.
(19)
Having grown up on a space station, Ilena Thanoptis wasn't claustrophobic by any means, but it was difficult to repress an instinctive and deeply rooted anxiety as she descended into the so-called Warrens. It was silly and she knew it. She had Shepard herself to her right and Chambers close behind. They were not just two of the most dangerous women Ilena knew, they were two people she trusted… as much as she trusted her own family, maybe moreso, since Rana was kind of the type to throw family under the shuttle without thinking. Ilena trusted Shep and Catty with her life, and beyond just them, the halls were slowly filling with paired Bekha-Yakshi and Eclipse fire teams.
The problem was more the Blue Vixens. They were Tela Vasir's pet commandos for this operation and they'd started clashing with the asari in Eclipse literally seconds after the two began to meet face-to-face. Asari weren't naturally all that territorial, not like krogan or anything like that, but they were proud. Ilena knew it. They were a proud people and didn't take competition all that gracefully. They had all heard about Eclipse and so the first thing some Blue Vixens felt they had to do was prove that they weren't going to play second lyre to their new partners.
The rivalry had been mostly one sided so far, which was good. Eclipse had no tolerance for poor discipline. That came easily to the turians and even the salarians, but asari were used to more freedom. Ilena was proud that her own Eclipse sisters took Vixen prodding and insults without incident. No one had risen to the bait, though enough of it had occurred that word trickled up from the ranks via Enyala and Liselle.
Ilena trusted her sisters, she trusted the humans, but she didn't trust Tela's Vixens.
She also wasn't all that sure what to think of the rest of the Spectre's little running crew. Tela herself was a hero, of course, but that big krogan with the rust-red crest was kind of scary looking. He and Shepard kept glaring at one another. There was tension there, like the rivalry the Vixens had with Eclipse, except this was more like a ticking time-bomb instead of a little firecracker. Ilena made a mental note not to be anywhere in-between the two when they finally settled things from the Glorious Harsa. That would not be a safe place to be.
Aside from that krogan, Wrex, there was that spooky looking White Varren guy. He seemed to be working as Tela's right hand man. He hadn't said much, but he was clearly tech savvy. Daro hadn't said anything about him after the meeting but she'd definitely singled him out as a threat. Very likely he'd done the same, identifying her as his main counterpart to deal with if the time came. Ilena was sure Daro was smarter – she had a big brain in that bucket head of hers – but this Varren guy seemed like more of the fighting and killing type. Ilena did not want him watching her back.
On top of those less than stellar impressions, they were all cramped into these tight little vorcha tunnels underground. The Blood Pack had been expanding the main ones to krogan-size, but ignoring all the side passages along the way.
The tunnels as a result were wide in the main branches but quickly diminished into little cracks and cubby-holes on all sides. Ilena marched past one particularly narrow crevice where a pair of baleful yellow eyes watched her with a mix of fear and hunger. There were vorcha squeezed into the side passages of the Warrens.
Ilena blinked, her eyes adjusting in the low light
Her new human-made eyes had built-in night vision. It wasn't like the usual night vision that came from a visor or helmet, either. All the usual range of colors came in sharply and crisply but as the light level fell more rods took over, lightening the dark areas and slightly darkening the bright areas. The result was a sort of a sepia-tone instead of pitch darkness. Things became grayer and a bit browner but exceptionally sharply defined. It might be harder to tell cerise from cherry red in the dark, but she could see every crack in the wall and every crease in the vorcha wedged where they thought they were out of sight.
Everyone just seemed to be ignoring them, though, so Ilena tried to as well. Vorcha could squeeze into exceptionally tight spaces but their weapons couldn't and any one of them foolish enough to jump out and cause trouble would be ripped to shreds by the heavily armed mercs marching through their homes.
"Look ahead," Shepard warned her voice quiet but firm. She'd spoken aloud in Thessian instead of using the team communication net.
"This must be the center of the place Tela mentioned," Ilena said, narrowing her eyes against the light as they exited the tunnel. "Oh, hey, look at that!" Up ahead, she finally saw what made the Warrens so special.
Vorcha had hovels all around Korlus and in every Junkyard, but the Warrens were a little unique.
Two barely-intact starships were buried here, side by side. One was turian, going by the ramshackle 'wings' that protruded a hundred meters or so ahead. The other was an asari frigate, the metal of the outer hull still glistening purplish-blue. Between the two ships the vorcha had built a makeshift canopy, like a vaulted ceiling. A lattice of crudely suspended and crisscrossing metal beams gave it an uneven appearance, more indicative of stubborn vorcha tenacity than architectural style. Everything that could be used to hold up the ceiling had been and the result was a forest of support beams of every size and shape.
To the left and right were the hulls of the former frigates, turian and asari respectively. The vorcha had cut into them, too, converting them into dilapidated makeshift apartments. Windows, more like crude tears in the hull, flickered with barely functional electronics. Strange lights swayed from exposed wires and fires burned out of metal cans with holes punched in them. The air was thick with noxious fumes and Ilena winced when she noticed what sorts of trash and other… leavings… covered the floor. 'Sanitation' and 'the garbage man' were clearly not the most popular things in this neighborhood.
Blood dribbled from a hanging varren-haunch nearby and into a murky looking pot and Ilena had to fight not to gag.
"We always visit the most interesting places," Chambers said from just behind, taking in the sights with a much more open mind. "Interesting! Oh, and is that toxic waste? It is!"
"They have a needle rental shop," Ilena observed, just barely making out the text on one of the nearby domiciles. "That's great. Just great."
"You can read that?" Shepard asked, pointing one of the shop signs.
"That's a different kind of store," Ilena said, reaching over to point Shepard's finger in the right direction. "That's the needle shop right there. And yeah, I can read some of this stuff. It's a really, really, really crude galactic standard which is based off Thessian."
"Huh."
"You can't read it?"
"The way Shepard learned the language poses problems sometimes," Chambers answered, but very quietly.
"You mean…" Ilena tapped her head for a second.
"It makes it very hard to understand… let's call them 'creole' languages that deviate from the basic sample," Chambers answered and went back to guarding Ilena's back. "That's it in a nutshell."
Ilena could hear other Eclipse and even a few of the normally quiet-as-the-grave Bekha-Yakshi humans muttering as they saw the beating heart (or was it sphincter) of the vorcha Warrens. It was roomy here at least. The vorcha quickly scrambled off the 'street' and into their homes and shops cut into the two frigates. This let the mercs move easily and without much obstruction… aside from the forest of support pillars anyway.
Up ahead, she could see the blue and white colors of Tela Vasir's hardsuit alongside the rust-red of her krogan battlemaster, Wrex. There was another krogan with them, too. He looked a little… different.
"We have a problem," Tela said as Ilena and her team approached. The Spectre didn't mince words. Her M-15 Vindicator-special was already in her hands, the side of it glowing with a little icon to indicate the presence of active special-ammunition inside.
"I lost contact with two of my vixens in the chamber below," she said, frowning, "the one that leads down into the excavation ramp."
"My sisters there have also gone silent," the new krogan added. Ilena watched him more closely. The armor was Blood Pack, but the crest was all funny looking and cracked and bumpy.
"You're… female?" Shepard asked just what Ilena had been thinking.
"Ubega Val," the she-krogan introduced herself. There was a huge burn-scar across the left side of her face, one that was bad enough that it left a discolored mess behind when it healed. More oddly still, it didn't look random. At least some of the burn seemed to begin and end at right angles. Not something that occurs, except by hand.
"Val here was my little surprise," Tela explained, though with a trace of haste to her tone. "My woman within the Blood Pack. A number of Ubega Pel's females have joined Val in working for me."
"Mmrm." Wrex grunted. He didn't sound too pleased. Ilena couldn't begin to guess why.
"Pel is my older half-sister, but she is no true Warlord," Val said, her lip curling into a sneer that reveled teeth. "Don't worry about her."
"More importantly," Tela tried to steer the conversation back on course. "I think someone stirred up the Okeer's little nest downstairs… we should-"
The sound of vorcha howls, a raspy but high-pitched 'nnnrah' sound, interrupted the Spectre.
As one, everyone's weapons came up and out.
Further down the Warren marketplace, the screams were followed by the sound of mass accelerator fire: the thud-thud of shotguns and concussion shots alongside the rapid fire wail of SMGs. Close quarters weapons for messy close quarters battles. Vorcha in the shops and homes around them began to screech in alarm. Some finally dared to run out into the streets, panicking like any other race panicked in the face of danger.
"Guess we won't be playing tourist after all," Ilena quipped and Chambers chuckled.
"I guess not," she agreed.
Tela, Shepard and Wrex were already moving.
Weaving between the support pillars, Ilena felt a tingle touch the back of her mind, a comfort like standing shoulder to shoulder with someone even when she was alone. Ducking under a swaying steel drum, the sound of gunfire louder and louder in her ears, she caught the first look at what had spewed out from the 'excavation ramp' Tela had described.
It seemed to be vorcha… but the yellow hide was split with faint blue lines of light, seeping with white puss. The eyes were hollowed out except for a tiny pinprick of azure light within the skull. That light widened and then contracted as the former-vorcha identified her as well. It hissed-
And then its head disappeared in a rain of fire.
A screaming vorcha rushed past Ilena, the first drop in a wave of terrified alien flesh. It was hard to distinguish between the vorcha who were running past her, or trying to, and the ones that might be running towards her. Ilena let a blast of biotic force surround her, refreshing her biotic barrier. It was enough to knock back some of the vorcha civilians.
"Get out of my line of fire!" she screamed, raising her weapon. Shepard had moved out of sight, though Ilena could see her highlighted outline in her augmented vision. Her MELD-enhanced eyes were working overtime to designate and mark targets in the confusion and the chaos.
"X-ray!" Chambers yelled, her Revenant chattering as it ripped a vorcha husk in half on the second floor of one of the ramshackle shops.
HOSTILES her eyes finally finished processing IDENTIFIED
Red outlines began to appear.
Dozens of them.
"Fuck me, it's like an old school terror site," Chambers cursed, locking her Revenant in place behind her and retrieving her sidearm. The heavy M-6 Carnifex began to bark and it was joined by Ilena's compact SMG as they pushed ahead.
The vorcha husks were amazingly nimble. Ilena could scarcely afford to gape in surprise as one jumped like a spider-mantis from the floor right up to the ceiling. Not only was it a ten meter leap right up, but the husk stuck there, finding purchase on all the crude scaffolding. It was crawling upside-down at a remarkable pace when three lines of fire converged on it, stitching it with intersecting death. It fell, swatted, with a mournful hiss.
"Watch the ceiling!" Vasir's voice was amplified across their lined communications net. "No explosives! If this places caves in, we'll all be buried in the same grave!"
She was right, and a second later when the ground rumbled and some sort of strange bluish explosion tore apart one of the nearby shops, Ilena held her breath and waited for the rocks to fall. Everyone wouldn't die, but she probably would. But it never came.
This way.
Moving alongside Chambers, Ilena headed towards the blasted area. There was a red orchestra there, their highlighted outlines merging together in her vision – and thank the goddess she could see in the low light like she could. Blasting one with a biotic Throw that knocked it into a partner, Chambers pushed an injured vorcha civilian aside and extended her clenched fist.
A purple event horizon materialized around the husks, filling in like an accretion disk. A full second passed before the purple psionic Rift formed, ripping the husks apart as it drifted slowly downward. Flesh etched with strange blue circuitry came apart like ribbons and confetti. Ilena had seen Rifts before and knew what they could do. She focused on making sure she didn't get anywhere near it.
"Help! Help!"
It was an asari's voice, and Ilena stepped over the smoking ship's outer hull that had once held the vorcha storefront. Her SMG fired, pumping rounds into a third husk that had been dragging a struggling Blue Vixen away in the confusion. The damn thing didn't have a kinetic barrier to speak of, but it absorbed an un-goddessly amount of fire before dying.
Or… if not dying… at least giving up on the whole 'moving, mauling, exploding' thing.
Satisfied that the husk wouldn't be moving any time soon, Ilena reached down to drag the maiden out of the fray. So far the husk things seemed to need to get into melee to do damage, but there was an otherworldly but familiar sound of return gunfire coming from the far end of the market. Someone, or something, was firing back and not at the bad guys.
The Vixen cried as her mangled legs shifted beneath her. She clutched an M-15 close to her chest, her breath labored and painful. Ilena dragged her back to where Chambers had set up, firing at targets of opportunity. Ilena could see Shepard, too, finally. She and an Eclipse team were advancing down the street, now clear of civilians. They were unleashing a murderous barrage on anything that moved and soon the return fire dwindled.
Two more of the blue explosions went off, the husks intercepted by precise fire.
"Look up! Look up!" someone warned. More and more of them were jumping up to try and attack from above.
"Use lift or pull!" Another asari yelled to her compatriots. "Don't damage the ceiling!"
"Those explosions," Chambers murmured.
Blue flashes dotted the rough scaffolding that made up the vaulted ceiling ripping vorcha husks loose. Eclipse fire tore them apart as they fell, heavy mass accelerators turning body parts into pulp or drones punching burning orange holes in targets with toroidal rounds. Ilena gritted her teeth and looked over the wounded asari at her feet. Her eyes highlighted the fellow asari as an ally, but had no name for her.
"You'll be alright," Ilena promised her as the commando stared at her mangled legs. The ordered a drone over.
"My legs," the maiden cried, repeating it over and over. She looked so young. "Oh Goddess, Goddess please don't take my legs! Please!"
She hardly even noticed when the drone sprayed her with a mist of fat-droplets laden with human tech. The pain-killers kicked in fast, though, and her breathing slowed. Most of the fighting was dying down, the last of the wounded husks eliminated by the advancing fire teams. Another Blue Vixen took the opportunity to weave through some of the rubble and check on her sister.
She glared at the Eclipse on Ilena's chest but the expression softened when she put together what must have happened. Ilena motioned to Chambers and they moved to link up with the others at the tip of the spear. The fight had been short but intense. A first taste of what was to come as they delved into Unit 7-31's lab.
Under the canopy of the turian frigate's left wing, Ilena found all the familiar faces waiting for her. Shepard was with Enyala and two other Eclipse troopers, looking grim in ichor stained armor. Wrex was kneeling next to a mangled body on the floor, inspecting something. Tela Vasir was as well, but she was standing, her arms crossed. The body at their feet was too large to have been a vorcha husk… logically, that meant it was a krogan one.
Goddess, just what the hell was going on down there?
"I was thinking this was familiar, wasn't it?" Chambers asked as they approached.
Shepard nodded. "At least nothing pops out of these ones when you kill them."
"You've fought these things before?" Enyala asked, not sounding all that unnerved by the experience but genuinely curious. "Major?"
"It was only superficially similar, lieutenant," Shepard answered, and Ilena could sense in her tone that she had put a cork on any more talk about that. She nudged one of the blue-speckled vorcha corpses with the edge of her boot. "We're designating these as 'husks' for the time being."
"Not zombies?" Chambers asked with a smirk.
"Husks," Shepard repeated with a trace of anger.
"Husks it is," Chambers consented.
"Then you can call this… thing… an abomination," Wrex spoke up, shaking his head as he stood. He was still looking down at the big body they'd gunned down. "This was a krogan once. I don't know what it is now."
"Not exactly how I'd go about curing the genophage." Vasir was already walking away. "Come on. Let's keep moving."
Shepard gave Ilena a look, one she understood right away.
"Let's keep going," she agreed. A chime sounded in her ear.
"Daro here," the transmission was coded for Eclipse-only. "Engineers. Swap teams to shredder rounds."
One of the nearby Eclipse troopers, decked in tech-armor, quickly began to work on her omni-tool. A second later and the ammunition-modification was online for her fire team. The Bekha-Yakshi modification took longer without dedicated engineers. Ilena was halfway to catching up with Vasir by the time her ammunition-mod kicked in.
Enyala and Liselle quickly started organizing parties to follow alongside their elite Bekha-Yakshi partners. Not everyone could or would be heading down, certainly not right away. There just wasn't enough room. White Varren, meanwhile, seemed to be the one organizing the Blue Vixens and overseeing their command structure for Vasir.
Ilena could see more than a few of the Vixens in shock at the sudden and savage firefight. It probably wasn't the fight itself that had shaken them, though. According to their extranet records, the Vixens were veterans of plenty of battles in the Terminus. It was probably more coming down here expecting to fight Blood Pack and instead suddenly being jumped by… whatever it was they'd been jumped by. Husks? Zombies? Whatever a zombie was.
"What are these things?" one of the Vixens asked, less prone to holding her tongue than her sisters. "Goddess… is this some sort of disease?"
"She's right," another commando spoke up in agreement. "Shouldn't we quarantine this place or something?"
"We haven't detected any contagion," one of the masked Bekha-yakshi said, her voice feminine and asari-like, but partly distorted. Already taller than the commandos, she shouldered through them.
"How can you be sure?" "Yeah?" "Well?"
The black and purple soldier ignored them, meeting up with her Eclipse team. They all nodded respectfully at the Bekha-Yakshi. They trusted their training and their equipment. Ilena could see them refreshing their tech-armor and their other systems, prepared to head deeper into the unknown.
Tela Vasir was waiting by the Blood Pack excavation ramp.
It was a descending hole in the earth, maybe a thirty degree incline. Built for krogan, the ceiling was comfortably high and the pit itself reasonably wide. The Blood Pack had started digging here and there was still some crude equipment scattered around. The specialized stuff was mostly for ripping, blasting or burning through metal and general starship debris. The axes and the picks were for vorcha diggers to do what they did best.
The resulting tunnel down wasn't particularly pretty. Light fixtures had been liberally drilled into whatever was most solid, the LEDs casting a pale mélange of whites and reds all the way down. A pair of skids used for hauling debris or other heavy objects was still in place… one off the rails, the other loaded high with clean looking metal plates. One of those plates bore a strange triangular symbol. Another was flecked with blood.
"I always hated the adventures that ended up in caves." Ilena swapped out her assault rifle for her SMG. "They always seemed so cheap. You could tell they were the same set."
Vasir had her Vindicator in hand, but she seemed relaxed as she delved into the darkness below. She sighed at the reference, though. "Do you really watch that stupid show?"
"I grew up watching it!" Ilena smiled, but Vasir never turned her head to see it. "Season Twelve was pretty weak, but it taught me a lot…"
"Taught you about how much I sleep around and blow things up," Vasir growled.
"It taught me about fighting."
That seemed to catch the Spectre's attention. She glanced over at the young maiden. "Fighting," she asked, not quite believing it, "Really?"
"Not fighting-fighting," Ilena explained, glad she had her hero's attention. "It taught me that a Spectre fights for everyone. Not just the Matriarchs or the Council or the Megacorps. The Tela Vasir in the show fought just as hard to save a small colony threatened by a monster or a pirate as she did to protect the Council themselves. That's why she's my hero." Ilena winked. "That's why you're my hero!"
Tela didn't smile; she just stared at Eclipse's Commander for a long few seconds.
"It's just a show," she answered, finally. She fixed her attention towards the bottom of the excavation shaft. "Besides," she added, "I'm more interested in talking about you."
"Me?" Ilena asked, surprised. She felt, and then looked back and saw Chambers walking close behind her. Shepard was further back, walking alongside that krogan Wrex. Enyala's team and a quartet of Blue Vixens were behind them, led by White Varren. The only one missing was Daro'Xen, and not for long. She would be headed over soon.
"Yes, you," Tela said, a little mockingly. "In case you haven't noticed, you're making waves out here."
"I guess I am!" Ilena admitted with a chuckle.
"And a few people are starting to wonder who threw you into the pool to begin with." Vasir took a deep breath, eyes scanning the low-lit darkness ahead. "I know the answer Eclipse loves to give: Jona Sederis and a lot of friendly faces in the Batarian Republic. They got the ball rolling."
"They did," Ilena lied. She felt a little bad about it, too. The lie and how easy it was to tell it.
"It isn't a secret that Jona had friends in high places," the Spectre continued. "Matriarchs, CEOs… contacts all over the Republics… in Armali… on Serrice. Some were friends, some former sisters from her old commando outfit, some she'd done jobs for and some she planned to blackmail."
"That does sound like Jona!" Ilena admitted with a laugh. "She was always up to something shady!"
"And how much do you know about it?" Vasir asked, slowly. "How involved are you in it? You're her successor after all."
"More a physical successor than a spiritual one," Ilena assured her, waving one hand placating. "I don't plan on blackmailing anyone! Trust me!"
"Thinking you can distance yourself from Jona's past misdeeds is naive." Vasir ducked her head under a low hanging pipe. "What you can do is protect yourself."
"Protect myself?" the maiden asked. "How?"
"You can start by coming clean."
"Coming clean…?"
"About who's bankrolling you... supporting you." Vasir clearly wasn't the most patient of matrons and Ilena could sense she was getting tired of the maiden playing dumb. Surprisingly, she took a deep breath and spoke the next few words in a conciliatory tone. "I understand… you want to protect those behind you. Your matriarch, especially. Or matriarchs."
Ilena, for once in her life, said nothing.
"Think of this as a social call," the Spectre said, lowering her voice slightly. "My mother wants to meet your mother, that sort of thing. Purely a matter of courtesy."
Ilena kept walking, keeping pace with Vasir, but she nodded finally. "Okay. Sure."
Tela smiled, a bit strained, but it did look like a smile. "I'll need names… or sigils if…"
"If?"
"Names," Vasir corrected herself.
"The only one I've met face-to-face is matriarch Vahlen."
"Go on."
"She's a scientist. Reclusive. Your 'mother' probably wouldn't know her." Ilena sighed. "For the others, you'd have to ask Jona. They're just funny sounding fake names to me."
"I see," Tela answered, not quite happy at the pithy information she had been given. "Awfully convenient that Jona Sederis is…'retired' and never sees anyone in person."
Ilena nodded in seeming agreement. "She's very sick... but it is really, really convenient, isn't it?"
For a moment, just then, Tela Vasir stopped walking. A quick glance over at the Eclipse's maiden Commander gave her a picture of a grinning young asari, totally at odds with the unspoken admission that she'd just heard. Jona Sederis was well known and feared. She was a ruthless killer. Ilena Thanoptis… wasn't. Was she?
"I don't suppose there's a way to contact this matriarch Vah'len?" Vasir asked, shaking her head and taking a few long strides to keep up with the younger asari. "
Ilena shrugged. "She contacts me if she wants something, not the other way around."
"That's a problem then. For you more than her," Tela explained and straightened up as they reached the bottom of the excavation shaft. The Blood Pack here had put down some crude catwalks over a dangerous jumble of jagged metallic debris. It was the crumpled remains of ship hull, and ahead, the side of the ship itself. It looked like the Pack had dug for a while, hugging the hull and looking for an airlock, before losing patience and just blasting their way in.
There were relatively modern looking lamps here, too, providing ample illumination. One was clutched in the hand of a dead krogan… literally, just a hand. Tela walked over for a closer if still cursory look. She gave the dismembered hand a kick.
"Fresh," she concluded. "One of Pel's probably."
"No bodies," Ilena noted. "This is where you guys would've stationed guards, right? It's a good spot. If they were taken out, where are the bodies?"
"That is the question," Vasir answered. "Maybe they're under Okeer's scalpel right now."
Ilena scoffed. "He's a busy guy if that's the case."
The rest of their teams joined them, plus five new faces.
"Ah, the ship! Excellent!" Daro'Xen seemed comfortable in her combat-suit, even surrounded as she was by asari commandos and krogan warlords and humans-in-disguise. This was a quarian matter, after all.
Rael'Zorah was with her, looking a little more nervous over the job at hand. The last of the quarian trio was P'meta, the former marine looking around warily for any potential threats. Rael was here to represent Admiral Talid'Vaan and by proxy the Admiralty. P'meta was here because she was Eclipse, now, and Daro'Xen's personal bodyguard. A trio of faintly glowing emitters on her artificial arm dimmed as she adjusted the heavy M-300 Claymore shotgun in her hands. Quarians were considered to be one of the frailer asarioid races so P'meta's new arm granted her some new liberties in what she could use in the field.
"This is a wreck," Rael argued as he inspected the hull and where the Blood Pack had cut through it. "And Korlus is covered in wrecks."
"This ship is quarian," Daro assured him. "We'll be able to gather more information inside, but there is only one registered quarian wreck in this area. The Narotal."
"So Okeer's lab is in the ship we're looking for," Ilena said giving the buckethead a little nod. It was good to have her close by again. "Coincidence?"
"Coincidence she says," Daro scoffed, not once, but twice. "Coincidence? Hardly! I'll be kind and assume you were being sarcastic. No. Okeer and these 7-31 people must have set up inside to take advantage of something within. The interior would have existing labs and open spaces that could be repaired. I'd suggest that is why."
"My goodness, it seems that old fool Okeer has made nothing but one enemy after another."
"Hey!" Ilena said, pointing at the krogan and his scarred and ever-silent asari bodyguard.
"Tuugo Thax," Daro reminded her. "How could you keep forgetting…?"
"You see, if I was Warlord Thax then I'm certain no one would forget me." Tuugo was in good humor, all things considered. Despite descending into a potential warzone, he had eschewed a hardsuit or armor, remaining in his formal brown coat and embroidered white shirt. His only concession for security seemed to be a drab black armored vest that covered most of his torso and strapped on over his clothes. His commando bodyguard, on the other hand, was armed and armored to the teeth.
"My daughter's somewhere in here," he continued to speak, reaching up to scratch his flat chin. "Hopefully not in the condition those fellows upstairs are in."
"Okeer went through a lot of trouble to smuggle them off Tuchanka," Daro assured the ancient krogan. "He'd want to keep them safe, not turn them into mindless shock troops."
Tuugo seemed to console himself with that fact.
"If she is hurt, I will be quite… upset," he said it rather matter-of-factly, but there was genuine emotion there. Mostly an extremely well-tempered anger. Ilena got the impression the civil old man would fly into a blood rage if they did find his daughter mutilated like the victims above. But not before that. Thank the Goddess.
"Another wave of those things could hit at any time," Shepard said, taking the lead.
"The first into the breach," Wrex agreed, and the two stepped side by side into the wrecked ship. The Blood Pack had been quite thorough in marking their presence, and the way through was marked with more lights. The others followed close behind, Ilena, Daro, Vasir and their subordinates.
"Oh yes," Daro spoke up soon after, fingers dancing over the haptic interface of her omni-tool. "This is definitely the Narotal."
"H-" Daro cut Ilena off with a look. "I mean, I'll take your word for it."
"The structure, which I'm mapping, and the materials… all match quarian records and projections," Daro explained anyway.
"A quarian colony ship," Vasir mused, looking around at the dilapidated walls of the service corridor they were advancing through. Aside from Blood Pack graffiti, it was surprisingly intact. The walls had lost their luster, electrical panels ripped out for salvage, the ventilation ducts corroded, but it was still intact and not a crumbling ruin. Then again, quarian engineering was well known for a reason.
"You've seen them before?" Rael asked. "Before they became liveships?"
"I attended Tevos when she met with a friend on a ship like this," Tela answered, lost in thought for a moment. "That was… before the war. She was buying a custom-designed geth for her quarters. She wanted one that could sing."
"Ah." Daro mused. "It didn't attack her, did it?"
"No."
"Lucky her."
Ilena winced at Daro's comment but Tela just laughed.
"We were lucky," she agreed, "But the one in the kitchen, on the other hand…!"
"Seriously?"
"No."
"Ohh!"
"What was it like, back then?" Rael wondered aloud, tracing a faded panel on the wall, the words there lost to time. "The quarians at their height…"
"I was just a maiden myself," Tela recalled, "But we all knew quarians. The ones that traveled used the first versions of the suits you have now. Everything quarian was hot back then: quarian fashion, quarian food, quarian tech, quarian bond-mates. There were twenty nine billion of them… most in the dominions, a few on turian dextro planets, but there was always a dome or facility for them on the major worlds."
"Despite the romanticism perpetuated by fleet propaganda, half of all surviving quarians were from populations outside quarian territory with little connection to the old dominions," Daro explained, walking and talking and working all the while. "When the fighting began, it spread outward from areas with large concentrations of geth platforms. The inner worlds were overrun quickly while the fleet staged a holding action to protect the smaller colonies within the dominion. In isolated regions with few geth there was no rebellion at all, as the platforms lacked critical mass to develop anything more than animal intelligence. By the time the rebelling geth contacted them, they were usually already off line."
"There were a few berserk geth back then," Vasir went on to add. "The worst was on Thessia since that's where all the rich asari were and they all had designer platforms they brought on Rannoch. A lot of rich matrons on Thessia woke up next to angry sex-bots that morning." She shook her head and muttered something under her breath before repeating it aloud. "I owned a geth, too back then."
Ilena started to ask. "…!"
"Not a sex-bot!" Tela cut her off before she could ask.
"Aww. So what was it?"
"It was a toaster."
"A geth toaster?" Ilena asked.
Despite herself, she couldn't help but imagine an evil looking toaster with a glowing eye and scary flaps, like geth were rumored to have. 'It feels like there's a credit chip inside my grill,' it would say to passerby, 'reach inside and get it. Come on. Free money, you disgusting meat bags! Use your easily burned water-filled fingers! Oh, OH, you want me to shut up and toast your bread, is that it? Check your organic privilege!'
"There were geth in many devices before the war, not just the mobile platforms," Daro said, all but confirming that there had been evil killer toasters during the Morning War.
It was then that another silly thought danced into Ilena's mind. "This ship was from before the war."
For a moment, all three quarians turned to stare at her.
"So it was," Tela Vasir simply agreed with a smirk.
"And this explains why we haven't had to fight our way down here," Shepard said from up front. She and Wrex had walked ahead slightly, right into a collapsed section of the ship. The cause of the collapse was also quite clear. One of the vorcha husks was half buried in the rubble and still hissing weakly.
"That exploding thing they do," Ilena guessed.
"Can we go around?" Tela asked, taking command. She kicked the nearly dead husk, snapping its neck. She looked to Daro for some sort of insight. "There is a way around, isn't there?"
Looking through the schematics, the resident quarian genius didn't sound hopeful. "Maybe, but the sonic mapping isn't looking good."
"We could blast our way in?" Rael suggested.
"And risk bringing down this entire section of the ship," Daro argued.
"Rael'Zorah has the right idea," Shepard spoke up in his defense. "Through is better than around."
"Major," Chambers sounded concerned. "Remember…"
"It's just biotics," Shepard cut her off, and then switched to human English. That was new. "It'll be just like what Voodoo did when they raided the Master of Puppets during the Exodus Campaign. The Shepard maneuver you guys were joking about before was just a one-woman version of it."
Chambers also switched to English. "That was a Temple Ship, Shepard, not this unstable wreck. Besides, we weren't supposed to use TK out here."
"Call it a biotic warp or something then."
Shepard switched back to Thessian. "So, we'll cut through with our 'biotics.'"
"A singularity?" Vasir asked, guessing at what they planned to do. Like the others, she couldn't make heads or tails of the human language Shepard and Chambers had spoken. Still, she didn't seem annoyed by the private conversation. "That won't work; it's too violent, it'll just suck in more debris."
"We have more control over our singularities than you do," Ilena said before Chambers could start to explain. "Or, Shep does anyway. We, I. Shep. Same thing."
Daro remained silent, but for lack of other options, everyone backed away to let the two 'asari' do their thing. It was well known that some asari were particularly gifted in the biotics that were intrinsic to their race. Forming a Singularity was one of the most advanced and dangerous of biotic techniques but that also meant it was one of the few that most asari knew relatively little about. That some asari had a natural gift for it was plausible. Probably not even a total lie, either! Except, of course, that these two asari weren't asari at all and the technique was no singularity. So still mostly a lie then.
Chambers groaned and walked over to Shepard. Ilena felt a tingle again, a shift in the air somehow.
Placing her palms against the collapsed debris, Shepard began to form a psionic Rift. Except this one wasn't the usual flat swirling pool or circle. Instead, it was a bubbling and filling up some sort of shape in space. A 'Shaped Rift' for lack of a better term. Given what they'd said before in English, it was some sort of combination of Rift and Tee-Kay, which was probably human for that telekinetic field thing they did.
The purple pool became an expanding bubble, one that swiftly enveloped the entire debris field. Ilena felt a chill run down her head-tentacles and a shiver inch down her spine. Maybe superficially this Shaped Rift could look like a Singularity, but there was no suction, no rush of air, and no sense of disturbance in the inner ear... just a silent, malevolent purple eye that crackled and churned like the Goddesses Abyss. No one who had an inkling of what humans actually were and could do would be fooled by re-branding it with a familiar name.
"Alright," Shepard began to say, and just as quickly as the Shaped Rift appeared, it dissolved, leaving a perfectly carved-out gap where the collapse had been. The way was left clear to the next room. "That should-"
"Shepard!" Chambers yelled a warning, but it was too late.
A rapport of fire from within the next room thundered, that strange combination of mass accelerator rounds and biotic force slamming into the unprepared Battle Matron with enough force to send her flying backwards and off her feet. Shepard's kinetic barriers flared in defense but were instantly overwhelmed in the face of the barrage, shattering like glass before a hammer. Shepard had already been blown off her feet before Chambers even finished crying out her name.
"Abominations!" Wrex yelled, crouching to fire through the gap with his Claymore.
A trio of misshapen krogan were in the next room, their red Blood Pack armor etched with neon blue lines, their right arms fitted with the same sort of cybernetic gun harness that Eclipse had seen on the Unit 7-31 Abominations. But those had been batarians. These were hulking krogan, warped like the husks, their faces impossible to distinguish at a distance as overgrown with tech as they were – thick like ivy on a dying, rotting tree.
"Take them out!" Vasir was yelling, running up to the side of the opened gap and tossing a grenade into the other room. "Hit them hard, now!"
Reinforcements rushed forward, setting up where they could to fire into the hole Shepard and Chambers had made. Revenants fired streams of rounds and shotguns sounded, but the enemy answered with equal ferocity. The air rippled and cracked with another shot from the krogan abominations. Their aim was uncanny. Wrex cursed as he was hit, and to Ilena's shock, the huge battlemaster was knocked flat on his back just like Shepard had been. Another shot hit one of the Eclipse commandos with Enyala, further down the hall. Rather than being knocked down, she was propelled flat against the wall, crushed in place like she'd been hit by a speeding shuttle. Where her chest had been there was now a deep cavity, enough to fist your fist in and not touch the sides. Ilena didn't need to see the poor recruit's face to know she was dead.
"Ameta!" Chambers yelled. After all, everyone in Eclipse's current class had been her students. She stood, purple ethereal energy rippling off of her spine like fire. "Bastards!"
The psionic fire collected in her hand, forming into what almost looked like a lance. With a snap of her wrist, she sent the projectile flying. Despite the impossible angle, impossible for anyone firing a normal weapon, the purple Psi Lance homed in on its victim without fail. The pale violet light enveloped one of the krogan abominations' arms, the weapon arm, shredding it apart. Peels of red meat and blue circuit came away from the arm like shredded cheese.
The Abomination, crippled, fell to one knee but didn't die.
"Knock them off balance!" Ilena yelled, even as her mind screamed 'shut up and find a place to hide!' Shep was down. Who knew how bad her condition was. Her IFF was still friendly. There was no time to check and less time to thick rationally. As she always did when her brain said one thing and her gut the other, Ilena listened to the one that handled freezing cold ice cream better.
One hasty and poorly thought through Biotic Charge later and Ilena slammed shoulder – and face – first into a wall of husk-mutated muscle. Seventy two and a half kilograms of flying asari maiden bounced right off the krogan abomination, which was totally unfair, since biotic charge was supposed to negate the enemy's mass. It was supposed to work on big guys like krogan. That it didn't work here was a total cheat. Someone out there was cheating or maybe using a trainer on these guys. Lame!
Falling back on her butt, Ilena dazedly looked up and saw the problem. There was a strange shimmer around the krogan, like you'd see on a shield, but not quite. Anyone who had spent too much time in engineering eating snacks where no one would think to look would recognize it.
"Eezo cores? Yikes!" She yelped and leapt to the side as both of the abominations focused on her. They were huge, insanely strong, but not exactly quick on their feet. In fact it was more appropriate to say they lumbered, leveling their weapon-arms with great care and diligence not to waste a shot.
Ilena scrambled on her hands and knees, her shields cracking when one of the abominations fired at the floor close to where she had just been. The cannon punched a hole clean through the deck.
The other slowly spun around, trying to keep the scrambling asari in front of it.
"Point that somewhere else, why don't you!?" Ilena cried, firing wildly at the thing even as she desperately tried to run circles around it. She was just feeling good about keeping ahead of the lumbering monster when she other one peeked out from around it, weapon taking aim.
"Shit!"
Diving in the other direction, she slipped beneath the thing's legs.
The abominations began to turn again, to pin her down, but then one slumped forward. Ilena could see it was riddled with holes. The biotics were having little effect, but enough bullets seemed to do the trick. The heat sink on her SMG popped, auto-ejecting, spent. Ilena tossed it and switched back to her assault rifle, squeezing the trigger hard enough to break it. More Revenant fire from outside joined in, ripping apart the abominations bit by bit, starting with their weapon arms.
It was quite a thing to see: what must have been three or even four Revenant machineguns focusing not just on one enemy but on one enemy's body part. Tough as the huskified krogan flesh and armor was, it turned to pieces and pulp. Within seconds, both cannons were out of commission and the krogan abominations were helpless.
Bekha-Yakshi advanced past Ilena, dark boots thudding.
Chambers was at the front of them and with a furious kick, she finally knocked one of the monsters over. The other jerked and spasmed as it was simply gunned down. Simply getting back on her feet, Ilena got her first real look at the room they had paid in blood to take.
A faded picture of a smiling quarian extolled them to eat smek, while holding up a can of processed mystery meat. Some sort of weird looking bird-lizard was in the background on what looked like a farm. Another faded poster behind glass looked like some sort of "food quadrangle." A third one advertised turian cereal. "From Palaven to your Plate." What looked to be… vending machines lined the other wall, one of them broken into by the Blood Pack before the idiot must've realized that the food here was both dextro and, oh yeah, centuries old.
It was some kind of Goddess damned break room.
All this over a break room.
"Goddesses tits, Thanoptis!" Tela Vasir barked, striding into the room through the gap. "You never said you had a death wish!"
Ilena wasn't sure whether to try and make a joke or just groan. What had she been thinking? Fucking biotic charge!
"Shep?" She ignored the Spectre for now and made her way back to where the troops were streaming in. Chambers was doing a good job there, securing the area. She was just a corporal, technically, but she was also a teacher and a 'matron' herself. A protective one given how she'd acted before. No one was going to argue with her.
"Where's Shepard?" Ilena grabbed one of the Bekha-Yakshi and the woman pointed off to the side. In an alcove out of sight there were two bodies being watched over by that krogan, Wrex. One was Ameta, and she was a mess. A third of her chest was just gone. Eclipse's first real casualty. Not just wounded, not in stasis somewhere. Dead.
And Shep…
Shepard's black and purple armor was blasted in, not just in one place but three. Those abomination cannons had hit harder than a Widow rifle, an anti-material rifle in all but name. The armor over her stomach and chest was stressed, you could see where it had been hit, but it had ultimately held. Goddess-be-praised but the humans built their stuff tough. Shepard's face had been hit, though, and she had only worn an open-faced helmet. It was next to her, half-compacted. The same helmet she had only consented to wear because Tela insisted she show her face. The one mission, the one damn time…!
Ilena couldn't see how badly she was hurt either. Wrex had put some sort of cloth over Shep's face. Ilena could feel tears in her eyes, no matter how much she knew she had to be Eclipse's awesome and unflappable Commander. "She isn't…"
"She isn't asari," Wrex whispered. "An asari would be dead."
"Uhhhhgh." A wet gurgle came from the corpse with the cloth over its face. "So you saw. Wrex."
"Hard to miss it, Shepard," Wrex had the courtesy to keep his voice down, though Ilena couldn't for the life of her imagine why.
Wrex worked for Vasir. If he knew something, why wouldn't he let his comrades know? Or did they know already? No. Shepard was alive. She'd never allow it, not while she drew breath. She'd order Chambers to kill Vasir and every one of her commandos to preserve XCOM's secret. Wrex was crouched nearby, though, keeping Shepard's injury and secret out of sight. There were two drones hovering quietly close by, too. Daro'Xen's eyes.
Shepard slowly and weakly reached up to her face, feeling under the cloth.
"That's… bad," she said, with that wet sound again. "But it could've been… worse."
"Funny," Wrex said, running a hand over the blast he'd taken to the chest. "I've killed a lot of asari over the years. They all bled blue, not red. So are you going to tell me what you are, or should I ask around?"
"I'm just a..."
"She's an alien, obviously," Ilena just out and said it. Shepard growled beneath her sheet.
"Terminus?" Wrex asked, simply. He didn't move from where he crouched, next to the fallen woman.
"No," Shepard answered, after a pause.
"Uncharted regions?"
"Yes."
"And you're here?" Wrex sounded amused. The old battlemaster even began to smile. "Just… walking around… blending in… among all the asari and they don't know a thing…?" He snorted. "Hah."
Shepard reached up to pull away half of the cloth covering her face. Even though the flickering asari membrane she wore, it was stained red, red with blood that was entirely and all too human. Ilena wasn't sure how, but the asari skin mod the humans used could and did mimic blood and DNA based off of master samples and then given slight alterations. If you pricked one, they bled blue like an asari. Shepard, however, did not have this mod. She had something called an 'Iron Skin' mod and…
Iron Skin.
"That's how you survived," Ilena realized, "the Iron Skin thing."
Ilena knew Shepard had to be thinking it, too. They had a living human and a krogan witness now, rather than an asari corpse. Shepard's waffling on finally getting the mod to better blend in might very well have saved her life just now.
"Shepard," Daro'Xen interrupted, holding a new helmet taken from one of the other Bekha-Yakshi. It was hard to tell with her visor tinted, but she looked concerned. "Those mods you have are certainly impressive. I've said it before." She hesitated, hawing and holding out the helmet. "I… well, I thought you might want this. I wanted to say it doesn't look that bad and I'm sure Chakwas can reconstruct your jaw just like it was before."
Shepard took the helmet. "It'll grow back."
Pulling down Wrex's cloth, Ilena finally saw the damage. Maybe it would grow back, but by the Goddess. How was Shepard even talking? With her other hand, the Battle Matron reached up and yanked down one of the drones. It obligingly sprayed down her face with the strange medical mist the humans devised. Then the helmet went on, the straps, the NBC lock, and no one was the wiser.
No one… except Urdnot Wrex.
"I'm keeping the knife," he stated, standing up and extending a meaty three-fingered hand.
"The hell you are," Shepard growled, taking his hand. He pulled her up and handed her back her Revenant. The bloody rag that had concealed her face went into a pocket. Standing now, she turned to look down at Squaddie Ameta. Her face was untouched, at least. That was something. Ilena kneeled down next to her. Chambers had known this maiden by name, but Ilena hadn't. She was just one of the many recruits they had accepted into Eclipse. One of Enyala's girls, and Ilena knew Enyala was close by, though not enough to hover. The other Bekha-Yakshi had probably moved her along to prevent it…
"I'm sorry I didn't know your name," Ilena said, softly. She touched her fingers to the maiden's forehead. "Ameta…"
"She was from Tuuza, a colony on the Attican Traverse," Daro said, respectfully. "Chakwas will take care of her. She'll want to have a look at you, too, Major."
"Husks!" A yell came in time with the IFF warning ping, followed by more Eclipse slang. "Ee-Tee detected!" Red highlights appeared through the bulkheads. The chorus of Revenants and shotguns began anew. Shepard turned to the fallen Ameta, lowered her head for a second, and then turned to head back into the fray. Wrex and Daro'Xen followed close behind. Ilena… lingered, just long enough to hand Ameta over to Chakwas for storage.
"Ameta," Ilena said to herself as she made her way through the halls of the ancient quarian colony ship, ignoring the looks of her fellow Eclipse and even the few Blue Vixens. There would be more like her. It was amazing they'd gone this long without losing someone, but there would be more. More dead maidens. Ameta was the first, though, and hers was a name Ilena vowed to remember.
Death was part and parcel of the job. No one signed up without knowing that and accepting it. It wasn't that Ameta from Tuuza had died.
She'd died in Eclipse; it felt important that Eclipse be something worth dying for.