Interloper: Chapter 29
By M.
"Could you repeat that?" I said, my insides turning cold and writhing unpleasantly.
"You're going to have to find an alternate route off the planet; the mine's too hot for Normandy to extract. I'm sorry, Deputy."
"I copy, Chief. Get the team back safely." I cut the channel. I was stunned by the orders from Normandy, but the rock of another hit shook me back to my senses.
"Liara, we need to find some way off this rock." Liara looked up from the console.
"We what?" I repeated myself. Her blue features paled. "Then we'd better hurry." She yanked an optical disk from the computer bank. "What should we do about him?"
"Leave him for the rachni, or the Admiral. He'll slow us down too much."
"Noooo!" he wailed, "I can help you, we have a shuttle parked nearby! We're only supposed to use it in emergencies."
"And you can take us to it?"
"Yes, please."
"Fine, Liara, administer medigel. We need to pick up Wrex, then we'll bug out."
"No need." The gruff voice of the massive krogan croaked behind us. We spun, eyes on the mouth of the tunnel. Wrex descended amongst streams of dislodged rubble. His armour was cracked and spattered with gore. A few open wounds glistened in the bright lights. "This guy is our ticket off this rock?" I nodded. Wrex lifted the ailing Cerberus operative bodily onto his shoulder. The man groaned, but didn't put up a fight. Wrex turned and bolted up the passageway to the surface. I hurried to keep up, but the ground was shaking now more strongly and frequently than before. The four of us burst out into the ashy waste to find a maelstrom of fire descending all around us. The clouds swirled as bright lances punch through the sky, each one detonating in harsh white globes of light.
"The Admiral must be holding back." Wrex commented, "A full bombardment would wipe this place clean in seconds."
"Liddle, look!" Liara was pointing back towards where we had left the tenth. It took a second for my eyes to pick out just what she was pointing at. In the sky above the Marine's compound, the needle shape of the Normandy hovered, buffeted by the explosion of nearby impacts. The bright light of the Mako's jump jets ascended into the frigate's belly and was swallowed as the ship darted upwards. The ground began to convulse almost nonstop as the bombardment swept closer.
"Where's this shuttle!" I demanded to the Cerberus man. My voice must have been lost in the gale, because the man merely squinted at me. "Where is it!" I yelled, louder. His response didn't make it back, but he lifted an arm weakly. I followed the line of his finger. There in the dirt, some twenty feet away, a flicker of motion caught my eye. A large square of the ground was moving, as if it wasn't ground at all. Wrex must have seen it too, because he fired his shotgun at the patch. The round tore away a tarp, revealing the escape shuttle nestled into a hollow in the rock.
Xxx
"Strap him down." I ordered as the shuttle's door shut. The interior of the shuttle was spacious, and even comfortable with the addition of leather seats in the cockpit. I belted myself in and kicked off what I hoped was an autostart. The shuttle kindly followed my directions, humming as it brought itself up to power.
"Do you know how to fly this thing?" Liara belted herself in beside me.
"I've flown a Mako in zero-g, does that count?" I replied ruefully. I brought up the flight controls with a touch. The lay out was fairly intuitive. "Here goes nothing." I jammed the throttle forward. The shuttle rocketed forward, scraping across gravel as it did. I gritted my teeth as the scraping drowned out the blasts. I pulled back and into the sky. The shuttle blasted upwards at my touch. Outside the lances of Kohoku's fleet were falling faster and harder. I set us on a weaving pattern to try and avoid being hit.
"They don't seem to be shooting at us." Liara peered out of the forward screen. She was right, will the blows fell thick around us, the pattern seemed more or less random.
"The shuttle has rudimentary stealthing." The operative said. "That and the bombardment will mask us from sensors until we leave the atmosphere."
"Lucky for us, we won't have to leave the atmosphere." I replied. A familiar shape yawned up out of the fiery swirl of ash. The ship lined itself up to us expertly, hooking us with exterior clamps. The shuttle shuddered as we suddenly accelerated backwards and up away from the planet. Even looking backwards the light show was blinding. The fleet above had apparently moved up to their heavy guns, because each blast lit the entire cabin through the polarized screen and issued forth a rumbling roar that shook the hull.
"Quite beautiful, isn't it?" Liara asked, half mesmerized.
"Yes," I answered, "and terrible."
Xxx
The debriefing was scheduled for the next day. The orders came through almost immediately after breaking the atmosphere, before we even crossed the boarding tube into the Normandy. The shuttle was towed behind us as we left the Phantom Fleet to its mission. The rest of the team and the rescued marines were glad to see us, if a little shaken. The Cerberus operative had started blathering on the way up, and was dragged none too gently to the brig.
"Come in." The Commander's voice sounded from the other side of the door. I straightened the unofficial uniform of the Spectre's Deputy, an Alliance Marine uniform with the markings filed off and replaced with Citadel Council pins. The doors swished open. "Please sit down." The Commander motioned towards a seat set to the side of her desk. "Ease up a little deputy. This is a debriefing, not a court martial." I sat down and looked around the room before returning my attention to the Commander. "I read your report," Shepard shuffled a data pad to the fore of her desk. "It reads more like prose fiction than a people of technical writing but this isn't a review of your writing. Overall, I think you did well, given the circumstances. Mission objectives achieved, no casualties, quite impressive. There was however, one thing…" Something hard and metal clinked on the desktop. It was the Cerberus emblem, still partially attached to a scrap of uniform. "Have you ever seen this before?"
"It was all over the walls down on the planet. At the observation post we found."
"That all you know?"
"No." I responded guardedly. "I know it belongs to whoever unleashed the rachni all over everything. That's in my report though." I studied the Commander's face. The impenetrable mask of her "business face" was in full effect.
"So what's Cerberus?" the woman asked, rapidly shifting gears. The question tripped me up. It must have shown, because the Commander leaned forward, features drawn. "Your helmet mike picked up the word, I just thought it was interesting that the friend you brought back with you admitted to being part of an organization of the very same name." she leaned back. "What's the matter, not feeling very talkative today?"
"Commander…. I…"
"You know, Captain Anderson told me he couldn't find you in the Eden Prime records, even after a 98% restoration was run. I convinced him not to arrest you on the spot because I thought you'd be an asset and because I thought you could be trusted. But you're not some simple farmer, are you?"
"No Commander."
"Now the question is, what are you? You're not a militiaman, you're not a farmer, nor are you a scientist, and I find it hard to believe you're an Alliance black ops operative. From your team's reports, this post was as much surprise to you as it was to them, and I doubt this Cerberus would be willing to take potshot's at one of their own. So what's your story? And I want the truth."
"They picked me up out of school," my mouth began moving of its own accord before I could stop it. "They called it an internship in science. But once I saw what they were doing, and what they were all about, I stowed away on a ship and escaped to Eden Prime. That's why I'm not in the records there."
"That's more or less what I thought." Shepard said after a long silence. "The boy in the brig said much the same thing, although he seems never to have suffered from the same attack of conscience. Sounds like you got out just in time, this Cerberus is bad news."
As the Commander kept talking, I felt my body loosen from the paralysis that had gripped it from the moment Shepard had mentioned Cerberus. Every word seemed to bring me further from being thrown in the brig alongside the other guy. I found myself telling lies more easily once the first had apparently been swallowed, although the whole affair kept me on edge. I tried to reveal as much about the organization as I could without letting slip some future knowledge, or something impossible for a new recruit to know. I mentioned being trained on a moving space station. Shepard listened intently. The debriefing was draining, and at the end, I left shaken. Kaidan stood silently at the door as I passed, his face stony. The rest of the crew seemed none the wiser, clapping me on the back for a successful mission. I wandered dazedly past them.
Author's Note:
Interloper is back! I apologize for the long delay. I'd like to thank all of you who have patiently waited. Now that I'm back on the writing track, hopefully these can start coming out on a regular basis again. Special thanks to user Dr34dnoise ,whose dedication to reviewing each and every chapter is what inspired me to take up the pen once more. See you next week.
-Liddle Out
