"This is making me nervous," Prangley said over the radio.
"Shut up Prangley, we're all nervous," Rodriguez quipped back, blowing water from her lips. "We wanted to be the big damn heroes. Now, we're the big damn heroes."
Those Hades cannons will tear any meaningful disembarkation into hamburger. And if we're going to end this, we need a significant ground presence. And it's better to open a way sooner rather than later, in this case.
The Reapers had a numerical advantage, but a minor tactical disadvantage: once they dropped their forces, those forces tended to stay where dropped. It wasn't like with organics, where troops packed up and picked up at the end of an operation to be moved somewhere else. The Reapers couldn't just move all their husks into London at the drop of a hat.
There were still way too many Reapers, and ground units close to London could still converge, but it wasn't as if fresh troops from Abu Dhabi or Brisbane or Nara could just drop in. And she'd love to see those zombies try to walk from New York to London.
Just having incoming troops walk in is not only too slow, it's too damn dangerous. There's too much ground to cover, they'd be picked off. So you five units are going to punch some holes in the Reapers' defenses. Disable the line of cannons as best you can, then come back to headquarters.
It was a highly-visible action; it would let the Reapers know there was something big going on. Rodriguez sighed; they'd lose the element of surprise sooner or later, and even Reapers needed time to fix equipment. It was comforting to know, even if their weight of numbers tended to make little comforts like that irrelevant.
What unnerved her were the cannons themselves. They looked like…mutant torchbugs…with their butts in the air, prancing around on their weird Reaper legs.
"Let's tear this thing apart!" Rodriguez hissed, throwing herself out of cover and sprinting towards the cannon, dark energy racing across her body as she moved. There was a time when she wouldn't have trusted her barrier as much as she did now. Now, she felt like a speedy turtle: nothing got past her, nothing.
She slammed a fist forward, knocking a clustered half-dozen husks into the air, other similar attacks widening the avenue towards the cannon. "Keep pushing!" she barked, the bug-like cannon looming up before her. She'd never seen anything quite that massive that wasn't attached to a spaceship. More than that, it could walk around on its own.
The plan was simple: the biotics were supposed to tear into the housing of the cannons, then one member of the team armed with a heavy weapon would launch a shot or two into the damaged infrastructure, blowing the thing up from the inside out. No one's guts were explosion-proof.
The heavy weapon was being handled by an Alliance vet, not a biotic, someone who was more familiar with the heavy Cain.
She'd heard Lomax call the Cain a 'tactical nuke launcher,' though he assured her this was a colloquial term, because of its mushroom cloud. She was curious about that cloud.
The cannon stood some three or four stories high—it was hard to count without points of reference—the light from its firing orifice stark white, eye-searing, which somehow made the harsh landscape look even harsher and more nightmarish that it already was.
Point in their favor: not a lot of ground troops.
Points out of their favor: unfamiliar construction—she couldn't even see the joins in the housing under the firing chamber, which was where they were supposed to concentrate their efforts—and the sheer size of it. She'd never assaulted something to large, even with help. She half-wished Jack was on her team and not with Prangley…though she took it as a vote of confidence that if anyone needed the extra help, it was Prangley and not her.
It was something to live up to.
It was frantic, moving about underneath the cannon's feet, using her biotics to claw at the undercarriage until one of the others—she couldn't tell who, so desperate to rip the thing open before the cannon stepped on their heavy weapon guy—shouted that it was coming apart, that they were making progress.
Rodriguez dropped her biotic field and squinted up into the darkness, beyond which was searing light, and saw a small hole, where a plate had dented enough to expose the seam. "Alright, concentrate your attacks, let's rip it open!" Biotic light flared around her as she targeted that tiny darker patch of darkness, hope blossoming in her chest. They'd damaged it, it wasn't invincible, even if it was obscenely huge and well-made.
"I've got it!" the vet shouted. "Get down!"
That was easier said than done, and probably said only out of habit.
She heard the sound of the weapon charging, hastily raising a barrier before checking that someone had their heavy weapon covered—which they did.
THUNK! The shot sent the vet staggering backwards, grunting as he hit the back edge of the dome-shaped barrier.
WHOOOM! The slug seemed way too heavy to make it as far as it needed to go, but the hole was big and while the cannon seemed to want to do a jig on their heads, its legs rather than its body were what moved the most.
The canon exploded spectacularly in all directions, shrapnel pushed away from the unit by those glorious laws of physics. The biotics and their veteran scrambled to get out of the way of the collapsing superstructure, but Rodriguez knew it wasn't getting up. The garish white light had gone done.
"Incoming!" Matt shouted, voice spiking. "Looks like we're gonna have to fight our way out!"
"Well duh!" their veteran answered, switching from the Cain to his rifle.
Rodriguez sent a bolus of dark energy slamming into the suddenly-appearing roach-like contingent of husks. "And that's why they wanted biotics!"