"Shepard's down!"
The rumble of Wrex's voice has never been less welcome. His basso exclamation cuts through Tali'zorah swifter than the Geth fusillade slamming into her flimsy cover ever could have. She can't believe what she hears, and is about to bark a hysterical denial to the Kroganwhen the distinct whirr of an advancing Prime echoes over her link to the battlemaster. A series of muffled grunts issue from the hulking warrior, followed by the bloodlusting roar and statacco clicks that tell Tali that Wrex has discarded his weaponry, and charged at the prime with vengeance in his blood-red eye. Even in her shocked state, she knows that it would be best to leave him alone for the moment. There is a lull in Geth weaponsfire, and morbid fascination drives her to pop her head out of cover to see for herself.
Her knees nearly give out
Commander John Shepard lies in a spreading pool of his own blood two hundred meters ahead, his armour holed at the right shoulder, left thigh and abdomen. His vital readouts indicate that he is still doggedly clinging to life, but even Tali's rudimentary knowledge of human physiology tells her that he needs immediate aid. As the first rounds of a renewed Geth salvo slam into her shields, she sees three troopers moving towards him, intent on finishing the job. Her eyes fill with tears, and the impersonal embrace of her faceplate whirrs in response, drying her eyes with a stinging blast of air.
This is wrong.
A man like Commander Shepard doesn't deserve to die at the hands of her peoples greatest mistake. For him to be cut down now is...unthinkable. Shepard should have died as she had seen him most alive; charging headlong into battle with his biotic corona and devastating shotgun at his side, an old song from his distant Viking heritage on his lips. She turns away, salt tears now cascading down her face. One of the greatest men she has ever known is bleeding out on the cold plascrete floor, an agonising death-by-inches, and she is powerless to stop it.
Isn't she?
If she has even a chance of helping him with her life...what right has she to deprive him of it?
Slowly, almost unthinkingly, her hand moves to her omnitool, bringing up her combat programs. The fabricator at the base of her spine hums, crystallising her weeks of design effort into a set of mines. As her combat warmup program begins a pre-emptive injection of painkillers, the flexible suit lets her feel her deadly work moving up her back and down her arm, ready to be hurled towards those who would dare stay her path. Her hands move as if in a daze, and she hears the comforting -chak- of her shotgun loading a round.
Tali'zorah nar Rayya stands up, and all hell breaks loose.
Her powerful legs launch her out and over her cover, a manoeuvre which the Geth had not seen since the Morning War. A Quarian's digitigrade legs, unhampered by the heavy, restrictive plates of a turian or the massive bulk of a krogan, give them an agility and acrobatic strength exceeded only by specially trained biotics. Their wide splayed feet give them great traction, perfectly suiting their evolution as an omnivorous pounce predator and tree-dwelling fruit gatherer.
Tali does not think of this. All she knows is that, for the briefest of instants, she is above the battle, and free to act. An almost inhumanly swift, superbly analytical mind meshes with hard-won combat reflexes and a wrath that Wrex would have grudgingly admired, had he not busy trying to bite through the starship grade armour on the Geth Prime's arm and, absently, wonder where his second liver had been thrown. He cannot see his Quarian squadmate flick her wrist, launching an overload charge at a knot of Geth ten meters away. He does not see her whip her shotgun around at the apex of her jump, and launch an explosive pulse into the unshielded Geth, sending white hydraulic fluid in all directions. The recoil snaps her sideways, throwing off the targeting of the rest of the Geth force, and a rocket whirrs harmlessly through the space she had occupied. She pivots at the waist, and hits the ground rolling over one shoulder. With a graceful, fluid motion she rolls to her feet, turns, and charges towards Shepard with all the speed she can muster.
/CONSENSUS INTERRUPT. All available platforms terminate target Creator-Blasphemer/
/:Platform 23 Responding
(In unnatural unison, a 4 platform assault team moves to a new firing position, and raises its weapons to target the low silhouette of the Quarian)
/:Target located. Rapid approach
(Her body is at a 45 degree angle to the ground, consistent with recorded data on a Quarian sprint. The posture is instinctive, allowing her legs to hurl her forward with long, low strides. Both arms clutch her shotgun, three fingered hands holding grimly to the ceramic and burnished metal of the weapon.)
ALERT: Target taking aggressive action
(An orange glow from the targets left arm. The limb sweeps out, points roughly towards Platform 23. The synthetic soldier spots a modified tech-mine emerging from the omnitool, which immediately extends a dishlike antenna)
-NO CARRIER-
ALERT: Transmitter drivers deleted. Restoring
-RESTORATION FAILURE-
ALERT: Foreign runtime detected in control core
ALERT: Memory erasure detected
Twenty-four milliseconds after Tali begins her hack procedure, the Geth spasms. It is cut off from the group, leaving it alone and stupid. This would do little in itself. The Geth would simply remember its orders, and continue on its way.
This Geth platform knows nothing
Its orders, its beliefs, even its self image are erased. All this creature knows is that it is surrounded by armed beings. So it fights. And as it blasts its closest neighbour's shielding into oblivion, and is in turn destroyed by its fellows, a Quarian hurtles past unhindered.
The next few moments are chaos. Shepard's last act before lapsing into unconsciousness was to drag himself to cover, but the rapidly advancing Geth killteam is not likely to be swayed by simple steel.
The damping mine that detonates in their midst is another story. Their limbs refuse to move, synthetic neural fibres overwhelmed by a green mist of statically charged particles, clinging to their hulls and delivering debilitating electric shocks.
Tali'zorah has a only a few seconds before they can move again, so she knows that she must act swiftly. She slings a sabotage mine into one of the two Geth squads that remain functional. The mine detonates. Each Geth soldier is bathed in ultra-intense radiation, wavelengths chosen by Tali's hardsuit computer specifically to trip the overheat sensors of their weaponry. The radiation singes circuits, setting off a chain reaction of internal damage as the self-repair systems go haywire. Before their weapons can reset themselves, she is upon them. The first two have shotgun barrels pushed through their shielding, followed by short, eventful meetings with ultra-high velocity particles. With a feral, canine-exposing grin on her hidden face Tali throws the overheated shotgun into the optics of the third and final platform, staggering it. In a smooth motion she snatches the dagger from her leg, and sheathes it in the mechanical soldier's main powerbus.
With a hum of electronics, blue light flashes into being in front of her visor. Her focus shifts from the broken Geth at her feet to the active and seemingly enraged platforms that remain. Though her vision is obscured by blue flashes, her hardsuit's scanners are enough to paint a grim picture; both the remaining Geth defenders and the squad assigned to kill Shepard have shifted to target her. All that stands between her lightly armoured suit and the withering hail of pulse-fire are flickering patches of focused gravity, winking into existence to halt the rounds that fly unerringly towards a fragile visor. As she leaps towards Shepard's refuge, she can't help but absently consider her rapidly draining shielding. Before she has taken a single step, the Geth projectiles have dumped enough energy to have cut through the barriers on her original suit. By the time she is five steps into her catlike sprint, a suit without cutting edge shield modulators would have failed. She'd been shocked when Shepard had presented her with these expensive and, at the time, apparently over-the top upgrades, but now it seemed that only he had realised the forces that would be brought to bear against them. Three more strides, and only the extensive modifications she'd made to the power distribution hardware were keeping her from a messy end. Another five-or-so loping steps, and the barriers fail completely. Two Geth rounds hit Tali between the shoulder blades, but fail to breach the tough colossus armour. Before more can strike, an orange blur lights up her arm as her beloved omnitool reroutes every joule of energy it can spare into the shield capacitor, sustaining a tenuous barrier long enough for her to vault into cover beside the wounded commander. She reaches down and plugs a levo-protein gel package into the feed nozzle on the commander's armour, not daring to hope until the status lights on his armour shift from red to green.
John Shepard opens his eyes, and sees a feminine shape. For a drowsy moment he believes that he is dead, and that this is the Valkyrie maiden sent to take him to Valhalla. A beautiful face, masked by haze, but on which a savage grin of triumph is still clear. He tries to speak a final oath, a laconic curse on the Geth who slew him...before his sight clears, and he looks with clear eyes on an exhilarated, slightly worried Quarian. Before either can say a single word, the ruined chassis of a Prime flies across the room, trailing biotic blue and carving a swathe through the remaining Geth troops. After a few crunches, Wrex's huge scarred face looms over them.
As the Mako trundles away from the warzone, the heretics reach a consensus. Each of their enemies accomplished the seemingly impossible, but only the member of their most hated species did so unscathed.
Only Legion will ever notice the fear that, two years later, will permeate the Heretic Geth when they realise that Tali'Zorah vas Neema nar Rayya is aboard their station.
Only he will ever hear them speak of their most feared demon, the Angel of Death.