Sgt. Ichii knew, in his heart of hearts, that they were all dead. He knew it, but as the de facto NCO he would never admit it out loud. The fact was, though, that the remains of his platoon were going to be goo in the Reapers' boot tread by this time tomorrow.

He glanced around the temporary shelter they'd found. The building was little more than wrecked rubble, but it was a defensible wreck in a sea of wreckage. Fighting had devolved into some mad variation of trench warfare.

He remembered a history teacher, a ridiculously long time ago, noting that trench warfare was up there with urban warfare in scenarios a person didn't want to get stuck in.

Well, hell, this seemed to be both: the Reapers had stopped shelling—or whatever it was—an hour after the last wave evac shuttles got off-world. They had stopped shelling, Ichii thought darkly, when they were sure that anyone still on the surface wasn't getting off again. He tried to imagine that some of the ships had escaped through the relay.

However, looking around him at the devastation, taking in the reek of burned stone, torn-up earth, dead Reaper and dead human…he wasn't hopeful.

The last transmission he received—just before the Reapers cut transmissions—had come from Sgt. Cavanaugh, the rightful NCO, evacuated among the injured, telling them to hold position, that help was coming. It was the sort of thing said to dead men who just hadn't stopped breathing, but Ichii appreciated it anyway—the rest of his team seemed to think that there really might be something in the wings.

"Sarge! Torey just died," came the exhausted voice of Whitman, the now de facto team medic.

He nodded to show he heard, then glanced at the Reaper-thing—but, with a human-looking cannon thing—sharing his spot. It stank to high heaven, a greasy, oily mix of organic matter and synthetic sludge. Like a morgue and a car garage had a wild weekend leaving this mess as a result.

Gross. And one didn't get used to the smell, either. The turian-looking ones smelled, if anything, worse. No offense to the turians; Ichii wondered if it was the difference in amino acids and whether the levo-Reapers smelled worse to turians than they did to other levos.

The fumes must be getting to his brain, he thought and tried, unsuccessfully and again, to shift the Reaper away from his position.

"Incoming!" someone shouted.

Ichii looked up and his heart sank: the weird semi-organic, semi-synthetic pods that the Reapers used instead of groundships, were falling like hail. From what he could see, this was it. This was the last wave. The Reapers had gotten tired picking them off in ones or twos and had decided to put a stop to what he and they knew was a futile holding action.

Ichii closed his eyes for a moment, trying to suppress the bitter thought 'and nothing to show for it.'

"Alright!" he yelled as the sounds of the dropships impacting began to fill the air. He hated the strange crunching-gooshy sound they made. Even more than that, he hated the way the big cannoneers—was that even a word?—seemed to use the leftovers to augment their fleshy armor. Just slapped it on like plaster. "Let's let 'em have it again!"

The words came out without betraying his inner cynicism, which was good. An NCO shouldn't share his certainty that the endeavor he was on was doomed to gruesome failure. Sometimes he wondered how many men in how many foxholes had already put bullets in their brains because they knew this was over and knew how it ended and just weren't willing to be made into zombies to fight their own people.

The imagination did funny things when one couldn't contradict it.

And there it was, that fleshy chatter like smacking meat and sparking wires, the warbled sound the Reapers used to communicate which no one seemed to be able to make any sense of. Talk about secure transmissions, he thought sourly.

They came in waves. Droves. Hoards.

And then he heard the sound no one wanted to hear: the admonishing beep of a weapon demanding more ammunition. A bullet to the brain to prevent repurposing was out.

He had no time to think about that. He had time to grab his field knife as one of the turian-looking things slid pver the wall. Whether it knew he was there or was as surprised to see him as he was to it—he had expected, for whatever reason, a human-looking thing—he didn't know. All he knew was that when he plunged his field knife into its throat and ripped it to one side, the thing went down. It didn't convulse, just gushed fluids everywhere. He picked up its weapon and found that he could make enough sense of it to use it.

He had just popped up over the edge of the wall to check the field when someone else shouted 'aw, shit!'

He looked up, too, to see something different dropping from the sky, white-hot with re-entry. The ground shook again and again as whatever-they-were cratered the ground in a steady and precise line some thirty feet ahead of Ichii's position, blanketing the field in dust and flying earth as new craters appeared in the abused world's surface.

Thus, he had a front-row seat to watch, horrified, as the things-from-the-sky unfolded into massive machines that could only be…geth. They loomed out of the dust, enormous and heavily armored.

He dropped back behind the wall, fresh sweat dripping down his skin. Reapers were bad enough, but how were they supposed to fight geth, too? He took a deep breath as shouts and gunfire filled the air, mingling with a decidedly geth warble of communication, wondering what he could say or do.

Nothing came to mind. His mind was blank, finally having reached the limit of bad news he could successfully handle.