(A/N: Okay! It's official, You Don't Hear the Bullet has hit 100 reviews and we're well on the way to 20,000 hits! All thanks to you guys!
*throws confetti*
Alright! So, I'm still having a little bit of trouble figuring where to go with this. The numbers of 'yes' that I have gotten for the lemon has been conclusive enough, but I've also received some word from a well worded man (you know who you are) that perhaps a lemon isn't necessary. I'll puzzle over this, but you guys go ahead and enjoy the next chapter!)
You Don't Hear the Bullet
Knock Knock, This is Your Past Calling Pt 2.
Aboard the SSV Einstein
Exodus Cluster
Twenty Thousand Kilometers from Planet Zion
Tali didn't hesitate for a second, turning and fleeing along with Shepard back towards the corridor they had just emerged from. The frame charge was designed to channel all force into the doorway or wall it was attached to as shaped charges do, and the added bonus of the sound, surprise and flying pieces of metal were an added bonus to disorient opponents. Familiar with how these explosives worked, Shepard was already moving, pumping his arms to keep up momentum.
Garrus didn't fare so well. Not only the closest one to the hatch, he had also been directly in the explosion's cone, sending the force slamming into his shields, sending him stumbling backwards…and leaving him vulnerable. A burst of fire caught him in the torso, and while some of the rounds ricocheted off his armor, a few buried into his flesh, making him grunt in pain as they punched through, splattering blue blood onto the deck behind him.
Garrus fell, dropping his battle rifle and writhing like a fish out of water before he finally clambered back up, his armor ringing like a bell as more rounds bounced off it. Fortunately, the thick plates across the back of the suit kept most of the assault rifle shots from penetrating, though with the amount of accurately placed fire being rained down upon him, some slipped through, punching through his innards and sending more blue blood streaming out.
"GARRUS!" Shepard yelled, having ushered Tali through the hatch and gesturing frantically to the agent to hurry, arm outstretched to give further encouragement. Garrus continued to hobble forward, one hand covering a particularly bad belly wound, the other swinging to reach for Shepard's own hand.
Time seemed to hang for a moment as a sense of déjà vu came back to them both. How many times had they saved each other's life? What about Omega, when Shepard had blow Tarak's gunship out of the air with nothing but a grenade launcher? Or maybe the countless times in the chase after Saren, when Garrus provided sniper overwatch for Shepard's mad charges? Haestrom even, blowing a stealthed geth hunter's innards all over the place when it was about to slam a blow into Garrus from behind...
And then Shepard had Garrus' claw.
And time resumed.
"IN!" he yelled, half-throwing the turian through, covering him with his own recharged shields, flickering and beginning to fail. In those few critical seconds, the Marines had all streamed in, ten of them in the squad, and had begun pouring fire out from their Lancer assault rifles and Thunder light machine guns. 'Always a Rifleman' was still the Space Marine Corps saying, and these elites proved that by pounding away at Shepard's shields as he keyed the sliding hatch shut, blowing out the control panel with his shotgun.
The entire exchange had barely taken six seconds.
"That won't stop them," remarked Garrus weakly from the floor. "Won't they just place another charge?"
"Nah," grunted Ken as he hefted the rebel up on his shoulder. "Not when there's two other open corridors they can go down to hunt us down without unnecessarily wasting explosives."
Tali was leaned against the wall, still in a bit of shock from their close brush with what seemed to be near death. A full squad of N7 Marines with the drop on them…if not for EDI's warning and Ken's instincts, they'd all be dead by now. Those were some of the closest odds she'd ever run into in her life.
Finally, when she got over the mental image of ten flashing barrels firing accurate, high speed death, she straightened up and turned back, heaving Garrus' other arm over her own shoulder, ignoring the blue blood that splashed onto her suit.
"What I don't understand," she remarked as they hauled the turian along "Is why they're on the ship in the first place. A squad of N7 elite troopers?"
Shepard chuckled, though Tali didn't see what was so funny.
"Oh, believe me, they won't have dispatched a single squad for –this- mess…"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, remember all the casualties out in space? And lining the hallways? All Alliance personnel have subcutaneous transmitters to flash their location as far out as a few thousand kilometers into space. Seeing so many flatlines-"
"Get to the point, Shepard," grunted Garrus as he struggled to talk, his mandibles flared in pain. "I don't think I can lose blood as fast as I am right now for long. Less talking, more getting me outta here!"
"Can't do that," remarked Shepard, checking a corner with his Carnifex in one hand. "The Normandy's being pursued by the New Delhi, remember? No evac for now."
Tali sighed, biting her lip as she realized that the ex-Spectre was right. So long as the Alliance vessel was out there, and the Normandy was being tracked by their radio signals, no one could escape. They couldn't leave because the shuttle would be an obvious target, and the Normandy couldn't leave the system without giving the New Delhi a clear target other than a few radio signals.
"We'll get you to this ship's sick bay," Shepard continued, holding the gun up high to joggle Garrus a bit up his shoulder again. "But even that will be a temporary respite. If we don't get off this ship, the N7 platoon will corner us and finish us off."
"I'm sorry, did you just say –platoon-?!" Tali asked rhetorically, shocked at the numbers. That had to be at least fifty of the Alliance's best soldiers swarming the decks of the carrier looking for them, and with one team having made contact, they'd be moving in on their destination like a pack of varrens to an easy meal.
"What I don't understand," Garrus said, wheezing and coughing again. "Is why the hell they're here. I thought the Illusive Man blocked the distress signals?"
"From the beacon. But the manual call couldn't be stopped before it reached Eden Prime. From there, you just relay it through a comm buoy to Command. I'd bet the New Delhi was sent double-quick."
"Fantastic, if you ask me," snarled Tali, grunting as she negotiated a tight corner with Garrus' bulk. "The one time Cerberus screws up, and we have to pay for it…I swear, ymina bosh'teti av agni…"
"Tali, don't turn off your translator so you can just curse! We're all so far in over our heads in shit that we can't see daylight!" snapped Ken, shouldering another hatch open with it refused to do so automatically.
"Oh, and I suppose –you're- going to be the one who finds out how to get us out of here?! We have fifty, count them –fifty- soldiers who are almost your equal coming after us with no escape route, and you're telling me that I can't get angry?!"
"Calm the hell down, I never said that! Jeez, is this your bitchy side, or do I have to work at it?"
"What?! Oh, you're –so- going to get it if we survive!"
"Butcher, this is Disciple. We've made contact, I repeat, we've made contact."
"Disciple, Butcher. We copy. Moving to your location."
"No good, Disciple. They've sealed the door behind them. We're moving to intercept on alternate route."
"Oxide here. You run into trouble?"
"Oxide, Disciple. Three tangos, one human, one qurian, one turian. We disabled the turian."
"Oxide, Avatar. According to specs, you should be able to take the door to your nine o'clock and move on to intercept."
"Avatar, Epsilon. Won't they head for the medbay?"
"Epsilon, Butcher. We've detected no transports. Agreed, most logical course is to patch their pal up til evac arrives."
"New Delhi to Nova Team. Status report."
"New Delhi, Butcher. Three tangos, Captain. We've got them cornered, nowhere to run."
"Have they returned fire?"
"No, sir. But we're hemming them in. Soon they'll have to either face us or try and jump out the airlock. Similar odds of their survival."
Captain Arnold Steele stroked his goatee thoughtfully as he cut the link to the Marines. Having taken the place of commander of the New Delhi since Captain Eisennhorn had retired six years ago, Steele was a large man, a former Marine as well. Regrettably, he was a simple combat engineer, hung back and provided support while the shooting men did all the real fighting. Still, it was one of those reasons that made him a good choice as Captain, and he had accepted the position with honor.
Built around her two enormous main guns, the SSV New Delhi had been the ship to take Jon Grissom to Arcturus, the current location of the Alliance's headquarters. After the First Contact War, she was refitted with mass effect guns to replace her old solid slug cannons, which moved much slower and fired depleted uranium slugs that couldn't make a dent in shields but could wreak hell on bare metal. Now a completely different ship, she sailed with the Seventh Fleet, based around the Citadel, and was therefore one of the closest vessels on call when Eden Prime received the distress call, as they were on patrol near Elysium.
Steele grit his teeth as he watched the flickerings of radio signals being tracked on their sensors. Their heat emissions tracker wasn't picking up anything, but the signals said otherwise, hinting that whoever had made their mysterious ghost ship had gotten their hands on the SSV Normandy. Was nothing sacred anymore? To go looting through a great vessel, one that had belonged to an honorable man, as if it were nothing more than a corpse on the street for someone to loot…disgraceful.
"Captain," called an ensign at one of the terminals. "We're still having trouble tracking the unknown vessel."
"What do we know about it?"
"Small, sir," said another soldier, typing away at his holographic keyboard and flickering his eyes from one display to the next unblinkingly, almost like a machine. "About one half the size of the New Delhi. That's really all we can get without any other kind of readings, captain."
"It'll have to do. Nova Team reported that they've run into three tangos on board the Einstein, and no other contacts. I'm going to have to say that whoever these people are, they didn't take out our carrier."
"Then…who did, sir?"
Steele sighed, running a hand over his goatee again as he narrowed his eyes. "I don't have a clue, ensign. And that scares the shit outta me."
He couldn't bring himself to do it. He just couldn't. But Garrus' life was slowly dripping out onto the deck, and the mission had to take priority over a stupid lovers' quarrel.
So, he finally said it.
"Tali, I'm gonna need you to get this lock for me."
He grit his teeth as she cocked her head slightly, obviously out of habit to indicate she was raising an eyebrow, and Ken was willing to bet that the quarian was wearing either a smirk on her face…or a cold glare behind that helmet.
"Fine," she said after a bit, obviously realizing that there were bigger things at stake than who won this stupid argument they were having. She moved forward, popping a panel next to the door to the infirmary.
"Y'know," muttered Garrus as Shepard gently set him on the floor, against the wall next to the door "No offense, but human technology always struck me…as a bit crude."
Shepard smiled a bit, realizing that Garrus was making idle conversation to distract himself from the pain he must be feeling. In all their haste to put distance between them and today's version of the Navy SEALs from the twenty-first century, he hadn't even gotten any medi-gel.
As Ken knelt, activating his omni-tool to administer the healing salve, he said "Yeah, why's that?"
Garrus gestured weakly, coughing again as he replied "It's blocky. Industrial. Square. Look at…all those mechs Hahne-Kadar makes. Square plates of armor, right?"
"That's because we don't really care to make things pretty at this point," Shepard remarked with a small grin as he cracked the medi-gel pouch, using the omni-tool to spray it in a fine mist over Garrus' visible wounds. "We're barely keeping up with you guys in weapons and computers. The only advantage we have is radios, and even then the salarians are close on us."
Garrus chuckled, wincing as he did so. "Nah. Salarains have been using the same comms for decades. You'll have left them in the dust long before they'll make another advance in communications."
Tali listened to the exchange quietly as she worked to bypass the sick bay doors, quietly connecting nodes on the circuit board. Human technology was a mish-mash of old and new, as the Alliance held a 'don't screw with what works' policy on all of their equipment. For example, they hadn't started making thermal clip weapons standard issue until about a year ago, wheras the rest of the galaxy had already started making some inroads towards converting their military. Now, they were everywhere, along with the clips to load into them.
As she worked, however, she began to think over what she and Ken had been arguing about. When you boiled it down past all the anger and panic over their situation…the reason was rather trivial. One could never give in to doubt or turn on their teammates needlessly, or they'd have already lost.
Garrus coughed again as Shepard finished up. "At least…at least I don't have to get any more plates patched into my face, right?"
"Couldn't hurt," remarked Shepard as he disengaged his omni-tool, smirking. "Hell, Garrus, you were always ugly. Slap some face paint on there, and no one'll know the difference."
"You little bastard. You still remember that?"
"It was less than a week ago, of course I do!"
Tali couldn't help but smile at the small patch of levity they were having in this dire situation. Here they were, being hunted by elite soldiers, outnumbered badly with no way to get out, and with one man down. Not a very good situation…
But she had to believe they would get out. Ken had somehow wriggled through everything else thrown at him before. Why not this one?
Her confidence in Shepard restored, Tali connected the final two nodes, watching as the hatch slid open.
"There we go," she remarked, picking up the panel and replacing it.
Shepard nodded, his mouth drawn tight and his expression wary as he replied "Thanks Tali." In that moment, the humorous atmosphere had evaporated into a tense, heavily pressurized awkward moment. After all, it had been their first fight, hadn't it? A stupid one, but still a fight nonetheless.
Garrus was pulled inside, the door shut behind them and the lock jammed, just in case the N7 had managed to find a way around that was shorter than Ken had expected. The stacks of medigel and synth-skin makers sat idling, unused for a long while. Obviously, the Collectors had slaughtered everyone too quickly for a proper resistance or triage to be set up.
Tali puzzled over the medical equipment before saying "The Collectors wanted to send a message, not capture more humans. That has to be it. Either that, or they have at least some form of emotion."
"Right," replied Shepard as he heaved the turian rebel onto the table. "So they know the concept of revenge. Either that, or they're just fucking with me."
Out in space, the New Delhi chased after the Normandy, caught up in a game of cat and mouse. The Normandy had better maneuverability and speed, but the cruiser behind it could tear it to pieces with its large mass effect guns the second they got a solid target. Neither could leave the system, either, so long as they had people on board the wrecked Einstein.
But another guest was about to join the party. One that had been sitting back and waiting for the best time to not only disable both active vessels, but to obliterate the carrier and finally end the life of the man who had dared to stand before them time after time.
Without any warning whatsoever, the Collector ship suddenly appeared right in between the Normandy, the New Delhi, and the Einstein.
