"At no point have I taken any steps to conceal any misgivings that might have materialized during the timeframe in which the reconstruction of these accounts had occurred. It takes time for the biases of history to be eroded after certain events—to explain my motives in the interim immediately afterward would only face scorn and obstinate derision by the public, with only the lightest scrutiny afforded by historians and academics. The latter group would inevitably have to face a nigh-insurmountable goal of transferring their nonpartisan viewpoint unto a rabid civilian populace, who would understandably be thirsty for blood and the culmination of vengeance as defined by their own perceptions. Unveiled too early, my truths, or however they will be interpreted, would have been stripped of their weight, willingly cast aside in yet the umpteenth effort to ignore the shadows of the past in the misguided attempt to face the construction of the future without acknowledging the errors that had led up to this point.
I will not find it acceptable to have my perspective to be discarded so callously. Therefore, I have taken certain measures to ensure that the deliverance of my motives would be completed at a time when the specter of my memory lies only as a footnote in the historical accounts. Timed data capsules have been strewn around the galaxy, their burst function set to fire many centuries from the writing of this account. Their targets are the majority of research universities and accredited news institutions on the most developed worlds. These transmissions will contain my writings, along with a detailed account of my every action as part of a complete disclosure. With this, I will ensure that my memory will never be forgotten and that at no point can ignorance of the past be utilized as a legitimate platform for any mistakes that might echo in my wake.
I leave the judgment of my character into the hands of the people who have grown up without the preconceived prejudices to decry me as a madman. Perhaps the judgment is indeed warranted, but this time I can be assured that such an analysis will be subject to a greater amount of rational thought than what could be guaranteed now. Should such recollections be considered as definitive? I would disagree wholeheartedly, but the hope is that what I am able to offer fills in the blanks to the questions that have yet to be answered."
Final Monograph: Transcriptions of an Augury
Unknown Author, (pg. 152)
Reprinted by permission of Purdue University
Vakarian
The all-hands alert that went out throughout every single deck of the Vakarian had the effect of jolting everyone from whatever reverie they had placed themselves in. The interior lighting of the ship flashed blood-red and a quiet but still noticeable alarm began trilling. Immediately, everyone on board the ship headed to their combat stations, either situating themselves in front of diagnostics consoles in preparation to monitor vital components, or strapping themselves into crash seats so that they could take control over one of the Vakarian's many point defense cannons. The process of getting the crew locked into their stations was one of respectful pandemonium. Ensigns crowded the stairwells and stuffed themselves into the elevator to get to their needed decks. The rushed crowd did not panic, despite the circumstances, and the commotion never rose above mild jostling.
The crew of Umbra ran up to the CIC, where Roahn was standing in front of the galaxy map, having been the one to trigger the all-hands in the first place. The quarian was in full armor, a new visor adorning her helmet with the same static-skull pattern that had marked the previous one. Korridon had already been in the room when the alert went out, now standing next to Traynor as he silently looked up as his commander. Roahn turned around, waiting until everyone had assembled before her. Only then did she step down to address everyone on even ground.
"We under attack, jefa?" James asked, eyes tipping up to indicate the dark red combat lighting.
A second later did he realize that his question was nonsensical. The display behind Roahn, where the holographic galaxy would normally be sitting, a projected FTL jump map had been traced like an erratic constellation. The marker for the Vakarian was sitting square in the middle of the last line that terminated at a system marked "Porontus", and on a more granular level, the path seemed to end right in the orbit of a ringed planet called Serannua.
"Not yet," Roahn said, the light from the holo-projector grasping around her back. "But we're going to have our hands full in a few minutes." She touched a button upon the arrow-shaped dais, connecting her to the bridge. "Sagan, what's our ETA?"
"Two minutes, thirty-four seconds, commander," the geth's voice broke out throughout the CIC.
Jack raised an eyebrow as she instinctively patted the sidearm strapped to her leg. Not that such a weapon would do much good in a ship-to-ship fight, but the weight of it pressing against her was assuring. "Something tells me you've anticipated this," she said, but her tone was even enough to not be considered accusatory.
Roahn affixed the human woman with her direct gaze. "In a manner of speaking. One might even say I designed it."
The ragged council all seemed to intensify their focuses unto the quarian. Confusion and deep thought had become etched upon the brows of everyone in the vicinity, trying to figure out what the long-term goal here was.
Jack now tilted her head. "What are you getting us into, Roahn?"
"I made an executive decision. One that I think will pay off for the resistance quite handedly."
On the leftmost wing of the group, Liara crossed her arms. Her eyes flicked over to Korridon, trying to decipher any further context before it could be fully voiced. The turian gave nothing up—he was looking at Roahn without expression. Full and implicit trust.
The asari then lifted her chin. A silent question. Roahn noticed this and backed up a step, ascending the riser behind her by one rung, the added height bolstering her resolve.
"The Congregation is readying for their final stand on Rema," she explained, her hands making smooth and calculated motions. "We've been delaying the Radius' preparations for the past few weeks now, cutting off the supply lines of their contracted forces. However, we still have no definitive intel regarding their overall fleet strength. Without knowing what we're going to eventually face, the entire Congregation will be at a tactical disadvantage. We need to ready all our forces to answer everything the Radius is going to throw at us, otherwise… well, I don't think I need to state the obvious, do I?"
"But it's not like we've ever been afforded a chance to actually obtain this info—as the groups we smashed would not have any data that would be related to Radius ship movements," James added. "I mean… who would trust the PMCs to not squeal?"
"Which means in order to get that intel," Liara interjected, "you're saying we would have to face off against an Alliance ship. Or Hierarchy, or any other of the enemy Council fleets. And not just any ordinary ship, it would have to be a command ship, one in possession of the very data we require."
Roahn nodded. "You read my mind, Liara. It just so happens that I do know of the very sort of ship that would have that information: the Normandy."
A deathly hush passed through the group, the mere thought that the storied warship that had led the charge against the Reapers was now acting as the hood ornament of the traitorous attack force being worse than whatever imagery any slanderous curse could conjure. The mighty and peerless symbol, now desecrated from its once lofty status.
Kasumi shifted on her heels. "And… when you said you engineered all this with the Normandy? How do you know that the Normandy is the precise ship that's waiting for us once we get out of FTL?"
"I… sent something out beforehand," Roahn now spoke a fraction lower in volume. Her eyes flickered and glanced away for a microsecond. "A very specific transmission packet."
"How specific?"
Roahn sighed, her body language tightening. Behind her visor, she clenched her jaw several times, a dull but distinct valley of warmth ridging along her spine, as marked as the evening redness. Everything else surrounding the heated vale suddenly grew cold.
"There's…" she finally said, "…there's one more thing I need to—"
"Exiting FTL in 5.0 seconds," Sagan reported over the intercom. "Sending all wavelength feeds to main command panel. Enemy contact registered—one vessel. Alliance affiliation. Frigate class. Profile scan up on screen now."
The crew now looked to the bevy of displays that replaced the transit map just behind Roahn. As both Sagan had said and Roahn had predicted, only one ship was situated on their scopes. The enemy frigate's thermal images were cold—most likely because they had their heat emissions masked—but the ship was hovering out in space, clear as day in the visible spectrum, a twinkling shard of sleek metal situated just above a rocky annular ring system that orbited a gas giant with clouds of caramel and fire red. The Vakarian's spectrographs were already running baseline scans on the composition of the ring structure—the planet of Serannua was a young world, as there were several million boulders of rock and ice that were the size of cargo haulers, not having been ground down to particulate dust just yet. The particle density of the rings themselves was denoted by the presence of ringlets that warbled in varying shades of gray.
But no one was paying attention to the planet, because even with the profile scan, there was not a single soul on board the Vakarian who would not recognize the near doppelganger that they were now squaring off against.
The Normandy.
"You really did know," Grunt said with an unconscious nod. "Bastards took your bait."
I'm not surprised, Roahn thought glumly.
"All right," she tried to shake off her apprehension by transitioning into her commander role, "this was only the first step of the plan. Hacking the Radius' network is still our primary objective, though that's going to be the tricky part. For now, everyone to their battle stations. Sagan, begin targeting our primary weapons on that ship. The Normandy isn't going to make things easy on us, so we're going to have to respond in—"
"Commander," Sagan interrupted. "Receiving a hail from the Normandy."
For a moment, even the resonant hum of the air recyclers filtered from Roahn's audible range, even though she had not touched the control for her auditory sensors. The beat of her heart seemed to double in intensity, pressing achingly against bone as that damnable permafrost feeling now seemed to spread to her joints. Her head pulsated and she gave a deep sigh. No sense in delaying the inevitable, it seemed. She knew this was bound to happen sooner or later.
"Answer the hail," she said, turning to face the dais, willing herself to shut out the existence of those that surrounded her. "Project it here, Sagan."
"Acknowledged."
The glowing skein of digital fog sizzled and condensed, the screens winking out all at once. Cybersnow rushed and rolled to form a massive shape of a torso with broad and powerful shoulders. The electric hue of savage blue rasped as the resolution became more definite, deepening the contours and lines that marked the segmented armor plating, pressurized neck seals, integrated cooling tubes, and the hardened carapace that made up the faceplate of the Haxan. Their hands and abdomen existed out of range of the projector's focus, but the cyborg's image crackled and grumbled as if it had just risen from a frozen cinderland, stray particles of static dripping from it like ashen embers.
A murmur quickly seeped across the group as they watched the Haxan slowly scan every member in turn, unnerved at the sight of the powerful enforcer. All looked up at the terrible thing, everyone's expression ranging from worried concern to outright loathing. Dark lightning broke across the Haxan's image, its baleful gaze impervious to any emotion save for hatred. Right now, the Haxan carried little difference to a savage deity, seemingly separated by dimensionality to stare up at the unconquered empire that lay separate from the volcanic archipelago that served as the floor of its hell.
The Haxan finished considering the crew assembled before it. Finally, it centered itself, fully facing Roahn. The holo-image seemed to loom over the quarian, the intensified sound of its automated breathing seeping through the connection in a hollowed and scraping hiss. It seemed to simmer as it appraised the quarian more and more, the object of its pursuit, the genesis of its existence.
"Ah," the Haxan said by way of an introduction, their eyes motionless but still emblazoned with a loathing of purest form. "You've added a few new faces to your crew, Roahn. Have you assembled them all, thinking they would unnerve me?"
Roahn carved an icy glance towards the spiteful cyborg. "They're out of the picture. This is just between you and me. I take it you received my message?"
"I did indeed. No doubt intended to lure me to a location of your choosing. Well, here I am. And as a courtesy, I insisted on the Normandy coming alone. Your message gave me the perfect leverage to make this detour in the first place. Yet, you would not have been so stupid as to send out an obvious lure without the expectation that I would merely fall prey to your machinations. To have your bait be of substance, you would have had to offer only yourself as collateral. I see you've held up your end of our unsaid bargain. Good to see you haven't changed."
"Roahn," Korridon whispered, "something's not right. This thing is talking to you as if it knows you too well."
The Haxan heard that exchange and straightened, adding a few inches to its already imposing height. "Oh, so you haven't told them," the cyborg said with a simper, a sound that its vocabulator nearly perfectly approximated. "Were you ashamed to let others know of your capacity for brutality? Or were the lies easier stories to swallow than the truth? I'll let you have this chance, Roahn. Why don't you tell them who I am? You'll tell them, or I will and we'll soon see which of our stories become reality."
Everyone now looked to their suited commander, appropriating a spectrum of quizzical looks. Roahn kept her focus centered on the hologram of the Haxan, breathing intensely through her nose. Her prosthesis tightened into a fist at her side before she relaxed, but her thoughts were unable to tear away from the sight in her mind's eye. The sight of a woman lying upon the ground at her feet, her front dark with blood, hands cradling their stomach as their porcelain eyes dully stared upward at the smoking barrel of the gun that had succeeded in claiming their life.
Roahn took a singular step forward, a sharp huff escaping from her mask.
"No more secrets," she announced wearily, mainly to her crew. She then gestured to the hologram, now addressing the being on the other end. "The difference here is that everyone on this ship has promised and proved their integrity to their shipmates and to me. Whereas you did neither… Skye."
All sound in the CIC seemed to cease. Korridon drew back, his eyes darting back and forth in confusion. Liara's mouth furrowed into a scowl as she looked upon the automaton in a new light. Grunt tensed his body, creaking coming from his armor as he levelled a frigid glare towards the Haxan.
The quarian was particularly sensitive to Korridon's own trepidation. Leaning away from the hololens, Roahn reached over and gently grasped the turian's arm. He looked at her with a sorrowful gaze that seemed to scream You knew? Her own defiant and concentrated visage was both confirmation and reassurance alike.
"The evidence of my existence has apparently been erased from the records of your ship," the Haxan trilled. "You must have thought you could discard my memory as easily as when you pulled that trigger. I once thought I could discard your memory too, when I had you at my mercy down in that pit. Now I see that your parasitic existence is hardier than I anticipated. Ridding you through sheer will is the only avenue available to me now. To pay you back for the callousness you had kindly demonstrated when you had deemed me unsalvageable to your tastes."
"Roahn," James gestured to the cyborg, "what the hell is this hijo de puta talking about?"
The Haxan dipped its head. The barest imitation of a smile.
Roahn ignored the reaction from the cyborg. "Before many of you came on board," she said, keeping James centered in her view as she glanced behind her, "there was a woman on board. A sniper. Her name was Skye Lorne. She… was with us for many months… until a mission went wrong on Triton and she was captured. The official story is that she was killed in action aboard the Morningtide, Aleph's flagship at the time."
She paused a second, in confirmation that she had gained everyone's attention.
"What was not mentioned was the identity of her killer. I suppose everyone assumed that Aleph had been the one responsible. That… is not the truth." Roahn inhaled. "I was the one who shot her. I wanted to kill her… but it turns out I hadn't finished the job and Aleph… well, Aleph salvaged the pieces that were left. What little he could use, anyway."
A growl echoed on the other end of the call in response to the insult. A bare smile almost came to Roahn's face. Good. Petty torments were the least of what the Haxan deserved, but at least they felt good to deliver.
However, the spectrum of her crew's demeanor was vibrant as it was distressing. It was hard for Roahn to tell if any of them were expressing disappointment in her for her part in what constituted cold blooded murder. Her heart seemed to skip the occasional beat as she absorbed their faces, one after the other, her warbling eyes making silent pleas for forgiveness, to assure her friends that the dark nature that waited in the shadows of her consciousness had been broken and strewn like bonedust in a heated squall.
Especially Korridon. Keelah, how many times could she sadden the man before he assumed the worst of her character? Even now, he provided her a long look, marbled eyes stiff and glassy. What was he thinking? Had she failed him yet again?
But the turian gave a long, slow blink. A momentary exoneration. The enemy out there was greater than the enemy within.
He then stepped over to face the cyborg. "You? You're Skye?"
"I used to be Skye," the Haxan corrected. "Your new paramour saw to that."
"She tried to help you," he scowled.
"As you can see," the Haxan lifted a hand, "she didn't do a very good job."
"She told me what you did. Roahn wanted to trust you and you stabbed her in the back. You were part of our crew! You sold us out!"
"The crew stabbed me in the back first. Roahn was the one to initiate the first betrayal. On Triton. On the Morningtide. I was shown where the loyalties of my crewmates truly lied and I now bear the weight of their decisions. Your commander murdered me in cold blood rather than acknowledge a reality in which my existence would be allowed to linger."
If the Haxan had expected that it would hold sway over its audience with its words, it soon found that it was facing a rather frigid reception. Everyone was staring up at the cyborg with prosecuting gazes, unable to be convinced by the cyborg's ad hominem attack.
Roahn swept her arm as if she was violently clearing a counter of glassware, shaking her head. "You're forgetting one thing, Skye. You haven't asked me if I ever regretted my decision. The answer to that is simple: no. Even after all we had been through, I would still come to this answer again and again. Why? Because I will remain forever convinced that it was the right choice. Because you were the one who was responsible for my father's death."
The temperature of the room seemed to increase as everyone started to inhabit the same fury that blazed within the commander. Wary contemplation substituted for an indignant and simmering bitterness.
"That true?" Jack growled as she tentatively approached the dais, the question itself rhetorical. James, Grunt, and Liara were exhibiting similar reactions now that they had a face to associate with the death of their dear friend. A face that was as terrifying as it was rewarding to finally have an object of scorn to hold all of their despair and anger that had grown over the past several months.
"She gave Aleph my father's location so that he could use him to activate the Monolith. If it weren't for her… he would still be alive… along with everyone else on the Citadel."
The biotic lifted an unforgiving finger towards the Haxan. "You're dead, fucker."
The Haxan shook its head dismissively, as if had suddenly became unabsorbed from the conversation. "Amusing words, to come from a woman who looks like a circuit board. All of you lack even a modicum of value to sustain my interest. Were all of you at my mercy, I would tear through you without sparing a nanosecond to ponder your lives. The only one of consequence is you, Roahn. And our dance is about to begin. Normandy, all ahead full!"
On the tac-map, the displays showed blasts of crystal light spear from the engines of the glossy SR-2 far off in the distance. The edges of the map now began to flash red and light as multiple lock warnings resounded all at once—the Normandy was targeting the Vakarian on all weapons systems.
"Evasive maneuvers, Sagan!" Roahn called to the front. "Countermeasures on standby. Show these idiots who they're dealing with."
"At once, commander," the geth reported.
There was a minute rumble that jittered throughout the ship, subtle enough that anyone who had not spent their entire life aboard ships would not have noticed it. But the Vakarian had already started the process of accelerating to several millions of miles an hour, radiation-scatter chaff blistering behind it in caustic stalks as the two ships charged one another, weapon emplacements bristling with heat and fusillade-fire. Asteroids of rock and ice cracked and crumbled as they broke apart in the wake of concussive ripples that pounded in thunderous explosions throughout the belt, the swirling vortexes of the world raging impassively before the combatants.
"So, it has come to this," the Haxan said, the holo-image still glimmering. "A shame we hadn't more time together."
The ship gave a rumble in response to passing too close to a neutron missile's detonation radius. A panel whited out for a moment before springing back to life.
"You wanted this conversation, Skye," Roahn said. "I've just been answering you in kind."
"Indeed. Yet this meeting was all your doing."
"You started this war and I'm the result of your actions. Same reason why you wanted to speak to me first—you wanted to see if I had any regrets, any guilty thoughts. But you've been met with a clear conscience… or so I've led you to believe. Think you've really started to understand me? Neither of us are going to be meeting face to face this time. No reason for us to stop now. No reason not to continue this little… talk. You want to understand me, Skye? This is the only chance you'll ever get. It's what you've always wanted, isn't it?"
The holo-image bounced as a result of a nearby detonation just outside the ship. The Haxan tilted their head a fraction away, pondering the request.
"Very well," it said. "You always did want to do things your way."
"You're right in that some things have yet to change," Roahn retorted. "I'll pick this up in the comm room in a few moments. Then we'll see just how apologetic you really are."
Roahn bounced the call to the terminal in the other room before the Haxan had a chance to respond. She looked at the tac-map again, which was showcasing the two ships, the Normandy in hot pursuit of the Vakarian, both swirling above the asteroid belt yet gradually reducing in altitude towards the irregular surface. Light-spidered eruptions of plasma flare curved behind wayward boulders of ice, shearing magnificent white chunks away the size of islands into the deep abyss.
She turned to her crew, her friends, breathing clearly like a weight had lifted off her chest.
"Get to your battle stations," she said before any questions should come. Now was not the time to answer any burning queries that would otherwise prove as distractions. "See to the automated defense cannons and prime the shields astern. Ready yourselves—this is just the next step."
Korridon stopped her before she could depart, the squad behind them quickly dispersing to their designated posts. "When did you know?" was all he asked her.
"Right after I left the Atoll Stoa," she said.
"You never mentioned it because…"
She could have given Korridon many reasons. She could have said that she had wanted the Haxan present to back up her revelation. She could have said that she wanted the burden of revenge all to herself, to take on the duty of eradicating the Haxan to avenge the memory of her father.
She said neither of those things.
"It was like I was in a dream," she said. "I've seen so many monsters that I thought I could never civilize them in my mind. It was… too easy for me to look at all those demons, those metal shapes, and see nothing behind them. Just emptiness. No souls. Nothing." Korridon's hand came to her shoulder to allay her shivering as she spoke. "The moment I realized what the Haxan's shell held, I… I couldn't breathe. Something that hideous protected the remains of someone I once loved. What used to be Skye is in that chassis, forever sought on its goal of killing me. She—it—is reminded every waking second of what I did to her… and I've been so focused on forgetting her."
"What she did to your father—"
"I thought I had repaid her in kind," Roahn interrupted. "I thought I had justified my retaliation. I only ended up making things worse. She was right—I have been trying to discard her memory since that day. I wanted to tear her memory and rend it to pieces, to have no one even recall a single moment of that woman's being. Since I've known her, all she's ever wanted was my recognition. I said nothing to you, Korr, because… because I wanted to be the one to kill her memory for good."
Understanding sparked behind the turian's eyes. The familiar call for justice. The wasteful effort of castigating Roahn for her secrets. The tangle of history between the quarian and the cyborg that he existed apart from. He held them all in his eyes, finding pure clarity in the moment.
He dropped his arm away from Roahn's shoulder for a moment, only to retrieve her hands. He lifted them up waist-high, the two of them standing in the corner of the CIC. Synthesized light from combat feeds scattered to the side, highlighting them in hues of lightning. He peered through the silken profile of the shale-colored mask, able to spot the foggy ridge of her nose and the sparkle of her pure eyes.
"You've made her hate you," he said. "She'll never stop wanting to kill you."
"I know."
The turian tilted his head, as though the adjusted perspective could allow him to perceive anguish in the quarian's face. There was none to be found.
"I can't believe it's her," he mused. "Spirits… we left her on that moon and she's tormenting us for our mistake after the fact."
Roahn clamped down firmly on Korridon's hands, eliciting a wince from the man. She relaxed her grip, eyes sparkling apologetically, before she returned to assure him.
"I did what I thought was right. Skye… did the same. The difference is that she made the wrong choice in the end. I know you must be thinking there is another way—to bring Skye back, I mean—but there isn't. She's too far gone. I don't want her to find redemption. If you think otherwise—"
Korridon emphatically shook his head. "No, Skye's a menace. She needs to be destroyed for what she did."
At least we're of the same mind, Roahn thought, her shoulders losing a bit of their agonized stiffness. She still held a bit of unease, knowing that the specter of the woman was waiting for her in the next room, its deadly eyes ready to tear her to shreds through its gaze alone.
"You knew all this would happen." Korridon stared at the hairline cracks in Roahn's pale mask. "Ever since we dropped out of FTL, I mean."
The quarian dimly nodded. "It was… expected."
"This is why you wanted to give me this mission."
"You volunteered when I told you the idea I had, remember?"
"And I'm not backing out. Just one thing…"
He let go of Roahn's hands and reached up to take the lower portion of her mask. Roahn did not resist and lifted her chin up in acceptance. Korridon depressed the catches and peeled the covering away, his breath being drawn away as usual when he saw the peregrine but radiant face her suit held. He held onto the visor with one hand and placed his other upon her light-colored cheek. Roahn leaned into the touch, her smile deepening and eyelids slightly drooping to signify her relief.
"…tell me that this is going to work," he whispered, the resonant tones in his voice buzzing in Roahn's ribcage.
The answer came naturally from her lips. "I know it will work."
"How?"
"Because," Roahn lifted her right hand and trailed it across Korridon's mandible, creating a deep shiver down the turian's spine, "Skye has not yet killed her memory of me."
The space between the Vakarian and the Normandy blazed with the exchange of railfire and neutron eruptions. The two frigates spat and swooped through the orbit of the gas giant, entering the protective cover of the ringed belt that looped around the impassive world. Explosions as big around as the ships flared in the weightless boulder field, each one powerful enough to blow one another to atoms. The Vakarian was newer and more advanced than the Normandy, and even though it was rated as a gunboat—theoretically less maneuverable of a ship—the geth at the helm was able to pull off moves that the operator at the controls of the Normandy had no hope of replicating. The Vakarian ducked underneath a cannonade of the Normandy's PDCs and proceeded to make a ventral slip that curved around the side of an icy cometary remnant. The Normandy was in no position to match the turn—it flared its port engines and kicked to the right, sending it launching out of the belt momentarily so that it could reengage.
Roahn felt the impacts from none of the carnage outside the ship as she entered the comm room. The Haxan was waiting for her upon the circular platform—the Haxan's holoimage, to be precise. Broad-shouldered, inverted trapezoidal faceplate, thin and searing optics, impervious steel muscular structure. The scale of the crunchy blue image had been resized so that the Haxan was at Roahn's height. The two warriors stared at each other, peering distantly as if they were looking out from afar across oceans on opposite ends of the shore.
They just stood there for a while, studying the other. The weathered quarian soldier. The intricate machine of destruction. How alike they were in that moment, finely crafted instruments of willpower.
Then the Haxan looked away, though it was keen to make it known that such an action was deliberate and not a mistake that showed weakness of any sort.
"I suppose you believe that my near-death changed me," it said. "Broke my perspective and mutilated it to fit a discombobulated version not cohesive with the person you once knew."
Roahn shook her head. "Right now, I'm finding it easier to believe that you were always broken."
The Haxan swung their head back, rising to the provocation. "Does that distress you, Roahn? To know that you could have stopped all this from happening? You could have saved me. Fixed me. Yet… when faced with a being that did not align to your mental worldview, you decided to cut your losses and sever all connections to me. You might have considered the action to be overdue on your part. Perhaps in doing so, you ripped away more than you could handle."
"I didn't want to be your savior," Roahn spat. "And you shouldn't have expected others to fix what you lacked. I was never responsible for holding you together."
"I see that now, but it doesn't change the present. I thought you might want to explain yourself."
"I don't have to explain anything to you."
A low shudder rippled the floor at Roahn's feet. It took everything in her power to not look away from the Haxan.
"I think you do," the cyborg hissed. "You're not infallible, no matter how much the media builds you up to be. Any sensible person would be consumed by doubt at the atrocities they committed in the past. I know I weigh heavily on your mind, ever since that day on Rotev. Ever since the Morningtide. You thought you had been searching for your inverse in beings far beyond you in order to denounce them to a more comparable concept. Has it truly dawned on you that your true antithesis stands before you now? For I am the result of your selfishness, your hate. Is it not the destiny of the created to destroy their creator?"
Roahn sighed. "Now you sound just like Aleph. Talking about destiny and symbols. I'm not interested in what you believe, Skye. All I want to do with you is to finish the job that I started. You can threaten all you want about trying to kill me. No reason that I can't make good on that same threat."
The Haxan ignored the bait that Roahn had deliberately inserted. "You may find your skill outmatched."
"I'm not as stupid as you hope. You think I'll go toe-to-toe with you?"
"Do you think I'll give you any other option?"
The quarian gave an internal huff, now realizing that her chest was pounding in a resounding ache. How could things have come to this? The being she was conversing with was everything she had devoted her life to obliterating. A murderous, traitorous cybernetic organism inhabited with the spirit of the firebrand human woman with a smile that could outshine the sun. The tiniest spark inside Roahn was allowed to flicker—the last vestige of her love for the woman. It was not a true love that flared into open flames when fed its fuel. It was a sorrowful mourning for days long past, an attachment she had yet to discard, to snuff out.
Even after all the atrocities Skye had done, even before she became the Haxan, there was a part of her that was allowed to exist within Roahn. Inwardly, she groped for the flicker, fighting with herself to destroy it once and for all, to smother it in one final pathetic gasp so that she could let her entire self go, heedless of the damage it could do in the process.
"Whatever happens," Roahn said, "I'll manage to make you regret that you spared my life on Rotev. You had me in your gunsights in that facility yet you chose to leave me to die. Instead… I didn't. I survived. I got myself off that planet by my own sheer will. Because I knew that only my own strength could do such a feat. I created you… but in some part, you created me, as well."
The glow of the holoimage pulsed and the edges of the Haxan's form fizzled angrily. The cyborg took a long stride forward, its faceplate inches away from Roahn's visor, as though those artificial eyes were trying to peer through the glass that sealed away the quarian's face from everyone else. It seemed to grow in anger as its optics could scarcely penetrate the clouded visage, denying it the sight of Roahn's appearance despite her already having seen her face several times in the past.
"Regret," the Haxan whispered. "Yes… it was a mistake, wasn't it? A foolish error. When I saw you suffering at the bottom of that pit, I was reminded of those last few moments before my world darkened on the Morningtide. I remembered the coldness of my flesh, the blindingly hot feeling of blood on my lips, the sheer distance my thoughts seemed to gather as they spiraled away from my body. And the seeping agony in my gut, drawing forth all feeling and pooling it into my stomach. It was a sensation that I remembered all too well, one that I dearly wished to let you experience. To partake in that part of hell that you had envisioned for me."
"That hell rejected me. Just like it did not keep you. A pity."
"Yes. A pity."
Roahn's visor hid a smirk. "You got sloppy, though. You knew my wound was not fatal. Or did you think I would simply give up and die? Was that your longing hope, Skye?"
"It doesn't matter now, does it? It was a mistake—that's all there is to say. One that I have no intention of repeating. But that means, when we finally do meet in person, I will not guarantee your end will come quickly. You will not be afforded the luxury of dying while peacefully laying on the ground, waiting for the end to meet you. I will kill you however fast or slow as I please. Though it will be definite, this time. Two of us will meet, but only one will walk away. And I promise that the job will be complete before I begin to walk away."
The Vakarian streaked along the curve of a nearby plume of ice particulates, blossoms of flame trailing in its wake as the Normandy kept engaging behind it. The PDCs on the former frigate were blazing away, leaving behind a screen of detonations that embarked into a grid of deadly flares. The Vakarian was also dropping mines and rocket turrets behind it to discourage the Normandy from getting into targeting range. The countermeasures worked—the enemy ship had to peel off as missiles and torpedoes from the Vakarian's auxiliary weapons spoiled its lock on its prey. A storm of bright blue streaks illuminated between the seemingly razor thin rings of Serannua, electric gnats sawing their way through the frozen cold of the shattered belt.
The geth helming the Vakarian seized his chance. The ship flipped and dived through the debris field, microthrust engines shimmering as the pilot slipped the ship between a pair of boulders. Proximity scanners were screaming alerts—small fragments pinged off of the shields of the ship as hundreds of contacts, the material of the belt, quickly flared on the scopes. Sagan slammed the propulsion burst function to the six thrusters, sending the Vakarian dangerously screaming through the compromised battlefield. Two seconds later, he cut the pulse to the engines, darkening them in an instant. He then ignited the jets on the dorsal fins, sending the Vakarian into a complex drifting motion, right around a half-cracked lobe of crystalline ice as large as a turian battleship, and flared the engines once it had reached the apex of its turn.
No organic had the reflexes to make a move like that. Not in such terrifying conditions. But the maneuver had paid off. The Vakarian was now the one giving chase to the Normandy, which had been cruising frantically through the rings, desperately trying to reacquire its quarry.
The Vakarian's cannons made a seam of tungsten and plasma that rippled all around the Normandy's hull, jostling it heavily. None of the shots made direct impacts on the ship itself. That was fine—Sagan was not trying to destroy the Normandy outright. But he needed to make sure that whoever was crewing that ship realized that they could not meet the Vakarian in a head-to-head evenly.
It was time for the lesson to begin.
The Normandy's heat emissions were masked to thermal sensors. No one said anything about ultraviolet readings though. And in the silent chaos of the crumbling belt, the ship's unique metallic profile stood out like a sore thumb under this wavelength. It was therefore a simple affair for Sagan to simply tag the Normandy with the onboard diagnostics, letting the Vakarian's VI apply machine learning to track the ship through the interior of the rings.
Sagan widened the accuracy scope of the automated PDC fire. Cannon fire thundered all around the Normandy in several quick flashes. The besieged frigate jolted sideways as an explosion scraped too close to its hull. A few stray bits of molten metal glowed in an ember-like trail, one of the ship's engines now flickering every so often, the fuel line compromised.
Korridon was standing behind Sagan in the cockpit, dressed in a vac-suit, watching the geth work. "What did you hit?" he asked.
"Autopilot system," Sagan responded.
The turian raised his brow as he lifted a sturdy helmet over his head, the neck seals giving a pneumatic hiss as the atmosphere regulated itself. "Is that going to affect their maneuverability?"
"They will need to self-diagnose. The rings provide several key areas for a ship of the Normandy's size to evade detection. To do that, the Normandy will need seek out one of these areas and lay low to initiate scans and repairs."
Indeed, for that seemed to be the case that was occurring at this moment. On all of the Vakarian's scopes, the Normandy could be seen darting off into the distance, scrambling through the haloed arena of terrene and irregular satellites of rock and ice. All screens had laid over a topograph of the planet's ring structure, with a singular beacon parked in the middle of the system.
"How long can we keep them on scopes?" the turian asked.
"Indefinitely. The Vakarian's systems have parsed the Normandy's profile from the other interstellar objects in the belt. Wavelengths are also being bounced around from the reflective surfaces of the frozen matter that constitutes the ring structure. In the immediate vicinity, there are precisely only seven dark zones that are out of reach of our scopes, though the sizes of these zones are drastically smaller than the volume of the Normandy."
Korridon tapped a pistol to the holster upon his suit. The magnetic moorings made a thick snap as it latched the weapon to the turian's thigh. He walked over to the airlock, the dark suit making him look like an alien knight.
"Follow them in, Sagan," Korridon breathed as he briefly glanced behind him. The ship tremored beneath his feet, but he put it out of mind for now. "Best this gets done sooner rather than later."
The holoimage of the bio-construct that was the Haxan began to stalk back and forth, pacing around in a tight semicircle as it savagely stared at Roahn all the while. The quarian swore she could feel her skin prickle from the static charge that seemed to be building in the air, a nearly imperceptible thrum that scraped down her throat and boiled in her gut.
"You're thinking that you have made yourself immune from your guilt."
Roahn gave a deadly squint. She didn't answer.
"You're looking at me now and thinking that you're above me. That, somehow, my existence will never compare to yours."
"Have I not made that obvious?" the quarian seethed.
"So, blind ignorance is what you've chosen, then?" the Haxan rasped. "You impose a strict morality whenever it suits you, is that what you think?"
"Feel free to try and rationalize my behavior all you want, Skye. Notice how I'm not even trying to match you now. You're not worth it."
The Haxan's image reared and an electronic bellow surged from its vocabulator. "What do you know of worth, Roahn?! Have you bought into this inflated notion that you're somehow faultless, just like the stories of your old man? Twice now you've abandoned me to die. One of those times you deliberately tried to kill me. After I had shown you kindness. After I had given you companionship. Yet even with all that to consider, you never hesitated when you made your choice to shoot me. No remorse for your act of cold-blooded murder? Just one hypocritical demonstration after another."
Mere mention of her father was enough to bring Roahn's blood to a boil. She clenched her hands at her sides, her mind an inch away from conjuring her omni-sword so that she could cleave through the holoprojector and be rid of this festering presence by force.
She held herself back. "You still don't see, Skye," she murmured. "You've never understood me at all. Even now, when I'm holding you in contempt, you're daring to question me about it. Why? Because you think you don't deserve it?"
"You made me do all this, Roahn! I had no say in any of this!" The Haxan angled its head down. "And the most grievous blow you've dealt me was the knowledge that you've withstood such a betrayal without matching my pain. Without the scars to show for it. Look at what I've lost. Dare to say our wounds are comparable."
Memories of times long past were running through Roahn's head in a kinetic slideshow. Moments of her in bed with Skye, their clothes hopelessly crumpled upon the floor where their bare feet poked out from below the sheets. Sharing quiet moments aboard the training vessels of the Defenders. Laughing at her bad jokes. Hunting holographic targets side-by-side, sharing weary grins, cocksure of their own skills.
Now she stood before the hideous simulacrum. Older. Wiser. More jaded, too. Cynicism was something she had acquired in spades over the years. She looked away for a moment.
"The two of us were really something, weren't we, Skye?" she whispered so quietly she wondered if even the Haxan's sensors could pick it up. She then turned back to face the cyborg. "I should have realized sooner how the two of us were going to end up. Maybe we had a chance. Maybe we didn't. It just all spiraled out of our control—what little we had, anyway. I didn't want this for you, Skye. For you to live like this. Had I known I was condemning you to an eternity of suffering…"
"—You would have aimed for my head, is that it?" the Haxan snarled, not at all moved.
Now the remorse had entirely departed from Roahn. The softness had burned away from her eyes, leaving a steel gaze as hard as diamond spearing through the glass of her visor. Her brow furrowed, adopting a marble-like definition. The back of her jaw turned to ice and a dull soreness throbbed at her bones.
"I made myself vulnerable for you, Skye," she said. "I gave you so many chances to earn my trust and each time I was disappointed. You've made the mistake in thinking that things could have turned out differently. Well… this is how they turned out. The monster of your own creation."
"And no contrition over how you treated me? Perhaps the monster in question is you."
Roahn shook her head forcefully. "None whatsoever. Because you don't deserve any of it. For all that time I pushed you away, it was only because I was afraid of getting hurt by you again. I then let you in a second time because I thought you had changed. Matured, was my hope. But the very second you decided that I had scorned you somehow, you decided to take revenge. You offered up my father to Aleph! The man who raised me from birth! If you thought I would choose you over my family…"
The Haxan had remained still, no quip coming forth. Roahn simmered for a few seconds before continuing.
"Because of you, my father is dead. Because of you, I have no more family. If I had even the slightest idea of what atrocities you were capable of, Skye, you would have found that there would not have been a single outcome in which I would not have shot you dead. You knew what you were doing and you did so with arrogance. With. Arrogance. And still you somehow think that I've inflicted greater wounds upon you." Roahn leaned closer to the holoimage, taking the offensive for the first time in the conversation. "Not even close, bitch. You took my father from me. There is no kind of pain I could deliver to you to make up for what you did. And when I finally do stand over your gutted corpse, once your pleas for forgiveness cease, you will realize that your death will not be a weight on my conscience. You say I've dealt you a grievous blow? Just you wait and see what I'm really capable of."
The cyborg merely watched Roahn. Absorbing every detail. Pondering every possibility. Any amusement had long left its posture. The tiny stars that orbited above its head—imperfections in the holocall—fizzled angrily, cold stains of light. It reminded Roahn of the safety that distance could offer.
Lifting a hand, as though imagining it held the quarian's neck, the Haxan leered, the glow in its optics seemingly diminishing, keeping its cold hatred locked behind an icy veneer.
"Then you will find yourself disappointed once more," it hissed. "With my very hands, I will let the blood of Commander Shepard flow for the second time. With your dying breath, you will watch as I hold your still-beating heart in my hands before I crush it into meat. It will be painful and you—"
The Haxan's head twitched as it suddenly stopped speaking. It leaned back to look at something out of view of the lens. It performed a double-take in Roahn's direction, synthesized breathing escalating in tempo.
"Motherfucker," the Haxan uttered, surprise encroaching upon its tone. "You stupid wh—!"
The pale light of the holoimage abruptly vanished, leaving Roahn alone in the comm room. The Haxan had cut the call. Ordinarily, this would have been the moment when resolve had rushed to bolster the agonized defenses left remaining in Roahn's psyche, but an abyssal fear continued to lap at the breakers of her mind. She did not need to guess what was going on—the Haxan had gotten wise to her maneuver. Her real plan.
She whirled to race back to the CIC, radio already engaged.
"Korr? Korr! She's onto you. Get out of there now!"
Normandy
Throughout the exchange, the Haxan had surprised and impressed itself at how it had been able to keep its composure. The thin suited freak on the other end of its call had seemed smug and impervious to any form of penance. This lack of self-reflection on the buckethead's part had irked the Haxan greatly, to the point where if they had been physically in the same room together, the cyborg knew that it would have already made a lunge to rip out the alien's intestines so that they could force-feed the woman her own flesh.
Many times, the Haxan had almost ended the call out of sheer irritation. The quarian had the outright gall to threaten the Haxan with its own demise? Even for someone borne with a natural confidence, this was over-the-top. Had the alien been amplifying itself with lines of YDust? There were many other ways to explain this bravado, but drugs seemed an altogether plausible theory to the Haxan. After all, did the quarian forget that the last time they had faced off against one another, things had ended rather badly for her? Yet she was the one making threats now? This was just madness.
Right now, the quarian had finished delivering its final threat to disembowel the Haxan, a notion that was so ridiculous the cyborg nearly laughed out loud. It was too angry to even laugh, however, so it merely resorted to raise a shaking hand, its entire chassis nearly erupting with anger.
"Then…" it breathed, "…you will find yourself disappointed once more. With my very hands, I will let the blood of Commander Shepard flow for the second time. With your dying breath, you will watch as I hold your still-beating heart in my hands before I crush it into meat. It will be painful and you—"
At the same time it had been speaking, the Haxan had been in the middle of addressing a security threat that the Normandy's systems had been flagging. The error had showed up as a circular orange icon with an exclamation mark in the corner of the Haxan's HUD—it had been ignoring this flashing icon for the past fifteen minutes, but after a while it just wanted the icon to go away, so the cyborg had decided to dedicate a subroutine to seek out the source of this threat as it continued to talk to Roahn.
The ship itself had no cyberwarfare experts on board—no doubt another casualty of Huston's incompetence—so the Haxan occasionally took it upon itself to sort these errors out.
A separate window in its digitized view was revealing a curious presence in the Normandy's servers. As it performed a comprehensive suite, the Haxan quickly grew concerned as to what its scanner was revealing: listening implants, backdoor executable files, proxy tools, destructive hard drive tools. All familiar components that would compromise a critical hack. But, the Haxan reasoned, the Normandy itself had the most sophisticated firewalls in the fleet. Remotely accessing and breaching the network was a statistical impossibility due to the server's octaphasic encryption standards. Even the best cryptographic-breaking machines in use today, placed in a controlled environment, could not crack the codes in less than a week.
So why were such rudimentary tools on the server to begin with? Surely the Normandy would have automatically parsed them out during one of the automated security sweeps it made every hour.
On a whim, the Haxan decided to spin up the security feeds on the exterior of the ship. Most of the screens had nothing to comment about. The stars beyond the sleek wings were motionless—the ship had parked itself in the shadow of a slowly tumbling asteroid while repair drones buzzed about the rear section of the ship, ascertaining the damage from the Vakarian's guns.
However, the feeds on the top of the ship, near the main antenna array showed something profoundly disturbing: a figure in a zero-grav suit, hunched near an access panel, omni-tool blazing fiery orange as their magnetized soles clung to the polished hull. A saboteur siphoning data directly from the ship, bypassing the firewalls!
It recognized the physical profile immediately. Korridon Sidonis. The quarian's latest acquisition, come to antagonize it directly.
"Motherfucker," the Haxan blurted out, cutting itself off mid-sentence. Finally realizing it had been duped, it swung its gaze back to Roahn. She knew. "You stupid whore!" it howled, but it had already disconnected the call before the insult could be completed.
Spinning around, the Haxan raced through the door, making bone-crushing stomps as its feet deformed the grating with every step. It hurtled through the war room, past the conference table, and smashed through the security scanner in the adjacent room before the terrified ensigns could order it to stop. The remains of the scanner exploded in white-hot sparks as the cyborg bludgeoned its way through, the only obstacle limiting it before it reached the CIC. Running past the galaxy map, roughly knocking over two Alliance soldiers in the process of rushing towards the cockpit, the Haxan dimly heard Huston shout after it, but his words were deliberately ignored. The Haxan slapped another soldier—a woman—aside as it traversed down the spine of the ship because she was in its way. The woman flew through the air and her head cracked against the corner of a nearby tactical display. She slid to the ground, blood matting her hair.
The cyborg skidded to a stop next to the airlock door and violently punched the control to be let in. It quickly stepped into the small room and, before the pressurization process could begin and before the door to the cabin could close behind it, the Haxan repeatedly tried to initiate the door controls to be let outside. Several dozen red warning signs flashed in the Haxan's face, cautioning about the risks of decompression. It ignored all of them and, frustrated at the slow pace of the exiting process, introduced a spike directly into the door interface, automatically overriding all soft-lock restrictions.
Even though the system spat one final warning, indicating the possibility of risking the ship's construction, the Haxan sent the fateful command anyway.
The door that previously prohibited the cyborg to the grandiosity of space quickly slid open, but the airlock filled with a sucking wind and a howling roar immediately as the improperly closed doors that separated the room from the cockpit hallway rapidly spat air out into space past the motionless Haxan. One unlucky soldier, having been too close to the door, was forcefully hurled into the thin gap of the malfunctioning doors, his entire body crushed against the razor-thin margin that separated the habitable ship from unforgiving space. The man moaned in pain, even though half of the bones in his body had been pulverized. In seconds, there was a savage ripping noise as the partially liquefied organs of the soldier began to be pulled from every orifice in the man's body, streaming out from his still-living carcass in the form of a whipping red mass.
The failsafe doors finally initiated, having detected a dangerous loss of pressure in the Normandy. An airtight steel safety door slammed down behind the Haxan, cutting off the suffering's soldier's arm at the elbow, and stopping the whipping wind in an instant. The severed limb lazily spun end over end as it passed the cyborg, tender drops of blood freezing into delicate red beads as the serenity of the void came into being.
The Haxan reached up and grasped one of the hand rails that lined the top of the door. It disengaged the mag-points on its boots and pulled, flipping itself out of the airlock and making contact upon the hull of the ship. Quickly, it made bounding leaps down the exterior of the ship. Micro-thrusters embedded in the Haxan's chassis pushed the automaton down with every jump, ensuring that it would not float away from the ship.
In seconds, it had made its way to the main antenna, a domed lobe that sat between the razor-like fins. The Haxan spotted Korridon's hunched form near the contraption, his omni-tool giving him away as clearly as a bonfire at night. The turian did not seem to be aware of the cyborg's arrival yet. Good.
As the Haxan reached for its pistol, a funny feeling drew the turian's attention in its direction. Quickly, his head reared back as soon as he saw the onrushing machination. Well, that was quick. The Haxan's mind roared a curse and it swiped its arm forward, its finger already in the process of pulling the trigger on its weapon. Korridon sprang away at the last moment and the entire antenna blew apart in a hail of metal and plastic. Licks of blue light flared on the turian's exhaust pack—he accelerated towards a storm of rocky detritus just overhead. The turian had not even withdrawn a weapon of his own. He was just too freaked out to do anything.
That was not good enough for the Haxan. A retreat was not satisfactory. It wanted blood.
The cyborg bent its knees and sprang up from the ship, magnetism anchoring it down no longer. It flew up into space, arms rigid at its sides, with nothing but the turian filling every targeting reticle it could spare in its HUD.
Truthfully, Korridon had been rather bewildered at how simple the process had been to exfiltrate from the Vakarian, locate the Normandy, and brute force his way into the antenna node all without getting himself blown up in the process. The Normandy had thought it had picked a good hiding spot out in the belt to initiate their repair diagnostics, but the Vakarian's sensors had tagged it on every possible wavelength, allowing the ship to drop out of momentary contact to make the enemy crew think that they had evaded their combatant. The Vakarian had summarily parked itself close by so that Korridon could exit the ship and make a controlled excursion to the Normandy's antenna array. Breaking into the server via the physical ports had been an entirely simple affair afterward.
But now, with the Haxan taking potshots at him in his wake, Korridon was glumly coming to the conclusion that he had been running on borrowed time anyway. This whole endeavor was perhaps fated to go belly-up at some point or another.
He couldn't feel the sonic pulse as the cyborg's railgun rounds shimmered past his body, but he could certainly see the aftermath, as several asteroids and ice boulders in front of him cracked and shattered like glass as the high-velocity bullets smashed into them. Hard reminders as to what was chasing him, Korridon noted. It was still a long trek to the Vakarian. His helmet was telling him he was only 3 km. from making it to the ship. Might as well have been 300 km. At the rate the Haxan was firing at him, it was only a matter of time until he got his head blown off from a stray round.
Korridon chanced a look back. Through a cloud of silver dust, a shiny figure smashed its way through the foggy scree, its fists lashing out against any wayward ice boulders that threatened to overtake it. The cyborg's hands met frozen ice and rock—the asteroid shattered into billions of pieces, the shockwaves rippling around the warbled surface before the entire structure of the objects collapsed and disintegrated. Spirits, this thing was an infuriated animal!
Long panes of light scratched from the Haxan's armor plating. Jetpack fueling its agonized climb, it stowed the pistol, now shouldering an elongated plasma cannon. The barrel sparked with the force of a sun, loping into a silent howl, before it unleashed a punishing gout of a long, red blaze. Korridon frantically tapped the controls of his own pack to evade the onrushing fusillade—he dipped down just in time for the plasma to smash against a mountainous and worldforsaken slab, melting a quarter of it and reshaping it in glistening curves of blackened obsidian.
The force of the momentum sent Korridon spinning, still travelling in his intended direction but now facing the Haxan. The cyborg looked up at him in a motion expressing extreme annoyance. It then lifted the cannon again. The violent rush of the assault went caroming through the belt. Korridon imagined he could feel the heat melt parts of his suit and he instinctively ducked. Bits of rubble seemed to vibrate all around him—the smaller particulates in the vicinity melted and turned metallic. Droplets of lava hung weightless before they cooled into black teardrops. Damn, she must really hate me.
The turian unhooked the rifle that had been slung across his back. It was rated to tear through combat armor at medium range. But against the Haxan, he figured it was like pelting grains of sand at an onrushing wave. Not much choice though. In the end, why not go out swinging?
He fired a raking burst at the cyborg. The Haxan jerked away and the barrage passed it by. A clean miss. Korridon fired again and this time two bullets skipped off the cyborg's shields. The barrier shimmered angrily where it had been struck, but it did not break.
"You should have brought a bigger gun," the Haxan's voice frightfully whispered into his comm. The thing had hacked his close-range radio, Korridon realized. Helplessly, he watched as the enormous figure raised the plasma rifle again.
But there was still one more card he had left to play. Quickly, the turian reached behind him and withdrew a round object with a glowing blue line warping across its hemisphere. An EMP grenade. He bent his arm, thumb clicking the priming button, and hurled it in the Haxan's general direction. There was an unceremonious pop, a puff of what seemed like smoke off in the distance, and the graphics in his HUD sizzled before winking back to life. He had been just barely out of its range.
The Haxan, on the other hand, had borne the full brunt of the blast upon flying directly into the cloud of chaff. Sharp crackles of electricity trembled along the surface of the cyborg. The thrusters on its back flared dead cold and its optics momentarily darkened. A full system reboot ignited in moments, jerking the brute back to life. All of its wavelength views apart from the visible spectrum were registering errors. An onboard diagnostic told it that full functionality would be attained in nine minutes. It shook its head, trying to reorient itself in the null gravity, rage boiling the brain encased inside its precious fluid sac.
Half-blind, the Haxan thrashed its limbs in all directions before straightening as the boulder field cracked and disintegrated all around it, desperate to take up the chase once again.
"Aw, Skye," a voice broke out over the comm, causing what little blood that was left in the Haxan to come to a frozen halt. "Still as reckless as ever."
Peering upward, the Haxan could only gape at what was situated before it. Roahn'Shepard hovered into view just meters away, pale fire streaming from their velocity pack, just a submachine gun in one hand as she gazed down upon the cyborg in a mixture of sadness and superiority. Rocks and stars swirled above her head as the quarian glided in the depths of space, limbs spread out almost in a relaxed manner.
The Haxan's hand slowly twitched towards the grip of the plasma cannon. All of its targeting software was still rebooting—it could only see Roahn like an organic could. "And you're just as foolish to be out here."
"I'm right where I belong. Can you say the same?"
"In mere moments, I will."
Hefting the cannon, the Haxan fired and a burst of superheated plasma belched from the barrel. It seemed, for a second of pure joy in the Haxan, like the burst would connect squarely with the quarian's chest, but at the last second, Roahn zipped out of the way. Damn her, she was fast! Impossibly fast. The volley continued to sear through the long dark of space until it turned an asteroid several kilometers away into a hailstorm of diamonds. To the immediate right of the Haxan, it saw the silhouette of Korridon as he clambered into the shadowed hull of the Vakarian, draped by a blanket of gray boulders. It ignored the ship for now and took off after the quarian. This mattered more. This was personal.
Roahn blasted through gaps in the belt as nimble as a dragonfly. The Haxan had to smash aside all obstacles barring its path between it and the quarian. Occasional, thick streams of immense plasma barrages like long flamethrower gouts carved the very fabric of space in twain from its cannon. Incredibly, Roahn could not be hit. She ducked, flipped, and twirled, doing whatever she could do to evade the punishing assaults that the Haxan was desperately levelling her way. She was as graceful as a zero-grav acrobat, the Haxan recalled. Like a true artist. The cyborg was only impressed for a few milliseconds and soon was doing whatever that could be done to close the gap, firing indiscriminately all the while.
"One would think you would have run out of ammo by now," the quarian quipped in the Haxan's ear.
The cyborg was too infuriated to even respond.
Scrambling along the curve of a long-cooled remnant of comet crust, the Haxan bounded into a swarm of iron globules as it finally managed to come within reach of that damnable quarian. It swung, trying to take her head off, but Roahn ducked the blow and the Haxan's momentum carried it past the quarian, sending it tumbling through condensed space until it smashed into the surface of an asteroid, cracking the rock below it and sending out an impressive plume of dust. With a shake of its head, the brute stood, still clenching its cannon in both hands. Roahn was hovering overhead, looking at the Haxan tauntingly. She had not even fired a shot yet.
Head furiously blinded by murderous thoughts, the Haxan removed the safeties to the cannon and began rapidly firing its weapon at Roahn. But, amazingly, the quarian seemed to phase through reality with how fast she moved through the belt, dodging every bolt, using every piece of rock and metal in the area to absorb any pulses that were meant for her. Seconds later, the firing unexpectedly ceased. Puzzled, the Haxan looked down and saw that it might have overdid the rapid-fire function. The barrel to its cannon had melted. It let go of the ruined weapon and the dead thing slowly tumbled away.
Roahn slowly flitted back into view, shaking her head almost like a parent scolding a misbehaving child. If the Haxan could have vomited out of sheer anguish, it would have been doing so right at this moment. That fucking quarian was floating out in the open, with seemingly no concern to her life! What possible purpose were these taunts serving?!
"Nothing has changed with you," Roahn sighed. "You'll never learn."
The Haxan's hands dove for its pistol.
"Neither will you," it spat.
It then raised its arm and shot Roahn through the head.
The spear of crystallight, glimmering and perfect in its deadly beauty, sparked in a quick arc that seemed to extend into the dark beyond forevermore. The bullet pierced glass, metal, and cloth, puncturing through it in a quick and imperceptible flash that seemed to betray reality.
In silence, the Haxan dropped its arm, removing the ribbed iron sights of the pistol from its face, seeking to look upon its handiwork. How odd, for there to be no spray of shattered glass. No puff of frozen blood. No soundless tearing of the sehni. In fact, if the Haxan scrutinized for a little more, it might just say that—
No, it could only think.
Wordlessly, it ignited the jets upon its back and floated up to where the quarian's limp body was suspended. But the quarian was far from limp. Her eyes were wide open. Open and blinking. Roahn's helmet was perfectly intact, not a trace of her armor or suit showing signs of a puncture. What was going on here? the Haxan thought. Now Roahn was starting to move again, her helmeted head cocked in the position of amusement.
"I told you," Roahn miraculously managed to say. "Deny it all you want, but I still linger in your blind spot."
Outraged, the Haxan surged a powerful arm forward, its fingers disappearing effortlessly into Roahn's chest, as if there was nothing there. A ring of light swallowed up its arm, a glowing bracelet around its wrist, but these strange stimuli only registered in the back of the cyborg's mind. There was only one thing there. Fingers inside Roahn's chest, the Haxan groped for Roahn's heart, but instead of clamping down on a beating and pulsating muscle, it only found something spherical and hard, like a paperweight of thick glass.
Immediately, the Haxan squeezed and something crunched in its palm. With a blast of corrugated light, the quarian disappeared into a sea of fragmented hexagonal segments, dissolving into a brackish swirl that almost appeared votive among the stars. Roahn vanished around the Haxan's palm, leaving nothing but the remains of a holo-drone crumpled and cracked in its outstretched hand.
More deceptions. More tricks. The heat stemming from the Haxan's rage could have consumed an entire system.
Realizing it had been fooled for the second time, the Haxan let the pieces of the holo-drone drift away to become more matter for the ring structure to warp. "Clever fucking bitch," it murmured into the empty frequency.
It then became aware of a harshening glare immediately towards its right. The enormous profile of the Vakarian, untethered from the grip of the labyrinthian orbit, silently floated with its cannons all pointing towards the one individual who now found themselves at the mercy of an obliterating firepower. It hung there like a clumsy special effect, stalking in the manner predators in the Earth waters very much did. Far away for the Haxan not able to do anything. Far away for Roahn to do everything.
As soon as it saw the glow begin to burgeon upon the Vakarian's dorsal cannons, the Haxan knew it had no time to waste. Frantically, it gripped a nearby slab of compacted ferrite, shifting its profile just behind the cobbled ore right as the ship fired. For several seconds, all the Haxan knew was a cauldron of blue flame, a hurricane of fragmented rock, and the concussed spreading of starlight as everything suddenly went spinning. Ancient dust set afire pulverized the Haxan from all sides before consuming the cyborg greedily like an undersea monster gulping its meal. The blazing coals of its eyes were the last thing that the Vakarian's scopes picked up before the metal creature was flung backwards into a reef of blinding soot, gigantic rocks as old as time crumbling around the place where the Haxan vanished, an impromptu pyre erected in the face of adversity.
Vakarian
Airlock 1
Korridon sat on the floor of the airlock, his discarded helmet rocking back and forth next to him from where he had dropped it. He gasped for breath, the stabilizing hiss of the pressurization pumps filling his ears.
Roahn sat next to him, the door to the ship having parted fifteen seconds ago. She had removed her visor, allowing him access to her bare eyes. They were both looking at the feeds from the exterior cameras projected upon the walls of the airlock, which had captured the Haxan's final known position on at least five different angles.
The turian watched as the cyborg disappeared into the ashen cloud of cosmic vapor. "Think we've seen the last of her?"
"I doubt it," Roahn said as she got to her feet, pulling Korridon up with her. "She's never made things that easy."
"I was afraid of that. Still, that was a neat trick with the drone."
"Yeah, Kasumi had some spares."
They walked into the spine of the craft, both of them peeling bits of armor from their respective suits. Up near the cockpit, they could already see the ultramarine sear of FTL transit blaze its way through the windows. Roahn made a note to give Sagan public kudos during their next team briefing, even though the geth cared not a whit for public accolades. The quarian didn't care—yet again Sagan had proved that his superior flying had been one of the many things that had resulted in this operation's success.
"How are you feeling?" she asked Korridon as they descended the small staircase that led to the CIC.
Korridon grimaced and rotated his neck as he unfastened the vacuum seals of his suit near the base of his skull. "A little freaked out of my fuckin' mind, actually. Not every day you get chased by a rabid metallic monster."
"Join the club," Roahn shrugged with a smile. "But she'll never be as mad as you as she is with me."
"You make it sound as if I'm the lucky one, here."
A smirk pulled at the edge of the quarian's mouth. "You'd trade places with me?"
The turian's eyes limpidly considered the ceiling. "Perish the thought." He then tilted his head, gazing at the woman in a studious expression. "Still, could have been worse, though you did neglect to mention the complexity of the Alliance's network."
Oh, he's on a different subject. "So my intel was bad," Roahn adopted a lighter inflection to her tone. "How difficult was it?"
"The access key was seven thousand and sixty-four bits, to start. And there were four access keys."
"So?"
"It required an advanced toolkit and a ZZR server, for one. And an illegal remote-access Trojan. Used them all to break through the K-crypt protocols. Weak link was the VPN bridge—traffic analysis spoofed user packets found in unsecured transmit-lines. Had to compensate for the protocol lag that generated the packets, too."
The turian was just grandstanding, trying to rattle off his knowledge on the subject. Roahn pretended she didn't understand what he was saying, even though she could have cut him off at any point. Still, she allowed an impressed smile to burgeon as she crossed her arms over her chest, head tilted at an impish angle.
She waited for a lull in his diatribe. "Wow. Didn't realize you were such a whiner."
Korridon's eyes flattened, clearly unamused.
"Merely making a point."
"More like making an excuse."
Korridon reared his head back in mock surprise. He then raised a hand, a miniature quantum drive pinched between two fingers.
"Excuses are for amateurs. I'd like to think I'm a rung up from one."
Roahn reached up and gently took the drive from the turian, cupping it lightly in her palm. A random thought came to mind regarding the material worth of the object she held. Billions of credits, ballpark guess. For nothing more than a stick of digital information. Though if this was just one of many puzzle pieces that led to her enemy's defeat, then assigning a price tag to this drive seemed a bit callous.
Relief flooding her, she trailed a hand down Korridon's chestplate, letting the tips of her fingers catch on the ridges for a moment.
"I'd say several rungs," she said. "Yes, Korr… you're definitely up there."
A/N: I would say that this chapter marks the end of Mausoleum's second-to-last act, but before you go thinking that the end is just around the corner, I will point out that this final act is perhaps the longest of the story. Trust me, I've been mulling over this ending for two years now. I'm going to take my time with it.
Playlist:
Enter Haxan (Holocall)
"Distance"
Lorn
Killzone: Shadowfall (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Haxan Gets Wise / Spaceflight Tussle
"TRUCKS IN PLACE"
Ludwig Goransson
Tenet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Chasing Korridon / Ersatz Commander
"Fight the A.T.A.C."
Joris de Man
Killzone 2 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)