Not This Time
Kaidan raised his rifle, and Leng sprang. Vega and Garrus' weapons both found nothing but empty air as Leng smashed his arm across Liara's, snuffing out whatever mnemonic she was performing, then lashed out a leg at Tali, catching her across the faceplate with a crack and sending her flying backward. His cybernetic speed made even Cerberus' stealth troops look sluggish. Kaidan let his corona flow over him and willed it out, trying to pin the man in place, but Leng was still moving.
He danced around Vega's bull charge and tripped the lieutenant, sending him stumbling right into Kaidan's mass field. As Vega went by, there was a flash of steel as Leng reached around the marine's bulk and neatly relieved him of the combat knife strapped to his waist. As if it were all one balletic turn, Leng spun, ducked under Garrus' swing and buried the knife into the turian's exposed armpit, then yanked it out, spraying blue blood.
Gravity lurched again, this time laced with the coiling strangeness of the prothean's touch. The sudden green inversion caught Leng as he spun away again and sent him reeling. As the prothean's mass field flipped him into the air, he managed to get one foot planted on the ceiling and kick himself away, bouncing off a crate in a half roll. Javik fired after him, the particle beam following Leng and raking across his legs, scorching the synthetic muscle and slicing his pants into charred strips. Kaidan fired as well, and saw EDI throw a tech grenade.
The Cerberus assassin rolled into the shadow of another crate as the grenade detonated, then sprang up and sprinted into the open hallway back the way Kaidan's team had come, chased by Javik's green beam, the same mocking smile still etched into his face.
"Get back here, cabrón!" Vega shouted, pushing himself up to his knees. Blood spattered the ground under him.
EDI started after Leng, firing her pistol. The body's skin was rent in multiple places and it walked with a distinct limp.
"EDI!" Kaidan barked. "Stop! Stay together! Liara, help Garrus!"
The turian sank to his knees, rifle limp, one arm moving sluggishly to the wound. Blood pumped down the side of his armor. Kaidan contained himself, but with difficulty. He had to stay on his primary objective. Leng had known exactly how to keep them from pursuing him.
"Tali, get that door open!" Kaidan called, pointing to the door through which Tennyson's squad had disappeared. "Javik, Vega, cover them! EDI, cover Liara! We'll deal with Kai Leng once the primary objective is complete!"
Tali looked from him to Garrus, wringing her hands, then spun to obey. The asari knelt next to Garrus, medigel case already in hand. Without hesitation, she pulled out one of the long pressurized canisters used for deep, penetrating wounds.
"I am sorry Garrus," Liara said, "I need to seal your lung. This is going to hurt a great deal."
His helmeted head nodded weakly.
She jammed the end of the medigel injector deep into the wound and fired it. The roar of pain that exploded from him nearly toppled him over, but EDI's platform caught his shoulder and steadied it without turning her head from its watchful scan. Garrus clawed at his helmet and yanked it off, gasping and spewing blood. Liara fired the medigel injector again, spreading the stuff over the surface of the wound. Garrus gurgled and coughed and heaved in a shuddering breath.
"The wound is grave," Liara said, looking up at Kaidan. "But I do not believe it reached his heart. Can you breathe, Garrus?"
"Not... nearly... enough," the turian wheezed. "Spirits... that hurt." His eyes took on the glaze of shock. His mexo was already flooding him with stims and painkillers. "Thought... rockets were bad..."
"We can't stop," Kaidan said. There was nowhere to retreat, anyway. "EDI, I need you to support and cover Garrus."
"Yes, sir," the body said crisply. She extended the undamaged hand to the turian. "Please issue orders as necessary."
Garrus grunted and let himself be pulled up. The skin under his plates had grown pallid, and he leaned heavily on the damaged mech. The platform had an eerily empty quality, devoid even of EDI's restrained mannerisms as it ran its backup VI. The turian gestured weakly at Kaidan, and he realized finally Garrus pointed at his pistol. The major pulled it off his hip and handed it over. Garrus nodded in thanks, putting it in his left hand.
Kaidan moved to the door, where Tali had the door panel off and wires pulled out. Kaidan noticed the quarian's visor had a long crack in it from top to bottom, half-covered by the protective armored plates that had slid into place. Beside her, Javik stood sentinel. Black streaks colored his armor in three places.
"Javik, you're hurt," Kaidan said.
"I am still capable," the prothean said curtly, ending any further discussion on the subject.
The ship shuddered slightly under Kaidan's feet.
Tali looked over her shoulder. "Got it. Give the word."
Garrus grunted in surprise. Kaidan turned and saw the EDI platform stand frozen, then suddenly straighten. "Connection re-established." She looked at Garrus, then back at Kaidan. "My platform appears to have sustained damage."
"It's going 'round," Garrus wheezed.
"EDI!" Kaidan said. "What the hell is going on out there?"
"The flotilla dropped out of FTL some distance from the Crucible build site-"
The deck jumped under Kaidan's feet, throwing him into the bulkhead and nearly knocking his rifle out of his hands. Warning klaxons blared again, this time the tone for external attack.
Whip-fast, EDI planted a leg and steadied Garrus. "The site is under guard by a division of Fifth Fleet," she said, unperturbed by the lurch, "including SSV Everest. It appears they were prepared. They attacked the moment you came out of FTL."
"Major!" Joker burst into the comm channel. "Are you still alive? Do you have Shepard? A warzone just erupted out here and knowing whose fucking side we're on would be helpful!"
"Hackett's side!" Kaidan snapped. "Stop any ship attempting to damage the Crucible!"
"Aye aye. Except, you know, you're in one of them!"
"We're getting Shepard and then we're getting out!"
EDI nodded. "The platform's memory has updated me on the local situation. Proceed."
The deck jumped again, less severely this time, but the team moved to the bulkheads on instinct as Kaidan nodded to Tali. The quarian flipped something in the gutted lock, and the door cycled open. He led the way, rifle raised, keeping close to the wall. Vega shadowed him. He could hear the lieutenant's wound in the man's breathing. It wasn't nearly as bad as Garrus', but Vega was also running on painkillers. They had to end this quickly.
"Be advised," EDI said, "the Crécy has accelerated to a collision course with the main body of the Crucible."
"He's gone insane!" Tali exclaimed.
"No," Javik said. "The Reapers have made him believe it is a threat. He is acting as a soldier would."
Kaidan gritted his teeth. Taking out the engines was useless once they had sufficient velocity- Hackett would be forced to either try to divert the ship's course or simply break the ship into as many pieces as possible. Unless Kaidan's team could get to the bridge and force a course change. Or a self-destruct.
"EDI," he said, "can you get into their nav systems?"
"Negative. Main computer access has been locked out-"
Something bounced down the corridor and detonated before anyone could react. Kaidan's visor suddenly went white, and the pain of an electrical shock shot through his muscles, making him stumble. Gunfire exploded around him as he pitched forward, landing hard on his knees and one hand. Somewhere ahead of him, mass fields surged and flowed. Something slammed into his shoulder, throwing him to the side. Another detonation punched the air, and he heard the whistle and ping of shrapnel.
As his vision swam back, he dimly saw the silvery silhouette of EDI hovering ahead of him. There was shouting and gunfire. Figures swam in his vision, grey-armored Alliance marines. Two bore red stripes down their arms. Kaidan wrestled his rifle up and fired, but the shots were wild. Dark energy crashed around him, fields crawling into each other, caving in the bulkhead paneling, and then it suddenly exploded outward, tunneling away down the hall.
As quickly as it had started, the convulsion of violence faded. EDI loomed over him as he blinked away the stars. It was a horrifying sight. Half of the mech's face was missing, showing the elaborate skeletal armature beneath, and one eyeball hung loose on the connecting cable. There were two fist-sized holes in her torso, and one hand looked mangled. Her entire right side was decorated with shrapnel cuts.
"EDI!" he gasped.
"Platform re-remainzzz fungzzzzional." Her jaw didn't move, and the voice was eerily directionless. "Three hozztiles down, one re-retreated."
"Everyone's still breathing," Vega said.
Behind him, Garrus was on his knees, pistol held out, panting. "Speak... f'rself..."
Kaidan glanced at the bodies sitting in pools of bright red blood. Their armor and rank bars ground at him- these were some of the best of Alliance marines. One of them had the bar of a biotic. Was it another L2 perhaps? They'd come painfully close to overwhelming his team.
"At least they die well," Javik commented. "And you, machine woman, you are... brave."
"It izzzimple math," the shattered head stuttered. "Thizzz body izzz val-valuable, but ezzzzpendable c-compared to living c-crew."
Vega extended a hand and levered Kaidan to his feet. "Bridge ahead, Major."
He nodded, popped his heat clip and signed for his ragged team to follow.
The command deck layout was quite a bit different than the turian-human hybrid design of the Normandy, but Kaidan had been on many a bridge like it in his career. The whole affair stepped downward with forward-facing terminals, all around a large CIC and captain's chair set in the rear center. Holodisplays lined the walls, the largest one taking up most of the front wall. There were narrow windows beyond, but they were shuttered and armored in combat. The holodisplay showed arrays of ships, a distant planet, and a very oddly-shaped vehicle that looked more like an ovoid space station.
Smoke eddied around them, swirling in the venting air as they came through the door, which let out onto the command levels around the center. At first Kaidan thought the entire bridge was empty, but then down at the main nav console, a large form stood up.
Kaidan realized with a small shock that he'd been fighting Tennyson just a moment ago. The admiral had removed his helmet, but the dark grey armor was the same, adorned with the same red stripe Shepard always wore. Once you earned that stripe, you didn't take it off. And Tennyson had earned it a long time ago.
"Stop! Don't any of you do anything stupid, now," Tennyson warned. "No biotics." He very deliberately pointed his pistol down at a kneeling figure at his feet.
Kaidan took a deep breath, lowered his rifle and held out a hand to the others. His eyes locked onto Shepard. Her arms were held stiffly behind her. He could just see a pair of large manacles over her forearms, and there was some kind of heavy collar around her neck. She wore the same spare prisoner clothing as Kai Leng. Her face was bruised, her mouth a hard line.
"You're not going to shoot me, old man," Shepard said. She leaned away from the pistol, more irritated at its presence than scared. Her eyes stared into a middle distance, clearly not seeing the scene around her. Kaidan realized the collar must be disrupting her vision.
"Listen to me, Major," Tennyson said, pointing at the huge display. "That thing out there, the Crucible, it's going to kill us all. The Reapers have been screwing with us. They passed the plans down so we'd spend all our energy building our own suicide machine!"
"That's not true!" Liara retorted. "It came from the protheans, and from many more species before them!"
"The Reapers would like you to believe that, wouldn't they? It's all just a sham!"
"This 'prothean' would beg to disagree!" Javik snapped. "It is our weapon."
Tennyson stared at Javik, a flicker of consternation crossing his face. "I don't know what genetic freak-tank Cerberus pulled you out of, bug-man-"
Shepard rolled her eyes. "He's real, Tenny. He speaks the damn language, the one only I can understand because of the alien cipher floating around in my skull!"
The ship shuddered, the structure creaking. A piece of wall paneling popped its rivets, sparks lashing out from behind it. Red warning text appeared on several of the cockpit terminals.
"It's quite an elaborate story they've set up, isn't it?" Tennyson raised his voice over the noise. "And now the geth are spreading it to everyone! They're running Reaper indoctrination software!"
"The geth rejected Reaper upgrades of their own will!" Tali retorted. "It's better than you-"
"Will all of you just shut up?" Shepard shouted. "It's a waste of time! I've had this argument a hundred times since I got here!" She twisted and bared her teeth in her former mentor's general direction. "The Reapers got to someone in this room, and there's only one way to know who. It's right at the moment of death. It was that way for Benezia, and for Saren, too. You want to settle this once and for all, that's what it's going to take!"
"Are you volunteering to go first?" Tennyson said darkly, moving the pistol closer. Kaidan's heart jumped up into his throat.
Shepard lifted her chin and thumped her forehead into the gun's muzzle. "I already died once, jackass! Remember? Hell, maybe my mongrel body is why the Reapers have such a hard time getting into my head!"
Something nudged Kaidan's arm, startling him. EDI's damaged arm appeared in his peripheral vision, pointing upward. He followed it and saw the exact same relay box bolted to the cockpit ceiling as had been on the Euryale. He hissed between his teeth and strode forward a few steps, but froze when Tennyson glared at him.
"The relay key you acquired was designed by Cerberus!" Kaidan said, pointing at it. "We found some of their schematics! Kai Leng himself was sitting in your cell, the man who turned a whole section of C-Sec against the Citadel! The poison is in your own house, and has been for months now!"
"Leng never got outside his cell!" Tennyson said.
"I'm betting he didn't have to," Shepard said. "He could be a walking indoctrination bomb-"
An explosion rocked the ship from somewhere below-decks, and gravity slammed them hard, then yawed weirdly sideways. Kaidan saw Shepard jerk her head back, plant her foot, and shove her shoulder into Tennyson's midriff. The pistol barked once, pinging off the deck plating. As the major snapped into a run, she lurched away, unseeing, and spun off a railing, sprawling awkwardly to the ground.
Kaidan vaulted, feeling the sheer will of his corona loft him just a little bit, and landed hard on the gantry next to her. Two, three shots hit his barrier hard, driving his breath out in red-hot impacts. He spun, focusing all of the tension he'd been carrying for hours, days, even, into one instant and cut the straining barrier loose. It slingshotted off him toward the admiral. The gantry buckled, and the railing warped and jerked free as the blue-black wave of dark energy savaged them with conflicting mass fields, finally smashing into Tennyson. He flew backward, crashing through a crew terminal and knocking the chair and holodisplay off their mounts.
As the din subsided, Kaidan stood panting, hands and rifle outstretched and shaking. His stomach hurt. It took a couple of overlong seconds to process the fact his hardsuit hadn't been penetrated. "I told you what would happen if you got in my way," he growled.
The admiral laughed, a short, humorless bark that made Kaidan feel a little stupid for his bluster. The huge man slowly pulled himself up from the debris. Blood streamed from his nose and a gash in his head, and there was a length of piping embedded in his hip, just above the thighplate. Kaidan pulled up his rifle and aimed between the man's eyes, finger tense on the trigger. Tennyson half-raised his pistol. He glanced to the side, and the array of weapons pointed at him, then back up at the large holodisplay now over Kaidan's shoulder, then down to where Shepard lay.
He glowered down at Kaidan until the hardness of his face retreated, until the deep lines and scars of it seemed to stand out in sharp relief to the flashing alert symbols. The blood coming off his face ran into the N7 stripe, streaking slowly across his rank insignias. Another distant explosion shook the ship. A baleful hiss started up from the atmo vents and smoke billowed in, coming from elsewhere in the system.
"You don't get to take my life, son," he said finally. "I'll live and die by my own decisions."
He turned and swept an imperious glare over the rest of the team, thrusting a pointing finger across the command deck. "You hear me?" he thundered. "Get off my ship!"
Kaidan suffered a moment of confusion before he realized the man pointed to the bridge escape pod bay. Two of the pods were gone, but one remained.
"That's... it then?" Shepard said. She bumped into Kaidan's legs as she tried to get back to her knees.
"If I'm gone then I'm already gone, and my sins are too deep to name," Tennyson tossed the pistol over his shoulder, and his face screwed up in pain. He touched the length of rod, bemused. Blood oozed over it. "But if you're right about death then at least I'll know for sure one way or the other before it's over." He looked at Kaidan. "You get to live by your decisions today, Alenko. Enjoy it while it lasts. Now get out of here before I change my mind. Or they make me change my mind."
"Tenny-"
"Don't... turn into me, Shepard. Whatever happens. Now go on, beat it!" He spun on his heel, limped painfully to the command chair, and summoned a display.
An ominous shudder built in the ship's structure, as if it were coming apart under its own weight. Kaidan stowed his rifle and spun around in one quick movement. His bruised and exhausted body was suddenly recalcitrant as he bent and pulled Shepard to her feet. She hadn't been allowed a shower in a few days, but the smell of her was perversely wonderful, singing through his blood.
"Kaidan... I can't see," she said through her teeth. She sounded very tired, and scared.
"I know. Come on, we're getting out of here."
He looked around and saw the others had already edged toward the escape pod. Liara and EDI appeared to be manhandling Garrus through the narrow door. The deck jumped under his feet again, and the a-grav and main power failed altogether.
The awful memory of the death of the SR-1 lurched into his head as he became suddenly weightless, making his guts seize. He snapped an arm around Shepard's waist before she could fall away from him and kicked against the terminal housing behind him. Emergency lighting flashed fitfully in the sudden dark, a nightmare shadow of the maw of hard vacuum waiting to devour them. Not this time. You can't have her this time.
Shadows flashed. A hand reached out to them, batting aside the metal fragments flying past. He was going to miss. With his free hand Kaidan pulled his rifle off his back and stretched it out, straining. The extra length was enough- Vega snagged it by the stock and gave a yank, changing their course toward the pod bay opening. The lieutenant bustled them through without ceremony, banging Kaidan's helmet on the doorjamb in his haste, then punched the eject. The door slammed shut and the docking clamps released with a thud.
They were eight floating bodies, some trying to get to the seats, others just hanging on. As the thrusters roared to life, Liara threw her arms out, stretching the breadth of the cramped pod, and surged blue. The mass in the room suddenly folded out, swallowing up their kinetic energy. Instead of slamming into the pod's door, there was only the slightest drift of the occupants as the craft accelerated away. More remarkable still, she held it ten, fifteen seconds until the main thrusters cut out. Then the field dropped, leaving her panting and clutching her wounded arm.
Garrus coughed. His breathing sounded painfully labored. The whole pod shook around them, then went still again. Kaidan tightened his grip on Shepard.
She was curled up awkwardly, arms still pinned, her head under his chin. "You guys are a sight for sore eyes," she said in the sudden quiet, voice rough. "Such as it is right now, anyway. Is... everyone okay?"
"Banged up," Kaidan said, pointing with a thrust of his helmet. "Vega, get the ox tank in the medkit for Garrus."
"On it," the marine replied. He edged around the other floating bodies and went for the supply compartments under the chairs.
He opened his comms. "Joker, what's your status?"
"You're learning all the wrong Spectre lessons about cutting it close," the pilot said irritably, "you know that? You're supposed to be the stable one!"
"Joker-"
"The Crécy just exploded. Looked like a self-destruct."
Kaidan swallowed. "And the Crucible?"
"Still trying to get reports from the Everest. From what I can see there's some damage but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. No major collisions. A couple of Hackett's ships got pretty badly shredded, though. They put themselves in the way of incoming ordnance."
"Okay. We've got wounded, need a pickup ASAP."
"Gonna be tricky, there's a lot of flying debris out there."
"Since when has 'tricky' been a problem for you?"
"Hey, if I don't remind you sometimes, you might forget how awesome I am!"
The comm clicked off. They drifted in their tiny craft. Vega and Tali fit Garrus into the human-designed oxygen mask, and Javik floated with his arms crossed, foot hooked on a seat rail. When Kaidan caught the prothean's eye, the alien gave a curt nod. Liara squeezed Shepard's shoulder and murmured something.
Kaidan hugged Shepard lightly against himself, feeling her breathing against his arm. She was tense, quivering just a little, no doubt keeping the turmoil she must be feeling locked up behind the dull veneer of shock. He eyed the collar and the manacles. They offended him to his core. He wanted to pull them off with his bare hands, but the memory of the thermite traps on Nos Astra kept him cautious, patient.
The enormity of the last few hours sank slowly through him, chilling him. Too many near misses, too many maybes. Everything way too close. Rationally, he knew he was supposed to care about the Crucible, and about the false relay keys. About Cerberus' divide and conquer ploy. He knew he would, sometime tomorrow, or maybe the day after that when his nerves had smoothed and it was about getting back to the job.
But right then, in the shivering privacy of his own skull, he cared only about the living, breathing person in his arms.