01: Army of Me
As I read once, every life form is on the peak of evolution.
That's because we're all survivors.
Retrospectively, while hunkered down in the smoking, smouldering wreck of a Kodiak right in the middle of the debris we once called London, this statement began to lose some of its credibility; though I couldn't wholly discard it either.
After all, despite the crash landing of our three-million credit coffin and the surge of paralyzing panic, the off-beat jackhammer pounding against the inside of my chest was my still-beating heart; and trying to fill my helmet with puke were supposedly several other of my organs, all indicating one thing: I was still alive.
And a good mixture of technical know-how as well as a desperate talent for ad-lib solutions made sure things stayed this way.
Since our shuttle crashed, so, five minutes and counting, my turret roared and spat death behind the Kodiak's barrier I had managed to power up again.
For now, I kept the grotesque routine of hasty repairs, piles of husk bodies and constant mortal fear up and going.
Admittedly, that's far more than my squadmates could claim, who dangled in all kinds of unhealthy angles from their seats or were splattered all over the crash site. Their polarized visors stared at me approvingly, but since they all knew I stayed in the game on borrowed time, I couldn't exactly expect standing ovations, I guess.
Cynical? Come on...
Being done over at project Crucible and getting labelled as 'Combat Engineer', as if there's nothing else to be done, now that's cynical.
I can't blame anybody who bought Admiral Hackett's Stand strong. Stand together bullshit, though. I was there myself, I'd heard it all before and I still believed it anyway.
The Sol Relay spat out more ships than there were stars. Fleet after fleet, joining forces to stem the tide against the Reapers, right on our home world. The biggest armada the Galaxy had ever seen!
During these very moments, when our curtain fire lit up Earth's orbit, and even an ancient machine with a god-complex had to admit that the current harvest had more teeth and claws than expected...things didn't seem so dire anymore.
A few flashbacks, including this lofty yet gut-wrenching moment, later, I was jarred right back into deadly and no less gut-wrenching reality. Here, projectiles hit the collapsing barrier and the bright beam, plus accompanying reverberation, of a Reaper's Hades Cannon, almost made me blind and deaf when I'd failed to keep track of my omni-tool's timer. Again.
At the same time, this reminded me why I was here in the first place . All things considered, the mission parameters along the lines of 'Stop the 160 meter high AA unit on foot' and their chances of success had gone from 'ridiculous' to, optimistically speaking, 'close to zero'.
During the drop, I wrote an algorithm to get the exact success rate, just to keep my mind off the impending suicide mission. But you know, not going to spoil anything. It's enough being marked as a cynic, I don't need the egghead label as well, thanks.
Sight and hearing were back online, proving their worth as they helped me spot the grenade landing with a soft ping right in front of my feet. My spinal cord and legs did some grunt work during the knee-jerk dive for cover, while my brain processed the bad news of Marauders and Cannibals now having advanced enough to smoke me out.
Plasma and shrapnel ripped my turret to shreds and knocked my ears out flat again.
I sent what would probably be my final drone on its journey to buy me some time, shoving a fresh thermo-clip into my Phalanx.
The heavy pistol failed to give me the confidence one would expect from a weapon like that; I wasn't exactly sure how I could make the few shots I had left count anyway.
After the crash, however, I had to choose between this and a Widow sniper rifle, which was probably going to rip my arm clean off as soon as I pulled the trigger.
Just like the good cardboard cut-out at the wrong side of the shooting range I had become , I popped out of cover and relied on the good old spray-and-pray.
Yes, with a semi-auto weapon.
Even before I could check if any or how many husks I could take down on the broken metropolis' streets, my shields collapsed and I was back, bruised and battered, behind my make-do cover.
Without blaming me for my incompetence, the routines of my suit did their job, sealing ruptures and providing me with just enough medi-gel and painkillers so I wouldn't pass out.
Timer!
This time I had the presence of mind to close my eyes, so the Hades Cannon's beam wouldn't blind me. This also helped a great deal not only to spot a husk right on the debris shielding me from direct hits, but also to shoot that thing right away.
It made for a nice opportunity to get a live impression of what I knew only from other soldiers' reports: shoot one of the bastards and at least two others pop up to tear you apart.
Those husks seemed familiar with our war reports, as two of them charged me with that nightmarish moaning.
I took one of the synthetics down as my gun punched right through it, but had to slice one with my omni-blade as it forced me into close-quarter combat. The mindless shock trooper, flailing, impaled himself on the razor-thin blade, forcing both of us to the ground in the process.
Through sticky dirt and my panting breath clouding my visor, I saw its hollow face and another one climbing the concrete.
That's it.
Game over.
Beaten to death by husks in a back alley between the street canyons and ruins that once were London.
No one worth shit was gonna know who I was or even pick up my dog tags, so I could at least be added to a memorial wall, joining the millions of other casualties; provided somebody could pull this mission off, anyway.
Fuck.
I kept going despite all that.
Irrelevances like awareness couldn't just overwrite evolution, so my body was denying the inevitable. The way I was fighting and screaming, one could think I hadn't already made my peace.
Body and mind don't always agree, it seems.
Everything slowed down, dampened. The omnipresent gunfire seemed far away; no bullets or grenades.
My opponent went limp but the disfigured muscles of the human husk atop the cover tensed, ready for the leap.
All in vain, since an armored hand yanked away the instantly struggling husk, pulling it down the cover's blind side.
The familiar slashing of omni-blades never sounded so good, that I can tell you.
During the cannon's next high energy pulse, a figure vaulted over the debris, landing no farther than one meter next to me.
With a casual jolt, the dead husk's weight disappeared from my chest and another helping hand pulled me back behind the concrete where I happily hunkered down.
Overstrained, but putting my best foot forward to stay focused, my senses tried to tell me this was in fact an Alliance soldier at my side. Tech armor, means Sentinel program, as the bright orange glow of the energy armor complementing kinetic barriers with controlled warp fields, told me. Since armor suits tended to be skintight, I figured out pretty fast that my savior was a woman.
'Anyone else coming? Are you the reinforcements?', I asked, repeating the question after realising I needed to sync our channels. A good thing, I might add, as the first attempt was an octave too close to nervous breakdown levels.
All I got at first, was a silent shaking of the head, completely hidden by a Kestrel-helmet.
'KIA.', informed her raspy voice behind my own visor. 'I'm everything you're gonna get.', she added, reloading her Avenger assault rifle.
'Evac?', I suggested accompanied by the droning boom of the AA cannon.
Now that she'd cleared the field from the enemy's rear, we had some precious moments of respite.
'Negative. Anything landing here would be taken down hard by that thing or the Harvesters.', the Sentinel made clear, and that well-known feeling of nausea crawled back through my innards, as she disconnected heavy equipment from one of the hardpoints of her armor. 'Can you fix that? 'It's an M- 920 Cain. Salvaged it from the shuttle crash landed with yours, couple of clicks from here.'
I ran a quickscan on the heavy weapon, as well as on the equipment and vitals of the soldier.
Damaged armor, old model, N-series but with amplified shield matrix. Vitals were strong, considering the circumstances. For all that's holy, she had an L2 implant. If you always wanted to make biotics high-risk gambling, go get one of those.
After I did my quick check, my omni-tool already fed back some viable data regarding the Cain.
'Can do. VI support kicked it, but I could make the thing fire again.' Up to that point, I didn't think about the soldier's implicit intent, or at least, I thoroughly blocked it out, so I gladly took the chance to shine in my field of expertise: 'Thus the effective range is severely decreased and I'd have to monitor the neutron moderators, recalibrating if necessary during charge-up...'
Applauding, the destroyer's cannon thundered as I finally understood.
'Which building, how long will it take?', the Sentinel asked and now the cannon's booming sounded like mocking laughter.
Resigned, I let my tool hastily run some simulations to pin down coordinates for an intact building in range allowing a clear shot at the AA unit and estimated roughly three to five minutes to fix the railgun.
For the first time, the Kestrel-helmet nodded. 'Alright, let's do this.'
'But...' I started, desperately grasping for reason under a burning sky.
'On your feet, soldier!', the booming voice in my helmet commanded. 'We don't know if anybody else is out there to send this thing straight to hell and Hammer will get torn apart if no one gets the job done!'
She was most certainly right.
Our chances dwindled in the single digits, but that was way more than the zero, presented by staying here...
'You will blast this Reaper,' , she said calmly, almost forgiving. 'And I'll make sure you get close enough to do just that.'
When her hand reached out, I saw in the reflective visor how she helped that sorry figure in battered, black Alliance armor get back on his feet...
In her voice, sore from all the fighting and shouting, there was a confidence making even that giant reaper in the distance appear tiny, beatable.
'By the way, I'm...' but again, the biotic interfered.
'Doesn't matter,' her words vibrating with trenchant sneer through the ether. 'No one's going to find our dog tags anyway.'