The rover swerved left and right on the slippery frozen ground of Tau Volantis. Shepard was in all due respect, a great commander, but his driving skills left something to be desired. Garrus was aware of this and sat in the passenger seat so the jostling of the vehicle wasn't as bad as it could've been. Tali, Isaac, and Carver sitting behind however, were thrown up, occasionally hitting the ceiling of the rover with every bump of the road Shepard ran over. Isaac was feeling nauseous. He's had his fair share of bumpy rides, but that was usually when the necromorphs were attacking and adrenaline coursed through the veins in his system. Right now he just wanted to puke. The rover veered and swerved its way towards the horizon with the big moon sunk into it. Its colors were faded thanks to the distance and mist the planet offered, but the moon along with the small tentacles sprouting up from beneath it grew bigger and regained its color as they got closer; the moon got paler, and its tentacles – no longer as small as the team thought – changed from a light tint of red to a dark crimson. In a matter of minutes Garrus, Tali, and Shepard were peering through the front windshield. Tali scooted closer to the front to get a better view of the moon. They had to throw their heads back up just to view its daunting entirety. Isaac and Carver didn't bother to even glance at it.
"There's a facility just behind the moon," Isaac said in a tone that rivaled the Normandy team's astonishment. "We can get to the bottom of the planet through a super elevator there."
Shepard turned a sharp right, and drove onwards at a ridiculously fast pace. Soon enough the factory showed up. Isaac and Carver got a twisted sense of nostalgia from looking at the tragically majestic vista. Just like the station with the broadcast tower a while ago, the facility was a dirty brown thanks to the rust and grime the infrastructure accumulated in the last two hundred years.
They parked the rover at the nearest building, a small shack that will serve as their landmark when they need a quick getaway. They left the rover with plenty of fuel to spare.
With helmets on and guns ready, they crept across the factory huddled together in a tactical formation: Isaac and Carver were in front since they knew the place well enough to know which way leads to the super elevator; Garrus and Tali on the back to make use of the offensive strengths of the sharpshooting turian and the techy defenses of the quarian; Shepard is at the center of the formation to assess both front and back. Isaac and Carver lead the group into the facility. Small-scaled snow-covered black markers were halfway in the snowy path that led to the building.
"Why are we going inside the huge building? I thought you said the super elevator was inside one of the many smaller buildings that are huddled up somewhere," Shepard asked.
"The necromorphs like to hide under the snow, remember? Better for us to have the tactical advantage of knowing where they'll pop out of than them popping out from beneath us," Isaac answered. The commander nodded his head and the group carried on.
The large door of the building opened and they went inside to see that it's an elevator. Everyone got in and the door closed. It was dim inside with only a few small light bulbs positioned at its corners that gave off red lights to partially illuminate the interior. It was a large, octagonal piece of machinery. A bulky, old-fashioned touch pad cranked and whizzed in front of Isaac and Carver. On it was the familiar blue hologram, this time with the word 'activate' on it. Isaac touched the pad with the index finger of the hand holding his plasma cutter and it turned orange. The word on it was replaced with the phrase 'please wait.' The entire elevator blew steam off from some of its pipes as its gears churned and whirred, slowly pulling the whole group up. The first sight that greeted the group when the doors opened were three dead necromorphs, de-limbed and blackened to a crisp. One was even impaled on the wall with a charred pickaxe.
"It's okay, we killed these fuckers before. Been seeing their bodies every time we pass through here," Carver explained, lessening the tension that came up from Shepard and his squad when they saw the monstrosities. "Isaac had to let loose an entire load of face eating gas over here to take care of some hostiles," he continued. "So yeah, that's why they're all pretty crispy."
There was a long pause. "… Oh…" Garrus eventually responded with that signature twanged fringe in his voice. The only response that came from Shepard and his team that showed everyone's acknowledgement of the revelation, as well as their speechlessness.
The grouped moved on and passed a section of the infrastructure labeled 'paleontology.' In this wing were several sliced up prothean specimens that lay on the floor in a puddle.
Isaac curiously looked at the heaping pieces of carcasses on the floor. "Huh, I guess the gas melted the ice. Those things used to be encased in ice guys." Isaac pointed at the ancient alien meat on the floor as if he was giving the squad a tour on a field trip.
They went further into the paleontology wing and eventually out into the open. The group saw more dead protheans, this time really encased in blocks of ice that are piled up on one another on the ground and in the air, hanging precariously on a wooden platform held together by a length of rope that was latched onto a crane hook. Aside from this relatively marvelous sight (Garrus disagreed with the view,) they saw what looked actually vital to their mission: a small yet heavy infrastructure – like a shack but more secure and dense. "This is the first of the small bits of buildings we'll see," Isaac told Shepard and his friends. Cliffs made it difficult to move around it so they passed through the inside.
It was an awfully cramped place. Isaac and Carver moved through this small stuffy space back then and they were already feeling claustrophobic; with five people, they had to form a line to make it through the linear interior of the small building awkwardly squeezed between two small cliffs giving it its straight shape. It was no doubt a shack; the only things in it were lockers aside from the corpses that lay on the floor, which made passing through the small building slightly more irritating than it should be.
They came out to more snow and blocks of ice, and yet another small-looking facility behind all the obstacles in front of them. They walked through two more incredibly small facilities. The last of which was more than just a hefty shack.
The door of the small building whooshed up and everyone walked right into it. What greeted them was a room with a giant hole at the center of the floor behind two control panels: an elevator shaft. The hole was big enough to fit in a couple and a half Makos. A heavy duty elevator for vehicle transportation, Shepard and his friends thought. They were no strangers to what was before them; they have seen dozens of the massive sort of machinery since the Alliance transports hundreds of vehicles larger than life every day at their state-of-the-art bases. The room had a low ceiling like all the other buildings the group recently passed, but it had much more elbow room. Everyone panned out and took comfort in their newfound personal space.
Shepard and Garrus' keen eye found bullet holes in the walls and ceiling and shiny bullet shells on the floor: relatively fresh signs of a gunfight. The two of them thought that Isaac and Carver were responsible for half the mess in the room, and possibly for the mess in the shacks a while ago as well! Just who are these two, the commander and Garrus thought to themselves as they eyed the two survivors, walking nonchalantly for personal space along with them. Garrus shrugged off to another topic, just glad that the two people beside him are allies.
"Well here we finally are," Garrus said, walking away from the group to approach the large hole. The hole was deep, as the turian could only imagine. The hole tunneled down to very deep, subterranean levels. The darkness hid much of the elevator's path. Small bulbs installed on the walls of the tunnel shone a red light, so it wasn't completely dark in a sense. The red lights trailed off deep, with the farthest ones shining like stars in the night sky: far and virtually unreachable.
"Did the elevator have to be on the bottom end?" Garrus sighed as he backed up from the hole.
Tali got to the control panel immediately. It was physically broken, jammed, and dirty according to her diagnostics. Tali brought out her omnitool to fix the problem and in a matter of minutes the control panel became operational.
The heavy elevator can be heard making its way up. It was miles deep into the planet but the noise it made was loud nevertheless. The group above took arms and backed up with each other on the center of the space in front of the control panels; their enemies were getting pretty obvious. Tali came to a sudden realization. She brought up her omnitool and gave the control panel a light tap on top, then went back into her formation.
In a matter of seconds an orange, transparent force field sprung up from the tapped area and enveloped the whole device in a temporary protective shield. The force field had a hexagonal pattern.
Three slashers and a puker clambered out of the hole. Two of the slashers jumped right over the control panel while the other one walked around it with the Puker. Tali, who was the first to spot them because she was tasked to keep an eye on that part of the room, alarmed the others. Her shout of fear infused with adrenaline, the guns that opened fire, and the bloodcurdling psychotic noises of the necromorphs, were only barely audible due to the large elevator coming out from the ground.
Tali was up in front of the group. She fired her shotgun on one of the slashers in front of the force field she generated. She hit the hostile directly in the gut. A gaping hole right through the beast was visible; internal organs painted the force field behind it. The other slasher didn't get too far either; Carver gunned him down ruthlessly with a barrage of firepower. With a shot of stasis, Isaac was able to slow down the puker and the slasher at once, giving the commander time to aim his javelin shot right at the puker's belly. The commander flipped his weapon's secondary switch and the bolt sunk deep into the puker shot out electricity that fried it inside, and made the nearby slasher flinch. Isaac took out his plasma cutter and sliced of the two bladed appendages of the hostile in two quick shots.
All of this was done in a matter of seconds. They all felt themselves getting stronger as a team. Isaac and Carver finally found people who wouldn't die around them, and Shepard has yet again found a couple more brave souls he could possibly take with against the Reapers.
The elevator was still miles away, its loud ascent got fairly quitter. More necromorphs were bound to come after them.
Out of nowhere, a necromorph fell from the ceiling and landed right on Garrus' face. It wasn't a humanoid. The necromorph was round, like a small ball of crimson bloody gore with the skull of a dog protruding out the top. It was no larger than a beach ball. It had three long tentacles that sprouted up from its back that were long enough to slash at Garrus' with their sharp bony tips. His armor sustained the damage, but the turian dropped his sniper rifle from the shock. He was screaming but his voice was inaudible because of the necromorph's firm grip on his face. Garrus pulled at the hostile that obstructed his view with both hands but to no avail. His claws dug deep into the rancid piece of meat that made up the necromorph's body.
All of the commotion on Garrus had everyone's attention. Isaac shot stasis at the sniper and his attacker. The two of them were enveloped in the stasis' bluish effect, allowing Isaac to easily dismember the lurker's tentacles that hung in the air with his plasma cutter. Three consecutive shots were all it took to render the necromorph's grasp loose. In no less than a second the effect of the stasis wore off, and Garrus easily heaved the giant dead piece of decaying muscles off his face.
Garrus roared loud as he threw the necromorph's corpse far, all the way to the other side of the giant hole – which still bore no super elevator.
What the dark hole did bore, however, was a low deep howl.
The bloodcurdling sound sent chills through everyone's spine: Garrus felt his heart sink, Tali begun trembling, Carver froze in place, Shepard's muscles tensed, and Isaac gulped. Another gut-wrenching howl came from beneath, and then another one begun before the first howl subsided. Two of them..!? Everyone thought. The heart-racing noise that came below was followed by squeals and growls, some of them sounded familiar, obviously the lesser necromorphs. It was as if hell itself was rising out from the deep dark hole that the group unearthed.
The commander took a deep breath and exhaled as loud as he can, "Brace yourselves, everyone! Fall into position!" His voice was strong, sincere, reassuring, it's the kind of voice from a man who you'd trust your life with. Shepard's orders resounded in everyone's ears; their heads once again back into the bloody fray of reality.
With the commander in the middle, a firing line was formed by the group. It was a fine example of a band of noble heroes. Despite the quick squabble just half a minute ago, everyone was still in good shape, even Garrus. The back of his armor is scratched and dented considerably, but he still held his assault rifle as high as everyone else. Five sets of eyes were waiting to set their sights on whatever will spawn out of the hole first.
"Damn, I'm going to set the mines!" Garrus said as he rushed towards the rim of the elevator hole.
"Garrus, forget it!" The commander yelled, but the turian ignored him.
He pulled a mine out from a pouch at the back of his hips. He was about to set the mine down on the floor and arm it. Garrus acted proficiently. He laid his mine on the floor as if it was just an ordinary ceramic dish. He pressed a couple of buttons to arm it and – Fwoosh
A giant bony arm zipped right out of the hole and uppercut Garrus into the air. He landed with a loud thud and groaned on the floor in front of Carver and Isaac. The menacing arm slowly went back below. The mine was left on the ground intact. Tali saw its light in the center wasn't on, signifying the mine wasn't armed yet. She felt the need to arm the mine and throw it below but the fear of getting smacked right at her chin just like Garrus kept her feet glued to the floor.
Without a moment's hesitation, the arm went back down and heaved the owner of the limb right out of the hole. It was unlike anything the group has seen.
It was gigantic. Standing on four legs, it looked like an elephant with its skin peeled off. The behemoth was twice as tall as them, had hefty girth, and sported a wide skull – which was the only thing that was left of its head. It took a big step towards the group before another one just as colossal and terrifying showed up behind it.
All five of the group armed and readied themselves because the two colossal monstrosities were nearing them, one step at a time.
The one nearest to them stretched its arms out to its side and puffed its chest which was nothing but ribs and internal organs. Its insides churned for a while before its ribs opened up like a cage's doors and shot a projectile near the proximity of Garrus, Isaac and Carver.
Garrus rolled towards Tali's side of the firing line quickly while Isaac and Carver dodged the shot, which nearly hit the soldier's leg. The projectile splashed its orange goop in a small radius. The projectile was a reddish, jelly-like substance. It remained on the floor, still shaky from the impact. Shepard only got to witness the oddity for a moment; the second behemoth charged right at him with its wide plated head.
Shepard received the blow painfully, and was knocked back considerably. Garrus forced himself up and began firing with Tali. The necromorph was now standing on Shepard's place on the firing line. It turned to face the two extraterrestrials with its intimidating size; it was much bigger than it was from a few feet away. They were firing at its long meaty limbs, Garrus aimed at the right arm, and Tali shot at the left.
Isaac and Carver on the other hand were facing the first behemoth. It took a large amount of time for the beast to recuperate from its attack and stand on all fours again because Isaac was quick to hit the beast with yet another shot of stasis. Carver unleashed his barrage on the limbs of the necromorph dealing little damage despite the high-grade quality of his gun and ammunition. Isaac was pitching in on the assault with his measly, but trusty plasma cutter.
Splack!
Isaac was thrown off his feet and fell to his left. He was carelessly close to the red projectile launched by their opponent earlier. It burst and small fleshy worms spawned out from it. They wriggled on the floor towards Isaac like huge maggots eagerly on their way to a hearty meal. Isaac quickly tried to stand up and move away from the worms. He fired a couple of shots on the floor, hitting some of the worms in every other shot. He reloaded his plasma cutter and moved backwards away from them…
Smack!
Their main opponent, the one that towered above them, hit the engineer powerfully with the back of its hand. Isaac was tossed nearly as far as Shepard and was wounded badly from two of the attacks that caught him off guard. He had completely forgotten about the large lumbering opponent.
Isaac struggled to stand. The world was still spinning around him. Shepard had just recently got up to the engineer. The commander looked like he was hardly rattled by the hit he received. He continued the fight by running towards the alien necromorph that were attacking his squad while shooting at it. Isaac begun to think; his group's situation wasn't looking good. He gave his right shoulder a spin. It was still hurting… The rest will soon receive some bad injuries as well, as it seemed it already started with the commander. Isaac's eyes darted between the two fights happening before him: The trio that were at even odds with their large enemy me, and the lone soldier against the behemoth, as if he was in some twisted reenactment of David and Goliath.
While everyone else was fighting, Isaac saw the elevator finally rising, and it didn't look good. Necromorphs were crawling out of the hole-made-shallow by the rising elevator, and undoubtedly the elevator itself is carrying a vast number of necromorphs. Isaac's heart wouldn't stop racing.
It was then Isaac got struck by an epiphany.
He aimed his hand at the floor between the two lumbering extraterrestrials and yanked Garrus's mine. The armed small explosive zipped dangerously close to Isaac. He made sure that it was indeed armed before doing the unthinkable: He shot the control panel's defenses a few times until it shattered. He was still holding Garrus mine in suspended animation.
"What the hell are you doing Isaac!?" Shepard asked the engineer while he was in between dodging.
"You'll see," Isaac launched the mine directly at the control panel. It exploded into a hundred tiny pieces of burnt circuitry and wires. The elevator this machine held immediately went into free fall, along with the hundreds of necromorphs on it.
Isaac then immediately opened a hatch on his arm and began configuring with the circuitry and wires in the device. He turned a dial straight up to overload and his hand begun to electrify and vibrate powerfully. With the hatch still open, he ran quickly onwards while aiming his charged palm at Shepard and his team.
"Brace yourselves," Isaac warned the three who were in a middle of a battle. He gripped his arm tightly and flicked his wrist.
Boom. Shepard and his squad were blown off the ground and into the hole like they were weightless ants.
Isaac's arm was blown aback by the powerful recoil. His scream was ripe with pain but he used the recoil as much as he can as momentum to get into a good position to blow Carver off the floor as soon as possible. Isaac was able to firm his ground in his desired position in just a matter of five short seconds.
The soldier was walking backwards as he continuously assaulted the alien necromorph with heavy fire. He was about to reload when—
Boom. The same puffy, loud explosion emanated in the room and sent another person into the dark hole behind everyone.
Isaac agonized in pain. The two powerful blows really crippled his arm. He held tightly onto it as he ran past the two behemoths that were ready to slaughter him with their bony limbs. Through sheer luck, Isaac was able to dodge the two beasts with the minimal movement he's capable off. Then he purposely fell into the darkness he sent his friends spiraling into.