A/N: Sorry for the delay! Hopefully I can speed up my progress but I had a hard time pumping this one out for some reason. Please continue to read and review! For those of you that do, THANK YOU!
"Niner this is one-one, BLUE BIRD now. Am observing four times enemy dismounts patrolling outer perimeter. Clear lines to all targets, one-two may be able to observe."
"Niner, roger. One-two acknowledge."
"One-two roger I see em. One-one this One-two I'll take the two on the left."
"One-one sounds good, Niner do you acknowledge?"
"Niner roger out to you. All stations this is niner. H hour in ten minutes, wait out."
It had taken Garrus and Ashley a little under two hours to drop into Binthu's atmosphere and establish a foot on the ground from two different vantage points around the Cerberus research facility.
We were running out of time, but it was the tactically sound choice to make. The research base was set up in a very sound defensive position, in the middle of a vast open space, on the high ground, allowing them to observe further than their weapons could shoot. The plan had to be simple, but flawlessly executed.
Garrus and Ashley would act as a faint; drawing enemy fire in two different directions, while Kaiden and I dropped from the still undetected Normandy, through the atmosphere, and right on top of the facility for a breach.
It was all about timing. Timing and precision.
I felt Kaidan's hands tapping my chute holds, checking my oxygen levels, scanning my suit for breaches and finally running his fingers along the seal of my helmet and mask. He gave me a thumbs up and I completed the ready procedure just as he did for me.
"Green light in thirty seconds." Joker's voice echoed in my helmet as I tried to steady my breathing. I positioned myself at the ramp, and readied myself for the jump.
There are several technical requirements and challenges to space jumping. In addition to kinetic barriers, armour needs to protect against hostile temperatures, pressures, and lack of oxygen. At the heights involved, low pressure can cause decompression sickness from space exposure, so suits need to be individually and precisely calibrated prior to each jump. There is also the possibility of a suit breach, causing the diver to lose oxygen. Duration may also become a problem, because even though supersonic speeds can be achieved in stratospheric jumps, the greater the height, the more oxygen must be carried to ensure the diver survives, thus calibration.
Furthermore, depending on the weight of the diver, the re-entry suit needs to be armoured with ablative shells to survive the heat of re-entry. While there is no "fire layer" of atmosphere, the speed of orbit is in the thousands of kilometres per hour. To go from this speed into the atmosphere produces a compression wave that heats the air, and could cause the diver to reach upwards of 200 °C. There is also the problem of the stress on the suit materials caused by supersonic or hypersonic shock waves.
G-forces are also a challenge. As the diver presses through the thin atmosphere to the thicker air below, he could slow at such rates that he experiences positive or negative G-forces from 2-8, possibly contributing to black outs or other pressure-related complications. Spinning can also cause blood to pool in extremities - possibly causing hemorrhages or unconsciousness.
I usually tried not to think about all these things. I had done this many times before.
"I've never done this before." Kaidan said through the comm., likely thinking of all the possible ways we could die before even hitting the ground. "Not outside of training anyways."
"Then we'll make sure you get your combat jump wings sewed to your dress blues when we get back." I chided.
"I'm afraid of heights." He said with nervous laughter.
"So am I." I admitted.
"You are?"
"Jumping out of a perfectly good spacecraft and plummeting towards a hostile planet is not a natural act. So let's do it right, and enjoy the view."
"Green light ten seconds."
I just focus on my breathing. Once breath in, one breath out. Nice and slow. Over and over. It's all I can hear. I focus on the readouts, the flight path. Not the intense pressure pushing my organs to my feet. Not the heat threatening to melt my skin should a piece of ablative plating succumb to the G forces.
I count the parachutes as they break my fall, one through seven, and then I can see my target. Chute eight opens as the target gets larger and larger and I know I'm going to have a rough landing. I relax my muscles and brace for impact. I feel my knees spike with pain as my feet connect with the roof of the facility and slam into my chest.
Kaidan used his biotics to soften his landing. I envied him in the brief moment between my landing and the time it took to grab my rifle and begin engaging the enemy on the ground, too distracted by Garrus and Ashley to notice our drop. Seconds later they were down and the Mako was on its way to secure the area, Garrus and Ash in tow.
I pulled my omni-tool from my belt and flipped on the flashlight. The thin beam of soft illumination allowed me to locate the tiny infrared emitters along the outside of the venting shaft. Adjusting a setting on the omni-tool, I used it to tap into the wireless signal, overriding the alarm system.
"This acid rain is wreaking havoc with our sensors, Sir." Sgt Chase radioed through the comm as Kaidan and I slid down from the roof and to the ground. "We can't stay here long."
"Roger. We won't be. Keep an eye out for a counter attack, once we've cleared the building, prep the bodies for extraction…and get them out of this rain. We need to be able to identify them."
We breached the door with no resistance and I halted short of the elevator shaft that would take us down to the main facility. Prying the doors open, I noticed the elevator itself was still at the bottom of the shaft, indicating our attack had gone unnoticed.
"I'm still blocking their comms," Tali said quietly as I continued to examine the shaft, "They're going to get suspicious sooner or later."
I knelt down and held out my hand, and Tali handed me the small, extendible camera that I snaked down the elevator shaft and through a vent, looking at the elevator exit on the bottom floor.
Images from the camera were transmitted back to the readout on my omni-tool, allowing me to see what awaited us on the other side. The elevator was at one end of a corridor. Several doors that looked to be cells lined either side. At the far end was a small table, where a pair of armed guards played cards and cast occasional glances at a bank of monitors resting on the table.
Using the camera magnification, I zoomed in to get a closer look at the images on the monitors. There were six in all: four showed only darkened rooms but one of the rooms had a lone figure huddled in a corner, another showed three occupants, two lying on the floor and the third sitting between them. I withdrew the camera quickly; it was obvious these guards were in charge of watching their prisoners.
Kahoku had to be one of them. But who were the others? Was Cerberus conducting experiments on them?
"Two enemy, four friendly at the bottom. I'll hook up first. Kaidan you're next."
I quickly stashed the camera, hooked up my rappel line, readied my shotgun, then lowered myself down from the top floor until I balanced precariously on the elevator's narrow bottom ledge, crouched, and quietly peeled away the vent door. It was only big enough to fit one of us through at a time. Kaidan reached me and I threw myself through the tiny hole in the wall the vent had allowed.
My momentum carried me into the corridor, where I hit the floor, tucked into a forward role and came up firing. Neither guard was expecting the attack and I caught them completely unprepared. Most of the first two blasts from my shotgun were deflected by the kinetic shields in their combat suits, keeping them alive just long enough to jump to their feet. But the third and fourth blasts killed the men before they had a chance to draw their weapons, hurtling their bodies back with such force that they slammed into the table, sending the monitors crashing to the floor.
Knowing we had to work fast, I turned my attention to the cells. Four of them completely dark, with thick bullet proof glass doors for viewing. I slapped my hand against the access panel of the nearest closed door, hoping it wasn't protected by a security code. To my relief it slid open, revealing the room with the three figures inside. And that's when I realized I had made a horrible mistake.
They weren't humans at all, the prisoners were husks.
I barely had enough time to raise my shotgun again and start pumping rounds into the charging human forms, running backwards as fast as I could.
"Rachni!" I heard Kaidan shout behind me and wheeled around to face the four of them, tentacles flailing wildly, screeching cries tearing through my brain.
I spun again and ran towards Kaidan, hoping to create enough distance between myself and the abominations so we could engage them in a fair fight. My eyes caught sight of the elevator, bending under the enormous weight of a krogan.
Wrex had heard the shots and the word 'rachni' and had thrown himself down the shaft without any sort of breaking mechanism.
Wrex ran right past me, and I'm pretty sure he was smiling.
I turned again, skidding on my heels as I adopted a firing position with Kaidan and laid down covering fire for Wrex.
Not like he needed any. Wrex charged headfirst into the three remaining rachni, punching, kicking, shooting, and completely ignorant of the toxic acid splashing on his armour. The chemical reaction was causing smoke to rise off his body and for a second I marveled at the sight. When it was all over, Wrex just stood in the center of the carnage, soaking up the scene around him.
"I think you broke the elevator…" Kaidan said quietly as we approached.
"Ha!" Wrex boomed. "I just made it a little more compact!"
Fortunately, Tali was able to call the elevator and the rest of the team joined us in the hall. We broke up into fire teams and started clearing the relatively small facility.
"Got a barracks here." Garrus said through the comm.. "All clear though I'm only counting eight beds."
"Then that leaves two," I confirmed, "Chase, confirm no remaining contacts outside."
"No sir, scans are clear for miles."
"Roger. All stations this is niner. We've got two more contacts somewhere in this facility. Stay sharp. Advise when sectors clear."
"Shepard…er… niner… this is…uh…Wrex…Labs are clear. Got some kind of operating theatre here. You might want to take a look."
The room was stark and utilitarian. A bright lamp hung down from the ceiling in the center. Beneath it was a gurney fitted with leather restraints. The straps and the gurney were stained with dried blood, as was the floor around it.
"They didn't use an anesthetic," Liara muttered, feeling sick to her stomach.
Medical equipment on wheels had been pushed up against the far wall. Some of it I recognized: an EEG monitor; an endoscope; a cranial drill. Other, more sinister-looking machines I could only guess the purpose of.
I gave each piece a quick examination, trying to get a feel for what it might have been used for. At the same time I struggled not to picture Admiral Kahoku screaming as he was subjected to the bizarre medical tortures.
"If he's not here, where is he?" I said to myself.
Kaidan and I carried on past the barracks until we reached what was obviously the station's primary
research lab. There was a large bank of computer terminals in the center of the room, and the two remaining contacts sitting at the stations.
We breached the room as per SOP, throwing a flashbang and rushing the room. One stood and drew his pistol as the other dove for cover.
At this close range accuracy barely mattered; the autotargeting systems of both weapons ensured direct hits. My kinetic barriers deflected all the rounds from the pistol except for one that embedded itself harmlessly in the padded shoulder of my combat suit and another that ripped through the corner of my ammo pouch. My opponent wasn't so lucky. The concentrated scatter of the shotgun blasts overwhelmed his shields, and a handful of pellets penetrated the kinetic barriers. The impact tore great holes in the exposed flesh of his face and hands, and the man dropped lifeless to the floor.
The other man, a scientist without any sort of combat armour was slowly rising to his feet while Kaidan screamed at him to get down on the ground.
The man had a calm, serene expression that worried me, and I cocked my weapon again as a gesture of impatience.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Were the only words he said before he closed his eyes and bit down hard on something in his mouth. Seconds later he was on the ground convulsing and foaming while Kaidan and I tried to administer first aid.
Fifteen seconds later he was dead, and contact number eight was down.
"He killed himself," Kaidan whispered in disbelief.
"I guess he figured he was a dead man anyway." I said to him. "Cerberus has contacts even in the Alliance."
"What was he protecting?"
The process of analyzing what Cerberus had been up to was threefold. First the encrypted data had to be carefully extracted from the databases. Then it had to be decrypted. Finally, it could be analyzed by Tali and Liara. It would have been simpler if the scientist hadn't started to purge the data minutes before we had arrived.
"This whole thing was a set up." I finally realized. "They knew we were coming, they sent out those four outside as cannon fodder to slow us down so they could purge the system. They had no intent of coming out of this alive."
"Then where's Kahoku? What were they hiding?" Ashely said, her voice rising with frustration.
We resumed our slow careful search of the premises. In another office, this one located just beside the data lab, I discovered a small door built into the floor. It was primitive in design; rather than sliding on rails it simply swung upward on a pair of metal hinges. It was closed and locked with a simple deadbolt latch.
Locking eyes with Kaidan, I took aim at the door with my shotgun and used the toe of my boot to slide the deadbolt aside. I waited for several seconds, and when nothing happened I leaned forward cautiously and threw open the door, ready to fire if a target presented itself.
The cellar beneath was completely dark. A rickety wooden staircase descended into the blackness. I flicked on the flashlight built into the shotgun's barrel, using its powerful beam to pierce the gloom as I made my way slowly down the stairs.
When we reached the bottom I cast about in a quick circle, sending the illumination into every corner. The room was square, maybe twenty feet on each side. The walls were finished with brick and mortar, the floor was bare cement. It was completely empty except for a motionless figure lying on its back near one of the walls.
Training the beam of my flashlight, and the muzzle of the shotgun, on the body, Kaidan and I approached. We were within a few feet before my mind finally recognized what I was seeing; I had found Admiral Kahoku.
Running the flashlight slowly from head to toe, I saw that the he was bound hand and foot, and had been stripped completely naked. If I hadn't recognized his distinct balding hair, I wouldn't have known it was him. His face was a deformed mess of lumps, bruises, cuts, and burn marks, clear evidence of the torture he had endured. Someone had knocked out all his teeth and caved in one cheekbone. The other cheek gaped wide, as if someone had slit it lengthwise from lip to what passed for his ear.
One eye was swollen completely shut. The other had both upper and lower eyelids missing, the ragged edges of the flesh left behind attesting to the fact that they had been savagely torn off with a pair of pliers. I recalled with distaste how much certain organizations enjoyed that particular method of torture: in addition to the excruciating pain of the brutal removal, the victim would go slowly and agonizingly blind as the exposed eyeball became dehydrated.
The rest of the body showed similar signs of abuse.
The fingers and toes were all broken, and several had been yanked from their sockets. Every inch of exposed skin showed signs of being beaten, cut, burned or dissolved by acid. However, there was something even more unusual about the body that caused me to crouch down for a closer look.
There appeared to be some kind of loamy, gray growth spreading out from his wounds to crawl slowly across the skin. It took me a moment to realize it was some kind of bacterial fungus; in addition to the sadistic torture, the Admiral must have been given a strange alien disease.
Kaidan was now vomiting in the corner, and I was holding back my own urge as well.
I gave a grunt of frustrated anger and stepped back from the body. To my surprise, Kahoku reacted with a short yelp of fear.
"Jesus Christ, the poor bastard's still alive!" Kaidan shouted.
He was actually trying to talk, saying the same phrase over and over in a shaky, raspy voice. The words were distorted from his missing teeth and misshapen face, and it took me several repetitions before I could decipher what he was trying to say.
"I can hear them….I can hear them in my mind….I can hear them….I can hear them in my mind… "
He kept repeating the same phrase over and over, his voice rising and falling in a trembling, terrified warble. I crouched down close to him, though I was careful not to touch the infected flesh.
"It's okay" I said softly, "Nobody's going to hurt you now. It's okay."
He didn't seem to hear me, but continued babbling, his words coming more and more quickly as his broken mind spewed out the information in a desperate attempt to avoid continued torture.
"It's over now" I shushed, hoping to calm the frantic Admiral down. "It's over."
My words seemed to have the opposite effect, as he began to thrash against the bonds holding his wrists and ankles. He let out a cry of frustration, then began to sputter and cough. A fine mist of black, foul-smelling ichor spewed from his lips and the gash in his cheek, causing me to jump back to avoid the spray.
The fit ended with Kahoku letting out a series of hitching, gurgling sighs, and then he finally went still and silent. Steeling myself against the fecund stench that was now emanating from the body, I got close enough to verify that the Admiral had stopped breathing.
I left the body in the blackness of the cellar and climbed the stairs back to the ground floor, passing Liara, who was uttering some kind of asari prayer.
"Tell me we're ready to leave." I said to Tali, my voice a little darker than intended.
"A few more minutes and I'll have the download complete." She said quietly, knowing something was wrong just by looking into my eyes."
I radioed up to Chase to have a HAZMAT body bag brought down.
Fifteen minutes later we were back in the Mako and making our way toward the extraction point.
Back on the Normandy, medical exams complete and Kahoku's body transferred back into Alliance custody for a proper autopsy, I found myself pacing in the CIC, waiting for Tali to finish her analysis.
"This will go a lot faster if you're not constantly hovering over me!" She snapped suddenly, and I took the hint.
I tried to busy myself with writing the After Action Review for Binthu in my quarters, which now felt all too confining. My mind kept drifting back to the state we had found Kahoku in. What kind of information Cerberus was trying to extract…if any. What kind of experiments were they conducting.
I was interrupted by the intercom. Four hours had passed and Tali had finished her analysis and I called a meeting with the primaries in the briefing room.
Tali started flipping through screens until she found the files she was looking for. Reaching out, she tapped the haptic interface, causing the data to balloon up so that all the hovering screens were suddenly filled with an assortment of charts, graphs, and raw numerical data.
"See this chart here," Tali said, touching one of the screens so that it expanded and moved to the forefront of the display. "This is the data we were able to extract from examining the husks you encountered on Eden Prime. But look at this one…it's altered, like Cerberus was trying to mimic the data."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It confirms the theory that Cerberus was attempting to extract something from the husks, and implant them in living human subjects. Some kind of experimental cybernetics." Liara said.
She continued to glance over the data, then stopped when she recognized something else, the cold chill of an old memory creeping down her spine.
"I've seen this before, too," Liara said softly. "Advanced AI research, biomedical implants. The same kind of thing we found on Noveria in the Rachni."
"Are you sure?" I wanted to know.
"I'm sure."
"This must have something to do with the Reapers," Liara said.
"But why would Cerberus be researching the Reapers?" Ashley inquired. "And what does this have to do with Admiral Kahoku? I thought they were an anti-alien group. Why would they be kidnapping and experimenting on humans?"
I wiped my hand across my face, not sure what to do with the information. "It's possible the subjects were voluntary."
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Kaidan recalled. "Though I doubt the Admiral had volunteered."
Liara stood and pulled up another data chart, "While we found no indication of cybernetic implants in the Admiral, Doctor Chakwas noticed some abnormalities. His brain showed signs of rapid degeneration, however, upon further examination we discovered the individual cells had been altered, and were in a state of partial arousal rather than true awareness. They may have been experimenting with some form of mind control."
"Reaper tech?"
"Of that I cannot be sure. Though it seems likely, given the evidence." She said.
"How did they get their hands on Reaper tech?" Garrus wondered. "How did they even hear about the Reaper threat in the first place?"
There were several possible explanations as to how Cerberus had caught wind of the Reaper threat. While it was a known fact that Cerberus had trained operatives within nearly every level of Alliance Command, a breach of security on the Normandy itself was highly unlikely. They may have simply read Liara's research papers on the subject. She had already published two since she had been aboard.
"Well we've got to stop them." Ashley stated. "If they're experimenting on humans we've got to stop it."
"They're not the main effort." I reminded her. "Saren is our objective. We'll keep an eye out for Cerberus, but they aren't our main concern right now, Ash."
"How can they not be!? You've seen what they've done!"
"As brutal as their methods are, "Liara interjected before I could respond to Ashley's frustrated outburst, "They are taking the Reaper threat seriously. They are trying to understand them."
Ash shot me a look, begging me to chastise Liara for her words, but she knew a small part of me agreed with the doctor's assessment. At least they were doing something…as horrible as it was.
"Ash, this attack was a serious blow to Cerberus. Binthu gave us a lot of great intel, and I swear to you the Alliance will put it to good use. They won't be allowed to flourish."
All she could manage was a disgusted snort.
The meeting dismissed, I decided to kill a few hours cleaning my weapons and conducting maintenance on the Mako with Tucks.
Liara followed me into the elevator.
"How do you do it?" She asked once the doors had closed. "How do you see what you see and still function as though nothing happened?"
"Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. It's called surviving. You don't really heal. You don't really get over it, and honestly I don't know if I could be around someone who could. You just press on. Put it away."
The Well of Fortitude is a finite resource. You draw from it, and you let others draw from it until it runs dry. Eventually, you become a statistic. A broken mind. This I know.
Prior to my posting on the Normandy, I had been sent on a special assignment with a young Lieutenant Alenko, to recover the leader of a biotic commune…my former CO Major Kyle. The commune distributed transmissions across the extranet, one of which was intercepted by C-Sec, inviting other biotics to join them on Presrop. Kyle began taking a more militant approach, preaching that the Alliance was in fact responsible for all the biotics' problems. Eventually the Alliance became concerned about his activities and sent me in. An unusually personal assignment.
The commune was in fact a cult, with the biotics referring to him as "Father Kyle". According to Admiral Hackett, Kyle — never a biotic himself — was likely seen by the cultists as a protector, and through 'protecting' them, Kyle was able to assuage his guilt over the events at Torfan. I was able to talk him down, but the image of a once strong and confident man reduced to a broken shell had never left my mind.
Everyone's well runs dry.
I turned to Liara and closed the small distance between us. "We never become whole again ... we are survivors. I know you're not a soldier, but you've been through hell and back and I know you want to keep going. You are a warrior."
I had rendered her speechless, and realizing the lift wasn't moving, I reached around her to hit the button to bring us to the cargo hold. For a split second my front brushed against her chest and I felt her breath on my skin.
"What about Cerberus?" She asked once she had caught her breath.
"What about them? If they continue to break the law within council space I will continue to pursue them. But if they're willing to figure out what the hell the Reapers want…it's better than nothing. Maybe we can turn them away from the dark side."
"I hope you're right."
"Next time you start to get afraid…just remember what you are capable of, and why you are fighting….and who you're fighting with."
The lift finally kicked into gear and began to descend. I was startled when I felt her arms around my shoulders as she pulled me into an embrace. Once the initial shock of the contact wore off, I slid my arms around her waist and pulled her close. The scent of her perfume was making my head spin, and I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the closeness of her. The tightness of her grip. The genuine sincerity of a hug meant to give comfort and nothing more. I wasn't sure if it was meant for her or me. It didn't matter. I hadn't been hugged in years.
A/N: For those of you who don't know, the torture scene was borrowed from the Ascension novel. Really good read if you're interested!