Thoughts from Andromeda part 33

By ElementalsAdvocate

…

Year 2819. Shipboard Time 19:39, Day 33 after Arrival. Andromeda Galaxy, Heleus Cluster, Faroang System, Planet Havaarl, Daar Pelaav. Tempest, Pathfinders Cabin.

…

SAM… start recording.

We found survivors from Ark Natanus today. They were under attack by the Roekaar. We managed to fight them off, but there were casualties on both sides. Now they're here on the Tempest, and things aren't looking good.

Okay, back up Scott, and start from the beginning.

When I got up this morning, all I wanted was to take some time, get to know the angara, maybe explore the ruins around the research station before heading out to find and activate the other monoliths. So, after breakfast we tromped back out into the jungle again, minus our Remnant expert. During her medical examination of Peebee last night, Doctor T'Perro found fungal spores growing in Peebee's wounds, so today Peebee was stuck in quarantine on an IV of anti-fungal medication.

When we got to the station, Kiiran had everyone come out and greet us, which was a nice change from the greetings we've gotten so. They thanked us for rescuing Then we all went into the station and had a powwow about the Remnant. One of the scientists we rescued from stasis, an angaran male named Torvar, mentioned that one of the Remnant Monolith's was "lost", and that was why the plants and animals were starting to mutate out of control.

I pointed out the greenery and the fact that the planet wasn't tearing itself apart like Eos.

Torvar agreed with me, that some part of the Remnant terraforming machinery must be working on Havarl for there to be this much life. However, unlike on other planets with Remnant structures, only two monoliths have been located on Havarl. That much we actually knew; we'd detected them on our approach to Daar Pelaav: one in the southwest of the complex, where we rescued Torvar and the angaran scientists yesterday, and the other located on the far eastern end of the complex. As for Monolith number three, we had nothing. We still have nothing.

Except. Torvar mentioned a group of angara; Sages, he called them, that might know the location of the third monolith. The problem is that these sages are an isolationist bunch, preferring to live on top of a Remnant tower and I don't know… meditate while the planet falls apart below them. Doesn't matter. I need to impress Evfra. I need to prove that we can work together. I need to show him that I- that we, the Initiative, can work with the Angara to make Heleus a better place.

Anyway… after that we said our good-byes and headed out into the jungle. I'd promised the astro-archaeologist Rashael Vier that we'd check out her old home in the ruins of Daar Pelaav, north of the research station. It wasn't far out of our way, and at the time I figured, "why not?"

We found her home half buried in an old mudslide and vines, and home to a pack of challyrions and large bugs that Jaal called draals. Clearing them out was a lot of fun… for Drack.

It didn't take long after we drove off the animals to find Vier's computer. It was… a total loss. Between the long-ago mud slide and the animals, the computer systems, the hard drive, and the memory core were all ruined. When I called up Vier and told her… she sounded so crushed, I couldn't help myself. I asked if there were any back-ups, of any kind. She admitted that there had been a town-wide computer cloud that might have back-ups of her data but that it, like the rest of Daar Pelaav, had been abandoned years ago, and would probably be as defunct as her own ruined computer. Still, I persuaded her to give me the nav-point for the old town's mainframe, and then we headed off into the jungle.

It took us a little while to get to the nav-point Vier provided, and then a while longer while I walked around in circles through the jungle with my scanners on their highest sensitivity trying to find something that would respond like a computer. By the time my scanners found something, Drack was getting his "grumpy old man" face and Liam was humming Pop goes the Weasel under his breath.

But! It was worth it. I found an access panel that led directly to the town's computer back-ups, safely buried underground, untouched and undamaged. SAM did his thing, and thirty seconds later we'd found Rashael's data, and a hell of a lot more besides. Heh, the sheer awe in Vier's voice when she linked up, you'd think we'd found a hidden treasure vault. Which, considering that the town and everything in it had been abandoned twenty years ago, I guess isn't far from the truth.

Liam had wandered a little away at that point. I didn't see what happened, but suddenly I heard him yell and when I turned around Liam was gone. Turns out he'd stepped on some slippery moss and went tumbling down an embankment hidden by ferns into a muddy pool covered with vines. Then Liam really started screaming and thrashing around, howling about snakes and begging us to get him out!

Jaal asked what snakes were. I tried to figure out a way down the embankment without falling into the mud. Liam kept yelling.

Drack took the direct approach. He jumped feet first into the pool, spraying mud everywhere, grabbed Liam, and threw him bodily out of the pool before smashing his way through the embankment and climbing back up.

Have I mentioned lately how glad I am that we've got a krogan on our side?

Jaal and I helped Liam clean off most of the muck. Unfortunately, while he was wearing the requisite Initiative survival gear like me, he hadn't been wearing his helmet when he went into the mud. It was… not nice. Liam was so pissed about the whole thing that he yanked out his side-arm and fired off a few rounds into the pool. I'd seen him do this sort of thing back on Habitat 7. I hadn't gotten after him about it then.

Looking back, maybe I should have.

While Liam cooled off, I did a perimeter sweep, and it was at that moment I noticed life-signs popping into view on my HUD, lots of them, and coming fast. I mentioned it to Jaal, and he turned on his haptic monocle to take a look. Three seconds later, and Jaal went from calm-cool-and-collected to surprised-wet-cat before my eyes. He said that the Roekaar had found us, and that we needed to find defensible ground immediately, before taking off into jungle at a fast trot.

I don't remember how long we ran, but we eventually found a small hill made of tumbled granite blocks and made our stand; Jaal on the high-ground with his rifle, Liam and I behind boulders lower down, and Drack on the ground. Big bastard patently refused to try to climb boulders, and we still hadn't been able to adapt a jump-jet powerful enough to move his bulk more than a few inches, so Drack got his way.

I remember watching the surrounding jungle with one eye down the scope of my Avenger, and watching those red dots on my HUD getting closer and closer with the other eye. I remember the sound of the mud squelching on Liams collar.

Then something exploded out of the undergrowth and the fight was on! A pair of large lizard-like with big teeth and sail-like ridges on their backs charged at Drack, hissing and growling. He blew the first one away with a blast from his shotgun and killed the other with a back-hand swing of his hammer that reduced the lizards head to bloody pulp. Looked like blue watermelon. Then they came; angara, a dozen of them, decked out in garish reds and yellows, yelling at the tops of their lungs, firing with an assortment of kett and angaran weaponry. Then I was too busy fighting to remember much of anything else.

I remember firing into the face of snarling angaran woman, a face that looked like a berserk wild-cat, all bared teeth and black-slitted eyes.

I remember invoking a biotic Throw, sending one of the Roekaar flying backwards and immediately following up with an Incineration tech that turned the angara into a torch before the plasma reacted with the biotics and exploded, taking out another angara and sending a third skidding away screaming and in flames.

I remember the sound of Jaal, growling, firing his rifle overhead at some enemy beyond me.

When the noise stopped, the Roekaar were dead. We weren't.

"Stupid idiots." That's what Drack said. Liam… Liam and I threw up.

Once we composed ourselves, Drack and Jaal were checking the bodies. I saw Jaal bend over a recumbent form, place his ear close to the angara's mouth, listened, nodded, and then drove his firaan into the angara's chest.

When I got up the nerve to ask him about it… SAM?

….

Ryder: "Why did you do that?"

Jaal: "Do what?"

Ryder: "Why did you kill that angara?"

Jaal: "He was dying anyway. His diaphragm had ruptured, his bowels destroyed. I have seen such wounds fighting the kett. It might have taken hours for him to die, but he would have died. I simply quickened his passing."

Ryder: "How can you be so calm about this? They're your people"

Jaal: "They are Roekaar. To die in battle tearing their enemies down is their greatest wish. Rrrr." Jaal growls.

Ryder: "I don't understand this. If the Roekaar are fighting the kett, doesn't that make them part of the Resistance."

Jaal: "No."

Ryder: "I'd like a bit more of an explanation, please."

Jaal: "I've told you before. The Resistance protects the angara. The Roekaar kill aliens."

Ryder: "So how does that lead to you sticking a knife between another man's ribs?"

Jaal: "Have you ever been in war, Pathfinder?"

Ryder: "No, but I've been a soldier. I know about mercy-killings. That's one thing. You blowing away your own people without a second thought is another."

Jaal: "That is no concern of yours."

Ryder: "Like Hell it isn't!

Jaal: "… Evfra… does not trust the Roekaar."

Ryder: "Go on."

Jaal: "They do not share our priorities. We want to protect our homes, our people, our families, our civilization. The Roekaar… all they want to do is kill kett. And they don't care how they do it. Or fail to do it. The Roekaar see a burning daar, and they see fuel for their hate, martyrs to their cause. Evfra sees a burning daar, and he sees a loss to us all; fewer watchers, fewer guns on the walls, fewer bodies to produce food, weapons, gear, supplies that all angara desperately need, now more than ever."

Ryder: "And that justifies killing your own people?"

Jaal: "What would you do, Pathfinder, if you discovered that someone was taking weapons from the Tempest's armory for an attack on a kett outpost; taking every weapon in sight, stripping you to the bones so that they may seek glory, even if they are truly incapable of achieving victory, and leaving you with next to nothing to carry on the fight another day?"

Ryder: "I'd stop them. With words, if possible. By force, if necessary."

Jaal: "Then… you do understand."

….

I think I do. I think I do.

{What do you understand, Scott?}

Nevermind SAM.

After our little talk, Jaal dropped a beacon to call in the local Resistance to recover the bodies, and we headed east, deeper into the ruins.

We passed more ruined angaran structures, the outskirts of the old Daar Pelaav, and kept traveling until we reached a chasm that split the valley in half. It wasn't a natural chasm; looking down, the walls were all the same grey metal laced with light that we'd seen in the vault on Eos. Really cool, but also really spooky since the stream ran straight into the chasm, and the heat from the Remnant devices turned the flying water into mist that completely obscured how deep the chasm actually was, and we couldn't hear anything over the booming of the water echoing in the void.

We headed south following the chasm. Mithrava, the tower where the angaran sages live is at the southern end of the chasm, and we could see it clearly from over a kilometer away. Then we ran into a wall of Remnant metal; a sheer wall, something like thirty meters, straight up, with no handholds or outcrops. The chasm butted right up against the wall and kept going south, but no way to follow the chasm, except maybe to jump into it.

We were just about to turn around and head back the way we'd come when we heard the shots. Even with the odd echoes bouncing off the Remnant structures around us and the chasm below, I recognized the spitting sounds of kett assault rifles and took off running.

We found a small canyon; a kind of defile formed by the Remnant strutures around us. And we found Roekaar, bodies scattered here and there and more of those large lizards, adhi Jaal called them, dead from shrapnel wounds.

Further up the canyon we heard more shots, kett and angaran plasma weapons, and then I heard the popping sound that only comes from an Avenger assault rifle.

When I heard that sound… God. All my instincts yanked me right back to basic, and I was hauling ass before I knew what I was doing.

Looking back now, it was clear that somebody had done their level best to make that canyon as defensible as possible with the materials available: Lots of cover for a defender made of Remnant plates, choke points, clear lines of fire. I ran past the bodies of more adhi, blown apart by buried mines. The Roekaar had sent in the adhi first to take out the mines, and then followed. They'd paid for the ground in blood, as I passed one red-suited body after another.

We hit the Roekaar from behind, a dozen of them, loaded for bear. The Roekaar tried to react, but then, I'm betting they'd never imagined getting ambushed by a pissed off biotic, a pissed off crisis specialist, an angaran commando, and a fourteen-hundred year old krogan juggernaut all at the same time. Only on our side, all the Roekaar that were already dead must have been the greenhorns because the ones that were still alive and kicking immediately turned around and charged us.

One of the Roekaar came at me, tried to fire his gun, a kett zalkin. After spitting two rounds the plasma charge ran out. He threw the gun in my face, yanked out a firaan, and tried to stab me. Thank god for marine combat training. The guy lunged, I dodged, paralyzed his outstretched arm with a jab to the muscles in his upper arm, and… and then I got him with my omni-blade. Almost gutted the poor bastard right there.

It was him or me… and it wasn't going to be me.

Thirty seconds later, the Roekaar were dead at our feet. There had been only seven of them at the end. I got one, Liam got one, Jaal got one, and Drack massacred the other four.

Again; I am really glad he's on our side.

Nobody shot at us from the back end of the canyon, so I assumed they were either dead or friendlies. SAM was busy scanning for radio frequencies, and I was about to try shouting when, low and behold, we got ambushed from behind.

Two angaran shuttles, showing up like spotlights in their white coats against the dark purple sky, flew into the mouth of the canyon, disgorged more Roekaar, and then took off again into the darkness.

The Roekaar came at us, some in red, but most in orange and yellow, loaded down with heavy weapons, a mix of angaran and kett gear. That's all I saw, but when I suddenly felt my shields pop and collapse without even getting hit by enemy fire, I knew that they'd brought along a hacker.

Jaal tried to contact the Roekaar over the comms, trying to negotiate. All I heard from the other side was angaran swear words.

This time, we were the ones on the defensive. The ground favored us, we had good cover, but four against twenty-odd heavily-armed and pissed off attackers was still a tall order, even with a krogan on our sides. Unfortunately for the Roekaar, a krogan wasn't the only thing we had.

With my shields gone, I had to keep my head down. That just gave me time to do something I'd never tried in combat before: invoke a Singularity. I told Liam to cover me while I pulled it off.

Invoking a biotic Singularity is one of the most complicated and powerful invocations a biotic, any biotic, can learn. It takes focus, solid technique, clarity of thought, and no small degree of power. Pulling off all that in the middle of a fight is not easy, even for a fully trained combat biotic specialist like a Special Forces Adept or a Vanguard. Luckily, I had SAM.

It was weird, and somehow, invigorating. I knew what I had to do, and somehow, SAM just shoved all the worries, cares, and fears out of my head, so all I had to focus on were the steps to invoke the Singularity.

When I was ready, I gave Liam the nod. He laid down cover fire while I stepped out of cover. I've watched videos of asari matriarchs invoking multiple singularities with a single sweeping gesture. I'm nowhere near that good. Even with SAM, I needed both hands to perform the Singularity. But… the risk was worth it. I picked a spot in the middle of the Roekaar, right behind where the biggest group was taking cover, and I invoked the Singularity exactly where I wanted it. First time pulling off a Singularity: one-hundred feet away, and

I see the angara, the unshielded ones, get yanked off their feet and dragged towards the micro-black-hole I'd opened up directly behind them. And then… I didn't even think. Again. Which was stupid.

I just reacted. I invoked my best biotic move, the Throw, and hurled it right into the middle of the Singularity.

A singularity is made by collecting and forcing dark matter to come together into a super-dense and microscopic ball, creating what is essentially a tiny, artificial black hole. Anything that gets too close is warped and crushed. Air phases into plasma. Anything not bolted down will get yanked into the singularity and crushed. Even biotic barriers will warp and shatter. But Singularity isn't an invocation that sticks around very long, and as I've learned, its an extremely delicate play of forces.

When you toss a large inertial mass, like a biotic Throw, into the middle of all that delicately controlled fury… Boom. Big. Boom.

The metal walls of the Remnant structures around us channeled the force of the blast up and down the canyon; right through the attacking Roekaar, and right through me. I didn't have time to take cover. I didn't have time to even think about taking cover. One moment I'm on my feet, seeing the Roekaar getting dragged into the Singularity, seeing the Throw go into the Singularity, and the next moment, I'm flat on my back and my ears are ringing.

I drag myself to my knees, yank my helmet off, trying to clear my head. I could hear SAM, but for the first time since Habitat 7, it was like I was hearing him through a wall. I'm covered in mud and dirt from the explosion.

Into my vision comes this angara, a male in the same kind of armor I'd seen the Resistance wearing on Aya, but clutching a red sash across his chest with one hand, and holding onto a kett pistol in the other. He staggers a few steps, then sees me. He walks up, raises his gun, pointing it at my head. I can't move, can't breathe, can't think, just look up the barrel of this gun that looks as big as a dreadnought's main gun.

Shots ring out. At first I thought it was me. But it's the angara that staggers and falls, a bloody hole appearing in its armor. Someone walks in front of me, and I focus on the glowing haptic lines on their boots, the brown tips of metallic spurs, and three-toed feet.

"Gut shot. Painful."

Those were the turians words, just before he fired another burst point-blank into the angara's chest, killing him where he was. Those were the first words I heard from the mouth of Avitus Rix. The first words I ever heard directly from the mouth of a Council Spectre.

Or, should I say, EX-Spectre. He'd retired from the Office of Special Tactics and Recon before joining the Andromeda Initiative, or so he told me later, after everything quieted down.

Avitus pulled me to my feet and introduced himself. Turns out he was from Ark Natanus, the turian ark, and a member of the Natanus's Pathfinder Team. Not the Pathfinder himself, but second-in-command. Two weeks before, he had woken up in his malfunctioning stasis pod, broke out, and found himself in a heavy shuttle with almost forty other turians, wrecked on a mountainside here on Havarl. When they determined that the shuttle would never fly again, the surviving turians, led by Avitus, salvaged what they could and headed down into the valley and in among the Remnant structures. Living off of their own small supply of dextro-based rations, they'd managed to get to the Remnant complex, set up in the canyon, and fortified in-depth. No sooner had they finished their fortifications that the Roekaar attacked.

Maybe it was the fortification that set the Roekaar off. Maybe it was because they were different. Hell, humans didn't do much better when we first met the turians.

A long story short, Avitus and his people had been fighting off attacks by the Roekaar and the local wildlife for the last seven days. Their original number of twenty-four survivors had been whittled down to fourteen, and three of those were critically injured. They all needed food, water, medical care, and a safer place to sleep than under a slab of salvaged hull plating and a thermal blanket.

That snapped me into action. SAM was already making the call back to the Tempest. I handed over all the Medi-gel I had on me. Liam did the same. I asked Vetra to load the Nomad with enough of her dextro rations for fourteen half-starved turians. I called Lexi and told her to get her turian trauma kit and extra medi-gel. Vetra would drive the Nomad, Lexi would ride shotgun with the food and medical supplies, and Cora would stay at the Tempest and get things ready for our arrival.

It was only about half an hour before the Nomad rolled up and Vetra and Lexi hustled out with the supplies. Lexi immediately demanded to see the injured. Two minutes later, she gave her diagnosis. All three of the turians needed immediate medical attention in a hospital, or barring that, in the Tempest med-bay, as soon as possible, or they would die, period. Not only that, but all the turians were suffering from malnutrition and starvation to one degree or another, and almost everyone was injured to one degree or another.

Somehow, I managed to convince Jaal to call Daar Pelaav and beg them to loan us a small shuttle that they had for supply runs. Not large enough to carry all of us, but just large enough to carry Lexi, the three critically injured patients, and two more to help her. Vetra loaded up in the Nomad with two of the weakest turians suffering from malnutrition, and then tore off back to the Tempest, tires hurling up mud behind her.

With the worst of the wounded and suffering moved out, Avitus and the rest of his survivors tore their camp apart, salvaging everything they could; supplies, weapons, gear, even the wires from out of the shuttle plating to use for rope. Everyone got a weapon from the dead Roekaar. I asked Jaal about it, and he said as long as we didn't desecrate the bodies or take personal items, things should be fine. He dropped another Resistance beacon for a body pick-up, and then we headed out of the canyon.

The walk back to the Tempest was… tense. Not only were we on a hair-trigger for anything coming out of the jungle, but we were two humans (and me a biotic), a krogan, and an angara. Turians had bad blood with each of our respective races. Drack is a krogan, turians put down the Krogan Rebellions over two thousand years ago now. Turians and humans had given each other proverbial bloody noses during the First Contact War, and turians are generally wary if not outright superstitious about biotics. And Jaal? Goes without saying, given recent events.

We moved as quickly as we dared, heading north along the edge of the chasm, then following the stream west until we got to Daar Pelaav, and then turning south in a straight shot to the Tempest. I don't know whether our fire-fight with the Roekaar had scared everything off or what, but nothing messed with us. We covered five kilometers in just over an hour, and when we finally got to the Tempest, we were all tuckered out, even Drack.

Cora and the rest of the crew had set up a makeshift triage and quarantine area in the cargo-bay. Lexi was up in the medical bay operating on the critical patients, and Vetra was up there too, giving blood. In the meantime, Cora and the rest of the crew had set up a makeshift triage and quarantine area in the cargo-bay. As soon as we were sure that someone wasn't going to keel over dead, we'd stick an supplements IV in their arm, directed them to one of the makeshift hammocks turians prefer to beds, and moved on to the next patient. The turians, for their part, passed out as soon as they lay down.

Now, we have fourteen new passengers, passengers with special needs. Turians can't eat the same foods the rest of do because of the chirality thing, and we didn't bring a lot of turian rations to begin with. I need to find out the situation.

But… tomorrow. Right now, I just really need a hot shower, a big meal, and about twelve hours of sleep. Make that food first; I thought I smelled Drack cooking something in the galley when I went past. I'll go and see what he's doing.

That is if I can keep my eyes open long enough to get there.

SAM, end recording.

…

Authors Notes:

Something that I've noticed in some of the reviewers of ME:A is that Jaal shows a seemingly marked disinterest during the Pathfinders first encounters with the Roekaar. I just wanted to give a little more characterization to this aspect within angaran society. Your thoughts on my portrayal, anyone?