The Better Part of Valour

The two marines had been crouching in the shadows in another debris strewn, wrecked building, around to the left of Shepard's original position, fiddling tensely with their weapons whilst they waited for the gunfire to begin, so that they could make their move and rescue the civilians from their ignominious fate.

Mark sighed, and looked up at his partner, and lover. He shied away from the term 'girlfriend', it seemed childish and trivial, whilst their relationship, to him at least, was anything but. She, however, had been... distant, of late, particularly since they had been assigned to Shepard's guard. He felt that it was somewhat to be expected given the nature of her admittedly indirect history with the man, but what had hurt was the fact that he had found out about this history at the same time as Shepard himself.

He preferred to be honest with himself, and realised that her anger had become a vendetta, and that vendetta had become an obsession which had a weird level of fascination to it. It had taken precedence over their relationship.

He allowed himself a wry grimace, realising that Shepard would probably realise before long, likely only hadn't already as his focus was on survival, and that he would be positively delighted, and not just because of all of the quips he would be able to make about 'trouble in paradise', which was irritatingly appropriate on many levels. `They just had to tempt fate and call this shithole Elysium...

She was aware of his eyes upon her, but evaded his stare. He wanted to talk to her about it, but knew that she would only become angry and defensive and that what could well be their last moments alone together would then be spent in hostility. He couldn't bear that possibility, and so elected to be discreet.

The silence continued.

Three deep, powerful shots against what sounded like metal. A cacophony of alarm calls and surprised shouts. Mark hazarded a look, and saw the batarians scrambling into new positions, splitting up to look for the sniper. He heard slight movement over his shoulder; Cameron was watching the chaos unfold too, but distantly, lost in thought at the same time.

Another few sniper rounds brought down one of the guards, and more were reassigned to hunting for the killer that was interfering with their business. The sniping continued, and the frustration of the batarians became palpable when the hunters simply spread out into the ruins on the one side that the rounds had been coming from. Ten guards remained, but they would still be outnumbered five to one.

Two quick shots reduced the strength of the guards to eight, and no more shots were forthcoming. Their situation was unlikely to get any better, particularly not when automatic gunfire rang out on Shepard's side of the battlefield, responded to by single shots from what sounded like a sniper rifle and a pistol. Mark rose up, his movement enticing Cameron's attention back to their own situation, mirroring his action of removing the safety from his weapon, before creeping out into the ruins to try and get close enough to help the 'valueless' people that were the only reason for a good soldier's actions, regardless of what Shepard said.

Mark was spotted first, having the worst luck and grasp of stealth, dropping when a batarian glanced in his direction, the movement attracting the enemy's attention more surely than the shape that he would have seen. Gunfire rang out, Cameron hesitated before opening up with her pistol in an attempt to aid her partner.

Shields weakened, the batarian ducked away from the rounds, allowing Mark to get up and raise his assault rifle, before beginning his run through the rubble towards the ships, bullets and ricocheting shrapnel flying around him, lowering the strength of his kinetic barriers. He didn't fire back, couldn't afford to concentrate on anything over than running over the treacherous ground, not gifted with the feline grace that marked Shepard's navigation through a battlefield.

Somehow, the bastard always seemed to move in the exact right way, do the exact right thing. But Mark was only human, so he ran. His armour droned a warning; his barriers had been weakened to the point at which they might as well not be there, and he didn't know what to do. He tripped, got lucky as rounds seared through the space that his head had been occupying, grabbed his rifle and crawled into cover before looking for Cameron.

She was trading shots with a batarian that had been attempting to close in on him from behind, whilst making more gradual but consistent progress towards the ship, always utilising cover and avoiding direct line of sight with the enemy.

Mark added his bullets to hers, firing in short bursts in an attempt to improve his accuracy. Caught under fire from two flanks, the batarian's shields failed, and he was picked off by a shot from Cameron that found its way through a chink in the criminal's armour.

What Mark saw then was disturbing. She smirked in triumph. The expression could almost have come directly off of the face of their local psychopath.

An explosion rang out from Shepard's flank, and the sniper fire stopped. Suddenly, regardless of his current value in keeping them alive, Mark really hoped that the Butcher of Torfan was dead.

The humans were jerked from their reverie by more gunfire, having been flanked by a group of three batarians whilst the remaining four had taken positions directly blocking the advance of the marines on the shuttles.

Mark scrabbled around in the dust that made another choking layer of atmosphere a metre off of the ground, and managed to get into a piece of cover that shielded him from both sources of projectiles, telling himself he was waiting for his shields to recharge.

Cameron returned fire and continued her advance, wearing down the shields of one of her attackers systematically, before managing to achieve a headshot, bringing the attention of the other aliens down on her with a vengeance, which pulled Mark out of cover on their flank to spray dozens of rounds at them, oblivious to anything else, including the rounds that were thudding into his back, accompanying the batarians in front of him in reducing his shield strength.

Given the opportunity to pick off fifty percent of their opposition in one easy stroke, the batarians forgot about the other half, understandably. Cameron ran at the two batarians cut off from their comrades, arcing her advance so that she was approaching them from behind, before shooting one of them in the back of the head at point blank range, past his kinetic barriers, execution style. The other whirled around in shock, raising his rifle, at which point two things happened-

Mark's rounds finally managed to punch through the kinetic barriers and a stray projectile carved a path through the alien's skull.

Also, his own shields failed completely and he was thrown to the floor as a result of the numerous bullets impacting directly against his armour, the ground around him slowly being stained red by an expanding pool of blood.

Cameron saw it. Cameron knew she could do something about it. She also knew that what she could do was unlikely to be of much use; neither of them had been carrying medigel. He was in the right direction anyway, and so she made her way towards the form of her lover on the ground, face down and still. Dead. The bullet had carved a path into his back that had come into contact with his heart, he had spasmed as his body shut down, resulting in the miraculous kill shot, and then he had fallen.

Cameron had never had anyone she had been close to die before her cousin. One of the reasons she had become so obsessed with it and the person who had done it was that she was sure that she was supposed to feel something more as a result of it. This was what she encountered again, now. Her partner was dead. Her lover was dead. She still had a task to accomplish.

She took Mark's assault rifle, still hot from his long stream of bullets in an attempt to aid her, and, staying down and avoiding her foes' line of sight, scrambled off through the rubble, coming up twenty metres away and firing a prolonged burst at her foes, managing to kill in that one burst with a high number of impacts to the enemy's head.

Ducking away from the bullets that screamed around her in response, she moved again, as the remaining three batarians realised that their best bet was to pursue her into a corner and then pick her off at their leisure.

However, they had a certain amount of trouble actually finding the Californian, who had managed to get around their advance and move up to the ships behind them, with the civilian prisoners and the large numbers of weapons lying alongside the corpses of their owners.

Cameron felt it would be nice to have the numerical advantage for a change...