Valkyrie's Song Chapter 3
The Rock
Valkyrie's Song is a Mass Effect Fanfiction by Eisen. Mass Effect belongs to Bioware.
AN: As I noted in my summary, this work is being rewritten and edited. My thanks to coffeeguru from AO3 for putting so much love into my work. I've removed all the old stuff for now and am re-uploading as pieces are finished. It will take a while since this story is on a backseat as I work on my DAO fic but I feel it's only fair to inform any of my readers, whose feedback is the lifeblood of my writing. The story will follow a similar path to the previous upload, just, well...all that better expressed.
Hannah ducked down behind the ruined wall just in time to avoid the barrage of bullets that chewed into the meagre cover and whizzed over her head. She waited a moment then popped back up, spraying fire blindly in the direction from which she had been attacked. There was the crack of a sniper rifle and the Lieutenant heard Stepesh crow in victory over the comm as a body toppled over from behind a wall. "I got you covered, Sir!"
"Thanks Step. Squad, wrap up any stragglers then pool ammo and check your gear." While ammo was no longer in use in small arms, the terminology was still used to refer to the thermal clips that newer weapons ejected to prevent overheating.
The chatter of gunfire continued for several more seconds and then a deathly silence descended upon the square where the soldiers had bunkered down. After a brief pause Marshal broke the oppressive silence. "Clear!"
It had taken the Marines a whole day to forcefully evict the raiders that had landed on Mindoir. Part of Hannah was glad they missed what must have been a brutal assault; another wished they had been there to make sure the fuckers had't done as much damage as they did. Psychologically and otherwise.
But they were now on the retreat; the discipline and trained skill of the Alliance response team easily overpowered the slavers once the Anti-air artillery had been reclaimed and the Kodiaks could be used to deliver fire support. Once more Hannah felt the two-sided bite, being happy the colony had not had more modern GARDIAN lasers installed yet, but knowing if they had had, they might not have been successfully invaded as they had been. Fucking batarians.
Hannah watched as the soldiers performed maintenance checks on their equipment and traded thermal clips. These were the most basic rules of the military, of the Marines. Dating back all the way to the twenty-first was the motto: 'This is my rifle, many are like it, but this one is mine.' It boiled down to taking care of your equipment, so that it could take care of you.
Eventually she judged that they'd had enough of a break. "All right men, hustle up and get ready to chase after those bastards."
She waited for the business of the impromptu bunker to die down before she continued, making sure that all the soldiers' attention were fixed on her. "Intel says that the raiders landed just within the perimeter of the bordering wilderness. Now I know some of you are colony kids, expecting endless prairies, but this is Mindoir and we're at the fucking equator. You won't be able to see two meters in front of you, so make sure you have your thermal sights calibrated, motion sensor active and ER on. No helmet-less rodeoing here. I will not tolerate any friendly fire because you got spooked by your buddy's fart."
She narrowed her gaze as she looked from soldier to soldier, making sure they had all picked up on what she'd said. "Alright, we know they took some of those that weren't killed or escaped, so I repeat, this is a rescue op, not wetwork. Watch for tarantula mines and other traps and for fucks sake make sure you kill them before they kill you. Got that?"
After a chorus of confirmations she nodded. "Move out!"
The squad moved out in a staggered formation, one member moving from cover to cover while another watched over their advance. Shepard was on the far left of the small column, her position slightly exposed but offering her a view of the entire group; she saw Udresku's amber outline approach her through a wall, the ER painting him as a friendly with his name and designation floating above his head.
The three squad leaders had reformed the teams once they had secured the majority of the main settlement, with Parata taking the reins rounding up the remaining civilians and bringing them to a secured location. The majority of his and Udresku's fireteam set down a perimeter for when the relief ships came. Udresku himself had decided to follow Shepard, as she and her squad cleared out any remaining pirates, slowly driving them out of the colony.
"These fuckers are proving hard to dislodge," she commented once he was within range.
"Yes, but we'll get them."
She looked at him, face expressionless. "Is there something you wanted, Lieutenant?"
He shrugged. "Nothing much Shepard. I just wanted to remind you that while your position might have a tactical advantage, I don't want to be the one to tell a girl and her dad that you couldn't keep your promise."
Shepard's blank expression turned hard as she clenched her teeth at his audacity, but then her visage changed as she could almost feel her daughter's shoulders under her hands, her husband's lips ghosting across hers. After a few seconds she relented. "Of course, you're right. The Alliance doesn't need dead heroes." She crouched down and slipped to the floor from her viewpoint, sounding as if she were talking to herself more than him.
As the Lieutenants spoke, neither noticed how one of the ER signatures winked out on the display, before appearing moments later as if nothing had happened, or how the orange line of a grey-armoured marine vanished as he silently disappeared into the rubble.
~o~
As the platoon neared the edge of the colony, the prefabricated buildings gave way to greenhouses. The clear glass structures were large enough to hold several acres of crops. The Marines walked between the buildings, space enough for several vehicles to maneuver separating each of them.
The soldiers tried to stick as close to the large houses as possible, moving from cover to cover as they advanced. Udresku had moved to the front and Shepard covered from behind, stopping every now and then to scan the terrain for hostiles as her troops advanced.
Shepard saw Udresku's icon get highlighted on her HUD as activated his comm. "We've reached the edge LT. Looks deserted."
Hannah made another pass of her surroundings with her scanners, checking that there was indeed nothing that would threaten the squads. "Roger that. Alright men, form up at Udresku, get ready for that jungle combat I promised you earlier. Gonna be a party."
She clambered over some stacked crates, seeing that the Marines had already started congregating where the ER told her Udresku was. As she drew closer, something in her gut felt wrong - a tension she knew to trust after all these years.
Panic gripped her as her she tried to voice her concerns. "Delta, spread out! Something doesn't feel right."
Just as she got the words out, the world was swallowed by flame. She gasped as the breath was knocked out of her, as her body was lifted off its feet and was flung into the crates she had just climbed over, her armour making a metallic clang as ceramic impacted with steel. Fortunately her suit absorbed the blow well and she was back on her feet in seconds, running towards where her men had disappeared in a ball of white-orange. Fuck…of course it was a trap, Shepard, come on! How can you be so blind?!
She had brought her rifle to bear, scanning the smashed infrastructure for signs of life, for signs of enemies. But all she saw was scorched ground, shrapnel, debris and twisted metal. Scattered among the torn area were parts of the squad, an arm here, a leg there. Blood pooled from under the black cloud that was hiding most of their remains from her sight. She never thought she could be that grateful for pollution. There weren't even screams; the explosion must have ended them all in the initial detonation, what kind of bomb would be that effective? All her men had been wearing the standard-issue ablative armour of the Alliance Marines, equipped with the extra protection of kinetic barriers. Warning bells were going off in the back of Hannah's head as all the facts presented themselves. Not hearing any sounds after an explosion near friendlies was far worse than the normal groans and screams. They couldn't all be gone….
She finally managed to gather up the courage to head into the smoke cloud, making sure that her helmet was fully sealed so that the toxic smoke wouldn't suffocate her. But as she took her first step towards the epicenter of this chaos she felt a sudden pain blossom in her chest, her kinetic barriers whining as they overloaded. She looked down at herself, seeing the hole punched right through her chest's armour. Fucking...trap, she thought as she collapsed to the ground, left hand fumbling to trigger a dose of medi-gel as darkness claimed her.
~o~
Eris watched the data that was being fed to the Einstein by the groundside teams. It looked as if so far the liberation was proceeding well, with minimal casualties. She sifted through the data, trying to find the feed sent out by her mother's hardsuit. It wouldn't take long, the custom runtimes it had been modified with would easily set it apart from the others, but every second that passed where she was not able to ensure that her mother was safe was agony.
The borrowed armour she wore allowed her to interface far better with the ship's systems and allowed her to bypass many firewalls that would normally have stopped her progress. She was grateful that ship's security was not controlled by a VI; that would have made things far more difficult. Instead, it was one of the older fleet vessels, a model that still relied on technicians to monitor and track what was happening in the systems - to them she would just be another suit blip.
After several minutes she found Delta squad's frequency. Discreetly masking her suit's software suite so as not to appear on the squad's HUD, she logged in. At once her own HUD picked up the rest of the squad. Several names appeared along with heartbeat monitor. She inspected each of them, heart rate slightly higher than normal, which was to be expected in a combat scenario, but nothing too extreme, which meant that they were not engaged in a fight at the moment.
She was searching for helmet audio and camera feeds when something odd happened. One of the suit feeds cut off entirely. The stats didn't drop, or flatline. The icon tracking the squad member simply disappeared from the HUD. Eris narrowed her eyes, watching the offending space. Seconds later the icon re-appeared, as if nothing had happened. The stats were entirely normal, but something nagged at her...something was not quite right about that reading, that display. It disappearing as it had should have been impossible, unless the entire suit was destroyed, the server that was linking the suits crashed or...it had been masked as she was masking hers!
Forgetting about the video and audio she started searching for the signal that was sending the current suit feeds from the one that had disappeared. It proved to be difficult, but eventually she managed to use a bypass to track it down. The extranet protocol hosting the signal was on a completely different subnet mask from the rest of the squad...now she knew something was wrong, and that wrong was entirely too close to her mother.
She tracked back to the logs, trying to find where the signal had originated from before it had switched off; when she found it she clenched her jaw in frustration. It was a dynamic address, changing every few seconds. She scanned the range it was in, which addresses were already taken by the rest of the squad and proceeded to track which EP the suit was currently linking from, since there was no way that that suit would not remain linked with all its fishy connections. Aha!
The first thing Eris saw as she enabled the video feeds from the suit were the crosshairs of a Mantis sniper rifle hovering over the chest of her mother's hardsuit. The young girl's mouth went dry as she realised what she had unknowingly become witness to, that the rest of the squad's icons on the HUD had all turned a menacing red, lacking any vitals feedback, or displaying an error. Her mother's was the only remaining living signal, and the heart rate was far too high. Far too high and with a sniper pointed right at her.
