3 - SSV Normandy: April 8th, 2183
On most Alliance attack ships, a full mission briefing would take place in the conference room or the war room or some kind of large tactical center where the situation could be discussed by the officers not engaged in running the actual ship. Normandy was too small of a vessel for that; the Comm Room was only large enough to fit three or four people so long as all of them really liked each other. The ship's mess was the second logical choice, but the holographic monitors weren't ideally placed for conveying information. That left the cargo bay and the CIC, and in the CIC the command station was high enough and positioned in the right way to make a lectern that Captain Anderson used this room for briefings and conferences.
The triangular center console formed a wedge that divided twenty marines - almost the entirety of Normandy's crew - between the flight specialists to starboard and the ground team to port, where Captain Anderson hovered above the command station, high enough that he could put his hands on the ceiling to keep himself in place and everyone in the room had to look through the holo field to see him. Lieutenant Commander Shepard floated at the point of the console in the center of the divide, perched on the point of the triangle like an eagle on a branch. The others had collected in a loose knot more or less oriented with their feet towards the deck, keeping themselves in position with gentle touches of hand holds on the floor and ceiling and the support columns that encircled the room.
The holographic field above the triangular console had been displaying a graphical representation of the Normandy when the crew arrived, but at a touch of Captain' Anderson's hand on the controls it switched first to a galaxy map display and then zoomed in until it showed a floating representation of the Utopia star system, along with a moving blip that represented Normandy's position. The ship's orbital trajectory was traced in green, with an arrow facing along that line away from the blue-green dot labeled Eden Prime. Everyone in the room knew that meant the ship was near the end of its braking maneuver, the main engines firing retrograde to their path to slow the ship down to a more reasonable velocity to enter the planet's atmosphere.
Nihlus had planted his feet on the wall behind Anderson and hadn't moved so much as a muscle in almost an hour. Most of the crew had forgotten he was even on board, the rest assumed he had fallen asleep and that not even Captain Anderson had the balls to wake him up and move him.
As the display shifted, Captain Anderson began the briefing with his usual opening, "Shepard? Are we ready?"
The Lieutenant Commander searched the room, met the eyes of every man and woman assembled here, and then nodded on their behalf. "We're ready, Captain."
"Alright, people. Here's the situation. Four months ago, a construction crew working in the northern sector of Xiong Memorial Spaceport discovered an alien structure buried beneath a layer of sedimentary rock. This structure was soon confirmed to be prothean in origin, and a science team was sent to investigate. Ten days later, the science team discovered a structure whose position and design were both consistent with a long-range mass effect communications complex. Investigation of this structure soon lead to the discovery of an intact, repeat, intact communications beacon. Given the robustness and longevity of Prothean technology, there is a very high probability that this beacon can easily be restored to full functionality."
No one moved. No one even breathed. The gravity of his words made all of them feel strangely heavy despite the Normandy's current weightlessness.
"Commander?" Anderson tilted his chin towards Shepard.
She picked up the details without missing a beat. "While we were sleeping, the marine garrison at Eden Prime setup a security perimeter and the scientists at the site have been putting the beacon under a microscope. Unfortunately, the colony's science facilities are not equipped to handle a find like this, so our orders are to transfer the beacon, the researchers and all of their preliminary findings to the Citadel for further study. At fourteen hundred fifty hours shipboard time, we will touch down at landing complex thirty nine at Xiong Memorial Spaceport. Ground Force will assemble into three fire teams, temporarily assigned. Lieutenant Pakti will lead Private Fredericks, Private Chase, Corporal Waaberi and Sergeant Dubyansky as Fireteam Guardian. Lieutenant Alenko, Corporal Jenkins, and myself will accompany Spectre Nihlus as Fireteam Mantis. Corporal Tucks, Chief Barret and Chief Postle will form Fireteam Survivor.
"The game plan is as follows," Shepard opened her omni-tool and tapped a command there. The holo field flickered and a translucent display of Eden Prime's main spaceport appeared. It was a coastal facility, a row of several dozen landing pads all built on concrete and steel platforms a few hundred meters apart. The northernmost landing platform, barely completed, was indicated with a pulsing circle, as was another location three and a half kilometers north of it marked by the label 'dig site.' Shepard zoomed in on this area as she continued, "Fire Team Guardian will provide site security and coordinate with local law enforcement and the Marine Garrison at the location to maintain a perimeter of at least one kilometer from our landing site. This must be done immediately, but operations will not delay for a perimeter breach. Mantis will secure the payload at the dig site and facilitate transfer to the Normandy for retrieval. Survivor, you'll be collecting the scientists and personnel who originally uncovered the artifact and make sure all principals are accounted for along with all needed equipment and personal affects. You have the hardest job, because you have to police up those civilians and get them moving in a reasonable amount of time, and the eggheads are likely to insist on making two trips so they won't forget their prothean barbie doll collections or whatever."
This got a chuckle, in the deadpan sort of way of people who knew it wasn't actually funny and that it was going to really suck having to deal with it for real and that somehow made it even funnier.
Shepard went on, "Friendly forces are in the area maintaining heightened security near the dig site. We'll be working with elements of the two hundred and twelfth and the two thirty second Expeditionary Combat Teams. Both units are about the same strength as us. That's twenty marines and three UT-41 Klondike shuttles. Remember, they've been doing this already for half a year, so trust them to know the terrain and the situation as well or better than you do. Once again, Guardian will have the job of coordinating with those friendly forces in the area to maintain a perimeter of at least one kilometer. I suggest making very good use of those shuttles, since Normandy will not be available for overwatch."
"This has to be done with the utmost caution," Captain Anderson said, "The information stored within this beacon could be a boon to the entire galactic community. We cannot afford to allow even the slightest-"
"Captain! We've got a problem!" It was the shipboard intercom and not the direct line to Anderson. So it was the sort of problem that didn't call for discretion. And Lieutenant Moreau's voice carried a deep, powerful tension that even his pathological sarcasm couldn't dissipate.
Shepard instinctively checked the battery level on her hardsuit's barriers.
"What's wrong Joker?" Anderson asked.
"I just lost the comm buoys at Eden Prime! All transmissions from the system have completely stopped!"
Anderson hesitated for a long moment, wondering why exactly Joker would be calling to warn him about something like this. "Priority connections?"
Nihlus stirred too, pushing off the wall and catching the rail next to Anderson like a diver maneuvering in a coral reef.
"Even the military channels are dead," Moreau said, "None of the beacons are responding. We got a big burst of emergency traffic starting about two minutes ago, and then the blackout."
Instinctively, Anderson and Nihlus both turned to the holo tank and started calling up extranet windows from Xiong's navigational services. Every one of those screens flickered and displayed the triangle-and-exclamation-mark 'trouble' symbols as the computer failed to locate the servers.
But Normandy was a stealth reconnaissance ship; it wasn't just a combat vessel, it was also a spy, constantly listening to everything around it. The computers in the comm room listened and recorded and the ship's VI was programmed to categorize its many intercepted transmissions for easy analysis.
So to his command console, Anderson said simply, "Replay last transmission on any military or emergency channel from three minutes prior to loss of signal."
The VI responded with a pleasant but enthusiastic beep. Immediately, the holo field in the center of the room was replaced by one large video window, probably shot from a news camera or or a photojournalist, judging by the quality.
At exactly three minutes prior to loss of signal, the video showed an Alliance Marine in red and white battle armor, backpedaling through a knee-high swampland. She was firing in short bursts from an M7 assault rifle at a target the cameraman couldn't seem to keep in frame; whatever it was, it was firing back, and the marine scrambled for cover as a stream of blue-white projectiles zipped over the top of her helmet. Then the image shifted - the cameraman had paused recording for some unknown length of time - and the marine was running towards him through tall grass. Enemy fire pinged off her kinetic barriers, making little auroras dance around the skin of her armor. She ignored it, focussing instead on the cameraman. "Get down!" she shouted, and gave a shove. The camera showed a view of the sky, then the ground, and then the same marine standing over him, firing again, then moving.
The camera swung around violently, trying to get a picture of whatever it was she was shooting at. Something grey and vaguely humanoid jittered across the screen for a moment, then another... a row of somethings moving in close formation, firing off weapons Shepard didn't recognize. Someone off camera fired a Carnage grenade; and one of the things exploded, and a moment later, someone screamed.
The camera shifted again. More passage of time. This time a man in yellow and grey assault armor was shouting into the camera, "We are under attack! Taking heavy casualties! I repeat, heavy casualties! We can't ar-" another carnage grenade zipped past his helmet, heading in the direction of his attackers. He didn't really seem to notice; he was clutching the sides of his helmet as if his ears were in pain. "We need evac!" he shouted/grunted, "Heavily outnumbered! We need ev-" the camera registered a sharp metal crack and suddenly there was a fist-sized hole in the marine's chest. He fell backwards like a sack of baseballs, and the camera fell sideways.
Under the rattle and pulse of gunfire and microartillery, a new sound had bullied its way into the universe. A deep, rumbling metallic sound, like the blast of a million horns sounding the lowest possible note that a human ear could still recognize as a sound at all. The camera field became totally still, as did the three marines caught in the frame at that moment. All of them frozen in something not completely unlike terror, petrified as they looked up at the sky at the source of that horrible sound. And once the man holding the camera came back to his senses, he turned his recorder in that same direction.
For an instant, a shape. Something airborne, something massive. Something that was descending through the cloud layers, flashes of red lightning all around it.
Static in the recording doubled, as did enemy fire a moment later. A glimpse of a marine ducking towards the treeline, kinetic barriers flaring as sheets of gunfire poured across his back. More static, more fire. The cameraman muttered something in Russian that Shepard could only interpret as 'to hell with this.' And then the recording ended. The cameraman had chosen that exact moment to upload his recording to the extranet. Whatever might have happened next...
"That's the last transmission?" Anderson asked, "Fourteen hundred seventeen and..." he looked at the timestamp, "Forty nine seconds?
"Aye, Captain," Joker said, "Everything cuts out after that. No extranet, no comm traffic at all. There's just nothing."
"Reverse and hold at thirty eight point five," Anderson said. The VI somehow realized he was talking to it and did as he asked. The video reversed back, and then stopped.
The shape was there, frozen in a single clear frame. The thing that had made that horrible sound was descending through a layer of thick clouds with a curtain of thick crimson lightning flashing around it. It looked, if anything, like a gigantic metal hand, as if an angry god was reaching out of the heavens to grab a mountain-sized fistful of Eden Prime soil. It was hard to judge distance or scale, except that whatever it was it was massive, and it was descending directly on top of Xiong spaceport.
The hardened mandibles that passed for Nihlus' cheeks gave an involuntary twitch.
Anderson thundered, "Travel time to the planet?"
"Seventeen minutes out, Captain. No other Alliance ships in the area."
"Take is in, Joker. Fast and quiet."
"Aye, Captain."
Anderson frowned, "This mission just got a lot more complicated."
Like it wasn't complicated enough, Shepard thought. "Strike my last, marines. This operation is now force recon, free fire ROE. Combat drops are indicated with deployment only as needed."
"A small strike team can move quickly without drawing attention," Nihlus added, "It's our best chance to secure the beacon."
Anderson nodded. "Agreed..."
"Mantis will perform a combat drop on the direct approach," Shepard said, "Once Joker and Presley spot us a landing site, we'll go in hard. Guardian and Survivor on standby."
"That's the play, then. Grab your gear and head down to the crew deck. Flight crew, man battle stations for atmospheric penetration!"
The room emptied almost immediately; the eight flight officers scattered like a school of gold fish and pushed themselves towards the bow, slipping into the operations seats that lined both sides of the forward corridor. Most of the marines, meanwhile, disbursed in almost exactly opposite directions; four of the marines took up guard positions near the doors to the CIC while the others went below decks to start preparing for a possible combat drop.
Nihlus turned from the holo tank and traced a path along the ceiling until he got to the stairwell leading below. The marines ahead of him parted like the sea and he passed them as if he hadn't even noticed them.
Shepard stared at the image, burning the thing into her mind. She could tell she was only seeing part of it, but whatever it was, she couldn't even begin to guess. It didn't even resemble anything familiar. A complete unknown.
"Alenko. Jenkins." The two marines were still in the room, staring at the holo field almost as transfixed as Shepard. "Suit up," Shepard said, "We're going in."
...
...
The Capital of Eden Prime was a tower called Constant, which in a previous life had also been the colonial transport vessel MSV Constant before the settlers landed it and converted its engines into a manufacturing plant. Constant was one of several hundred enormous structures that dotted the surface of the planet now, each tower rising over a thousand meters into the sky, supporting between four and eight thousand people in so-called "post-urban" developments. Post-urban colonies were known by one term or another to most of the civilized species of the galaxy; they were an attempt to compact all the amenities of modern society - hospitals, stores, public parks, indoor plumbing, shopping centers, public spaces, manufacturing centers, schools and offices - into the smallest possible horizontal footprint. The idea was to avoid an ever-expanding and inefficient urban sprawl and make a minimal impact on a planet's local ecology while also still being able to support huge populations in relative comfort and safety. This didn't always work the way it was intended, but Eden Prime was one of the more inspiring examples of its success.
Three quarters of a million people lived in these tower dwellings, and between them they controlled much of the money, resources and political influence of Eden Prime's budding new society. But in recent years the post-urbanites had started to be out-numbered by pre-fab shelters and co-ops setup by hardy outdoorsmen, survivalists, adventurers and aspiring farmers. With year-round temperate climate, mild rains and few predators, Eden Prime was even more attractive to people who preferred the comfort of wide open spaces and total independence to the clockwork, carefully engineered convenience of post-urban life. The arcologies may have offered better services and a more cosmopolitan way of life, but the kinds of people who made Eden Prime the success it had become had arrived here looking for a much simpler, humbler existence.
Most of the new development, therefore, was taking place outside of the pre-planned tower communities, much to the chagrin of the colony's wealthier residents. The new Xiong Memorial spaceport had been built near the shoreline of a temperate coast, roughly in the center of most of the homesteading development; a five kilometer tram ride would take new arrivals to Aguilar Station where the Baria Frontiers Corporation had its new headquarters. Both of these stations had their own fusion reactors, supply depots for ships and colonists, and a small market of sorts where farmers and tradesmen could come to buy and sell. These two linked complexes made the heart of a community that valued independence and personal freedom but still wanted to be a community in some form.
At the moment, however, most of the prefab towns and communities lay scattered and broken around a tormented landscape, knocked from their foundations and tossed about like paper cups in a thunderstorm. A huge column of black smoke was rising from a deep crater near the center of the spaceport campus, and all around it the evidence of a colossal blast that had flattened buildings and displaced shelters and structures for kilometers in every direction. It looked like someone had dropped a nuclear warhead right in the center of the spaceport and then melted ground zero into glass for good measure.
So of course, the geostamp from that last recording put right in the middle of it all.
Lieutenant Moreau made his approach from the east, flying the Normandy at nearly treetop level in hopes of avoiding detection. With the stealth drive engaged and the ship's emission sinks active, Normandy's thermal signature was identical to the surrounding air, but anyone with a decent lidar system or at least a working pair of eyes would still be able to see it.
A few kilometers short of the spaceport, Normandy passed over a huge rectangular depression the size of a soccer field, carved into the ground in neat terraces that converged on a deep, wide shaft in the center. Around the excavation, smooth angular towers with triangular tips pointed skywards. The distinct hallmarks of ancient prothean architecture.
Newer and larger towers were up ahead of them now, these showing the more familiar patterns of human architecture the closer they got. It was here alone that the first signs of violence became evident: streaks of tracer rounds cut through the sky, flashes of light and explosions as isolated skirmishes raged for tens of kilometers in every direction. Two UT-47 Kodiak shuttles passed overhead and began firing at some unseen target on the ground; something on the ground fired back at them with a weapon that looked like a glowing blue fireball and sent one of the Kodiaks tumbling almost out of control.
Lieutenant Presley swiped his fingers across his tracking console, a soft grunt as his sensors told him what he already knew. "Joker, are you seeing this?"
"I see it, alright. Radar and lidar both. Somebody's got some serious jamming tech out here."
From the CIC, Captain Anderson said, "I'm marking drop points for the Makos. Set for deployment."
Two new navigational points appeared on Joker's screens. Both of them were on the other side of a deep, broad valley on the least-developed side of Xiong Spaceport. So Captain's going for subtlety... "Roger. Vectoring in on drop point one. Fifty five seconds."
Anderson switched off the intercom and toggled to the ground team channel. "You loaded up, Shepard?"
Two decks below in the vehicle bay, Commander Shepard was just sealing the armored hatch on forward compartment M-35 Mako infantry fighting vehicle. Lieutenant Alenko was in the seat to her right, patching the ship's sensor readings into the Mako's computer to update its internal topographical maps. Behind and between them, Corporal Jenkins was seated at the controls for the tank's main gun turret with a look of wild excitement in his eyes. "Locked and loaded, Captain," Shepard said, strapping herself down, "So what's the plan?"
"Nihlus will scout ahead," Anderson said, "He'll feed you status reports throughout the mission. Your team's the muscle in this operation. Go in heavy and head straight for the dig site. Maintain radio silence except for absolute emergencies until you've secured the beacon."
"What about survivors, Captain?" Lieutenant Alenko asked.
The inner door at the front of the vehicle bay began to hiss open. A kinetic barrier had already snapped into place to keep the air pressure from dropping and to keep the wind from blowing into the bay; outside it, the landscape of Eden Prime rolled beneath them as Normandy continued its descent.
"Helping survivors is your secondary objective," Anderson said, "The beacon is your top priority!"
"Approaching drop point one!" Joker announced.
To their left, the other Mako IFV began to stir as its engines powered up. Lieutenant Jenkins chirped, "Nihlus! You dropping without a gunner?"
The hold down clamps in the deck released the other Mako and it began to rock gently on its wheels. "I move faster on my own," said the Turian over the comm channel. Moreau counted down on the intercom, and then at "zero" all four of the small thrusters on the underside of the Mako fired. The vehicle had just barely risen off the deck when it suddenly shot forward like a bullet propelled out of a gun, racing into the distance. And then it was gone, falling out of view, disappearing behind them.
Almost immediately, Normandy turned hard to starboard and began to ascend again, circling back towards the edge of the valley.
"Ready to roll, Skipper," Shepard said.
The landscape shifted and Normandy dipped its nose again. "Approaching drop point two," Joker announced, "Sandby for kick in five... four... three... two... one..."
At zero, Commander Shepard gently pulled the leaver between their seats, firing the Mako's jump thrusters at ten percent power, just enough to take the weight off its wheels. At that exact moment, Lieutenant Moreau cut power to the main engines and fired a strong pulse from the Normandy's retro thrusters, and the stealth recon ship dropped so much airspeed so fast that the Mako was simply thrown out of the cargo bay and into the open air along with anything else in the bay that wasn't properly bolted down.
Rapid Deployment, she told herself, remembering the jargon. Nobody ever bothered to actually land starships in a combat zone to offload troops. Every Marine was a paratrooper, and even their vehicles were just spaceships with wheels; the fastest way to get off of a starship was to open the door and jump, and the fastest way to get to reduce your airspeed was to slam your vehicle into the ground. The M-35 Mako was specifically designed to do both of those things, and for some reason nobody thought this was crazy.
"Seven hundred," Alenko reported, watching the radar altimeter, "Six fifty... six hundred... five fifty... five hundred... four hundred meters... terminal velocity!"
"Thrusters active," Shepard said, and for the second time, pulled the lever between their seats, opening it to full thrust.
The four mass effect jump thrusters flared to brilliance on the bottom of the tank, glowing an otherworldly blue as the vehicle descended. She felt the sudden onset of normal gravity and quite a bit more as the tank began to decelerate.
"Two hundred... one fifty... one hundred... seventy meters... thirty meters..." Alenko clenched his teeth and gripped his restraints. Jenkins did the same, and Commander Shepard held onto the steering wheel with arms straight and her body tensed for impact. Oh God, I hate this part...
The Mako hit the ground about as softly as a fifteen ton armored vehicle would be expected to, which is to say amazingly hard. It kicked up an explosion of dust and topsoil, bounced and skidded almost a dozen meters before finally coming to rest in the center of a clearing. Shepard caught her breath, shook off the blunt force of the impact, then slammed her foot on the gas and started moving.
The way ahead was mostly clear, just thin forests and grasslands between here and Xiong Spaceport. Alenko's navigational display told them they had come down about three kilometers south of the port, which in turn was about four kilometers east of the excavation site that had unearthed the Prothean Beacon. As they drove, Shepard looked through the mission summary Anderson had uploaded to her hardsuit computer. The prothean ruins on this planet had been discovered years ago, but excavations had found very little of value here in all that time. It was the same as it was in most places prothean ruins were found: a lot of rubble, a few fragments of what might have once been defunct technology, and every indication that the burried ruins had once been a fully populated and thriving city until whatever happened to the rest of the Prothean civilization finally happened here. And still no one had any clue what that was, although the theories were endless...
"What do you think, Commander?" Jenkins was saying. Shepard had been dimly aware he and Alenko had been talking to each other but hadn't been listening to what was said, "We're not just gonna grab the beacon and run, are we? I'm itching for some real action!"
"I hope you're joking, Corporal," Alenko said, "Most 'real action' usually ends with Doctor Chakwas patching up crew members in the infirmary."
Shepard nodded over her shoulder, "I need you to calm down, Jenkins. A good soldier stays cool, even under fire."
"Sorry, Commander. But this waiting's killing me. I've never been on a mission like this before. Not one with a Specter on board!"
"Just treat this like every other assignment you've had and everything will work out..." Shepard checked the threat warning panel on the overhead display. It was still showing nothing of note, but it wasn't showing any reflection from the trees or the rocks they were passing either. They're still jamming us even at this range, she thought.
"Easy for you to say," Jenkins growled, "You proved yourself on Akuze. Everyone knows what you can do. This is my big chance! I need to show the brass what I can do!"
"This mission isn't about personal glory, Corporal! We have a job to do! Don't do anything stupid to mess it up!"
"Don't worry Ma'am! I'm not gonna screw this up!"
The threat display flickered, with multiple contacts suddenly appearing and disappearing at the edge of detection range. Sensor artifacts appearing, with the computer not being sure how to make sense of them. But they were all appearing in roughly the same direction, bearing zero one three degrees. Which put them roughly in the direction of the secondary dig site that had discovered the beacon. Shepard checked the navigational display again. Eight hundred meters now to the dig site.
Go in heavy and head straight to the beacon. Those were Anderson's orders. But going in a large armored vehicle with no infantry support and totally blind at that...
Shepard brought the Maco to a stop just short of a shallow creek and shut down the engine. "We'll take it on foot from here."
Alenko glanced at her, "You sure about that, Commander?"
"We've got no sensors out here. No way to know what's ahead of us. If they see us before we see them..."
"Got it. Right behind you."
Jenkins dismounted first, throwing open the side hatch and climbing down to the soft grassy soil. Shepard opened the transparent hatch on the side of the seat and dropped smoothly out while Alenko did the same on the opposite side. All of their weapons were already mounted on the two service hardpoints on the backs of their suits, and now deployed, they unstowed them and unfolded them from their storage mode to their service configuration. Jenkins' standard rifle - the M8 Avenger he'd been issued at basic and had somehow convinced himself was a really effective modern weapon - unfolded to almost twice its stowed size in his hand and he spent a few overly optimistic moments checking the calibration on its telescopic sight. Shepard's weapon, an M-92 Mantis sniper rifle, was also standard Alliance issue, but not standard Alliance spec; she'd modded it with high explosive rounds and a gyroscopically balanced targeting system that was actually capable of providing useful feedback to her hardsuit. In two and a half years of using this weapon, Commander Shepard had scored twenty six confirmed kills, eighteen of which had been head shots.
Lieutenant Alenko carried no visible weapons at all except for the standard M3 sidearm at his hip holster. Shepard knew from his service record that what the Lieutenant actually carried wouldn't be visible until he decided to use it.
She lead them across the creek and up a slope that would have been too narrow for the Mako to pass through on its own. If anyone was waiting in ambush for them at this point, they'd be expecting a large armored vehicle and not three soldiers sticking to cover. Her hardsuit's threat detection - displayed as a phantom image in her field of view - only had a range of about sixty meters, but even this was still throwing up phantom images blinking in and out of existence all around her.
"Alenko," Shepard said, "Take point. Jenkins, drag tail."
Alenko responded by pumping his fist and then moved in front. Jenkins took position behind her, bringing up the rear with his crappy assault rifle. Shepard set the pace, keeping her head on a swivel, but her attention was divided elsewhere.
She had her hardsuit pump its raw data into her neural interface and listened to the static as much as watched a graphical representation. There was nothing recognizable in the signal input, except that there was a lot of it and it was coming through on a lot of different frequencies. On a hunch, she told her hardsuit to cycle through radio frequencies in narrow bands, first in amplitude and then in frequency modulation, and listened as it began its sweep.
"This place got hit hard, Commander. Hostiles everywhere. Be on your guard." She didn't recognize the voice at first, but then she realized it was because she had gotten used to hearing it with a slight flanged echo. Nihlus must be close to the research station, she thought. Nice of him not to tell us what the hostiles actually look like.
"This place smells like smoke and death." This time it was Alenko, his voice barely a whisper. He wasn't using the helmet radio, speaking just loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to give away their position. He was nervous, she could tell, and reaching out to his squamates. But he was also staying off the comms, which meant he knew enough to keep radio silence as ordered...
Then something crackled out of her comms, and Shepard paused, lifting her fist to signal the others. It was a low pitched electronic stuttering sound, like the recording of a tree frog with extremely choppy audio. She listened to it for a few seconds, but nothing in it was recognizable. There wasn't a pattern to it, exactly, but the way it sounded it was almost certainly some form of communication. If it wasn't a language, it was at least a code.
Shepard programmed her omni-tool to ignore all other transmissions except for sources of that specific signal at that specific frequency. As soon as she did, three small contacts lit up on the edge of her threat detection, fifty meters ahead, circling slowly. She couldn't see them from where she was, but she could tell by their position that they were obscured by an outcropping of rocks ahead and slightly uphill to the right. Still circling slowly... but not slowly enough to be walking.
So what makes a sound like that and moves like a kid on a skateboard? she asked herself. Of course, there was only one way to find out.
She signaled Jenkins forward, and with another hand signal told Alenko to cover him. Jenkins checked the charge on his assault rifle and then advanced, with Alenko just a few paces behind him.
Shepard's threat display blinked, and one of the circling contacts stopped circling. Then all three of them began to move in a slow side-to-side motion. Shepard knew this pattern. Combat drones of some sort. Must be making a barrier formation. No wonder Nihlus hadn't told them who they were fighting; simple combat drones wouldn't give many clues as to who was operating them.
But two could play at that game.
Shepard toggled the functions on her hardsuit computer and charged her omni-tool's EMP. One concentrated blast of microwave radiation at just the right frequency could usually overload the kinetic barriers of anything smaller than a main battle tank. She'd follow up with the usual VI logic bomb, just in case those drones were autonomous and not remote controlled like she suspected they were. And if all that failed - or even if it succeeded - the sniper rifle she was carrying would make a very decisive argument.
None of which mattered in the end, because at that exact moment Corporal Jenkins leapt out from cover and opened fire.
"Goddammit Jenkins!" she shouted, but her words were drowned out in a rattle of gunfire.
She couldn't see what Jenkins was firing at - he was too far ahead of her and too exposed for her to get a shot - but whatever it or rather they were, their weapons fired with a soft electronic chirp and such a fast rate that the Corporal took almost three dozen hits before Shepard could even take a step forward. His armor peeled back around his chest and stomach and the corporal tumbled backwards as if he'd been kicked in the chest by a racehorse.
Shepard dove for cover as bright blue plasma bolts zipped past her. Alenko, on the other hand, planted his feet in the ground and raised his hand to their attackers like a man addressing an unruly crowd. Shimmering blue light danced across his palm, and then a concave shell of incandescence filled the air in front of him, like a giant curved wall of faint light. The incoming fire deflected on sharp angles up and away from Alenko as it passed through the barrier, leaving hazy tracers along their path like light rays bent by a lens. Every strike of the barrier sapped some energy from it; the barrier grew imperceptibly smaller as Lieutenant Alenko struggled to replenish it from the energy of his own metabolism.
Shepard wasn't about to let him burn himself out for no reason. She came to her feet, pointed her right arm at her target, and fired the EMP. The first drone flickered in a flash of light and then toppled over to the ground, disabled. The other two next to it adjusted their positions, the air sparkling around them as their kinetic barriers failed. Shepard raised her sniper rifle and sighted on the first one, taking just a moment to learn it's shape.
The drone was hovering ten meters in the air, bobbing like a balloon on a breezy day. It was roughly disk shaped, with a flat surface on the nearest edge that probably contained sensors. A small turreted weapon was slung beneath it, tracking at them, spitting blue bolts of ionized plasma in an almost constant torrent. She lined up her shot at the optics plate of the drone and squeezed the trigger; the rifle barked like a thunderbolt, and the drone exploded.
Alenko's barrier dropped, and in that moment a soft blue glow enclosed the second drone. It hovered motionless for half a second, then slammed straight down into the ground with such force that Shepard could feel the concussion from forty meters away. Ahead of her, Lieutenant Alenko let out a deep sigh as he tried to catch his breath. Human biotics could manipulate mass effect fields by sheer force of will, but even with amplifiers sewn into their brains and nervous systems, doing so took a massive toll on their bodies.
Corporal Leroy Jenkins lay in a pool of blood up the slope, not far from where the last drone had been slammed hard into the ground. Six wide clean holes had been punched straight through his body.
Alenko knelt down next to him, paused for a moment. He scooped up his assault rifle and the two grenades from his belt, then reached up and gently closed the dead man's eyes through his visor. "Shields never triggered, Ma'am," he said, kneeling next to him, "Never stood a chance."
Shepard stiffened. "We'll see that he receives a proper burial once the mission is completed. But I need you to stay focussed, Lieutenant."
"Aye, Commander..."
"For starters, we better figure out what happened to his shields. I doubt it was a malfunction in his suit."
"With Jenkins, Ma'am? It's certainly possible."
"True, but..." Shepard turned her attention to the two drones, one smashed to bits on the ground nearby, the other lying mostly intact but disabled up the slope. She picked up the disabled one and turned it over in her hands. It was heavy - heavier than anything she would have expected to be flight capable - and when she turned it over it made a sloshing, churning sound as if it was partially filled with fluid. She looked at the small weapon slung underneath it, and frowned. "Well there's your problem. They're not using mass accelerators."
Alenko paused next to her, looking worried. "What are they shooting at us? Lasers?"
"Something like that. Which means our sensors never detect incoming fire fast enough to raise the shields." Shepard held it up for him, turned it in her hands, "Any ideas, Lieutenant?""
Alenko thought for a moment, "Well my biotic barrier deflected it well enough, so it's not a laser. Probably some kind of high-energy particle beam?"
"That makes sense." Shepard smiled, and then opened her omni-tool. The glowing orange holographic gauntlet appeared around her arm and fist and she began to adjust the settings on her hardsuit's defense suite. She patched into Jenkin's suit and loaded data from its battle damage logs, had her computer analyze the burn profile, and then programmed her hardsuit's threat detection system to scan for energy emissions with the same pattern. "If those particles move slower than laser beams, this should still work."
Alenko nodded and started to adjust his own settings. "That's a good idea, but won't this make our shields less effective in close combat?."
"Until we know who and what we're actually fighting, I don't plan on getting into close combat."
They both moved on, reaching the top of the slope and passing the point the three drones had been circling. Three badly mangled human corpses were lying there, all three in civilian dress, and all three bearing the same deep penetrating wounds as Jenkins. One of them was carrying a Mattock assault rifle, the other two carried Carnifex hand cannons. Mercenaries, probably, Shepard thought. Or maybe crew members of a civilian ship. They all had the same symbol sewn into their clothing: an elongated hexagon with the bottom corner open...
"Got some burned out buildings here," Nihlus said on their channel, "Lot of bodies."
It was interesting that they still had radio contact. Shepard realized that the jamming must not have been frequency specific... or, more than that, it might not have even been jamming at all. She set her transmitter to an NBC filter mode and keyed her mic, "Radio traffic is so heavy it's interfering with our scanners."
"I noticed that too. I'm not sure what's causing it. Maybe that ship in the distance?"
Shepard paused, "What ship?"
"The one we saw from the recording, or so I assume. From this distance, I would guess it is at least two kilometers long. I don't recognize the design..."
"Contact!" Alenko shouted, and fired off his sidearm. Two more of those strange combat drones were hovering up ahead of them, pulsing away with their particle cannons. There was no time to get into cover - Shepard began to think that was the entire point of these things - and the bright orange kinetic barrier panels flashed into existence around her armor just in time to block a half dozen energy pulses raining down on her. Shepard dove for cover, shield panels flickering like a ghostly second layer of armor all around her, and sighed with satisfaction as her shields chose only this exact moment to fail.
Alenko fired off a few more rounds, then raised his arm and put up his biotic barrier. Shepard counted to three, then rose from cover, sighted the first drone in her rifle, and fired. The drone exploded with a loud pop, and her rifle's ammunition case popped open and spat its spent casing into the air with a hiss of steam. She popped in a fresh one, sighted on the second drone, and fired again. The drone seemed to be turning to retreat when the round struck it; it died in a small but extremely loud explosion, and pieces of shrapnel tumbled through the forest all around them.
"Enemies everywhere," she muttered, echoing Nihlus before adding, "Ooh rah!"