Maya Brooks

Maya Brooks was a former Cerberus operative and a gifted infiltrator who spent her career hidden behind a succession of false identities. Her true name was never recorded; "Maya Brooks" was itself an admitted alias, and she used at least three other names while serving Cerberus: "Captain Channing", "Hope Lilium", and "Rasa". Skilled in espionage and disguise, she favored flooding her targets with distractions while she completed her objectives in the open. She compiled the intelligence dossiers used to assemble Commander Shepard's crew, and later turned against both Cerberus and the Commander in a plot built around a clone of Shepard.

Origins and the name Brooks#

Brooks's earliest years were spent in poverty and servitude. As a child she was bought by a handler, an old man named Brocktun, who shaved her head to pass her off as a boy and put her to work as a miner and thief, treating her brutally. After a looting attempt went wrong and she wounded a miner who attacked her, Brocktun beat her in a rage over the risk of discovery, and she at last killed him, stabbing him in the chest and leaving him where he lay.

In 2161 CE she was a forced child laborer in an asteroid-mining facility orbiting the gas giant Themis, which supplied much of the material for the construction of Arcturus Station. There she crossed paths with a mysterious woman, a ruthless operative who killed the mine's foreman and took the child along, still assuming she was a boy. The girl followed the woman through her work, including a deadly errand to track down a man named Roth, and learned that the woman's ship addressed her as "Miss Brooks". When the woman refused to take her along, warning that she worked alone and that the child would only be captured and made to betray her, the girl shot her in the back. She revealed at last that she was a girl, and that she had hoped to trust the woman just once, then left her to die and took her ship. From the dead woman she took the name Brooks.

Service to Cerberus as Rasa#

Years later, identifying herself as "Rasa", she gained an audience with the Illusive Man and asked to join Cerberus, explaining that a man she once overheard had said Cerberus stood for something, and that she wanted to stand for something too. She became an espionage and infiltration agent of considerable skill.

Among her field assignments, Rasa was tasked with turning Fist, an agent of the Shadow Broker, over to Cerberus. Operating on the Citadel while the krogan bounty hunter Urdnot Wrex hunted the same man, she infiltrated Fist's apartment, discovered that he had been bought instead by Saren Arterius, and maneuvered both Fist and Wrex without killing either, drawing praise from the Illusive Man for the quality of her work and the means she used. Working alongside the assassin Kai Leng, with whom she shared a prickly rivalry, she also operated after Saren's attack on Eden Prime. Disguised as an Alliance psychologist named "Captain Channing", she interviewed Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams to learn what had happened at the colony, confirming that the geth had been responsible.

On another mission she and Leng were sent to a training facility under attack to capture a target with extraordinary biotic ability. Rasa deduced that the target was a former Cerberus subject, one of the biotic children the organization had trained in its early years. The pair found the woman, Jack, but proved no match for her power; Subject Zero was eventually subdued and carried off by Blue Suns mercenaries to be ransomed back to Cerberus.

The Lazarus Project#

When Commander Shepard was reported dead after the destruction of the first Normandy, Rasa was assigned what the Illusive Man called the most important task of her life. She was brought into the Lazarus Project, the secret effort to restore Shepard to life, where she worked under Miranda Lawson. There she glimpsed the Commander's body undergoing reconstruction, and saw for the first time the Cerberus-made clone of Shepard kept in a tank.

Rasa's role was to gather intelligence. She compiled the dossiers on the candidates Shepard would later recruit, studying figures such as Mordin Solus, Thane Krios, and Zaeed Massani, often unable to understand what the Illusive Man saw in such a ragged assortment of misfits and aliens. One assignment sent her to the Citadel to steal Shepard's classified records from the Spectre offices with the help of the Spectre Tela Vasir; the operation went badly when Vasir turned on her, and afterward she was poisoned by the drell assassin Thane Krios, surviving only because he chose to spare her. Throughout her time at the project she repeatedly tried to access restricted Lazarus files, drawing Miranda's suspicion and surveillance, and her resentment at being treated as a tool steadily grew.

At last she resolved to break free of Cerberus and to take the clone with her. When the clone project was ordered terminated, she seized her chance, planting a crippling virus in the research station's systems and subverting its security mechs so that they turned on Miranda's troops. In the chaos she loaded the clone aboard a shuttle and escaped, venting her grievances at Miranda as she fled. At a hidden location she kept the clone in seclusion, vowing to make it better and more loyal than the original, and promising that the two of them would forge their own destinies and stand for something.

The Citadel identity-theft plot#

Brooks resurfaced on the Citadel presenting herself as Staff Analyst Maya Brooks of Systems Alliance intelligence, a twitchy and talkative figure who warned Commander Shepard that an unknown party was hacking the Commander's personal accounts and records. Almost at once mercenaries of the group CAT6 attacked, and Brooks appeared to take a bullet meant for Shepard before recovering and helping guide the Commander to safety. Back at Shepard's apartment she explained that her tracking program had detected the breach, and she was drawn deeper into the investigation that followed, including an infiltration of a dead casino owner's panic room and the decryption of recovered data drives, aided by EDI. The trail pointed to the Citadel Archives, and to a mysterious figure who proved to be the Cerberus-made clone of Shepard.

When Shepard's team assaulted the archives, the clone took Brooks hostage to force a standoff, then slipped away. As the squad pursued, Brooks's true allegiance came to light: her nervous Alliance persona and even her accent had been an act. She was the ex-Cerberus operative who had assembled Shepard's dossiers, and she had left the organization to avoid the indoctrination she believed had claimed the Illusive Man. Disgusted that Cerberus would turn to aliens, she had orchestrated the entire scheme, intending the clone to assume Shepard's identity and never meaning the real Commander to survive. She and the clone sealed Shepard and the Normandy crew in an iridium vault to suffocate and seized the Normandy SR-2, only for the team to escape with the help of an overlooked virtual intelligence.

In the fight to retake the Normandy, Brooks urged the clone to face Shepard directly. When the clone was left hanging from the open boarding ramp, Brooks chose to abandon it, and it fell to its death. She was then taken into custody but began secretly hacking her restraints while mockingly resuming her staff-analyst persona. Her ultimate fate depended on Shepard's decisions. The Commander could persuade her to stand down and submit peacefully, after which she was led away remarking that the clone would never have let her live; or, if Shepard remained unmoved by her betrayal, she would continue feigning innocence, free herself, and bolt, only to be shot in the back as she fled. In either case she did not afterward contribute to the war effort.