Holy Warrior
(Father Ignatius)
A child was screaming in the middle of the market, lost or separated from her parents in the maelstrom of chaos that the Arena's evacuation had become. Perhaps a frantic parent was screaming for her as well. Or, more likely, that parent was among the casualties the Legends had already suffered and was now among the ranks of the abominations that had swarmed and overrun our northern emplacements.
"Drella!"
Without needing any further instructions, the young asari next to me crouched and sprinted forward, aided by the biotic abilities natural to her species. With a single, deft motion, she scooped up the child and then turned back to sprint back to us.
"Pull back to the Lifts!" I called to the firing line, many of whom were also members of my flock. I felt a pang in the my heart as I saw the grim determination in their eyes, along with the raw fear. These were not battle-hardened veterans, or even grim thugs, here to profit by the chaos unfolding around them. These were shop-owners, mechanics, and foundry workers, trying to defend their homes and loved ones. These were fathers, mothers, sons and daughters fighting for a higher cause than a single gang's territory. They were fighting for their very livelihoods, homes, and lives.
A harsh anger filled my chest, and before I was even conscious of the decision, I felt myself rising from cover, and striding forward.
"On my right hand, Michael!"
A mutated remnant of a turian fell backwards, a gaping hole where its forehead had been.
"On my left hand, Uriel!
Before me, Raphael!
Behind me, Gabriel!"
I punctuated each sentence with a pull of the trigger, and at each, an enemy fell. At each, another denizen of my flock was safe. At each, someone else would live past today.
"And above my head, the presence of God," I added with a whisper.
"Ignatius."
Grunting in surprise, I lifted a hand to my helmet, connecting the call.
"Go ahead, Khentu," I called out, straining to hear the call above the din of the battle.
"We've lost the Docks, and the last of the northern outposts," Khentu's voice sounded strangely calm and even, contrasted to what we had been through in the past shift. "I have to activate Samson."
I felt my chest constrict, and felt a cold chill spread over me.
"Khen, look at all these people," I protested, willfully ignoring the ridiculousness of the phrase, given the voice-only call. "We do that, we're writing their death sentence!"
"We don't blow the lift, we'll be writing the death sentences of everyone on this station,"Khentu replied, as I knew he would. The fact that he was speaking the truth didn't do anything to quell the spike of rage I was feeling. "Tell them to make for the Villa, we'll do our best to bring them up there."
"Damn you, Emrys!" The sentence escaped me before I cut the connection with a savage jab. It was entirely unjust, some part of me knew: Emrys was responsible for saving not only the several thousand people who were still between the Villa and the Arena, but also the untold millions that dwelt above us. If this wave of abominations reached Kima… and then Doru… how long until they were overrunning Afterlife?
How long until they're overrunning this sector of space?
I turned back to my firing line and cranked my armor's external speakers to the maximum.
"The Lift's about to blow!" I heard my voice bellow, warped and garbled by the sheer volume of the shout. "Make for the Villa! NOW! GO! GO! GO!"
More shouts arose as the news spread from position to position, and fresh screams of raw panic arose as civilians who had opted to bunker down in their homes, in the vain hope of the Legends driving back these otherworldly invaders, now realized that those same homes would be rubble in a very, Saints have mercy, how very, short amount of time.
"Abandon the Arena!"
"RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"
I had lost track of Drella, and Hadasi, and I sent up a prayer to every saint I could remember that the twins had joined the stream of refugees making for the tunnels leading to the relative safety of the Villa, that Drella had gotten the child away safely.
"Ignatius?" Barco was now beside me, leaping into the defensive trench we had dug around the Arena, in the aftermath of the Maw's Wrath invasion. Granted, all of our preparations had been anticipating repelling an invasion from outside of the Arena, not defending a wave of enemies pushing us out of our own homes.
"Samson?"
The salarian nodded, and behind him, Jehu ul Cokat's jaw clenched, the batarian captain no doubt also realizing the sheer extent of what we were about to do."Do it."
Barco pulled a detonator from his belt, and after only a moment of closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, pressed the button.
And nothing happened.
"What the fuck?"
The salarian looked nonplussed as he stood up in the trench to look at the still-intact Arena of the Deeps.
"Karking Pillars," Jehu swore, switching from his pistol back to his heavy assault rifle. "What do we do now?"
I felt a sinking feeling joining my comrades' feeling of panic. The firebreak we had hoped to create, not to mention the closing of a direct route to Afterlife, the beating heart of the station, had failed. My brain scrambled as I tried to come up with something, anything.
"We… we'll have to pull back," I began feebly. "If we can get to the Villa, we can set up a crossfire to cover the-"
"No!"
"Barco," Jehu stammered, as the salarian reached over and plucked the batarian's heavy pistol from his belt, "What are you…?"
"Fixing my mistake!"
Before any of us could stop him, or even realize what he was really planning, the salarian was out of the trench, and running back towards certain death.
To this day, I have no idea how a one-legged salarian with a single pistol made it past the hordes of creatures that must have been between us and his Comm Center. All I know is that less than five minutes later, the Grand Arena of Patriarch, which had withstood countless centuries and two full-scale wars, detonated in a fireball that incinerated everyone and everything in its path.
And generated a shockwave that knocked every single one of the survivors of the explosion flat on their backs, choking in the blinding dust storm.
"Pillars," I heard someone mutter hoarsely, as I struggled to my feet to survey the field of rubble and destruction.
"Father in Heaven, Holy Virgin and the saints," I spoke under my breath, "if the soul of Nasum Ora Gili Weds Lechwe Barcoo comes unto you, be merciful, I pray. For by his selfless actions, he may have saved the lives of everyone man, woman and child here."
Chosen Heir
(Ptolemy Emrys)
My brother's counterattack thus far had been going… poorly.
To be fair, it was hardly his fault: he was trying to coordinate hundreds of fighters, most of them useless, undisciplined alien gangers who would almost rather have been shooting at each other than engaging mysterious, unknown, horrifying creatures of nightmare. The lion's share of those who had engaged them first had simply retreated in sheer panic and had been overrun in short order. This, of course, meant that their reanimated corpses were now added to the ranks of those Deepers still pressing forward.
Blowing the Arena and the Main Lift had slowed their attack down, but it had not come close to stopping it entirely.
The same shuttle that had carried us from Kima to the Deeps had certainly never been designed for long-term space-flight, but it had served to carry me and Quan out the midpoint rendezvous with our "freighters."
And now, I stood on the bridge of the Horus, staring hard at our destination. With the Arena blown, and the docks overrun, we could not simply land at the docks. Which was precisely why I had placed us on a collision course with the station instead.
"This… Is… Suicide!"
The shrill protest brought me back to the present as I returned my attention back to the armored woman on the bridge behind me. Chou had been fully prepared to kill any number of aliens she needed to in order to secure our place on Omega. She was less than thrilled at the prospect of fighting nightmares in the depths of Omega's Deeps in order to save the rest of the station.
"We have six thousand RAMPART mechs, Allison," I said quietly. "Taggart and his ATLAS mechs number almost two hundred. You programmed their lethality and IFFs yourself. Do you doubt your own project's effectiveness?"
"You're going to get us all killed," Chou continued, ignoring my reply entirely. "All to save a couple of bleeding-heart four-eyes, and your bastard brother, who's too preoccupied sucking the dick of the blue bitch ruling tha-"
In hindsight, I should have used my pistol. A rifle round might have been capable of bouncing around inside the bridge and wounded or killed someone else. As it was, it simply went though the woman's head and went through an open door to rebound harmlessly down the hallway.
If the Jackal priest beside me had grunted in mute approval of my execution of my "unbeliever whore," as he had termed her back on Capek, I elected to take no notice of it.
"We will be landing in T-minus nineteen minutes, Sacred Pharaoh," Quan Zhang stated aloud, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it was the most normal occurrence in the world to have someone executed in front of him. "I have activated our first-wave RAMPART mechs."
"Very well, Beloved of Ra," I replied, and managed a smile. The man's zealotry was a trial to deal with from time to time, but that self-same zealotry meant that I had zero doubts that the priest would follow me into the darkness of the Underworld itself, if his Pharaoh ordered him... which was extremely convenient when you had to rapidly change your entire invasion plan with zero preparation. "You'd better get into your ATLAS. When we land, I need your detachment to veer right to secure the beachhead. Abbas and our regular troopers will land once you give the all-clear."
"At once, sir."
I turned back towards the navigational display, seeing the station upon which I had been born and raised draw ever closer. I half-closed my eyes, trying to summon any feeling of nostalgia or homecoming. None came.
In truth, the sight of Doru, recast and remade in the Silver Blades' image, banished any hopes of my reestablishing Little Egypt on the same level as my father and grandfather. And my conversations with Khentu, along with my interaction with the rest of the station, had been enough to confirm their assertions that this was not the Omega of the Blood Arrows' previous days. I was only surer of that when I had seen the Deeps, and the development that T'Loak (it was obvious who held my little brother's purse-strings) had poured into a previously useless section of her fortress.
Someone was strapping the Big Boy to my shoulder harness. How exactly Markham had come to possess such an obvious prototype, I had no idea. The M-920 Cain was the result of some Cerberus mad scientist making love with a munitions supply officer. It was a portable particle accelerator surrounding an array of dust-form element zero chambers. By subjecting its eezo chambers to extreme positive and negative currents fueled by antimatter reactions, the weapon projected mass effect fields that sheared away at the target.
Based on the one test-firing I had seen Markham perform, I looked forward to seeing it in action. It had also been obvious that the weapon's charge was only sufficient for three more shots, after which time the Blood Arrows had no means to recharge the thing, so it had been set aside for use in emergencies only, as I didn't even harbor the remotest hope of reverse-engineering the monstrosity. But I was determined to get as much use out of the thing as I could, and I could not imagine a more fitting situation to which to attach the term "Emergency."
"Haty-a Ormsby," I stated calmly. "You have the bridge."
"I have the bridge, Divine One," the appointed captain of the Horus nodded gravely. If there was any amusement or irony at such formal military procedure being applied to the bridge of a converted freighter, no one commented on it.
"Have Haty-as Maven and Dombrowski fall in on either side of us," I went on, naming the commanders of the Sobek and the Thoth. "We'll have to plan our… controlled landings carefully, spacing out the ships so we don't crash into each other."
"As you say, sir," the former slave nodded, and I reproached myself for stating the obvious to a capable subordinate.
Cutting off my natural inclination to micromanage, I turned and left the bridge. I heard the tramp of heavily-armored boots as my complement of bodyguards fell in behind me. I strode down the narrow hallways, and down the ladders to what had been the main cargo bay of the cargo hauler. Rank upon ranks of armored Blood Arrows snapped to attention as I passed them and took my place beside the ramp that would deploy us onto the ruined remains of my brother's Docks. I lifted my Omni-Tool and the image of Abdul Abbas appeared on the screen.
"Ready to go, Tol?" my "uncle" asked, and I felt a swell of familiar pride at hearing my nickname.
"It's time to go get Khentu out of trouble again," I replied, placing the Cerberus-issue helmet over my head. The armor's systems came online, and the call viewscreen shifted from my arm display to the corner of my helmet's HUD. Abdul grinned, ivory-white teeth contrasting with his olive-toned skin and heavily-painted face before disappearing behind a similarly decorated helmet.
"Indeed, Pharaoh."
I cut the connection, and took a moment to reflect on the current situation: I had departed this station with only a handful of broken, desperate refugees. I was returning with a professional army. Small, even diminutive perhaps, compared to the other military forces of the Terminus, but compared to the rank and file of the gangsters and thugs of my youth, it was a weapon of terrifying proportions.
But I'm not leading them against gangers and thugs, a despondent corner of my brain reminded me. I'm leading them against a foe of unknown origins and capabilities, a tactical nightmare for any military. I could only hope my forces were up to the task.
They had to be, if I wanted to save the family that I'd rediscovered I still had.
I double-checked my weapons before straightening and switching my channel to "General Broadcast" mode.
"SOLDIERS!" I called out, my voice now deepened and amplified by the helmet, "WHO ARE WE?"
"ARROWS!" came the reply from five hundred throats, scattered across three vessels. "AR-ROWS! AR-ROWS! AR-ROWS!"
Omega's Child
(Khentu Emrys)
Ramming three trawlers into what had been the Deep Docks was certainly far from subtle. Oran T'Loak had certainly raised enough hell about it, but she had eventually given permission for the three ships to approach the station and marked their flashing transponder codes as "friendly" so the station's heavily-shackled beast of an AI wouldn't light them up with cannon-fire for daring to approach on unauthorized vectors.
But even more difficult than convincing the Sahrabarik Fleet commander to allow my brother to ram his ships into Omega was finding enough humans to form a competent force powerful enough to meet the Blood Arrows' new offensive. My brother's damned RAMPART mechs had been programmed to be racist, taking the institutional racism of Quan Zhang's, or rather the Blood Arrows', Neo-Egyptian pantheistic religion to new heights of stupidity. That meant if we pressed our regular troops forward to try and coordinate any offensive with them, it was all too certain that those same saviors would become the Legends' executioners, without so much as a pause to consult their internal programmed IFFs.
Despite the fevered, delirious imaginings of Nasser and Mentu Emrys, there were simply too few of my own species on this station, much less in the ranks of the Legends. Matthews and the remnants of Zadith Ban militia that we had conscripted into the Legends formed the core of the strike force I'd managed to assemble. Even Tess had grabbed a rifle and donned a serviceable suit of armor from someone who no longer needed it, to join the assault.
And won't Tol be thrilled at that, I thought grimly, but sorry, big brother: if you wanted me to be able to pick someone else, you shouldn't have programmed your fucking mechs to shoot aliens on sight. I swung the usually tripod-mounted support weapon sideways, belching flame and death through the ranks of the Deepers who swarmed forward.
The Deepers didn't have rifles, per se. If they had, we'd all have been dead long ago. Somehow, and by the gods, I had no idea how, the onetime residents of the Deeps had mutated to form an arm that could bloody well fire a miniature gods-damned Singularity at their targets, ripping someone apart with a direct hit, or throwing them like rag-dolls even with an indirect one. The result in even an indirect hit was to keep that unfortunate someone dazed long enough for the Deepers to close to melee range and infect the unfortunate soul directly, adding another victim to their ranks.
And it was just one of those gods-awful Singularities that sent Osman flying through the air. A corner of my mind was detached and aware enough to inform me that my self-styled secretary had just been blasted almost in half by the biotic shearing motion. His sister Jasmine rushed forward, cradling the ruin of her bother in her arms, in a vain attempt to bring comfort to the screaming figure.
"For gods sake, finish it!" came the shrill plea from the broken thing that had been her brother.
Jasmine El Sadat looked deep into her brother's eyes. Her helmet blocked her face, but her shoulders shook with emotion.
"I love you."
The ragged words came out raw and stiff, supremely calm contrasted with the maelstrom of combat unfolding around us. Then, she drew her pistol, and fired first at his heart, and then sent a second shot into his head.
"Left!" came the warning cry from Jon Whitson. The punk had been almost worse than useless when he had first come down the lift, full of the misplaced self-assurance and bravado that only youth and an unfused cerebral cortex could supply. Now however, the young man, for that was what he had become, had risen to the crisis with a dedication and an energy that he hadn't displayed in the entire time I had known him.
At his warning, I swung the weapon to my left, revealing a narrow passageway from which more Deepers were pouring. However, the same narrowness of the hallway provided only a choke-point from which they couldn't hope to escape. Ignatius seconded my efforts by throwing a grenade down the passage. The resulting fireball brought a rare moment of relative quiet, and the remnants of my improvised, humans-only squad took the moment to try and suck heaving breaths.
"How much… fucking… farther?" Tess asked, leaning against a pile of rubble that had been a part of the Arena.
"Not… far… now," the priest replied, as exhausted as the rest of us.
Just then, a nearby pile of rubble disintegrated, and the sight of a massive suit of armor came into sight, with several small figures behind it.
So that's a RAMPART mech.
The thing looked like someone had started with a LOKI chassis, stolen a sniper rifle to use for an arm, and melted down an aircar to give it armor.
"No alien infestation detected."
I felt my eyes roll up into my head. Fucking Classical Jackal BULLSHIT.
"ALL HAIL THE GLORIOUS PHARAOH, WHO RULES AS GOD AMONGST MEN."
Now I worried that my involuntary reaction might strain something, and an audible groan of exasperation escaped me. On top of all the other preparations that building a mech army must have entailed, SOMEONE had elected to sit down and WRITE A FUCKING program to have the RAMPART mechs snap to attention and broadcast Blood Arrow propaganda at regular intervals.
Because who wouldn't make that an obvious top priority for someone embarking on a holy war?
As if in answer to my unspoken question, the giant exo-suit, that must be an ATLAS, some part of my brain informed me, opened with a hiss. Quan Zhang's face appeared, sweating from exertion, and a trickle of blood was coming from somewhere higher up in his scalp.
"Haty-a," he stated in greeting, and I felt my jaw tighten in irritation at the Jackal's insistence at using my Egyptian title, which I hadn't heard in more than two years now. "The Pharaoh's compliments. He sent me to try and link up with your force."
"Mission accomplished, Quan," I replied with a shrug. "How's the rest of the Arrows' attack going?"
The priest's face fell, and he sighed deeply, seemingly as exhausted as we were, despite his effort-saving exo-suit. Or perhaps, I thought unwillingly, because of the effort needed to pilot that hulking weapon.
"Not well," he confessed. "If it wasn't for these mechs, it would have been impossible. We've lost the lion's share of them already, but we're pretty sure we've secured the area between here and the LZ."
A massive arm waved, in mimicry of its pilot's gesture.
"These weapons bear with them the very blessings of the Sun God Himself," he stated in a voice approaching awe. "And our holy fire cleanses all before us."
And how many battalions does the Sun God command?
I was thankful for my helmet hid my expression as I choked back Mentu Emrys' quote just in time. The mechs were already turning and sprinting back in the direction from which they had come. I nodded in approval, and despite all of my best efforts to guard against it, I felt hope building in my chest for the first time since our shuttle had first landed in the Deeps from Kima.
"Tess, Ignatius," I barked. "Send Laila and Chell the all-clear. Have them move our people forward at the fucking double. Have them secure what we've gained so far. Tol will expend the rest of the mechs as the head of our spear, and then we'll finally get this clusterfuck under…"
There hadn't been a spoken warning so much as the twist of alarm in the others' expressions that caused me to duck instinctively as I twisted back toward the ATLAS suit.
That instinctive duck was all that saved my life. A blue-black Singularity blossomed directly in front of Quan Zhang, and the Jackal priest was yanked from the exo-suit, bones popping as they snapped against the ATLAS' safety harness as it attempted to resist the dark-matter energy that tugged and warred against them. The fire from our combined weapons turned the lone, wounded, not-quite-dead Deeper into nothing so much as resembled soup, and the lower half the body flopped back down limply. I spared a single glance at the body of the priest, and the unnatural angle of the neck and back were all that I needed to know that he was dead, even before Ignatius bent down and confirmed it for the rest of us only a few seconds later.
"Ok," I stated slowly, even now aware of an illogical sense of loss at the death of another of the original Blood Arrows. "We head out and do our best to support the rest of the Arrows."
"Just us?" Whitson asked, gesturing at the diminutive group of ragged human Legends. "Not a whole lot of firepower we could add to the situation, boss. We should probably sit tight and wait for the rest of the Legends to catch up."
"No time for that," I shook my head in answer. "That would take at least an hour, and Tol will need every rifle we can muster before this is all over. Besides…"
A smile crept across my face, despite the gravity of the situation, and I jerked a thumb towards the now-empty ATLAS mech.
"I see no reason to let this thing go unused."
"Do you know how to operate it?" Ignatius asked, looking none too confident in my abilities to do so.
I shrugged, and grunted as I lifted a boot onto the access ladder on the inside of the exo-suit's left leg.
"How hard can it be?"
Author's Note:
So, now we are well and truly stuck in, with nothing less than the fate of Omega at stake.
Players of the Mass Effect: Omega DLC will remember the RAMPART mechs, except this time they are on OUR side! (somewhat).
My thanks to Kat-2V for the AU-worldbuilding, and the awesome beta-reading/editing skills!
Your thoughts/suggestions /comments/ constructive criticisms/ are always welcome in the reviews and or PMs.
Ee-RAH!
Tusken1602