Windswept snow blew against the transparent walls of Port Hanshan in sheets, buffeting them in a silent storm. Captain Maeko Matsuo peered up from her work, looking across the wastes. At this late hour the snow looked blue when it could be seen, but this storm did not seem to be abating. Each gust blew as hard as the last, the same muted fury.
An investigator got a little too close to Binary Helix last week, poking around about that incident on Peak 15 last year. Work piled up when this happened, and a stormy night like this seemed perfect to catch up on some of that backlog. BH sent a few guys to rough the journalist up, now it became her problem that a bleeding salarian managed to crawl back onto his shuttle and make it to orbit.
As a co-worker told her long ago: Deny, deny, deny.
Elanus Risk Control Services is looking into this altercation, she wrote in response to an ANN reporter's mail. HNS, Westerlund News, CN, and some others had reached out for comment about the "tight secrecy" surrounding Binary Helix and its work on Noveria.
It's as though they didn't know how things worked here.
The door issued a brief beep and slid open, revealing Lieutenant Sidizi. Sidizi only recently rose to the rank of her second-in-command, but he proved able enough. Like most turians dedication came as second nature, commitment to duty being valued as high as it is in their society. It made for excellent soldiers and security guards but poor independent thinkers. Sidizi scarcely moved without being authorized to do so. He practically raised her on the comnet before taking a leak.
"Bad time, boss?" Sidizi asked, standing just beyond the door.
Matsuo leaned back, taking her eyes off the console. "No worse than usual. What can I help you with?"
"I heard from somebody in the ExoGeni office that their deep space telescopes are catching all kinds of interference. Radiation pulses in high orbit, they say," Sidizi reported- and report would be the only word for it. He stood rigidly, hands folded behind his back.
This intrigued the ERCS guard captain. "Any indication on what it might be?"
"No."
She almost wished he would mince words sometimes. One word answers ended conversations pretty quick. "Keep me posted. If there's something going on in orbit I want to know. Can't have one of those eco-types frying telescopes."
"Understood," Sidizi replied, hitting the door-close panel as he walked away.
Left alone, the office once again became silent. A blank incident report opened up as she waited for word from Sidizi, and she filled in the date, time, and other information she had. If not now, by morning she'd be getting calls from ExoGeni's representatives and she wanted to be ready for them. A sort of cynicism settled in as the time ticked on. The cursor blinked at a rate calculated to draw one's attention to it, just steady enough to drag the eyes back to it where it sat on the mostly blank page.
Comnet sparked to life all at once. "Are you seeing this, Thomas?"
A second voice, David Thomas, responded. "What the hell am I seeing?"
Before Matsuo could respond she heard it- the silence of her office snapped with the sound of some great celestial whip. If the sound could be heard in here, the whole city would have heard it. The first though to spring to mind was an explosion- more eco-terrorists? Another screwed up experiment in the Peaks?
What she heard couldn't really be explained that way, though. It sounded like nothing she'd ever heard, a crack followed by a rushing noise with a warbling buried in the center of it, all the noise fading rapidly until she was left with shocked silence. She stood, picking her service pistol up off the desk and pulling three of the new heat sinks out of the top drawer. She rammed the first home and readied the pistol to fire before leaving the office and locking her door.
Sidizi bounded toward her from the far end of the hall, his rifle in hand. "There's something over Port Hanshan. In the storm it's impossible to tell, but LADAR scans are reporting it's one kilometer long."
A dreadnought? She thought, alarmed. What could've brought a dreadnought to Noveria?
"Get everyone up," she ordered, speaking quickly. "I want every gun ready on this one. Do it in ten minutes and meet me at the plaza."
"Yes ma'am," Sidizi replied, continuing past her to the communications room further up the hall.
The plaza had huge floor-to-ceiling windows bent inward at a forty-five degree angle. If they couldn't see this thing from the plaza, they wouldn't see it anywhere. Her office sat close to the plaza, but not enough that she didn't have to run to get there. Even if it had been next door she would've run, most likely.
By the time she arrived a crowd had assembled, people of all races staring upward and muttering quietly. Two ERCS officers- the two she'd heard on comnet earlier, Thomas and Tariax- stood at the front of the crowd, looking up as well. Heeding the crowd, Matsuo looked up as well and froze.
Whatever hovered above them looked like a cross between a teardrop and a spoon on a massive scale. Blue lights shined down from the underside of the fattest part of the teardrop, arranged in a concentric pattern around one large, bright white light in the center. It hovered stationary above Port Hanshan, a dark shadow against the night sky.
Her mind spun as she looked up at this behemoth. The first assumption, given the destruction of the telescopes, would be that this thing was hostile. One of the consequences of the corporations on Noveria being so hush-hush was a lack of external contacts- ERCS had been contracted to provide security, but Noveria had no military or police. No government beyond the bare minimum necessary to keep the companies out of each other's hair existed. Who would help them?
Before anything else she sent a high-priority alert to ERCS' office on Noveria, which would find its way off-world in minutes if all went well. Even so, it would be hours before help arrived. From Noveria it would be beamed to ERCS' corporate headquarters on the Citadel, and from there she had no clue where it went.
A trio of ERCS officers marched into the plaza behind Matsuo, weapons also ready. The atmosphere remained muted, reminding her of her sister's wedding reception. Quiet conversation barely audible under the sound of the fountains. How long until things got panicked?
"Get these people back to their homes," Matsuo ordered, pointing toward the crowd. "Be quick about it."
As her men dispersed the crowd, Sidizi's rough voice brought her direct Comnet channel to life. "I'm in communications," he said. "Denia from the docking authority radioed in multiple contacts descending from the new arrivals, shuttle-sized."
"Several?" she asked, her tone of voice rising sharply. "How many exactly?"
Several moments of dead air followed. At last, Sidizi returned. "Four. Looks like they're heading right for you."
"I want every gun in Port Hanshan loaded and in the plaza right now," Matsuo growled before cutting the connection. She turned to face the crowd her men were pushing away from the windows. "I need everyone to leave the plaza immediately!"
The crowd broke up more readily now, worried by the arrival of another group of officers brandishing their weapons openly. She had ten men, now- one sniper, seven riflemen, and two pistols. Not exactly an army, but enough weapons to do serious harm to whatever emerged from those four shuttles. The sniper she placed against the far wall, two tiers up from the floor. He had elevation and distance, the best she could give him at least. The riflemen took cover behind the planters lining the first tier. As more officers arrived they would fill out these positions, though ERCS supplied them with precious few sniper rifles. She positioned herself and the other officers up top to cover the snipers.
Before they could really settle in their assailants faded into sight through the blowing snow, speeding toward them. Her best guess was that the massive windows showed up as a structural weakness they could exploit to gain access to the city. The first of them pulled up, revealing a two-pronged structure. From the center there something flashed and the window shattered, blasting inward in a shower of reinforced glass.
She shivered as the gale-force wind thrashed her exposed skin, snow getting in her eyes and ears. The shuttle drifted into the opening like a boat coming into dock, all tiny adjustments and smooth motions. Her muscles tensed as the thing turned ninety degrees, showing her the long side. Some kind of turret tracked across the room, but didn't fire.
The arm split down the middle, halves flinging upward and downward in unison. What they revealed startled her: creatures she judged to be two and a half, perhaps even three meters tall leapt from the craft. They wore crimson armor plating that covered everything but their reptilian heads, and amber eyes flitted from position to position. Their mouths defined their features most distinctly, though. Four jaws, each jointed like a finger, rounded their mouths. As they breathed she could make out sharp teeth lining each jaw. These things did not look friendly.
At first, though, they didn't act unfriendly. The largest among them uttered something in a guttural tongue, gesturing to Port Hanshan.
I'm in command here, she thought. I guess I have to try. "Who are you?"
The lead alien's head snapped toward her, and it began to approach with long, heavy strides. Metal plates clattered together with each thudding footstep, and it growled something else in its language, pointing emphatically at the interior of the city.
"Stop!" one of the riflemen screamed, standing and aiming the rifle right at the alien's chest. "Stop moving!"
The alien stepped to the side with blinding speed, grabbing the rifle with one hand while the second flew to her man's chest, delivering a staggering blow. So it seemed, at least. The officer collapsed backward, revealing a shining blue blade that appeared to be pure light.
"Holy shit!" another rifleman called. Before she could even issue the order the plaza became a free fire zone, her men lighting the aliens up at very close range. For the most part, though, the aliens showed little sign of impediment- then she saw it. Blue fields surrounded the things, flaring up as they deflected mass accelerator rounds into the floors and walls.
Even with her men firing the opening salvo they didn't even seem to wound one, much less kill one. The aliens returned a withering barrage of bright blue energy fire, however, that cut down almost all of her riflemen. They shrieked as the alien weapons scorched their skin and sent them to the ground writhing.
One sniper broke and ran, darting into the city. That seemed like the rational thing to do, and Matsuo ordered a retreat. They'd been overwhelmed by half a dozen aliens.
"Sidizi, all ERCS forces are to assemble at the southern docking bays. They took the plaza, and anyone who goes there is going to be fried."
Her turian lieutenant replied promptly. "I'm sending everyone to the docks now."
Panicked civilians ran this way and that, awoken by the aliens' arrival and sent running by their brutal entry to the city. By now the other shuttles will have disgorged their aliens, meaning there were probably twenty-four of the beasts running around. We couldn't handle six, how can we take two dozen of them?
"They're in commun-" Sidizi called, but before he could finish the signal cut out. She attempted to raise him, but nothing came of it. He could only be presumed dead.
Minutes later the bulk of ERCS guards stood assembled in the south docks, sixty-two armed men and women of all races. ERCS paid one hundred guards to keep the peace in Port Hanshan and she'd just seen eight killed, and she had to wonder how many died in the ERCS office with Sidizi. It didn't seem likely any more than sixty-two would be arriving.
Alarm klaxons beeped steadily, broken only by messages broadcast in several different languages telling people to evacuate immediately. Several dozen civilians occupied the docks as well, cramming into a freighter that had only hours ago begun unloading its cargo. Those crates now would serve as cover, and Matsuo had a team of guards maneuvering them into positions and configurations where they would provide the most utility to the men.
The first sign of trouble came in the form of a wave of screams echoing up the hall toward the docking bay. No one heard any weapons firing, though- the electric pop of the alien weapons could be picked out fairly easy if it were there to be picked out at all. No weapon in Citadel space sounded like that. People stumbled up the halls, clutching bleeding appendages and casting fearful glances over their shoulders.
It didn't take long to see what chased them. Bounding forward on all fours a nightmarish creature, reptilian in nature by its looks, gained quickly. It had a broad mouth with sharp teeth beneath what appeared to be some kind of breathing apparatus wrapped around what may have been a nose. This creature didn't grunt and growl like the big ones, it made shrill little gargles and squeaks, misleadingly diminutive noises for this creature with blood and gore caking its face.
As soon as the last refugee cleared the hall her guards opened fire, peppering the beast with rifle fire and painting the slate grey hall's floor with luminescent blue blood. This one went down, at least. It shuddered before letting loose a long, high-pitched moan and being still.
They had little time to rest before more of the things sprinted up the hall, scrambling over the corpses of the fallen to get to their target. The assault stopped after fifteen of the things crowded the floor of the hallway, bleeding and whimpering. At that point their bigger friends arrived.
Bright bolts of energy flashed down the hall, hitting the shipping containers with wet slaps. The smell of burnt metal and plastic filled the air as the barrage continued, forcing her men's heads down. The first to fall didn't get down fast enough- a bolt hit the side of his head. His hair burnt, his skin turned black and cracked, his ear vanished, his eye boiled in its socket. He was dead long before he hit the ground.
The grisly sight shook those around the fallen man, but with their backs against the wall they had nowhere to run. The battle continued for several minutes unchanged, which set off a niggling warning feeling in Matsuo's mind. These things are shielded, they are fast, and they are powerful. Why haven't they forced us back? Distraction.
"Watch behind us!" she shouted over the roar of the fight. "They might be trying to get around the hallway!"
There was no other way she could think of, but if they had some means to drill through the ceiling or sent the smaller things into ventilation shafts they might be in trouble. It wasn't until an explosion ripped through the air behind her that she remembered they had aerial capabilities.
The cargo ship belched black smoke and fire, gutted by the alien shuttle. It broke from the magnetic clamps and dropped two stories to the ground, exploding in one terminal blast that shook the building.
"Clear the hall!" she screamed, diving out of the way as the shuttle fired several rounds into the crates blocking the aliens' advance. The other guards simply ceased to exist, save for a shoe here or an arm there. Another was thrown free by the blast, landing on the ground with one flat thud. She didn't become aware of the severe burns across her back and shoulders until the remains of her shirt fluttered to the floor in a blackened heap.
When the ringing in her ears stopped she caught sight of the first red-armored alien stepping through the smoke, firing towards her guards. Several more poured through the gap, but she couldn't push herself off the floor. They didn't seem to spare her any thought while they wiped out most of the surviving guards.
As someone fired the last shots she felt a cold hand grab her by the neck. Metal gauntlets dug into the flesh around her throat as she struggled to remain conscious against the blinding pain in her back. Something eclipsed her sight, something grey and rough. The alien's eye searched hers. It flicked down to her feet and back up again, and it barked something in its own tongue. Hot breath that stank of something indeterminate blew in her face in what seemed like a scoff as she was dropped to the ground, landing on her back.
Before she blacked out she saw one of the little ones approaching, wearing a white robe.