Author's note: Thanks so much to everyone who's read and reviewed, and especially thanks to my excellent beta-reader, clafount, for all of the support and encouragement!
Captain's Office, SSV London
17:30 Zulu
10 July 2178
Olokun (orbit), Osun
The ship dropped out of FTL a few hours ago, well back from the planet, so they could come in as cold as possible. There hasn't been a call to general quarters, so the plan must've worked, for whatever purpose they came to the Hourglass Nebula for. Even so, Major Kyle looks antsy, more so than usual; he's the ship's XO, responsible for the affairs of the ship's crew, especially the shore party leaders. The London has four three-man fire teams for maximum flexibility, and Kelsa's had command of one of them since she earned a real promotion to 1st Lieutenant back in January. That's when the first of the Theshaca Raids happened, the first Alliance strike against the pirates that tried to wipe out Elysium. If she had to bet, Kelsa would say that's what they're here in the ass-end of the Terminus for, another dance with slavers, the kind of dance Kelsa's good at. When Kyle doesn't return her salute or speak after a handful of seconds, Kelsa clears her throat. "You wanted to see me, sir?"
The major's standing behind the Captain Ito's desk, looking down at a datapad, and he doesn't look up for another couple heartbeats. "This is it, Shepard," he says at last, his face setting just before he finally turns his eyes on Kelsa. "The last FTL vector that we could trace out of Theshaca leads to a point a few light years out of this system. Probe recon has a hot zone on one of the planet's moons, hotter than any cell we've hit. Arcturus thinks this is the syndicate's main hub."
Being proved right puts a smirk on Kelsa's face, even if she was only betting with herself. "And we get first crack at it, sir," she says, trying to keep the hunger out of her voice. Then a splinter of doubt itches at her thoughts. "Shouldn't Commander Nwoso be here?" The lieutenant commander's the ranking officer of the ground teams, reports directly to the major. "I can get him for you, sir."
"There will be no need," Kyle tells her, and she can tell that he doesn't like what he's about to say. "Nwoso's not in charge of the shore parties for this mission, Shepard. You are."
Kelsa isn't sure she heard him right. "Shore parties, sir?"
The major nods, once. "It sounds like your letters got to somebody back at the station, Lieutentant. It's up to you to...handle the situation."
Her throat feels like a desert. "Major, I didn't mean to-"
"I know you didn't ask for it, Shepard," Kyle snorts. "I proofed your communiqés before you sent them off, remember?" He shakes his head and slides the datapad across the desk, toward the junior officer. "Admiral Chelsea read your reports, and he wants us to strike the decisive blow against these rabble right here. Are you up for it, Lieutenant?"
Kelsa scans the datapad as Kyle talks to her, caught somewhere between impressed and relieved that her concerns were actually listened to. As good as her word to Anderson, Kelsa hasn't hurt a single civilian in past raids, but she's had to let too many pirates slip the noose, each time under orders from Nwoso or Kyle himself to secure slaves and hostages first and pursue the slavers second. Now, the brass thinks that they found the pirates' base of operations. Surprise is supposed to be the order of the day...surprise, and victory. No more Mindoirs, no more Elysiums. Not after Torfan. "Yes, I am, sir," Kelsa answers the XO. "Is there any intel on the base's layout? Does the London have the firepower to contain any attempt to withdraw?"
The major doesn't answer right away; instead he measures her, almost like he hasn't properly seen the soldier before. "A few geoprobes gave us enough to know there are two ancillary entrances to the catacombs, and one large cave that serves as a hangar bay." Kyle's omni-tool lights up, and a holo on the desk projects a sphere between them. The major touches a couple points on the orange ball that turn yellow, and the last one turns red. "That'll be where the lion's share of their ships are, and I assure you that we have sufficient ordnance to collapse each entrance, along with decimating the pirate fleet before it even gets off the moon."
The lieutenant leans toward the holo of Torfan, studying the details. "There could be other ways in and out, emergency shuttles…" But already a plan's forming behind her eyes.
Kyle grimaces. "In my opinion, a ground assault is foolish; there are hundreds of pirates, and only twelve of you. I've argued with the admiral, but he refuses to send reinforcements for a proper assault. Instead, he's asking Ito to throw all of your lives away."
"Waiting on backup's too risky," Kelsa breathes, all her focus eaten up by mapping out her assault. "If they know we're coming, they go set up shop somewhere else, and they'll be back in a year or two, or five. Gotta make them think they'll win until it's too late…" Her finger traces from one yellow circle to another. "It looks like these two doors lead to a common room, probably deep under the base. Nwoso'll take Daniels, Constanza, Pelopoulos, Johnson, and Sheldon down the left path. I'll take everyone else to the right. We'll demo the caves on the way." Blinking, the lieutenant looks through the holo to Kyle. "Don't blow the hangar until the first shuttles try to take off. Then it should be safe to call for reinforcements to dig us out, sir."
Her borderline-insubordination doesn't look like it sits well with the XO, but an admiral's given an order, and it's Kelsa's operation. "And if we excavate only to find a dozen Alliance corpses and the pirates find another way out?"
"Then have Arcturus send somebody better next time, Major," Kelsa tells him. "But I know I can do it, sir. Just give me fifteen to get the others ready."
The holo flickers off and Kyle straightens up, finally giving Kelsa her salute. "You have ten, Shepard," he says. "Make them count."
Kelsa gives a parting salute with an Aye, aye, sir, and heads to the mess to gather the shore party.
Subsurface Bunker Entrance
1800 Zulu
10 July 2178
Torfan (ashore), Olokun, Osun
Kelsa kicks one of the batarians on the floor, and he doesn't kick her back, so she holsters her shotgun and takes off her helmet. The blast that brought down the outside cave shook the airlock, but didn't breach it, and they're gonna be in these tunnels for a long time; no point in wasting their suits' life support. She's got five other people with her in the bunker, no casualties. No prisoners. If she prayed, Kelsa'd pray that Nwoso's team hasn't run into any worse trouble in taking their own airlock. "Reedquist," the soldier barks, to the only other officer on her team.
"Ma'am?" 2nd Lieutenant Sarah Reedquist clips, once she's collapsed her own helmet and readied her assault rifle again.
Kelsa checks over her shotgun as she talks. "Take Barnes and Amato to scout the hallway. They've gotta know we're coming. Go stir up some trouble and bring it back to us." Reflex has her return the junior officer's salute.
Without having to be told, Corporal O'Mara and Service Chief Schreier take up defensive positions around the bunker's back entrance. Both are good men, steady, older than Kelsa but ready to follow her orders. The three of them were a team before Captain Ito made Kelsa the pointman for the whole shore party, and they've already followed her into hell over half of the Terminus Systems. They hadn't even winced when she told them the plan. Ain't nobody else gonna steal our action this time, Shepard. We do it our way. Hell, Schreier even played an old Sinatra song into all of their HUDs in the push down to the airlock, about a click underground.
Kelsa nods to her men and takes her position just outside of the bunker, using a boulder and a big box as cover. She doesn't have to wait long; about thirty seconds later, a symphony of real music starts up farther down the tunnel, a bolero of bullets and battlecries. Barnes and Amato back into Kelsa's view, laying on suppressive fire until Reedquist comes running. Grenade pops and raspy screams cut through the gunfire, and the scout team withdraws, pulling back to the relative safety of the fortified airlock. Kelsa waves them on. "Whadda ya got, Reedquist?"
"Took out about eight of 'em, maybe a dozen more inbound, ma'am," the lieutenant rasps. "Looks like that big room you talked about's maybe a couple hundred metres, but it ain't gonna be easy to get to."
O'Mara snorts. "Nothin' ever is, LT," the Australian lets on.
"Damned right," Kelsa grunts. "Those four-eyes better get their asses moving. Nwoso's prob'ly waitin' for us already." The batarians oblige a second later, thirteen undisciplined thieves funnelling themselves right into a hard point. Kelsa takes out three of them with two shotgun blasts before she falls back into the bunker herself, and her team cuts down the rest. Schreier's sniper rifle drops a couple batarians who tried to run. "Come on," Kelsa tells her people. "Let's get to the rendezvous."
A chorus of five Aye, aye, ma'ams chases Kelsa into the corpse-covered hallway. She jumps when one of the bodies groans, fixing her shotgun onto the batarian, the only one still alive...and he doesn't look like that'll be true for too much longer. Even so, he manages to force out a few phlegmy words. "Did...Kraxnos send you people?"
"No," Kelsa tells him, checking her shotgun. The whole team got fresh ammo blocks in all of their firearms, not to mention two spare blocks per soldier, but she doesn't feel like wasting ammo on a dead body. "We're Alliance marines. Corporal Jane Howard sends her regards." Before he can die on his own, Kelsa brings her boot down hard, right on his face, and then she keeps walking. Amato and Reedquist both mumble uneasily, but neither of them speak up; Corporal Howard saved a lot of people on Elysium, but she couldn't save everyone on the planet, and every Alliance Marine's heard stories about what the pirates did to civilians before the Alliance flotilla arrived. O'Mara and Schreier won't breathe a word against their lieutenant while they're on a mission, loyal to a fault.
The cave gets wider and a little taller, but the floor and walls are smooth, free of anything that might be used as cover, all the way up to a set of horizontal bay doors. Bay doors that are sliding open a centimetre at a time. Instinct takes hold of the soldier. "Scatter and zigzag," she yells. "There's a side door on the right. We can make it!"
Kelsa's instincts haven't failed her yet, and they don't start now, as much as she might wish she was wrong; there's a personnel carrier behind the big doors, a six-wheeled turian model. One big gun and two rapid-fire APWs. The marines open fire even as they run and dodge, but there's nothing to hide behind, and not even Kelsa can dance fast enough to keep the machine gun rounds from grazing her shields. The main gun doesn't fire for a long stretch of seconds, tracking closer and closer to Kelsa, and no matter how fast she runs, the soldier can't close the distance to the far wall in time.
Schreier, that quick bastard, catches up to Kelsa with about thirty metres to go. She opens her mouth to yell, to tell him to get back, but he shoves her sideways, hard, just a half-second before the APC's cannon belches out a shell. A half-second later, the only thing left for Kelsa to yell at is part of a leg and an arm.
And then Kelsa feels cold, in spite of the hard fight down here, in spite of the shotgun that's near to melting in her hands because Amato shorted out the heatsink routines that limit the number of rounds per minute any standard Alliance weapon should be able to fire. She feels the bone-cutting cold of a bad Michigan winter in patched-up clothes, the dead cold that she hasn't been able to shake since she dropped Jay.
Kelsa runs straight for the APC, not bothering to dodge, not even trying to zigzag. The cannon pops off another shot, but she rolls under it just in time and then jumps up, clearing the last two metres to the vehicle. Somehow she manages to land on the front with one lucky machine gun slug in her thigh, even though her shields dropped just after Schreier caught the shell. The pain doesn't even register, though, and dozens of hours of simulations kick in; the soldier pries up the tank's forehatch and drops a grenade into the front chassis. In another handful of seconds she repeats the exercise on the rear section of the vehicle, and the guns fall silent. She doesn't have time to stop, to breathe, to think. Movement means life, and the big chamber's crawling with pirates, maybe a hundred. Maybe more. The soldier dives into some cover from off the top of the smoking tank, rolling behind a stack of barrels that won't stop too many bullets. But the barrier holds long enough for her shields to come up and her suit to give her leg some medi-gel.
A skirmish starts up from nearby, just a little bit beyond the barrels. "Must be Nwoso's team," Kelsa yells, to anyone in range. "Let's get ready to join up!" She counts out three more breaths before she jumps out from cover. Unlike the end of the cave, this chamber's a maze of trucks and boxes, so it doesn't take Kelsa long to find somewhere more secure to fire back at the enemy from.
O'Mara's the first one to find the 1st Lieutenant. "Amato's carked it," he tells her, in between barrages from his pistol. "Took that second shell you dodged. Great work on the tank, LT." The man's words are hollow and his eyes look glazed. Kelsa won't say anything about it in the middle of a firefight, but she knows that Operations Chief Castela Amato meant just about as much to O'Mara as Schreier did.
"Hold it together, Kevin," she breathes, ditching her half-melted shotgun and taking up her own pistol. It's maybe the third time she's used the man's first name since they met two years ago. "Stay with me, stay smart. We'll get these fuckers."
The corporal swallows and nods, but anything he's about to say gets sidelined when the whole room starts shaking. Chips of rock rain down from the ceiling and a couple boxes fall around them. "Guess the Tokyo's joining the party," O'Mara yells.
Kelsa nods. "No way out but up," she tells him. "Let's go!"
They push off together and meet up with Reedquist and Barnes in the next row over. Reedquist's limping, even with medi-gel, but her assault rifle's steady. Halfway into the big storehouse, the team's joined by three more marines: Staff Lieutenant Maisie Sheldon, Corporal Hector Pelopoulos, and Serviceman Victor Constanza. Nwoso, Johnson, and Daniels are dead, taken out by some heavy mortar fire. The seven living soldiers form into a single squad with Kelsa on point, even though Sheldon's technically the ranking officer, just as Commander Nwoso was before her. The marines fight across the storage bay; Kelsa picks up a shotgun from a dead batarian along the way, and by the time they've cleared out the room from the outside in, she's used it to kill twenty-seven batarians, six krogan, and two turians.
In the base's middle levels, the soldiers have to go room by room, and Kelsa splits them into two-man fire teams to cover more ground. The tactic's risky, especially for Kelsa herself, since she's the odd one out. But they stay in radio contact and rendezvous often. That way they clear two more floors. Kelsa thinks it's strange that they don't run into any slaves, but nobody has any ideas, and the pirates aren't interested in talking...not that the marines are keen to listen, in any case.
After sixteen more hours of combat, Barnes walks into a grenade launcher, and Constanza gets taken out near the collapsed hangar bay a couple of hours later. Everyone else is hurt, woozing on their feet, but they can't stop. The Alliance isn't going to try to dig them out for at least another day, and it's hard to say how many pirates are left. Kelsa regroups the marines into a single squad and stakes out a defensible position to catch a few minutes' rest.
Bootsteps echo in a near corridor, but before anyone can get a shot off, a booming voice calls out from the shadows. "We would speak with the humans," the stranger says. He sounds krogan to Kelsa's unpracticed ears. "We've come to parlay, unarmed, in good faith."
Reedquist and Sheldon both give Kelsa skeptical looks and she mumbles for them to keep their weapons raised. "Never heard of good faith out of a pirate," she tells the shadows. "Come and talk. If I like what I hear, I might even let you leave again."
The speaker takes a step forward; he's a batarian, but a big one, and he looks unarmed. Nobody else comes out of the shadows. All four of the pirate's eyes blink, and then blink again. "Where are the rest of you?" He growls, suddenly paranoid. "My men have reported dozens coming up from the cellars. I see only five."
Kelsa kicks off from behind her rock, keeping her stolen shotgun ready. "I've got infiltration teams scouting," she lies. "Whatever you're offering, my answer's no."
The batarian laughs. "That's no way to bargain," he tells her, and takes another look at the wounded band of soldiers bleeding in front of him. "We are trapped by cave-ins, with no equipment to dig ourselves out. The surface communication towers have been compromised, and we have no QECs. But I still have a hundred brothers for every human I see. On my word, you would not survive the hour."
"Get on with it, then," Kelsa barks, her eye twitching. "Either say what you came to say, or try and kill us. Hasn't worked out so well for you yet."
"Fine," he grunts. "I have much property that I am willing to part with, in order to secure passage for me and my brothers out of this system, where your kind will not follow us."
The soldier's lip curls. "By property you mean slaves," she says, and the batarian doesn't argue. "I've killed two hundred and fifty-seven batarians in the last twenty-four hours," Kelsa tells him. "Seen half the fuckers before now, on other planets and moons. Times where I had to let them go and couldn't follow them, because my superiors wanted to save their hostages."
The batarian nods. "Wise people, these superiors of yours," he says. "Everyone lives, everyone's happy."
"I wasn't finished," Kelsa hisses, gripping her gun tighter, though she's not pointing it at him just yet. "But my superiors got tired of chasing you and your brothers from one rabbit hole to another." She glances up toward the ceiling. "They put me in charge of this operation to make sure that doesn't happen again...and there ain't any way for them to tell me different, now. So I've got an offer for you."
The man's face scrunches up, in the batarian gesture of a frown. "I'm listening, human."
"Surrender," Kelsa tells him. "Give up your weapons and hostages, and when the Alliance comes to dig us out tomorrow, you can all spend the rest of your days in an Alliance brig." She knows it's just what she told the batarians on Elysium, that it's not an easy mouthful for anyone to swallow, but it's all she's got.
"I don't know who you think you are, human, but you address Master Eg'harn Blyest," the batarian says, and Kelsa knows he'll give her the same answer she got back on Elysium, two years before. "I have been more than patient with you. I count twenty-three humans among my property, who breathe only at my pleasure. I will see each of their throats slit before I surrender to you."
The soldier spits and tastes crimson on her tongue. "I'm Lieutenant Shepard, Alliance Navy," she says, levelling her shotgun at the pirate. "And here's my answer."
Coburn Memorial Hospital
0900 Zulu
5 August 2178
Arcturus Station, Arcturus
She opened her eyes two days ago and nearly killed herself trying to pull the tubes out of her throat and arms. The last thing she remembers before then is hobbling out onto the surface of Torfan in between O'Mara and Sheldon. She collapsed almost as soon as she saw the silhouette of the London hanging overhead.
Schreier, Reedquist, Amato, Barnes, Nwoso, Johnson, Daniels, Constanza, and Pelopoulos. Forty hostages, over half of them human. Nine hundred and seventy-eight pirates.
They're all dead.
But Kelsa's alive, and so's O'Mara and Sheldon. From what the nurses say, they're just as bad off as Kelsa, or worse. She doesn't even know if they're awake, not really.
Captain Ito came by to talk to Kelsa after she opened her eyes, told her how proud he was of her, but there was a shadow in his face. She got the feeling that he almost would've liked it better if everyone had died down there, the whole team, so they could be heroes. He said they all were anyway, but Kelsa knows she isn't one. She just did what she had to. Major Kyle came around not long after, but that visit didn't go so well, and a burly pair of nurses had to push him out of the room by the end.
No one's been by since, so when a soft knock sounds on the door, Kelsa isn't expecting anyone but another nurse, or maybe the doctor. But the man who steps through the door doesn't look familiar; he's old, at least sixty, with bristly white hair parted along one side. And then she recognises the face she hasn't seen but once, six years ago, in the Alliance recruiting office in Detroit. The heart monitor beeps a few ticks faster for a couple of seconds. "Major Kincaide," she rasps.
"Shepard," the man says, and his voice cuts through her memory like a slug through meat. "Looks like you've got yourself a little banged up."
"I would say I've had worse, but I promised not to lie to you, sir," the soldier manages. Then she laughs, and regrets it.
Those blue-grey eyes flicker for a second. "I had my doubts about you, you know," he tells her. "Way back when I took you in off the streets, I thought you'd wind up right back on them, or in jail."
"Been to the brig a couple times already, sir," she says. "Think they might...put me back there now? For what I did?"
Kincaide's wrinkles twist. "Oughta be giving you a goddamned medal," he growls. "A whole stack of 'em. It'll be a miracle if we have another Elysium in my lifetime, kid. And now the bastards know what's coming for them if they try to pull one off."
Kelsa just breathes for a minute, pushing through the pain of her cracked ribs and the deeper aches that the medi-gel and the painkillers can't touch. "Major Kyle called me a butcher," she tells the old man, looking up at the ceiling. "A monster." She tastes the word on her tongue, and doesn't find it as bitter as she thinks she probably should. "Maybe I belong in prison, sir."
"Major Kyle's been relieved of duty," Kincaide sneers. "The press is having a motherfucking field day with that little quip of his...the Butcher of Torfan, the aliens are calling you." He shakes his head. "But as for prison...I'm afraid the Alliance has much worse in mind for you, when you're ready to get up out of that bed, soldier."
The woman peers at him through half-lidded eyes, heavy with painkillers. "Breaking big rocks into smaller rocks out in Hawking Eta, sir?" She hisses out another laugh.
"Worse than that, even," comes another voice, from the doorway. Major Kincaide stands up straighter, and Kelsa even tries to sit, but the machines by her start beeping like crazy. Captain Anderson takes a step into the room, giving the major a sharp nod. "I've read over Captain Ito's reports. Impressive stuff, Shepard, even if the cost was more than many could bear."
"Sir," Kelsa acknowledges, because she can't think of anything better to say.
"The nurses say you're tired, so we won't disturb you much longer," Anderson says. "But I just wanted to let you know in person that there's a spot in ICT waiting for you as soon as you're able to fill it, Staff Lieutenant Shepard."
ICT? Kelsa blinks. Staff…? "I...don't think I understand, sir." Her tongue feels like sandpaper. "You're sending me to the Villa?"
Major Kincaide steps in. "Only if you want to go, Shepard. But you've already proven yourself to everyone that matters."
"Hell," Anderson says, "I don't know if there's even a handful of N7s that could've taken a dozen people into that hellhole and lived to tell about it. Like the major says, it's your choice...but the Villa wants you, Shepard. It was made for people like you."
"If you say so, sir," Kelsa rasps, just before she closes her eyes. She doesn't hear the two men leave.
