of the Shadow Broker reviewed the take of an intelligence network that reached across the galaxy: progress reports from the galaxy's last superweapon project, manifests pulled from smugglers, mass relay traffic tallies, dispatches from agents in the Terminus Systems, and the intercepted correspondence of Commander Shepard's former comrades. Read together, its files formed a running portrait of a civilization fighting for its life against the Reapers.

A broker's office aboard a warship#

After Liara T'Soni took the Shadow Broker's chair, the network's traffic followed her wherever she went, and during the Reaper invasion its nerve center was a modest terminal in her quarters aboard the Normandy SR-2. The archive it held was curated rather than raw: intercepted emails, recorded calls, audio logs, interrogation transcripts, and inventory lists, each judged worth the Broker's attention. Her info drone Glyph helped manage the files, flagging notes and reminders on request. Even the Broker's own operatives were not spared its reach. A dispatch from the drell agent Feron closed with a plea that Liara finally teach "our little friend Droney" to stop saying "Shadow" and "Broker" out loud in the same sentence to anyone in sight.

Watching the superweapon rise#

No subject occupied the terminal more than the galaxy's last superweapon, the immense device assembled from the plans recovered in the Mars Archives. Kahlee Sanders, writing to David Anderson on occupied Earth, described a device not even halfway complete that was already the most breathtakingly complicated piece of technology she had ever seen, and told him it gave her hope. Project scientists traded solutions through channels the Broker quietly read: Dr. Cole sent Dr. Lok a capacitor redesign meant to shave 3.6 milliseconds off the activation time of the weapon's mass effect field, with a quarter of a million units needed by the next morning for testing.

The archive also caught the strange new alliances forming around the project. Dr. Lok reported to Admiral Steven Hackett that security had nearly opened fire when rachni ships pulled up to the project site, and that staff remained badly rattled by the sight of rachni walking the halls. A soldier named Sergeant Cavanagh wrote of geth primes dropping from the sky to mop up Reaper forces, identifying themselves as "allied assistance" while his squad, having fired first, apologized to one of the geth for shooting off one of its lights. Which voices appeared in the archive depended on who had survived the preceding years and how the war's alliances had fallen out; in some accounts, Mordin Solus himself wrote to a colleague in the Special Tasks Group from the project site, marveling at its scale, doubting the necessity of its scaffolding, and looking forward to correcting the galaxy's most brilliant minds in person.

The Broker's hand in the war#

The terminal recorded not only what the network saw but what it did. When Professor T'Kisha ran out of pure platinum for the superweapon's primary trigger inlay, a ship arrived within the hour carrying sixteen tons of it "courtesy of the Shadow Broker," then left to scavenge more; the professor, grateful and unnerved, checked her computer for surveillance bugs. In the Yungiss system, Operative Morat handed the authorities the manifest of an Athabasca class freighter loaded with food stores, stamped platinum ingots, mothballed Alliance and Hierarchy fighter craft, and three hundred indentured workers, mostly batarians recaptured while fleeing the Reapers. The seizure was arranged on the Broker's terms: the Yungiss government agreed to grant the enslaved passengers asylum and certificates of citizenship in exchange for future favors.

Feron's dispatches from the Terminus Systems showed the network straining. Pirates and mercenaries were on edge, suppliers were going quiet, and the black market was becoming too unreliable to serve as a source of materials for the project, yet Feron answered the doubters among his fellow operatives with a single question: "When did the odds ever stop the Broker?" Around these operations the archive kept a cold statistical pulse of the war. Relay traffic reports logged a 95 percent surge through the Widow relay and heavy increases at Omega-2 and Tasale, falling traffic at Seinhand and Pelion, and no data at all from Charon or Shanxi-Theta. Other intercepts caught the war's moral extremes: a colonial councilor named Gujir, abandoned by the military and out of funds, authorized the seizure of his own senate's private eezo stockpiles to buy his citizens passage off-world, forfeiting any hope of re-election; and an Alliance interrogation of a captured Cerberus operative ended abruptly when an implanted device, guessed by the shaken interrogators to be some kind of ocular flash-bang, killed her in the chair before she could say a word.

Voices of the old crew#

Scattered through the war traffic were the voices of those who had once served beside Shepard, their presence in the files depending on who had lived through the missions of earlier years. Kahlee Sanders called Jack to arrange delivery of an experimental L3-X1 biotic amp for the students she had led out of Grissom Academy, and received a gruff, genuine thanks. An audio log caught Grunt meeting the krogan recruits placed under his command, one of whom sneered at taking orders from a tank-grown warrior and was on the floor moments later, while Grunt dismissed the rest as whining pyjaks and gave them an hour to move out. Purchase records for Zaeed Massani itemized bulk incendiary grenades, fuel, field rations, two bottles of aged scotch, and rifle parts for a long discontinued Avenger series, the last entry suggesting the old mercenary was restoring a beloved weapon for the fight. Kasumi Goto surfaced in a call to an astrophysicist working on the project, having left a one of a kind communications server, formerly locked inside a Cerberus facility, sitting on his doorstep. Jacob Taylor wrote to Dr. Brynn Cole of the cold shoulder he still received for his Cerberus past and of the use he had made of it, teaching Alliance soldiers exactly how Cerberus fought. And Miranda Lawson received the Alliance's carefully worded gratitude for intelligence that had spared its convoys from Cerberus ambushes, along with a studied refusal to confirm that a certain group of "private special operatives" was dismantling Cerberus bases at all.

Letters never read#

In accounts where the justicar Samara had died and her fugitive daughter Morinth still lived, the terminal preserved three letters Morinth sent to her sisters Rila and Falere in their monastery. In the first she claimed their mother had fallen fighting the Collectors beyond the Omega 4 relay, her last thoughts surely of her daughters. In the second she described the towers of Illium, zero gravity gardens aboard a quarian ship, and a return to Armali on Thessia, aching that her sisters were closed away from it all. The last, signed with her birth name Mirala, urged them that the monastery was not impossible to leave. According to the terminal's records, none of the three letters was ever opened; the recipients deleted them unread.

The Prothean notebooks#

The terminal also served as the vault for Liara's own past. Her research notes ran from 2171, when the University of Serrice sponsored the young student on a dig at Dretirop under Professor Henell, through an embarrassing misdating of artifacts corrected by a colleague in 2174, to the Therum expedition of 2183 that swept her into Shepard's orbit. There she recorded her astonishment that a human carried the Cipher, an instinctual key to the Protheans taken from the artifact on Eden Prime, and her growing dread at the involvement of the Reapers. A 2185 entry, written after she reviewed the old Broker's footage of the Collectors, called it chilling to know they were the Protheans' husks. The 2186 entries traced her unsettled acquaintance with Javik, the last living Prothean: first awe, then dismay as he revealed his people as feared imperialists, then a hard reckoning with how thoroughly she had romanticized the civilization she spent her life studying. The notes ended on a hopeful entry all the same. She proposed writing a book with Javik, and he said he would think about it; a saved list of candidate titles ran from "The Prothean Empire" to an exasperated "I Despise Thinking Up Titles For My Own Academic Research."