Cenotaph II: The Monolith

by Rob Sears

The year is 2214. A weary galaxy festers. Military privatization has become the norm in a new economic depression. A malicious plan, decades in the making, has finally been set into motion. The only one who can stop it? Roahn'Shepard and a team of some of the most extraordinary individuals the galaxy has ever seen. Fear. Agony. Hatred. Roahn's lethal nightmare begins!

26. Chapter 26: Heist II - Day of Ice

"That picture was a placeholder. It should never have made it into the final game."

The Mass Effect 3 Manual (2012)

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Triton

The exalted and ultimately primordial crests of frozen mountains slashed at the tattered night, carving the light of Neptune's sister moons in half while faint speck of the sun bounced off the ice that capped the tops. Jagged ridges, carved from a thoughtless and irrational surge of corpus energy, marked the barriers of the valley, not having been exposed to elements or time to erode its edges down to smooth curves. Perhaps Triton could have sustained a chance as a place for life to flourish, if the cold blue maelstrom-stricken world it was tethered to had not snatched its fetal foundations before gravity and pressure had given it form.

A crunchy blue-white plain stretched from one end of the mile-long basin to the other surrounded by the newborn mountains. From time to time, erratic plumes of subterranean nitrogen gas burst through the glass-like crust in towering jets, billowing brief clouds of the colorless element for a scant few seconds. The unimaginably cold temperatures would take hold of them and freeze the geysered gas into a solid hail, now doomed to slowly float its way back down to the surface in a sleeting torrent.

At the far edge of the valley, a Kodiak sat on the lone landing pad with its engines steaming. Two other craft, stone-dead cold, were situated next to it, one with Alliance colors adorning it. A group of five, borne from the shuttle, trudged down the singular metal walkway that led to the base of a nearby mountain across the temporary flat the plain of the valley provided. A solitary door embedded into the rock wall shimmered tantalizingly, acting as a beacon for the wayward travelers. The walkway made hollow metal sounds as boots tromped upon it—it had been erected on stilts so that anyone venturing upon it would be situated a couple of feet above the reflective and ever-still surface.

The air was dead here. Hollow. No wind to blow upon anyone's frame. Roahn's eyes swept across the landscape, taking stock of the decrepit surroundings. Her suit's heater was working overtime, but she could still feel the cold through the thick membrane. Even her visor was starting to fog with every breath she exhaled.

Frozen nitrogen ice crunched around the metal stilts of the walk. A brief blizzard of numb pellets assaulted Roahn's frame, the little bits making pinging noises as they bounced off her mask. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Garrus next to her draw himself in a bit, also perturbed by the cold. Skye and Korridon behind her were making noises of discontent, not at all appreciative of the current setting.

Oddly, the only one who was not fazed by the alien landscape was the man leading the group. Shepard had temporarily overcome his lethargic limp and was dressed up in armor again (sans any N7 coloration), taking charge as he guided the squad towards the door that led to Aegir Base. Roahn kept a careful eye on her father. He had been rather maladroit of late, she had noticed, most likely stemming from health complications she feared he was not being completely open about. Heavy-footed and shuffling, as though he sought to avoid being taken by an arthritic flare-up not because of the pain but because of the fact that it sought to destroy the one true image he had erected for his own daughter. But now, either from the low gravity or from the reassurance the armor provided, Shepard avoided a gauche gait and powered his way forward with an energetic determination she had not seen from him in… years, perhaps.

Near the entrance to the base, the walkway split to the right. A few maintenance sheds and an open-air garage had been erected near one of the wide chasms that connected to the adjacent valleys beyond. Garrus stopped at the fork in the road and tapped the side of his helmet, activating his zoom feature as he stared in the direction of the garage.

"No vehicles in sight," he reported. "We got lucky with the timing of the patrol."

By chance, Roahn looked up and strained to peer through the obnoxious veil of stars, searching for… there! A lone speck of light, moving as opposed to its static peers, gently blinking as it made a silent screaming through the sky. The Menhir, their loyal overseer.

Roahn looked at her omni-tool to read one of the latest reports from Liara that had just come through. The asari was safely up on the ship, constantly monitoring the zone of operations on her multitude of terminals. Their reliable eye in the sky.

"Menhir's picked up two vehicles to the northwest," she reported on the squad channel, reading Liara's shorthand to the group. "Alliance tags. Two squads of six. One vehicle's moving away from the base. The other will be back in roughly twenty minutes."

"Hunh, we have our time limit," Shepard said as he walked to the base's entrance. Upon reaching the door, the man palmed the interface crudely bolted onto the frame. A spinning wheel icon booted up as it frantically tried to connect to the net, having received Shepard's ident tags.

"Fucking freezing, even with my suit on," Skye groused as she rubbed at her arms uselessly.

Garrus gave the outside temperatures a quick check. "Not surprising, given the complete lack of a sustaining atmosphere out here. A serious suit breach would be a death sentence."

"How serious would it have to be?"

"A puncture might not do the trick, but a large gash certainly would," Roahn answered in the turian's stead. "A lack of oxygen in such a small timeframe means loss of consciousness in about fifteen seconds. The cold will be the least of your problems at that point. You won't die from frostbite at least—warmth does not dissipate that quickly in vacuum."

"Yay, that's reassuring." Skye gave a wry chuckle as a thought came to her. "Now I know what it's like to have your life."

Roahn blew air from her nose as she rolled her eyes. "Not even close," she said. What's the matter? Feel vulnerable, Skye? she wanted to ask, but bit back such a venomous comment.

Shepard lifted a hand. "It's going through now."

As he spoke, the entrance panel emitted a quiet beep of approval. The locks cycled, releasing a sudden rush of filtered air before they parted, revealing an empty lift buried within the mountainside. The party of five quietly shuffled in, all eager to escape the cold. Only after the door resealed itself and everyone's omni-tool was soon reading that the atmosphere was rapidly back to breathable levels did everyone (sans Roahn) remove their helmet, desperate to be free of their infernal prisons.

"We're on schedule?" Shepard scratched at his neck as he slotted his helmet to his waistband.

Korridon, after fumbling with his helmet seals initially, had gotten it removed after Roahn had come over to help him. His eyes held a vulnerable warmth that emitted the requisite thanks to the quarian. Remembering himself, he consulted his timetable to double-check his figures.

"The automated gate is up next," he reported. "Assuming that I managed to convert everyone's military access, we should get by the security check no problem."

"We'll get by," Shepard assured. "Otherwise we wouldn't have been permitted to land the Kodiak at the pad, right?"

Korridon looked to the ceiling, as if he expected to find his response etched between the crudely soldered beams there. "When you put it like that…"

The silence afterward was interrupted only from the staccato stirrings that the elevator emitted as ice-rusted gears laboriously cranked the enveloped box further into the deep core of the moon. No one inside had the urge to quip about the length it took to reach their destination, though admittedly more than one would have the random inclination to do so. As it stood, it only took less than a minute in total for the lift to finally reach the terminal floor, upon which a sparse and hastily constructed framework of a hallway was there to greet them. There were no guards, no lifeforms to observe their exit.

Roahn felt like her weapons, slotted onto her back, were acting as a suspicious counterweight that would only suffice to give away her squad's true intentions. They lingered there, seemingly desiring to tip her over and to leave her vulnerable. But as soon as her father moved off the lift, she shook out of her trance, finding it easier to breathe in the presence of calmer minds.

After traversing a few meters, Shepard lifted a hand, the signal for everyone to halt. The man looked down on the floor. A white arrow had been painted onto the cement just a few feet in front of him. "PROCEED FORWARD CAREFULLY," the verbiage next to the arrow read. Everyone's gazes then lifted upward—the area just beyond was suspiciously bare, but it was also worth noting that the walls and the ceiling for perhaps a five meter stretch of the corridor were draped in blackened glass, acting as a sort of tunnel for all new arrivals to proceed through.

"It's the advanced identity scanners," Korridon murmured. "They'll check all of our idents, make sure we're affiliated with the right unit."

"Well," Garrus said after he gave his neck a quick crack, "I suppose we'll soon see just how good a job you did with faking our credentials, eh?"

To give his words the ammunition he intended, Garrus confidently strode past Shepard, eyes maintained straight forward in a stalwart expression of fearlessness. His feet led his body into the monitored tunnel, but he did not slow. Nothing in his body displayed any tentativeness or irresolute intentions. The turian could very well have enacted a slow blink… and would have found himself at the end of the hall, all sensors unperturbed and ever silent.

Roahn and Shepard then embarked forth, emboldened at seeing their friend, their captain, take the lead without incident, though Roahn held a deep wish that she would have been the first one to demonstrate that any fears need not hold any residency in their heads. Like Garrus, they too passed through the glass hallway without any of the sensors going off, indicating that the credentials embedded within their omni-tools were legitimate and thus not at all needing to be flagged due to further suspicions. Korridon and Skye would soon join them, but Roahn did take note that they had been stealing tense glances at one another, perhaps wondering if the alarms were to go off that it would have all been on the account of the other and not themselves. The selfsame outcome came to pass regardless, and soon the squad of five was rejoined on the other side.

Recalling from memory, the manned security checkpoint was down on the next level, stationed at the foot of the upcoming staircase. Seeing as there was only one direction in which to proceed—down the hallway which took an abrupt left in about a dozen meters—the squad headed there without any debate.

Everyone's boots made knocking echoes upon the concrete stairs as they proceeded downward. There were two flights to contend with, leading deeper and deeper into the recesses of the moon. Why the Alliance had not budgeted to insert another elevator here was anyone's guess—more than one person had the notion that either the Alliance was being cheap or was sadistically unsympathetic to their own soldiers.

Rounding a turn, the second flight of stairs now in view, Garrus was about to complete the automatic maneuver of setting his foot down upon the first step when he suddenly halted in place, leg frozen in mid-air. He threw a fist up—the universal signal to halt in place. Everyone behind the turian stilled themselves, eyes growing wider and wider as their confusion began to mount.

"Do… not… make a sound," Garrus whispered over the comm.

Tentatively, Roahn edged around the corner, hand nearing the grip of her pistol. She looked down towards the foot of the stairs. The ceiling of the stairwell was partially blocking her view, but creeping just from the edge, a dark and luminous stream of liquid was plaintively crawling along the ground. Venous branches broke off from the main tributary—Roahn realized she was staring at a pool of blood.

Not again.

Garrus gave the hand motion for everyone to draw their weapons, followed up with the instruction to make a silent approach. They descended the staircase one at a time, Garrus in the lead followed closely by Roahn. Their feet tread carefully upon the steps, careful not to misstep upon an area that would create an unexpected noise. The foyer in the next floor down turned out to be empty, with the exception of the brutally decapitated body that had been left down here to greet them.

Roahn had to bite the inside of her cheek to prevent the sensation of rising bile in her throat from gripping her. It had suddenly gotten quite cold once again in her suit. Her palms were taking on a slight sweat out of sheer panic. As the squad approached the mutilated body—an Alliance soldier, judging by their armor colors—Roahn could only think of the carnage she had first stumbled upon on Luna and the madness that had closely followed her discovery.

Everyone took care to step over the trail of blood that leaked from the stump of the soldier's neck. Skye craned her head to the side as she followed the trajectory of a nearby blood splatter. "Head," she tonelessly remarked as she lifted a finger. Everyone followed her indication out of reflex, spotting the still-helmeted head of the brutalized soldier just a couple of meters away down an adjacent hallway, gore having been painted across every surface near the unfortunate object as though someone had taken an aggressive brush to the place.

Korridon turned away with a disgusted shudder. Roahn mustered a slow blink, trying to drive the terrible images out of her head. Garrus and Shepard had stone-faced expressions on, having been desensitized to the worst sort of violence imaginable in their shared experience. Sad to say that this was perhaps one of the easier sorts of sights to stumble upon in their line of work.

"Damn," Garrus gritted. "We might be too late."

"Careful," Roahn had to grab the turian's shoulder plate before he could proceed. "We don't know who's still here." What they might be capable of, was certainly the implication.

Hefting his rifle, Garrus adjusted a control on his eyepiece as he linked the two devices, emitting his scope's view onto the gear that rested upon his head. "We'll take this slow. Nice and easy."

Each step further into the base threatened to spill forth a slew of repressed emotions that resided just underneath the surface level of Roahn's subconscious. A nameless fear. Dark and intense. They lied in wait, eager to press against the rusted lock that had been crudely slapped over the gates in a careless attempt to hold them back.

The terrible lighting cast the five in sheets of white, halving them in shadow. Everyone took a dreadful note that the security booth they soon came across was conspicuously empty—not a good omen. Soon after passing the deserted post by, scattered and demanding voices could be discerned from somewhere very close. Around the next corner it seemed, which was coincidentally where the vault in the base was located. Garrus purposefully slowed his gait. Everyone else followed suit.

The voices were louder here. No doubt that if someone were to peer around the corner, they would be able to spot the source of the commotion. But there was no sense in risking getting spotted—rushing in blindly at this point could be tantamount to suicide if they did not approach this intelligently.

Without being prompted, Roahn hit a control on her omni-tool and a tiny camera drone fluttered free with a blink. It spiraled through the air, inconspicuous at a distance, and took up residence near the ceiling, amongst the bundles of cables and oxygen pipes that ran for miles throughout the facility.

Roahn piped the camera's feed to everyone's implant view. Displayed directly within their eyeballs, everyone could get a perfect view of the scene just beyond their sight. In the next room, three Alliance soldiers were on their knees, all in varying states of injury. Three other bodies belonging to their comrades were lying motionless around them—the width of the pools of blood around their corpses were the only indications of which one had been killed the most recently. Five troopers decked in shadowed armor lazily punctuated the scene. Dark Horizon, it had to be. Roahn swiveled the view of her drone, frantically searching for a terrible presence overseeing the entire horror, but from what she could tell, none of the beings who haunted her nightmares was apparently in the room.

Was that a relief to her? Roahn had no idea how to process this. At some level, she had been expecting to run into Aleph, Raucous, or any one of that sinister quartet. It was as if she had been preparing for such a moment for months. To see, with her own eyes, a replication of the very events that had preceded her maiming on Luna only to be lacking the antagonistic force that drove her… it would only serve to press on her mind with worry.

The Dark Horizon troopers were milling about the room, the solid steel door to the vault still locked shut in front of them. They must be in the process of "negotiating" the code out of the stationed Alliance forces here, Roahn figured. One of the PMC henchmen was crouched in front of a bound man in Alliance armor, combat knife in hand—the ringleader, ostensibly. Two other troopers, one with a flamethrower, covered the hallway entrance/exit, not having noticed Roahn's drone yet. The other two Dark Horizon soldiers remained near their captives, itchy trigger fingers dangerously close to setting off their weapons as they basked in the brutal mutilation.

The mercenary with the knife waggled his weapon, indicating a sensitive spot between the legs of his current interrogatee. Probably a tactic he had learned from his boss, the Aeronaut. "Round four," he hissed through a crackling vocabulator. He tilted his helmeted head in the direction of the vault. "Lucky number four. Want this to end? Then give me the vault's access card."

His captive was in a bad way. He had already been roughened up prior to Roahn and the others arriving on the scene. Blood wept from several cuts on his face, thick like oil. Bruises marred the skin around his cheekbones and eyes. His nose was broken and already starting to clot around the nostrils. A rasping wheeze emitted from the recesses of his throat, like one of his lungs had been punctured from a brutal beating. He looked like he was barely clinging to life—not even the threat of castration appeared to faze him.

That, of course, did not do for the man conducting the questions. He gave an oblique nod to one of the other mercenaries standing by. They took a step forward and walloped the man across the back of his head with the stock of their rifle. Blood burst from a ruptured eardrum and the Alliance captive uttered a stark cry, already sounding drained from previous agonies. The interrogator reached out a hand and grabbed hold of the prisoner's jaw so that they would not teeter over completely.

"Access card," he repeated dispassionately.

Through smashed lips and ruined eyes, the prisoner struggled to lift his head. Incredibly, he started to smile. The process to do so must have been painful.

"Think I left it up your mother's—"

Razor-swift, the brutal inquisitor surged his arm forward and lodged the knife in the back of his prisoner's mouth. There was a terrible gagging sound and a gush of blood swept over the teeth in the man's lower jaw, slipping over his killer's gloved fingers. He was gone instantly.

Watching the entire scene play out through her viewscreen, Roahn felt sick to her stomach. It had all occurred so quickly! There had been no time at all for her or anyone else to react.

"Cute," the helmeted mercenary snarled as he continued to kneel in place, dead eyes of his victim mirrored in his face-plate.

As he yanked the stained and standard-length blade free, one of the last two living captives, a blond-haired woman, could not help herself any longer and shot to her feet, breath streaming out in wild gasps as she raced to the exit, unknowingly heading toward where Roahn and potential rescue was lurking in wait. Little did the woman know that her safety could have been secured with additional patience.

One of the mercenaries wheeled about, a cutting burst of machine-gun fire ripping through the air. Skin, muscle, and bone popped and the woman fell to the ground in a violent splatter of blood. She was still alive, but was trying to lift her arm in a daze, or what was left of it; the bullets had completely destroyed the limb to the point that it was halfway hanging off her body. Strands of sinew and meaty stumps of fingers dangled uselessly, freely dripping fluids. The woman tried to cry out, but all she could utter was a pitiful gurgle. Her body thrashed as she lay there on the ground, succumbing to helpless twitches.

Rising to his feet, the lead mercenary walked over to the stirring body of the Alliance solider and shook his head in derision.

"Ah, shit. She's going into shock. She's not going to be useful to anyone now."

The woman curled into a ball, the pool of blood growing larger underneath her. The trooper that had shot her over her quickly levelled his submachine gun accordingly.

"Make it so that she'll be difficult to identify."

For the second time in the last five minutes, Roahn felt a solemn burst of dissociation hurl itself from her body as she realized the consequences that were about to befall the woman. She felt pathetic, impotent. Little better than a disinterested bystander. She wanted so dearly to lift out an arm and to see all of those troopers in there fall dead with just the flick of a wrist, felled straight out of thin air.

But they were all out of reach. Seemed like everything in her life never wanted to stay within her grip anyway.

The weapon gave a hollow bang and the woman's head flew apart in a gory mess of blood and brains. The frenzied spasms ceased instantly, still fingertips spattered with crimson liquid.

"We're out of time," the trooper said as he his hands swept across the grip of his holstered pistol, carelessly turning a heel to disregard the new body he had left lying on the cold ground. He pointed a finger towards two of his comrades in turn before he approached the final prisoner. "Cut off what you can from this one's body that he can live without. We can take turns betting on when he reaches his breaking point."

The last hostage, a middle-aged man with frosty hair, had a tough exterior about them but it could be plainly observed that he was harboring a severe fearfulness behind his wide eyes. Not content to let his captors off so easy, the man quickly made a lunge for something hidden in a side pocket. He withdrew what looked like a square red chit with rounded corners. Before anyone could react, the man shoved the card into his mouth and forcefully swallowed, a large lump making his way down his throat with a grimace.

The interrogator did not even seem fazed as he gave a singular once-over to the culprit who had just swallowed the access key he needed. "I suppose you think you're clever?" he intoned, his voice rather mild.

"Perhaps," the captive man coughed. "I just bought myself some leverage, after all."

The trooper seemed to consider this for a moment before he slowly shook his head. "No, I don't think you did."

Without being ordered, two Dark Horizon troopers quickly moved in and grabbed the captive's arms, holding him in place for a frenzied second. The lead trooper centered himself accordingly before he lifted his foot back and delivered a savage kick to his hostage's gut. A heavy boot impacted and indented squarely through unprotected and soft flesh. The man tried to double over in a coughing and spluttering fit, but the mercenaries holding him in place would not allow him to do so.

The hostage wretched, pained as the access key traveled back up his gullet as the urge to vomit took him by surprise. He clamped his jaw shut though, unwilling to let the item pass from his mouth into the hands of his enemies. However, he would be unprepared for the savageness and simultaneous desperation that his captors were willing to exercise. The lead interrogator abruptly dropped to a knee and closed a large hand over the wheezing man's throat. The trooper's knife was back in his other hand—Roahn could see through the screen just what he intended to do and her mouth fell silently open as her own gut dipped into a freefalling plunge that sent her entire mind spinning with horror.

There was a slash of metal and the quick sound of what appeared to be a longing sigh. A thick red gash had been opened up in the captive's neck. Dark pillars of blood burst from the opened arteries in a pulsating mist, momentarily drenching the assailant. The knife had torn through cartilage and nerves to open up the trachea. A dark whistling sound could be discerned—the lingering and pathetic death knell. Without hesitation, the trooper reached his hand into the wound, plunging his fingers through muscle and carotid sheathes as he slipped and fumbled his way inside.

Roahn felt like she was about to throw up. Next to her, Garrus had on a furious grimace. Skye looked particularly shaken and Korridon was doing his damnedest not to watch.

The trooper, hand still inside the throat of the dying man, gave a firm yank as he gripped something within. The body rippled in a fatigued pulse, refusing to release whatever it was the mercenary had grabbed. Another yank, another shuddering ripple. Now gradually pulling, the trooper gave a grunt and finally, with a crunching sound and a splash of more blood to add to the macabre collage of gore, he fell backwards onto his ass, an access card dribbling with carnage held tightly between thumb and index finger.

"Always figured I'd make a good surgeon," the mercenary quipped as he got to his feet after shaking the card clean.

Roahn could take it no more. She tapped Garrus on the shoulder and relayed her intent with a simple nod of the head. She then stood from her position and brazenly rounded the corner, assault rifle already shouldered.

"Consider your career cut short," she snarled.

The first round she unleashed passed right through the torturer's neck, exiting in a flurry of blood and gore that arced in an impressive trajectory. He had only begun to collapse, stone-dead, when the quarian quickly turned her heels and focused her next shot on the now-closest Dark Horizon trooper, the one with the flamethrower. He had not even gotten his weapon up when the first round from Roahn hit him in a precarious position right between his legs. The ground right below him quickly splashed a vibrant and slick red. He collapsed, already groaning in pain when Roahn's second volley removed the top of his helmeted head, as if someone had carved out part of his skull with a metal scoop. The flamethrower bounced to the ground, the final flame that leaked out of it shivering in the sudden absence before it finally died in its solitude.

Garrus and Skye then bounded out from their positions and laid into the final three troopers that had just gotten their bearings together. One of Garrus' sniper shots impacted perfectly onto a merc's chest, the kinetic force spinning them around completely before death overtook them. Skye's own bullets shredded the legs of another trooper that had been moving forward to gain a better position—she finished him off two seconds later with a bullet to the head.

The last trooper Roahn took care of in short order. He had been fumbling by himself all out in the open, unsure of what to do when all hell had broken loose. She did not give the man any time to consider his position. She unleashed a trio of well-placed shots—the fifth and final mercenary collapsed, all three shots having made contact with his stomach. He shuddered in weak gasps while blood leaked from his fresh wounds, no doubt in a lot of pain.

And just like that, the skirmish was over.

Roahn approached the first of the Alliance bodies she saw, ready to lend a hand. It was soon apparent that there was no point—all of the hostages were well within the thralls of death judging from the catastrophic mutilation that had been applied to their bodies. A grimace creased her mouth as she stood among the dead, blotchy red footprints marking a deadly trail around her.

The last trooper that Roahn had shot had yet to expire, though. He was painfully rocking on his back, hands cradling his gut which now looked like ground hamburger, a common side effect of absorbing three bullets fired at high velocity. Skye had hurried over by now and had picked up the flamethrower that had been previously deposited by one of the trooper's colleagues when he had bought the farm (again, courtesy of Roahn). The flamethrower was a newer model—white polymer coating that looked like enamel, oversized fuel canister, aesthetically pleasing to the eye—and was easily activated after a few pulls of the trigger, spewing blindingly hot fans of flame that danced in the curves of Roahn's visor. She now walked over menacingly to the downed trooper, holding her newly acquired weapon in a threatening manner.

"Give as good as you get," the woman snarled to the dying mercenary, who was probably too imbibed on his own agony to even acknowledge her words anyway. "Unfortunately for you, I also practice what I preach!"

Korridon, now also in the room, had turned at the sound of Skye's brutal declaration. As soon as he laid eyes upon the flamethrower in her hands, something changed within the man. An intrinsic and downright nameless dread seemed to fill the turian at the very sight of the fire-spitting device, its heat washing over him in powerful waves. His hands, as if exposed to a fierce cold, took on a shake. The flames from the weapon died down, but they remained lit in his eyes. Automatically, his legs moved in long strides, his hands gripping at something latched to his waist while Skye lined up her shot on the downed mercenary.

Roahn was about to call out to Skye, anything to dissuade her from completing her violent inclination. But as soon as the flamethrower's muzzle was fixated upon the trooper's head, the sharp crack of a pistol shot rang out. The mercenary finally flopped to the ground, lifeless and still. A round hole in his helmet oozed blood and smoke.

The same vapor poured from the barrel of Korridon's pistol as he stood in the middle of the room, his arm outstretched, and a blank look on his face.

"We gave enough," the turian rasped, still staring down at the man he had just killed. "Enough."

Skye groaned, not understanding the fact that Korridon was in a lot of anguish at this moment. "You took my k—"

The quarian knocked the flamethrower out of Skye's hands with a fierce blow from her prosthesis. The weapon bounced to the ground with a loud and clamorous rattle. The housing cracked from the impact and the fuel drum disconnected and rolled away, spilling a few precious droplets. Skye jumped backward in alarm, rubbing at her wrist, and was about to make a startled exclamation until she saw the absolute fury that had enveloped Roahn's eyes at this moment, so bright they could have shattered the glass of her mask.

Roahn could have slapped Skye. The insensitivity of it… the downright barbarism! So willing to pick up that immolating device without any sort of consideration to the consequences both observable and beneath the surface.

She walked up and lowered her voice so only Skye might hear. She had to crane her head upward due to the human being just a few inches taller. "You… idiot," she seethed. "Do you even know what you were intending to do?"

"Yes, Roahn," Skye said loudly and matter-of-factly, apparently not at all abashed. "I was avenging these—"

But Roahn would not hear any of it. She raised a hand between both of their faces right as she looked away, cutting Skye off. When the human tried to voice her protest again, Roahn responded by jabbing her hand closer to her lover's mouth indignantly, hoping that her immeasurable disappointment could be conveyed in such a brief action.

Shepard and Garrus were staring, naturally drawn to the conflict. Roahn gave a slow blink and her head a brief shake before lowering her hand.

"We'll discuss this… incident when we're back on the ship. Until then, keep your hands to your own damn weapons."

She then bent down and plucked the blood-stained access card from where it had dropped, next to the freshly killed mercenary she had shot. She then walked over and grabbed at Korridon's arm, leading him towards the vault door and everyone else behind.

By the time they had passed into the next room, the younger turian was getting rather anxious. "Back there," he began to say, "I shouldn't have—"

"Don't apologize," Roahn gruffly said as they halted in front of the vault door. The egress point was standard Alliance quality; thick and dense starship steel, triple bolted, sliding access point, plus an integrated keypad built into the doorframe. Opening her tool, she conducted a quick scan for any physical weak points that were lying under the surface. As expected, there were none that could be discerned as she cycled through the wavelength views, but that did not mean that this was a dead end for them.

Roahn placed the access card into the slot on the keypad. A monochrome screen flashed as it accepted the physical access key. There were no other prompts to be displayed as the software was now awaiting the digital security key, which was going to be the tricky part of the operation. Not even close to deterred, Roahn linked her omni-tool to the datapad—an easy endeavor considering it had the most complicated serial number on the network, thus denoting its importance—and primed up her cracking program. Next to her, Korridon was nearly shaking as he wrung his hands, something eating away at his mind.

"Roahn… I didn't want to shoot that man. But Skye… she looked like…"

"I told you not to apologize," Roahn sighed but she dropped her arms and turned towards him, providing the turian with her full attention. "You did what you had to. You just didn't want to see a man burned to death in front of you. I don't blame you. It's not a nice way to go."

"No, it isn't."

Something about the conviction in Korridon's voice gave Roahn pause. Almost as if the turian knew exactly the sort of hell he had just spared the mercenary from undergoing.

It was a fate he had to have seen once already. It was the light in his eyes, the quick and nearly imperceptible flash of savagery that gave it away.

"What happened to you, Korr?" she whispered. "Why are you really here?"

Korridon blinked, not understanding the question. "You picked me for this mission… didn't you?"

Roahn shook her head. "Why are you here with Umbra? What made you look to us? Did you think you could find some redemption here?"

The turian tightened his jaw, almost as if he was now wishing that he was anywhere else other than here. "You should already know," he said. "You've seen my file. You know that I had no future anywhere else."

"Because you were charged with insubordination."

"But you don't really know why, do you?"

Roahn faltered, a lump in her throat lodging there. Her hands unconsciously flexed, all pressure, as she felt her entire body seem to draw in upon itself, a compact and denser form resistant to damaging changes.

Korridon's eyes flashed to the right, making certain that no one else was in earshot. "I killed my superior officer."

The turian lurched, as if he wanted to say more, but kept his mouth tightly shut after that. Roahn could have sworn that she had just heard a dark presence laughing some shadowy corner of her mind, but the phantom faded before she could hone in on its location.

"Was it justified?" her follow-up seemed pitiful, her voice now light and sounding hopelessly naïve.

Korridon shook his head. "In cold blood."

Roahn stayed frozen in place, unsure of how to react. Was Korridon expecting her to yell hurtful words denoting the betrayal of her trust? To shy away in backlash against the destruction of the previous image she had built up in her head of the man? She was still here, wasn't she? So was he, evidentially. But still… such honest brutality. No punches pulled. As if he did not anticipate her immediate comprehension, or if he hoped she would ever comprehend his motives.

"They gave you insubordination instead of murder?"

A clawed hand raked at the turian's own face, razing part of the orange facepaint that had been liberally applied to his carapace, sloughing it off in wide chunks. "The situation was… complicated. Problematic for everyone. Insubordination was the only way the judicial board could placate both sides, to assign what they felt was the appropriate amount of fault." Korridon then unexpectedly slammed a fist into the wall, creating a dull ringing throughout the room. He pried his fingers away from the impact area, the cartilage around his digits now scratched. "Fuck. I shouldn't have brought this up. This was the wrong time, Roahn, I'm sorry."

Roahn was torn between the two warring halves of her—her professional side and her inquisitive side. After such a bombshell like that, of course she would have wanted to know the specifics of what had possessed Korridon to do something like what he had said. Shy, considerate Korridon murdering his own superior officer? Had it not come from his own mouth she would have laughed it off for it sounded so ridiculous. Yet the other half agreed with the turian in that this was the wrong time to discuss this. The both of them had a job to do, not to delve deep into each other's past for the sake of discerning motivation.

She grabbed at his arm, gently, with her real hand. Her expression behind her visor softened, no longer judgmental and accusing. "When you're comfortable, I would like to know the story." She then released him as she reopened her tool, focusing on the mission again. "When we're back on the ship, come to my cabin any time and we can just talk. No repercussions. Just us. Talking."

Slit pupils rose to meet hers, a wary and newfound hope that had been long buried just now starting to become unearthed in his eyes.

"I think I'll take you up on that, commander," he choked out gratefully.

She smiled, though the subtle movement was difficult to discern through the sapphire glaze. Ending this dialog with a pronounced nod, the two of them settled back into their operational mindset, closing off all emotional gates to return themselves to the objective that required their full and utmost attention.

We all have our demons, Korr. It's our life's duty to find the right way to kill them. You may be able to tell me yours… but I'll never reveal mine. That's my burden to bear.

Returning her thoughts to the here and now, Roahn found her concentration seeping back with every deep breath she took. Her hacking program was still locked on to the vault's datapad. With a few precise button presses, she initiated a process that began examining the construct of the base's network thereby formulating a digital framework on her very tool. Machine-learning software in her omni-tool took the intruding packets—little bits of tracking information that were barely intrusive so that they would not trip any security alerts—that Roahn had been sending out into the network she wished to hack and began hypothesizing the complex digital architecture on her own private network located around her wrist. A few seconds later, she received a notification indicating that the process she had initiated was now finished. A clone of the Alliance's system, security protections and all, now resided on her own tool, ready for her to play with.

There were perhaps many more elegant ways of cracking the datapad to a vault like this one, but the one thing that complex and beautiful digital solutions required that Roahn did not have was time. The most expert hackers in the galaxy used clever tactics such as custom rootkits and social engineering to derive the perfect exploit into the system they wished to access. The methods that Roahn had at her disposal were rudimentary, crude, and quite messy to their network victim. This time, the process was not the most important part. The result was the point. It had always been the point.

Cloning a victim system was an uncommon hacking method that had good reason to be utilized so rarely. It required at least a secure-level user access to the network in question (which Roahn had obtained from her father) and the right software needed to craft the clone in the first place, which was an expensive and unwieldy piece of software unavailable to the public. But, a cloned system was beneficial in that it allowed the hacker to run any sort of exploitation tool they desired, even the obnoxiously detectable ones like brute-force attacks and vulnerability scanners, and they would not trip any third-party detection because the "network" was now on another drive. Her drive. Roahn essentially now had free reign over the cloned system, able to play with it to her heart's content. Any solution found in her own instance could be utilized in the real one, without ever having made any serious assault against its actual defenses in the first place.

Not willing to let just one process to do all the work, Roahn unleashed three separate applications on the clone network that were designed to punch their way through the levels of encryption by cycling through a series of repeatable steps in the form of system attacks. Little by little, each layer of security was slowly whittled away, with more and more letters of the digital access key being revealed over time as every conceivable combination of characters was brutally applied to the clone system. It took less than two minutes for the deluge of applications to reach the unveiled password and it soon popped up on the screen for Roahn to just take, as if it had been given to her in offering.

Roahn copied the password and reconnected her way onto the Alliance network, deleting the clone for good measure. Her heart leaped as the password immediately took. No error screens for this quarian! The grin she had on her face must have been infectious because she could see the same expression take hold of Korridon as they heard the vault doors begin to shift.

Heavy metal slid aside to reveal a blank room with just a singular cart parked in the middle. A thick black case sat upon the top of the cart, plaintive and unassuming. It appears that the vault had only been constructed to accommodate this one item. Approaching it, Roahn could feel a membranous pulse slide inside her head, a watery filter that accompanied a drunken sway.

"Feel that?" Roahn momentarily clutched her head.

"Yeah," Korridon said as he widened his stance. "Residual energy from the artifact."

The turian unclasped the case and gently lifted it open. The artifact had been laid across a bed of foam stalagmites within, balanced perfectly upon the soft tips, awaiting interaction. At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a rough and jagged black stone, looking like it had just been chiseled from the ground in ore form. But upon closer inspection, Roahn could see that one of its sides was flattened, like a delicate knife had just carved away part of it. This side was smooth and polished and deeply etched with intricate and sophisticated markings interwoven and esoteric in its design. Roahn wondered if it was a pictogram that was being displayed here, or some ancient language that defied alphanumeric shapes to relay and comprehend information. Whatever the case, it certainly matched the cryptic designs she had seen on all the other artifacts thus far. That, plus the sloshing feeling of dark energy pounding her head was all the confirmation she needed that this was in fact what they had come for.

Korridon reached out, segmented and fractured circles rotating upon his palm while thin lines of strobed light stabbed out, touching every corner and angle of the artifact. Roahn tilted her head in wonderment, soon realizing that the turian was conducting a quick scan of the artifact. She could see a brief profile of the object plus wavelengths of its energy output appear on his omni-tool's screen.

The turian looked towards her after he shut down his tool. "Backup. Just in case," he explained.

Roahn knelt down and unfurled a strapped duffel bag from a compartment in the small of her back. Snapping the case shut, she shoved it towards the bag so that it could be consumed by the thick canvas. She then zipped the bag back up and slung it over her shoulders, bouncing it so that she could shift the weight for an ideal distribution on her body.

"All set?" Korridon asked, breath bated.

The quarian yanked on the straps to tighten them. Her hand brushed the grip of her pistol before she lifted it away, unconcerned with the weapon for now.

When she looked up at him, all the turian could see was a fierce determination.

"All set," Roahn nodded. "Let's go."

---

The air was still and cold in the elevator as the squad hustled inside, nerves beginning to jitter upon their bones. The lift quickly shot upward, barreling everyone up through the dead crust of the moon like a bullet out of a gun. Roahn adjusted the weight upon her back—the shoulder straps of the pack were beginning to dig into her skin through her suit. She resisted the urge to check her chronometer—time was going to be tight if the next Alliance patrol was estimated to arrive back at base soon. The soldiers were certainly not going to be all that sympathetic to find their comrades butchered in the lower levels. The circumstantial evidence alone would be nearly impossible to sort out. She would have contacted Liara for confirmation on the patrol's whereabouts, but a little readout in the corner of her suit's HUD indicated that she was still too far underground to get a clear signal to the Menhir.

"That little skirmish with Dark Horizon's put us a few minutes behind," Garrus said as the doors began to open. He was already moving before the opening had widened all the way. "We're going to have to make a break to the shuttle."

"We should've posted a lookout at the entrance," Shepard groused as he flexed his hip joint. "Too late to do anything about that now."

Everyone quickly shoved their helmets back onto their heads right as they reached the airlock door. Garrus waited for everyone to give him a thumbs-up or some other sign to indicate team readiness. He then hit the first control to seal the door behind them—once completed, he initiated the atmospheric equalization process before opening the door to Triton's surface.

"Get us in contact with the Menhir," Garrus ordered Roahn as he took his first steps out onto the boilingly cold plain. "Tell them to be ready to stand by with… with… oh, crap."

In hindsight, Roahn had already been planning to raise a link with the ship that was irritatingly locked to the barest definition of an atmosphere some hundred miles above her head, and she would have gone through with it had her captain not frozen in place as if his suit had sprung a leak and the beyond subzero temperatures had completely flooded his interior in a catastrophically frigid wave.

It was clear that they had made one major miscalculation. They truly had been beaten to the punch at every turn.

Positioned directly in front of the entrance, using the elevated walkways and several scattered boulders as makeshift cover, nearly a platoon's worth of Dark Horizon troopers had been aiming their weapons at the door that Roahn and the rest of her team had exited from. A Phantor mech, angular and terrible, took up the rear of the ambushing force, both cannons squarely aimed at the center of the Umbra squad. The mech's two legs sunk into the shattered ground about a foot, raising jagged chunks of frozen rock and ice around its feet.

"Hands in the air!" one of the troopers bellowed. "We're not fucking around, do it now!"

"No one reach for anything," Garrus muttered as he slowly, haltingly, began to comply.

Roahn's eyes scrambled back and forth in her incredulity. She wanted to scream if Garrus had a plan for this at all, but everything in her was saying that there was no plan for this sort of outcome. Nothing.

"They can't get the artifact," she nearly moaned in her impotence.

"Just be calm," Garrus said, which seemed like a crazy thing to even utter in this moment. "We can't make a difference if we're dead."

A vibration, discernable even in this voided hell, became a worrisome presence as rasped intakes like exhaust vents sang in the audio receptors of everyone's helmets. From the darkness, a coil-white and impossibly thin outline leapt down from above and landed just in front of the platoon almost as if they had stepped from the door of a passing starship. The impact they left on the walkway caused it to sink down a couple of feet, bending the struts underneath. Silently, they then began to float from where they had fallen, mass effect fields surrounding the skeletal chassis and tenderly exerting its dark forces upon it. Four spindly arms unfolded from behind its main arms on its back, giving the cyborg a spider-like appearance.

"I truly wonder if you had hoped to hold the encroaching storm back with a hand," the Cardinal preened, her voice slithering through everyone's helmet speakers—the cyborg had managed to bypass their security protocols! Her emotionless head, blue light continuously blaring and god-like, swept its beacon gaze upon the members of Umbra. "History evidentially does tend to repeat itself. Now, kindly hand over the artifact. You will have painless deaths if you cooperate."

As the Cardinal finished speaking, her four rear-mounted arms were now being brandished in prime slashing positions. The tips of her arms unsheathed themselves and what looked like dull green spear points exuded from the very ends of those rigid limbs. As soon as they came into view, Roahn's particle detector immediately began crackling loudly in her ears, emphasizing sudden spikes from a nearby energy source.

"Spirits," Garrus buckled, also detecting the same thing. "Radioactive sensors just went off the charts." He took a look at the cyborg's armaments and gave a slight stirring. "She's been completely laced with polonium."

"One scratch from those and it's over for you," Shepard grimly noted out loud.

Roahn felt as if lead weights had been anchored to her feet, keeping her in place. Shepard then moved slightly to left after the Cardinal had spoken, partially shielding his daughter from the creature's gaze.

The Cardinal still oozed a calm exterior while four of her infectious arms began to rotate in pinwheeling-like motions. If air had been tangible here it would have been shredded from the cyborg's increasing velocity of her rotations. "Your posturing is only an exercise in recklessness, not heroics. I wonder which of you is the likely culprit for possessing it?" She tilted her head as she considered each member of the squad in turn before she finally seemed to settle upon Roahn. "Ah. Of course. Wouldn't that be fitting? Aleph seems to have quite the obsession for you, quarian. A misplaced hope… but who am I to question his immaculate construct? Will you hand over the artifact or shall I rip your remaining arm off to indulge inevitability's theorem?"

It seemed like everyone else had clustered around Roahn unconsciously to protect her. A foul sensation took hold of the quarian around her neck. Not only was she disgusted at even the vague notion that Aleph routinely considered her, she was—at the same time—taken by an indignant outrage that this metallic brute was displaying such an arrogance, like she actually believed that Roahn would comply with such a request!

Under the stare of rifles, cannons, and unfired bullets, the danger washed away from Roahn as she slowly crept her hand to the grip of her pistol.

Garrus spotted the movement out of the corner of his eye. "Roahn… no…"

"Roahn…" Shepard uttered.

"Roahn…" Skye croaked.

Korridon said nothing. Instead, he placed his hand upon her shoulder. Three fingers gently squeezed, locking her in position.

Her next breath billowed warmth through her body. It felt like she had just emerged from a pool of gelatinous liquid, every inhalation a horrible effort. Her hand fell away from her weapon, her last line of defense.

The Cardinal seemed to slump. "How pitiful," her siren-like voice rasped. She seemed rather disappointed. She then raised a hand and swept it forward in a long arc. "Move in," she ordered the Dark Horizon troopers behind her. Taking the lead, she floated on ahead down the warped walkway, a nearly intangible bubble of biotic energy surrounding her form, keeping her levitated.

The mercenaries began to rise up and follow the cyborg's lead in formation. Rifles were slotted against shoulders. Submachine guns were held sideways to allow sight alignment with bulky helmets. Shotguns were lofted at hip-level. They were eerily silent as the air-less moon stifled their footsteps, a procession of shadowed shapes lightly grazing a reflective and glassy surface.

Roahn looked at the elevator shaft behind her. Too far away and the doors were already closed. If they tried to make a break for it, they would be torn apart. She shuffled backwards a step, but Korridon's hand was still on her shoulder, making it difficult to traverse further.

As the mercenaries approached, it soon became apparent that something was causing a distraction among the leftmost positioned troopers in the formation. Several of them were turning to the side, now not at all concentrating on Umbra as something new caught their attention.

"Contact right!" one of them shouted, causing the rest to turn.

Roahn also rotated her head about, as did everyone else. From a nearby canyon, two open-air buggies were silently arriving, throwing up small clouds of particulate ice behind them as they traversed. The vehicles were manned by six troopers each, all decked out in Alliance colors.

"Time's up," Roahn heard her father say next to her.

"You are intruding in an Alliance operating area!" one of the Alliance troopers called out as their buggy slowly rolled to a stop. They leapt out, along with the rest of their team members, and quickly brought their rifles into position, point them at both Umbra and Dark Horizon alike. "Identify yourselves! Now!"

The three separate forces stood in a triangular formation. No one dared move a muscle. They all remained statuesque, finding themselves quite welcome amongst Triton's stillness.

"Well," the Cardinal clucked, "this is quite the unfortunate development."

Garrus edged forward at last, hands still raised in the air. He slowly rotated towards the commanding Alliance officer, hoping his body language would register as a desperate plea for assistance. "Lieutenant, I—"

"Stay right where you are!" the lead Alliance trooper brought his weapon to bear on the turian, a harsh snap of reflexes keeping him taut even in this low gravity. "You do not move forward until we tell you. This is a restricted area. Lay down your weapons or we will fire on you!"

The lieutenant touched a control on his belt and Roahn's omni-tool, as well as everyone else's, gave a soft ping. She then realized that they had all just been tagged. The Alliance had just shot off a flare telling the whole military—damn near the whole galaxy—that her team was intentionally violating sovereign human laws. Umbra had been set up from the very get go. In the right hands, this information would be used to discredit the entire team. They would be disavowed by the Council.

Was this really how everything ended?

"Garrus…" she gave a horrified whisper, but someone else cut in on the comm before she could voice out her complete worries.

"Signal contact reacquired," Sagan's voice cut in on the team's private channel. "Coordinates place you out of the killzone. Firing for effect. Splashdown in two."

Wait… Roahn realized. Splashdown in…?

"I called in the cavalry," Garrus reassuringly murmured.

Quicker than the blink of an eye, a momentary beam as high as the tallest skyscraper in existence glimmered into being for a pure and perfect moment. The light was so immediate that everyone only reacted well after the phenomena had come and gone. The low-mass orbital strike was supremely silent in the paltry atmosphere, the only sonorousness made apparent was the vibrations that rumbled deep within Roahn's helmet, resonating deep into the soft parts of her skull.

In the next second, the two-legged Phantor mech, blew apart in a terrific blast, tongues of flame and strips of metal flinging through the air. The Dark Horizon troopers closest to the mech were shredded into pieces or consumed by the briefest conflagration from the escaping oxygen. Roahn dropped to the ground—the walkway was shuddering. A sputtering roar. A long burst. The debris was still in the process of falling. The Alliance troopers had tripped over themselves, clearly shaken. The Cardinal was still floating—stray random detritus bouncing off her biotic shields—lazily appraising the ruined mech once the vacuum of the deep cold sucked away the fire and the heat.

But Umbra was still standing. Each and every one of them. Still shielded by the geyser of metal, rock, and ice, they all ran as one, plunging themselves across the plain while they braved the dense and white hail of fragmented moon raining down. A snowblind geyser, frozen dirt and ash surrounded by buffets of trapped nitrogen gas. The shuttle was a quarter of a mile away. They could make it.

"Execute them all!" the Cardinal howled.

---

For a brief period of time, a small part of the surface of Triton became ablaze with the glittering beams of mass-effect-laden bullets blueshifting across the curvature of the moon. A small valley, one of thousands, was now interlaced with light, a subtle framework that only revealed itself in fleeting bursts.

Roahn raced from boulder to boulder as bullets careened into the ground all around her. Shockwaves of force and light battered her body, pyrotechnics threatening to blind her. She dove behind one of the first rocks large enough to shield her from the brunt of the madness. In the brief lulls she would pop up and return fire of her own. Her gun made satisfying jolts against her shoulder—a welcome pain. Her cybernetic arm kept the rifle from arcing upward too much from the recoil as she tore apart her own sight as the end of the weapon flared over and over again.

A shot arced over the rock and slammed into Roahn's shoulder. Her shields held nicely, but the sudden flare of agony that transpired was a startling shock to her. Fear quickly evaporated into anger as she adjusted her aim and tried to find the bastard that had momentarily gotten lucky with his aim.

Dark Horizon's tactics had been advantageous in their initial ambush, but they were now caught between two fighting forces. Not exactly the prime location to be situated in during a firefight. Worse still, their position had quite the absence of cover to utilize. They still had the advantage of numbers, which was all the more devastating when several errant shots ripped up the ground all around Umbra as they hunkered down for shelter.

Roahn pivoted her aim as she saw one foolhardy mercenary make a dash towards her position. She gently squeezed the trigger and felt the welcome break as her finger pressed against the end of the guard. Her enemy's head burst apart in a mess of blood and shattered polymer, but something quite strange happened right afterward. The low gravity of the moon caused his body to slowly topple down as though he was underwater. The brutal cold had also frozen the blood that had jetted out from his shattered skull—red sheets were now tumbling in broken panes only to break apart like glass on the ground.

Another breath from Roahn as she purged her memory of the ghastly sight. She shifted her aim and focused on another one.

Again she fired. Again she was on target. Another mercenary spun around, his rib cage opened up like he had just been unraveled. More and more of Dark Horizon's forces were falling from the savage assault. Their bodies stuttered and stalled, frozen statues that pierced the landscape. Blood splatters froze in midair like melted rubies—if it managed to retain its warmth by the time it hit the ground, the blood would actually bounce only to finally succumb to the dark and the cold.

"Go!" she roared to the ones who had fallen behind—Skye and Korridon. They scrambled to their feet and dashed to the next clutch of rocks. Roahn took one more trooper out before she too continued her retreat.

Further ahead, Garrus had secured himself behind the rim of a small crater about a hundred meters away from the shuttle. He was liberal in his shot-taking, felling trooper after trooper while Shepard, who was next to him, provided close-range support with his pistol. The wearied commander was a bit slower on the uptake as he went from target to target, but his aim had not deteriorated in the slightest. Spent thermal clips began piling up around the two as their slides soundlessly slammed open, the lack of noise eerie.

Roahn felt weird as her loping gait made it seem like she was bounding across the surface of the moon. The ground passed by underneath her in a flat blur the color of refined steel. Her breathing, dry and deep, rasped into her ears, nearly deafening.

More and more soldiers, Dark Horizon and Alliance alike, were now beginning to spill from the edges of the valley, drawn to the conflict. Roahn waved a hand to ward off the Alliance soldiers, but they did not heed her signals, choosing instead to open fire upon her. She screamed out orders to cease fire, but she could not access their channels at all—they had cut her entire team off. To them, she was no better than the mercenaries. Just another enemy to vanquish.

It's all falling apart, she thought miserably.

A rocket streaked by her position and detonated in a fiery wave of pressure, throwing the quarian off her feet. She stumbled and fell, embarking into a roll that saw her skidding across the ground for several sections. She came to a stop on her back, head now spinning, beholden to watch the spray of bullets interject themselves between the stars overhead. Groggily, she turned herself back over on her stomach, retrieving her rifle from where she had dropped it. Prone, she squeezed several short bursts at the soldiers overhead—more and more shots sang by her head, puncturing the ground all around her. Roahn howled in the face of the terrible danger and she saw through her scope the bodies of Alliance soldiers fall to her shots, one after the other.

Her three-pronged heartbeat felt like it was pushing needles deeper and deeper into the very muscle. Roahn lay on the ground in a half-daze, muscle actions automatically assuming command as her shock-saturated brain temporarily ceded its will. With every soldier she killed, she dug her grave further. But she could not stop. They would just… not… stop. The lines had been drawn and they could no longer be erased.

She had a job to do. Protect her team. Her friends. If others had to die to see her mission accomplished, then so be it.

Rising to her feet, Roahn gave a silent snarl as she let the encroaching forces have it. Rifle billowing with light, vibrations chattering up her arm, she resigned herself to her own private damnation.

---

Glimmers of crystalline beams flickered by the gaunt exoskeleton of the Cardinal, shattering stone and metal all around her form. Red-hot bits of debris smashed against the ovular shield that encompassed her body, creating liquid ripples around the pod-like field. An explosion bloomed in the background. Screams of the dying billowed in the helmets of those that lay at her orbiting feet.

The Cardinal seemed to breathe in the vacuum. A shudder of pleasure. Whatever electrical impulse left within her ruined nervous system that could satisfy such base cravings coursed through her. Water billowing from a congested dam.

She watched members on her side, on the opposing side, hopelessly wheel around, completely lost. Her own immobile form was a beacon, an icon for the mapless. Coddled by dark and bitter cold, the Cardinal slowly floated her way towards the greatest concentration of Alliance soldiers, the sparking of their bullets across her shields acting as an irritant to her sensibilities. The arrogance to think that they could even so much as scratch her. Her! She was the Cardinal! Her sovereign's most trusted herald! These nuisances shall be dealt with.

Lowering herself to the ground calmly, the Cardinal suddenly erupted into a multi-legged form as every one of her limbs dropped down and clawed at the dirt and ice, propelling her forward with only a ferocity that would rival Raucous'. Her unreadable face was its own star dimly reflected on the face of the chalk surface of the very floor she tore up. A construct of inorganic plates and shielding all concentrated around this one mote, this singular light in the very center of her head. It was beautiful and terrible all at once.

Her prey always realized this too late.

Launching herself into the air, the Cardinal used her rearward thrusters to propel herself back down to the surface. A cluster of six Alliance soldiers huddled in a circular formation over a small ridge, completely unaware of her arrival. A shame for them. The cyborg landed with a heavy thump, enough to nearly cause everyone to lose their footing. The soldiers all pinwheeled for a split-second as they suddenly realized who had just appeared in the middle of their group.

But the Cardinal was already in motion.

Quicker than the blink of an eye, the Cardinal ducked and spun out her rearward arms in a wide arc, slashing them as far as she could reach. Her arms closed upon each other like scissors, bladed forearms passing easily through armor and flesh. In the next second, she came to a standstill, only the wisp of dust and ice left streaming from her arms as proof that anything was still moving.

What happened next all passed in a terrifying silence. There was a simultaneous streaming sound that wisped from all six men—a slow and subtle sigh, almost. All at once, each of the soldiers' knees buckled and collapsed, causing them all to fall. But as they fell, they came apart at nearly the exact same moment. Bisected cleanly at the waist, the six soldiers became twelve pieces as they finally settled upon the frozen ground, the last bit of blood that had not yet been chilled momentarily leaking from their torn halves. Cut off at the waists, legs without owners formed a macabre tangle while the suddenly detached torsos seemed to create a startled and pained tableau, as if none of the Cardinal's victims had even realized that they had died.

As she stood tall amongst her victims, the Cardinal then whirled indignantly as a sudden burst of machine gun fire ripped across her shields. An Alliance trooper had seen the horrendous display and was now laying into her with all the power his weapon had.

"You monster!" he howled as he struggled to contain his weapon on full-auto. "What are you?! What—are—y—?"

With a speed that seemed to rip a hole in the universe, the Cardinal shot forward, limbs extended, not stopping until the soldier had been impaled through the neck. Twice. Fierce jets of blood sprayed out before dropping down in a thick rain.

"Merely an envoy," the Cardinal hissed, right before she messily ripped her limbs from the soldier's neck, "to silence."

As if they were being trapped in a schizophrenic zoetrope, the cream-white limbs slashed their way free from the man, bringing about an explosion of blood and viscera that scattered its way to and fro under the gaze of a tortuous strobe.

The rest of the Alliance soldiers had turned to face her by now, all alarmed at the speed and efficiency with how she had dispatched their brothers-in-arms. How sweet, drawn by their comradeship, the Cardinal thought. Her internal software picked up at least a dozen weapons in the process of being pointed right in her direction. A comforting thought, partly because now she knew she had their attention. Time to wrap this up.

Before any of the soldiers could pull their trigger to launch their assault on the cyborg, the Cardinal savagely lunged her six arms forward and a spray of sickly-green particulates hurled from the tips of her limbs in a noxious mist. The flecks, precisely crafted molecules of polonium, moved through the air, unimpeded by the low temperatures or gravity. They embarked in a wide spread, like how a shotgun's rounds perform. A good chunk of the toxic molecules missed the men, but regardless, every one of them was quickly hit from the nearly invisible cloud.

Satisfied with herself, the Cardinal folded her arms in front of her chest. She only needed to watch now.

The first death happened in seconds. The first Alliance soldier near the back doubled over, their weapon slowly slipping from their grip. The Cardinal tilted her head, the closest she could manage to a gesture of humor. She could see, by the way the human appeared to be retching, that the inside of his visor was completely covered in thick black gore. Not surprising, considering that such an amount of absorbed radiation like that was causing him to uncontrollably throw up pieces of his disintegrating digestive system. Organ failure had already begun—pieces of the brain would die off in the next few seconds. Loss of motor control would be simultaneous with this cascading development. The reaction had begun, there would be no stopping it.

One after another, the members of the Alliance team fell to the ground, wetly coughing before rolling around in the most indescribable agony they could ever imagine. The Cardinal stood over the closest dying soldier, able to easily peer through the tinted faceplate of his helmet. The man was bleeding out of every orifice. His eyes were completely bright red, bleeding freely from his tear ducts. His nostrils and mouth were clogged with masses of black. His skin was also the color of decay, nearly rotting off his bones.

Diseased cells in the humans could finally take no more and they simply came apart, the decayed DNA within having withered down to shredded nubs of dispersed amino acids. Around the cyborg, several humans in various states of liquefaction sagged. Behind their helmets, their features took on lumpy shapes, the underlying structure compromised, the fluids within in the process of messy evacuation.

"One more disruption quelled," the Cardinal spoke as the last soldier took his final, shuddering breath, a deity to the torture and misery that she had inflicted. "The Tranquility grows ever closer."

---

A line of concentrated fire suddenly erupted the ground in front of Roahn, throwing her off her balance. She had to dig her heels into the ground so that she could find enough purchase to leap behind a nearby dune for safety. The rocky knoll popped as bullets from the PMC's suppressive fire routinely pounded it. Crushed ice and rock rained down upon the quarian, snagging in the fabric threads of her sehni. Several times she tried to maneuver around to lay off a couple of potshots, but the enemies were too numerous. She could not get the chance to fire back!

"Maneuvering in geosynchronous orbit," Sagan's voice resonated through her comms. "Reacquiring contact in forty-five seconds."

Blindly, she lifted her rifle above the rim of the hillside and clenched down on the trigger, letting the recoil of the weapon dictate the aim. A terrible habit, but it had the desired effect of warding off any mercenaries who had wandered too close.

Then Roahn's weapon decided all on its own to have a breakdown. One of the heat sinks, automatically designed to eject upon absorbing too much thermal energy, failed to clear the slide after its forceful removal, lodging half-inside the guts of the weapon.

Roahn cursed and yanked at her weapon to clear the jam. In the middle of her maintenance, she could spot her father and Garrus near the shuttle, doing their damnedest to plug away at the entire army they had attracted. She was several dozen meters further from the transport than they were—a coverless steppe stretched before her. If she ventured out there, she would certainly be killed. Those bullets would drain her shields in seconds and then she'd be easy pickings for any crack shot Dark Horizon had happened to bring along.

There was movement to her right and left. Roahn instinctively reached for her pistol at her side before she had to force herself to relax the inclination. It was only Skye and Korridon, both breathless after making their last jump to safe cover. The quarian was between them both in the middle of this piece of lowlands—either one of her friends was at her flanks, trying to huddle themselves behind anything that would screen them from enemy view.

Korridon's rifle lay in pieces at his feet—a stray bullet had ripped a quarter of it away, rendering it useless. Weaponless, the turian's body language told Roahn that he was completely terrified as he struggled to push himself into a little crack in the side of the small rock wall his back was already against.

Skye was not faring much better. She was in a decent enough position to provide some cover fire, but there were too many of Dark Horizon's forces that were encroaching too closely—her sniper rifle was unwieldy and ill-suited at this range to take care of them all.

Both Skye and Korridon happened to notice Roahn at the same time, trapped all alone like they were. Stuck in between them both, weathering the storm on the barest scrap of shelter she had left.

They screamed at her all at once, rifle fire partially drowning out their voices.

"Roahn!" was Skye's cry as a curtain of dust momentarily collapsed over her head. "Get me out of here! Help me!"

"Roahn!" Korridon yelled as the rock wall exploded all around him. "I can't… they're too many! I need covering fire!"

The crushing weight of her entire psyche threatened to come down in a collapsing rush upon Roahn. Between her allies, her friends, there was a distinct tugging at both ends of her body. Free to move, yes, but also endlessly trapped. Trapped behind this hill. Trapped in her head.

Skye and Korridon were still screaming at her, begging for her to come over and save one of them. Roahn could see their failing shields on her readout steadily drop lower and lower. Time was of the essence. She could rescue one of them, she was sure of it. But the both of them… she pushed aside those consequences for now.

Now it seemed ironically clear to her how her father must have felt on Virmire. Torn between one life or the other. How he had made his decision, she would never be completely certain. Gut instinct, she figured. No time for logic. Did he feel powerful or impotent back then, knowing he held the weight of a single life in his hand? It was a terrible burden, far heavier than the artifact she carried on her shoulders, heavier than anything she had carried before.

"Roahn!" Skye cried. "Roahn, please!"

"Roahn!" Korridon roared before he held up his arms to protect his head as a close volley dislodged a few precarious boulders on the ledge above him, spilling them in his direction. "Roahn! Shields are nearly down! Where are you?!"

With a deep breath, Roahn twisted herself around, readying to spring out. She had one smoke grenade that she had carried along for this mission. It was now in hand, her thumb already preparing itself over the activation switch. She looked to one side of the valley and then the other. Skye or Korridon. The woman who loved her or the man who would lead her to Aleph. The veil of tracer rounds from Dark Horizon streaked all around her position, blowing off bit by bit of cover, eroding it away.

I'm sorry, Roahn bemoaned as she bent her head towards the ground, eyes closed in regret. The smoke grenade in her hand arced away in a lazy bow. A thick exhaust cloud erupted from the device while it was still in midair. I'm sorry.

In the next instant, mouth tangled in an enraged snarl, she pushed off with her feet, exploding from behind the hill before the smoke could obscure her view. She heard Skye and Korridon both gasp over the comms. Her rifle, cleared and back to working condition, savagely bucked in her hands with muffled bellows of its own. Dark Horizon troopers toppled to the ground on the ridges above, their chests momentarily bursting with red puffs as Roahn's volley cut them all down. She made a sweeping cut with her aim, felling at least seven mercenaries before her low-gravity assisted glide brought her to the edge of the valley.

To Korridon.

"What are…" the turian seemed shocked that she had come to save him first. "You're here?"

"We need you if we're going to put this artifact to use," Roahn gritted as she unhooked her pistol and flipped it to the turian. "Defend yourself."

"Roahn, I have to let you know that—"

"Save it." Roahn tried not to let the emotion infect her voice as she turned around, now barely able to spot Skye huddled in her own hidey-hole at the other edge of the basin. Farther away and even more out of reach.

Roahn's heart was nearly cleaved in two as she could see the barrel of Skye's rifle drop downward, its owner having gone slack in disbelief. The human's visor was polarized but it was a remarkably simple affair for Roahn to imagine the surprise and most likely horror as she processed the breadth of this small betrayal. Did Skye truly believe that Roahn would put kinship over duty? Or did she never even know Roahn at all?

Skye's feet stumbled as the woman numbly got to her feet. Her head poked up from the rim of the ledge. Roahn saw the danger crest the lip of the valley behind the human and tried to shout a warning.

"Roahn…" Skye thickly mumbled, her head minutely shaking in the quarian's direction.

"Skye…" Roahn whispered, eyes opened wide.

"Why would—"

A fragile beam of light, the lingering heat cascading from a finely honed bullet, slammed into Skye's chest, crashing through the abused shields with ease. There was a burst of sparks and a meaty punch of dust and fragmented rock. The woman uttered a gasp of surprise right as her weapon involuntarily left her fingers, falling a foot for the edge of the scratched barrel to collide upon the frigid ground, eager to beat its owner upon that fateful spot.

She crumpled.

In the lower corner of Roahn's HUD, a heartbeat flatlined. Savage mountain ranges stretched into infinite plains. No loud wail to indicate the presence of an asystole resounded in her helmet. Just the taunting silence to accompany the image of the still body, so far away, lying prone on the ice.

"No!" Roahn screamed as she leapt to her feet, aghast. Smoke continued to wisp around her, nearly liquid in the absence of wind. Pain lanced through her as though it had been her that had gotten shot. "No, no!"

She tried to run over to Skye's body, but there was a firm yank on her arm. Korridon had fastened his hand around her wrist, frantically shaking his head.

"She's gone, Roahn!" he yelled. "Skye's gone!"

"I can't leave her behind!" she shouted in his face. She wrested her arm free with a ferocious wrench and made the sprint back across the valley, ignoring the cries from Korridon and her commanding officer.

Korridon stumbled after her, body cradled by the thick tendrils that lingered from the smoke grenade. He saw the quarian make it back to her original cover spot, smack-dab in the middle of the lowlands, less than a dozen meters away. He mustered to get over to where she was—she was not paying him any attention anymore.

"Roahn!" he called, pistol numbly clenched in a fist. "Roahn!"

Just as the quarian finally turned back, an empty look resplendent in her eyes, a grenade round sailed through the cloud of vapor, tender sparks trailing in its wake. It hit the ground between them and detonated, erupting in a billowing hemisphere of pressure and momentary light. Roahn was thrown through the air, towards the shuttle, her thoughts blank and dazed, and landed in battered heap. Korridon had been propelled through the smoke with a cry and disappeared as the mist consumed his body, shards of rock slashing through the cloud along with him.

Roahn coughed as she struggled to get back up, a powerful headache slamming her skull. Her throat felt parched, like she had been burned. Her shields fizzled around her body—they had been overloaded from the blast and were in the process of recharging. She looked around for her rifle, realizing that she must have dropped it in all the confusion.

"Korr?" she mumbled as she fought to get her bearings back, no longer concerned with reaching Skye's body. "Korr, sound off!"

There was no answer. No sound. Even the rasping crackle of gunfire had died down. The silence seemed absolute.

The curling smoke then parted to reveal the unnatural contours of the Cardinal, her head a blue sun that cut through the murky nebula of vapor. From the sooty sheets, she lifted an arm, dragging what it held out to be viewed by all. A metal clamp of a limb had been fastened around Korridon's neck, who was choking and gasping in his helmet, hands uselessly clawing at the appendage that contained him.

"Korr," Roahn mumbled, already succumbing to shock and terror.

The Cardinal laughed, answering in the turian's stead. "So it has a name," she cackled. "Good. That will only make it all the more painful."

Vents upon the Cardinal's back hissed, flooding the valley floor with more shapeless fumes. With a final laugh, the Cardinal stepped backwards into the smoke, the restrained Korridon reaching out a helpless hand to Roahn, his heels furiously digging in the ground deep enough to leave massive trenches.

"Korr!" Roahn cried as she raced forward to grab his hand, casting the danger aside. But just as her own metal fingers were inches from Korridon's, the smoke closed around him in a frantic sigh. Her hand clenched upon empty air—thick smog bled between her fingers.

Roahn threw her head back and howled towards the dark stretch of space, mouth locked open in rage. She spat wordless noises, esoteric curses, that she manipulated and crafted into her own weapons of hate. Of an impotent anger so immense that she was close to having it break right out of her. First Skye. Now Korridon. If only she could smash her fist down upon the ice-coated ground of this cursed moon and be able to crack it in half down to its frozen core. If only she could reach across time and space and rip out the diseased heart that belonged to Aleph. Perhaps then could this galaxy finally realize the terror they were in danger of unleashing upon themselves. The scourge that would display the full might at what a coddled and passionate hatred could exert upon this sorry existence that was her life.

She was about to charge her way in, damn the fact that she lacked any firearms, before two hands strongly grabbed at her shoulders. Roahn twisted and turned, continually howling "No! No!" but Garrus was not listening to her. The quarian knew deep down that his deliberate ignorance was borne out of a loving care and not a detached indifference. She still wanted to break his face though, for forcing her abandonment.

Still continuing to struggle, Roahn repeatedly roared her pledge to the empty battlefield to rescue Korridon, Garrus hauling her back to the shuttle in his stoic silence. The PMC had left, along with the Cardinal. The remaining Alliance forces had been wiped out in their departure. The smoke from the cyborg's body still lingered upon the plain, obscuring the entrance to the base as well as where Skye's body had fallen.

The battlefield now erupted with explosion after explosion. Red, white, and blue tones tumbling together in a percussive phenomena. The Menhir was back overhead, providing cover for their retreat. The light of the detonations momentarily overwhelmed the surviving Umbra crew, silhouetting the shape of the struggling Roahn in Garrus' arms upon the launch pad.

Once she had been restrained inside the shuttle, Roahn disabled her vocabulator so that her keening moans could only be heard by her. Her hands threatened to rip out the restraints that were now rattling as the shuttle's engines ignited and quickly propelled it from the thin atmosphere.

Skye… I never told you…

…and Korr. Korr.

Her resounding scream, condensed all around her head, tore at her like an eager scavenger willing to pick at her bones. She filled herself with the noise of her own despair, feeding it further and further as she yelled until her voice went hoarse.

She was all alone.

As it was meant to be.

---

A/N: I certainly had a time trying to get this chapter to completion, let me tell you. I was in the process of building a new PC these last couple of weeks and had started on a section of this chapter when the power supply in my new computer developed a fault and unexpectedly fried the motherboard, deleting all the additions I had made to this chapter at the time. Fortunately, the bulk of the chapter had been saved elsewhere and I was able to finish it up, although I did have to rewrite one particular section from scratch, which as you could imagine, was quite annoying.

Once I recover my original chapter, I might come back and see if I can possibly take any passages from that draft and add them to this one, as I thought I had some decent work done on that first pass-through.

Playlist:

Landing/Dark Horizon Encounter
"Fight Your Way Through"
Joris de Man
Killzone 2 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Stealing the Artifact
"Get Out"
Patrick Doyle
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Ice Battle (Pt. I - Bombardment)
"Cemetery Wind"
Steve Jablonsky
Transformers: Age of Extinction (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Ice Battle (Pt. II - Skye)
"Launch"
Hans Zimmer
Man of Steel (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)