Psi Effect

by Cap'n Chryssalid

A fun-loving asari mercenary finds herself a little in over her head when she ends up abducted by terrifying aliens from beyond the galactic frontier. These asari-like creatures call themselves 'humans.' They seem to be secretly nosing about on the borders of known space, acting through proxies, conducting covert operations, and they've got a deal for an enterprising asari...

21. Chapter 20

Update time!

This is a bigger chapter than normal, just FYI. But it is the weekend so people shouldn't mind.

Thanks again for all the comments and reviews! I can't wait to hear what people think of this particular chapter as it has some very important and probably unexpected stuff in it!

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(20)

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Tela Vasir ducked low behind a bank of centrifuges as her rifle vented heat and steam. She was alone in the cover, Shepard and Chambers still hosing down the far end of the lab with a seemingly endless stream of mass effect rounds. The normal chatter of the Revenants had long since turned into a merciless and oppressive chorus. A wet pained gurgle from the far end of the room heralded the snap-ROAR of one of the strange purple singularities that the bekha-yakshi were so fond of. The sole remaining krogan abomination was reduced to inarticulate gurgles and pops as it tried to escape the rift, ripping apart as its crippled limbs flailed and came apart. As if surpassing some unspoken damage threshold, it finally came apart entirely, the churning rift giving the walls nearby a new color of paint.

"X-ray wave incoming," another of the masked Eclipse warned. "ID reads Husk type. Twelve bodies."

"Warm them up!" Shepard ordered. "Wrex! There!"

Swapping out her overloaded Vindicator, Vasir willed biotic power into her arms. A rippling barrier coalesced around her as she stood. The first few husks were already emerging from around the corner, misshapen vorcha bodies warped by the strange cybernetics of Okeer. They ran right into a paired wave of biotic shockwaves.

"Ugh!" Ilena cried, switching immediately to her SMG. "More of them!?"

The maiden, Vasir had determined, was not particularly powerful as far as biotics went. This was only her second shockwave and her biotic reserves had visibly dimmed. Actually, it was more accurate to say she had a lot of power but not nearly the reserves to go with it. Vasir pumped more biotic focus into her right leg, stamped her boot, and sent another shockwave into the growing conflagration.

Charging husks were bowled over like varren before a rampaging klixen. Eclipse continued to rain down death from afar. One enthusiastic husk jumped forward, springing on enhanced legs, only to rip apart as three Revenants interlocked fire on it in midair. A severed arm splattered against Vasir's chest. Explosives would've made things so much easier, but everyone was in agreement: they wanted to capture this place, not level it.

"Biotics!" Vasir yelled to her Blue Vixens. Two of them ran forward from behind the Eclipse blacks and golds, brutal biotic throws blasting husks off their feet. One was cushioned by slamming into a comrade. The other flattened hard against the wall, neck snapping. The crippled body landed, head lolling limply like a wet noodle, and tried another mad charge forward.

A second rank of Blue Vixens stepped forward as the first stepped back, barraging the husk swarm with another timed volley. The two husks that managed to slip past the fusillade were met with glowing ingots of death courtesy of Eclipse's engineers and their pet drones. One husk took three of the toroidal plasma rounds to the face and neck. What little gray matter left in the creature's skull overheated, turned to steam, and reacted poorly to the skull's attempts to hold it all in. Even without a head, the husk continued to run forward until it lost all bodily coordination. The legs kept churning and kicking and trying to run even after it fell forward, tripping on one of the bodies underfoot.

Tela's rifle chimed, a green light on her visor's HUD catching her attention. Reaching without looking, Vasir whipped out her Vindicator and helped put the last three vorcha husks down. They joined a steaming pile of flesh and cool blue circuitry that had piled up at the lab's only other exit. Vasir had long since given up on counting the bodies. After a while, they just turned into a solid mass of dead vorcha.

"Read clear," one of the black and purple huntresses said, even as the last husk kept crawling forward minus a pair of legs. "All X-Rays eliminated." Wrex put it out of its misery with a stamp of his right foot.

"Scout ahead," Shepard ordered, not giving her own troops a moment's breather. "Enyala."

"On it!" one of the gold armored Eclipse asari answered. "Leave it to me! Fireteam One! Let's go!"

Two asari commandos, a salarian engineer, and a turian moved ahead behind a flight of angry gray drones. They briefly hugged the corner outside the lab and began to secure the hallway beyond.

"Wrex!" Vasir yelled. "Batetha! Yana! Back them up!"

Two of her own Blue Vixen mercs responded to the affirmative and moved forward. Wrex caught up to them easily, the big crimson hump of his armor standing out against the blue armor around him, the blue-tinted bodies that littered the floor, and even the bluish haze in the air that lingered from all the massed biotics.

For the first time, Vasir was actually able to look around the lab they'd secured. It was the first one they'd run across in the sprawling complex, past a number of lobbies and living areas. All empty, of course… none with anything obviously important or sensitive, though both Vixens and Eclipse had a backup team combing through the area just in case.

The crackle of an omni-tool caught her attention.

"You hear that?" Chambers asked, craning her neck. She pointed her Revenant towards one of the fallen krogan abominations, the one that hadn't been turned into extra chunky pâté.

"-have heard this question often, my children, and I do not fault those who ask it." A hologram of Quash Hurgott appeared atop a flickering, dying omni-tool. It was some sort of sermon. "How can the god Heshtok be also the god Vaul? Is not one a god of Tuchanka and the krogan and the other a god of the vorcha?"

Hurgott crossed his hands over his midsection, his hologram crackling briefly.

"Children, imagine a vorcha and a krogan, their back to a blazing fire. The vorcha sees his shadow and points proudly to it. The krogan does the same. They argue over whose shadow is real. Both are, for both are the means by which they understand the light that illuminates them. The face of Vaul-Heshtok is not found in the paltry reflection. Vaul-Heshtok is called the Father-Mother because it has no gender, and it has no race. It is the light, and both our races bask in it and are connected by it. Praise be-"

The hologram whined and died, the omni-tool that generated it burning out. Vasir shook her head and focused again on the lab. She was no scientist herself, not in her many centuries had she even dabbled at trying to be one, as some asari did. She recognized some of the equipment anyway, but none of it looked important. Most of the room was taken up with large centrifuges that were as tall as her waist and half again as wide.

"There's nothing here," Daro'Xen said, though she wasn't alone in examining the place. White Varren was doing the same, but he lacked the small air wing of drones that the quarian had at her disposal.

Vasir narrowed her eyes at the sight of one of the drones remotely accessing a computer.

That was a surprise. These drones were deceptively sophisticated for their small size. But it was good news, too. If the drone could hack another computer that meant it could be hacked in turn. Most likely, anyway. It was just a matter of analysis to determine how to transform that advantage into vulnerability.

Double-checking the heat level on her rifle, wondering privately how one of the thermal-clip hybrids Eclipse used handled – she'd have to liberate one sometime and find out for herself – Tela Vasir lingered behind slightly even as her counterparts began to move forward. White Varren picked up on her picking up on his unspoken signals and meandered over. The Shadow Broker agent had no face to read behind his mask, but Tela had an inkling that he was… annoyed.

"Problem?" she asked quietly, the two partners moving step in step.

"That quarian's drones are surprisingly advanced," Varren answered, ostensibly calm but clearly just a little worried.

"They can remotely access computers," Vasir said, knowing that what had surprised her was the source of the batarian's ire. The Shadow Broker always tried to give his or her agents the best tools to do their job. Right now it seemed they were playing second fiddle and to a quarian of all things. It almost elicited a chuckle from the Spectre.

"Remote access using a drone isn't difficult." Varren snapped his fingers and a cloaked sphere briefly appeared by his side before hiding behind a holographic projection.

Vasir wasn't too surprised by the little display. There had been hints of it before this, and the tech was known to exist by the STG. That meant most of the well-connected Spectres knew about it, too. Combining a stealth drone with a remote hacking array made for a formidable little tool, limited only by the fact that it had a limited operational lifespan and needed to be constantly re-initialized via omni-tool.

"Having four of the things working in parallel?" he went on to say, glancing back as a pair of Blue Vixens rushed past. "I was optimistic when I assumed I could keep ahead of Eclipse and feed them scrambled data. I can hack faster, our mutual associate's software can slice into protected systems more quickly, but one versus four… it isn't in our favor."

'Mutual associate,' Vasir scoffed internally. Why didn't Varren ever just say it? The Shadow Broker. What point was there in being so obtuse between just the two of them?

"I'd be careful about messing with that quarian's tech, if that's what you're thinking," Tela warned. "If she notices, she'll cry to her friends. That won't end well for you." Catching his look, she explained, "I'm not shy about turning this into a fight, but here and now isn't the time."

"I'll do what I can then," White Varren growled and hustled ahead. Tela was mildly entertained. She'd never seen the stoic batarian agent frustrated like this before. She reminded herself about the difference between them. Varren worked for the Shadow Broker; Vasir worked with the Shadow Broker.

Emerging into another open lab, Vasir scanned the area. The left wall was dominated by a series of tubes, all empty. Interestingly, there was a pair of suspiciously narrow cages leaning against one another. They were just the right size to both hold someone and shove them into the tubes. Familiar looking marks on the floor indicated this was more than just another research area. She wasn't the only one to realize this, either.

"Slave cages," another asari in Eclipse gold said, kneeling down and examining the floor. She traced her fingers over a scuff-mark on the ground and placed a hand on the closest cage.

"They're too narrow," Vasir argued, though she actually agreed.

"You're probably thinking of transport cages," the asari said, standing up and looking around, face hidden behind her closed helmet. "These look like modified display cages. They're made this way to keep the slave inside standing straight. Sometimes to punish them, sometimes to show them off to buyers."

Her omni-tool did a sweep of the cage and she tilted her head slightly.

"These cages are some sort of iridium composite…" She moved closer to one of the tubes, omni-tool still glowing. "Worth a lot of money but why… ah, I see! There are corrosive compounds left in this tube! Were they sticking people in here?" The asari lieutenant gave a disgusted groan. "Were they melting people? Why? This is sick!"

"Right now I'm a little more interested in who they were melting, rather than why or how," Vasir said, turning her head as a gnawing sense of wrongness infringed on her well-honed fighting senses. "Unless you were manhandling a krogan, a cage like that wouldn't be necessary, would it? If I were a betting matron, I'd say that…"

"What?" the Eclipse asari asked, and gasped as she saw them. "Shit! X-RAYS! Liselle to Squads All-"

The husks were getting clever.

They'd been violently cleared out of this room like so many others, their bodies left where they fell, bleeding and broken. A couple of them, though, had decided to play dead under the corpses of their friends. Waiting until most of the enemy vanguard has passed by, they picked now to emerge and ambush anyone left behind. Vasir approved.

Her rifle chattered, a line of fire ripping across the chest of one of the vorcha husks. Liselle wasn't far behind, opening up first with a biotic throw before switching to her shotgun. An overcharged shot cored a second husk mid-charge, knocking it back and completely arresting its forward momentum. A third husk powered through Vasir's assault rifle fire and began to glow like a lit fuse. It didn't take a salarian scientist to realize what that meant. Everyone had already seen the suicide-trick the husks tended to use in close quarters.

A biotic shockwave knocked the living bomb off its feet and a throw blasted it across the room. The resulting detonation and shockwave sent a reciprocal tingle through Vasir's biotic amp. Having seen it a few times now, and felt it personally, Vasir had a sneaking suspicion that the tech behind these husks and their weapons was far from conventional. It was biotic. Artificial biotics. Aside from the obvious how, the question was why? It couldn't have been too hard to stuff high explosives into one of those husk things. Why not just use conventional weapons and explosives?

"Lieutenant!" a salarian voice cried, and two golden Eclipse rushed into the room, immediately firing into the closest husk. The concentrated fire knocked it onto its side and even began to push it backwards, skidding along the floor as it spasmed and thrashed.

"-stranded! Abandoned. By my own so called 'comrades,'" Quash appeared on another glitch omni-tool, the program triggered somehow by the death of the husk wearing it. "But I see now that it was the guiding light of Vaul-Heshtok that brought me to your world, my children. There in the mountains of Srashihe, I met the vorcha who I honor to this day. A vorcha who taught me what I now teach you." The hologram held up a wreath of prayer beads, bones, delicately threaded.

"It was in that dark time that I came to realize how my kind mistreated yours," the Warlord explained, voice turning to static for a moment. Stray gunfire briefly ripped through the hologram as the firefight continued around it. "-fodder for our wars and our battles, leading so many poor children to die senseless deaths. Was this how an elder race should guide a younger one? A kindred people? No! Alone among all species we krogan have encountered; only the vorcha are our rivals in spirit and body. We betray our brothers by leading them poorly, to die with a whimper for no cause other than credits. We betray the vorcha and we betray ourselves, for only together, vorcha and krogan, can we regain our lost strength!"

"Our numbers are spent, but the vorcha are limitless. Every one of you is an army waiting to be born! You have even evolved beyond the need for male and female, instead becoming whatever gender is needed! We krogan are old and we have wisdom and guidance. Let us lead the vorcha… let us lead them to glory, and in so doing, save ourselves! Redeem ourselves! Glorify ourselves!" The hologram raised his hands high in exultation. "Children, listen, for all those who die for me die in the light of Vaul-Heshtok, and those who fall do so not with a whimper, but with a mighty roar!"

The hologram crackled at the end of the sermon, the audio turning into a loop of hissing static, the holographic krogan raising his hands over and over again. The omni-tool and the arm it was attached to tumbled over as another vorcha husk scrambled free of the pile of corpses, leaping clear across the room on cybernetically enhanced legs. Tela Vasir slammed the palm of her hand into its face in time with a biotic throw, hurling the reanimated body across the room with more than a thousand Newtons of eezo amplified force.

"Is it just me, or are these things learning new tricks?" she asked, putting rounds into the broken corpse that landed at the far end of the lab.

"More and more of them are jumping at us instead of running," Liselle said, firing into the fallen husks for good measure. An Eclipse engineer was already adding a series of incendiary blasts to make double sure. The Eclipse lieutenant took the opportunity to swap out a steaming thermal clip.

"The word has already spread to the rest of Eclipse to keep an eye out for X-Rays playing snap-eel," she added, shooting a quick set of hand signals to her comrades in arms. "Spectre, you should make sure your mercenaries are also aware of the situation."

"You don't seem too intimidated by me," Vasir noted, firing a single shot with her heavy pistol to silence the crackling, glitchy omni-tool sermon. "And how are you so familiar with slaver gear anyway?"

"I'm from the Terminus," Liselle answered, already making her way out and forward to join in the rest of the ongoing assault. Apparently that explained everything.

She was a Terminus asari; slavers were a part of life.

Vasir chuckled to herself and pushed ahead, too. While it was fun playing around alongside the Eclipse maidens, there was still real work to do. The lab complex sprawled out from the living quarters and the enemy contested every route into and through. Teams shouted over the open comms when they were bogged down and if they needed support. Eclipse troops were also able to 'see' each other and identified enemies, even clear through walls and bulkheads. One group of Eclipse had fallen back so another could hit the enemy by the side, blasting through a wall to flank the unprepared krogan abominations.

Bit by bit, Vasir revised her earlier opinions of them. This SCOPE technology was more dangerous than she had been led to believe. It wasn't just some sort of tactical aid or aiming assistance for a single Eclipse trooper. It was part of a battlefield network. Nor did individual Eclipse seem particularly eager to score kills or rush into danger. If anything, they fought very conservatively… more like a turian cabal than a normal commando unit.

Tela only had time to think much about it in between fights, and all too soon she was caught up in a major one as the lead team branched off to secure the inner coil of the Liveship's non-functional spherical midsection. The huge spherical body of a Liveship was rotational, holding three inner coils and a maze of hydroponics. That was the case in a functional Liveship… not here.

The inner coils of the Liveship were long since ruined and abandoned. Part of the lab overlooked the hollow triple-coil that sat at the heart of the ship, sticking out like an artificial sore. Cranes and a pair of basic funicular lifts were used to descend the curvature into the makeshift pit below. There, where quarians had once grown crops and maintained an enclosed ecosystem, was a series of pre-fab structures: a makeshift shanty village.

"There's a lot of heat down there!" one of the Eclipse Bekha-Yakshi sounded pleased. "Lighting them up!"

"Form a choke point," Shepard ordered, fist burning with strange purple biotics. Another Eclipse tossed a bright red flare down into the 'village.' "Marking targets; Leapers have priority."

"Leapers?" Vasir asked, joining in and adding her Vindicator to the half dozen Revenants and other assault rifles.

More than half of the husks down below proved to be of the jumpy type. The runners ran into swirling walls of rifts, and the Blue Vixens and Vasir herself took more than a little pleasure in using their biotics to knock the reckless husks into the murderous vortexes. There was just something satisfying about hitting a husk with a throw, tossing it and two others into one of those purple swirls and watching them all splatter.

The Leapers, though…

Those were more of a problem. They could and did jump over the Rifts and even scramble up the sheer curved walls. In the dark and the confusion, they didn't make for easy targets even before they started bouncing around. From their perch the mixed company of Eclipse and Vixens kept close together, forming a phalanx of fire and biotics.

When a pile of bodies began to form, one of the Bekha-Yakshi targeted it for a stationary rift. The husks that tried to play dead writhed and tried to escape, but none made it before ending up shredded. When a few of the luckier husks made it through the merciless barrage and into melee, a biotic welcome repulsed them. Flashes of blue and purple streaked across the hollow Liveship chamber laying waste to everything in their path.

"Shepard!" Wrex yelled over the din. "Look down below! Twenty meters from the flare on the right!"

The Battle Matron growled and craned her neck slightly. "Some sort of flag pole?"

"There's a krogan on it!" Wrex said, pumping a carnage-powered shot into a one-armed husk that had been mid-leap. "Impaled on it!"

"So what?" Shepard asked, and immediately answered herself. "He's still moving?" Vasir tried to see it, too, but it was too dark and too far away. "No, that's impossible…!"

"Is it what I think it is?" Wrex snarled, standing taller to get a better look.

"Fray on targets!" Shepard yelled, jumping. And Goddess, did she jump. "Fray, not Rift!"

"Move! Move!" Three other Bekha-Yakshi also jumped clear into the air.

"We're heading down, too!" Wrex wasn't close behind them, running down the thick rails of one of the laboratory funiculars. His shotgun roared as a few of the remaining husks tried to take the opportunity to jump the lone krogan. But both Eclipse and Blue Vixen weren't close behind him. As one, the phalanx broke apart and spread out, killing everything that opposed it.

"Look at this mess…" Daro'Xen seemed to be the only one reluctant to join in the carnage. Instead, the quarian engineer was busy looking over the interior of the Liveship for something. Vasir noticed White Varren also keeping position, hovering not far behind the suit rat… but after a few seconds, and after one of the quarian's drones kept watching him with a baleful glowing eye, he jumped down and into the fight again.

Two of Daro's drones soon shot off in different directions, zipping across the hollow space in search of something.

Well, let the quarian sight-see. If she was distracted here…

"We found something," Wrex said, his voice clear over the Spectre's combat visor. "You better get down here, Vasir."

"What is it?" she asked, hopping into one of the unmoving funicular platforms and then breaking into a quick run across the guide rail.

"I'm… not sure what it is," the old Battlemaster admitted, and snorted. Not his usual snort of amusement either.

All around her, Eclipse and Blue Vixens were putting extra rounds into fallen husks, making absolutely sure every one of them was dead… or non-functional… or however you wanted to look at it. Eclipse drones were buzzing overhead, their lights bright as they scanned or put burning toroidal rounds into husk corpses. More flares had been thrown down, these ones shedding bright white light instead of red.

"We found Warlord Quash," Wrex said, motioning her over.

There was a body at his feet.

The Warlord was a mess. His armor was rent and torn in multiple places and his bony crest was split down the right side, deep enough to cleave into the tender tissues below. It was just the kind of wound Vasir knew krogans feared the most. Blood bubbled up from the tears, but the worst of all had to be the hole that had been punched clean through his left side. It was bad enough it went clean through him, but there was surprisingly little blood. One of the Bekha-Yakshi was crouched down next to him, fitting a breathing apparatus over his mouth while a drone shot some sort of gel over the open wounds. His prayer beads were still clenched in the fingers of his right hand.

"He was stuck on that," Wrex explained, and pointed to a jagged metal pole that protruded from a clean white pedestal. Three smaller metal spikes protruded from the larger one, like twisted metal branches growing off a Goddess-forsaken tree. The metal itself was black and inky, not one uniform color but swirling with deep and dark veins of purple and red.

Tela couldn't say she'd seen anything like it before, but the pedestal was another matter. It was reinforced plastic, with batarian numbers and labels she could read. Now that she knew what to look for, she also noticed there were a few blood-stained stickers stuck onto the inky black metal. Labels.

"They dragged this from somewhere," Shepard said, though more to Ilena than to her new partners. The maiden looked more than a little uncomfortable with their latest discovery. "Look." She pointed to scratches on the floor. "It must've come from the lab…"

"Shep," Ilena said, softly, looking up at the twisted metal wreckage. "What is this stuff?"

"This is clearly prothean technology," White Varren answered, examining the metal and scanning it with his omni-tool. He ignored the drone hovering nearby that was doing much the same. He threw a not entirely subtle glance Vasir's way. She knew what it meant and she knew what she was here to do.

"Whatever it is, it isn't batarian," Vasir said, resting a hand on her Vindicator. "We'll go with prothean for now. You know what that means, right?" She turned to Shepard and Thanoptis. "I don't have to point it out, do I?"

The Battle Matron and Eclipse Commander exchanged a look.

"Let's secure the area first, fight over who gets what later," Shepard said, motioning to her Bekha-Yakshi to fall in.

"What she said," Ilena agreed, and turned to follow the matron… except her foot bumped one of the krogan corpses. Quash was not the only one pulled off the metal tree, after all, and the others were in more advanced states of… decay… or maybe conversion was a better word? While Quash had been lucky enough to be impaled while still alive the others had probably been dead, and whatever the device did, it had an easier time turning dead krogans into abominations than living ones.

"I am Warlord Quash Hurgott!" The crystal clear hologram declared, thudding a fist against his chest. "If you are hearing this, then I have fallen in battle. Likely, I have become one of the twisted demons of this cursed place. Yet you have slain me, and hopefully, the others as well. It is with that hope that I wish to share what I have found. May you be strong and worthy and able to act on this information!"

"A deathbed confession?" Vasir wondered, as the hologram paused.

"Interesting," White Varren noted, no doubt recording everything. His cloaked drone was probably hacked into the omni-tool already.

"We came here in search of Okeer… and the females he stole away from Tuchanka," Quash explained with a sneer. He was about to continue when the recording hiccupped and jumped forward. "-were lied to! Lied to! To! To!" The glitching recording skipped forward again. "-see the truth… having delved this deep into these labs at the cost of so many lives-"

"The recording's corrupted, just like the others," Varren explained, shaking his head. "We might be able to reconstruct it, but it would take some time…"

A muted alert on Vasir's visor indicated she had mail.

Daro's Eclipse drone dipped and hummed, the optics briefly flaring orange.

"My children-" the hologram of the warlord flickered, trying to raise his hands. "Imagine. A shadow. Illuminates! My own. Comrades! Our numbers. Betray! Limitless! Ee-ee-eee-"

"I'm sure Daro burned a copy off the omni-tool," Shepard said, patting the nearby drone on the 'head.' It chirped in reply. "Good. We'll leave a team behind to secure the area and move on. Chakwas, do what you have to do to get that krogan stable. Riley. Police him and these other bodies."

"Aww!" Ilena whined, strolling away from the fallen Warlord to keep up with her battle Matron. "I was hoping we'd come across a recording with lots of secret information! Like in a video game!"

"Life isn't a video game, you know."

"How do you know?"

Wrex kneeled down alongside the Bekha-Yakshi medic named Chakwas to examine Hurgott's comatose body, curious about what was turning krogan into the abominations they had fought so far. Vasir took the opportunity to linger nearby, ostensibly to oversee her own squad of Blue Vixens. This was a prothean artifact now, after all, and that meant it was Council property in all but name. She'd made the claim so now she had to back it up with boots on the ground. Not that the damn thing looked prothean, but whatever. Details like that didn't matter.

She also took the opportunity to look through the short text message Varren had sent to her point-to-point. Almost a minute passed before he physically made his way over to her.

"I have some interesting information," the batarian Broker agent whispered, one hand busy with his wrist-mounted omni-tool. "…about Okeer."

"Oh?" Vasir had expected as much. "Do tell."

---

X-RAY DATABASE (update v5.2.04)

HUSK
Codename: Geist
Vorcha husks continue to be encountered in large numbers. Pending autopsy, all operatives should be aware of the following abilities and variants. Initial analysis indicates that husks have a form of environmental adaptation that parallels that of the vorcha host. Scans indicate that husks can differentiate from the baseline form very rapidly to better respond to battlefield stresses or challenges.

HUSK-P
Codename: Wraith
HUSK-P "Popper" variants have been adapted to explode in proximity to enemies. These can be easily distinguished by their visible glow. All Eclipse SCOPE systems have been updated (v5.2.04) to automatically tag and illuminate P-type Husks, to better distinguish them in a mobile husk pack. Note that since our initial encounters P-type Husks have displayed a decreasing level of visual illumination. SCOPE will now track these targets via infrared emission spectra instead.

Warning: P-type Husk explosions have a primarily biotic element and generate extreme concussive force and shield disruption. Recommend biotic attacks and massed fire. Husk-P targets do not explode prematurely, and if killed, typically self-immolate.

HUSK-L
Codename: Poltergeist
HUSK-L "Leaper" variants are adapted for jumping attacks to better close the distance into melee. The legs appear to be massively enhanced and both feet and palms are covered by backwards-facing hooks to allow purchase on available surfaces and facilitate climbing. Perhaps in response to normal Eclipse tactics we are seeing high levels of specialization of Husks into Husk-Ls. SCOPE systems have been updated (v5.2.04) to automatically tag and track Husk-Ls in a battlefield by gait and kinematic analysis.

HUSK-H
HUSK-H "Hunter" variants are adapted to "play dead" and remain dormant in the confusion of battle. They will pretend to be hit and feign death. Some have been observed to simply keel over, others jerk and spasm and put on quite the show to try and pretend they've been mission killed. The husk then goes into a dormant state; even opening superficial wounds to appear like a mission kill. The husk will then emerge when circumstances are more favorable and attempt to attack with the advantage of surprise. So far, this variant has been extremely adept at fooling or spoofing our SCOPE and drone sensors. We will patch in an update when we have a fix. Until then, just shoot, burn, smash and blast everything and never assume any fallen husk is actually dead.

REMINDER

ECLIPSE-ALL, please remember that we have stealth units in the theatre. These are friendlies, though they do not show up on your SCOPE HUD. If stealthed enemies are confirmed to appear then command will issue a designation update. If you see a stealth field or bump into something invisible, please don't shoot it. It is one of ours. Probably. Thanks in advance.

-DX

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They were on their way back up the funicular rail's incline when Ilena asked an innocent sounding but loaded question. That question being:

"So that's Reaper stuff, right?"

Annabelle Shepard had been expecting the question to come sooner or later. Even when the information was available, Ilena always preferred to talk rather than research. She had access to a largely unfiltered historical database, and she was considered a valuable part of Operation Athena and by extension one of the few non-servitor aliens on the extended XCOM roster. She knew enough that they were here to look into Reapers, not just on Korlus but in Citadel space as a whole. They'd talked briefly about it before, when she'd expressed the common Citadel view that the Reapers were just a galactic bogeyman hiding under the cosmic bed.

Now, though, she'd seen something she couldn't explain, even with her inoculation towards psionic "space magic" as she liked to call it. Ilena was walking slowly, weapon in hand but dipped downward in a relaxed but not careless manner. She was savvy enough to also ask while not looking like she was asking; she was facing off and away, her eyes searching the gloom of the Liveship habitat ring. A drone buzzed by on its patrol route. Eclipse had the area under control, to a greater degree than Vasir or even Wrex knew. Both had a Seeker trailing them in stealth from a distance. Taking chances and getting overconfident was a mistake Annabelle Shepard didn't intend to make again today.

"Probably," she answered, slowing her stride. Ilena was walking just to her right, a recessed area between them that served as a track for the angled funicular lift the batarians had installed over the quarian ruins.

"How much do you guys already know about this stuff?" Ilena asked, just a whisper, but her voice was amplified and sent into Shepard's ear by a micro-implant. "This isn't the first time we ran into husks. Those things on the crashed ship had biotic weapons. You were surprised to see them, but not too surprised, you know?"

Ilena stopped walking, and Shepard did the same after a few footsteps.

"I know this probably isn't the best time," she admitted, freely, "but…"

"It was the Ethereals," Annabelle explained, turning around to face her maiden protégé and partner. "You read about the war, at least a little. You know about the Temple Ship… the first one… the Killing Road."

The maiden Commander nodded. "Durand volunteered for something… and… she led the assault on the ship?" Ilena grimaced visibly, partly because she knew there was more there that she should know, but didn't. "It isn't clear what happened after that."

Shepard exhaled into her helmet, the newly regenerated flesh over half her face still painful and sore when she smiled… or frowned. Glancing around, switching from her normal tetrachromatic visual spectrum to the multi-colored mélange of thermal and then to the blurred black and blue of magnetic, she sighed. This wasn't the worst place in the galaxy to stop for a minute or two. It wasn't the most private place – that would be back on the Tevura, or better, on Arcturus – but it would do. Ilena was already being pretty discrete.

So: the truth then.

"It wasn't just Durand and her team," Shepard said, her mind touching the asari's with a faint tingle. "Everything XCOM had, it threw at the Temple Ship. It was literally the End of the World and the Commander at the time knew it…"

---

"Another of the New One's kin falls…"

The droning murmur of the Ethereal's voice in Durand's ear echoed in her mind above even the roar of the Sectopod's beam cannon. The half-second whine of the beam charging was followed by the ear-splitting roar of it firing, a brilliant white-gold beam of collimated particles punching through obstacles, targets, walls, ceilings and anything else in its path. A thunderous explosion from behind damn near tossed her forward onto her stomach.

"Kill it!" she screamed, the pain behind her eyes blooming as she summoned up another Rift from the Dark Place the Gollop Chamber had revealed to her.

"Zhang!" She heard Colonel Ben-Solomon roar. "NOW!"

Major Shaojie "Chilong" Zhang (PRC) was their squad heavy, loaded for bear with their fire team's lone blaster bomb launcher. Falling onto one knee, Annette shielded her eyes as the Sectopod unleashed another screaming particle beam as it clambered over the edge of the balcony overlooking the open area below. Jointed arms and segmented claws dug into the mangled metal precipice, but the whole thing shuddered as Durand's swirling purple Rift enveloped its right side.

The walking tank whirred in protest, almost like a living thing, as the Rift tore off sheets of alien alloy and twisted a multi-jointed leg into an almost full circle. Stressed robotics came apart under the incredible stresses of the Rift before peeling away in layers like an onion. Still, the mech was alive, and correcting its missed blasts from earlier. Now that it wasn't firing through the balcony, it would have a clear shot at them, even if they were behind cover.

It was then that Zhang's blaster bomb zipped in from the unwounded left side of the Sectopod.

The glowing green ball was almost too fast to perceive, all Annette could see was the glowing zig-zag trail it left behind in the air as it passed by, shot far off to the side and curved back like a trick throw or a demented boomerang. When it hit the Sectopod, though, she felt it in every bone in her body.

The blaster bomb exploded like the hand of God Almighty, a bright blinding flash of radiation followed by a blast wave that knocked her backwards and across the floor. For a few seconds, the world was a tumbling confused mess seen through tinted yellow-orange. The "smart" systems in her Psi Armor had registered the launch of the bomb and actually initialized the polarizing cells in her visor the moment it left the barrel.

Stopping her roll with an elbow, Annette tucked in her legs and used her momentum to tumble upright, plasma rifle trained on the now screeching and mangled mess that was the Sectopod. Rifts seemed to be unaffected by physical forces like explosions, so the directed blast of the killer BB – itself enough to cripple a Sectopod – had also knocked it bodily into her Rift. A glowing orifice in the body of the Sectopod whined, but in the maelstrom it all came apart, cracked and splintered and unleashing a dozen tendrils of white light that ripped apart the rest of the torso and scarred the remains of the ceiling above and everything below. A third explosion heralded the final death throes of the mechanical terror.

"Status!" the Colonel ordered. Ben-Solomon was affectionately called 'Smokes' by his team for his ongoing efforts to quit his coughing nail habit. He was a tall man, support class, easily distinguished in his urban-camo Archangel power armor and by his bandolier, still heavy with grenades. A bandolier much like Annette's own, which was sadly bereft of explosive goodies.

Annette's armor chimed as it returned her physiological status, displaying both her results and that of the team.

"Echo!" Lieutenant Clarke yelled, joining the Colonel in a rush. Annette strained to stand and was slower in checking in on Sergeant Susan "Echo" Anderson (CAN). The team sniper, she'd been hit by the Sectopod's blindfire plasma-bomblet barrage.

"I got her!" Smokes said, moving Clarke aside. He already had a medikit in hand.A red flashing warning prompt on her SCOPE's bio-rhythm display told Durand that Echo was nearly flatlining. A second or two later and she stabilized and the flashing box turned green.

"Incoming! Mutons!" Another voice cried out from one of the flanks. "Mutons! Blue Flare!"

It was the young Sergeant "Mad Dog" Massani (NAM), the youngest of their team being a full two years Annette's junior. The crack of plasma-claymores exploding drew Durand's eyes towards one of the side chambers in the endless maze that was this cursed Temple Ship. Mutons. Maybe a dozen of them. The first few had been ripped to burning pieces by the mines but the rest were already trying to take middling cover behind braces in the floorwork.

"You like that?" Massani yelled from his own high cover, protected by both a railing and an alien pillar. He took a snap shot, nailing one of the enraged Mutons in the arm and turning the limb into a blazing green mist. "Here's some more!"

Without even hearing the order to back him up, Durand found cover of her own, as close to flanking the approaching Muton squad as she could find. The air blazed with back and forth fire, lances of murderous green tearing across the space between the humans and the aliens. One of the Mutons in the back of the pack reared up and roared, pounding his chest with a clenched fist. Soon the entire group was howling and roaring, their blood boiling with the need to fight and kill and die.

Two of the Mutons, their bloodlust high, rushed forward to try and cross the no man's land and break the human lines. Major Zhang's Plasma LMG hosed them down in flickering green fire, sixty plasma bolts raining down on them in the span of a second, so fast and so intense it was more like watching a fireman douse an area with a solid stream of water. Except this water was plasma and everything it touched it melted to the core. What few flammable materials were nearby instantly vaporized, and even the ridiculously tough alien alloy melted and ran in sticky white rivulets.

Lieutenant Daniel "Crater" Clarke (USA), their second support-class, let fly with a grenade, the range of it vastly enhanced by his genemods. The tiny timebomb landed in the midst of the thickest group of Mutons, far to the back, exploding in a plume of plasma and fire. It wasn't enough to kill the Mutons outright, not protected as they were by their combination of alloy and reinforced bio-armor skin, but it did deprive them of their cover. Newly exposed, precise rifle fire picked two of the creatures off before they could scramble out of the killing zone.

"Durand!" Ben-Solomon hunkered down next to her. "How much longer before you can use Rift?"

'Minutes,' she wanted to say. Her body and her mind weren't used to reaching into the Dark Place. Using a Rift was different from using Fray or Panic. It was on a whole other level. Ideally, she'd have had days to practice it…

"Less than a minute," she promised. Plasma flared overhead, barely missing as another chorus of roars form the Mutons re-ignited their morale.

"Alright," the Colonel said. "There are two Berserkers in reserve. Tell me if you see them."

Durand nodded and briefly glanced over the lip of her cover. She knew to look for red. Red meant either a berserker or an elite, and if it was an elite, it would be letting them know it existed by opening up on them with a heavy plasma barrage. It took a second, but she saw them: two berserkers, waiting for their chance to rush in. They were in low cover and practically hugging the ground.

She ducked back down. "I see them!"

"You take left," Solomon ordered, and the next time the two psionics caught the Mutons in sight, their minds reached out in concert. Annette felt her mind touch the Muton's. It was simple, pliant… weak. As mighty as Mutons were in body, their minds were exceptionally vulnerable.

"Psi In!" The call came up, a warning and a signal to the other humans. As a team, they unleashed a barrage of mindfrays and panics. Everyone on their team was a psionic of some skill, even if it was only a basic fray in Massani's case.

The Muton squad wavered in confusion, their perceptions and minds assailed by tortured images and impossible vertigo. It was into that confusion that the Colonel and Captain attacked. The possessed berserkers stood with fearless abandon, charging into the ranks of their allies and savaging them with monomolecular blade enhanced blows. Half in the body of the berserker and half in her own, Annette sneered as she directed her berserker puppet to rip apart a roaring Muton soldier, wrestling her opponent to the ground and tearing open the alien's belly.

"Mad Dog!" Zhang yelled, advancing. "With me!"

Massani swapped to his alloy cannon. "Don't need to tell me twice."

Clarke joined them from the rear on overwatch, and like a well-oiled machine, they cut into the Muton ranks like a scythe. Anything that raised its head, anything that tried to fight back against the mind-controlled berserkers, anything that panicked and fired wildly or tried to flee… all were cut down, one by one. The last to die were the first to fall, as Annette commanded her meat-puppet to lumber over to Massani. She 'felt' him put the barrel of his alloy cannon up to the berserker's forehead, and then the sudden shock of flying back into her own body.

"Clear!" Lt. Clarke yelled, still on overwatch. "Area clear!"

"All X-rays down," Zhang's baritone was professional, like this was just another Triad hit in Hong Kong. "Orders, Colonel?"

"Secure the area. Make sure there aren't any more surprises," Ben-Solomon said, also returning wholly into his body. "Then we move on. Ice, which way?"

'Ice.'

Captain Annette "Ice" Durand (FRA). As if she'd ever imagined this being the way her life would turn out. As for the name itself, it was another little joke. They all knew she had a short temper, so in honor of her fiery personality they dubbed her 'Ice.'

"Non, nothing yet," she answered. The Ethereal's voice was gone, but she could still sense it… somewhere nearby. It was closer than before. Louder. More insistent. The question was where. The Temple Ship was the size of a city.

"We're down a SHIV, and now Echo's unconscious," Lt. Clarke growled. Calling her unconscious was being generous. She'd have been killed outright if not for her Secondary Heart genemod. "Fucking X-rays!"

"Keep your voice down, would you?" Susan "Echo" Anderson groaned from where she still lay, flat on her back. "Ohh," she moaned in pain, trying to pull herself up.

"Easy, Echo," Ben-Solomon said, walking over to check on her.

"Looks like I'll have to thank the mad doc," Anderson said the helmet of her archangel armor thumping as she fell backwards. "I can feel it… the backup heart… Sweet Jesus that was close."

"You're regenerating… slowly, but regenerating," the Colonel said when his voice hitched. "Shit."

"What?" Anderson asked, worried. She still couldn't move.

"Not you. Hotel just reported in." Their commanding officer shook his head, and Annette could feel his emotions lingering in the air. She knew right away what the news was.

"Colonel Kim?" Massani asked, less sensitive to the psionics of the others. He balked, and sat down on the smoldering edge of a fallen beam. "Christ. How many of us are left, sir?"

"Eppner's boys are still fighting," Ben-Solomon said, and reached out to help Anderson back into her feet. She sucked up the pain and managed to stay upright. "Hunter and Zulu are still active. Last I heard Ross and Dupont hooked up and they're making another push."

"Five Teams?" Massani asked, incredulous. "The entire strike force reduced to just five fire teams?"

"Our Skyrangers were shot down half an hour ago," Zhang reminded him, lumbering in his enhanced Mark II Titan armor. "Rio and Lagos are ashes by now. Two terror sites at the same time…"

"Three," Clarke reminded him. "There was a third ship landing outside our base in South America. They'll probably hit the countryside when they find out there's only a skeleton crew left there."

"Do or die, ladies and gentlemen," Ben-Solomon summed up the situation. The world was going to Hell and the aliens had stopped pulling their punches. XCOM had spent everything in this attack, hoping against hope that the Temple Ship was it, the final bastion and command center of the alien invasion. Taking it down had to take down the aliens. If it didn't, they were finished.

XCOM was an organization of thousands, now it was down to five squads and however many engineers and scientists were left huddled in underground bunkers, waiting for news. This was it.

"New One…"

Annette heard it, even before the others did.

"New One. Come to us. Come to me."

"Did you hear that?" Annette asked, wincing a bit as her accent slipped in from surprise. She'd been working hard to sound less stereotypically French. It was bad enough when her countrymen on base reminded her how they were military and she was just a stray cat picked up from off the back of a truck.

"A whisper," Clarke said and flipped his helmet's faceplate back for a second to glance around. "God that's creepy."

It was more than a whisper.

"This way!" Annette said, giving Anderson a quick look. She seemed well enough to follow. The woman was already cradling her plasma sniper rifle in her arms, looking like a wounded predator that was still up for a hunt. She nodded, once, when she noticed Annette watching her.

"You heard her," Ben-Solomon said. "Load up!"

Following her instincts and the gentle pull in the back of her mind, Durand led her team passed the burning Muton corpses and down a long grav-lift. One by one they descended and secured the area. It was empty, but they could all see signs of what had been a firefight in the area. There were dead Sectoids and Floaters in what had once been defensive positions. A door nearby was half-functional, one of the two leaves that opened or closed blown onto the floor. The other just kept opening and closing without its opposite twin.

"I didn't think any of the other teams landed this close to us," Clarke said, scanning the bodies. "Is it me, or…?"

"These X-rays were killed by lasers, not plasma," 'Echo' Anderson finished for him. She knew weapons and was intimately aware of the many ways lasers could kill. Sniper rifles had been the last weapon to make the transition from lasers to plasma. Many snipers still preferred lasers for the job. She kicked a Sectoid corpse cut messily in half, bearing the scarred signs of laser damage, like the result of a chainsaw on wet organic flesh.

"This way," Annette motioned forward.

They were just ascending a long ramp when the ship shuddered and the entire team instinctively dropped down flat. It was all the warning they had before the world turned upside down to the chorus of screeching metal and disintegrating Elerium. Annette cursed, her hands flying up to protect her already armored face as a veritable tidal wave of debris rained down on her. A particularly large piece slammed hard onto her shoulder; would've squashed her flatter than a crepe if not for her psi armor. Then she was airborne, falling backward in another mad tumble, lost in the sheets of metal and crumpled alien alloy.

Her Second Heart jolted her awake.

"Fais chier," a groan and a curse escaped her lips. Her eyes fluttered open but all she could see was near-pitch black. It took a moment to realize she wasn't blind. What tipped her off first was the blinking light on her helmet HUD informing her it was restarting. A second later and power came back, connected to the rest of her team.

Palms flat against the metal that had buried her, Annette tucked in her right leg and just barely managed to brace her boot against it. Pushing first with her arms and then with her right leg, genemodded muscles kicked in and the ton of blasted metal began to move enough to let in a few hints of light. Once she had enough room, the XCOM Captain added in her left boot and kicked… the muscles in her legs at last up to the task of freeing her.

Emerging from the wreckage in the area they had just vacated, Annette switched on her friend-or-foe display. It took a second, but her helmet HUD highlighted the rough location of her team. Most were also slowly extraditing themselves. All were alive, thanks to their powered armor.

This was insane.

This whole mission was insanity.

Finding where Sergeant Anderson was buried, Annette started removing rubble. It would've been an impossible task for a normal soldier, but between her gene mods and her armor, she was still alive, still able to help, still able to fight. But how much longer could they take? Finally finding Echo, Annette grabbed the other woman by her arm and pulled her free.

"Not dead yet are you?" she asked, and Anderson scoffed.

"After the day I've had?" Anderson asked, and kicked over a ton of metal to reveal her sniper rifle. "It'll take more than that to… ohh shit."

She might have surprised, but her sniper rifle was considerably more delicate than its user. The long rifle was bent badly and sparking dangerously. It wouldn't explode, thank god, since Elerium was inert except when bombarded by certain particles, but it was out of commission. It wasn't the kind of weapon anyone could repair in the field.

"Fuck it," Echo decided, and took out her plasma pistol.

The two women made their way over to where the boys had all pulled themselves free. Clarke looked fine, and Zhang was as much a tank as ever. Massani, though…

"Guess I won't be winning many beauty contests," the young man remarked, minus his smashed and broken helmet. Half his face had been crushed, his right eye reduced to a hollow bloody mess. He smiled, roguishly, through the gore. The Colonel finished treating him with med-spray and it left a shiny sheen on top of the bloody mess.

"It's a mess, but you're stable," Ben-Solomon pronounced. "You should stop bleeding in a few seconds. Most of it will regenerate, but…"

"Hey, I'd say it's an improvement," Clarke quipped, slapping the Sergeant on the back. "You okay, buddy?"

Massani tossed his ruined helmet away and protectively patted his plasma rifle. "I've still got my little lady here. I'll take her over half a face right now."

Zhang nodded.

"What the hell hit us?" Anderson asked, and for a few seconds the entire team took in their surroundings. There was rubble everywhere, and overhead they could see a ragged tear punched into the Temple Ship itself. Annette could see the blue sky through the wound in the side of the ship, and as she did, she heard a roar and the bright flash of a ship-scale plasma beam. The sky beyond was on fire.

Anderson tapped her helmet, zooming in her vision.

"Looks like the air force," she said.

"Which one?" Zhang asked. "Ours?"

"Everyone's," Anderson stated. For a moment, the sky flared with distant explosions. "Everything that can fly." She shook her head and tapped the side of her helmet before lowering her hand. "But I think what hit us was a Firestorm."

"Kamikaze?" Clarke wondered.

"No way to know," Echo argued. "Does it matter?"

"Ice." The Colonel turned to Durand. "You still have a direction for us?"

Annette nodded, still able to feel it. "I think so."

Fire Team November continued on, jumping or climbing back up the original incline. It was a mess now, nothing but broken scaffolding and ragged drops into the levels below. Of the Firestorm that had crashed into the Temple Ship there was little to distinguish its remains from the alien materials of the ship itself. Once again the genemods proved their usefulness, letting the six soldiers navigate the treacherous terrain.

A small mixed squad of Floaters barred their way after they passed through the most heavily damaged section of the crash. The flyers used their mobility to zip around and rain down grenades, but a quickly erected TK Field deflected the explosives and mind-frays crippled the aliens' coordination and accuracy. Some of the light Floaters were weak enough that the Frays alone killed them, tearing their minds apart and scrambling their brains with multiple explosive seizures.

Durand led them back on track, heading deeper into the ship towards the prow.

"Holy shit," Lieutenant Clarke saw the bodies first, "is that what I think it is?"

"That's impossible," Massani said, jumping down next to one of the cooling corpses. He nudged it with his foot and flipped it over onto its back.

The man was Caucasian, well built, and he'd been killed by a plasma round to the chest, probably a heavy plasma round. None of that was particularly shocking. It was more two things, the first being the armor. This man wasn't wearing power armor, XCOM's standard for all active duty troopers, but instead a type of carapace armor mixed in with what looked almost like a pinstripe business suit. Over his threaded vest this man had worn a mixture of white plate armor – salvaged alien alloy – and tactical webbing. As if that hadn't been enough of a tip-off, the man's face was also concealed behind a combination of a black balaclava and beneath that… a red and orange striped bandanna wrapped over the mouth and jaw.

"EXALT," Massani said the name like a curse. And a curse it was for XCOM. EXALT had ruthlessly and relentlessly opposed the organization almost since the beginning of the war. Annette damn near saw red. Few had had more experience with EXALT than her.

"Bâtard!" she hissed, having to hold herself back. Instead she focused on the rest of the bodies and the rest of the area. This bastard EXALT hadn't been alone. He hadn't died alone either. There were dead Floaters and Mutons mixed in among the dead men and women.

"If I had to guess, I'd say they're doing the same thing we are," Zhang answered, calm under pressure as always.

"I fucking hate EXALT!" Annette growled, resisting the urge to put a round or two into some of the bodies. EXALT had been the ones to catch her and sell her to the aliens. The ones responsible for the torment the aliens had put her through. Then they had been the ones to rescue her… only to experiment on her themselves. Not in a hundred years, not in a thousand, would she ever forgive them for what they had done.

"You aren't the only one," Anderson reminded her, walking through the bodies to snatch up a spent laser-type sniper rifle. It was EXALT manufacture but the principles and operation were the same. She double checked the weapon and the sights as she spoke. "It looks like they managed to scrape together a team for one last hurrah."

Massani reached down and ripped a bandanna free, tugging off a black balaclava in the process and revealing a pale almost albino-white face. He tucked the souvenir into a pocket. "But I thought we put the boot to these bastards when we took out their base in Hong Kong?"

"We burned that place to the ground," Annette snarled but was lucid enough to admit that, "Maybe a few might have escaped. We weren't subtle when we hit the building."

"EXALT elites often carry plasma grenades," Ben-Solomon interrupted the speculation. "You have sixty seconds. Get what you need and then we keep moving."

November squad gave a series of affirmatives and started scavenging for plasma grenades. Except for the two support troopers, the rest of them were all out. Durand wasn't too proud to turn down using the weapons of the enemy, even if it was EXALT. Passing on a pair of flashbangs hanging from the waist of a fallen EXALT medic, she found a Heavy minus his head. A trio of unused plasma grenades had been left for the taking and Annette helped herself to them.

She'd just found a fourth grenade when her eyes settled on another of the fallen EXALT. Moving closer, tickled by some strange familiarity, she crouched down and carefully pulled back the dead man's balaclava. His orange bandanna followed, she pulled it down around his neck. The face that she saw then was pale, too pale, warped by EXALT gene mods… but familiar.

"Said," she whispered, running an armored finger over his now hairless eyebrows. Said Tariq. It was him. She was sure of it, but… he was dead. When XCOM had rescued Fatima and Matt, they'd never found Said. Everyone had assumed he'd died.

"Why?" Annette whispered, so low her helmet mic wouldn't pick it up. "Why EXALT?"

"This New One was unworthy." The voice in her head said, hearing her even when her teammates could not. "He could not see the ethereal as you have. His potential was great, but squandered. Unworthy. Not what we want. Another failure..."

"He was my friend."

"Ice?" Clarke asked, and she heard his footsteps. "You good to go?"

"I'm good," Annette said, standing up and walking away. "We're almost there. I can feel it."

They were close.

Fire Team November ran into their first Ethereal only a minute later. It had been commanding a cadre of Muton elites and Berserkers. Luckily, Anderson had her mimetic skin and stealth, relaying giving them the drop on the aliens. Mind controlling two of the Muton elites had played merry hell on the aliens, throwing them into a panic as their heaviest units whirled around and started opening fire on the Ethereal. The robed alien had responded by creating a Rift of its own, promptly shredding both mind controlled Mutons… along with two of its own Mutons, and a pair of Berserkers.

Under a barrage of plasma fire, the Ethereal had taken a disturbingly long time to succumb. Hands flew up from the robes as it tried to float away, reflecting fire as best it could. Eventually, overwhelmed by six XCOM operatives hitting it with a non-stop stream of fire and psionics, it finally collapsed, shriveled up, and began to glow a brilliant purple. Ben-Solomon had motioned everyone to get down, and a second later, the Ethereal exploded in a final burst of psionic power, scouring the nearby Muton bodies of flesh in an instant. Nothing remained of the X-ray save for burnt and tattered scraps attached to a smoking golden mantle.

"That was unnecessary. We acknowledge you, New One."

"I heard that one," Massani said, moving forward warily. "You guys heard it, too, right?"

"I did," Clarke answered first. "They acknowledge the 'New One.'"

"That must be you, Ice," Zhang added with a huff. He was also moving cautiously.

"Careful," Ben-Solomon warned, plasma rifle at the ready.

Up ahead was a single passageway, reaching up at least ten meters; tall but very narrow. It widened only at the front around what looked like a ceremonial archway. Three men in armor could stand abreast here, but only one at a time could pass through into the room beyond. Annette took cover along one of the sides on the platform leading to the archway.

Looking over the edge, she could see down into a bowl-like depression with radiating supports of alien alloy. Beneath the bowl, she could see the churning waters of the south Atlantic. Were they really at the bottom of the ship? It didn't seem possible. They'd landed near the top and it was a kilometer at least from that section to the ground floors. It had to be a strange projection of some sort.

Even as she watched, a burning aircraft banked to the side below the Temple Ship, violently splashing down.

"Come, New One. New Breed. Come before us. Let us see ourselves reflected in you."

"Echo!" the Colonel ordered, making a fist and pointing to the doorway.

Anderson nodded, creeping forward enough to throw something into the room beyond. It was a battle scanner, one of the many benefits a sniper brought to her squad. Echo already had them patched into her video feed as it came in, a semi-transparent window popping up on Annette's helmet HUD to show her what the sniper saw. But what Echo saw when she looked into that room, what they all saw in that instant, filled them with despair.

Ethereals.

A dozen of them.

And pairs of elite Mutons… two for each Ethereal. It was impossible odds. Unbeatable odds. Not with XCOM's most elite team could that room be taken. Probably not with all five surviving teams, not through a choke point.

"My God," Clarke whispered. His mind roiled with emotion: pain, fear, despair. Hopelessness.

"We've secured the area," Ben-Solomon quickly reasoned. "Set up a kill zone. This is the only exit. We can wait for Eppner, Hunter, Ross, Dupont…"

"Come, New One. Come."

"Come and get her!" Massani yelled back. "Come on, asshole!"

"Massani," Anderson asked, backing away and looking for a good spot to take up position, "have you ever met a hornets' nest you didn't poke?"

The scarred young assault cracked a grin. "No."

"We'll need some grenades," Zhang said, hefting his heavy plasma. "Rig them to make IEDs. Then I can use my blaster bombs to-"

"Let me go in."

Slowly, her team mates all turned towards her. Annette could feel the sweat trickling down her forehead beneath her helmet. It was stifling. Reaching up, she undid the NBC seals to her helmet and opened them with a hiss. Her helmet slipped off, her short brown hair free to fall to her shoulders. Her team mates were all looking at her like she'd lost her mind.

Maybe she had.

Her mind hadn't been her own since she'd entered the Gollop Chamber anyway.

"There's no way in hell we can take that room by force," she stated the obvious. Then she pointed to the narrow door. "And if they come out to get us, we might kill a few, but we will die."

"Then we fall back," Zhang answered with a shrug. "Fight them for every inch."

"The one speaking to us is different. A leader. And it wants me." Annette wiped the sweat from her forehead and tried to make them understand. "This team… this operation… has one chance. I have to go in there."

"And then what?" Clarke snapped, angry. "What happens to you? We just use you as bait?"

"What happens after…?" Annette shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. "You'll know it when you see it."

"That's insane," Anderson objected, hands clenching as she hugged her newly acquired EXALT laser rifle. "Annette, you can't-"

"We won't let you is what she means," Massani chimed in.

"Colonel," Annette said, looking to the only man she had to convince. She couldn't see her CO's face with his helmet on, but she could tell he was thinking, entertaining the long odds her gambit might give them. Even at the cost of her life.

"They can read minds," he said, softly. "It will know this is a trap."

"Even if it does, it won't care," she assured him. "Give me the order, Joshua."

He hesitated. Below them, another pair of fighters crashed and burned. How many were dying right now, all around them? No weapon in the human arsenal could take down the Temple Ship. XCOM and the allied nations had opened up with a nuclear salvo before sending in the Skyrangers and Firestorms. It had done nothing but EMP half of the southern hemisphere.

"Do it," he said, finally, and stood to let her by.

"Are you really going to do this?" Clarke asked, hardly able to believe what he was seeing and hearing, "Ice, are you really just going to walk in there?"

"That's exactly what I'm going to do," Annette said, leaving her helmet behind as she walked to the archway. She started unbuckling her bandolier.

"No other last words?" Anderson asked, stepping forward but not far enough to block her way.

"Nope, not really," Durand admitted, and the other woman chuckled. "Just watch my back."

"That's what we've been doing for a while now," Massani reminded her. The others nodded or agreed outright. Durand smiled. They had. And it had been nice to have someone who could watch her back, someone she could trust, and one by one they had found the same Gift she had. The same Gifts that had drawn her to Fatima and Matthew… fighting with Fire Team November had probably been the first time she felt like she ever actually belonged somewhere.

But they didn't need to hear her say that to know it was true, not with their Gifts.

Dropping her plasma rifle at her feet, Annette Durand stepped through the threshold and into the chamber beyond. There were three levels to it, she saw that right away. To either side was a raised section with two balconies where handfuls of Ethereals had collected to watch and witness. Armed Muton elites guarded the ramps up in a veritable phalanx. In the middle was a recessed area with what almost looked like banks of huge alien servers. Even more red armored Muton elites were congregated there, heavy plasma rifles in hand.

At the far end of the chamber, where the outer raised areas descended and the central sunken section rose, was another platform at her level. More Ethereals waited there, floating like ghosts in crimson and gold. Foremost among them was a single Ethereal, almost identical in appearance… and yet more regal, more distinguished, more powerful. She felt it more than she saw it. Beyond that Ethereal was a raised platform with a counterpart to the Gollop Device.

"Behold the greatest failure… of the Ethereal Ones…" the voice echoed inside her skull even as Annette shielded her eyes against the light. "We who failed to ascend as they thought we would."

The foremost Ethereal floated forward, four arms emerging from the folds of the robe to gesture to the aliens around it. It was talking about itself, Annette realized. It was talking about the Ethereals as a race.

"We who were cast out," it thought to her. "We who were doomed to feed on the Gift of lesser beings… as we sought to uplift them… to prepare them… for what lies ahead."

"We never asked for you to uplift us," Annette thought, and the words that left her mouth were incomprehensible even to her own ears.

"You were on this path before you knew it was a path," the Arch-Ethereal declared.

Annette was now fully exposed before the assembled Ethereals and Mutons. Any one of them could have cut her down where she stood. Yet they were as silent and motionless as statues. Only the greatest of the Ethereals spoke for them all.

"I don't understand…"

"We found you before you were even young," The Arch-Ethereal explained, "We molded you in our image. We planted the seed of the Gift in you. We nurtured and protected you. When the Interlopers came, we protected you because you were ours."

"Humans… are Ethereals?" Annette shook her head, denying it. It couldn't be.

"No!" The Arch-Ethereal corrected her, the harshness of the response eliciting a wince in the young woman. "No! You are Not Ethereal! You are the New Breed. Your Gift is equal to our own, but your Bodies are stronger. More fit. Ideal."

"I still don't understand…!"

"Look within your veins, the proof is there! The substance you call 'MELD.' See how it flows through you? You glow with it in a way we cannot." The Arch-Ethereal actually sounded… happy. Pleased. Yet the sensation was so alien, so strange, the emotion nearly made her nauseous. "Observe. This was not a vain undertaking… but a necessity, as our physical form has grown… ineffective. Our search for a perfect specimen was driven by our own crippling limitation."

The Arch-Ethereal hid the top two arms back in the folds of its robe.

"At last, one of our seedlings bears fruit," it said with a contented trill. "We take now what was always ours, New One."

"Human beings aren't just things for you to harvest!" Annette yelled now, with both her mouth and her mind. "We're living beings, thinking beings! The same as you! How many millions have you killed? How many billions?!"

The Ethereal floated forward, drifting over the heads of the Muton elites in the sunken platform.

"Those without value are no loss," it pronounced, indifferent to a billion and more deaths across the globe. "The Great Enemy comes. Their vanguard has been sighted. The New Breed will need us to guide it. We will show you the path."

It reached out to touch her and Annette stepped back, slapping the withered hands away.

"We don't want anything to do with you!" she hissed, reaching behind her back for her plasma pistol. "All we want…" Quick as lightning, she had the weapon out and fired. "…is to be left alone!"

It was a suicidal attack, but Annette had never intended to entirely catch the alien by surprise. The Ethereal had a hand out and a Reflection Field up. The globular pulse of green plasma wavered inches from the Ethereal's hand before ricocheting off to the side.

"This is not your path," The Arch-Ethereal thought, the other arm glowing with psionic energy as it pulled her forward. "This is not your purpose!"

Annette fought off the telekinetic hold and lunged forward, knife in hand. It was the oldest weapon. The last one a star spawned demon like this would expect. That was the only way to get past a Reflection Field: you had to catch the user by surprise or break their concentration. Reflect could only defend against what you anticipated, or so the leading theory went.

The tip of her knife vibrated as it struck, the tip wavering against a faintly glowing psionic field.

"You need us," The Ethereal chastised her, but kept the Reflection Field up. "You cannot survive the Great Enemy without-"

The Arch-Ethereal vanished in a plume of blazing green and fiery orange. It had failed to notice the bandolier of EXALT issue plasma grenades that rolled to a stop behind it, and safe on her side of the Reflection Field, Annette Durand prayed that not only would her trick work but that the field would hold long enough to protect her against the conflagration. She could already feel the heat wash against her face. She heard the enraged roar of a dozen Mutons and smiled grimly to herself.

'You felt that one, didn't you?' she thought vindictively. 'Good!'

"NO!" A hand surged forward through the fire and the field to take her by the throat. The Reflection Field crackled and dissipated and the Arch-Ethereal emerged from the dying embers and fires. Both of its lower arms had been blown away, leaving only charred stumps, but the other two that had been inside the armored alloy robe had survived.

With deceptive strength, powered not by muscle but by mind, he lifted her off her feet.

"New One!" It roared into her synapses, enraged beyond reason. Annette felt the power of the alien seep into her, the cold of its nearly lifeless hands on her throat and the chill of its alien mind invading her thoughts. Cracks formed on its broken and blast-scarred helm, the gold flaking or breaking away. Even before it did, though, Annette could see through it, see the alien's desiccated and atrophied face.

"If you will not be our new seed, New Breed," he explained, and the cold spread like a sudden tidal wave across her chest. "Then you will be consumed instead!"

Psi Drain.

She had seen Ethereals use this before, but only on other aliens. No one had ever reported it being used on a human.

'Not on a regular human,' Annette realized, her eyes wide. "Oh God!"

Cocking back a fist, with all her genemodded strength, Annette Durand summoned up every iota of her willpower to push back the paralytic effect of the Drain. Screaming, she struck, her fist taking the Ethereal across the helm. The hands around her throat relented, loosened. She fell. And the psionic power it had begun to drain, to add to its own, coalesced and warped and exploded into a titanic Black Rift.

The walls split like rotted kindling, the ground heaved and fell away into the bowl shaped projection below. Mutons howled in pain and toppled over like bowling pins. The others unfortunate enough to be close enough to get caught in the huge Rift were ripped instantly to shreds of un-identifiable green and crimson. The other Ethereals, stunned or confused or afraid to intervene, simply watched. Only two on either front balcony were close enough to fear the Rift, but even they floated away from it, not wanting to be engulfed.

The Arch-Ethereal recoiled, still alive within the abyssal Rift, still kept alive by sheer Will. But its arms were wounded, and the strain and explosion had ruined them. Broken fingers hung from shredded hands, bleeding a thick purple miasma.

"New One!" it cried out. "You need…us! You need our guidance!"

Annette was too busy scrambling backward, away. The ground was giving out around her, falling a hundred feet down. She could do some amazing things with psionics, but not fly. Even with the struggling, convulsing Ethereal in the center, the Rift was still expanding. Still destroying everything in its path. Annette could feel it pressing on her from all around. The Psi Amp in her armor blared a warning and overloaded, sending jagged shards of metal and crystal into her right arm.

The ground had just started to give way beneath her when a hand reached out and grabbed her wrist.

"Colonel!" she yelled, falling helplessly even as he pulled her back. The Archway fell apart all around her as the edge of the Rift consumed it. All that was left was the platform where her team had waited, watching. As the walls came apart and fell away they at last had a clear line of sight. Plasma rifles, alloy cannon, a laser sniper and a blaster bomb launcher all rose to find targets.

"Wait! Wait!" Annette yelled to them, all too aware of the dozen Ethereals who had so far only watched and not intervened. She could feel them, too, more clearly now that the Arch Ethereal was weakened. They were concerned. Confused. Aware of the danger. Arrogant. Ancient. Anxious. Wary. Even excited. She could feel a link to them, unhindered by their master.

"Colonel!" she yelled over the din of the Rift. He was inside it, too, but able to hold together. She could see crackling arcs of psionic energy dancing over the surface of his armor, just barely held in check by his Will. "Get me closer!"

"What!?" he yelled back.

"Get me closer!" she said again. "Fly me closer! Nobody fire!"

"You must've lost your mind, Durand!" But he did as she asked, pulled her in close, wrapping an arm around her midsection and activating his maneuvering jets. His Archangel armor had an internal low-energy low-output gravity drive, and in a moment she was weightless.

When she was close enough, she launched herself forward and out of the Colonel's arms.

"New One…!" The Arch Ethereal, what was left of it, grunted in an almost human way as Annette Durand slammed into it. The two tumbled end over end down an incline and into the recessed area that was now layered with dead Mutons, killed by the psionic backlash and shockwaves. Only a few of the Muton elites were left, having retreated to the far end of the chamber. Annette could taste their fear, too. They were afraid of her and of all Ethereals. Afraid, because they knew how vulnerable they were to psionics.

Straddling the fallen Arch-Ethereal, Annette took out the only weapon left to her. It was almost comical. The white Mark IV Arc-Thrower fit comfortably in her hand, the power cells charged and ready. Every XCOM operative had one of the miniaturized weapons, but this would be the first time Annette had ever used hers. Capturing enemies was not her forte.

"Think - think about this, New One," The Ethereal's thoughts assailed her, pressing hard with the alien's will to make her comply, to make her receptive to its reasoning, to make her agree. "The New Breed need our guidance to hone this power…"

With her free hand, she ripped away what was left of the X-ray's helmet. A corpse-like visage glared back up at her, desiccated and frail. The elongated head pulsed gently, the true heartbeat of the alien mastermind.

"Without us," it pleaded, "what are you?"

"Free," Annette hissed, lowered the arc-thrower, and discharged the entire battery into the alien's face, firing again and again into its twitching form. A collective shudder passed first through the other Ethereals and then into Annette herself. It was like a chain around her neck being loosened. Not removed, not broken, but loosened. But maybe this was a start.

The Arc-Thrower whined, surrendering to a powerless click-click-click as she continued to squeeze the trigger.

Annette threw it aside and sat up, eyes on the ceiling. Purple energy welled up from within her, erupting out of her eyes like fire. Her breath, too, tinted a dark violet. For a moment her mind drifted back to the Dark Place, the one the Gollop Chamber had showed her. This time, her shackles removed, she could see more. It wasn't just dark.

There were shapes in the darkness, and a galaxy in the distance. These, she understood, were the Enemy. The Great Enemy. The ones the Ethereals hated and feared. She saw, too, that there were other Temple Ships, hiding from the Enemy. They knew how. They had survived the coming of the enemy many times, always by hiding, always telling themselves they were simply waiting for the time to strike. The truth was that they were afraid. All the others had given up.

"This ship is the Killing Road," she said, understanding. The first human to ever understand. She saw the ship visit the Earth, not once, but many times. She saw them fall on a lesser enemy, one that had been trying to steal secrets. She knew more, understood more, and beyond that she knew how she had gained that knowledge.

It was coming from the other Ethereals.

"They've stopped fighting!"

Annette turned slowly towards her team, still waiting on the other platform. A broken gulf divided them, but only for now. They were standing, clustered together, hands on their helmets as they listened in to incoming radio and comm traffic. Only Massani, minus his helmet, had to ask the others what was happening. Annette had no need. She already knew. She could already see what was happening through a hundred pairs of eyes.

Forcing her body to rise up, she stumbled away from the stunned former Arch-Ethereal. It would never hold that position again, but it had knowledge and power and it was right to a point. The New Breed did have much to learn, but it would do so on its own terms and in its own way.

Muton elites backed away as she approached, and a pair of Ethereals floated backwards to give her space. Hands falling on the X-ray's Gollop Device, Annette Durand's mind expanded a hundredfold. Like bright lights, she saw them: she saw them outside the chamber, she saw them throughout the ship, she saw them fighting in the sky and on the ground, she saw them huddled in bunkers, she saw four of them in particular standing before a holographic projection of the Earth, waiting for news.

They'd waited long enough.

"Wake up," she whispered, and humanity did.