For a ship of its tonnage, Ardenne had a small crew. Aside from the Navy personnel retained from the original crew, Cara helped hand-pick nearly everyone else, and knew each of them at least by reputation.
The aged ship's pilot, Flight Lieutenant Victor "Sparrow" Perez, had been at the helm of the Ardenne for fifteen years, and Stockholm had seen little need to replace either him or any of the CIC staff. Ground combat personnel, however, were recruited from a variety of posts and stations around human-settled space.
At the top of that list were Operations Chief Alvin Hyatt, a prodigious NCO from the garrison on Mindoir, First Lieutenant Ichiyo Bradley, a multi-lingual liaison officer from Shanxi who was Cara's personal favorite, as well as Staff Lieutenant Abdul Haytham and Gunnery Chief Fergus Bellamy, a pair of iron men from Ceres, a particularly nasty, resource-rich world in the Traverse where the Alliance maintained a heavy industrial presence mining for vital minerals. All the top names were combat specialists, men who had impressed in significant engagements and were known quantities.
Not all had such telling resumes, however. Cara's bunkmate, Franca Garces, was only a corporal and had seen little action at her post with the garrison on the colony of Elysium in the Skyllian Verge. But she was a proven sniper, and along with her spotter, Service Chief Julius Ricketts, made a team that—although they had been in no noteworthy engagements—was good enough to catch Stockholm and Cara's attention.
At the moment, Garces had assumed her preferred sniper's position—prone—on her and Cara's shared bunk in the crew's cabin while she read a romance novel—with a pen. Due to the extra personnel on board, the whole crew would hot-bunk, dividing sleep cycles.
"Hey, Franca," Cara said as she hopped onto an unoccupied bunk directly above.
"Commander, I just want to say thank you for assigning me and Ricketts to your ship."
"You earned it, kid. So how'd you and Ricketts get stuck with each other, anyway?" Cara asked. She'd read the file, but their partnership was downplayed, little more than a notation reflecting the fact that as a team, they scored higher in cooperative training scenarios than when evaluated by themselves. It was mostly word-of-mouth that put her in Cara's searchlight.
Cara had watched the vids of some of those tests, and she recognized when two people knew each other well enough to read minute changes in body language and interpret commands from each other without words or even the standard hand signals soldiers had been using for hundreds of years.
Below her, Garces turned pages, and occasionally Cara would hear the scritch of her pen as she vandalized the book with some snappy commentary in the margins. "We've been together since the academy. We met when I moved to Elysium with mami, right after my father finished four years on Shanxi, trying to clean it up after the war. Ricketts and I were military kids; his dad died on Shanxi, mine tried to put it back together. We had a lot to talk about, even joined the academy together. I just wanted to make my mami and papi proud. I'm sure you know how it is."
Before Cara could respond, a stiff shudder ran through the ship, followed closely by a loud boom that was heard even above the racket of the ship's engines and the entire craft lurched violently. Garces' romance novel flew from her grasp before the ship righted itself.
Cara made good use of her prison education and rattled off nearly every human language swear word she'd ever bothered to learn, while Garces swore in Spanish. "What was that?"
"That's what I'd like to know," Cara growled, dropping down to the floor and clicking the intercom on the wall nearby. But Stockholm was already hailing her from the bridge. "Shepard, get down to engineering and find out from Lindemann what in the blazes was that."
"Are we under attack, sir?"
Stockholm cursed something indistinct. "No, we shouldn't be. At least that's what Sparrow and the Ardenne's sensors are saying. Our kinetic barriers haven't taken damage, and structural integrity of the ship is intact. We think it was some kind of engine malfunction, fracking outdated--"
"Alright! I'm on it, sir!"
"Be snappish, Shepard. I need to know what my ship's doing."
"I will, sir. Shepard, out."
Garces winced. "Engineering Deck, you're going there?"
"Looks like."
"Isn't everyone down there deaf?"
"Most of them. There's no sense in having audio communications to that level; all we'd get was feedback and engine noise. I get to play messenger. Lucky me."
Cara stuck a pair of plastic earpieces in her ears and headed for the nearest ladder down to the Engineering Deck. At the bottom, she picked up a pair of well-worn drydock officer's ear protectors and fitted them over her head to keep from being deafened by the roar of Ardenne's obsolete and ill-repaired drive core. All the engineers had ear protection such as this, and even with it, most of them were hard of hearing. Chief Engineer Klaus Lindemann was almost stone deaf.
When he requisitioned the ship, Stockholm had hung on to most of the original engine crew because they were already acclimated to the Ardenne's "unique" equipment, and he wasn't of a mind to deafen any more Alliance personnel than he had to. Ideally, they should have replaced the old drive core, but some things had had to wait, given FSTF's tight funding situation.
Down the rabbit hole into Engineer Lindemann's domain was a world entirely different from the one most of the crew was used to seeing. Engineering Deck was tangled with a maze of pipes, steel grates placed at odd and seemingly arbitrary angles, rusted valves leaking a variety of gaseous compounds into the air, and the perpetual condensation dripping from the ceiling as if the entire ship were sweating. Aside from the roar of the engines, the air itself seemed to pulse with energy in tune to some mechanized heartbeat, moving back and forth through the steel jungle like she was walking inside a giant metal lung.
Even though it didn't cover very large an area, anyone not properly trained would quickly become lost in the myriad twists and turns of the Engineering Deck. Due to the space constraints and the simultaneous need to access various parts of the engine systems, the mechanized heart of the ship was labyrinthine, so Cara had taken the time at drydock to have Lindemann and two other engineers walk her through the most commonly-used paths to the main drive core assembly housing. She'd familiarized herself well with those routes, and followed a mental map of that twisting, convoluted path through the ship's steaming innards to take her to Lindemann, a tall, lanky German engineer who was one of the few on the ship taller than her. He was in his customary spot at the datacenter looking in on the rotating blue glow of the core's intake manifold, directly above the main core. Cara tapped him on the shoulder and made a few quick signs with her hands.
What was that bump about?
Lindemann gestured rapidly, his signs a little hard for Cara to follow. The primary buffer conduit failed after we hit the Relay. We're running diagnostics to determine an alternative.
Cara rolled her eyes. You told the Admiral that buffer conduit would last another week.
The engineer gave her an exasperated expression, his signs large and angry. That was a month ago, Commander!
Cara shook off her frustration. Do we still have thrusters? Is just the main drive out?
The chief engineer nodded. Thrusters are fine and kinetic barriers should still be operational, but we've lost FTL and are running on inertia at the moment. The Admiral's going to have to adjust his ETA, but Ardenne should get there no problem.
But can you fix it?
The big German rolled his shoulders and then grinned at her, suddenly reminding Cara that she'd left her shirt in the crew's cabin. Are you hot?
An angry burst of seething projectiles whizzed past her head, peppering the dirt and stone just inches from her face.
Cara maintained an easy grip on the stock of her rifle as she crouched behind a barrier of blasted rock, letting all four of her enemies expend their fire harmlessly into her cover. To their credit, they were good, staggering their fire so they didn't get caught all reloading at the same time, but their attack strategy was repetitive and boring. Cara already knew how to beat them at it.
Rolling to her side once she heard the sharp whine of an overheat and sharp click of a thermal clip being ejected, Cara tossed a short-fuse grenade at the opposite side of the gorge to draw fire, and at the same time opened up with her rifle. She hit one squarely in the chest with her spray, grazed another. Utilizing that moment of uncertainty, Cara skirted to the side of the steep embankment just below her two squad-mates.
They were cornered at the end of a U-shaped depression, steep earth walls rising up to either side, wreckage from old buildings and blasted military equipment buried in the dirt all around providing them some cover from the assault. Cara leaned up against a massive concrete slab while above her, her two squad-mates, Chief Ricketts and Corporal Garces, had ensconced themselves in the remains of some kind of scaffold with a high vantage point.
After leaning out to take another few shots with her assault rifle, Cara thumbed on the voice-activated radio link in her helmet. She could see enemy reinforcements joining with those already in the gorge, and she guessed they were about to move in, now that they were confident with their number advantage.
"Look sharp, ladies," she snapped on the squad channel. "Tangos approaching."
Ricketts must have seen them too, for just a second later he exclaimed, "Charlie Foxtrot!"
Brawny, tall, and of African descent, Ricketts was Garces' spotter, the man who found her targets to waste with her mad rifle skills. At the moment, however, the corporal had more than enough enemies to worry about and few strategic marks. She would have stayed up there shooting all day, as long as Ricketts and Cara could give her covering fire long enough to take the shots.
A long spray of bullets stitched the side of the scaffold above her. Cara heard Garces curse in her native Spanish and then Ricketts over the radio, calling for another diversion of fire. "Shepard, Franca's got a shot, but we just need a second's distraction."
"Roger, I'll draw their fire." Cara leaned out and chucked another grenade at the advancing enemy, standing in plain view after the blast to send a long burst from her rifle. A few rounds ricocheted off her shields, signaling the time for her to start running.
She dove from cover to cover, in the opposite direction of her teammates, taking shots with her rifle wherever she could and providing an excellent show for the attackers while Garces lined up her shot.
Garces' sniper rifle erupted with a satisfying crack that echoed off the sides of the drunken gorge. Cara saw the man fall, having taken Franca's shot in the chest.
"Adios, pendejo!" Garces shrieked over the radio.
Her moment of triumph was short-lived, as Cara saw a man duck out from behind cover of his own with an RPG launcher hefted to his shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream at Garces and Ricketts to redirect their fire, but it was already too late.
The rocket-propelled grenade hit just below the scaffold, the explosion ripping through the floor and tearing it apart like a box of twigs. Just like that, Ricketts and Garces were gone.
Cara roared incoherently as debris showered down into the gorge. She had no more grenades on her belt and her rifle would make no more than one or two shots before her thermal clip was depleted. Cursing, she threw down the cumbersome weapon, drew a pistol, and crouched down into a small crater in the side of the embankment, just behind a scarred wind-worn boulder, confident she hadn't been seen.
The gorge went quiet as the enemy, believing themselves victorious, halted their fire and began to once again advance into the depression toward her last-known position to finish her off. They knew she wasn't part of the sniper team, but they might have assumed she'd retreated or possibly been caught in the backlash from the explosion. They were reasonably sure she was down, but couldn't be certain, and Cara intended to capitalize on that uncertainty.
She waited until they were nearly atop her. She could hear the rasp of breath past the visors of their helmets, could feel their footfalls in the earth beneath her. Cara forced herself to allow no sounds, no movement of any kind, melding into the landscape and becoming one with it.
One of the opposing team took the penultimate step, inches away, and Cara suddenly surged forward, driving the top of her helmeted head upward into the closest chin. The man was knocked back and off his feet, and his companions hesitated, watching their point man hit the ground, reeling from the shock to his jaw. Still moving forward, Cara dipped low, planting her hands on the ground and cartwheeled her body forward, landing in the midst of her opponents.
Hand still clutching her gun, she pistol-whipped the nearest man and crashed her elbow into another's throat. She disarmed him with a swinging kick and pounced, wrapping a free arm around his neck and jamming the barrel of her pistol against the side of his helmet as she back up into the side of the embankment. He froze instantly, as did the rest of his squad.
Cara gave a savage jerk to the man's head. "Come on, shoot me!" she taunted the rest of the men.
No one moved. They kept their guns at the ready, but no one fired, and no one made a move for her and her prisoner.
"Come on, you retarded sobs," Cara growled. "Shoot me!"
But none of them did. They were worried about the hostage.
Angrily, Cara put a bullet in the man's head.
"Cut it! Cut it now!" she yelled in disgust, and abruptly the scenery changed. The entire environment sloughed away, exposing the mundane reality of riveted steel bulkheads behind rock faces, patterned non-slip tiles beneath the hard-packed dirt, and underneath it all the orange grid lines from eight highly-advanced projection matrices which had transformed the giant warehouse into a post-apocalyptic training scenario.
"Dead" Marines got up from "fatal" injuries, took off their helmets and picked up the neutered weapons. The soldier Cara had just shot in the head turned to her apologetically. "I'm sorry, ma'am. That wasn't my best effort ever."
"I'll say," Cara growled, as she ripped off her helmet and made a bee-line for the leader of the opposing team, the thin-nosed Ops Chief Hyatt.
"Hyatt, that was bloody pathetic! What were you thinking?"
Hyatt gave her a surprised look. "I was thinking of my team's safety," he said, standoffish.
"Safety?" Cara exploded. "Safety! Your job is to kill the enemy! That's what you signed up to do, and that's what I expect from you. Your team is only safe when your enemy is dead. You should have eliminated the threat, but instead you decided to put your teammate's fate in my hands—an enemy's hands. You've got too much faith in your enemies, Hyatt!" she snarled.
Surprisingly, Hyatt didn't seem cowed by her tirade. In fact, he only seemed irritated. "So that's your solution to everything, then. Just shoot first and ask questions later, no matter who gets in the way? Is that it?" It was as if he hadn't even heard anything of what she'd just said.
Angrily, Cara grabbed the man's collar and rattled him like a two-day-old sack of laundry. "You're a miserable fool, Hyatt!" she spat in his face. "Didn't Mindoir teach you anything? You don't negotiate with these kinds of people, they're not going to listen to anything other than a bullet in their brain. You show even the slightest hint of weakness and it's like chum to a shark. Your job is to keep shooting, do that and you just might stay alive. If you don't, you're probably going to get your team killed." His face inches from hers, Hyatt was still defiant, but he at least registered that she'd spoken to him.
Cara released him with a hot glare. Silence reigned. She abruptly turned to the rest of them. "And that goes for all of you! Dismissed!"
Hyatt glowered at her and slunk off to the lockers with a few other Marines as they all broke off into little groups representing the various regiments and divisions from which they'd been drafted. Cara was beginning to be sorry she'd recruited them in the first place; they splintered at the wrong times and, as Hyatt had brilliantly demonstrated, could be indecisive at crucial moments.
And all this just as they were about to rocket into their first, most critical mission. Things just got better and better.
Her two protegés, Ricketts and Garces, at least seemed to get what she was saying. Except for Bradley, she'd spent more time with the two of them than any of the other Marines in her new unit, and they were both solid.
As she walked by, Cara took the corporal by the arm. "Franca."
She must have expected a similar tirade, because her Latin features were patterned with a look of consternation. "Commander?"
"You did good, you and Ricketts both." Cara gave the corporal a pleased smile. "That's what I like to see."
"Oh. Gracias, ma'am." Garces gave her that cute, brown-eyed smile of hers and left to return her faux rifle to the racks.
Cara went the other direction, to the com-sim operations room, where Bradley was waiting, her "hostage". He rubbed the side of his head, as if she'd really shot him. Following the impulse, Cara loosened her ponytail, swishing hair that was far beyond regulation length.
"Final thoughts on the scenario?" she asked.
Bradley scratched his short-cropped, dark Oriental hair. "I took a bad chance. I shouldn't have been that careless. It won't happen again ma'am."
"And Hyatt?"
"He should have taken the shot. Even if it might cost you one of your team, you have to end the threat before giving him the chance to take you all out."
Cara snorted in disgust. "Maybe if I were batarian he would get the message."
Bradley shook his head. "No, Hyatt's like that. I've seen him, talked to him, listened to him talking to the other Marines. Even if you were batarian, he still would have hesitated."
"Gorram fool. It's a nice ideal but one you can't rely on out here," Cara growled. "I should have shot you straight up. Maybe then he would have acted."
The Lieutenant only shrugged. "If he knew you weren't going to let me go no matter what he did, I'm certain he would have risked the shot. But Hyatt tends to err on the side of caution."
"He's going to get us all killed making a nondecision like that," Cara said flatly.
"Is that experience talking, Commander?"
"Mm-hmm," she muttered. Nondecisions got people killed in the Traverse, or anywhere the lawless made their own rules; the Fugitive Four Incident had proven that to her. With her team under fire, the team leader was unable or unwilling to make the only decision possible, and while he hesitated, friends died. They paid the cost in blood and comrades for that failure to act. In the end, Cara acted, and she was the only reason any of them survived that disastrous mission; because she killed the two-faced asari traitor they were sent to retrieve. She should have been a hero, but was court-martialed instead.
Rather than talk about it, Cara changed the subject. "Do you think they even get the importance of what we're doing?"
Bradley shrugged. "You and the Admiral were always very clear about what this unit stands for, Commander, I don't think they're doubting your resolve. But I think some of them have differing ideas of how we should be going about it. Like Hyatt, for instance; he's all for protecting human interests, but he prefers subtler methods than sticking a gun at everything." He paused. "No offense, Commander."
Cara waved away the comment. "And what about you? What do you think should be our goals?"
The light-heartedness that usually marked his attitude vanished at the question. His face hardened. "I think that we owe ourselves security on our borders, ma'am." He glared through the observation window into the empty com-sim. "If we aren't going to protect our holdings in the Traverse then we shouldn't even be out here, and I sure as heck don't think we ought to tuck our tail between our legs and run for cover. I grew up on Shanxi, ma'am, and I'm more than familiar with Alliance failures to keep its own safe. If you look around, not much has changed, except now it's not the turians carpet-bombing civilian targets, it's the batarians. I've got nothing against cooperation with the Council races, but our first responsibility is to our own, and no one on the Citadel is going to help with our problems. Whether the politicians want to admit it or not, we're in this alone. We have to take action."
Cara looked at him with newfound respect. "You don't get angry nearly enough, Bradley. I wish I had another ten of you."
He smiled ruefully. "Sorry, ma'am. I'm just the one."
Everyone on her ground team was good at what they did, she'd made sure of that, subjecting them to extensive screenings before getting them assigned to Stockholm's Frontier Security Task Force. But as good as each of them was, they were all from different stations, different units, and different ideologies. Figuring out how to mesh all the personalities and temperaments to get them to function as a cohesive whole was critical.
If she couldn't rely on them to watch each other's backs, they were all going to die.