MOTE

FOUR: VACUUM


A week passed.

Vortash wandered through it in a daze, mesmerised by the diversity of Vakarian's team. He'd expected a largely turian ensemble from the evident discipline he'd observed in Archangel's behaviour, but he'd never imagined it could be this broad and still function as a coherent force.

The humans didn't seem to hold any of the anti-turian prejudice he encountered from time to time in their species; Butler, the quiet, anxious-looking techie, was achingly polite to him, while Monteague and Weaver seemed to spend most of their time bickering amongst themselves. They made an interesting pair: one slim and hairless, one vast and hirsute, and there was apparently some kind of national rivalry between them as well. Vortash knew very little about human internal politics, but Butler had intimated to him that their respective homelands were broadly unimportant. That made sense. In Vortash's experience, how much people cared about something was often inversely proportional to how much it actually mattered.

The salarians were insane, of course, but in different ways: Mierin used words like they cost him a thousand creds apiece, and Erash was an explosion fetishist. On the third day after Vortash had joined, the bunk on the top floor of the base he'd taken to using had, along with about half the furniture on that level, disintegrated. After they'd treated him for minor burns, Erash insisted that the basic principle was sound – though when asked which basic principle, he'd admitted it was up for debate. Vortash slept in his old apartment for two nights after that.

The turians... Vakarian was Vakarian, hardened from the man Vortash had known but still undeniably him. He didn't seem to have any downtime, and only slept about six hours a day. The rest of the time, he was poring over stolen data troves and drawing up complex plans in the air with his omnitool. Once, Vortash found him in the garage, shooting down a row of fifty or sixty empty cans and bottles with his rifle. He didn't miss a shot.

There was a single-mindedness to him which Vortash found both reassuring and unsettling. Reassuring because there was no doubt that Vakarian was as serious as he could be about Archangel, unsettling for just the same reason. Vortash knew there was uncertainty under the carapace and behind the visor, but Vakarian's actions betrayed no hint of any weakness or indecision. He'd expected dedication. Vakarian's seeming lack of any kind of personal life, though, was a step beyond. A step too far, maybe. A man needs to stay sane.

Vortash could think of no better evidence for that than Ripper. He knew damaged goods when he saw them. It was in the stare. Nearly every time he saw Ripper, he was cleaning something: his elegant black armour, his weapons, the kitchen... and he did so with a strange, distant look in his eyes, like he was permanently watching something on a distant horizon. Even before he'd got the full story of V-33 out of the rest of them, something about Ripper's clinically, obsessively professional attitude got to him. Ripper was to soldiers as other soldiers were to civilians: he was on another level, a different, alien dimension. He'd even tried to call Vortash 'sir' for a while, and he was the only one who called Vakarian that. Vortash had heard about the cabals, though mostly from exaggerated rumour, bad films and a series of video games he'd played way back when he was a teenager, and the detective in him had wanted to drag every last detail out of Ripper – but he could see that there were wounds there which hadn't healed. Might never heal. And until they did, Ripper's eyes would always be glassy, distant.

Sidonis, on the other hand, Vortash tried not to talk to. The kid was brash, arrogant, rude, and worst of all, he was irredeemably, undeniably and offensively young. There was something fundamentally wrong with the universe, Vortash reflected, if Sidonis was allowed to be so youthful and he himself was condemned to a slowing, crumbling body. Sidonis would grow out of it in time, Vortash knew, but it still grated. He gathered that Sidonis had grown up on Invictus, away from the Hierarchy proper and with an unorthodox version of the mandatory military training all turians went through, and maybe that was part of it – or most of it.

Krul he found fascinating. The krogan was slow in a regal, intelligent way, thoughtful and meditative and devoid of almost every stereotypically krogan trait Vortash could think of. He behaved almost like an elcor in some ways, like a salarian in others, and like a krogan in none. Vortash hadn't got the full story yet, but what he'd heard sounded like what he'd expected – that Krul had been raised by non-krogans. As a case study into the nature-nurture debate, Krul was exemplary. Vortash had run across a number of non-conformist krogan – if that's the word for it, and I don't think it is – in his time, but never one as unique as Krul; they had been urbane, restrained, cultured, yet simultaneously superficial, their outward façade only skin-deep. Krul seemed fundamentally different in a way that eluded Vortash. It might have been in his movements, or his speech, or his face, or any combination thereof.

To complement the krogan who was not a krogan was the volus who was not a volus. The first time Vortash had seen Melenis unfurl himself to his full, hulking size, he'd sat down on thin air out of surprise. Everyone had laughed. Well, except me. And Melenis. And Mierin.

He'd always known the technology existed. Forms of it had seen use for those people unfortunate enough to have some rare genetic disorder or other that meant they couldn't have replacement body parts grown, and there were rumours that some salarian and human special forces, blacker than black, cybernetically enhanced their operatives in similar ways. He had, however, never expected to see it on a volus, and therein lay Melenis's greatest value. Nobody suspects the volus. Well, not in this business, at least.

Melenis was the only one whose pre-Archangel life Vortash had learned absolutely nothing about. The name was clearly assumed, though he could only guess at why. Nobody seemed to know much about the volus, and Melenis himself was carefully, politely evasive when pushed.

Sensat was the closest to Melenis, and if anyone knew it would be him – but the batarian would never tell, perhaps only out of spite. Sensat seemed to exist in a constant state of exasperation with everyone around him. Out of everyone Vortash had ever met, he was a contender for the coveted prize of 'easiest to irritate', an impressive feat considering his competition. Captain Fracanus once punched someone out for breathing too loudly in one of her briefings, I remember that much... mostly because it was me. Those were the days.

Sensat's role in the group wasn't immediately clear, partly due to his habit of locking himself in a small room all day, but it became obvious the day he came haring out of his study in the early hours of the night cycle, shoved past a yawning Vortash on his way to the bathroom for the second time in an hour, and threw a shoe at Vakarian while he slept.

"I was just getting your attention," Sensat was muttering an hour later, as Butler and Krul came hurrying in to complete the group. "I thought you would dodge it."

"I was asleep," Vakarian said wearily. There was a small gouge on his carapace just above his right eye. "I'm good, but not that good."

"I hope this is good," Butler said, collapsing into a couch next to Vortash. "I don't think Nalah likes it when I get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. Come to think of it, I don't like it either."

Vakarian glanced around, then stood. The murmuring died away, and eleven faces watched him intently. Even in the dead of night, bleeding from a wound made by a thrown shoe, he still radiated command.

"OK," he said. "I know getting up at this hour is a pain in the ass."

"Or the head," Erash said cheerfully. He got dirty looks, not for the comment but for the fact that he was as fresh-faced as ever. Damn salarians. It's not fair. If I only needed an hour's sleep a night I'd rule the galaxy by now.

"As some of you might remember," Vakarian said, "about a week ago, we knocked over an Eclipse network hub." Vortash nodded when Vakarian looked sideways at him. "Now, that screwed their systems station-wide. That's the kind of harassment we want. If we do this right, they won't just be living in fear of us. No, it'll be much worse. They'll be annoyed. Every little thing will get just a bit harder for them, everything will run just a little less smoothly. Long-term, we're looking at destabilising the syndicates from within, encouraging decentralisation, fragmentation. Divide and conquer, in short. But along with that comes another imperative: we don't go for the big ones. We're not shooting for the moon any longer. This is small-scale guerilla action, not huge shows of force. There are examples from every history to show us why we shouldn't risk it all. The battle of Crythos Spire, the Skyllian Blitz, the assault on Jurionn City back in the third Lystheni uprising, the Tet Offensive... history shows that every time, the smaller force crippled themselves by playing to the rules set down by the people they were fighting against."

He paused, looked gravely around.

"Here it comes," Erash murmured.

"But," Vakarian said firmly, "tonight we have a unique opportunity. We swiped terabytes of data from Eclipse storage when we killed the hub, and we've had Butler and Sensat decoding it all week. Guys?"

Sensat stood up very quickly, before the yawning Butler had even stirred beside Vortash. "Basically, we're ignoring most of it. They might not have good discipline when it comes to file storage, but their encryption is top-notch. We have to unlock each file individually, and their ICE is way past the commercial shit you usually see. Still, we've got a lot of valuable stuff, mostly to do with off-station business – and that's why we're here. In-" He looked down at his omnitool, "-just under four hours, an Eclipse freighter comes in from Illium, loaded with what looks like high-value hardware. Not guns, but mechs, armoured vehicles, maybe even gunships. This is top fucking secret; the ICE around this was three, four times thicker than the average, which is why we cracked it in the first place."

"As far as we know," Vakarian continued, "the boys in yellow don't have a clue we were there to steal data. We got the techies outside before we started mining, and we had it done even before we were done setting the charges. Now, they might suspect we took some, but they won't know we broke their highest levels of encryption. I hope."

Sussurant laughter rippled through the group.

"On the flipside," Sensat said, "if we act on this, we alert them to the fact that they're idiots, never a good move. They'll know we're good enough to get to them."

Vakarian nodded. "That means an increase in operational security, and our job gets harder. And that's not even considering the dangers of hitting them in the first place. It's on the border between harassment and large-scale assault, and the data we have on the ship has nothing about defences or security. We know- put it up, would you?"

Sensat tapped a few buttons on his omnitool. The lights dimmed, and a skeletal white hologram of the freighter appeared in mid-air, slowly rotating.

"Standard Hariyye Wayfarer class, fourth model," Vakarian said. He walked over to the ghostly image and held out a hand to quell its motion. "Now, the way we see it, there's no real way you can mod something like this for combat effectively; you might get firepower, if you sacrificed pretty much everything else, but even fully modded it'll manoeuvre like a drunken elcor. The Hailfire can run rings around it, snipe out their weapons before they can bring 'em to bear. That means it'll be boarding actions."

Sidonis half-raised a hand.

"Yes?"

"Can we not just blow them the fuck up?"

"We could," Vakarian said. "But we want to scour their computers, check their inventory, work out their routes so we can hit them again and regularly – this is about information, not just one shipment. It's a new kind of war now, and especially with Eclipse, you have to beat them at their own game. Turn their own tech against them."

"Know your enemy and know yourself, and you'll... be really bloody good," Weaver pronounced. He looked around smugly. "That's Sun-Tzu."

"A direct quote, no less," Monteague said under his breath.

"Indeed," Vakarian said, with a thin smile playing on his lips. "And besides, I've always wanted a gunship to call my own."

Sidonis snorted. "Whatever, have it your way. But if I get killed up there, I'm blaming you."


Discussion petered out fairly soon. There was unanimous agreement that the opportunity was too good to pass up. Vortash refrained from pointing out that this kind of opportunity had a horrible habit of ending in disaster, but a familiar feeling of cold, heavy paranoia settled in his chest nevertheless.

He remembered it from dozens of dangerous operations over the years. It was a deeply disquieting sensation, a stomach full of lead to carry down dark corridors and into the deepest hives in the Wards every time there was a tip-off the brass decided had to be acted on or an investigation was forced to a head prematurely by politics. That is to say, frequently.

It was a younger man's game, no doubt, and he'd been acutely aware of that as he watched the plans as they were drawn onto the hologram. The geth attack had been the only time in fifteen years he'd seen major combat action, and it had been a living nightmare. They'd fought geth hand-to-hand in the streets of the Wards while wreckage and fire rained down like the judgement of an angry god, while centuries-old building crumbled and smoke blotted out the arclights overhead, and he'd fought like a man a third his age – until his body had caught up to him as they engaged a squad of juggernauts under the decapitated statue of Byara Trelyn on Fifteenth, and he'd been left a wheezing wreck with legs of jelly while battle raged around him.

That feeling of helplessness, with barely any breath in his chest and hands so weak they could barely hold a pistol as he slumped against the statue's base, was one of his worst experiences in a long life full of contenders. He remembered wondering if civilisation was coming to an end.

The same pistol rested in his hands now as the Hailfire flashed away from the spaceport and out through the air curtain. It was a better ship than Archangel had any right to; smaller than a frigate but larger than a corvette, it was designed to be piloted by a skeletal crew – in fact, Melenis could apparently fly it by himself. They wound through the traffic coming in and out of Omega and – Vortash watched this on a screen, little icons blinking and moving along dotted lines scratched into the fabric of the universe – took a wide trajectory out, away from the main lanes, cut the thrusters and drifted into position.

And waited.

Vortash explored the ship for half an hour, in which time he saw the whole thing twice. It was cramped, compact and built for function rather than style apart from what looked like a captain's quarters. He went through some of the files on the unlocked terminal; months old. A familiar name appeared. Huh. So that's what happened to Gus Williams' old ship.

An hour later, he was breathing heavily into his helmet. He was still using the Hailfire'sair rather than his suit's own supply, but any hint of decompression and his air filter would clam up tighter than tight. It didn't make Vortash feel any better. He didn't like space. There was too damn much of the stuff.

The Eclipse ship ran late by a few minutes, enough to set some nerves jangling. Could they know? Ripper asked himself for the dozenth time, and then told himself: No. There's no way.

"These lazy fucks had better get their asses in gear," Sidonis said loudly, and the ship appeared.

There was an instant of silence as the huge new blood-blue icon blinked on the main plot, ponderously drifting away from the relay.

Nobody shouted, Vortash recalled later. There was a bridge-wide intake of breath, a moment to take stock and react.

"Right," Vakarian said evenly. "Take us in, Mel."

On some level, Vortash had known space combat wasn't as flashy and headache-inducing as the vids made it look. The only time he'd seen it before, however, was at the Citadel, slumped against a broken statue, staring up into the electric play of lasers and k-strikes overhead. Even now, he could still see the Normandy diving in to deliver the killer blow to the immense geth ship at the heart of the Citadel, howling past so close he could almost feel the wind on his face.

But all he saw on the Hailfire was a screen of lines and icons and numbers that didn't make any sense to him. Machinery hummed and crackled deep within the ship, making the deckplates rumble beneath his feet, and once there was a sharp jerk to one side as something hammered into their kinetic barriers – but it was all over inside twenty seconds. The first he knew of it was when Vakarian sat back from his console and breathed out.

"Their central power core is offline," Melenis said. "Shields down, weapons destroyed, engines no longer functioning." There was a pause. "We have sustained no damage."

Weaver tugged at his beard. "Poor buggers. Come out of the relay and bang, they're crippled. It doesn't feel fair." He shrugged, and unhooked the strap of his Revenant from his shoulder. "Ah, well. Fuck 'em."

"Is that it?" Vortash said cautiously. "We won?"

"Well, they're a powerless, unarmed hulk drifting through space at the mercy of a much better-armed ship," Vakarian said, "so, yeah. We won. At least, we won thatbattle. Does it look like we need another one?"

That last was directed at Melenis in his pilot's seat. The volus hit a few more keys, waited ten seconds, then turned and shook his head. "No response to our demand of surrender. Their comms may be down, but it is unlikely."

Vakarian sighed. "So we're doing this the hard way. It's never the easy way, is it?"


Ten of them crowded into the shuttle, with Butler and Sensat remaining behind. It was only a few seconds from the Hailfire to the Eclipse ship, though the approach was made harder by the gentle head-over-tail spin the boxy grey mass of the freighter had been sent into by their onslaught. Sensors told them the freighter's auxiliary power had kicked in, with weak mass effect fields providing some gravity. The cargo bay had been ripped wide open by a raking laser from the Hailfire designed for just that: making surgical incisions on an already-crippled target to allow for boarding action, and it was there they put down.

The lights had gone completely dark, with even the red pulse of the emergency lighting absent. The blackness made the cargo bay seem vast, a city of containers and crates wrapped in miles of shadow. Nobody was visible.

They made the breach perfectly. Vortash could still remember his old basic training on the matter, not to mention a few live-fire attacks on small-time pirate ships on the fringes of Hierarchy space, and it was second nature to fan out with the others and find cover behind a looming container. The gravity was maybe a third standard, making his every motion floaty and awkward. An oppressive silence filled the bay, broken only by the others' quiet breathing over the comm link. The atmosphere was long gone, a million little crystals floating somewhere in space outside.

He crouched there and waited for instructions, listening to the drumming of his heart – faster than it had been in years.

Vortash didn't know how how long it took for the first Eclipse trooper to arrive. It was more than ten seconds and less than ten minutes, but the time melted all into one mass in the darkness. Ghostly lines spooled across the inside of his helmet to delineate his surroundings, relying on scans over night-vision. The others were glowing webs in the shape of suits of armour, flexing and shifting slightly; the crates were wire blocks looming overhead.

Darkness, and heartbeats.

"Now," Vakarian said quietly.

Vortash's muscle memory took over, and he folded up and around into a firing position on the corner of his crate. Strings of red marked out the enemy shapes advancing into the room, some of them clearly organic and some unmistakeably synthetic, and before he could discern anything more, the air was ablaze with gunfire.

The blue-white streaks crackling away from Vortash's ancient pistol were lost in a sea of bullets. Assault rifles chattered noiselessly away on either side of him, punctuated by the sharp glare of Krul's shotgun as he advanced behind a mobile biotic barrier. Vortash's helmet was automatically cancelling out most of the light to maintain the visibility of the wire-mesh display, but Mierin was still visibly bathed in a harsh blue glow as he followed the krogan, hands buzzing with biotic power.

"Mechs on the left," Vakarian called, and Vortash swivelled to see a crate sliding open to disgorge a silent, slow-marching horde of LOKIs. He cursed himself for not having thought to scan the containers even as his pistol snickered in his hands. Three mechs went down before they reached the opening, one with its head burst apart into a mess of wires and melted plastic by a lucky shot from Vortash and two mown down by Weaver, who had shifted his child-sized LMG to sweep across the crate.

More were coming, stepping over their fallen predecessors. Vortash's body was racing with an electric fire that burned the years away like a shell of dry tinder, bringing to the surface sensations that had long been buried, sending pulses of excitement, energy and youth galloping through his old bones. His gun never seemed to overheat, though it must have time and again; to him it seemed like he was always firing, and every shot was hitting its mark.

Ripper had torn apart half a dozen mechs with one biotic vortex, chewing through the LOKIs with a burst of blue light and what would have been an explosive crunch in an atmosphere. Vortash downed two more with inch-perfect headshots he'd normally have taken ten minutes and fifty rounds to make, then swivelled at someone's cry over the comms to see an YMIR trundling around a corner, flanked by advancing Eclipse troops. One was cut down immediately by Vakarian, the unmistakeable gleam of his rifle's fire lancing through darkness, armour, flesh and bone in the blink of an eye. The salarian whose head he'd ventilated fell under the feet of the mech and was trampled by the unfeeling YMIR – but his organic allies flinched away, giving Vortash all the opening he needed to squeeze off the last few shots in his pistol before ducking down for the cool-off. Silent sprays of machine-gun fire fountained over his head and sparked away down the cargo bay, mixing with the constant glimmer of biotic power and occasional white flash of a deoxygenated explosion.

When he watched the recording of the battle later, it seemed almost calm. Played back, his breathing sounded measured, steady, and it was the only sound apart from the quiet scrapes and clinks of his combat armour as the light show played out overhead.

But at the time, it was like taking a jaunt through a mass relay in a go-kart.

When he rolled back out of cover, the YMIR was in pieces, the last of its fight ripped out of it by Weaver's Revenant before a bright flash signalled the explosion of one of Erash's sticky grenades on its 'chest'. It hit the ground in pieces, but more were coming, lumbering into position over fallen bodies and sparking LOKIs. Vortash watched one torn apart by two separate biotic fields and a close-range shotgun blast from Krul at the same time and felt the silent force of the explosion throw off him aim. One shot went wild, but his next four found their mark, chipping armour and circuits away from one barely-intact YMIR and sending it crashing down on top of another.

"We've got to move to the next bay," Vakarian said, making Vortash jump a little; it was the first voice he'd heard in a few minutes. "They're pulling back."

He was right, Vortash realised. The organics had been retreating for the last minute or so, leaving the last few mechs to hold them back – and the final holdouts were sparking on the floor.

They moved up as one, stepping over remains and through pools of blood mixed with synth-oils, delineated in Vortash's vision as chalk outlines in the dark. The airlock to the second cargo bay was a simpler model, an air curtain rather than a full rotary lock to allow for easier cargo transfer between the two.

Breaching it was almost like stepping through a waterfall; the sudden existence of air pressure outside his suit threw Vortash off a little, and the sudden return of noise after so long in the silence of the vacuum was disorienting. Gunfire started up almost as soon as they were through – and Vortash realised there were low-level emergency lights on here – nearly deafening him in the process. He dodged behind a stack of small crates to his left, finding himself next to Monteague.

"Well," Monteague muttered, "this is fun, isn't it?"

Vortash grinned under his helmet. "Oh, hell yes."

They peeled out of cover as one. It took Vortash a split-second to adjust and work out what he was looking at; here many of the crates had lost their bindings in the attack and were strewn all over the bay, and behind many of them there were helmets and guns. Vortash hesitated for a moment, spoilt for choice between targets, and then with a fizz of blue energy and jerk of his fist Monteague yanked an asari from behind her cover and sent her tumbling wildly across the room, wreathed in unearthly biotic light.

That, Vortash's mind told him earnestly, is a target.

He put three bullets through the helpless asari and the next three through a LOKI below as Monteague tossed the corpse aside and went for another – Sidonis got that one, and a sticky crunch that stayed with Vortash for the rest of his days signalled that Ripper had torn someone apart across the room. Every time Vortash picked a new target, someone else got their first: Vakarian was holing heads left, right and centre, Krul and Melenis were obliterating even YMIR mechs with their shotguns, and now that they were in atmosphere Erash was letting loose with his grenades, filling the air with shockwaves and debris.

Standing there in the midst of the carnage, swaying to the symphony of destruction, Vortash felt tiny and out of place. It wasn't a battle; the term gave the Eclipse too much credit. It was a massacre.

For just a moment, something inside him was aghast at the ruined bodies and spreading pools of before him. Then another wave of adrenalin surged up behind him and bore him away, and he was firing without knowing he'd even found a target. A young man's finger was on the trigger with a young man's eye at the sight, and the Eclipse couldn't come fast enough. In fact, the gunfire was petering out, and he began to wonder if it was all over-

"Oh," Vakarian said. "That's not good."

Vortash's senses were buzzing, but it took him a moment to see what the problem was. The only reason he didn't notice it sooner was because it was too big.

It rose up – not silently, though the clanking, whirring sounds of its motion had been hidden behind the firefight until moments ago – a huge silhouette visible through veils of smoke, looming over twenty-foot containers, almost brushing the high ceiling.

"Well, we're fucked," Weaver said cheerfully.

"I'm inclined to agree," Monteague murmured.

It was a mech, but unlike any Vortash had ever seen before. It towered over the YMIRs they'd left in pieces on the floor like an ancient colossus, and as its massive, slate-grey bulk swung towards them, he saw the clear, yellow-tinted duraplas canopy and realised there was someone inside it: a salarian in what looked to be an unarmoured spacesuit.

"Do you have any idea who you're messing with, Archangel?!" an amplified voice boomed, loud enough to vibrate the deckplates under Vortash's boots. "You and your friends are dead!"

There was an explosive crack, and what looked like the last organic enemy, peeking up behind a crate, dropped dead. Vakarian lowered his hissing rifle and slotted in a fresh clip.

"OK," he said. "New plan. Kill that thing."

Monteague snorted. "Tactical genius."

A massive, heavy machine-gun-equipped arm swung out towards them like a construction crane, and they moved.

Vortash ducked under a stream of white-hot bullets and hurled himself behind a few crates. Gunfire chattered away behind him, interspersed by the throaty roars of shotguns and the static crackle of biotic power; as he made his way around the cover, looking for a vantage point, somebody shouted "Missile!" in his ear and he instinctively ducked, barrelled around a corner as an explosion rocked the bay – and ran straight into the Eclipse trooper coming the other way.

Instinct took over. Vortash's knee came up like a piston and crushed the human's hand against his Avenger, sending the gun clattering to the floor. The merc grunted and shoulder-charged him before Vortash could bring his pistol to bear and the two of them went sprawling, Vortash underneath. A fist drew back and slammed into his helmet, once, twice and three times, with Vortash desperately trying to shield himself with one arm, his legs scrabbling on the floor. Tiny cracks started to appear in his vision, helmet integrity warnings started to sound – and his pistol coughed in his hand.

The human hit him once more, drew back again, and then slumped sideways.

Vortash lay there panting for a few seconds. Spots of scarlet blood dotted his helmet's visor until the electrostatic wipers flitted across and spirited it away. The cracks started to fade, filled in by some clever system Vortash had never learned the name of.

Something exploded away to his right and he jumped to his feet, wrestled the dead human's legs from between his own and ran.

He rounded a corner and came face to face with a mound of crates held together by ancient duraplas netting. It was a dead end, but the crates didn't reach the ceiling.

Never was much of a social climber...

It took him ten seconds or so to scale it, pistol still clutched tightly in his hand, and the gunfire was only intensifying, the heavy rattling of the machine-gun coming so quickly it seemed to blend into one bass note that shook the whole ship. When he made it over the top, he wormed forwards under the two feet of clearance until he could see the mech below him, and opened fire. Waited for the cooldown. Opened fire again. And again.

His shots were insect bites for the vast machine; it was focused entirely on the others. From his perch, Vortash watched Melenis pound around one stack of crates, out of the mech's sight, hurdle another one and launch himself at the mech, driving mechanical fists into its back and pulling handfuls of wires loose. The mech waved its arms around itself almost comically in an attempt to dislodge him and succeeded, but the damage was done; Melenis bounced back to his feet and raced into cover as soon as he hit the floor, and sparks flew from the mech's exposed innards when it moved.

Vortash had no idea if he was helping or not; the mech seemed to rely entirely on armour with no kinetic barriers, and his pistol seemed like a pea-shooter against it. It was damaged, though, and the missile launcher on one arm was either broken or depleted; all it had left was the massive chaingun, and the cover was so ubiquitous and deep that it hadn't landed a single hit with it yet.

Vakarian's rifle snapped twice from somewhere out of sight and chips of duraplas spiralled away from the mech's canopy. It held, but a brittle, white web of cracks was spidering across it – and then a biotic burst tore chunks out its knee and sent the mech staggering sideways into a pile of heavy crates with a shearing screech of broken metal. The stack just about bore its weight, leaving the mech left hopelessly propped up, chaingun still firing but with its only good leg useless; if it took any weight off it, the whole thing would go tumbling over and it would be finished.

It was over anyway; its firing arc was limited, and Vortash watched as the team started to move around it and towards its exposed back. The excitement was slowly draining out of him now, leaving nothing behind but emptiness. He knew it was over, and all the energy that had been sustaining him for the last hour had evaporated. He fired one last time, watched the bullet make a minute, futile dent in the mech's armour, and then started working his way backwards.

Gunfire scored his return, picking his way carefully down the side of the crates and around them, over the body he'd left – a few feet away from where he thought he'd killed the man, the detective inside him noted; he must have had a minute or so of painful life left in him, and indeed blood trailed behind him where he'd tried to drag himself away – and back to the open area where they'd brought down the mech.

The chaingun was gone, ripped away from behind by Melenis, and the mech seemed to have nothing left. The team was emerging cautiously from cover and moving towards the fallen machine; Vortash was reminded of old nature documentaries showing some proud old beast whittled down to nothing by legions of tiny predators.

"Be careful," Vakarian said over comms, "he might still have-"

"Fuck that," Sidonis said confidently. "He's done for." He bounded forward to the canopy and rapped on it with the barrel of his assault rifle. "Isn't that right-"

The canopy hissed up, knocking Sidonis off-balance, and the salarian inside lunged at him. There was a crack as a pistol went off, then a retorting rattle as Sidonis instinctively fired. The salarian jerked and fell dead on his face, greenish blood splattered across the cockpit behind him. Sidonis turned away.

There was a hole in his armour, almost directly centred on his stomach. Blue blood leaked from it, horribly visible as it trickled down his steel-grey armour. Vortash watched, numb with horror, as Sidonis uncertainly touched the rent and raised his bloodied hand to eye-level.

"What?" he said, and his legs gave out. He sat down heavily, still staring confusedly at the wound.

Vakarian ripped off his helmet and came sprinting over, shouting something, and everything dissolved into chaos. Vortash had no significant medical training, and what he had was decades old, but even if he'd been a fully-trained paramedic he couldn't made himself move. Cold exhaustion was lapping around his thighs and surging higher still, and he felt older than he ever had before.

His own legs couldn't support him any more. He sat down, slumped against the crates, and watched. It all seemed so far away – all except for the tiny rivulet of young man's blood winding its way out of the press around Sidonis, and across the hard metal floor towards him.

Slowly, Vortash removed his own helmet, leant over to one side, and coughed up the contents of his stomach. The bitter acid taste stung his mouth and left him feeling painfully empty; a shell of decaying armour and old memories, wrapped around a vacuum.