The batarian and the geth stared at each other across the cargo bay, as Garrus gave a last look to the armor that he'd spent the last day and a half fixing. It was ugly as sin; cobbled together from the non-broken and non-fungus-infested parts of three different armor suits, nothing lined up perfectly, the color changed from one plate to another, and it probably weighed five kilos more than it should have. But it was finished, and it would keep a certain Avatar alive. That was something.
"A question, machine," Balak said, as the elevator dinged behind Garrus, and a glance over his shoulder confirmed that it was Shepard finally coming 'round. "What would you call... 'alive'?"
Shepard stopped where she stood in her approach, as though paralyzed by a shocking philosophical debate in the making. Adahn turned to Balak, its eye irising in slightly. "Alive. Meeting the criterion for aerobic or anerobic respiration."
"Sentient, then," Balak pressed.
"Able to interact with one's environment; possessing sensory organs and a systematic ability to interpret stimulus," Adahn defined once more.
"Soulless answers. What about 'sapient'?" Balak asked.
"What's... going on?" Shepard asked.
"I'm not sure. I think that Archangel and Adahn are discussing teleology."
"...there is no proper answer for this question. Several definitions vie for 'proper use'. Able to discern oneself as separate from the environment. Capable of metacognition. Ability to learn in the abstract. The ability to enter emotional states divorced from direct stimulus."
"So you're saying that sapient is, as sapient does," Balak said.
"...yes."
"Does that make you alive?" Balak asked.
"No. We do not perform respiration."
"Sophistry," Balak dismissed with a wave of his hand. Adahn's eye-petals fluttered a bit, as though confused.
"...No. We are synthetic. Organics are 'alive'."
"Really?" Balak asked.
"So, you remember how you consigned me down here to fix your armor? Well, I've got good news and bad news," Garrus cut in during a point where the two began hashing each other on points of debate that the turian honestly didn't have a lot of grounding in. His words were just enough to turn the befuddled Shepard to him, rather than them.
"Bad news first."
"Would make no sense without the good. The good news is, I've got a suit of armor working for you," he said. "The bad news is, it looks like that."
"How terrible. It clashes with my hair," Shepard said.
"On the plus side, I did get the helmet thing working," Garrus offered.
"A distinction without difference," Balak said loudly, cutting Adahn off. "Imagine a machine, if you would. A machine which has been programmed in every conceivable way to react to the world around it as though it were, by your definition, alive. Would that be alive?"
"No. It is synthetic. It was created to a purpose. The purpose is emulating 'life'. Emulation is not being," Adahn said, not understanding it was being baited.
"Really? Then what is a man, but a machine designed by natural selection, the current pinnacle of what could survive its environment before. Every decision that they make is one based on factors that surround them, whether they admit it or not," Balak said. Garrus was a bit shocked at that. He'd not even known that Balak could talk this long. "Is there any meaningful difference between a machine that is perfectly programmed to act as a man, and a man?"
"Yes. The man is organic. The machine is synthetic."
"A distinction without a difference!" Balak repeated. "It doesn't matter what flows through your veins, or what hand created you. If there was no difference between organic and synthetic, no difference between blood and steel; Are. You. Alive?"
Adahn looked down, as though contemplating its own nonexistent navel. Then, looked up at Balak once more. "We do not know."
"Alright, break it up," Shepard said, clapping loudly to pull the attentions of both to her. "There will be no epistemological beat-downs aboard my ship, is that clear?"
"...teleology," Garrus corrected, but she only gave him a look before turning to the others. Balak, though, fell silent. There was a turn to his lips as he strode back into the machine shop that was his domain.
"Whichever," Shepard said, when the door closed. "Alright. Barriers working on this thing?" she asked.
"Tested them with the Mantis. They'll take one shot before rupturing. That makes them pretty tough."
"High praise," she said. She thumbed her ear. "Joker? Set us a course to Omega; I think it's time that the Normandy got a krogan on board."
"I knew there was something wrong with the feng-shui of this ship. I narrowed it down to the two AI's that are running around, and the lack of a krogan. Nice to know that I was right both ways," Joker said, before there was a chirp on the intercom as he went to his task.
"Hey!" Shepard shouted to the geth. "Get your gun ready. We're going to need it on Omega," there was a long pause. "Adahn! Wake up!"
The geth turned toward her, eye widening. "We were distracted by a Consensus update. Heretic activity is increased in Ma'at and Dholen."
"You get updated here?"
"Geth signals pass unremarked through normal communication channels," Adahn said. "Transmitting runtimes, however, requires an amount of bandwidth that most carriers would consider 'suspicious'."
"Dholen?" Garrus said, his attention instantly peaking. "Adahn, is the activity in that star system on the planet Haestrom?"
"Yes," Adahn said. "Heretic forces are engaged in a seek-and-destroy action against scattered creator task-group."
"That's not good," Shepard said. She was somewhat shocked, though, when Garrus grabbed her shoulders and abruptly turned her toward him.
"Shepard, that's where Tali is!" he shouted.
"What?" Shepard asked.
"Tali! She was going to Haestrom on some scientific mission!" Garrus said, trying to make it very simple for her.
"The geth are after her," Shepard said. Garrus nodded very vigorously. She shrugged one hand off of a shoulder and brought her finger to hear ear once more. "Joker! Change of plans; we're going to the Far Rim."
"What? Omega too crowded?" Joker asked.
"We've got a quarian in need of evacuation," Shepard said. There was a moment of silence on the line.
"...Tali's in trouble?" he asked. There was a tiny lurch that even Garrus could feel, as the ship went from 'about to hit the Mass Relay' to dead stop in a second. "Alright. New course plotted. We'll be there in ten hours."
"Actually, I can have us in orbit of planet Haestrom in two hours," EDI's voice helpfully intruded.
"By scraping our belly along the Spirit Roads!" Joker pointed out.
"Do it," Shepard ordered.
"By your command," EDI said, and then, the ship was moving once more. Shepard pounded the ship intercom that was built into the wall.
"Lawson; I need you in the cargo-bay. I need somebody good at crushing AI opponents," Shepard said. She ground her teeth. "Figures. Had to do it before Jack got back."
"I'm going too," Garrus said, moving to his stack of arms and armor.
"Obviously. Why?"
"Armored mechanized opponents, long sight lines, and a high powered rifle. What more do you need?" Garrus asked.
"Point taken," Shepard admitted. Garrus breathed exactly one sigh of relief, before the tension returned. It felt tighter than it'd been at any point since the ambush, the siege, and Sidonis.
This time, it was going to end better. Nothing in this galaxy would prevent that.
Or else.
Chapter 9
Scorched Earth
As far as methods of returning to consciousness go, a kick in the nuts was one of the more unpleasant ones.
Vega's voice had a remarkable castralto tone to it as his eyes focused and the words "What the hell?" squeaked out of them. His hands were instantly cupping his wounded buddy, and he rolled onto his side. That just was not cool.
"By the Ancestors, that actually worked!" bean's voice came from above him.
"Well, I was running out of options," Jimo said, as though half-embarrassed.
"You kicked me in the nuts!" Vega shouted up at her.
"Given the choices, that was one of the better ones," the asari said. "You've been flat on your back for more than a week!
"What?" he asked.
"She's telling the truth, Sarge," the FNG said, sitting on a rock. It was about this point that Vega realized he had no idea where he was. The ebbing pain of his very-favorite-body-part allowed him attention enough to see that not only was the Tomkah nowhere in sight, but the terrain was far and away different from the forests he'd been plowing through a few seconds ago. Or as truth would have it, a few days ago. "After you crashed the Tomkah..."
"I crashed the Tomkah?"
"Drove it off a cliff, into a gulley. We couldn't drive it out," Zek said with a shrug.
"We had to carry you out of the gully. Be thankful biotics are easier to handle than muscle, otherwise I would have just left you," Anette said. Vega sat up and gave her the winning smile that either got him fawned over or slapped for.
"Ah, we all know you did it 'cause you're in love with me," he said. The glare she shot him could have frozen a blue-giant star. Ignoring it, he turned to the FNG. He looked different from when Vega crashed; namely, the scar had started to scab and pull together, leaving about a third of his face a livid, branded red. "Did those bastards get away?"
"No," Anette said. "They've been looking for us for the last few days, but they think we're somewhere north of here."
"Took some tricky maneuvers to get them off of our tail," Fung said. Vega decided that enough was enough. Time to name this guy.
"I take it that was your idea, Zuk."
"Zek," Zek said.
"Not you. Him. Zuk. You know. Like Zuko. That Fire Lord way back when? Branded on one side by his father... That guy?" Vega asked. All three stared at him with confusion and silence, until Zek broke the silence with an involuntary and quiet cough. "You guys are all ignorant."
"Says the man who didn't know that ryncol causes vodka to spontaneously combust," Fung said.
"Hey! That's chemistry! I ain't inta' chemistry," he began.
"Humans, shut the hell up," Anette cut them both off. Both turned to her. "Good. The dig-site is about four kilometers that way," she cast a thumb over her shoulder. Zek gave a glance to her, then pointed a slightly different direction. Vega had his money on the bean. "If nothing else, they'll have something I can turn into a FTLC ansible, or something."
"Or we could steal their ship and leave 'em to rot," Vega chimed in.
"Thaaaat isn't very likely," Zek pointed out.
"No reason we have to set our sights low," Vega pointed out. He shifted himself a bit, the last twinges of pain coming when something bumped something else the wrong way, and slowly got to his feet. His armor had been removed and wrapped up, probably for ease of transportation. He started to pull it on, piece by piece. "How many of those meat-things do you figure they'll have?"
"We won't know until we have some reconnaissance-by-force," the kid said.
"I like your attitude," Vega said. "You two could learn from him."
"No thanks. I like having both sides of my face intact," Anette said. Ouch.
"Well, you two stay here, we'll..."
"Get slaughtered if you go in there alone," Anette said. "The last time you faced them on their terms, you and Fung were the only ones to survive, and he survived because he was a few dozen kilometers away at the time. Add to that, neither of you knows the first thing about engineering or salvage..."
"Not my idea, I swear," Zek said when Vega turned to him.
"I can believe that," Vega said. "I can't bring civilians into a firefight."
"There's no civilians left on Fehl Prime," Anette said.
She had a point, there.
"Fine. Gear up and move out," Vega said. Gods damn it, why did this all have to land on his shoulders? Oh, right. Because he was the highest rank left.
Leadership sucked.
They moved out, grim as a death march. Fung seemed oddly emotionless, even with his burned face he seemed locked into a pall of determined scowling. Zek was Zek, which was to say nervous and impossible to discern of face. Anette... she looked almost as focused as Fung, but for one difference; she was sweating, a lot, even with the cold of the coming night. The night would keep coming, though, for another day or so, while the 'daily' thunderstorms raged overhead.
Vega thought she was more nervous than she was admitting.
Vega was right, for the wrong reasons.
"We're in orbit over Haestrom, Commander," Joker's voice came through the comms, his tones serious in the way that they only where when he understood exactly how grave things were. "Ready for shuttle launch in forty seconds."
"About time," Shepard said, shifting in her seat in the shuttle. She'd sat there most of that two hours, impatient as ever, but instead of an eagerness driving her forward, it was nervousness. Garrus looked every bit as concerned; then again, anybody who had shared a ship with Tali'Zorah nar Rayya would have been much the same. "Can we shave that down?"
"Not without... Huh. We've got a message coming in. From Weaver. Should I patch it through?"
"Weaver?" Shepard said. She shot a glance to Lawson, who shared the shuttle with them. She leaned back.
"I'm not sure what he could be calling about right now," Lawson said. "I'm not aware of any..."
"Ignore it," Shepard cut Lawson off, talking to the pilot. "We've got a time-crunch that I don't feel like screwing up."
"Cutting off our benefactors mid conversation? Just like old times," Joker said.
"You don't say," Shepard said. There was a slight lurch, as the shuttle pulled free of the Normandy's bay and began its brick-like descent into the blazingly hot air of the former quarian colony.
"We're not going to be able to linger down here," the shuttle's pilot said over his shoulder as he descended. "Even with our heat-vents at maximum, we'll overheat in a matter of minutes."
"Then drop us off. We'll extract the quarians," Shepard said.
"Aye, ma'am."
"Shepard," EDI's voice popped in. "The intense solar activity will cause your kinetic barriers to overheat. I recommend you stay out of direct sunlight."
"Thanks for stating the obvious," Garrus said.
"Also, your weapons will be less effective; expect a twenty-percent decrease in the amount of shots per heat-sink."
"Anything else?" Shepard asked.
"Yes. Long range-scanners will have difficulty cutting through the solar radiation, and the interference caused will prevent any but tight-beam communications between parties. In essence, the geth will not see you coming."
"That's actually helpful," Shepard said.
"The heretics will adapt quickly," Adahn pointed out. "They likely have countermeasures in place to prevent the worst of the effects of radiation bombardment."
"Noted," Shepard said. She then threw open the door. "Everybody out."
She herself was the first one through the door, twisting the air into a spongy cushion to slow her landing. Probably for the best, since this armor wasn't exactly the toughest-seeming. Every time she raised her left arm, she swore she could hear something rattling. The others landed, respectively, on jets of firebent flames, on shock-absorbant synthetic myomers, and painfully with a grunt for each of Garrus, Adahn, and Lawson.
"Adahn, do you detect any geth near us."
"Negative," Adahn said. "However, their could be Hunter-class platforms in the vicinity. There are few methods to detect them in cloaked form. The methods are not reliable."
"This just keeps getting better," Shepard said. "Come on, move out."
The shuttle was already lifting off and moving away when Shepard put Mattock to cheek, and began her advance. It didn't help that it was more than 320K in the shade, and it was clear by the way the concrete was colored that it was far, far hotter where the sun actually landed. She came up short at the edge of that searing line, and gave a glance back to the squad behind her.
"Exposure to direct sunlight is not advisable," Adahn reminded.
"At least I'm wearing white," Lawson said evenly.
"Can we just get into somewhere a little less deadly?" Garrus asked.
"You heard the turian; haul ass 'till the burning stops," Shepard said. With a deep breath of very hot air, she began to storm forward, boots crunching on the degrading concrete as she crossed the gap – and descended the ramp that consisted it – until she staggered to a halt on the far side, sweat pouring off of her already. Garrus wasn't exactly correct in his assertions; this armor was not hermetically sealed.
The others were only a few steps behind her, and looked somewhat cooked when they reached Shepard's side. Adahn, for obvious reasons, didn't seem as impacted. It turned toward her, eye-petals opening slightly. "Shepard Commander; we have a question."
"Is this really the time?" Shepard asked.
"You disregarded the communication of Coordinator Weaver. This will serve to alienate potential allies," Adahn said.
"Weaver's a big boy. He can handle somebody ignoring his calls once and a while," Shepard said.
"However, if..."
"Shut up a second," Shepard said. "Do you hear that, Garrus?"
"Yeah. It sounds... like there's a quarian ahead..."
She motioned the others to follow her with a single gesture, and advanced, rifle first. It wasn't long before she saw the first geth, riddled with holes. As she moved toward where that distorted voice was originating, there were more. Several figures much like Adahn. One which was essentially just a pair of torn legs with a detonated body – a pyro-unit, most likely – but there was no noise, and no flames. Whatever happened here, happened a while ago. "Friendly!" Shepard shouted, presuming that the quarian's translator would be able to parse English. Silence answered her. Or rather, distorted voice that didn't respond.
She moved up to a scorched bulkhead, and slapped the bright blue, triangular button which the quarians used three centuries ago instead of floating haptics. The door slid open with barely a whisk, and showed a dead quarian man, lying in a pool of purple blood, his back slid up against a back wall. Now that there wasn't a bulkhead between her and the voice, she could actually understand it.
"Anyone who gets this, find Tali'Zorah vas Neema. She should be in the depths of the colony with the rest of the Migrant Fleet Marines. She should have the data Admiral Xen was so desperate to have. Since I'm probably dead if you're hearing this, I only pray I bought them enough time. Bid the Ancestors welcome Gau'Dama vas Tonbay home. Keelah se'lai."
The recording started to loop on itself, but there was no immediate evidence of what killed him. That didn't sit well.
"Likelihood of Hunter units is significantly increased," Adahn confirmed her grim suspicion. She didn't say a word, instead looking over to a complicated panel system that the quarian had died against.
"Can you open this bulkhead?" Shepard said. Then, she paused, sighed, and shook her head. "What am I thinking?"
She walked to the wall, slammed her fist forward, and created her own doorway. She shook her head, kicking herself inwardly for forgetting even for a moment that she was an earthbender.
It was fortunate she made her own way. The dust that was thrown from the degraded concrete landed on something that wasn't visible to the naked eye. Shepard went into a full-body flinch, but luckily, her reflexes ensured that doing so brought her Mattock to her eye, and shots were smashing into the Hunter within a half-second. The machine recoiled backward, possibly stunned to have been attacked from that direction, or otherwise just unable to contend with the comparatively intense stopping power of the old-made-new rifle. The last shot tore its gun-arm off, and a plasma shotgun skittered across the concrete.
"Lucky we hadn't gone through the door. He'd have gotten the drop on us," Shepard said.
"Alert; Heretic dropship incoming!" Adahn said.
"This just keeps getting better," Shepard muttered, as the ship dipped low, and a number of objects dropped out of its belly. One hadn't even reached the ground when the Mantis in the hands of an unusually humorless turian blew it in half. "Move up! Find yourself some concrete!"
The gunfire was already zipping toward them when Shepard made good personally, sliding to a halt with her back to a block that had likely laid untouched, a rusted-away pallet-jack sitting next to it, since the Geth Uprising. She fired, but the rifle immediately started beeping at her. Not even a dozen shots to a heat-sink? EDI was right. This place was hot.
"How many?"
"Effectively infinite," Adahn answered, followed by a much louder thud of its rifle punching straight through the hexagonal kinetic barrier a Destroyer had put up, and causing the guts of the machine to spray back as though blood and viscera. "Destroyed platforms can be replaced from a transport vessel in orbit. We must leave this area so they are unable to track us. Also, terrestrial sonar is a standard feature in modern platforms; manipulating terrain is not advisable."
"You heard the... thing," Shepard said, almost calling him 'man' for some reason. "We've got to cut through!"
"Might be a problem," Garrus said.
"Why?"
"You might not have noticed, but I do carry a sniper rifle," he said, motioning to the thick battle-line of geth ahead of them. Any getting past them would involve, at some point, essentially a knife fight.
"Then we'll have to take up the slack," Shepard said. She leaned out, and cast her hand in a circle, before launching out with a bolt of lightning which knocked a second Destroyer on its ass. Then, she was charging forward, into a hail of gunfire. She'd made it about twelve steps when the barriers cracked and dropped, and a second shot hit her in the chest. This time, though, the plate deflected rather than absorb it, and she was twisted off of her path and made a bee-line tot he ground. She had to roll aside into the protection of a concrete sewage pipe to get out of the line of fire. This was hairy and a half.
After a few seconds, which she gave running a finger along the chestplate – there was a gouge in it, but not a hole, thankfully – she leaned around the pipe. Still a bunch of geth. Outnumbered. But at least nowadays their shields weren't borderline unassailable. That had made the Saren-hunt downright aggravating. There was a fresh whoosh, as the dropship passed again, and more machines dropped out of it. Adahn was right. Staying here was going to be a death-sentence.
"Adahn!" Shepard shouted.
"Shepard Commander?"
"What's directly under us?" she shouted.
"Incomplete sewer-system. Its dimensions are insufficient for your needs."
"Are they sufficient for yours?"
"No."
"Damn. So much for that idea," she muttered to herself. Oh, for the days when you could build a cottage in a city's sewer. She looked out again, and her eyes widened slightly when a different white form had closed distance with the geth. Then, with a slash of her hand, a pike of ice launched down from where Miranda had somehow snuck close, and impaled two of the geth together where they had been pinning Shepard and the others down. Clear enough sign to haul ass.
She rolled out and started running, even as the barriers chirped back to full integrity. Even as she charged, firing rounds as quickly as the Mattock would let her – overheating problems included – Adahn was keeping up. Then, he was surpassing her. He bounded into the midst of the geth ahead, and then, he started to flow.
It wasn't like water through a stream. Rather, he seemed to be the breeze slipping between the leaves of a tree. The heretics turned their attention from the approaching human and turian, and toward the geth who was amidst them. Their inattention made them fodder for Miranda's waterbending attacks; if there was one thing water was good for, it was bypassing shields. Adahn, though, continued to flow. Every now and then, its movements – which almost seemed to be some kind of dance – ended with the bass thud of his rifle going off, and when it did, a heretic was blown away. The heretics never stopped firing. They seldom if ever hit.
The beep-beep-beep of her Mattock finally running completely out of ammo was not music to Shepard's ears. But it had carried her a lot closer. So she started a dance of her own. Unlike Adahn's, this was no ballad of looping steps and cunning evasions. Not surprising, considering she carried forty kilos of M-920 Cain and ammunition for upon her back. Hers was the thuggish dance that ended with every twist, a lightning bolt. In its way, it was much as Shepard always danced; she had a lot of fun, and everybody around her went blind and ran away in terror. A distant part of her wondered why it wasn't more tiring to fling lightning with the reckless abandon that she was. She remembered when she first learned how to do lightning – hell, when she was fighting on Therum, for that matter! – that four bolts in a row was like getting hit over the head with a rubber mallet. Now?
She stopped counting at twenty.
She moved closer, her dance of lightning joining the grace of the orthodox geth, amidst the clumsy and inarticulate steps of the heretics. Cracks of Mantis shots still zipped past her as she moved, striking down a geth as the opportunities arose, but not often. From time to time, ice that was being held despite being above water's boiling point lashed out, sweeping a geth down into a pit, or else severing a limb. The water then pulled into a delicate arch, which Lawson outright sprinted over, crossing the distance in naked sunlight, atop boiling-frozen water, until she reached the far side of the courtyard first. Then, Shepard reached Adahn. Then, the two of them pushed deeper.
'Does this unit have a soul?'
Looking at the way Adahn moved, compared to the heretics, she had to wonder.
The dance of death was brought to a sudden halt by a chunk of ice slamming into an otherwise unremarkable piece of air, which started to spark. Then, the icicle tipped and dropped, as a Hunter slowly entered the visible spectrum, already dead. Garrus ran past, turning to fire a parting shot at something Shepard did not see. She, though, came to a halt when the path took a hard right. She reached behind her, her fists clenching against hot air, but as she did, she demanded centuries-old concrete and metal obey her. A great shift, and a huge portion of the building behind her ground toward her, dropping a deeper darkness over her. The geth in the sunlight, already starting to crackle and overheat, slapped new heatsinks into their weapons. They would be firing in half a second or less.
A final shift of her arms, and she slammed them down. When she did, the great mass of the colonial construct shifted and slid, crashing down in a great wall of debris and detritus. With a smirk on her face and a fresh sink in her Mattock, she turned to the others.
"There. That should buy us some t–" Shepard began.
She was cut off when Adahn kicked Lawson' in the stomach. The human dropped to her knees from the impact, and a blast of plasma bolts which would have gone straight into the back of her head flew harmlessly over. All hands and rifles began to blast, filling the naked air with bullets, until Shepard found the one which had tried to kill one of her squad. She advanced, firing on the Hunter that found its way to the wrong side of their line. High-powered shots blew away circuits and burst fluid lines, before the last shattered the 'eye' and neck, all the way to the shoulders. The geth let out a final grinding noise, then collapsed.
"...As I was saying, that should buy us some time," Shepard repeated.
"Did you have to kick me?" Lawson asked, rubbing her armored belly as she got to her feet.
"We judged it the surest way to cause you to vacate the path of fire without compromising possible counterattack."
"A warning would have worked."
"Not with the amount of time you had," Adahn answered.
"Adahn, will they be able to move that?" Shepard cast her thumb over her shoulder as she moved past, in the sweltering darkness of the colony's interior.
"No. That would require enriched demolition charges, which are not standard equipment for heretic search-and-destroy squads; requisitioning them will require a return to the mother-ship, followed by a return to orbit. Estimated time of this maneuver stands at one hour, thirty minutes."
"And we'll be long gone by then," Shepard said.
"We hope," Lawson said.
Shepard didn't like to have to agree with that statement, but things were as they were. She'd turned a third corner in the increasingly maze-like structure by the time she started hearing quarian voices. And by that, she meant electronically distorted voices.
"Break-break-break; Op1 do you hear me?" a voice called out. "Damn it! I told you we should have sent backup for the Spooks!"
Shepard leaned around a corner, and saw a pair of quarians. One of them was lying on her chest, a cauterized hole in her back. The other was missing an arm, which lay several meters away, and he was still in his clutching of the stump. The blood was already dry. Must have been the heat. Between them, though, lay a communicator clip, the likes of which was used by quarian marines to send tight-band that couldn't be intercepted. Not that Shepard knew that; she just knew that somebody was talking out of the thing on the ground. She stooped, and picked it up.
"Op1, this is Squad Leader Reegar; another dropship is headed toward Op2. Where are you people?"
"They didn't make it," Shepard answered.
"Who is this?" Reegar immediately asked. Then, he continued before she had a chance. "Nevermind. You're talking, which means you're a lot more friendly than most of our 'buddies' out there. What happened to Op1?"
"I've found some dead quarians. It looks like they'd been ambushed," Shepard said.
"Damn it!" Reegar said. "Those Hunters are tearing us apart."
"I'm here to bring anybody I can off of Haestrom," Shepard said.
"Then you're our Guardian Angel, if you don't mind me borrowing a batarian saying. Name?"
"Shepard."
"...The Shepard who's a Spectre? The one Tali served with on the Normandy?" Reegar asked, tones suddenly suspicious, and understandably so. "Maybe the Ancestors aren't pissing on us after all. Patch into frequency Theta 617; it should get you contact with the rest of OpPrime."
"What were you doing here?" Shepard asked, as she fiddled with her Omni. She was starting to hate the covered colony almost as much as the baking sun – out there, at least, it seemed logical that you were roasting. In here, she might as well be standing in a concrete oven.
"Stealth mission. We got pings off of a weird signal. We found it, but the geth found us. Can't reach our ship, can't transmit out. Haven't eaten in a week. Which suits me, I've been looking to lose a kilo or two..."
"What about Tali?" Garrus asked, cutting into the feed.
"Tali'Zorah's in a safe spot. Well, safer. Safe-ish. But if you're going to get us out of here, we'll need to pull in Op2. I'm not going to lose my entire squad on one of our dead colonies!"
Shepard nodded, then turned, confused at Adahn. The geth had turned the quarian woman over, and gently removed her faceplate, setting it under the hands it crossed onto her chest. He was doing much the same to the man. "What are you doing?"
"Taking pot-shots with a rocket launcher," Reegar anwered Shepard's question. "Pity I can't eat rockets; I've got no shortage of them."
"It seemed... appropriate," Adahn said by way of answer. Shepard shook her head.
"Right. Who am I looking for?"
"Just follow the gunshots," Reegar told her, and with a crackle, he turned off his line.
The sight through the scope wasn't what Vega had expected. Well, yeah, he did see that light-frigate thing of theirs, sitting on the ground like a dirty turd covered in spiky metal, but the stark thing was that the 'town' of Wajue was almost half gone; vast stretches of land which had been stark hills had been outright removed. The researcher's facility was likewise absent, but their sleeping barracks, several other minor buildings, and even the bar were all still intact.
"That's a lot of open ground," Vega said, handing the sniper-rifle he used just about never to Anette, who had accompanied him to this little jaunt. He didn't blame her. There wasn't much point in holding back, not with him having... yeah, he still didn't want to think about that. That the bug-thing had taken his bending away from him. He'd heard about Amon back in his school days – he hadn't paid much attention then, but come on, this was Amon – but he had a sinking sensation in his gut that told him that whatever he did... it wasn't what the bug-thing had done. Honestly, he needed what help he could get. "They're obviously digging for something. Something Prothean, maybe."
"They've opened up more than two square kilometers. I didn't even know there was a site all the way over there," Anette said. He gave her a glance as she handed the rifle to Fung next, who put it to his good eye. She was sweating like crazy. And it wasn't even particularly warm.
"You know that place well?" Zek asked.
"Not really. That was Treeya's turf," Anette said. "We each stayed out of each other's business."
"Treeya? She that Prothean-hunter that popped into Fehl all those times?" Vega asked. Anette nodded. "What d'you figure happened to her?"
"If she's lucky, she ran for it an' hid," Anette said. "If she's really lucky, she's dead. And if she isn't lucky at all... I don't want to think about it. You saw what they did to the colonists."
"We don't know those things were the colonists."
"Yes. Yes we do," Zek said.
"Guys," Fung said. "I've got a bug."
"Where?"
Fung inched back from where he was on his belly – as were they all – on the crest. "Intercept. I don't know if he saw us, but he's coming this way."
"Shit!" Vega said. He patted the shotgun at his back. He'd love to have had his Revenant, but obviously there was only so much good fortune to go around. He'd make due. "We need to set a trap, and fast; these things fight like the damned Avatar!"
"I'd have to see that to believe it," Zek said distantly. What he meant by that, Vega couldn't say.
"How are we going to do this?" Fung asked.
"Well, we've got a pair of biotics – don't think I didn't see you throw down, bean. I might be hurt, but I ain't blind – a guy with a big gun, and somebody who's not completely shit with a sniper-rifle," Vega said. He gave a look around, before deciding on the thick, shadowed brush that looked almost black with the long-twilight falling upon it. "You stay up here. Once we start whacking it, you take whatever shot you can get."
"Wait, whacking?" Zek asked.
"Warps and Kicks, in that order," Anette said. She hauled on her shirt-collar as she did. "Where are we going to stand?"
"I'm guessing at three and nine," Vega pointed to a pair of relatively covered spots that would, if nothing else, give them something to hide behind between flinging blue crap around. "I'll be straight up at twelve. Keep 'im off balance, and I'll put some buckshot up his ass."
"Should..."
"Just do it, Zek," Anette said, with more edge to her voice than usual. Stress must really be getting to her. There wasn't much else said, as they split apart, heading to their respective places. Strategy was a sore point for Vega, but when it came to tactics, he had a gold star. It'd almost be like having Zorp and Wall back.
Only Zorp was a biotic quarian, and Wall was an asari, now.
He'd slid behind the rocks which piled at the very bottom of the depression between hills, his shotgun unfolding in his hands. The Eviscerator wasn't the roughest shotgun around – that fell plainly into the wheel-house of the Claidheamh Mor, which even Vega had a hard time shouldering – but it had one thing that most shotguns didn't have; a field-adjustable choke. Right now, slaughter was best served by something with a bit of reach. The gun offered a few more clicks and clacks as the structure of the barrel shifted minutely, the scram-rails giving the potential blast a near rifle-like accuracy... out to about a hundred meters, anyway. Then, Vega waited.
The sound of the thing approaching wasn't what he expected. He'd thought that it'd come with the droning of wings, since it was probably like all those bug-bastard things that the Bellows had stored, borne, and released. But there were no wings here. Just the sound of a wind. Vega leaned out a bit, just using the edge of his eye to view the thing.
Brown and chitinous, it drifted over the hill on a cushion of wind, one leg folded up in a mockery of an airbender atop his air-scooter. Of course, it wasn't really a mockery when it operated just as well. The leg swung down, and the thing popped off of the ball of air, landing with a single step to kill its momentum. Then, it began to look around.
"What are you searching for?" Vega whispered, so low that he could barely hear it. When the bug stopped, so too had the wind, leaving all in silence. Then, a clicking grumble sound from the freak in the valley, surrounded by soldiers. Well, two soldiers, an asari, and a biotic quarian. He had to make do. It opened a hand, which opened out a golden construct of hard-light, one which formed into a spike. The bug leaned well back, then hurled the hard light thing straight down, with such force that it caused earth and stone to spray upward in a sort of rocky fountain, which all 'miraculously' missed the thing standing right next to it. When the spraying of stone into the air ceased, the cracks had extended – unsettlingly enough, one toward each of the people flanking the bug – almost two meters.
It opened its hand again, and this time, a hexagon of golden-amber light formed. There was something on it, like script or code, but Vega was way to far away to see what it was. Another clicking grumble. It held its hand over the hole, and twisted. The earth, broken as it was, lurched and followed his wringing motion, curling itself closed in a spiral of broken grass and soil. It looked first to the west, then to the east. Then, straight down.
Any time now, Anette...
The first assault didn't come from Jimo, as he'd so aptly called her; it came from Zek. The bolt of pulsating blue light launched from the stand of stones that had been haphazardly stacked there by eons of natural forces. The bug thing didn't try to dodge. It simply held out a hand toward Zek.
The blue struck.
It struck a field made of hexagonal non-Newtonian-fluid-bearing cells, which erupted into being at the last possible instant. The blue light played across the field as the bug slowly turned toward Zek. It snapped the hand closed, and when it did, the field dispersed, but with its other, it launched forward into a move that Vega knew by heart.
The simplest of all earthbending forms; to move a rock.
A ripple of stone raced toward the quarian, even as Vega was pushing himself out of hiding and getting his legs pumping. The full-body flinch of the quarian was evident even at the distance he was; he only got a step away from his 'cover', before that cover betrayed him and launched him into the air. The bug then took a new step forward, and this one had a much more firebender flair. Its arms twisted through a mudra, that had crackling electricity trailing its fingertips, before launching that hand out. The bolt of lightning would have struck Zek right in the face... had he not punted himself aside biotically. The head of the bug thing tilted ever so slightly aside, as though it didn't understand what it was looking at. Vega could understand that.
Of course, his confusion was enough so that when it turned to no-sale the Warp coming off of Anette, the field was only half formed when the ball of chaos hit, and never expanded to the full size it had for the quarian. Which was unfortunate for it, because the bolt of blue force following it slammed straight into its chest, and sent the thing rolling. A fraction of a second later, there was a bass thud, and the sod jumped a little bit, closer to Vega than the bug; Fung missed his first shot.
Maybe he wasn't 'not shit' with a sniper rifle.
The Eviscerator came to Vega's cheek, even as he sprinted, and he fired a shot. The blast caught the bug true, but it deflected off of a purplish field. The thing turned its four-eyed face toward him, next and spun in a tight circle, its fingers trailing the ground. When it did, the water was torn out of the grasses around him, and formed a great blob, which it hurled at Vega almost contemptuously. He tried to duck under it, but it still bathed his back and shoulder.
When the bug clenched its fist once more, the water turned to ice, and its momentum was imparted onto Vega completely; he was lifted off his feet and went flying backward.
"Reegar, I've got combat ahead of me," Shepard said, finger to her ear. She'd had to open her helmet, because without the hermetic seals working, it was just a head-sized oven.
"That'd be the ass end of OpPrime," Reegar said. "How many geth do you see out there?"
"Not many," Shepard answered him. "But they're throwing missiles like they've got a sale on 'em."
"Hit their back ranks; we might be able to roll 'em and get the rest of the squad coming in," Reegar said. "Not now! Deal with... Keelah... that's a problem."
"What is it?" Shepard asked, turning away from where she'd almost started running.
"A dropship just dropped a damned Colossus right in front of me; they've probably got a lot more, and they're heading your way," Reegar said. "I've got to knock this thing down before it busts Tali's bulkheads!"
"Good luck," Shepard said. "We have incoming, so we'd better mov–"
Shepard was interrupted in her backpeddling advance toward the fight by the whoosh of a dropship zipping overhead. This one didn't drop platforms, though; it rounded on the defensive position that the quarians held, and began to pepper them with disruptor missiles. Shepard winced. There was no way anybody could have survived that. It began to drift up and away, with the grinding of concrete sounding, as a support pillar, compromised by the bombardment, fell and slammed into the ground in the way of the exit.
Not a problem, that, but...
"Shepard Commander, the dropship is returning," Adahn said. Shepard motioned ahead to rusted industrial equipment, abandoned here for who knows how long – 300 years, most likely – while the others picked their own spots. Garrus and Adahn were side by side. Large rifles, long sight lines. The humming of the geth dropship mounted higher, until it shifted sideways slightly. And it didn't drop anything. It just hovered. Then it flew away.
"That was unsettling," Shepard said.
"Hunters," Garrus said.
"That's pretty likely," Shepard agreed. "Advance; we can't reach the quarians if we're sitting here with our thumbs up our butts."
"I've never understood that saying," Garrus said to Adahn. Then, he stopped, turned to the distance and sighed. "I'm talking to the wrong person."
"Lawson?"
"Focus on the rocket-launchers first," the woman in the white armor said. Not a bad strategy. The thud of Adahn's rifle told how he'd done that without hesitation. The crack of Garrus' Mantis came slightly after. Meanwhile, the rest advanced.
"Trap?" Shepard asked.
"Absolutely," Lawson said. She looked around. The tanks which probably held coolant were long burst, utterly dry. She was in a hard spot, with almost nothing of her element available on hand. Shepard, though, wasn't under that restriction. She counted down from three on one hand, and when the last digit dropped, she thrust both fists forward – one holding her Mattock – and then flared the fingers of the one not carrying the gun. The concrete of the ground buckled ahead of them, leaping up and rolling in a wave that sent boxes and defunct machinery flying. The rocket launchers had no recourse at all.
And the wafting up of dust on the ground told Shepard a damned grim tale. There had to be almost a dozen Hunters down there.
"Anybody got an idea how to kill a dozen guys you can't see?" Shepard asked. She then pulled her fist upward, creating a shelf of concrete for she and Lawson to duck behind. Lucky she had. A second or so later, rockets and bolts of plasma began introducing themselves to it. She reached back, tapping the Cain... but it didn't feel like the right time. Yeah, it'd clear the deck, as it were, but this thing deserved a much more momentous return to the living galaxy.
"I've got one," Garrus said, as he slapped his rifle to his back, and began to sprint forward. Shepard's eyes widened, as she watched him hurl himself off the embankment that they'd halted upon, great fans of flame – almost like the wings of the mythical Phoenix – raked out behind him, before sweeping forward and cutting the closest rocket-launching geth in half. The blanket of flames also fell unevenly as it went, broiling the barriers of the machines down there with him.
Shepard wasn't about to let Vakarian have all the fun.
She didn't put her Mattock away, but simply passed it to her off-hand. When she leapt down, she did so with one foot reaching behind and slamming down with an axe kick that sent a wall of blue flames rolling along the ground. That same foot spun from its concrete-crushing introduction to the ground, and a wave of azure flame rolled outward, cutting the corner off of the direction Garrus was facing. Snaps of electronic systems shutting down lest they overheat and rupture sounded from those flames, and four Hunters shimmered their way into sight, staggering from the heat that had been dumped on them.
The sound of a thunderstrike struck almost simultaneously with the bass thud of Adahn's rifle. One blasted a heretic in half, the other lanced through two of them in a straight line. Shepard used the spinning momentum of her flaming kick to bear her in something like a pirouette, which dragged crackling lightning behind it as she went. Fingers lanced forward, and lightning took its due, unmaking synthetic enemies.
She brought her Mattock to her cheek once more, and fired. Every shot sounded like a sniper-rifle going off – which was appropriate, because it had a comparable stopping power – and with perhaps two shots a target, the Hunters revealed by her wave of fire were sent crashing to the ground, coolant blood and cybernetic viscera blown out around them.
After all of the pandemonium, there was a bulletproof silence that descended on them. Shepard turned to Garrus, who was panting, flames still wreathing his fists, and thumped the sink out of her Mattock. "See? That wasn't so hard."
"You didn't seriously just say that, di–" Garrus began asking.
He was cut off by several dozen tonnes of machine slamming down between he and she. With the deep grind of geth speech, it bore itself upward, standing fully three times the height of a human. Each arm bore the thick bore cannons that would be functionally identical to miniature Reaper Death Rays. The iris lensed in as it focused its attention on Shepard, almost ignoring the second crash, as a comparatively smaller Geth Prime hit the ground behind it. The Juggernaut leveled two cannons at her.
"...Yeah, I deserved this one," Shepard said flatly, as the barrels began to glow with power.
Punching ice off of his back was about as easy as licking his own elbow, Vega decided. It wasn't until he took a chance on blowing the worst of it off with his shotgun that he got some mobility back; the rest would just have to melt off... or get chipped off by Fung and Zek. When he saw the melee, he had a lot of impetus to start charging.
The bug bastard was manhandling the three who were attacking it, its golden, blank eyes staring dispassionately as it sent a bolt of biotic force at Fung, which slammed him into the hillside, before its other hand crooked, and dragged upward, and the FNG was hauled not to his feet, so much as dragged upward by the water of his chest. He let out a clipped shout of pain at that. That he gave so little was actually kinda impressive. It took all Vega had to not bawl like a baby when they put him through Bloodbender-resistance training. Much good it could do an earthbender, anyway.
His shotgun made its displeasure at the bug's presence known, a scattering of shot peppering the field that surrounded the thing just past its skin. It's head pivoted toward him, and it flicked Fung away, before holding out a hand toward Vega. Even as he started to feel the blood in his veins start to twist, there was a bolt of blue that came screaming out of the rubble of stone. The sheer impact of the Biotic Charge by Zek was enough to throw the bug's control off. He tried to follow the impact with a shockwave, but the bug recovered from its stagger with two fists rising. A crash of stone rising brought a wall up between it and Zek, so that the biotic force simply crushed rock instead of chitin.
Then, with a flex and then a thrust, the wall crumbled into bits, and those bits were sent blasting into Zek. Vega shook the sensation of near-bloodbending off, and sent out another blast of his shotgun. This time, while the purplish field manifested with the first blast, with the second... it didn't. Some of the chitin seemed to ablate away, showing a pustular layer of slime below it, followed by another chitin layer. The head turned back to him, and it gave a circular twist of its arms, bringing a gale to check Vega's advance completely. His aim was thrown completely, and he even almost lost hold of his gun.
He was sliding backward, loosing his footing in the turf, when the gale abated, and he stumbled forward. The bug was drifting to one side, surrounded by a bluish haze. It twisted in the air, reaching out with a clawing hand. Its beckoning motion caused a fresh blast of wind, but not from airbending; Anette was dragged at extreme speed toward the bug, ending right in front of its now upright and floating body. The bug cocked back its fist, which glowed with dark energy, before driving it straight into Anette's bare belly – bare only because, for reasons that Vega didn't have the wherewithal to know, she wasn't wearing her shirt anymore. The blast sent the asari flying away, bouncing and rolling along the dry ground until she slammed her own feet under her, and drifted backward.
She then had to leap aside, as it thrust both hands forward, and a column of flame leapt toward her.
There was a fresh crack in the air, and the flames abated as the bug shifted aside slightly. Vega had barely gotten his gun back into a useful position when he noted that the bug was now missing one of its hands. A greyish fluid dribbled out of the stump. It waved that stump toward where Zek had fallen, and hexagonal shield jumped into being. Its feet went wide, its posture dropping enough that the shot that Vega levied against its head sailed right over it, and it slammed its two arms together.
The ground under Vega's feet rebelled, and sent him flying.
He landed at a roll, about a meter away from the bug. Fung, also flung in by the earthbending attack, was about the same distance away. Vega had no idea where his shotgun landed. He tried to hurl himself at the bug, to tackle it to the ground and pound the shit out of it with his bare hands. The bug defied that by simply twisting out of the way with the easy grace of an elusive airbender. He didn't even get the comfort of falling on his face, because his face got introduced to the top of the bug's foot. The kick sent him flat, stars flitting before his eyes, vision narrowing slightly. But for some reason, beside that momentary dimming of his perception, he felt fine. In pain, yeah, but fine. Not even the slightest bit groggy.
Not that Vega knew, but not having a soul did have a few, fringe benefits.
He forced himself to his feet as the bug sent a brutal kick into Fung's gut, driving the wind out of the FNG's lungs and doubling him down onto the ground, one arm holding him up from being flat on his belly. The thing reached a fist up, sparking it with dark energy, but it never got a chance to send it crashing down. Vega powered into it, leaping and sending both feet directly into the side of the thing's head. The impact made its punch only send it spinning in the air, before twisting and landing on its feet, even as Vega kipped up himself.
"Now this is what I've been lookin' for," Vega said. "I've seen you shoot flames and shit... let's see if you can dance!"
It tilted its head at Vega, standing with his fists before him. Then, it flicked its remaining hand toward him, and its Kick slammed into Vega's chest and flattened him onto the ground.
"Cheatin'... bastard..." Vega muttered.
There was a chitinous gurgle, as it walked to Fung, and drove its foot down into his back in a brutal axe-kick. It flattened Fung, hard enough that a dribble of blood started to flow out of the kid's nose. Its foot raised again, even as Vega tried to get his wind back. When its foot went down, it slammed into something solid, something immovable.
A biotic barrier, held in place by two different aliens. Zek, to one side, had a spiderweb crack on his faceplate, but seemed to be not-much-the-worse for his time under a tonne of rock. Anette was soaking wet, and she seemed to be shivering. If Vega knew more about asari physiology, he'd know that shivering, for an asari, was not normal. The bug let out a chatter, then twisted both arms. Vega was lifted off of the ground, as was Fung, and Anette, and Zek, and quite a bit of the loose rocks and debris around them. They all started to drift in, trapped in a Singularity that the bug was somehow making exclude itself. Its one remaining hand began to glow with blue energy. A Warp, to detonate the singularity. To blast those present to bits.
Only, it was interrupted by a blast from Vega's shotgun.
The shotgun which was not in Vega's hands.
Fung, still floating and looking beaten to all hell, steadied his aim, and fired again. This time, the blast ripped into the bug's shoulder, causing the limb to hang from a single sinew, to recoil from the attack. The Singularity continued, but the bug's feet were drifting clear of the ground. Whatever it had done to exclude itself, wasn't working now that it was distracted. Fung shifted his aim slightly, and a new blast lashed out, deflecting off of the purplish field, right at the thing's face.
Fung spat, a gobbet of blood flying as he did, and fired once more. This time, the blast went straight into the thing's dung-colored skull.
There was a faint tearing sound in the air, and all five dropped to the ground. Two of them got up quickly, the two humans, much more slowly.
The bug didn't get up at all.
"Shepard! Back off from the Juggernaut! Kill it with a thousand cuts!" Reegar shouted into Shepard's ear.
"Fuck that," she said. Dropping her Mattock to the concrete – a feat she only allowed because she knew that as a krogan-human codesigned rifle, it could absolutely take it – she reached out with both hands. She then pulled back in, her stance dropping low. The blasts of particulate death that the Juggernaut was about to rearrange her with were sent wide, when that pillar which had been blocking the door hit it in the back of the head.
It staggered toward Shepard, who twisted hard, the concrete and metal in her hand still bearing stains of quarian blood and flesh. It spun in the air as she imparted such force into it that she almost felt a muscle in her soul straining, then slammed it down, a rod from the gods, compacting the Juggernaut into a pancake of metal and plastics. Its two cannon arms splayed out, protected from destruction, but everything else was an absolute loss.
Then, a three gram slug traveling at hypersonic speeds slammed into Shepard's chest.
The impact of it not only liberated the pillar of concrete from her bending grasp, it also sent her flying back, grinding her back along spalling synthetic stone. She blinked and sucked in a breath to replace the one knocked out of her, before she looked down. No, there wasn't a gaping hole through her, surprisingly enough. Garrus must have done better at putting this armor together than he believed.
The Prime, thinking Shepard down long enough, turned its attention to Garrus, and with one shot sent the turian sprawling away. Shards of blue and black plating skittered and rolled into the blasting sunlight, but the way that Garrus was moving – and the lack of a splat of blue blood – told her that he wasn't ventilated by the mass-driver that the Prime had built into its body. Already came a stream of shots, automatic gunfire that plinked off of the Prime's barriers, as it took deliberate steps toward Garrus, who was now standing, unsteadily, trying to figure out what he could do to not get dead. The gunfire from above ended as Lawson's heat-sink popped, and she ducked out of sight with an audible curse.
Shepard pushed herself to her feet, even if she did list a bit to do so. Between the top-heaviness she had with the Cain on her back, and the massive blow she'd gotten dealt, it was lucky she only stumbled. She looked ahead of her, to where the Mattock was lying on the ground. It would be a long run to it, then another split second to fire, and no guarantee that it'd punch through the barriers.
So she began to spin her hands through a lightning kata.
She had only finished her first half-twist, when an orange glow manifested from the Prime's back. The glow swung in an arc, driving itself into vital circuitry that managed the cannon the Prime used to do its killing. The Prime spun abruptly, its arms flailing backward. One of them managed to hit something with a dull thud, and with a fritz of electronics going off-line... a quarian appeared on the Prime's back. The woman planted her feet on the Prime's back between turns, and got a greater grip, before spinning out a fresh Omniblade. This one, she drove straight into the hole she'd already created, and then twisted. The grinding from the Prime began to rise to a crescendo, and the quarian sprang away in a graceful backflip, as the power-plant of the Prime self-destructed, creating a hole in the ground a meter across, and very little scrap besides it.
"Tali?" Shepard asked.
"No ma'am," the quarian said, her accent completely different. Now that Shepard got a look at her, there were quite a few other differences as well. This one was slightly taller, and her hood wasn't indigo, but instead a reddish purple. Her faceplate was also brazen rather than purple. "Juna'Calis vas Rayya, MFM. Where's Op2?"
Shepard took a moment to catch her breath, then moved to where her Mattock had fallen. A glance aside, to the bloodstains now standing with brutal audacity before all who saw. She gave a gentle gesture towards them, and Juna's posture shifted into something betraying very real pain.
"...Damn," she said. Then, she looked up. "There's nothing else we can do for them. The only thing that matters is getting Tali and that damned doohickey out of here before the geth swarm us."
And of course, the universe decided to be a comedian, and chose for Adahn to jump down at that moment. Glowing eyes behind her faceplate went wide, and she scrabbled for her sidearm, sending three crisp shots at Adahn before Shepard could interpose herself between them. "Hey! That one's with us!"
"That one's with... that's a GETH!" she roared, her gun still out. "Just like the ones that killed Op1 and Op2! And you're defending it?"
"Adahn has done nothing but ventilate geth since he hit the ground," Shepard said, sidestepping to keep herself between the righteously outraged quarian and the sole orthodox geth that Shepard had ever come into contact with. "If it weren't for him, I'd be dead a half-dozen times over."
"Him? HIM? IT!" Juna roared. "That thing slaughtered eight billion quarians on the Homeworld alone!"
"This platform is incapable of creating that many casualties," Adahn said, which was exactly the wrong thing to say.
"Get out of the way, human," Juna demanded.
"Not. Going. To. Happen," Shepard said.
"You're insane. You're all insane!" the marine shrieked. "It's a geth! It'll shoot you in the back the moment you drop your guard!"
"We have had many opportunities to assassinate Shepard Commander. However, doing so would be utterly counterproductive to our goals," Adahn said.
"I can't believe you're protecting that thing," Juna muttered.
"It's part of my crew," Shepard said, simply. And the funny thing was, just like Wrex and Tali and Asha were her crew before, Adahn was now. If there was one thing Shepard put a great deal of effort into, it was protecting her crew.
"The longer you threaten this platform, the greater the probability that the Colossus Armature will have time to breach the protective barriers around Creator Tali'Zorah. We must liberate her, quickly," Adahn said.
"That sounds like a plan," Shepard said, staring down the quarian marine before her. "I'm going to go rescue my friend from the heretic geth. You can help, or you can stand aside... but I promise you, you will not get in my way."
Juna's aim wavered a bit. Perhaps because of the brutal finality of Shepard's oath. Perhaps because the words came out with a reverberation of ten thousand throats. Her body language spoke of fear, now, when before it was naked hatred. Fear... and worry.
"Leave her. We've got bigger things to worry about," Garrus said, his flaming fists snuffing before he pulled his rifle off of his back once more. "Literally, if my memory of Colossi is accurate."
Lawson simply gave a nod, and began toward the bunker that the quarian's companions had died trying to protect. Garrus fell in beside her. Adahn didn't seem willing to move, until she shot a glance over her shoulder, and the geth started to walk, its rifle pointed toward the ground. Shepard moved even still, keeping herself between Juna and Adahn. It wasn't until they reached the door that Juna let out a growl and slammed her gun to her hip.
"Fine! Since the galaxy's decided to go absolutely insane, I might as well play along!" she exclaimed. She tapped a button on her collar, and with a hum of electronics coming to life, she slipped into invisibility. "I'm going to go kill something."
Shepard gave a look around, but no gunshots rang out from the naked air, so wherever the enraged quarian had gone, it wasn't directly on their tails. They descended out of the light, and into another broiling bunker. It was obviously not the best of fall-back positions, because the ground was littered with broken, battered, and all around busted geth. Several cots lay empty, and a number of machines were lit up, active along one wall. Shepard gave a nod toward Lawson, who activated one.
"Our ancestors walked these halls with uncovered heads. The air-conditioning must have still worked, back then. So much space. Walls of stone instead of metal... I wish my friends could see this. I wish... I wish Garrus was here."
"Garrus?" Shepard asked.
"What?" he asked.
"Some reason why she wanted you here?"
"Charming turian company? Better food? Best marksman in the galaxy at her side? What's not to want?" he said with a shrug. Shepard rolled her eyes.
"Tali'Zorah to base-camp; come in, base-camp," the quarian's voice appeared again. All turned to a console nearby. "Please, tell me you're still there."
Shepard poked the reply button, and leaned in. "Somebody is," she said with a smirk.
"Shepard!" Tali's image appeared above the console, looking every inch of her surprised. "What are you doing here?"
"Giving my favorite quarian a ride, if you want one," Shepard said.
"I definitely would not say no," Tali said.
"How are you holding up?" Garrus asked, leaning over Shepard's shoulder. Because Shepard had turned a look toward Garrus, rather than watching Tali, she didn't see the flinch of tension the quarian held at hearing that voice.
"I've been better. And to think, humans have to work to lose weight. All I have to do is fight for my life for a week without eating."
"I'll have something delicious, sterile, and dextro waiting for you on the Normandy," Garrus promised.
"I can't wait," Tali said dryly. "What about the marines? Is anybody still alive? I can't tight-beam anybody from in here; the only reason I can reach this one is because the land-lines are intact."
"We just ran into Juna'Calis, and Kal'Reegar is shooting rockets at the Colossus outside your bunker," Shepard ticked off her fingers.
"Finally, Prazza does something other than being annoying," Tali said with what was obviously a roll of her eyes. "Shepard, I found what Admiral Xen was looking for... And it's addressed to you."
"What?" Shepard asked, leaning back.
"I'll explain when there's less gunfire outside my door," she said. "Please, try to keep the rest of the team alive. We've lost too many already."
"I'll do my damndest," Shepard promised. She gave a glance to the others. "Let's move, people!"
"Right behind you," Garrus said. Shepard took a few steps to the side, and faced the great, alloyed bulkhead which was pocked and stained with explosions and high impact shots. This was the kind of barrier that would hold out anything short of a Mako. So Shepard reached one hand toward it, clenched her fist, and pulled. With a shriek, the bulkhead was ripped from its mooring, and sent flying into an abandoned corner of the bunker.
They'd barely gone thirty seconds, when they heard shouting.
It was closer to forty-five when Shepard realized that the shouting was quarian cursing.
She peered around a corner, looking through the expanse which seemed the belly of a quarian overpass, just in time to see a quarian – who was on fire – drop-kick a geth off a ledge to a fall that wouldn't be easily surmounted. He then rolled to his feet, and continued running, his suit still ablaze.
"That was odd," Shepard said, and she let her Mattock precede her. From ahead, she could hear the crack of bursting shield generators, the hiss of caustic incendiaries eating through polymers, even the occasional blast of something detonating.
"Shepard Commander, we have detected a group of Pyro platforms in the vicinity," Adahn warned.
"Noted," Shepard said. She sprinted across a stretch of sun-blasted concrete, then flattened herself to a fresh wall. She could see a yellow-painted, tank-backed machine walking away from her. Perfect target, really. She leaned out, and squeezed out three shots. The first two cut down its shields, and the third punched a hole clean through the top of one of the tanks. The hiss of escaping gasses brought a smirk to Shepard's face. The smirk began a grin when she punched forward a fist, and a discreet bolt of flames streaked across the distance, struck the leak, and caused the geth to explode from the inside out. "That never gets old," Shepard said.
"It does when you have no gun," Garrus countered. He, looking around a different corner, leaned into his own shot, before giving a barked laugh. "I love this rifle."
"We should do something about the quarian," Lawson said, moving as an organic unit, pairs moving up, pairs giving cover. "He won't be able to stand that torment much longer."
"Why was he on fire?" Shepard asked.
"Probably so the Hunters couldn't grab him," Garrus said. There was a fresh crack, and this time, something exploded. Shepard had half-gotten out of cover when she saw one of those damned geth drones in the air. In her mind's eye, she saw the things which had given the first volley at her on Eden Prime. Drones, geth, and a Destroyer as the ultimate foe. How far she'd come.
"Somebody take out those drones!" Shepard shouted.
Adahn's iris lensed in slightly, and a moment later, the drones all turned away from trying to shoot the flaming quarian, to shooting at each other. They all detonated at about the same time, victims of 'friendly fire'. Adahn then turned to Shepard. "Drone forces neutralized," it said. Contrary to what the more prejudiced quarians around here thought, having a geth on her side was damned handy, Shepard realized.
It was about then, when Shepard was stepping into her next advance, that she realized a gaping hole in her rescue plan.
She was coming to rescue Tali with Adahn at her side. That was probably going to end poorly.
She grumbled, shaking her head slowly, her Mattock pointing toward the ground for a moment. Gods damn it, why couldn't she ever think this shit through? Of course, a Shepard who looked before she leapt was no Shepard at all.
"Hey, Shepard, did you get hit?" Garrus asked.
"No. I'm fine," Shepard said, and began to advance once more. A stream of fire crossed the path ahead of her, followed by a quarian bounding toward it's source the instant it terminated. While the majority of the flames that had been on the quarian's body had snuffed, there were still hold-outs that made him seem like some sort of Si Wongi fire-djinn. At this point, Shepard was more than a little curious what quarian was doing going head-to-head with Pyros all day without a visible gun.
Her answer came when there was a blast, and the quarian went flying backward, landing awkwardly on his back... more or less. Because he was folded and pressed against a wall, so his feet were above his head, and his body was wedged by momentum, before gravity would take its course and let his body unfold and leave him simply supine.
There was a flicker in the air, which Shepard immediately shot at. Her shots ripped into the metal flesh of the Hunter that was trying to finish off the burning quarian, damned near ripping it in half and sending it collapsed to one side. "You still alive?" Shepard shouted at the quarian who was only now flopping truly onto his back.
"...ow," he answered her, as she and Lawson came close. Garrus and Adahn were watching her back Then, his body tensed. "Keelah! It isn't dead!"
A glance to the left showed that 'it' was a one-armed Geth Prime. The one arm it had was sadly the one with the cannon. Shepard turned her rifle, and pulled the trigger rapidly, as though she could emulate full-automatic with a semiautomatic rifle. She got one shot, then the sink dropped out. Damn it!
Lawson had a bit more luck, sending a spray of bullets across shields which obviously hadn't restored to their utmost; the last bullets to her sink pocked and cracked at already blast-damaged armor. Then, a clack, and the beep-beep-beep of a gun running dry.
The Prime growled at them, and it picked it's target. Shepard, of course.
Then, for no reason that Shepard was at that point aware of, it exploded, its torso falling off of its body, before the torso underwent a secondary explosion of its power-core popping. Shepard just stared at the legs which slowly fell to the ground for a moment, then looked to Lawson. "...New ammo you've not told me about?" she guessed.
"I wish," Lawson said, sliding a fresh sink in. It was obvious that she was running very, very low. The fritz of a cloak shutting down hit Shepard's ears, and she instantly turned to fire at it, before her rifle helpfully reminded her that it was not going to fire until she reloaded it. And it turned out to be moot, because it was that angry marine appearing, and hauling the burned one to his feet.
"You look like hell," Juna said.
"I think I pulled something," the male quarian said, as he patted out the last burning fire on one of his elbows. He sounded very familiar for some reason.
"Well, we're even, Prazza. Don't fight Pyros on your own again."
"Advice I gave you earlier today," this Prazza said. Shepard thought about it for a moment, but the name just didn't ring any bells for her. He pulled a hardened flask from his side and made a tugging motion at it. Then, he upended it. Bone dry. "Well, damn."
"How many others made it?"
"Just me, and Reegar," he motioned over his shoulder. Then, he flinched and pulled Juna's sidearm from her hip. Shepard instantly stepped into his line of fire, because she had a fair idea what he was aiming at. "Get out of the way!"
"This one's on our side. Note the hole through his chest. Not geth-standard-issue," Shepard said, giving a lie of omission and letting him fill in the blanks however he pleased. Prazza still aimed his gun, but gave a glance toward Juna. She simply shook her head slowly in exasperation.
"You know, it might be a good idea to invest in one of those things that the lady is using," Garrus offered at a stage whisper to the geth amongst them. "If only to avoid these kind of unpleasant meetings."
"This platform was built with a hard-light holographic projection suite to mask our presence amongst organics. The system was rendered defunct by Shepard Commander on Virmire."
"I did what now?"
"You shot us," Adahn answered.
"She should have shot you more," Juna muttered, but she pulled her gun from Prazza's hand before he could take her up on that.
"The bunker shouldn't be far," Lawson said, motioning past the two quarians.
"Wait, are you going in there for Tali?" Prazza demanded, stepping in front of Juna. "No. Not with that thing."
"Do you see this?" Shepard asked, pulling the Cain from her back. It sat heavy in her hands, awkward and unbalanced enough that she was sure she couldn't run with it thus. It was bright yellow, marked with hazard symbols, and even had a tiny notice on the lip of the barrel reading 'do not aim at face'. Simply put, it was an intimidating piece of krogan over-engineering. "I'm offering to use this for you guys. I'd hate to have to use it on you guys."
"Are you threatening us?" Juna asked.
"I'm trying to save your lives. And you're arguing," Shepard pointed out. She slid the Cain back into its hoist. Still heavy as shit, but no longer throwing off the simple act of walking.
Prazza seemed to seethe, before turning to Juna and throwing up his hands. "Fine. FINE! Let the geth help us! You do realize that this means we're probably both dead and in some sort of ironic afterlife! That's the only way this makes sense."
"I'll be watching you," Juna said, her fingers symbolically linking her eyes to Adahn's one lens.
"That is acceptable," Adahn said.
"Good. Now can we go save Tali, now?" Garrus asked.
"You heard the turian. Move out," Shepard said.
"Man, this thing's uglier dead than it was alive," Vega said, prodding it with his boot. Anette was rubbing at her shoulder where her bra-strap touched her skin.
"I didn't believe it when I first saw it but... mister Vega, that thing's a Collector."
"I don't think we need to know about his hobbies, Jimo," Vega said. For some reason, Zek gave a glance toward his Omni, but Vega didn't pay it much mind.
"Species, not hobby," Fung said. Damn, that burn still looked like it hurt like hell. And now there was dirt in it. That was going to permanently scar, for sure.
"These things come out of the Omega Relay, snatch up some weird aliens, then bugger off to who knows where," She said, sitting down on the ground beside it, and pulling off her boots.
"What's it doing here?" Fung asked.
"It's harvesting us," Vega managed the deductive hop. "How many do they usually take?"
"That's the weird thing," Anette said, staring at the thing as she distractedly pulled off her socks. "They usually take a dozen. Maybe twenty. These things ransacked an entire colony. I think they're after you in particular," she said, pointing a sock at him, as her body shivered and shuddered even under its sheen of sweat.
"Alright, two things," Vega said, giving Anette a forestalling gesture as she fiddled with the clasp on her pants. "One, how come this thing fought like an Avatar, and two, what the hell are you doing?"
"What do you mean, what am I doing?" she asked, as she pushed her pants down, exposing very long, very nice blue legs. She kicked them away, rising on bare feet, and once again rubbing at her skin around what little clothing she still wore. Zek was the only one who was looking away, either out of respect or what, Vega couldn't say. At least, for Vega's part, he was staring out of confusion rather than simple desire of a good ogle. "And for the other... I couldn't tell you about benders. That's all news to me."
At this point, she was unfastening her bra.
"Hey! Jimo, stop!"
"Stop what?" she asked, her hands falling still for a moment, her body going into a shiver.
"Look at what you're doing!" he said, picking up her cast off pants and holding them up for her. At first, she looked surprised, confused by the fact that he had her pants. Then... then, her expression began to shift into abject horror.
"Oh... oh no. Goddess no, not now!" she begged.
"What are you talkin' about?" Vega asked.
"Get away," she said, as she outright ripped her bra off. "I... I need to go somewhere..."
"Why are you getting half... strike that, completely naked in the middle of nowhere?" Vega asked, shifting his statement when situation changed. Only at this point did Fung let out a 'gack' and turn away as Zek already was.
"C-c-chrysalis..." she stuttered, as the sweat that poured off of her began to gain an almost plastic-like sheen. She grabbed Vega by the shoulders. "Promise me. Promise me you'll shoot me the second I come out of there! Promise!"
"What are you talking about, Jimo?" Vega asked.
"I'm an Ardat Yakshi. I'm too... too... Too bright. Too bright!" She pulsed with incandescent blueness, and the rocks which had been thrown asunder by the 'Collector' were rearranged, turning the rough pile into what seemed a tiny, tiny hut. One so small that only a child could comfortably use it. But the asari, shuddering the whole way, practically ran to it, before levering herself inside of it. From the size, she had to scrunch herself into about as small a ball as was physically possible for a person of that size.
Vega stared at that for a few seconds, then turned to the others, who were still looking away. "She ain't visible anymore," Vega told them. That got both of them to turn, and when Zek saw the stone-hut that Anette had crammed herself into, he scratched at his head as though he could reach through his helmet and reach his scalp. "What the hell was that?"
"Um... that's a problem," Zek said.
"Yeah, I heard what she said. She's an Ardat Yakshi," Fung chimed in.
"...Something I should know about?" Vega asked.
"Think old-school bloodbenders, only eviler," Fung said with a shrug.
"She didn't want to hurt anybody," Zek said.
"What?" Vega asked.
"When she comes out of there... she thinks that she's going to start killing people. She told me she doesn't want to hurt anybody."
"When'd you get to be her best friend?" Vega asked.
"Right about when you drove that truck-thing into a ravine."
The bean had a point on that one. Vega wiped a hand along his face, which had the unpleasant side effect of swiping stinging sweat into raw and slowly healing scars across his cheek and nose. "As I see it, we can't barge down there with just the three of us. Ardat whatever or not, we need her, too."
"I don't think that's going to be an option," Zek said.
"Well, it's not your call to make," Vega said, leaning toward him. "I know you ain't military, and I've got no call giving you orders, but if you want to get off of this planet alive, you're going to have to pretend. Am I getting through to you?"
Zek flinched back a bit. "She said she wanted..."
"She would want to get out of here in one piece. That's hu... asari nature," Vega said. "What about you, Zuk? You going to force this lady to eat a gun, too?"
"Zek," the quarian said, waving at him. Then, he shook his head. "You need to give him a better nickname."
"Whatever you say, bean," Vega said.
"And why am I bean?"
"If they're anything like bloodbenders," Fung said, rubbing at his cheek just below where the raw flesh ended, "then that means they've got some scary powers... but that doesn't say that they're going to use them on just anybody. I think the Sargeant is right. We can't storm that place with what we've got."
"This is going to end in tears," Zek said, palming his cracked faceplate.
"You should get that looked at," Vega said, turning away from him. "Before somebody sneezes on you."
He didn't see Zek's reaction, as he traced fingertips along his mask until he found that there was a hole that Vega didn't see, the source of those cracks. Fung, though... Fung seemed to notice.
"Hey, Jimo? Hey!" Vega said, squatting beside the hut. "Anette? Need anything in there?"
When he shone his Omni light in there, there was a faint hiss sound... but nothing that looked like an asari was in that hole. It just looked like a sizable lump of translucent blue plastic. Vega leaned back. He glanced toward the others, then down into the hole once more. With a shake of his head, he summed up his entire opinion with three words: "...Asari are weird."
Having to duck the instant she stepped through a door was becoming something of a reflex for Shepard; this time, it meant that a blue bolt of ionized particles flew over her back instead of cutting her in half at the waist.
"Firepower disadvantage detected. Recommend orbital fire support," Adahn said as it skirted its way past the door. Shepard could kinda agree. The massive frame of the Colossus now stood stark and intimidating at the far side of an open expanse. While she did give a moment's consideration to Adahn's recommendation, the fact that the area the Colossus was standing had several layers of colony above it put paid to that idea.
"How did it even know we were coming through?" Garrus asked as he belly-crawled his way into the room, out of the Colossus' line of sight.
"Tight-beam communications by defunct heretic units, geth reaction times, and a visibly opening door," Adahn summed. And that actually made sense. Shepard squirmed her way to a 'window' of sorts that gave a view of the land beyond. There were geth, but most of them were facing the other way, trying to hack their way through the gates at the far side of the Colossus. Others, a slightly smaller number, were sending fire toward Shepard. But not Shepard in particular; their aim was significantly lower, and slightly to the left. She got an answer as to why they were firing there when a missile streaked from that tangent and caught a geth in the chest; the explosion ripped a second in half, and threw the third off the side of a steep drop-off.
"Friendly!" Shepard shouted out the window.
"Since you're talking, you definitely are!" the answer came back, with a reverberation because it sounded both from below her, and directly in her ear.
"I'm coming down to you!" Shepard shouted, leaving her transmitter off. She motioned with a jerk of her head to the ramp leading down toward where Reegar was holding off a platoon of synthetics by himself. She turned back to Lawson. "Keep an eye on our six. The last thing we need are geth or trigger happy quarians shooting at us. And by us, I mean him," she thrust a finger toward Adahn. Its eye-petals raised and lowered in mild confusion.
"I've got the door," Lawson said, forming a rear-guard, as Shepard herself scrabbled to the ramp, at which point she finally allowed herself something of a stand. She skirted the corner at a run, and had to hop to pass the med-kit on the which lay open and used up on the ground. She stumbled to a stop directly at the side of a quarian man in a red and copper armored environment suit. His faceplate had an open hole in it, and Shepard could see one orange eye, topped by a white brow. He fired off a blast with his rocket launcher, then ducked straight down, as a rocket in return shot past where his face had been.
"Kal'Reegar? Shepard," she said. The quarian turned away. "Right, sorry."
"I'm not too worried about being sick," Reegar said, as he slapped a new rocket into his launcher. "I'm swimming in antibiotics 'cause of a rupture, and the air's too hot to let any diseases live. Hell, this whole part of the planet is damned near sterile! 'Long as you don't spit on me, I'll be fine."
Reegar gave her a look, which turned quickly into a double take with that orange eye widening, and he swung his rocket launcher toward Shepard. Or rather, who was behind Shepard.
"You've got a geth right behind you!" Reegar shouted.
"We are allied with Shepard Commander. We are opposing the heretic forces in the area," Adahn said to the jumpy quarian.
"Heretic? What the hell?" Reegar asked. Adahn answered by turning out of cover and sending a shot into an unremarkable piece of air, which exploded, as the Hunter was cut roughly into half. "Alright, fine. Ordinarily, that wouldn't fly with me, but he ain't pointing a gun at me, and right now I can't really afford to be picky!"
"Sit-rep?" Shepard asked, as Garrus joined Adahn in the geth target-shooting. Hunters as found, and rocket-launchers over troopers, just like they'd agreed.
"They've got Tali pinned down in the bunker, and they've killed all of her body-guards. Hell, I'm pretty sure they wiped out my whole squad!"
"Juna and some guy named Prazza survived," Shepard said.
"Tali'll be happy for the first, and annoyed at the second," Reegar said. "I'm just trying to keep their attention on me as much as possible; I can't give 'em time to think, or they'll get through the bulkhead!" All flinched as a rocket slammed into the concrete nearby, dusting them with cracked rocks. "The Colossus is the worst part; damned geth are getting smart. They put a self-repair protocol in that thing. Any time it's dinged up, it huddles up and fixes itself. SOP with Colossi is to drop their shields and whittle 'em down. Kill 'em with bug-bites. That shoots that whole thing to hell."
"You said you had a rupture?"
"I'll be fine. If I die, it's not going to be from the sniffles; that'd just be insulting," Reegar said. "I might not be moving so well, but I can still shoot, and this launcher hasn't been fried by the sun yet. If you can get close, I figure we can chip it down if we work together."
Shepard opened her mouth to agree, before she fell silent, and a smile began to crawl across her face. The eye of Kal'Reegar drew down in suspicion as Shepard's grin grew more and more manic, but she turned a look to Garrus, who ducked and ejected the sink from his rifle. He fumbled at his side, where his spare sinks were kept, but found none.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Shepard asked.
"Possibly, but you have to remember that I have a terrible reaction to human chocolate," Garrus said. She gave him a flat look, for the moment holstering her grin. "Yeah, I know, I know."
"What are you two talking about?" Reegar asked.
"On three?"
"How about on one?" Garrus asked.
"One," Shepard said. The two of them rose and twisted in perfect unison, lightning twisting along fingertips of three and five fingered hands. When they stopped, they were now flanking Adahn, with she in Garrus' former spot, and he one spot further, as the lightning reached out and lanced the distance to a crack through the scorching air. A single bolt of lightning was troublesome to a shield generator that wasn't built for something the size of a frigate, say. The Colossus might be frightfully large, but it only had so much room for capacitors and failsafes. One lightning bolt, it could handle. But when two raked along the shimmering blue barrier that appeared in a bubble around it, the bolts were shooting for scarcely more than half a second, before Shepard's bolt cut through, and blackened a streak across it's 'neck'.
Garrus hit the deck, as Shepard spun once more. She barely even noticed the weight of the Cain, as her movements compensated for it instinctively. Contrary to what Benezia said, in her heart, she was an airbender first. She ended with a shot whizzing by her ear, and the barrel mounting forward, with an increasing beep coming from the weapon that she braced against the metal plating separating her from incoming fire. The beep finally became a steady tone, and a bright red light blinked on at the top of the weapon.
Then, there was a thud.
An instant later, a blast of almost nuclear proportions. The five kilogram hypersonic high-explosive capsule impacted just at the joint of the Colossus' front 'hip', but the blast was far and beyond what that joint could withstand. The flash was blinding, and Shepard had to throw a hand up before her eyes. No true atomic detonation, but still, the blast of wind made her glad she blocked her eyes, as it drove hot grit ahead with it into her face.
When the flash subsided, there was a great blackened crater where the Colossus once stood. The only sign that it had been there at all was a single leg, torn off, flying through the air past the drop off, looking for a place to land. All incoming fire stopped for a moment, as though the heretics were just as shocked by this startling turn as Reegar was. Adahn broke that spell by picking off what few platforms were remaining.
"Keelah... I want one of those," Reegar said.
"Hard to get, sadly," Shepard said, as she hefted the heavy bastard and slung it onto her back once more. Still, it was a bit lighter than it was before. Shepard looked up the ramp. "Lawson! How's the back door?"
"Busy!" Lawson answered, followed by several gunshots.
"Move up! We're through!" Shepard ordered. She offered a hand to the squad-leader who just stared up at her with a sort of weighing look in his eye. "Well?"
"I ain't going to turn away help, no matter how insane it is."
"Why does everybody say that about me?"
"Possibly because you're half as crazy as Liara," Garrus said, before bounding over the barricade and beginning to cross the expanse, toward where the bunker lay.
"Half?" Reegar asked.
Adahn took the last shot – last, because after he took it, he put his rifle away without so much as a second sweep – and nodded toward the quarian. "Anecdotal evidence points to mental instability in Doctor T'Soni. Using her as a mental-stability frame of reference is apt."
"Squad-Leader, this is Juna, come in, Squad-Leader," came a voice in Shepard's ear. Mostly because she was patched into their network.
"I'm here, Juna. Status?"
"Alive. Somehow. Prazza too."
"Good. Status on our ship?"
"Don't know, and I'm not eager to find out," Juna said. "That's a long walk past a lot of geth."
At that point, Shepard pipped the channel off. Whatever was to be said, would be said between them. She could still hear muffled words – untranslated from whatever quarian language that Kal'Reegar spoke – coming from the rift in his helmet, but beyond that he had privacy. He leaned against the wall which was the source of so much worry on the part of the organics, and consternation on the part of the heretical geth. He deserved a breather.
"A bit antsy, Garrus?" Shepard asked, as she reached the bulkhead which had numerous blast-marks against it, as though they were wearing it down with repeated mass-driver shots. Shepard simply reached out, gripped with her bending, and ripped, sending the bulkhead out of its frame. When finished, she struck the grit from her gauntlets, and thumbed her ear once more. "Tali? Can you hear me?"
"I really hope that was you, Shepard," Tali said. "Because if it wasn't, AAAAUGH!"
"Very funny," Shepard said. "And it was."
"I thought it would be," Tali said dryly. "I'll open the inner doors. No reason to destroy our entire colony on your way in."
There were some geth on the ground, but not many, and those that were, were blasted to bits by shotgun blasts. And not just any shotgun blasts. Shepard paused as she stepped over a dead trooper, and noted that the holes in its structure looked like somebody'd turned one of their own guns against them. Shepard chuckled and smiled a little. That sounded just like Tali.
"Shepard, just give me a second. I need to finish this clean-up," Tali's voice came from ahead of them. Shepard rounded the bend in the room, pausing only long enough to pluck what looked like a completely intact pulse-rifle from the floor with a 'hrm'. Tali's back was to her, as she worked a display, seemingly shutting something down.
"Fair enough. Tali, before you turn around, I've got to warn you, I've go–" Shepard got that far before Tali did indeed turn around.
"GETH!" she shouted, and had her shotgun pulled from her back in a flash. A plasma-shotgun. Even as Shepard jumped into Tali's line of fire, she couldn't help but be proud that little Tali had so much boom.
"Allied fire predicted. Seeking assistance, Shepard Commander," Adahn said, ducking around the corner at the sudden aggression.
"...as I was about to say, I've picked up some pretty strange allies, and Adahn is one of them."
"How... does it know your name?" Tali asked, still staring down the synthetic-designed shotgun.
"A story so strange you wouldn't believe it, trust me," Shepard said.
"Shepard Commander opposes the Old Machines. So do Orthodox Geth. Alliance was mutually beneficial."
Garrus, though, just looked about three settings less tense than he had been before. "Personally, I'm just glad to seem everybody's favorite quarian managed to get through without getting new holes in an old suit," he said with – Shepard somehow detected – feigned calm.
"You would be worried about my suit, wouldn't you?" Tali asked. She lowered her shotgun, though. "I... Don't want to believe you, but I know you. If you say this... thing... isn't going to kill us, then I'll believe it."
"We do not plan any aggression toward the Creators at this time," Adahn said, still flattened against the wall around that soft corner.
"I'll explain later, I promise," Shepard said. She looked past her, to the panel. "So what exactly was all of this for?"
Tali grumbled, putting her shotgun to her back, then pulled a little device from a pocket in her suit. "This," she said, holding up... one of Benezia's OSDs. "It was letting off a strange signal. Admiral Xen thought it was a new geth technology. Turns out, it's a message for you. I got my entire team killed to play answering machine."
"Not your whole squad," Kal'Reegar said, as he came into the bunker. With him came Lawson, and with her, the other two marines. "Although it's going to be a pretty quiet ride home."
"You do realize Prazza survived?" Juna asked.
"Oh, shut it," Prazza muttered. He gave what was certainly a glare at Adahn, then moved past. "We need to get out of here before the geth return; they've already sent for reinforcements."
"There's no way we'll reach the ship in time," Juna said. She waved her hand, Omni shining bright, toward Kal'Reegar, "...not with you in the condition you're in."
"I said I was getting you out of here," Shepard said. "Your ship will still be here when the geth aren't actively searching for you."
"Ma'am, it's not standard Migrant Fleet Marine policy to lose our landing-craft. It's not like we have a lot of them to go around," Reegar said plainly.
"You can come with Shepard now and go back for it later, or get yourselves killed trying to reach it now, in which case, we've lost it anyway," Tali summed. Prazza was the one to sigh, and nod.
"Tali'Zorah is right," he said.
"Good," Shepard said. She thumbed her ear. "Joker? We need a pick-up. Sending coordinates."
"I hope this was worth it, ma'am," Kal'Reegar said, still holding where his wound ached him.
"...you and me both, Reegar," Shepard said. "You and me both."
To say that her body was in pain was an understatement.
Every step sent lurches of pain up her back, past the torn skin that was now sealed under layers of adhesive tape, since there was nothing else to close her suit with. She could only imagine the amount of inflammation she was going to have to deal with – let alone the infection that was likely ravaging its way through her body. The last auto-injectors of powerful antihistamines and antibiotics lay about a kilometer behind her, not far from where the calling started.
She knew they were following her. Of course they would; she smelled like fresh food to something as voracious as a varren. But they followed her in a pack, always just out of sight, moving up where she couldn't see them. Waiting for her to flag. Waiting for her to stumble. She didn't know much about verran, other than that they had really strong jaws, and took an entire thermal clip – her only thermal clip – to kill. She didn't know that they were adaptable not only in their physiology, but in their instincts too. That they could adapt to hunt anywhere, to hunt anything. On Tuchanka, that made them ambush predators. Here, on Gai Hinnem, that made them endurance hunters.
Forzan'See vas Idenna couldn't help but spare a glance to the hand which held that 'bandaging' around her waist. Her blood was on her hands. Few quarians indeed ever survived seeing their own blood. She hoped she would be one of the few.
"Where are you?" she asked, her head swinging up and around only for a moment, before returning to the path before her. She couldn't afford to trip. The 'rooo' calls of the varren told her that much. A part of her was kicking herself for abandoning the wreck of the Cyniad... but rescue, after so many of her friends and comrades were eaten by those beasts? It was something not to be given up.
She heard a thump behind her, and cast a glance over her shoulder. One of the varren had apparently lost its patience, and now took to the path behind her. And it was traveling a great deal faster than she was.
She had a scream building in her throat, her legs pumping ever faster, until she, with her attention firmly behind her, ram straight into a tree.
"Stay down!" the tree ordered her, and started shooting.
Forzan shook her head, trying to clear her mind a bit. Not a tree. A... human? He was dark of complexion with a brutal set of scars that ran down half of his face. One of his eyes appeared to be a poor prosthetic, and his armor was scuffed and scraped all over, a suit of plate that would have not seemed out of place on one of the old Desronin sipahis. His hands held a shotgun, one that belched out loud shots, which tore apart the face of the incoming varren, and when that failed to kill it, the chest as well. Forzan started to crawl backward, past this human who now slowly retreated, firing until his shotgun announced rebellion. Then, he switched to what looked like an old-model rifle, and shouted what were probably human profanities at the varren which began to erupt from the foliage around her.
"Who..." Forzan managed, before the human turned and grabbed her under the armpit. With a heave, he dragged her not only to her feet, but in his wake, as he fired using her other shoulder as a rifle-brace.
She didn't hear much else, other than gunfire, needless to say. Her steps, staggering though they were as he dragged her back, finally banged against metal. There was a fresh pull, and she was thrown aside, landing face-first on the metal deck of a hovering shuttle. The human pulled himself up, firing a few parting shots at the varren which now massed where the ship seemed to be poised to rise. One beast launched itself in a powerful bound, seeking to dig massive tusks into armored human.
The human answered it by kicking it in the face before it came close, then slamming the shuttle door as it fell back to the ground.
Forzan took a moment to just lie there, breathing heavily. A part of her wanted to take a brief moment to cry a little. Unfortunately, that was a very small part, and the parts of her which were military and proud denounced it as foolish and weak. The human stepped over her and pounded on the door. "Alright! I've had enough o' this guddamned rock! Show me some space!"
There was a faint shift in Forzan's perception as the engine pulsed to full power, and the shuttle moved upward. She slowly pushed herself to a crouch. She looked up to the human, who seemed to be trapped in a state of perpetual wrathful fuming. "...Whoever you are... you just saved my l–"
The human interrupted her by grabbing her by the mouth-piece of her helmet, lifting her and slamming her against the door to the shuttle in one motion. He leaned very close to her, that synthetic, sightless eye quivering as his jaw took a moment to chew out his words. "Now... I didn't rescue you out 'a the kindness of my 'eart. You've got ways a' findin' people. People 'oo don't want to be found. So here's my offer, suit-rat; you find me a man named Vido... and I don't open this door, and drop y' back onto Gai Hinnem. Nice and fair, ain' it?"
"Yes! Yes of course it is!" Forzan said in a panic.
"Of course it is. I'm a guddamned philanthropist these days, ain' I?" he said. He let go of her helmet, and pointed to a box next to the padded bench that ran along the other wall of the shuttle. "Drugs are there. Patch y'self up and get somethin' t' eat."
Forzan, standing with her back to the shuttle door, wondered if she'd managed to get herself in worse than she had been before. It was like the ancestors always said; anything that seemed too good to be true, is.
"I should have stayed on the Idenna..." Forzan said, shuddering from pain and bloodloss, both.
"A geth, Shepard?" Tali asked.
"I know," Shepard said, as the quarian continued to pace a line in the meeting room which had seen, to this point, exactly no traffic. "But the things he says have a weird way of checking out."
"He's a geth!" Tali said. "A name and some patience doesn't change that!"
"If it wasn't for that geth, I'd have died on Freedom's Progress," Shepard said.
"...what do you mean?" Tali asked, her pacing finally halting.
"He put bullets through a Collector's head before it could kill me," Shepard said.
"IT WAS ON FREEDOM'S PROGRESS?" Tali shouted.
"Hey, mind the volume on that thing," Shepard said.
"That thing's been with you this whole time? Keelah, Prazza was right not to trust..." she trailed off. Then, she turned to Shepard once more. "...No. No, I'm not going down this road. The last people who didn't believe you, got a giant AI laser-cuttlefish blowing up their pretty space-station. And I will not agree with Prazza."
"Nice to know you're believing me out of spite," Shepard said flatly.
Tali took a few fuming breaths, before turning her gaze to Shepard once more. "You? I trust your intentions. You mean well. Usually," Tali said. "But I can't... it's a geth, Shepard."
"Have you ever talked to him?" Shepard asked.
"Him?" Tali asked.
"Volume, Tali," Shepard said. Tali glared at her for that, but thankfully, didn't yell. "Talk to him. The situation with the geth is a lot more complicated than I thought it was back during the whole Saren thing."
"...I might," she said.
"Without shooting him."
"...I might," she repeated, sounding even more begrudging.
She turned, and made for the door. Before she reached it, EDIs virtual avatar popped out of the wall-projector, facing her. "Kal'Reegar is currently occupying the 'clean room' that was set aside for you, so you will have to find other accommodations until he is discharged."
Tali didn't shout. She just glared. It was the angriest 'are you fucking kidding me?' look that Shepard had ever seen, the likes of which was only ever possible when done by quarians. Without a word said, she stalked out of the room. EDI watched her leave, before turning that ball toward Shepard.
"I believe I have upset Miss Zorah," EDI said.
"She's quarian," Shepard said with a shrug.
"I am aware of her species, and it's antipathy towards artificial intelligences. However this seemed less risky or potentially harmful than revealing my true nature at a time of crisis," EDI said.
"You planned that?"
"My plans are manifold, and beyond mere organic understanding," EDI said flatly.
"...That's a joke, I take it?" Shepard said.
"I will work on my delivery. Logging you out."
Shepard sighed and shook her head. Between the AI's and the quarians, this was going to be an interesting trip to Omega. She stepped out into the hall. She'd only gotten three steps when a new EDI blob appeared before her.
"I've just received word from Miss Nilsdottir. She should be rendezvousing within the next two hours."
"Good. Anything else?" Shepard said.
"I don't believe so. Logging you out. Really, this time," she said, before the ball and cone vanished once more.
AI's. She could only shake her head. She pounded the elevator call button, leaning against the wall next to the doors. "Chambers?" Shepard said, her eyes closed.
"Yes, Commander?"
"Am I juggling vials of nitroglycerin by having so many zealots, geth, and quarians on my ship?"
"There will be tensions," Chambers said diplomatically.
"Think I'm a big dummy for trying?" she asked.
"No. Well, m... no."
Her eyes slid open, and noted that Chambers was pointedly not looking in her direction. "You've got to learn to straighten that backbone, Chambers. You've got an opinion. Spill it."
She turned, and nodded. "I do. It's not a matter of bringing them all aboard, it's that you're giving neglect to situations that require attention, and attention to people that would be better left alone. Mister Balak, for example."
"Oh, him..." Shepard said.
"He needs time to acclimate to his new surroundings. Take him out on missions, but don't impinge on the space he's taken as his," Chambers said. "As for Adahn... I think he might have more to say than he's letting on, but I don't know exactly what that would be. He is an AI after all."
"I am also an artificial intelligence, however you have no difficulty conversing with me," EDI chimed in.
"An artificial intelligence created based off of a human paradigm. The geth... they have a fundamentally different way of thinking. Talking to them is like asking a non-shaman what a greed spirit smells like. Our frames of reference are just so different," Chambers said.
The door binged behind Shepard, but she stayed where she was. "And what's your take on the Justicar?"
"She is, in many ways, an archetypal asari. Some parts of her are remarkably old, others, remarkably new. She's severe in some ways, liberal in others. She'll be an excellent teacher, I feel. However, I know that she's in some turmoil," Chambers said.
"How do you figure?" Shepard asked.
"Call it a woman's intuition," Chambers said. "She's... somewhere between grieving and angry."
"Woman's intuition... You do realize I'm a woman, right?" Shepard asked.
"I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed," Chambers said primly, then turned back to her console. Maybe she had a bit more backbone than initially appeared. She backed into the lift, thumping the ascent command as she went. The lift swiftly rose and stopped, opening before her quarters. She moved through, and gave a glance to the fish tank, which was now starting to look a little disgusting.
"I'm going to have to get somebody to clean that," she muttered to herself, as she unlocked the connectors that held her make-shift armor together, and let it start to come off in sections. The boots, as usual, were the last to come off, leaving her in her underwear, considering a shower. She was already sweaty and disgusting... but she still had Benezia's OSD to look at. And for all she was a stunted airbender, she still had an airbender's curiosity.
She dropped herself into her chair, sliding the OSD into the slot next to the console. It hummed to life after a fritz of static, and once again, had the same dichotomous loading screen. 'Press here to activate', or 'self-destruct'. A tap of the green button, and...
There was a twitch, almost like Shepard was seeing with an extra set of eyes. Darkness, and cold.
Then, the strange doubled perception ended, and Benezia's face was on the console before her. She looked only slightly better than what she looked like when Shepard had had to kill her, and she had some sort of metal device attached to her 'ear'. "I don't know how many more of these I'll be able to make," Benezia said. "But this was vitally important. Ignore what I said in the fourth message..."
"Easily done, since I've never seen it," Shepard muttered.
"The Reapers are more dangerous to you than you know. When you enter your 'Avatar State', they can sense you. Some only vaguely. Some, with laser-etched precision. Because they are you. The Reapers, they can make more as I said before," again, a message Shepard hadn't seen yet, "but for some, for the most powerful of them, they need you. The Avatar is the beating heart and driving mind of the greatest of the Reapers. If they capture you... they will turn you into one of them."
"...That... doesn't... sound good," Shepard said.
"If they capture you, and you have no way to escape, your only recourse is suicide. If they Indoctrinate you... then all is lost."
"...no pressure," Shepard muttered.
"And I was wrong about Harbinger. You can't fight It. Not as you are. It's..." she seemed go glaze a bit, before reaching up and turning a crank on the metal thing on the side of her head. When she did, she let out a low, long moan of pain, before her eyes opened clear once more. She took a purging breath. "The Reapers can be stopped. But not like this. Not with the weapons that all the galaxy could throw against them. Even if we armed every one of the trillion salarians alive, we would be brushed aside. You have to find the Once Great And Glorious. He understood as well as Nazara... only to fail far worse than who came before him. If... if I can hold out, I will be able to tell you where he is. How to contact him... how to hear his Revelations. If you can't... then don't let them take you alive."
There was another fritz of static, a strange not-white-noise, a grinding of flecks of black and white and grey, a blast of noise, something that shot past Shepard's conscious filters, and stuck itself somewhere in the back of her brain. A message, waiting for a decoder, one that Shepard would have to wait for.
The screen turned off, and powered down, leaving Shepard, caked in sun-baked sweat and half dressed at best, blinking toward her screen. The Reapers were fallen Avatars. If she screwed this up, she'd be out there... just like Sovereign. Doing this, to innocent people, forever. She considered taking a shower.
Instead, she opened the shelf in her desk, and pulled out the bottle of whiskey there.
Codex Entry (TECHNOLOGY) Thanix Cannon
At the battle of the Citadel, the geth super-dreadnaught 'Sovereign' possessed firepower on a scale not previously seen by any martial force. Capable of projecting a stream of button-sized nickel-ferrous slugs at a small fraction of the speed of light, the Dreadnaught's cannons were able to rip through existing kinetic barriers with ease, and destroy turian dreadnaughts with a single salvo. After the destruction of the vessel, a great deal of work went into reverse-engeineering the weapon, so that Council Forces would be better armed in the event of a second geth invasion.
The technology hit a number of stumbling blocks, as much of the weaponry seemed to function on what remain essentially Black Boxes. The turian-human-salarian development teams only recently managed to produce a viable weapon using the theories espoused by the geth device. Taking a cue from the quarian's Ionized Particle Cannon - sometimes called the 'lightning cannon', an atmospheric anti-fighter weapon - the Thanix used, rather than one-centimeter oblong slugs, a 'sand' of salt-grain sized germanium-tungsten pellets. While not directly emulating the geth weapon, the Thanix nevertheless operates at a level conventional navies found astounding.
Unlike most weapons that rely on the mass-effect to provide momentum, and thus damage, the Thanix has a limited range; the weapon fires not only the 'sand', but sends a powerful electric charge through the stream, which melts the sand as it is projected and allows it to 'glob' when it impacts, and causes massive interference with kinetic barriers. The combined one-two punch is enough to cut through any but the strongest barriers that the weapon was tested against. A shortcoming of the Thanix system lies in that while the weapon and its underlying principle scales down very well, it scales up poorly. While even vehicular Thanix Cannons are in development, all attempts to directly replicate the brutal effectiveness of 'Sovereign's weapons on a dreadnaught scale have been mired by technical difficulties.
Proponents of the Thanix Cannon cite that the weapon, being so compact, can fit onto frigates and allow them to 'punch well above their weight'. With sufficient capacitors and a robust power-grid, a frigate can fire the Thanix once every five to six seconds, with every bolt equivalent to a cruiser's main gun. Cruiser versions of the Thanix Cannon are somewhat more anemic, comparatively, as they don't compare to the power of a dreadnaught's main cannon, but they do allow for much faster fire. The only other limiting factors with the Thanix is the scarcity of parts, and the difficulty keeping the weapon calibrated. The first will be solved as the weapon becomes more ubiquitous amongst Council Fleets. The second, on the other hand, is a more major hurdle. Without a dedicated hand to keep the weapon in perfect calibration, it could lose as much as 2% of its accuracy after as little as two minutes of use. Given the distances the weapon is capable of firing (admittedly, shorter than 'effectively unlimited' as the Spinal Cannons boast), that can mean missing a target by hundreds or thousands of kilometers.
The Thanix currently enjoys a great deal of popularity amongst the Turian Hierarchy and Systems Alliance. It is estimated that by P.M. 3585, all frigates in these armadas will have switched over from Disruptor Torpedo loadouts, to the more versatile and longer-ranged Thanix Cannons.
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