Mass Effect: Well-Traveled
The first thing I recognized was the smell of burning flesh. It filled my nostrils, so strong as to almost be a taste, and my stomach turned slightly. Always so disgustingly sweet. It didn't matter how used to it I was; the stench got the same reaction every time. At least I knew now to gulp back the bile before it could reach my tongue. The second thing to enter my awareness was the feeling of something digging painfully into my back.
I rolled onto my stomach with a muted grunt. My hand swept along the space I'd been occupying, and I snorted as I realized what I'd been laying on just by the feel of it.
"Always the same shit," I growled under my breath, almost tempted to throw the gun away from me. Just once, I'd have loved to wake up someplace where I didn't have to kill something within the first moments of my existence. I sighed, bringing the weapon up to examine despite myself. It was a pistol, awkward and bulky, yet surprisingly light for its size. A logo on the side read 'Kessler,' and I didn't see anything like a magazine or ejection port. Probably some kind of energy weapon, I decided. I'd found myself in another sci-fi thriller, then. Likely a dystopia of some sort. Lovely.
Armed and already pissed off with my new life, I surveyed my surroundings as best I could from the… crater I was laying in, which wasn't very well. All I could see was the smoky, orange-tinted sky above me. I really didn't want to stand up in the middle of what was probably a battlefield with no idea what the expect, even with the cover my improvised foxhole provided.
Fuck it. After a second's contemplation, I rolled back over and put my hands behind my head, eyes drifting closed as I was lulled by the faint sounds of explosions in the distance. I was pretty well-hidden, and I didn't feel like joining whatever fight I'd been unwillingly tossed into just yet. Picking sides, shooting people, answering questions; honestly, I'd done it all so many times already that I just didn't feel any urgency to get started again. Maybe if I was lucky, I could sneak away after things quieted down and enjoy some normality for the first time in ages.
The familiar, nearby sound of pulse-weaponry in use simultaneously destroyed that notion and brought a snarl to my face. It was fucking typical. I didn't kick it into gear as soon as my eyes opened, so the universe decided to give me a push. I almost grabbed the gun and tore toward the noise just for the chance to take out my frustration on something.
I stopped myself half-way to my feet, shaking my head and laying back down. Just because the fighting was close didn't mean that I was going to get caught up in it, I told myself. If I stayed low and kept quiet, the whole fight could go right past me without incident. I just had to keep my cool and stay still.
My eyes drifted closed again. With every fraction of a second, however, the gunfire grew closer. I felt my brow tic from the immense feelings of exasperation and annoyance that were building, and my fingers twitched restlessly over my pistol. I swore to God, if anything happened -
A girl in pink armor tripped over the edge of my foxhole and landed right on my stomach. Having my breath knocked out of me was the only thing that kept me from telling her that I was going to feed her own liver to her. Probably a good thing. I wasn't that great at first impressions anymore.
"Fuck!" her voice blared from her helmet, off-sounding in that way that means it was being played from speakers built into the armor. She was on her feet in a split second, firing at her unseen pursuers without so much as a glance my way. I seriously considered putting a round into the back of her head and hoping the other side would like me for it. I didn't need this shit right now.
Unfortunately, the electronic warbling coming from the direction she was shooting in probably meant that the other side wasn't human, and thus probably wouldn't welcome me into their fold. A sudden increase in enemy fire drove her into cover with me, a strange blue aura fizzling into and out of existence around her with the sound of shattering glass. My eyes narrowed. Shields were something I didn't think I had on me at the moment. She met my gaze with a double-take.
"Shit! Stay down! I'm won't let them get you!" she told me, fire in her voice. I blinked. Great. Now I felt like shit for almost killing her. God, I was an asshole. That blue aura flared around her again with the traditional 'powering up' sound seemingly every futuristic device made when in use, and she was up and firing again. A memory tickled the back of my mind, and I was hit with a slight feeling of deja-vu. Not strange, considering how often I found myself in similar situations, but this was a little different. Maybe I was more familiar with this place than I'd thought.
"Fuck! Fuck! FuckfuckfuckFUCK!" she cursed, rifle making a loud beeping noise, seemingly venting heat. I mentally made a note of that as she dropped it and swapped to her pistol, firing until her shields broke again and a shot clipped her shoulder. She spun down into the crater, landing on her back opposite from me. The armor looked to have taken the damage for her, but the warbling was right on top of us, and she knew it.
"I'm so sorry," she gasped to me, eyes clenching tight with anguish. In that moment, I made a split-second decision, an irritated 'tsk' sound escaping my lips as I stood to my feet and raised my pistol in one motion. Death was cheap, anyway. My first shot fizzled against the foremost robot's shield right in front of its eyepiece, the second and third doing the same as it seemed to stumble back slightly from the force, and the fourth shattered the thing's lens and sent it tumbling to the ground in a motionless heap. Without pause, my aim shifted to the next-closest just in time just in time for a single, echoing shot to tear its flashlight-looking head clean off if its neck before I could fire. I blinked as a third and final one jerked into the air, glowing with an odd, purple-blue sheen as it went ass-over-heels before another thunderous shot shattered its mechanical skull as well. Blinking, I turned to look at my unexpected reinforcements.
"I made the right call after all," I commented to myself, taking in the armored duo who'd come to my rescue. One was a fierce, lithe woman with fiery-red hair and a rifle almost as long as she was tall. The other was a rather plain-faced man in dark blue armor, an orange hologram appearing over his arm as they walked toward us.
"Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy. You two alright?" the woman called out, rifle collapsing as she stowed it on her back. The tickling in the back of my head grew stronger for a moment, but faded again. I knew this story. Too bad it had been lifetimes since I'd last heard it.
"Gunnery Chief Williams reporting for duty, ma'am!" my attempted protector rattled off, having stepped up beside me. I looked at her for a moment, studying her just long enough for her to catch me staring before I turned to answer.
"All pieces accounted for," I said, my tone bland. This was hardly my first firefight, not that they could know that. To my slight surprise, Shepard turned and spoke to me first.
"That was a brave thing you did, taking on those geth like that," she told me. I had to stop myself from shrugging and waving it off. She saw me as little more than a civilian with a gun. Honestly, I'd like to keep it that way.
"Thank you, Commander," I managed, giving her a nod. I had a good poker face. Things would be much easier for me if I could slip away to a quiet, civilian life after this fight. Assuming things were in good enough a state for that to be possible, anyway. Returning my nod with her own, she turned to Williams.
"What's the situation?" she asked. Williams hesitated a second before drawing a breath.
"We're overrun, ma'am. My squad's been wiped out, and I don't imagine the others are doing much better. The colony is lost," she reported, her voice shuddering on the last part. Shepard's mouth twitched like she was having trouble suppressing a snarl.
"What about the beacon?" she asked.
"I'm not sure, ma'am. Last I'd heard, the dig site was still secure. Lost contact since then, though," Williams replied. I mentally clicked my respect for her up a notch. The woman was handling this better than most would. Shepard nodded.
"Alright, you're both with me now. Williams, take point. You…" she trailed off, looking at me expectantly.
"Darius Schaeffer," I introduced myself, the alias slipping from my lips with practiced ease.
"Darius, you pull up the rear and stick to cover. Call out any hostiles on our flanks, and let us do the dirty work. Sheer balls won't protect you from a headshot," she quipped, turning on heel.
"Let's move out, soldiers," she ordered, and I bit back a curse. Guess I wasn't a civilian, after all.
SCENEBREAKSCENEBREAKSCENEBREAKSCENBREAKSCENEBREAK
To my immense gratitude, the next fight went by without me needing to do more than take potshots at the few geth (as I'd learned they were called) that weren't taken out in the squad's initial salvo. Honestly, I hadn't even needed to do that, but after Shepard had gone to the trouble of commending me for my bravery, I'd have felt like a heel if I'd done nothing.
I was less pleased to learn that our objective wouldn't be as simple as I'd been lead to believe. The relic Shepard had come for had been moved from the dig site and replaced with a bunch of grotesque Impaler-style decorations.
"Damn it," I found myself cursing. I knew Shepard's type. She was a soldier, and one setback did not call for a mission abort. Things were getting far more complicated than I'd have liked. I whispered the curse again through gritted teeth when she touched a finger to her ear and told us we had orders to meet some fucker called Nihlus at a spaceport. It was apparently way too much to ask for this little misadventure to end quickly. Nevertheless, I squared my shoulders and prepared to march on. Things only ever got worse when I fought too hard against the flow of fate.
"Hold up, Shepard," Kaiden, the plain-faced one, interrupted my internal bitch-fest. He was squatting over some sort of odd-looking container with his arm glowing orange again.
"What's wrong, Alenko?" Shepard asked, hand hovering vigilantly by her side-arm.
"Nothing, Commander, but I found a set of Scorpion light armor. Thought it might keep our friend Darius alive for a few more firefights, at least," he explained, standing up as the container popped open with a faint clicking sound. Idly, I wondered if it was normal for soldiers to root through random containers in the middle of a war zone, but I put it in the back of my mind as I strode over. Gift horses and all that.
A few moments saw me decked out completely in my new set of armor, not a single inch of skin exposed to the elements. The helmet had an integrated HUD that displayed my shield strength and ammunition count at all times, as well as a much-welcomed atmospheric control option and air-filter. I hadn't fully realized just how much the heat and smells actually bothered me. Patching into the squad's communications channel had almost been a small debacle, but I figured out the suit's integrated computer with a few well-educated guesses based on a vast well of past experience.
"Alright, now that you've got some shields, you can put that gun to better use. Still, keep to cover, and don't get cocky. You're not invincible," Kaiden advised me as he scanned me over to be sure I got everything on right. I had to hold in a groan of long-suffering; I'd heard that line more than one too many times. As soon as he gave me the green light, we were moving again at double-time.
It didn't take long for us to fall head-first into another fight. Just as Kaiden commented that we were walking into an ideal ambush location, a few of the impalement spikes suddenly collapsed into themselves. I couldn't keep my thoughts to myself this time, nor contain my sudden fury.
"Fucking zombies," I growled into the mic, "it's always fucking zombies." I broke formation to stalk toward the loping trio, raising my pistol and putting rounds into the closest one's face until its shield shattered and its head pulped. Kaiden hit the next one with a pull as Shepard yelled for me to fall back, now, but that didn't matter because the last one was right in front of me, and it was about to fucking die. My pistol over-heated just as its shield broke. I dropped the weapon to grab the zed's wrists when it dove for me.
My vision went white for a split second as its rubbery flesh made contact with my hands, the white-hot pain of electrocution locking my muscles into spasms while sparks arced across my armor and the monster shrieked at my face. Then my vision tinted red as the flow of energy ceased, and it tried to pull its wrists from my hold.
"You. Little. Shit," I snarled, hands tightening until I felt the zombie's joints begin to creak in my grip. Adrenaline coursing through my veins as I fought my body for control, I raised my leg and pressed my foot against the thing's chest and pushed. Its right arm came away from its shoulder with a wet squelch, blue blood arcing over the ground. I tossed away the limb and slammed my hand under my victim's chin, lifting it into the air by its neck. Another flare of electricity arced into my armor, but my lips only twisted into a savage grin as my hand slowly tightened between spasms. When the lightning stopped, my hand crushed the zombie's neck down to the spine. Of course, it wouldn't die until I broke that, too, so I released its one remaining wrist to jam my fingers into its eye-sockets. It clawed at my arm, but my shields held as I laboriously twisted its head back and forth on its spine until the vertebrae finally came apart with a spray of discolored spinal fluid, and the corpse fell limp once again. As it should be. My shoulders heaved up and down as I began to catch my breath, small twitches and tics making themselves known across my body in the aftermath of electrocution.
"You fucking IDIOT!" Shepard heaved me around to face her and slugged me across my helmeted face hard enough that the whiplash knocked me out.