Interloper: Chapter 28
"How long?"
"Since before we arrived. There's another one to the south."
"You think Kahoku…" no, the Admiral may have gone nuts, but he hadn't shown signs of being sadistic. Who then?
"Whoever it is, they're no friend of ours." Forrest turned to me with a grim expression pulling the lines of his face taut. He looked back, eyes piercing the smog that had settled back over the hills.
"Keep an eye out then, I want a report if you spot anymore." He nodded.
The rumble of movement underground signaled the return of the rachni. Marines got to their feet and fresh ammunition blocks were passed around. In the center of the compound, the automated defenses quivered with deadly potential.
"This is it, people. We hold now, we go home, simple as that. You see something with more than two legs, you shoot it. You keep shooting until it stops moving. You hear me!"
The marines managed a surprisingly raucous battle cry, each one poised and ready, even the walking wounded. I joined them on the ready line rifle tucked into my shoulder. With the scope gone, I had rigged a pair of iron sights to the barrel. The exposed circuits allowed for more rapid fire at least, letting me wield it like a battle rifle. Behind the steel barricade, Isik, Wrex, and Liara flanked me with weapons drawn. I looked to them for support, just as they looked to me for leadership. I gave them a curt nod, it was all they needed. The first rachni burst from the gravel. A rocket caught it full in the body, blasting it backwards. More popped up, all across the arc of the tunnel network. I plugged away at one after another. Each time a puff of superheated air blasted past my helmet. The flash of outgoing rounds and biotic bursts lit up a ring around the base.
"Right flank!" a marine yelled. I threw my aim sideways and took a shot that way. The rachni fell back at the same time my rifle vented. I dropped it in the gravel and drew my shotgun. Its thunder joined that of the soldiers around me. Everywhere I looked, debris of insectoid alien splattered on the ground. More of the wild rachni piled up in mounds, pushing through their dead to get at us. I unfurled my arm in the motion Tali had shown me to activate her program. I flexed my thumb to toss an incendiary grenade out onto the plain. Fire burst across the ground, blocking the path straight ahead of me.
"Deputy, I see another reflection." Forrest's voice crackled past the background static. "I can see them now, two men in black hardsuits, observation glass, looks like some kind of recording device. Should I engage them?"
"We don't want them to know we're onto them."
"They're moving, looks like one of them…" a shaving of white hot metal whizzed by my helmet. Forrest stood and fired almost as if by reflex. The crack of his return shot came a second after. "Target eliminated."
"Who's shooting at us?" Durand yelled. Another blast as a rocket tore apart a rachni drone.
"We need to put a team together, go find them." I looked out at the hills, trying to find more flashes. "I can take one, maybe two…"
"Are you nuts? We are in the middle of an attack!" Durand rounded on me. A marine fell into place behind her and took up her rifle. "We need that Mako's power if we are going to hold this point."
"Then we don't take the Mako." I said, looking for another solution. My eyes flicked from the hill, to the charges, to the tunnels. "We go on foot, through the tunnels."
"The tunnels that are full of bugs?"
"They can't be using all of them, and the shot came from the direction of the mine. We take out two birds with one stone." The tired lieutenant regarded me with an incredulous look on her face.
"I can't tell you what to do with your team, but those marines with you are now under my command. You aren't taking them with you."
"Then I'll take the aliens." I shot back. "Liara, Wrex, pull back to the Mako."
"We're leaving the fight?" Liara replied.
"No, just taking it elsewhere."
The thin roof of one of the sealed rachni tunnels collapsed in on itself in ruins. Roof tended to do that when they took a biotically aided body slam from an angry krogan. I followed Wrex into the yawning mouth of the tunnel with my rifle up and ready.
"It stinks down here." Wrex said simply. He began to walk towards where the mineshaft had been marked on our HUDs. Behind us the explosives floated down, eerily buoyant within a wreath of pale blue static. Liara followed them with her hands outstretched.
"How are you holding up, Liara?" I cast the Asari a worried glance. Her amp was already running hot when we met up at the Mako.
"I'll be fine," she gave a wan smile. "What is it you humans say? Don't take a girl on a first date you can't match on the second? I'm not sure if I want to know what you have planned for the next one."
"Quit chirping, little birds. We have business to take care of." Wrex rumbled. He kicked at the broken appendage of a dead rachni. Liara and I exchanged smirks. The rest of or trip passed in almost complete silence as we passed out from under the battle zone and towards the mine. Taking a side tunnel, we were able to avoid the rachni. Wrex and Liara took turns hauling the explosive charges through the low tunnels.
"Hold up." I dropped low to the ground as we neared a junction. The tunnel we had been running through was rough, as if chewed out of the rock by thousands of teeth. The path we had just run into was clearly made by blasting explosives and tunneling lasers.
"This must be the mine." Wrex muttered. Behind us the bombs fell to the ground with a dull thump. Liara fell back against the rough hewn wall.
"That observer was just above the mine entrance, if we can get through these tunnels without being detected…"
"Walk through a rachni nest undetected? I have a better idea; you and the doctor make your way to the surface. Set the charges somewhere nice and load bearing on the way up."
"And you?"
"I'm going to be moving in the other direction, making as much noise as possible." Wrex smiled in the dark. "That should give you enough room to maneuver in."
I made to dismiss the plan, but the look on Wrex's face quieted me. The aged battlemaster was resolute and proud. His offer gave us the best chance of sneaking by and tracking down the observer and sealing the mine.
"You take care of yourself, Wrex." I said, taking a hold of one of the charges.
"I'm not the one who should be worried." The krogan jumped into the mineshaft and bellowed a challenge. The yell echoed throughout the complex of tunnels. He sprinted off deeper into the shaft, yelling the entire way.
"Let's go." I said shortly. I gave the bomb a mighty heave. The casing scraped across the floor, the bomb was much heavier than it looked.
"I think I see light."
"Huh?" The voice was drowned out by the rhythmic thumping of weapons' fire and the harsh scream of rachni below.
"I said, I think I see light." I looked up. Sure enough, a feeble shaft of light stabbed through the relative dark of the unlit mine. Squinting, I could just about make out the outline of a circular door at the end of an angled shaft. Unburdened by the hefty demolition charges, Liara and I moved quickly and quietly towards the exit to the surface. With all the noise Wrex was making in the deeper caverns, the attempt at stealth was mostly a wasted effort. I threw myself into cover at the top of the shaft.
"Do you see anything?" I peered into the dusky gloom. The mine entrance led out into a shallow valley and past that over the flat plains that lay between us and the surviving marines. The post was still lit by floodlights, but no signs of battle were evident. I snuck forward past the bent open blast doors. The diffused red light of the planet's night barely lit the black gravel of the hill, but a path could still be seen leading up to the peak. "This was where Forrest saw the observer."
"Why would anyone voluntarily set up a camp so close to a rachni nest?" Liara asked.
"I don't know," I said honestly. The location of the observation post had been bothering me. There had been no such base mentioned on the mission in Mass Effect. It was possible they were survivors of the Binary Helix crash, but then why would they have shot at us? "Move carefully, we don't want them to see us coming." Liara nodded and drew her pistol. Together, we crept up the flank of the hill, stopping every now and again to get a movement reading. The hill was desolate, completely empty apart from us. "What's this?" just before the crest of the hill, we came upon a hollow in the gravel. "This can't be a natural formation." I reached for the hollow. The side of the hill moved, irising outward to reveal a hole that led down into a brightly lit room. Blinking to clear my eyes in the sudden brightness, I stumbled forward into the tunnel. Before I could catch myself, I was rolling headfirst into the room. I was met with a hail of gunfire.
"Stop or I shoot!" a quavering voice called out too late. I came up into a low crouch in the open space, gun trained on the hapless man in black armour. He held an assault rifle in shaking hands. His unhelmeted face was pale beneath a head of close shaven brown hair. "What do you want?" he stammered.
"You shot at me!" I growled, trying my best to sound intimidating. My eyes swept the room. It was quite bare, with grey walls that seemed to have been cut straight from the dull rock of Nepmos. Behind the scared gunman stood a bank of computers and above that… My heart skipped a beat. Emblazoned on the wall in pale gold was a double hexagon, the symbol of Cerberus. "We have to get out of here." I muttered to myself. If this was a Cerberus post, it was most likely Cerberus that dropped the Binary Helix transport, and if Admiral Kohoku was in the area… the ground heaved underneath me. I flailed madly to regain balance. The Cerberus observer triggered a short burst over my shoulder. A gun returned fire, knocking the observer backward. The ground continued to groan under a continued pounding. I thumbed my radio on, breaking radio silence.
"Ground team to Normandy, what's going on?" the Normandy didn't answer, but the radio crackled with the voice of Chief Forrest.
"Deputy, someone's bombarding the planet from orbit!" He had to yell over the crash of explosions. "Wait a second, receiving tight-beam transmission from the Normandy…" silence fell on the channel, occasionally punctuated by the crack-boom of an orbital strike. Liara advanced on the downed observer with gun drawn.
"He's still alive." She noted, somewhat coldly.
"Please… I…" the man pleaded. His eyes had grown beady, darting from me to Liara. From the look of him, he wasn't much older than I was.
"What is Cerberus doing here?" I asked. The man's eyes widened slightly at the name.
"Please, I, I, we just, we were only observing. The boss said we had to analyze the rachni's effectiveness as a bioweapon. I never killed anyone!" his voice rose in panic.
"But you let Alliance soldiers get slaughtered right in front of you." Liara stepped forward. Her voice definitely held a hard edge now. Her normally placid face was set with cold fury.
"No! I mean, yes, but I didn't know when I signed up, you've got to believe me!" the frantic man was now inching back away from us. His arm reached for the console.
"He's flashing the disks!" I tried to aim for a spot near his hand, just to ward him off, but he lunged for a hidden button near the base of the computer bank. The screens lit up with scrolling text, quickly brought up and then erased. I kicked the wounded observer savagely in the gut and stepped to the computer. Dust was now trickling from the ceiling as the far off explosions grew ever closer. "We need to recover this!"
"Let me!" Liara ran hands over the keys so fast it made me dizzy.
"Deputy, are you there?" Forrest's voice drifted back. "Normandy says it's Kahoku, he's got the whole flotilla up there pounding on the surface. We've been ordered to extract the survivors in the Mako."
"Are we heading to you, or are you coming to us?" I asked.
"Negative, your area is too hot for extract and there's no time for you to come to us. You're going to have to find alternate escape vehicle."
