AEGIS MANTLE
XCOM's mobile headquarters resembled an anthill that had recently encountered a boot. Personnel dashed to and fro, about a quarter of them with the frenetic energy that showed some critical purpose or other, the other three quarters wandering around asking what was going on, shouting for order or orders, panicking and generally getting in the way. Through it all Hackett sprinted, dread fuelling his every move.
He burst onto the command deck, already snapping out orders.
"Bradford, get me fleet wide."
Less than a second later the light that indicated his voice was being broadcasted to every receiver on the XCOM secure network.
"This is Fleet Commander Hackett to all XCOM personnel. As of 0330 GMT the Wall has been breached in fourteen locations by Groundsplitter class plasma bombs and Chryssalid swarms are free. We strongly suspect EXALT to be responsible. The United Nations Chryssalid Containment Task Force has lost all assets on the Wall. It is most likely that they have been exterminated to a man."
Hackett could hear the quiet curses of the bridge crew as it hit home that eighty thousand men had been wiped out by Chryssalid swarms.
"All section leaders are to report to their work stations and all combat personnel are to report to briefing halls. All other personnel are to remain in quarters or common areas until they receive orders to the contrary."
He paused for a moment, looking around at the terrified faces staring at him for reassurance.
"As of this moment, we are in a Code Twelve situation. I urge you all to keep in mind the consequences of failure at this juncture as we proceed. Good luck and may our gods protect us."
He nodded at Bradford, who shut off the fleet wide.
"Sir, incoming priority calls. At least a hundred."
"Run analysis."
Ignoring the shouts and general chaos of the room, Hackett leaned over the comm tech's station.
"Putting through Warlord Wrex for you."
Moments later a familiar scarred visage filled the screen.
"Warlord. What can I do for you?"
He grunted.
"Heard your speech. Turns out our comms are still in your network. I can have twenty thousand pairs of boots on the ground in a day, a hundred thousand more in a week."
"I ... Thank you, friend."
Wrex looked right at him.
"Try not to die until we get here."
The line cut off. Hackett shook his head in amusement for the half second it took for reality to crash back down around him.
###
NORMANDY MIDNIGHT
"Alright, listen up!"
The Normandy's ground complement snapped to attention as Shepard strode in, already armoured up.
"The nerds have done their math, and the bugs are going to reach the refugee camps approximately forty hours before the estimated time we can get them evacuated. We're talking about fifteen million displaced French civilians we need to get out of the path of the Chryssalids. Our objective is Camp Nouveau Lille, eighty miles south of the French-Spanish border. We need to fortify it as best we can and then weather the onslaught until all the refugees are clear."
She looked around at her crew. Every single one of them had proven themselves in battle but she knew that this sort of long defensive action was far out of their comfort zone. XCOM operators were trained for short, fast, small scale actions. This would be a test unlike anything they had experienced before.
###
CAMP NOUVEAU LILLE
Shepard watched from her vantage point as the colossal ship came to a halt overhead. Intellectually she knew that it wasn't even as large as the Normandy but this close to the ground she could feel every single one of its six hundred and fifty metres.
The Kaesos class assault transport was the first ship in almost a millennium designed and built on Tuchanka. Granted, the Geth had done most of the legwork but she could clearly see the Krogan design influences in its hard, angular cuboidal shape and the intimidating but seemingly ornamental structure on the upper side of the prow that reminded her of a rhinoceros horn. At present the armoured shutters that usually covered the two long tunnel-like launch decks that ran right through the ship from bow to stern were open and shuttles were steadily flowing through, the ones exiting at the front full of heavily armed Krogan and their equipment and the ones entering at the rear packed with civilians.
She looked over as two Krogan approached her vantage point. One of them was fairly unremarkable looking, with a dirty brown crest and green eyes. He was in what looked like stripped down armour and lightly armed, leading her to conclude he was part of an artillery crew. The other was easily five foot taller than any other Krogan she had seen, although she couldn't tell how much of it was due to the heavy armour he was wearing. His entire figure was hidden by the armour and so she couldn't get a look at his features.
"Commander Shepard?"
She nodded.
"That's me."
"I'm Urdnot Vass, commander of our artillery units. This is Grunt, our infantry commander."
She raised an eyebrow at the unusual name but dismissed it.
"What assets do you have?"
"Eight heavy guns we can deploy, a thousand regular infantry and a hundred specialists."
"Specialists?"
To her surprise the larger Krogan spoke up.
"MEC units."
That explained his inordinate height.
"I see. The firepower will come in handy, I'm sure. How many of your boys have fought Chryssalids before?"
"Most of us have come across them at some point on Tuchanka."
Further conversation was stalled as she tilted her head to the side, listening to the psionic chatter of the various XCOM units assigned to protect the camp.
"The swarm's just passed the twenty kilometre mark. How quickly can you set up your artillery?"
"We can deploy in ten minutes."
"Good. I want shells hitting the swarm ASAP."
The three of them looked over to the north as a series of bright flashes lit up the horizon.
"That would be the bombers. Set your guns up behind the bastion. Grunt, I want your men split into squads and stationed around the northern perimeter. We'll have to break their initial momentum if we want to survive this."
The two Krogan nodded and left to carry out their orders as the familiar booming of artillery met her ears. The MLRS was a venerable weapon system that still used pre-Ethereal tech but against Chryssalids the much-feared 'Steel Rain' was more than enough. If she strained her ears she could fancy hearing insectoid shrieks as the bomblets cut a swathe through the ranks of the approaching Chryssalids.
"Prepare your men. And good luck."
The helmeted Krogan let out a low chuckle.
"I don't need luck. I have ammo."
As he stomped away, Shepard smiled wryly. She already liked the Krogan MEC pilot.
"Tali, give me a sitrep."
About three quarters of a kilometre south of her, Tali let loose a final string of invective before answering. Usually she could psionically communicate the information Shepard would inevitably want, but the psionic ruckus thrown up by a quarter million panicking civilians made mental communications near impossible without direct line of sight.
"We're one wrong move away from a full on panic down here. The shuttles are moving as quick as they can but for the civilians they can't go fast enough. Even with psionic interference there's a real morale problem developing."
"Keep them calm however you can, but above all keep them moving. What about the backup plan?"
Tali sighed. The backup plan, and the source of her ire, sat in front of her, mocking her with a single red light among a row of greens.
"One of the injectors got cracked on the way down. I'm working on it."
She glowered at the city-buster plasma bomb in front of her, arms coated to the elbows in oil that was leaking from the damaged injector.
"For the record I'm not happy about this."
On the other end of the line Shepard sighed.
"I know. But this is SOP for Chryssalid attacks. If you can't save a civ, better to kill them than leave them for a Chryssalid. The only difference here is the scale."
"You're willing to kill all these people ..."
Shepard interrupted her with an iron voice.
"I'm willing to do whatever it takes to protect my planet. That includes denying assets to the enemy by any means."
Tali snapped out her response with a definite edge in her voice.
"So that's all this is to you? Denying assets to the enemy?."
When Shepard responded it was with a cold tone Tali was unused to.
"That bleeding heart of yours is a liability. Get a handle on it. Shepard out."
Tali heard the click of the comm line disconnect in her ear and turned back to the bomb, her movements just slightly more forceful than necessary.
###
CAMP NOUVEAU LILLE
"Two Kilometres! Ready weapons!"
All around the perimeter, soldiers clutched their weapons like precious lifelines.
"Snipers fire at will!"
Emerald green beams snapped out from airborne Archangel equipped snipers, each one picking off a charging Chryssalid. Shepard had been imagining a solid wall of purple chitin stretching back to the horizon, a super-sized version of the much feared swarms seen during the Invasion and Tuchanka, but instead the Chryssalids had just enough separation to mean that they weren't bumping and jostling one another. Either the artillery had thinned out the horde quite a bit or the Chryssalids were smarter than she had expected. Nevertheless it did mean that the snipers did have discrete targets to aim at instead of just blindly firing into the horde.
The Chryssalids had accelerated as soon as the snipers had opened fire, charging headlong heedless of casualties. At the rate they were going they were covering one hundred metres every five seconds.
"1500 metres! 1200 metres! 1000 metres, heavy weapons open fire!"
From behind the line, direct fire artillery pieces started to roar. Their range was far longer than one kilometre but they chewed through ammunition fast and were only designed for use in short bursts. Plasma cannon, laser cannon and even some venerable Phoenix CIWS were all roaring, chewing up the front line of Chryssalids, and the charge faltered as they reaped their toll. Nevertheless the Chryssalids kept coming, dashing through the kill zone then reforming their phalanx once they were past. A couple of the cannons retargeted but Shepard ordered them to maintain their staggered bombardment, creating a gauntlet the swarm had to run in order to close in.
"600 metres! 500 metres! 400 metres! Rifles, fire at will!"
A mix of plasma rifles, heavy plasmas and Krogan weapons barked out, sending emerald green ionised gases and shards of alloy flying into the swarm. Although individually less powerful, the sheer number of infantry weapons meant the wall of fire reaped a terrible toll on the Chryssalids. Nevertheless, they kept pressing forward, leaping over their own dead in their urge to get into melee range of the soldiers pouring fire into their ranks.
"300 metres, 200 metres, 100 metres ..."
Then a new voice came over the comm networks.
"Curses fire at will."
Any response was cut off as from the frontlines rose the most bone-shakingly powerful roar Shepard had ever heard. The Chryssalids kept running but the frontline abruptly stopped exactly twenty three metres from the crude rampart. No Chryssalid could make it past that line, and Shepard initially thought that there was a stream running along the line until she realised that whatever weapons the Krogan were firing had carved a trench into the ground that was filling up with liquid state Chryssalids.
Her jaw dropped, Shepard peered down and used her advanced eyes to see exactly what the Krogan were using to do that much damage. What she saw made her fight down a laugh at the sheer Krogan-ness of the weapons.
The Claymore had been the most powerful shotgun in Council space before the Ethereals had showed up, and the second iteration of the venerable weapon expelled the same volume of alloy as half a clip of the Katana in one shot, shaped into needle thin flechettes that could slice flesh into a substance that somewhat resembled Tubby Custard. The Krogan had taken four such Claymores, arranged them into a two by two configuration and to put it bluntly had turned them into a Gatling gun. With a rate of fire of approximately six alloy shells a second coming from a colossal box magazine hooked to the backs of the warriors wielding them, the automatic scatter-cannon had the same damage output in one second as about forty Katana firing simultaneously. Approximately four hundred such weapons were now pelting the approaching swarm, two hundred infantry carried weapons and one mounted on each wrist of each of the hundred Krogan MECs. The sight was nothing short of beautiful.
By the time the Chryssalids stopped charging blindly into the firestorm their chewed up losses formed a crescent shaped lake that was thirty metres wide and over two hundred metres long. Shepard watched as several requisitioned trucks made the trip from the landing site to the front line, delivering replacement magazines for the scatter-cannon.
"Recon, what are the bugs up to?"
High above the battlefield, a recon ship orbited, a whole bevy of sensors pointed at the battle.
"Looks like the bugs are pulling back and regrouping."
"Feed the co-ordinates to the artillery crews if you please."
Moments later the eight Krogan rail-mortars hurled their shells high into the air, booming as the munitions broke the sound barrier about halfway along the barrels. At the apex of their arc the shells split into massive clusters of flechettes that aligned with the ground through the simple mechanisms of air resistance and gravity before raining down onto the unfortunate Chryssalids. The fondness the Krogan had for flesh-shredding alloy flechettes was never more apparent and appreciated as the impact of the artillery produced not a thunderous booming but a wet slosh sound audible all the way from the barricade. Moments later the Human artillery barked, rockets and plasma balls joining the flechettes in raining death down on the Chryssalids.
"This is Recon. Looks like the bugs are spreading out, trying to surround the camp."
Shepard acknowledged the message.
"Attention all Coalition forces. The Chryssalids are trying to surround the camp. Distribute yourselves around the perimeter of the barricades. Artillery, cease fire and await new targets."
Watching the clusters of friendly unit markers redistributing themselves, Shepard couldn't help but feel a stirring of fear. The line of green markers just looked so thin, like a soap bubble just waiting to burst at the lightest prod.
"Alright, make sure you dig in. Anything you can do to make the bugs lives harder, or preferably shorter."
Her attention was drawn by an unfamiliar humming sound. Looking around for the source, she saw nothing.
"Anyone else hearing a buzzing sound?"
She received a wave of affirmatives.
"I need eyes on the source ..."
At first she thought one of the artillery shells had caused a fire, until the cloud of smoke turned and started heading straight for the camp, the hum of thousands of insectoid wings growing steadily louder as they came.
"Oh."