Shepards assault rifle let out a dry click as it overheated and could no longer be fired. He pressed a button on the side of the rifle and it ejected it's thermal clip, only to load in a new one. He had already used four of his eighty-round clips on the pirates, and they still kept coming. From the beginning, Shepard had counted in his mind how many bandits he had shot. When he lost track after sixty, he decided to not think about it and just shoot instead.
The pirates had, to Shepard's relief, no armor or shielding, unlike everyone of the Normandy; even the crewmen had combat shields applied in this occasion. Instead, the pack of thieves and murderers relied solely on ferocity and sheer numbers. The pirates "uniforms" where so random that some even had gasmasks while others didn't. Some had eyepatches while others had mechanical eyes. Bionic arms and legs could also be found among the rabble. Shepard had even seen one with a mechanical lower jaw. As for weaponry, some of the pirates had simple lead pipes, machetes or swords, while others had assault rifles, shotguns or heavy pistols.
The commander looked to his right and saw one of the pirates aiming at him with a pulse rifle. Under the black bandana that the thug had tied around his face, Shepard knew that he was smiling. He quickly turned around and fired a couple of rounds in the pirate's face, splitting his head and spraying blood and brains all over the wall that was behind him.
As he saw the gory kill he just made, Shepard let out a grunt of annoyance. "Why do these weapons have to be so overpowered? It's gonna be a bitch cleaning this mess up!"
Shepard suddenly saw something in the corner of his eye. He turned back to where the hostiles where storming into the Normandy, only to see another thug in an ancient gasmask, just about to hit him in the head with a sledgehammer. However, before the man in front of Shepard could fulfill his plans of caving in the commander's skull, a throwing knife suddenly appeared in his eye and he fell lifeless to the floor. Shepard looked at the direction the knife had come from, only to see Zaeed looking at him. Shepard made a thankful nod at the mercenary before returning to the onslaught ahead.
When Shepard once again "emptied" his thermal clip, he had lost track of time and numbers. As far as he knew, they could have been fighting for days and killed thousands of pirates. When Mordin threw a shock grenade, one of the professor's prototype inventions, it cleared two of the "hallways" that had pierced the hull of the ship, with a cacophony of screams in pain, and Shepard released a breath he didn't knew he had been holding.
Although they had recently attacked, seemingly without fear or concern for their own well-being, Shepard saw on the remaining pirates faces that their courage was beginning to falter; they had lost hundreds of their companions and comrades, while the Normandy had lost none. There where still a complete horde of them left, so they showed no signs of wanting to stop attacking.
Shepards rifle let out another dry click as he used up his last thermal clip. Most of the crew had also run out of ammo, so they where firing with their heavy pistols. The considerable reduction of firepower let even more pirates into the ship and even spread around a little. This resulted in Shepard not having time to switch to any other weapon on his back, so he dropped his rifle and quickly pulled his knife that he had strapped on his thigh.
The human jumped over the barricade that he was behind and slit the throat of a thug aiming a Scimitar shotgun at Joker, before stabbing a woman with a Predator heavy pistol in the chest. Her eyes widened and she got a shocked look on her face as she saw the metal blade in her chest. She coughed up some blood before Shepard pulled the knife out and she fell dead.
All of a sudden, Shepards eyesight went dark and blurry, as his head exploded with pain. He became dizzy and fell down to his knees and kept his arms as support. His head pounded and he felt like he was going to vomit. He tried to figure out what had happened, but found himself barely able to think.
Shepard turned around on his back and saw a pirate standing with a Lancer assault rifle. Instead of the barrel, it was the rifle butt that was facing him. Most likely, the pirate had rifle-butted him in the back of his head.
The thug turned around his rifle and pointed the barrel at the commander. A wide grin spread across the the bandit's scarred face. Shepard felt the eyes of the man look at him through the black, shiny goggles.
As the man raised his rifle and put the barrel right in front of Shepard's face, the commander felt time slow down. Shepard heard the firefight as silent noise in the background. He heard more pirates screaming in agony as they got ripped apart by Jacob's biotic field.. He swore he could hear the bald, goggle-wearing man in front of him slowly squeeze the trigger.
Shepard had nearly given up all hope of surviving, when he suddenly, like a godsend, heard Joker, who had detected his troubled situation, shout his name. In the slow-motion speed that only was in Shepards mind, the bald pirate slowly turned his head towards Joker with a questioning look, before getting shot back to the stone age by the pilot's ravaging happy trigger-finger. Joker actually shot so many times, that the pirate's clothes had caught fire. He only stopped shooting when his rifle had overheated.
Shepard got back up on his feet as fast as he could, readying his knife to strike again. He then noticed that they had run out of pirates. Instead, there where now bodies lying like a sheet across the floor. The walls, the floor, the crew, even the ceiling, all covered in blood. Shepard then also noticed that all the pirates where humans. A fact that he hadn't given much thought before.
Shepard looked at his crew. None of them had died in the attack. There where barely any injuries neither, except Joker who had broken his right thumb by the recoil while making the bald pirate look like cheese. He then looked to his other direction where the walkways where protruding from the hull. Far in the back of the walkways where doors that where probably the only thing preventing the crew of the vessel to be sucked out in space if the walkways are ever blown off. In two of the walkways, the doors where shut and sealed, but in the third, hey had apparently been damaged and where still unlocked.
Shepard activated the radio in his omnitool and signaled to his entire team. "Squad, report! We've cleared the CIC. No casualties."he said into the radio.
A few sparkles could be heard, followed by the voice of an exhausted Garrus. "Crew deck cleared commander. Three wounded crewmen, one of them badly. None dead."
Shepard nodded. He was not surprised that they had managed to hold out so well. After all, Garrus, Miranda, Grunt, Jack, Legion, Samara, Thane, Kasumi and most of the crew was down on the third floor, while him, Mordin, Jacob, Zaeed, Joker and a part of the crew had managed to hold out.
Shepard's heart froze as he remembered that the only ones that where down in engineering was Tali and five crewmen. "Tali! What's your status?" he said in the radio. No answer. "Tali! Report!" he almost shouted at his omnitool.
At first the radio was dead-silent, but suddenly it sparkled to life and he could hear Tali's voice.
"Going to hell Shepard!"the quarian shouted from the other side, trying to make herself heard over the radio. Shepard didn't know whether to be happy to hear her voice, or worried over her situation. "Crewmen Fawkes, Gonzales and Marks are dead! Gabby is badly hurt and I don't know about Ken! Could you lend me a hand here!" A scream of agony could be heard together with the sound of Tali firing her shotgun.
When he heard how the situation was, Shepard's mind decided to be worried instead of happy. "Hold on, I'll be there!"he shouted into the radio so Tali would hear him over the cacophony of firing weapons in the background.
An explosion could be heard from the other end, followed by Tali's voice. "Good, because I really need some AHH!"the signal from her suddenly went dead and Shepard felt a very genuine stream of fear flow through him. He was not afraid that she would be dead; his mind didn't want to accept that as a possibility. He was afraid that she would be hurt badly.
"Well...that didn't sound good." Jack's voice transmitted over the omnitool radio. Shepard didn't register Jack's comment. He stood there, trying to think. Trying to figure out the situation.
"S-stay where you are. I'll go get Tali."Shepard said. He dismissed an objection from Garrus by saying that he needed them there in case the pirates came back, but what he really wanted was to get to be alone with Tali, whether she was alive or not. He walked over to the elevator doors, only to find them out of function. He turned to Mordin. "Get this ting going!"
A loud, cracking sound was heard as the pirate that Tali had recently high-kicked in the head, hit the rail with his neck, breaking it instantly. She raised her shotgun to blow a hole in the head of a large, muscular man that smelled like cheese and garlic, when a young woman, seemingly in athletic shape, kicked it out of her hands, sending it gliding across the floor.
Tali quickly dodged a large fist, almost three times the size of hers, pulled the knife that was strapped on her shin and then put her hands on the floor behind her. She put her weight into her hands and made a backflip, kicking the large man in the lower jaw in the process, sending him out cold.
Tali landed back on her feet, her right knee in the floor and her right hand held high in the air behind her, while her other leg was standing on its foot with her left hand on the knee. The quarian laughed inside her mind. "Shepard knows that I'm both military and mechanically trained, but he doesn't know that I'm also a little of an acrobatic!"
She looked up at the other woman, who was standing dumbfounded over Tali's knockout. Tali guessed that she wasn't as agile as her, but was unfortunately proved wrong when young pirate suddenly did a number of cartwheels, followed by a backflip. She ended up standing right in front of the quarian.
The woman couldn't have been much over twenty. Pretty young, even for a pirate. She was wearing a black, zip-less leather jacket that only went a small bit below her ribcage. Underneath, she wore a red T-shirt with some human letters on that Tali didn't recognize. On her legs she had a pair of very tight, stonewashed jeans, a material that humans had been wearing for hundreds of years apparently. On the woman's feet where a pair of black boots with a zip on it's side, instead of laces. Her hair was colored red and was set up in a shaggy punk-style. She had also a very dark makeup on her eyelids and lashes. Tali found her to look basically like a bitch.
As Tali stood up, the young pirate made a high-kick towards the quarian's face. Bad move. Tali easily dodged the kick and jumped up at the wall to her left, right above her working panel, kicked off and kicked the human in her very exposed back. Tali did everything so fast that the other woman had no time to react. The blow in the back came completely unexpected and she flew into the rail, where she cracked her skull at the cold metal. "She wasn't so good as she thought, after all."
The quarian heard running to her left and turned her head to see more pirates running towards her. A smile grew on her face as she felt she was beginning to get cocky. She made a quick cartwheel, jumped with a frontflip and landed on the shoulders of the thug in the front of the small army. If Tali hadn't broken his neck almost instantly with a snapping twist of her body, the pirate would probably have enjoyed the view. Tali jumped off the bandit, who fell to the floor with a heavy thud, and, with a quick movement of her knife, cut the throat of a hostile who was unlucky enough to be within arms range.
The man grabbed his throat when he realized that it was springing with warm blood, before he too fell dead to the cold, metallic floor of the Normandy. Tali had killed surely around thirty pirates all by herself, but they showed no signs of decreasing in numbers, and she was getting tired and winded. She heard the gunfire blaze on the floor above, together with screams of agony. She could only imagine how many where up there if there where this many down here; the engineering room in not exactly a top-priority place to strike.
As she heard a whining sound, Tali automatically dodged something that she didn't even know what it was yet. A loud clang was heard as a large object that Tali didn't recognize, hit the wall next to her. It looked like a very large version of the human tool called "hammer". She figured that the tool that was in front of her was what she had heard of as a "sledgehammer".
The person who had swung it was a large, robust woman with a pink mohawk, something that Tali had seen human juveniles have in different colors on, among other places, Omega, and more piercings than she thought should be legal. The large woman had piercings in her ears, her nose, her eyebrows, hell, even her tongue. "How the hell can they think that looks good?" Tali did find the human version of tattoos nice; she particularly liked the large tattoo on Shepard's back that he said resembled something called a "Chinese dragon", but piercing? Small metal pieces through your skin? Tali did not find that as nice.
The woman raised her large hammer to smash Tali's faceplate into smithereens, but as she ran towards her, Tali took a nonchalant step aside, put her and in the back of the head of the large woman and used the woman's own speed, together with a little added power to bash her head into the wall, face first. As Tali turned to the rest of the bandits, she heard a tired groan from the large woman behind her, followed by the classical thud of another pirate hitting the floor.
Tali smiled when she saw that the rest of the pirates had now stopped, and where now standing at the terminals where Ken and Gabby used to work with unsure looks on their faces. The tables turned, however, when the door behind the pirates opened and they received rifle-armed reinforcements. It was now the pirates that where smiling and Tali standing there with an unsure look on her face. The only difference was that her expression could not be seen.
Tali looked back to where her shotgun had disappeared and saw it lying right next to the door that Shepard used to sneak behind her and take her by surprise. The quarian threw herself towards her gun as the space thugs opened fire; no time for fancy acrobatics now. However, as she did so, she tripped over the unconscious body of the large woman she recently knocked and fell to the floor after about halfway to her gun.
Tali screamed in pain as she landed with her full weight on her left shoulder. She struggled, trying to crawl towards her shotgun, as she found herself not being able to move her arm. For every feet she made, her shoulder exploded with pain, like there where two knives grinding against each other inside her shoulder.
Although it felt like knives, Tali knew very well what it was: she had just broken or dislocated her shoulder, she hoped for the latter, and bone was now grinding bone. She had experienced this kind of pain before, on the original Normandy, when it had exploded, a piece of flying debris had broken her femur and she had felt the same bone-to-bone grinding pain; she had to work like hell to make it to the escape pods. She was still feeling guilty for engineer Adams' death; if he hadn't stopped to help her to the escape pod, he wouldn't have gotten that piece of debris on him, and maybe he would still be alive.
When Tali finally got to her shotgun, well behind cover behind the some pipes, she attended to her shoulder. She found to her relief that her shoulder was only dislocated, even if seriously, and she slowly tried to correct it. She let out a painful groan as her shoulder popped back into place and she found herself being able to move her arm again, now that joints and nerves could work unimpededly.
Tali suddenly returned to reality when she heard footsteps close in on her. The pirates had stopped firing and was now going to check if they had hit their mark. Fortunately for Tali, the pirates where stupid enough to send just one to check. The stream of gunfire resumed when a shotgun blast was heard and their comrade got his brain spread all over the wall behind him.
Tali leaned back on the rail and counted the seconds as the wall in front of her was slowly torn apart by itchy trigger-fingers. Suddenly, the radio sparked to life and she could hear Shepard's voice. "Squad, report! We've cleared the CIC. No casualties." Tali felt a knot in her heart loosen when she heard the voice of the man of her life, heard that he was alright.
"Crew deck cleared commander. Three wounded crewmen, one of them badly. None dead."Tali heard a winded Garrus proclaim.
Tali let out a relieved sigh when she heard of the well outcome. The outcome that had not occurred down in engineering. She remembered when the attack had hit. When some strange tings that looked like hallways, suddenly pierced through the hull down in the cargo hold, killing crewman William Fawkes. Then the pirates had stormed out and Tali had seen one of them crack the skull of the unarmed crewman Caesar Gonzales with a pipe.
Tali had ran into the room where Gabby was standing by her terminal, holding onto it to not fall by the sudden quake. Ken was nowhere to be seen. If Shepard had warned of any attack, then the comm link to engineering must be dysfunctional or something. To the engineers, the attack had come without warning. Tali had rushed with locking the door she came in through. The door that she was sitting by right now. Unfortunately, she did not have time to lock the other door before the pirates stormed out of the elevator and into the room, where they had mutilated crewman Veronica Marks with gunfire and one had shot Gabby, who had walked over to Tali to see what she was doing, and was now sitting to the left in front of her.
It had taken a few seconds after Garrus' comment that Tali was brought back to reality by Shepards voice. "Tali! What's your status?" the commander asked through the comm radio in his omnitool.
Tali instantly tried to activate her comm link, but it seemed the small mechanism for doing that had been damaged in her painful fall. As she attempted to get the comm link functional, he heard the voice of Shepard again. "Tali! Report!" The worry in his voice made her fasten her work even more; she wanted to talk to him. To tell him that she was okay.
She finally got her comm link open and she shouted over the radio. "Going to hell Shepard!"she remembered the fate of all the crewmen. "Crewmen Fawkes, Gonzales and Marks are dead!" the quarian looked at Gabby, who was sitting against the wall in front of her, trying to keep pressure on a bullet wound in the stomach. "Gabby is badly hurt..."Tali looked at the door next to her, like she was going to see through the doors and walls of the ship and see where Donnelly where at. "...and I don't know about Ken! Could you lend me a hand here!" She leaned out of cover and shot one og the thugs with her shotgun, making him scream in pain as he hit the floor.
The radio gave away a few waves of static before she could hear Shepards voice again. "Hold on, I'll be there!"she heard Shepard shout. Tali smiled over that little detail in what he said: "I'll be there!"
"Good." she said in the radio, and didn't notice that the gunfire had one again stopped and footsteps where closing in on her. "...because I really need some AHH!"she was cut off by a slam in the back of her head and she fell down to the floor. As her vision became darker, she saw the large, bald man that she had knocked earlier standing there, the knuckles on his right hand bleeding a little bit from hitting the back of her helmet. She saw the man lift her left arm up in the air and tear off her omnitool and break it with a light crack.
Then everything went dark...