Cenotaph III: The Mausoleum

by Rob Sears

The galaxy has been shattered. A malevolent foe has achieved what the Reapers could not do: eradicate all hope. But there are those that still resist, that push back in the face of futile odds. It will now be up to Shepard and Tali's daughter - Roahn - to figure out a way to restore that hope, unite their lost allies, and pursue their enemy to the universe's very edge.

30. Chapter 30: House of Ashes

"The prototypical reaction for autocrats or ones so selfishly inclined is that it is preferable to hold sway across a legion of thralls rather than free-thinkers. Feasibly, it would be foolish to expect any other response. Magnates and oligarchs have the unfortunate trend of sacrificing aspects of their morality in order to attain entry to the highest echelon. Either that, or they were introduced circumstantially into an environment with those traits already lacking. They learned to crave the nectar of their whims being tended to, an elixir stronger than any drug or alcohol. Power over others was the true euphoria they craved; to tear down a person into a mindless beast that is forever bound to their master. Such relationships are parasitic and at times reflective. Authoritarians tend to surround themselves with a sycophantic cabal, providing a safe haven for only their urges to take precedent at the expense of others. In such an environment, the egotist's point of view is the only one allowed to surface, squandering the council of those more otherwise realistic with their mercenary abandon.

I have nary a conceivable notion of sympathy to offer for those that persist in poisoning the intellectual spectrum with their inbred ideas. The cretinous minions that seek out such obtuse parties are also deserving of scorn due to their willful spread of these insidious concepts.

Is evolution not the propagation of intelligence and wisdom amongst a receptive audience? To mire oneself in a cognitive zone of complacency, no matter if the atmosphere is fostered by the master or the slave, is antithetical to the natural order that we are all inclined to pursue. Those who take part in the suppression of ideologic curiosity and displacement of the truth in lieu of convenient falsehoods deserve nothing more than the brutal and permanent excision of their existence and opinions. For the very concept of possessing power over others demands the altruistic quid pro quo in the form of doctrine based in some part on a perspective oriented in the correct direction of conventional theorem."

Final Monograph: Transcriptions of an Augury
Unknown Author, (pg. 170)
Reprinted by permission of Purdue University

---

Rema
Orbital Battlezone 12

The jewel-glow of the thousands of ships that rimmed the planet Rema sparkled like veins of pyrite. Battle-marked destroyers and heatwarped cruisers violently punched their way back into Euclidean space, the warpaint of the Radius ships a hasty red laminate upon roughened starship steel, covering up the previous icons that had adorned them and had marked their former affiliation. A belt of the incoming fleet made an irregular crescent as it slowly pushed its way closer to the planet, intent on smashing itself directly against the smaller meniscus of punctuated vessels that had positioned itself between the intruding force and the planet.

Multicolored glints seared from the angles and plates of the Radius ship, along with winks of what looked like neon off of glass lenses or infrared turrets. The squid-like shape of Ministry was the most irregular blot amidst the horde—the Reaper led the pack in a brazen charge, its multitude of legs already spread wide as thermal slag-beams began to build in intensity behind ancient cataracts. Somewhere in the pack was the Normandy, hidden behind one of the larger dreadnoughts, most likely, its captain not keen on demonstrating such bravado and daring in the face of what was truly a thankless task: the elimination of the Congregation and the Vakarian crew once and for all.

As the beginnings of the first volley built in their fateful charge, the Rema-based forces of the Congregation had also been taking decisive action. They spaced their numbers, maintaining an even dispersion. Inside the CIC of every Congregation ship, all of the screens were filled with the vibrant color of red enemy icons atop the tac-map of the soon-to-be-defined battlefield. Too many to count—the Radius fleet was a glowing swarm unfurling towards its target.

If fear was to show its hand, its time was slipping away. All of the captains knew where their duty lied, what was expected of them. They had reconciled their actions against the Radius as the final bitter cry of the people who had tasted freedom for a scant, brief moment, and longed to return to that fountain.

This would not be a tidal wave engulfing a town. This would be a clash of storms, lightning crackling amidst two furious pressure zones. The Radius had been treating the Congregation like a little child since before their inception. A child they had pushed around and bullied, confident that things would always be in such a way. Time to show them how those ways had changed. The child had grown up.

At once, en masse, the space between the two fleets, the rapidly diminishing null zone, became filled with color and light.

Drenched with azure radiance, the kinetic barriers of the ships on both fronts crackled and fell. Snap-wave arcs of plasma crisped the hulks as the energy feedback rippled and concentrated around the shield generators, several of them blowing out in plumes of scarlet flame. Restless lasers carved deadly tattoos across plating several meters thick. Gentle sparks of torpedo propellant belched the laden projectiles across the plain only for automated PDC fire to pick them off, one by one. Powerful Thanix surges split the battlefield, the pulsation of the quantum scintillations so bright that even the combat lenses mounted upon the ships had to automatically dim to behold the magnitude of their awe-inspiring terror.

Ships burned in the dead of space, belonging to Radius and Congregation both. Breached hulls disgorged atmosphere and crew. The titanic volley left both sides battered and bruised, several crumpled vessels now drifting aimlessly in the void, their engines dark forever.

Overconfident, a third of the Radius ships peeled away, most of the blips undamaged. The full force of the Radius fleet outnumbered the Congregation nearly two to one—this first strike was a softening blow, and now it was time to build up a reserve line. It was only good tactics, after all. No true military tactician would risk everything in a single suicidal line. Besides, the commanders helming the death fleet did not think that there would be another chance for them to utilize the full might of their forces for the duration of the battle, but they did take obscene pleasure in knowing that the captains of those ships would be positively fuming that they were being held back. They were hungry for blood and the restraint on their leash could only slip further and further, not that there was much incentive to hold them back.

However, to the Radius' annoyance, they did notice that the Congregation had positioned its fleet exactly above where the centrally located ground base was on the planet, which prevented any orbital bombardment from taking place. Their troop carriers and their escorts were already in the process of disengaging, laden with thousands of troops ready to raze that stronghold to the ground. However, they were going to have to make a route that curved around the edge of the battlefield. That would take time before planetfall could be completed—making matters worse was that topographical scans showed that the only valid LZ in the area was a salt plain that stretched at least a couple dozen miles away from the city's edge. More time wasted to get the troops in position.

It seemed the Congregation was proud of the fact that they had frustrated the Radius from obtaining an easy victory as they quickly rallied, their fallen ships quickly evacuated of survivors and their battle lines reformed. The two fleets were minutes away from converging. And now, the carriers were opening their metallic bays like gigantic wombs, birthing a morass of fighters, drones, and bombers to stream forth and give the Radius hell. The streaming fighters quickly converged into their squadrons, and no sooner did they maintain tight formation did all of their ladar sensors detect fast-moving bogeys. Across every pilot's HUD, thousands of individually marked contacts blipped up as thin red diamonds—toggling just one of these contacts superimposed the word "FIRE" right above it.

The advice was welcome, and every pilot followed it.

Thin flashes of burning matter—cannonfire—spat between the dead spaces in the midst of the warring ships. Fighters and drones embarked upon elaborate chases, banking around thruster backfire, skimming over curved hulls of asari gunboats, spitting chaff to disorient any pursuing missiles. Their anguished lines of fire twisted and chattered, tearing off pieces of their targets until they finally hit their marks and detonated in brilliant explosions. Several of these eruptions abruptly flared almost all at once, as if the battlefield was bearing new suns within a few hundred kilometers of each other.

A formation of Congregation frigates—turian make—made low passes over a Radius cruiser cluster. Their aft cannons raked fiery geysers upon their hulls and shields, boiling the metal until the globular surface broke and vented in screeching exhalations. Two Thanix bursts were sent into the remainder of the Radius formation, impacting center of mass whereupon the projectiles bored straight to the middle of the ships, igniting the fuel in the core and causing both targets to explode from within in conflagrations of purple and white.

One human Congregation battleship—the Zugspitze—brought its railgun turrets to bear on a nearby destroyer. With barely a cough, the weapons fired, sending tactically cloaked bore-shaped projectiles hurtling through the warzone. The missiles used no propellant, and the technology to cloak them to the visible spectrum had been repurposed from the geth, therefore the shells were effectively invisible to all sensors. The projectiles weighed several tons, the kinetic force easily smashing through the shields of a hapless Radius carrier. They then continued forward and punctured the dorsal hull as though they had breached through tissue paper, and did not stop until they had plowed straight through the CIC in the middle of the vessel, completely obliterating the ship from the inside and killing the entirety of the command crew in one fell stroke. The braindead cruiser ceased all functions, several fires now burning along its spaceframe. The Zugspitze moved on to find another target.

Stealth cruisers on both sides flew through the chaos, surreptitiously dropping mag-mines in their wake. The explosives activated after a minute timer had elapsed and quickly sought out the closest metal surface. Immediately upon all of their spindly arachnid legs latching onto their hapless target, the mag-mines detonated, taking chunks out of Radius and Congregation ships alike.

The Radius fleet bristled at the opening salvo's performance, incensed at the Congregation's capability for resistance. All of the traitorous captains were shocked at the level of coordination their opponents were demonstrating. This battle was looking like it was going to last several rounds when it should have been a near-immediate knockout.

A COMPLY-3 Level order was quickly broadcast and, from five Radius flagships, the plumes of nuclear missiles sparkled in the cosmic brilliance, making rainbow-arcs through space. Warnings on all of the Congregation's targeting panels began screaming—a defensive cannonade screen took down three of the missiles. The other two slipped through the net. On the far ends of the battlefield, momentary white spheres of fission cascaded and pulsed as the ships within the blast radii were vaporized to atoms. Static wisped across all electronic displays for half a second, and several fighters spiraled out of control, the EMP having knocked their engines offline for the moment. When the light finally cleared to reveal stark regions of glowing scrap, the Congregation had lost a tenth of their forces.

Matters quickly got worse for the fledgling fleet, for Ministry quickly entered the fray with all the grace of a charging rhinoceros. The towering Reaper was more than twice as long as the largest ship the Congregation had to offer, and Ministry was keenly aware of that fact.

Using its immense size and near-indestructible armor to its advantage, Ministry barreled into the closest carrier, not even bothering to use any of its weaponry. The carrier crumpled where the Reaper slammed into it before it simply broke in half, the shattered ends of the bisected ship ripped and torn like it had been wrenched apart in the hand of a child. Surrounded by the orbit of frozen detritus, Ministry impossibly wheeled about, a low roaring bellow throbbing through the cold and stark expanse, its arms tossing aside the severed pieces of the ship that it had just split asunder. Propelling itself forward, the multitudinously appendaged monstrosity moved right into the middle of a cluster of smaller gunboats, golden fire surging just underneath armored plates larger than Citadel blocks. It spread its eight multi-hinged extremities, its front two curled just underneath its base. Nearing two Congregation ships, Ministry suddenly lashed out—the two arms that it had previously crimped now whipped forward as powerful jets at the back of the limbs suddenly flared and fired the arms forward at super-accelerated speeds. Two of the gunboats simply disappeared in clouds of debris and brief gouts of flame from being pulverized by the Reaper's brutal blows. The rest of the ships were dispatched callously by a clawing hurricane of crimson laser spears that melted anything they touched that tonelessly hummed from large intricate lenses near the spindle of smaller tentacle-like arms that approximated Ministry's "mouth."

More and more Congregation ships turned on the Reaper, launching volleys of their own to counter its assault. But Ministry's shields were too powerful, and the Congregation did not have the practical tonnage that the previous Earth fleet had once demonstrated. Torpedoes skipped off of the Reaper's kinetic barriers in paltry explosions, a veinous web of electricity sinisterly crackling and rippling at the feeble impacts.

Ministry, however, was only one Reaper, and it could not sustain a direct assault for too long on any of the larger command ships without incurring any sustained fire. As powerful as it was, it knew its limits. Any more audacious charges would be doomed to fail, as the Congregation was now keeping a constant eye on it. The Reaper disengaged and broke off to rejoin the fragmented Radius lines, skirting the boundaries as it eyed an opening for it to make an intrusion.

The infinite horizon, speckled with inferno blooms and tortured asteroids of rippled steel, glimmered the purple color of a melting dawn. The battle continued on.

---

Rema
Control Tower

Compressed motes of shimmering air altered the landscape of the great desert that was situated before Roahn. Within the CIC of the tower, both the quarian and Cirae stood practically plastered to the arcing window that wrapped around the southernmost edge of the room. The roads of New Sura seemed to part the city evenly like embedded splinters, carving the innermost blocks to give way to levelled transport avenues, a cadre of arcologies and condos bobbing and churning in a blocky tide.

Roahn reached out and touched the window, bringing up a rounded magnification lens. The window was made of eGlass, and could be manipulated with haptic feedback. A scarring puff of chalky dust off in the distance had caught her attention. She wheeled the lens in that direction and upped the magnification. She slithered in a breath as she saw, through the dappled air, hundreds upon hundreds of iron glints surge in their shadowed shapes behind the veneer of dust they were kicking up. She could see troop transports, armored mechs, low-atmo rotary craft, and legions of armored APCs and tanks roving about on the cracked plains.

Cirae, in a form-fitting combat suit, appraised the scene with a lens of her own. A sour look came to her face. Her hands unknowingly brushed the hilt of the pistol that remained latched at her waist. "Right where you said they'd be," she said. "Goddess, to see it in person…"

"It'll be fifteen minutes before they get into range," Roahn grimly reported. She turned on a heel and picked up a shotgun that she had left propped up against the wall. Running a finger over her suit seals, the encased quarian tested her limbs, trying the weight of the armor that cocooned her and made her look like a medieval creature. With a careful yank at her sehni, she silently pronounced herself ready. "I'm heading down there now."

The asari followed Roahn to the lift. "You know Aleph's leaving nothing to chance this time, right? He'll destroy you if he gets the opportunity."

"Which is why he has to have brought the Monolith here," Roahn glanced back. "No better time, right? He's not going to just flick it on and end it all for everyone in an instant. He'll show it off—flaunt his power. And when he reveals where it is, that's when we strike. But for now, the goal is just to survive."

Roahn switched the shotgun to the magnetic holster that lined her shoulder blade. She entered the lift, but Cirae stayed behind. The asari's lips pursed and she looked down upon the pale blue carpet that lapped at her feet before she looked upon the commander again.

"And if there is no demonstration? If… if it all just… ends?"

Lifting her chin, Roahn's eyes were milky blots hidden behind a thick shadow of a tormented maxilla. The shape sizzled across the glass of her visor like a digital dream, hiding the uncertain girl that continued to exist within the hardened carapace of the Shepard, the warrior spirit. Her fists slowly clenched against her and her entire body seemed to grow rigid, like molten metal was being poured into her and slowly cooling to form an impermeable endoskeleton.

"It won't," was all she said right before the elevator doors shut between them.

---

Rema
New Sura Outskirts – Congregation Front

The dust reached the city before the Radius did. One moment, the clear morning sky, flecked only with the wan glints of distant starships, tender beams of hypervelocity fire, and immediate caustic flares like gas bubbles, was soon coated with an orange and brown haze that seemed to rain a black fire upon the parched ground. The sun turned violent and red, a sinister scratched disc embedded over the valley as shadows rippled over the land.

The sandstorm puffed and writhed in parasitic lumps. Metallic rumbles soon emitted through the silent howl of the gale; a stomping of weighted feet and the shouts of helltroopers.

Deep behind the lines of barricades, mine tripods, barbed wire, and manufactured gradients, the soldiers of the Congregation stirred in their trenches, their eyes locked behind the scopes of their weapons, fingers lightly brushing their triggers. Their faces were streaked with grime and pallid sweat, several of them wearing grimaces as they stood within their crumbling crevasses. The hum of wired shield generators helped dispel the quiet, as did the soft whirring of servos in the automated turrets that lined every ridge. The storm was less than three miles away. They could hear the enemy approaching. They just couldn't see them.

Five minutes later, the storm bulged and a horde of X-4W drone walkers—bulbous heads atop a skinny bipedal chassis—raced out from behind the dirt cauldron. Each walker had a different weapon emplacement mounted upon it—cannons, pulse guns, AA fabrications, grenade launchers—and all were blazing away in unison. The ground erupted in magnificent plumes, sparks and shadows of ash playing together in terrible unity.

For the participants, it would only dawn on them later that this commencement of hostilities marked the end of a poignant chapter in all their lives.

The turrets upon the ridge and embedded into the cliff immediately opened up on the drones, sending a punishing onslaught of flak and precise-point energy into their hulls. Precious components of the X-4Ws melted and several of their legs were severed, with many of the joints buckling and explosively popping as their center of gravity was suddenly skewed. Most of the drones topped forward, burying themselves in the dirt.

A sparse cheer went out from the troops in the trenches. A minor victory.

The revelry died in their throats in the next instant as the gale winds parted the tempest to reveal a nightmare. Screens of open-top troop transports charging forward, bipedal chain-gun walkers with cockpits of sunlight gold jogging behind them, shuttles and low-altitude gunships heavily droning overhead, divisions of Hammerheads shunting over the ground, and foot soldiers in a hodgepodge of armor colorations—most of them army regulars, while about a quarter still wore their PMC outfits—burst onto the scene like an onrushing avalanche. The resulting Radius front stretched for what seemed like miles across the dried salt plain, thick metal thumps emitting from their cannons as they opened up on the city and its inhabitants.

The Congregation forces seemed to take a thin sigh all together. Rays from the sun danced upon the dotted line of scopes that lined the trench. They all dug their feet into the dirt, for there was nowhere else to run to.

There was a stale moment in which the world seemed to pause in beautiful consideration. Then the guns of the Congregation opened up, from every man, woman, turret, mech, tank, human, asari, turian, krogan, salarian, quarian, and any being that could pull a trigger, creating an obliterating wall of steel and noise on a multi-tiered plain as they tore the planet apart in pale explosions, sending bodies into the air while walls of fire rolled across the ground, mirrored from the spilled lubricants, fuel, and blood that shimmered for mere seconds before the scorched earth swallowed them up.

---

The Trenches

The first of the Radius troops reached the perimeters of barbed wire fences, uttering bloodthirsty roars as bullets zipped by all around them. They quickly clawed through the razor fields with omni-blades, leaving behind glowing scraps of wire in limp spools. Asari troops simply jumped over them with biotically-assisted leaps.

Congregation directed fire chewed lumps out of the trapezoidal hills that ridged unevenly between the two armies. The Radius reached the first outward position and began digging in, unleashing a rapid hail of return fire, machine gun emplacements jackhammering away and filling the air with glowing tracers.

Grenades sailed in frantic arcs, lobbed from both sides, and heavy fountains of dirt and flak sprouted in sharp crackles, throwing body parts in all directions. Armored denizens locked themselves into their weaponry, helmet diodes glowing behind the ribbed gunsights as rifle recoil massaged their shoulders.

A mortar detonated over one of the Radius trenches, destabilizing part of it and causing it to crumble uncontrollably. Five Radius troopers were buried alive underneath the thick dirt, their screams quickly becoming muffled over the unending explosions. Congregation soldiers focused their sights on the enemy soldiers that ran back in a vain attempt to dig their cohorts out. The narrow cone of fire tore the grouping to pieces—large chunks of flesh burst out from holes bored in armor, exposing pale bones and rips of glistening muscle.

Many of the entrenched soldiers ducked after expending their ammunition, giving their heat sinks brief tosses in the air in personal flourishes before they were loaded into their guns. Some jumped back down to wipe their faces after being sprayed by ash and bits of their friends.

One faltering Congregation line became partially blinded after several smoke grenades were tossed in their vicinity. Peering through the fog, they barely had any time to react as howling Radius soldiers sprinted up to the lip of the tactical canyon, lightning spraying from their rifles as they blew their rounds straight through their targets. One noncom tried to lift a rocket launcher—a Radius lieutenant shot him dead, right between the eyes. Some of the apostate soldiers forwent their guns, choosing instead to launch themselves into the trenches to do battle hand-to-hand. Bodies fell in twisting heaps as they were tackled. Knives flashed before they were buried in necks. Vibrant spurts of red splashed the sides of the moats, a deathly acrylic.

A few Congregation soldiers found their courage. They waded into the slaughter, holding their weapons like clubs so they would not shoot their own men. A bloodied Radius turian wandered from the smoke in a daze, thick streams tumbling from his scalp. He looked up, expecting to find himself among allies. An answering blow from one of the Congregation's own burst his skull, spewing brains in all directions.

Through the churning mob of snarling combatants, one Radius trooper suddenly lifted a flamethrower. Two seconds later, a cauldron of white fire plunged through the narrow gorge, heedless and indiscriminate in its destruction. Screams went up seconds before they were engulfed by flames. The smoke that scarred the sky turned black and a roasting smell of plastic and charred meat wafted over the battle. When the flames finally ran out of fuel, they left behind a grayed depression of selfsame corpses in a sea of soda ash, blackened and twisted, features all melted away so that any individuality the men and woman had once possessed in life had been dispersed to the callous winds, their final sacrifice conducted in terrible anonymity in this time of paladins.

---

The Arsenal

The thundering of mag-rounds rippled the air as the vibrant bolts of biotic mortars splashed against the azure shields of the Congregation's own defensive grid. Asari techs panted alongside human engineers, wonderous hellscapes of lightning and cosmic power thudding before their eyes like supernovae, energy streaming from their fingertips as they kept their barriers aloft, each blow against it threatening to bring the biotics to their knees.

Subversive asari, belonging to the Radius, leapt across one trench, their fists hammering white before they punched the air, sending walls of biotic energy skidding across the gap. The blows smashed into the domed barriers, knocking the edges a foot off the ground, but the Congregation's engineers held on in time, sweat pouring from their brows as they made painful gasps.

"Need reinforcements in quadrant four n—" a Congregation sergeant was shouting into a comm right before a bullet pierced her neck. Her hands flew to the wound, but she was already on her knees, coughing in a blind panic, watching as her dark blood poured down her arms and seemed to spread out from her splayed palms across the ground. Five seconds later, her face splashed into her own puddled gore. She never got back up.

The Radius' biotic corps advanced closer. Their units flowed their arms, tuned to the harmonics of the universe, right before they unleashed volley after volley. Smoke blew in from just to the side, brushing their hi-tech suits of armor. They shunted their palms out and this time they were successful. Congregation asari were thrown backwards as if punched, the biotic energy smashing their bodies as if their bones were made of tissue paper. The Radius asari leapt upon the fallen squads, either surgically shooting them in the head with their pistols, or hacking away at their faces with curved axes.

The smoke was swept in by a wave of dust—the visors of the Radius troops solidified to protect their faces. That was when the Congregation counterattacked.

Jumping through the choking exhaust, a young-faced asari in white Congregation garb leapt into one of the trenches and made a quick jab with a closed fist. A pillar of pulsing force took a Radius soldier's leg off at the knee and blood spat in startled bursts. More defenders leapt into action, many of them already in the process of summoning the requisite energy to accomplish such talented feats of physics. Punches laden with zones of increased gravity met the sides of the Radius troopers, caving in their ribcages and crumpling their armor directly into their organs. Two-handed downward blows shattered helmets and removed faces, leaving nothing but gore-laden empty sockets that shrieked for one pitiful moment in agony right before they abruptly expired.

Some asari warriors, having finally snapped after thinking they had just won the last war only to become embedded right into another one, bodily launched themselves at their Radius tormentors. Making their hands into the shape of shovels, they punched through flesh and muscle with the aid of their biotics, wrenching open the necks of their enemies so they could get at their carotid arteries and burst them within their shaking and slippery fists.

The zone crackled with empyrean energy and unworldly light, the smell of ozone burning at the nostrils of the warriors as they stood within the growing corpse field while the universal bursts of erratic phosphorescence served as reminders that the havocs they emboldened were mere scraps to fuel the ravenous appetite of Aleph's intricate war machine.

---

The Air

The Nimbus support ship was a cheap addition to ScionFoundary's broad manufacturing portfolio that had been nothing but a boondoggle from the concept stage. The idea for a gunship that had no space capabilities whatsoever, only worked in atmo, and possessed enough universal weaponry emplacements to offer a customizable (and inexpensive) option to fledgling colonies filled a niche in their product line that had not yet been addressed by that point. It seemed like good business to fill a demand where supply had previously been nonexistent.

However, the real reason for the Nimbus' inception had origins more political in nature. ScionFoundary's production numbers had been floundering after a catastrophic pair of failed ground vehicle launches—the units in question suffered from a defect in the fuel tank that caused it to explode at quite unreasonable times. This stark decrease in customer orders meant that it was going to lose out on a critical round of government funding, though it was worth mentioning that this funding round was not desperately required so that ScionFoundary could fund its complete slate of operations, but the interest in the immediate cash flow came from SF's board, who were particularly keen to use the funding to line the pockets of its already cash-laden executives. So, as a quick way to justify its budgets for the next ten years, the Nimbus product line was whipped up into existence, practically written on spare napkins from the corporation's cafeteria. The Radius snapped up the contract, happy to add the extra ordinance to its arsenal. Based on the latest quarterly statements, SF's executives were pleased at the results. They had gotten their payouts after all.

Now, as the battle of New Sura continued to grow more chaotic and deadly, squadrons of Nimbus darkened the skies around the city as they orbited friendly and enemy positions both. Ball turrets upon their hulls creaked and jerkily rotated, chugging low burps in the form of explosive heavy rounds that pounded the ground below. The wedge-shaped, slow-moving transports lurched to and fro as AA fire from the ground rippled around them. Half a mile below, Congregation squads disappeared underneath eruptions from the frenzied rounds. The innumerable emplacements on the Nimbus' seared all at once, making it appear that every single ship was sparkling like brilliant holiday decorations.

Fighter jets in white Congregation striping quickly pulsed past the Radius' airborne armada, after they had unleashed a barrage of torpedoes that burst the flimsy ships completely apart. Some of the Nimbus craft had carelessly floated into range of the AA turrets—accurate flechette fire pierced their hulls and obliterated their engines. Shrapnel dotted the hulls and turned whatever living creature was just behind those walls into shredded meat.

One ill-fated Nimbus spiraled out of control, two of its four engines knocked offline in whirls of black vapor, while the other two were impotently sparking in frustration. The transport craft spun several times in the air, losing altitude all the while, until it finally impacted into its own front line. Fragmented metal and gouts of lit fuel sprayed over the area half a second before the stressed vessel exploded, taking out two mech walkers and half a Radius division in an instant.

Implacable to their cohort's demise, the chorus of Nimbus continued to pester the Congregation from the air in their raggedly organized fleet, ignoring the turret salvos as they burst all around them. What would it matter if a few of their numbers were felled? The taxpayer paid for these things by the dozen, anyway.

---

The Roads

The ground in C-Zone 12 began to helplessly vibrate seconds before the throaty ensemble of hydrogen engine roars blared all at once. A monumental column of Mako tanks—thirteen in all—tore past the battle as they exited one of New Sura's underground passages, training their guns upon the far side of the Radius' line. Their underside jets flared in sequence as they vaulted the trenches, shock absorbers easily taking the strain. The tanks mounted the rolling defilades, smashing aside still-burning ruins of fallen Radius armor before they cleared the no-man's land.

The queue of tanks quickly became a straight line as the unit slowly swept around to face the Radius' right flank, streams of white dust being expelled from underneath each of the Makos' six tires. This part of the basin was empty, with at least four miles of broad nothingness separating the two lines from one another.

Four miles and closing, at the very least. Perfect conditions for a turkey shoot.

A company of Radius mechs turned to face the oncoming threat. The bipedal walkers were numerous in their designs; broad-shouldered and hulking brutalizer models with heavy machine guns, spindle-limbed models with particle-beam sniper rifles, and ergonomically-lined models that toted an array of mech shotguns, miniguns, and missile launchers. The mechs lifted their weapons, the muzzles upon them buzzing like screws turning. The pilots selected a Mako tank to target—the BattleNet was linked to their units, indicating which of the tanks had the most targeting locks focused upon it, enticing members of the cadre to disperse their fire groupings without prejudice.

A glamorous synesthesia of dappled white and red hues flared unevenly as the Makos and mech walkers fired at the same time. The horizons became kindled with the crisp blotches of shockwaves exiting massive gunbarrels. Machine gun rounds, 155mm projectiles, UV laser pulses, and slow-moving missiles devoured the ground and any hapless armor that became interrupted by the violent fulmination of fiery detonations. Makos flipped and skidded out of control—some dislodged wheels tumbled away in bouncing arcs. Mechs sparked and crumpled, their cockpits caving in as the heavy rounds hit them center-of-mass before they blew up spectacularly. Cometary streaks of white flaming shrapnel became hurled almost a mile into the air, cascading down in the form of a steel rain sharp as razors, gouging the dirt where they hit and tumbled.

One by one, the Makos disappeared off of the face of the planet, vanishing in the wake of nuclear detonations strewn by fixed Cain launchers upon the shoulders of the broad berserker mechs. The Radius line had not been unscathed, though. Metallic joints in the knees of several mechs had melted into gnarled ferrous chunks from superheated rounds. Engineers taking up a support line at the base of the mechs' feet had exploded when anti-tank rounds had erratically plowed into them, showering the bipeds with a film of liquefied meat and bone. Several of the mobile walkers were swaying on their feet as their recovering shields rippled a field of blue over them. Other walkers were missing gun-limbs or had chunks missing from their designs. Smoke curdled their battered and blackened chassis.

Scanning that the threat had been dealt with, the remaining members of Radius Armored Column 11 lazily turned back to face the main battle.

---

Trench 11
Congregation Front

A concussive blast from a grenade showered a dusting of onyx dirt upon James' head, who instinctively ducked back into the trench he had stuffed himself into. Next to him, Liara was breathily reloading a machinepistol and Jack was hugging the trench wall, a cool bluish gas wisping between her fingers as her eyes remained locked to the ashen and roasted sky.

There was a muted thump in the deepest range of his hearing. James looked up just in time to spot a Dark Horizon commando—one of the Aeronaut's remnant forces—step upon the lip of the trench, the optics in their helmet glowing a ghastly yellow. James hardly felt his pistol jump into his hand before he shot the commando at point-blank range in the chin. A savage arc of blood burst from the back of the man's head and he tumbled into the pit to splatter into the thick mud lining the floor.

He felt a tugging at his arm. He looked behind him.

"Fall back?" Jack asked, her voice calm. Not urgent.

He quickly scanned the opposing lines. The shallow hills were filled with the shifting shapes of armored troops in varying shades of black rush the first of the trenches and turret positions that had been erected as the first line of defense. The forward positions were reporting major losses across the width of the battlefield—it didn't take a genius to determine that this place was due to be overrun in the next few minutes.

James nodded. "Fall back. Next position."

There was a rocket launcher lodged in the grip of a dead soldier. James retrieved it before he waved his friends and the rest of the soldiers to get to the closest defensive position through this tactical withdrawal.

The edging nose of a Hammerhead punched its way through the smoke and the fog—the launcher's reticle ID'd it as hostile. James let loose two rockets before the weapon clicked dry. He dropped the launcher, but not before witnessing the first rocket drop the paltry shields of the hovertank in time for the next rocket to consume it in a ball of fire. James exhaled a breathy chuckle.

He crouch-walked through the slowly disintegrating line while bullets snapped by just over his head, dirt crumbling from both sides of the weakening trench like the hastily bolstered walls were about to snap shut like a crocodile's maw. In front of him, Jack and Liara were alternating between throwing up barriers that deflected shaped-charge explosions and propelling shockwave bursts that sent incoming Radius troops flying, sometimes with missing limbs from the sheer brunt of the blasts. Two PMC mercs leapt into the trench to engage the group. Liara was quicker on the draw—her machinepistol flashed and the privateers shuddered and dropped, their kneecaps obliterated into dark and dripping caverns. The asari finished one merc off with a bullet to the head while Jack jumped forward, hot biotic energy singing from a sharp chop, and the second man's head rolled away from his shoulders while a still-glowing stump spat blood.

"Jesus," James breathed as he glanced at the headless corpse. "All that with your bare hands?"

"All that and more, tough guy," Jack said as she blew a strand of hair from her face.

James caught Liara's eye. "Didn't know that kind of precision was possible with biotics."

The asari shrugged as she ejected a spent clip from her machinepistol. "What isn't?"

Switching to his rifle, James covered the rear as he saw twisting nightmare shapes of black armor curl through the haze down the trench line. He dropped to a knee and fired, half-blind, with no way of knowing if he was hitting anything. All he could truly see were the white streaks from airborne missiles part the sky above and the crowning plumes of terrifying infernos rise from the mangled metal corpses of vehicle wreckage.

"Come on!" he barked into his comm to anyone who was listening. "First line's failing. Next tier!"

They stepped across broken and twisted bodies, blood slicking the ground beneath them. Cortez even jumped in to join the group at one point, the man's armor already showing carbon scoring and scuffed to hell along one forearm.

"Mr. Vega!" Cortez had to shout over the explosions by way of greeting.

"Esteban!" James planted a hand on the man's back and shoved him forward to even their pace. "Was your position hit?!"

The former shuttle pilot nodded. A cut at his eyebrow wept a steady dark stream that refused to clot—he intermittently wiped at the wound. "Scattered, mostly. Suicide fighter landed in the middle of my position. Radius cut me off from the other half of the group."

"Well, stick with us! We've got to hold our positions for as long as possible!"

"Right behind you!"

They marched through the gloomy clouds, specters of vengeance amidst a world on fire. The ripple-fire they unleashed from their positions looked pale in the greasy smog. Shadows of Radius troopers jerked and dropped from their precision. Carving arcs of biotic pulses from Jack and Liara sliced their enemies in half. Shields of liquid intensity doused the flames of incendiaries that threatened to wash over them, tactically dropped by the ex-Shadow Broker and one of the foremost brutal convicts the galaxy had ever known.

Continuing to retreat through the labyrinth of trenches, James kept himself at the rear as he let his friends lead the way, his face set in stone as he witnessed all of existence begin to uncouple within the lens of his eyes.

"Just gotta stay alive," he whispered to himself, worn boots crunching on warm ground. "You're not going to get through me, assholes. I'm not gonna let you touch any of them."

---

Field Medical Site No. 3

Thick tires skidded upon loose ground as the white-paint slathered Mako jerked to a stop in front of the first of the medical tents, which was a prefab made out of gray plastic. The rear doors to the rover kicked opened and a turian and an asari jumped out, both wearing armor with glowing crosses upon their shoulder plates. They reached back in and grasped the handles of a hardshell stretcher, which was holding a bandaged and bloodstained human—pieces of the injured man's armor had melted into their flesh and a sour odor wafted from the tank's interior.

Sam McLeod, holding the other end of the stretcher, quickly followed his cohorts. His face was dripping with blood, but he seemed to be unhurt. The three then quickly shuttled the patient into the prefab; the asari held an IV bag filled with a clear solution. Inside, all of the table space was filled by a menagerie of wounded and dying, with doctors and medical personnel practically jogging from body to body. Blood of every color stained the ground, turning it slippery. The trio quickly found a spare bit of empty real estate on the floor and gently set their patient down. Sam then grabbed an unused coat hangar and twisted it into a crude hook—he beckoned for the IV bag and looped the ringed holder through it and latched it to a nearby rack.

After waving an orderly over, Sam grabbed a spare towel and dried off his face as he headed back outside, back into the acrid tang of cordite and the dead sunlight. A troop coordinator—a fresh-faced human—took stock of the medic's blood-splashed appearance and his face paled.

"Holy hell. You hit?"

Sam tossed the used rag aside, which was now completely stained an arterial red. "No. Patient's thyroid opened up on me in that last run. Made a mess of the interior. The driver didn't like the sight, I guess."

He pointed back towards the vehicle he had been riding in for the past hour. A turian was down on all fours near one of the tires, vomiting his guts out and making wrenching upchucking noises. The coordinator's mouth parted slightly, sympathizing.

Rubbing at his eyes as a heavy weight seemed to come down just behind them, Sam gave a long-winded sigh, wishing that he had a flask handy. "I need to sit down," he said to no one in particular.

He was about to claim a flimsy metal chair for himself, but stopped mid-sit when he noticed that the coordinator was about to say something. Sam's muscles ached, his gut cramped, and he had an unbelievable headache like he was going through a withdrawal, but against his more hoggish instincts, he stood back up.

"You need another runner team," he said, taking the coordinator's words and ripping them out from his mouth.

The coordinator hastily consulted a timeboard. "There's always going to be a need for a medic team. But… I can't send you out right away. Registry said you've already made three runs, McLeod. Five patients brought back, that's enough for right now. Forget it—I can send another—"

Sam's eyes were scanning the motor pool. The only transport in the vicinity was the Mako he had just arrived it, albeit with one very distressed driver. "All mobile medic teams are already out in the battlefield or have been destroyed," he gestured with a thick arm in the direction of the distant explosions. "Who else are you going to send? And don't tell me you're going to draft volunteers—we are the volunteers."

"Your driver's…" the young man looked over at the still-stricken turian, who still had his face in the dirt as this morning's breakfast was continuing to show its face, "…indisposed. We'll need to scrounge up another."

The bearded medic pulled a long face, an eyebrow arched as if he was savoring this moment of prosaic thought from the coordinator. Absentmindedly wiping a patch of his chestplate clear, Sam then gave his holster a pat, confirming that his submachine gun and pistol had been left where he had set them. Lifting his chin, he then gave a somewhat defiant nod to the younger human.

"It may be a tank," he said as he began to walk over to the Mako, "but it's got a steering wheel and a gas pedal. Not exactly rocket surgery."

The coordinator's expression mimicked the sort of reaction to one watching their dog get shot in front of them. Sam found the comparison amusing.

"You…" the man jogged after Sam, spluttering uselessly, "…you can't! You have no idea how to drive such a vehicle! You're not qualified either, I bet!"

If Sam had not been looking decidedly unamused before, there was no mistaking his composure this time. He gave a slow glance to the burning plain miles away, at the loping forms of the tall mechs overseeing the chaos they dispensed, and at the legions of gunships making slow orbits while their cannons boomed. He then turned back to the coordinator.

"Say that again. Think that fucking matters?"

From the squall of prefabs, Sam could glimpse his team of combat medics hustle their way over to the Mako. Evidentially, they had heard the call for a crew to be sent out once more into the fray. Seeing as he had not yet received a reply from the coordinator, Sam gave an exaggerated shrug and clambered up the stout ladder that led to the cockpit of the tank—he knocked the access panel with a gloved fist and the gullwing door swung upward, the empty pilot's seat awaiting.

Indeed, the coordinator seemed to have given up, but not without one last feeble attempt at a put-down as Sam settled into the uncomfortable chair.

"What if you run someone over?"

Sam laughed right as he yanked the door to the Mako firmly shut. "It's war, man. You'd better hope I run someone over!"

---

Forward Assault Unit 44
Radius Line

Deep within the pale gastine, in the forests of razor metal and blackened flesh, the entire air seemed to be lit with a gypsum fire, orange sunlight warring against the clouded shadow. Dark Horizon troops, still bound to the bidding of a hierarchy of masters, pressed forward as they marched through lakes of flaming fuel, the obsidian of their armor looking like black ice as the flickering conflagrations danced upon the curved surfaces.

The rifles of the mercenaries jumped as brutal motes belched from the muzzles as quick as flintsparks. The men, fifteen in all, wreaked destruction upon the Congregation from their concealed positions, hiding behind pillars of smoke and crumpled skeletons of mechs and tanks. Automatic fire chattered like the percussions of woodpeckers, amplified tenfold.

One mercenary dropped to a knee to reload. A new shadow, dark against the shrouded star, fell upon him. Irritably, he looked up. He only had time to behold the infinite bore of a thickly barreled shotgun, focus falling into place, just before it ignited with a roar. What remained of the privateer's head flew as a thin blur to land in the dirt several meters away. He sank with the report of the blast swallowing up the sound of his headless body collapsing.

Immediately, the merc's compatriots whirled to face the source of the gunshot. From out of the mists of smoke, Grunt's hulking profile suddenly loomed over the platoon, an angry orange light burning like embers in the corners of his eyes.

The krogan bared a grin, a mech walker going up in flames just behind him.

"I interrupt you idiots?" he growled.

The Dark Horizon mercs all whipped their weapons around. They were still too slow.

Bounding forward in two great strides, Grunt reached out with a massive paw and wrapped his massive fingers around the helmeted head of one of the humans. Giving a powerful squeeze, the helmet crunched and crumpled inward, gore leaking from the cracks. He pushed the body aside at the same time he flipped his shotgun, now holding it by the barrel, and swung it in a savage arc. The stock of the weapon broke in half in a flurry of sparks as it connected with the face of another trooper, killing him outright. Grunt dropped his ruined weapon at the same time he retrieved a grenade launcher from the merc he had just killed. Hardly wasting time to aim, he pulled the trigger on the heavy weapon—a sharp hiss seeped through the battlefield and a Dark Horizon privateer at the far edge of the perimeter was turned into a membranous red cloud.

The closest Dark Horizon sergeant turned his weapon onto the krogan and unleashed it upon him. Grunt rolled sideways, the ground pulsating with every bullet that smashed into the ground, his shields crackling angrily. Midway through his roll, the krogan reached for the wickedly long knife he kept sheathed near his shoulder. Whipping it out, he chopped off the sergeant's leg at the knee and plowed the blade straight through his spine by the time he had fallen upon his stomach. Yanking the scimitar free, Grunt made a raking upward cut, sweeping another mercenary's head off his body with a single stroke—thick ropes of blood sprang out from the stump as though they were trying to claw the missing head back into place, but they finished their descent before the wayward dome met the earth.

Charging through steaming fire and crackling coals, Grunt rushed a grouping of three Dark Horizon soldiers. He lowered his elbow before shunting himself forward. A mercenary was flung through the air and landed upon a spiked bed of a disfigured Hammerhead chassis—there was a meaty thumping sound as the airborne man suddenly became impaled by six different blackened spikes in his chest and limbs that protruded from the wreckage. One of the corsairs shot Grunt at point-blank range with a submachine gun, but the krogan's shields were at full charge and the bullets dissolved in a sea of static electricity. Despite being untouched, Grunt was enraged at the display of bravado and punched the offending man in the chest so hard his heart ceased beating. Stomping upon the man he had just killed, drenched in the blood of his enemies, the krogan bellowed as he reached out to grab yet another freelancer by the arms—he tugged in opposite directions and both limbs popped out of their sockets so quick the rounded knobs of bone had completely shattered into sharpened splinters. The man he had just disarmed sank to his knees, shock already washing over him. Grunt dropped the arms he had liberated and grabbed at the man's head, giving it a sharp twist until it was oriented a hundred and eighty degrees, a thick crack carrying over the din of battle.

There were six men left in the Dark Horizon platoon, hardened killers who had seen and committed their fair share of atrocities, but even they were shocked at the level of brutality that Grunt had just casually demonstrated, to the point where they all stopped in their tracks, wondering what hell this brute had just clawed out of for them to bear witness. Grunt had no such qualms, as he was quite enjoying ripping all of these bastards to pieces, and had yet to tire in his revelry.

Quickly bending down, the krogan hefted a minigun that had been dislodged from the emplacement in a Phantor walker's arms. A few wires dangled unevenly from the weapon but the firmware support through his armor instantaneously linked to the firing mechanism of the minigun and it opened up upon the remaining group. Pieces of the armored humans simply disappeared underneath the whirring bore of the machine gun. Limbs, heads, chunks of torso, all were vaporized from the high-velocity bullets tearing at muscle and bone, leaving ragged wounds of frayed tendons, snapped cartilage, spilled organs, and bubbling arteries.

Four seconds later, Grunt dropped the smoking weapon at his feet. Fifteen mercenaries lay around him, none of them intact, their mangled bodies already turning dusty and rank, nearby blazes whipping with the brief spalls of desert wind.

He afforded a moment to himself so that he could catch his breath. Only a moment. There were still plenty others left to kill.

---

Fueling Station Site 2
Congregation Line

Alliance sharpshooters lay prone on their stomachs as they crawled underneath the parked Congregation VTOL squadrons that had failed to take off in time before their positions had been overrun. They moved through the fields of darkened fighters, whose albatross-like wings spread gracefully in their permanent positions of flight and engines cold and dark. Engineers among the snipers placed charges on every other gunship they passed, linking all the detonators to a singular command toggle.

As the onrushing squad passed through the sixth row of vehicles, another two-man team of combat engineers stepped forward to apply the shaped explosives to its underside, near the fuel tanks. But before they could plaster their devices, a burst of gunfire tore the scene apart. The engineers fell to the ground, their pack units flaring and smoking. The snipers hurled themselves to the floor, scopes already trained in the direction of the shots.

Upon a barebones stairwell within the cadaverous structure of the fueling station, which was a network of catwalks ringing around two cylindrical tanks each ten stories high, a lone figure crouched with a rifle resting upon the middle handrail. Korridon shifted his aim as he peered through the widened hunting scope he had salvaged from New Sura's armory—the lens was oversized and not treated to inhibit light reflections, but it featured twelve unique digital targeting systems in three different wavelengths. With it, even the most amateur shot could become a makeshift marksman.

Bullets smacked just below the rung he was crouched upon, sending up a high-pitched series of twangs. Korridon grimaced as he forced himself to move a level up, taking cover behind a shielded section of the gantry. Getting himself situated once more, the turian lined his scope up with his eye and quickly found a sniper duo crouched behind the nose section of one of the VTOLs down below. Carefully, he inched his finger upon the trigger until only his clawed tip was touching it. He then squeezed and the weapon kicked back satisfyingly into his shoulder. Three fiery plumes cascaded from the nose of the ship and the two bodies behind the ship fell to the ground, both having been hit in the chest.

His efforts had attracted the attention of the belligerents. More and more gunfire crackled on or around Korridon's position, frequently forcing him to take cover. The turian risked a glance at the aircraft lot below and saw about nine armored figures all firing in his direction before a nearby ricochet forced him to pull himself out of harm's way again.

"All this attention for one shooter?" he asked out loud.

It was true that the Radius' odds against him were overkill at best, but at least the turian took solace in the fact that for every one of them that he distracted by being here in this moment, that was potentially equal to a Congregation life saved.

Then another shot rang out, flat and dead amidst the dynamic plain. A thin pillar of light punched itself into existence just an inch from Korridon's heat. He stared dumbly at the hole that had just been carved through the armored wall. Damn, that was close! Guess he now knew the barrier he was hiding behind was not exactly bullet-resistant, not against armor-piercing ammo.

The turian lifted himself up and sprinted across the gangway, his dusted and scratched armor making wild clangs as he stomped upon the flimsy grating. A sea of sparks from ricocheting bullets followed in his wake like trailing firecrackers. Various glances down towards the field now revealed more than twelve Radius soldiers all converging in this location to take him down. So, this is how it feels to be a prime target. Korridon wasn't sure if he should feel flattered or not.

A band of sprinting mercs became grouped near one of the He3 filling pumps, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. Korridon slid behind a section of piping and quickly brought his rifle to the crook of his arm as he rose to one knee. He ignored the bullets zipping around him for the moment and he rested the rifle's forestock against the pipe that was blocking the view of his body to the soldiers down below, currently saving his life. With a breath, the red reticle of the scope lay silhouetted in the tender lens of his eye—Korridon rested his cheek against the stock, tried to imagine the wind drift, and finally touched the trigger.

His shot caromed through the air with a loud whang.

Just behind the crowded Radius squad, one of the fuel hoses suddenly erupted with a clear liquid stream a millisecond before flames the color of talcum bulged outward and ravaged ten of the mercenaries as the chimeric blaze quickly crossed ten meters in the blink of an eye. The ignited He3 hungrily flumed out and upward, wrapping itself around attack fighter and man both, reducing them to either cinders or melted slag.

The remaining armored combatants wandered around the inferno plain in a daze, some of them deafened from the sheer force of the explosion. Suddenly, several of them stuttered and halted in place, like some final judgment had been laid upon them. Those that remained in their frozen states then jerked, one man after another, before toppling to the ground, fresh wounds upon their necks and backs where there had been none before. Silhouetted by the fire, thin spurts of blood sheared in long arcs from the blackened shadows of the Radius soldiers, a distortion of static and warped air accompanying each victim close enough to embrace them.

There were now three men left upon the scorched quagmire of the VTOL field. The blaze had since died down to a fragile simmer, leaving behind glass-like expanses of roasted concrete. They had seemed to become wise to the reason why their fellows were being felled in such quick succession—they now knew that it was not because of the turian currently housed up in the filling station just overhead. Their weapons became trained upon the distortion, seemingly peering at nothing but open terrain until the deceptive barrier dropped, revealing Kasumi's shrouded figure behind the light-bending profile.

The Radius soldiers blasted away, looking to riddle Kasumi with their volleys of fire, but the woman quickly dove to the ground, a bloodied knife in one hand, and a machinepistol in another. The rounds passed harmlessly over the woman's head, giving her just enough time to level her own weapon and pull the trigger three times. Three helmeted heads snapped back, the tops of their domes having been completely shot away. They all collapsed within seconds of each other while Kasumi quickly jumped back to her feet.

Breathing hard, the woman tapped at her earpiece as she turned amidst the smoking wreckage, able to spot Korridon perched within the metallic skeins of the fueling foundry some distance away.

"Nice shot," she smiled. "Took out almost a whole company and deprived the enemy a cache of ordinance at the same time. Smart."

Over in his sniper perch, Korridon shakily got to his feet, having to lean against the guardrail to steady himself.

"Would you believe me if I said I wasn't aiming for the pump?"

"The thought crossed my mind," the woman cheekily replied. "Still, nice work, but better get your wind back quickly, tall guy. This isn't over yet."

"No," Korridon agreed as he lifted his weapon and started to head back down the stairs, a wilderness of conflict laid out before him through the tangle of ridges and wilds of killing fields. Out there laid his destination and his destiny. "No, it's not."

---

Radius Forward Command Center

The megalithic guns in the claws of the gargantuan Radius mechs were uncompromising and unrelenting in the judgment they continually dispensed. Railgun slugs whipped through the air, thin metallic pillars that were stealthy quiet until the moment they passed, in which a terrible shockwave of pressure and noise would rip by, tossing anything lighter than a tank. The dark-armored commandos that milled just behind the feet of the walkers were spared this assault—they calmly watched as the Congregation was decimated again and again as they gradually pushed up the furrowed slope, the walls of New Sura less than half a mile away. The doors to the multiple hangars that rimmed the city's perimeter had been dented or otherwise smashed, but the turrets that lined the peripheries continued to put up a spirited defense, though spirit could only do so much in the wake of pure firepower.

One Radius lieutenant hung back near where the secondary assault line was patiently waiting. Forty heavy shuttles with their ramps down roared upon the ground, their engines idling and the ridged mountains looking monolithic in the background, each one filled with mercenaries and infantrymen in high-powered armor, ready to storm New Sura once the Congregation's front lines had been routed. The lieutenant had the entire plan memorized: break the line and the Radius would have a direct avenue to the city, whereupon the walkers would target the defensive turret screen in that sector of the battle, allowing the Radius to breach the entrance to New Sura without the fear of being molested by enemy fire.

A simple plan, and doctrinally sound. Also, from the rate the Congregation's forward position was deteriorating, the next phase of the assault looked like it was going to come into effect any minute now.

"Zetta fire-group," the lieutenant keyed his comm, "stand by. Prepare to move out in ten mikes max."

A Christmas tree's worth of acknowledgement lights winked in the lieutenant's HUD. All fireteam leaders had heard his orders. Satisfied, the lieutenant grabbed the retractable set of macros he kept strapped to his hip. He raised the electronic lenses to his eyes and zoomed in to the Congregation's front line.

Visibility was poor, what with all the haze from the pouring smoke and distortion from the multiple fires that had sprouted across the field and up the hill. The route that led to New Sura was a cacophonous and jagged puzzle of crevasses, man-made hills, and obstacles made from wreckage. The lieutenant had a hard time discerning individual combatants through the choking fog—the heat that bled from all the blazes was also interfering with the IR sensors in his macros, washing everything in a thick red blur.

The attacking Radius task force was nowhere to be seen, not in these conditions. Irritated, the lieutenant opened a private channel to the commander of the division. "Tau fire-group, provide status update. What's the word? We oscar mike?"

There was no response. The lieutenant waited a few seconds before making the same request only to be met with the same answer of hissing static. Sensing something was amiss, he grabbed his macros again and glassed the far edge of the campaign boundary, flipping through every filter he had on the device, desperate to glimpse something that gave him an inkling of what was going on.

To his annoyance, the lieutenant watched as a lone missile streaked from the cliff wall and impacted right into the spot where he estimated Tau group's fireteam commander was located. On his minimap, a dozen contacts suddenly darkened. Well, that was one less person he could receive updates from.

The strange thing was that the comm to the Tau leader was still open, but only a hissing sound could be discerned from the other end of the line.

As he continued to struggle with his limited line of sight, the lieutenant swore he could now hear something garbled on the other end of his still-open comm with Tau group. Only, instead of intelligible words being uttered on the line, it was a low and rhythmic thundering of one word repeated ad infinium. It sounded like chanting.

"The hell are they saying—" the lieutenant muttered right before a cold metal hand reached over and rudely ripped his earpiece away from his head. Fearfully, the man peered up as the visage of the Haxan glowered over him, the fire in its eyes looking like sizzling coals locked into thick sockets. The machination paid the fleshling no mind as it held the earpiece up to its audio receptor, listening in frigid silence.

The lieutenant decided to risk a question. "Can you understand it?" he managed to ask the cyborg, his voice heavily wavering within its hellish presence.

The Haxan listened for two more seconds before it coldly let the earpiece fall between its fingers. It then turned its head, evil eyes boring a hole straight through the man. The Haxan straightened, its breath a crude hiss as it seemed to vibrate with a pleasurable serenity.

"They're saying… 'Shepard.'"

---

New Sura Entrance Corridor

Two columns of Congregation troops made a crude alley through the thickening combat zone, all of them stomping their feet, pounding their chest, and raising their weapons high as a singular name passed through their throats. Multiple races, multiple colors, all saying the same word. Between them, five distinct shapes almost three stories high sprinted in a single-file line, each separated by a dozen meters. Energy thrummed from the crowd, creating a thick vibration that seeped into the hearts of the defenders and of the vaunted persona they were cheering for.

From the wall of smoke, the five ViPR mechs charged forth in their brazen march, the leader amongst them practically flying across the field in bounding leaps courtesy of the jump jets retrofitted on the back. The tortured sun glinted off of the thick plates of armor that had been bolted to the sides of the sleek mechs, the gigantic weapon gripped between two tungsten carbide claws rippling with slowly trickling bolts of white electricity. The clawed feet demolished the ground beneath them as they raced across it, ripping up soil and any obstacle into fractured pieces to be flung in all directions.

In the cockpit of the lead ViPR, a quarian sat leaning forward at the controls, her face a contorted expression of rage while her hands urgently gripped both toggles.

"Kaidan, I'm going to make a hole for you. Units 4 and 5, dispense cover fire."

"Roger that, commander," Kaidan—Unit 2—said over the radio. "We'll get it done. On your mark."

The engines of Roahn's ViPR kicked and soon she was thrown back into the contours of her uncomfortable seat as the entire mech was hurled forth at 150 miles an hour. The Radius battle line loomed before her, a boundary of mechs, men, and tanks all sitting in a nice even row for her to slam against. In an instant, the enemy armor seemed to recognize the threat that Roahn and the rest of the ViPR squad posed and immediately began to open up on them with chaingun rounds. Gray metal blurs—railgun slugs—rippled past Roahn's mech in deadly curves, but the sonic booms did little to slow the quarian's advance. Already, Roahn had built up an incredible pace with this deadly machine. The control scheme was intuitive and getting back into the groove of mech piloting was a simple affair thanks to old muscle memories.

Hell erupting before her as thousands of guns all trained on her platform, Roahn mustered a grin.

"Watch this, dad."

Roahn shunted both of her arms back on the control yokes. The ViPR immediately leapt upward, lift jets sending it surging to the height of a small Citadel building. She then plunged both of her hands forward and the jets abruptly cut with a whistling noise. She then plowed one leg forward upon the pedals that controlled the locomotion. The ViPR landed heavily upon a Radius Atlas, heel-first, the weight of the mech instantly breaking through the cockpit and killing its pilot with a satisfying crunch. Roahn then had her ViPR reach out and grab the remains of the dead craft, hefting it like a shield to absorb the small-arms fire while she continued to hold upon her arc pulsar with her right clawed limb.

Confusion and pandemonium immediately gripped the Radius forces. Clearly, they had not been expecting anyone to make a dent in their lines. Roahn was looking to capitalize on that—the ViPR's arc pulsar charged to full power and she let her finger off the trigger. A cascading ball of blinding energy shot parallel to the ground, emitting a wreath of electric bolts as it travelled. The bolt slammed through a mech's arm, murdering the metal and turning it into bubbling paste while its driver was completely electrocuted as the resultant energy flayed across every alloyed surface. The shot continued to seep over the plain—the wild lightning shafts that surged from the rounded nova caught the occasional foot soldier, sending so much power coursing through their bodies that they disintegrated into fine clouds colored an arterial dark color.

Growling, Roahn lurched forward and hurled the wreckage of the Atlas she had previously stomped. It flew fifty meters in a wide arc and crashed into two drone walkers. They all toppled in a heap, crushing a Radius mortar team below them.

It seemed like a million target locks were honing in on Roahn. Radar warnings were shrieking incessantly in her ear. But still, the expected wave of fire did not come. She was in the center of the Radius assault—there was too big of a risk of crossfire. Through the digitized displays, she could see the rest of the ViPRs in her squad leap into action, their mag-guns already blazing away to devour a mob of several VL-series tanks. Kaidan and the others. She was not alone out here.

Roahn did not bother concerning herself with the Radius infantry. Her focus was on the mechs and the tanks—they packed the heaviest ordinance and thus were the primary targets. Touching a control, her ViPR quickly darted left, evading a fissile volley that one anti-armor Mako had unfurled in her direction. She brought her arc pulsar to bear again and fired. The Mako flipped into the air as the full front of the bolt pounded into it—the cockpit of the tank was now a glowing and gaping hole, stretched inward and empty.

Small arms fire smattered against the armor of the ViPR, dashing against segments of her mech's power shield. Roahn's brow was damp with sweat. She was a lone knife-fighter in the middle of a rabid horde. She had promised to make the Radius die from a thousand cuts and only here did she have the ability to deliver those cuts all at once.

"Get in formation," she radioed her squad. "Launchers, give me a tactical phalanx. It's time to shape the battlefield."

Dozens of incendiary missiles fired from the rear-mounted tubes on ViPR Units 3 and 4. They hit the ground in hundred-meter intervals, each one detonating into a pyrite flare of napalm and glassfire. The flames reached heights of a quarter mile, frenzied and grasping towards the charred boundary of the forgotten world. Radius troops and material scattered out of the way, not wanting to become incinerated by the multiple blasts. But when they recovered to reengage, they found that the resulting inferno line had been burned straight down the middle of their position, completely bisecting the second assault force.

At least one individual was not intimidated by the fire—Roahn's ViPR took a running start, its sharp feet crushing a few soldiers as it ran, and jumped through the brilliant pyre, landing on the other side with a thud into a soup of boiling mud and streaming billows of fragmented air. The arc pulsar was still gripped in a massive metal fist. In the other, a dismembered limb she had reclaimed from a downed Atlas.

"You're not going anywhere, bosh'tets!" Roahn screamed, the mech's loudspeaker carrying her voice to ear-shattering volumes. Her mech looked like a skeletal demon that had just risen from some unearthly pit, blood and oil streaming from its thin design as it raised its limbs while the gigantic conflagration seethed just behind it.

Roaring, Roahn shot forward and swung her left arm down, the one holding the dismembered mech arm. It curved in a deadly arc until it impacted dead-center into a Radius walker, completely smashing the cockpit. At the same time, she fired her arc pulsar and the shot plowed into another hulking enemy mech, ripping it apart in a blast reminiscent of a nuclear mushroom cloud. Her ViPR's foot lashed out and overturned a Mako tank, kicking off two of its wheels. The quarian switched the pulsar to scattershot mode and directed it onto an incoming Hammerhead. The fusillade riddled the hovertank with laser flak, a thousand holes drilled completely through its armor. Roahn then swiftly turned the weapon onto a Radius trench and blew four mercenaries to chunks of glistening meat.

Leaving shattered carnage in her wake, Roahn continued to wade through the front lines of traitorous troopers and material. Belting forward at speeds un-survivable to the unprotected man, Roahn's ViPR leapt into the air, both hands raised upward like it was beseeching some cosmic deity. She slammed the mech back down to the ground again, its fists swinging forward and shattering the cockpit of an improvised construction mech that a PMC had outfitted for war. A giant sidestep to the left and Roahn was hurling her fists back and forth like a maniac, her ViPR completely pulverizing a pilot's housing within an enemy Poseidon walker. Unrelenting, the quarian touched the controls and a chainsaw-like blade sprang out from a latch near her walker's forearm—one sweep to the right decapitated two drone walkers, separating their control domes from their legs, whereupon they fell in crackling heaps.

An expeditious vanguard-type mech, slashed with yellow salarian warpaint, levelled an industrial shotgun at her—Roahn bounded her mech to the right and to the left in zigzagging bursts until she managed to slide her way just behind her target. Instead of getting her own weapon out, Roahn lunged forward and the clawed hands of her ViPR began ripping out any component it could reach—countermeasure tubes, shield generator harnessing, secondary batteries—until she pried free one of the refrigeration canisters and shunted it against the cabin of her enemy. The canister crumpled and the released gases from the crushed tube flash-froze the flesh-and-blood salarian that had been piloting it. Frozen wisps seeped around the edges of the canopy door as Roahn leapt away to find a new target.

In her mech, Roahn was dancing with the infernal flames. Bullets and plasma streamed all around her, nearly scoring her carbide armor. She ducked missiles, returned fire, and smashed away insulting rifle rounds that dared to impact her shield. She was the storm, the righteous anger of a galaxy sick and tired of warfare, the embodiment of conflict's end. Her entire body seemed to tingle with energy, not unlike the powerful draw of biotics.

Her mech crashed further through the Radius front lines, scattering the infantrymen before her. Roahn watched them all retreat with disinterest. From a half-crouch, she toggled her ViPR's arms and the walker lifted the arc pulsar at the fleeing troopers.

"You're all dead!" she howled as charged the pulsar. She had to hold this corridor for her troops, keep this gap open at all costs. How much blood that necessitated spilling all depended upon the Radius and their actions in this moment. "Do you bastards hear me?! You wanted Commander Shepard, didn't you? You… have… her!"

Before Roahn could take her finger off the trigger, all of the pulsar's weaponry information abruptly vanished in the corner of her screen. She realized that the weapon had been destroyed in her mech's hands, pieces of it still thrown up in the air and trailing showers of sparks. The walker's fingers automatically opened, dumping the useless gun upon the ground, the shattered cavern exposing electronic innards that continued to lifelessly belch blue-white bolts of lightning.

Shot away, she realized with a pang of fear. But… who—

A new voice intruded upon Roahn's frequency at the same time the image of a sallow metal vertex with angular predatory features jumped to life upon the HUD.

"You've had your fun, Roahn. Now it's my turn."

Slowly, Roahn turned around. The Haxan was standing atop the fallen leg of a mangled walker, the seven-foot-tall gleaming giant a diamond amidst the smoky sea. In its hands, Roahn recognized the enormous profile of a Black Widow sniper rifle, one that had been modified with anti-vehicle rounds. It jumped down from its perch, steel clanking upon stone, white flames springing up around it.

Within her cockpit, the quarian tensed herself with a grimace. "No tricks this time, Skye. You're getting the real deal."

The Haxan raised its weapon with a wry rasp, its words cutting effortlessly across the comm. "Oh, I know."

The Black Widow fired and the heavy slug careened across the battlefield with a loud roar. It impacted upon the knee of Roahn's ViPR. To her alarm, the shields in that area instantly depleted by half. Incensed, Roahn twisted her mech just in time to avoid the Haxan's follow-up shot. She touched a button and a minigun popped out from a hatch upon the ViPR's forearm. Roahn whirled her walker around and began opening up on the cyborg, yellow tracerfire cutting a jagged trail through the heat-ruined air. The Haxan carefully sidestepped the incoming volley and loosed another shot before ejecting the spent heatsink. Roahn's eyes widened as she saw the minigun abruptly fly into pieces before her, leaving only a jagged chrysalis of scrap smoking along the mech's arm.

In desperation, Roahn raised her mech's left arm and fired a length of thermite flares straight on at the Haxan. The cyborg shouted as its internal sensors went haywire and flinched away to avoid being scalded by the superheated chaff. Roahn used that moment to initiate her ViPR's grav-beam tug: a whip of aquamarine light flowed from an emitter at the wrist of the mech and latched onto the Haxan's Black Widow. With a crack of a metallic wrist, Roahn jerked back and the sniper rifle was torn out of the cyborg's hands and bashed to pieces against a small rock formation.

The Haxan glowered as it watched the remnants of its rifle become swallowed up by the shifting sands.

"You think I need a gun to beat you?!"

Roahn did not give the Haxan the pleasure of answering. Instead, she rocketed her ViPR forward and loosed a hefty swing towards the cyborg, but the blow was ducked as easily as if Roahn's mech had been moving in slow-motion. The Haxan, frenzied with energy, leaped towards Roahn's back, twin omni-blades emerging around its forearms. The double-armed blow crackled through the mech's shields and carved partially through the ViPR's left arm. Roahn recoiled away before the Haxan could cut the limb off, but a constant wound of dripping sparks was now seeping from where the blades had bit into it.

In answer, Roahn whirled down a massive hammerfist that sought to crush the Haxan's head all the way down to its ankles. That blow, the Haxan dodged as well, and the ViPR's fist sailed through empty air until it collided with the parched ground and made a cracked depression several feet deep. The Haxan used this opportunity to lunge again and this time one of the fingers on Roahn's mech tumbled away, cut free from the sizzling daggers that glowed darkly crimson against the sinister dust gales.

"If you didn't have that armor," the Haxan laughed, "I would have ripped you open by now."

Roahn backpedaled, her entire mind swimming sluggishly. Fatigue seemed to hammer the back of her eyeballs and sweat remained latched to her brow. Even though she was more than twice as tall than the Haxan with the mech, she could not muster the speed to beat it. Skye—no, that thing—was far fiercer and more agile than Roahn could hope to be in this walker.

But if she abandoned the mech, the Haxan would tear her apart.

Now it was the Haxan's turn to make an offensive thrust. Holding her breath, Roahn overcharged the shields in her right arm and angled her forearm to block the blow while stepping into the attack. Omni-blades crackled across the nearly-invisible barrier, bouncing off with a brutal lightning bolt connecting the two for a split-second. A shock rippled up the mech's arm, jolting the quarian within the cockpit. Her shoulder bounced off the side of the plastic seat, bruising it, but she quickly got back into position and swung her arm to return the attack.

The Haxan rolled out of the way and, as it exited its evasion, it swiped its blade across what constituted as the ViPR's Achilles tendon. A gout of pressurized fluid sprayed over the ground and the walker staggered, but it was still mobile, though its foot was dragging.

The Haxan gave a huff. "I'm surprised you thought this would be enough to kill—"

Roahn whipped her mech around, a grenade launcher now slung along the length of the left forearm. She clenched down on the trigger and the massive projectile sailed right towards the Haxan. This time, the cyborg was too slow—the grenade hit the Haxan on the upper-right corner of its chestplate and dented it four inches. It did not detonate, as the range had been too close for the grenade to arm itself. However, the force was great enough to knock the mechanoid off its feet and send it skidding across the ground several meters.

"Care to retract that statement?" Roahn bellowed.

With a frightful roar, the Haxan sat up, dirt and ash streaming from its body as it rose. It touched the impact site upon its chest, fingers tracing the edges of the rounded crater. In the background, soldiers and mechanical weaponry all paused in unison, watching the battle silently but not interfering in any way.

The grenade lay smoking next to the Haxan, still having not detonated yet. The Haxan bent down and plucked it up.

"Lucky shot," the cyborg snarled. "But your hatred won't be enough to destroy me."

It bent its arm and hurled the grenade back to its sender. Roahn realized the danger and raised her shielded arm just in time. The grenade hit the barrier and finally exploded, momentarily overwhelming Roahn's display with a pure white flare. Bloody fingers of fire stretched around the ViPR, ripping at its shields until they dissolved with a pathetic snap. Once the oxidizing flashes extinguished themselves, Roahn's HUD focused just in time to see the Haxan looming in its sights, having leapt straight up towards the mech in a devastating charge.

The Haxan jumped upon the ViPR, its fingers wedged in the handholds of the mech. Snarling, the exoskeletal behemoth plunged its arms in the gap between the walker's limbs, grabbing at wires and pistons, ripping anything out that it could. In the cockpit, Roahn's controls were now either refusing her commands or actively fighting her. Warning sirens rang in her ears. The Haxan was manipulating the mech's mobility. She had to throw it off.

Quickly, Roahn slapped at the button to activate the mech's sonic pulse. In the next instant, the entire exterior of the ViPR began to vibrate as an intense resonation abruptly blasted from its skin, rattling the Haxan atop it and the sac of organs housed within it. The Haxan cried out, the remnants of a camera housing gripped above its head within its fists, and its footing momentarily slipped. That was enough for Roahn to bring her walker into a brutal twist, causing the Haxan to be thrown off, only to land headlong into the same rock formation that its now-ruined sniper rifle had smashed into.

"You self-centered fool, Skye," Roahn seethed as she leaned forward in her seat, trying everything in her power to gain back a 100% visual line of sight as her onboard diagnostics indicated that the walker was half-blind after the Haxan had torn away that exterior series of cameras. "You think I can't hate as much as you? You're still alive—but only just. I ended up taking nothing from you… but you took something from me."

Grimacing, the Haxan stood, its faceplate and chest now marred with black gouges after landing amidst the sharp rocks. "Your hate is widespread. Mine's focused. I only need to kill one person to find fulfillment. You will still be left wanting… if you somehow survive today."

"Then… I'm sorry, old friend. I wish things had turned out better for us."

"Indeed," the cyborg snarled.

Constructs of bare steel and simple epoxy regarded each other silently. Hard shadows elongated their forms, deepening the crevasses into simple black geometric shapes. The war-scarred mech. The throbbing cyborg. Shells of metal encasing the precious biology protected within. The sun above was now hollowly yellow, like an archaic globe of iridescence. Both fabrications twitched in anticipation, sizing the other up, ready for the first one to make the fateful next move.

A calamitous noise from above drew both their attentions, breaking the spell. Across all e-bands, various warnings were crying out, describing the terror that was now seemingly hurtling towards the combatants at jaw-dropping speeds. Several miles out and closing, a frigate in a death-dive plummeted towards the earth, multiple fires completely engulfing it and creating a cometary tail of debris and ash just behind it. No emblems were visible at this distance—not that they could be, seeing as the blazes had already burned them off. But this presented an immediate problem, at least for Roahn and the Haxan. Seeing as this ship had been willingly let past the Congregation's defensive screen so that it could impact into the Radius' forces, there was now the issue of having to survive the impact.

Borne into its fatalistic plunge from sustained combat fire, the frigate surged towards the locus of the gravitational pull that now encased it. Three kilometers long, the ship was not heavy enough and not travelling fast enough to be classified as a planet-killer, but no one could doubt the severity of what was about to happen.

Roahn looked at the Haxan.

The Haxan looked at Roahn.

They sprang at the other the moment the doomed frigate's plow touched the earth.

Fire, ash, and wind immediately tore at them in buffeting gusts, sending a holocaust of heat and razor debris whipping past their bodies like the worst hurricane imaginable had smashed into them. The Haxan disappeared into the inferno right next to Roahn's mech. Unshielded men and women on the ground were either disintegrated into chunks of flesh from the windswept detritus that ravaged their bodies, or were roasted into piles of smoldering ash from the intense shockwaves of flame.

Inside her walker, Roahn screamed as the internal temperature spiked to levels above what the automated climate was able to control. Her body was roasting—she was being cooked alive in here. Her skin felt slippery underneath her suit and her throat felt congested with moisture. But the horror soon subsided as the worst of the heat passed the area near the epicenter. Half of the walker's electronics were malfunctioning—the weapons systems and shields had been permanently knocked offline—but she could still move. After a minute in which her tormented body was finally allowed to cool down, the quarian forced herself to look at her surroundings.

Her world was colored in varying shades of orange and red. The pure blue of the sky had finally been scorched away, replaced by the cloying branches of smoke that hovered overhead. Fire seemed to erect her entire existence, layered upon levels and levels of edifices as though this purgatory had structure to it. Yellow ripples of the everlasting fire caged Roahn in all directions, trapping her in this heated prison. The ground her mech was standing on was a fine black soot, the top layer burned so bad that parts of it were glowing, melting into glass. Ignited pieces of starship wreckage lay around her on all sides—shorn rafters, ripped I-beams, scattered detritus that warped a scathing red color. The ragged guts of the ship, an interior section completely cut away from the impact, furrowed just meters away, the glowing portions of the bisected halls scalding in throbbing rectangular light patterns.

A thunderous bolt of lighting ripped apart space and time as it slammed down less than a dozen meters away from Roahn, causing her to jump. That was no ordinary lightning, she realized. Overcharge from the damaged drive core: bolts of dark energy seeping out from a breached containment pod as the last of the limp eezo charge bled off in the form of power streams. The damn ship was still alive… but not for long.

Past the billowing smoke clouds, Roahn saw a nearby structural beam become lifted away, something underneath it pushing it up. The Haxan growled as it casually tossed aside the rubble that had momentarily buried it, its armor now streaked a charcoal black. It stepped upon the flaming wreckage and dropped down into the crackling sand, fiery bulbs of plastic and glass rippling around its metallic feet.

"I suppose you were hoping that would've gotten rid of me," the Haxan quipped over the roaring uproar of the burning ship.

"Wouldn't be the first time," Roahn growled. She maneuvered the controls of her walker into a lower stance, knees bent, arms poised to spring forward.

The Haxan chuckled, the winds sending the flames into a circular whirlpool, embedding the two warriors into the middle of the cascading tornado, the walls long and flowing as if the blaze had become liquid. More lightning split the sky above, turning the cyborg white in its stark flashes. "Remain cocky all you want. I only need to crack that mech's casing to make you boil."

"Not if I kill you first," Roahn hissed, her body taut within her ViPR, muscles strained to the agonizing point of stripping from her bones.

"Come on, then!"

---

Roahn had decided a long time ago that there was nothing left of Skye in that shell called the Haxan that she loved anymore. Perhaps she had never loved Skye to begin with. Maybe all along it had been a mutual infatuation that she had mistaken for love, blinding her to the dark creature that had existed inside that woman all along.

Now, between crackling flares of energy, and the thick metal slashes from hulking walker arms and massive permasteel curves, the former lovers cast away their bonds. Forever.

This was not a duel between friends. A fight that embodied any larger conflict outside of its sphere of influence. This was just a personal war, in which the existence of the other was an insult, a scar upon their psyche that begged for its destruction.

Not even Aleph had earned such personal scorn from Roahn before.

Bombs of melting wreckage thundered to the ground, spewing drops of burning metal upon the combatants—little distractions which went ignored. Scraps of simmering cable dripped hot copper to form a liquid golden cage around the fight. The heat flared and whispered around them, threatening to break both of them down to their base molecules as they warred.

The Haxan grabbed a flaming pillar of steel and swung it. Roahn's walker caught it in its hands. In its two-handed grip, the Haxan shouted as tender sparks flared into its face, its synthetic muscles struggling against the massive hydraulic power of the ViPR. Roahn leaned into the lock, about to bear down upon the cyborg. That was her mistake—the Haxan leaned back and Roahn's ViPR uncontrollably stumbled forward, its center of gravity askew. Her walker let go of the pillar. The Haxan then sidestepped and plunged the spike straight through the right knee of the mech as the hulking machine passed it by. In the cockpit, upon a miniature diagram of the mech, Roahn stared as the right leg section abruptly flashed red. Oh, this is not good.

The time for talk was over, as neither Roahn nor the Haxan found it of much use to them anymore. The chainsaw knife-blade of the ViPR reemerged. Roahn swiped at the Haxan in ferocious arcs—the armored warrior quickly leaned back to dodge each blow, the scything metal of the weapon passing close enough to tease shavings off of the Haxan's frame.

Frustrated, Roahn reached out and, with an armored paw, grabbed a bushel of flaming debris. Slag dripped around the mech's fingers, colored a sickly yellow, as if the ViPR had squeezed an enormous fruit. Armed with her superheated gauntlets, Roahn swung her arms in wild bursts towards the Haxan, the lava spraying from her clenched fists in vibrant contrails, hissing angrily as they pebbled the cyborg's armor. One blow connected; the Haxan was thrown into the blackened ground, its shoulder aflame. It rolled before Roahn could crush it with an overhead strike and lashed out with an omni-blade the moment the fist connected with the hot sand next to it. The ViPR recoiled, its left hand now a sparking stump.

The Haxan slowly stood back up, blade sizzling along the length of its arm as the wreckage of the ship disintegrated right next to it. A dark gargoyle silhouetted against the violent waves of an unsteady sea.

Roahn shunted the controls of her failing ViPR forward—it was now reading a power leakage which was only worsening exponentially. She had seconds left, but she had to kill the Haxan. The mech swiped and pounded, its widely-swinging arms carving paths through the shrouding smoke and creating vibrant pulses of sonic force when they battered the Haxan, denting parts of its armor.

But the Haxan refused to yield. In the middle of one of Roahn's wind-ups, the cyborg stepped forward and made two ranking strikes along the width of the ViPR's "thighs." Cabling snapped and the upper half of the walker suddenly folded forward; Roahn had to hold out a hand to prevent its face from plowing into the steaming ground. The Haxan calmly walked up to where the cockpit was, blade angled to deliver a brutal pierce.

At the last moment, Roahn surged back in her seat and yanked the red-and-white striped level that had been situated between her legs. Explosive bolts along the top of the walker detonated—the Haxan barely had time to dodge before the wayward hatch to the ViPR was propelled through the air only to disappear in the cloying cloud of smoke. The automaton had a nanosecond's realization as to what was going on and it sheathed its blades and hurriedly jumped, just in time to snag the edges of the cylindrical escape pod that had begun to lift off from the shell of the walker.

Together, the two ascended through the heat and flames as the stressed ship finally exploded beneath them.

Darkness clustered around the pod for three terrifying seconds. Roahn was rattled in her seat—the violence of ascension. Then, without warning, a burst of light from the distant star. Warm yellows and vibrant blues intruded into the ascending cockpit. The sight was almost enough to bring Roahn to tears.

As was the sight of the Haxan's visage staring balefully at her through the window.

The two just looked at each other, their eyes made of eternal glass. The cauldron of the wreckage dropped far below them, half a mile down, and trailed away as the autopilot sought a safe place to land its passenger. Cold wind whipped around the Haxan while its fingers dug deep divots into the sides of the pod as it locked itself upon the airborne object, heat continuing to warp from its outline.

The Haxan's head tipped, as if it was saying something. Roahn couldn't hear it. The cyborg then reared back as it released its grip with one hand, the omni-blade lit once more.

Roahn slapped the controls to the escape pod and the stabilizing jets on the right side fired all at once. The next instant, the entire craft frantically embarked into a death spiral, twirling over and over and over again as the land and sky came together in a frantic singular-toned blur. The Haxan tried to regain its grip upon the pod, but the centrifugal force was too much, even for its carbon-reinforced fingers. With a metallic scream, the Haxan scraped along the exterior of the pod until it was rudely thrown off the wayward vessel. Out of Roahn's side, the cyborg cartwheeled as it tumbled through the air, a quickly diminishing dot as it headed on course for the neighborhoods of New Sura.

Inside the pod, Roahn was about to pass out. The blood was pooling toward her midsection, away from her brain. She was losing control, everything was going dark. She was sitting in this fiber-ripped chair, her suit encasing her bruised and bleeding body, and she was in the final throes of consciousness as the rotating craft refused to iron out a path in its deadly descent back down.

Something in her head abruptly smoothened out, like she had taken a massive hit of alcohol. Immediately, everything became pleasant for her and she felt tired. Almost as if she should take a nap. Ignoring the whipping sight of the disintegrating world encroaching into view, Roahn rested her head against the back of her seat, content to slip off into—

No.

The quarian's eyes snapped open. Her arms reached out robotically, grasping with aching fingers upon the controls. She took a breath, imagining she was gathering all of the luck that imbued her form, and then she took control of her destiny.

Automatically, her fingers twiddled with switches and the glossy haptic surface of the control panel. Atmospheric fins on the pod shot out, angling its descent. Attitude thrusters began firing in controlled tempos, a contrabass whuff. Trajectory flaps slid open and closed, slicing the pod out of its death dive and into an iron plummet that turned into a piercing whistle. Her head felt clearer, her vision amplified tenfold. Cold breath calmly seeped from her lungs as she watched the altitude gauge slow… and slow… and slow…

But would it be enough?

To the quarian's concern, after she analyzed the rate of her descent, the arithmetic gave her the answer that… no, things were still going to get a little dicey. She had only seconds if she was going to survive. Right before the altitude meter clicked to "0", Roahn abruptly thrust out her arms on both sides of the cockpit, anchoring her in place, and she stiffened her body as the cry of the world came to her ears.

There was an earsplitting shattering noise, everything went topsy-turvey, and Roahn's head bounced off the control panel.

This time, she did pass out.

---

Weirdly, it was the stabbing sensation in her temples that made her come to. For a moment, Roahn figured that it was uniquely unfair that the first thing to bring her back to the world was the feeling that someone was stabbing ice picks through her skull. But with the realization of the pain came the realization she was alive. The work was not yet finished.

Her eyes slammed open at the same time she took a frantic gulp of air. She immediately sat up from her seat, which ordinarily would be a mistake, but aside from the usual gamut of aches and bruises, there were no injuries that were particularly aggrieving her right now. The interior of the mech's escape pod was dark and all the panels were smashed. But the spinning feeling in her head had stopped and there was a distinct sense of being solidly in one place that gave the quarian some relief. She had to have landed by now.

Next course of action: getting out of the pod.

Roahn reached over and unlatched the belt that anchored the straps bolting her shoulders to the seat. There was a brief moment of panic as her stomach rolled and her body abruptly pitched forward as the seatbelt no longer kept her anchored in one place. Gravity took hold of her and she flipped and landed back-first into the main display, producing even more cracks into its already shattered surface. Roahn groaned as she lay amidst the field of equipment. Stupid! She had not bothered to check if the pod had landed the right way up or not. She could have broken her back by being so careless! Annoyed at herself, she stood back up, her boots crunching the glass displays as her weight settled upon them, and grasped for the emergency hatch release on the ceiling. She gave it a tug and hot air and light exploded into the pod as the metallic cover was ripped away by the ejection force, tugging at her achromic sehni and forcing her visor to automatically dim in response to the change in illumination.

Grunting, Roahn grabbed the edges of the hatch and hoisted herself up and out of the smashed pod. She blinked several times to clear the spots in her vision and fumbled for the heavy pistol that had been strapped to her hip, unconsciously checking the clip to see if the weapon was ready to be used at a moment's notice.

It was only when her vision returned to normal when her face paled in shock.

"Oh, crap."

A dark tide of enemy armor—mechs, tanks, and hovercraft—were all positioned in a line in front of her, their cannons all aimed in her direction, looking particularly murderous. Too many to count. Behind them, the bleached mountains that blended into the rapidly graying sky, which was slowly seeping into the color of a faulty display. Scattered foot soldiers crouched and lifted machine guns in her direction, mere peons in the wake of the war engines in their midst.

Someone shouted at her to drop her weapon. Roahn looked down at the pistol she clenched in her hand. That seemed an asinine thing for them to say. After all, they had the advantage in range and weaponry. Did they seriously think she posed a threat to them?

She was in the middle of weighing all the options at her disposal—the number of outcomes in which she walked away alive quickly diminishing in her mind—when someone made the choice for her. A voice over the comm did, to be exact.

"Got you on transponder, commander. Payload's out. Danger close. Might want to duck."

Roahn was a bit slow on the uptake, which explained why she jolted when the entire enemy column in front of her suddenly vanished behind a red-white curtain of fiery radiance, the crash of the detonation so loud that she swore her bones were rattling in their sockets. The flames quickly wiped away to reveal blackened, half-melted skeletons of the tanks and walkers smoking where they had been struck down. There were no signs of the soldiers that had been milling among them.

The euphoria bubbled in Roahn, but she kept it pushed down, hardly daring to dream. The resounding roar of a sharp-winged and angular bomber sweeping by just overhead, clearing all the smoke in one savage burst, caused it to well up beyond her barriers anyway.

Roahn stared up at the bomber and watched it curve upward, its wings waggling in a subtle salute.

She laughed and keyed a particular channel. "You never lost your sense of timing, Joker."

"I was never aware I was in danger of losing it," the pilot retorted mirthfully. "I got them all, though, right?"

The quarian turned. Not much was moving out there except for the occasional burst of smoke from the ruined wreckage.

"Oh yeah," she said. "You got them. Thanks for the assist, Joker."

The remote-driven bomber gave a singular spin in the air right before it banked underneath a cloud and abruptly climbed straight up, vanishing from sight.

"Anytime, commander. Go give 'em hell."

"Will do," Roahn breathed. She headed back to the pod and, from one of the racks inside, withdrew a spare assault rifle that she had previously stashed away. It was still functional and fired in a wide variety of ammo types, perfect for ground work. She also grabbed a few wire grenades—explosive cores wrapped in several meters of looped steel.

She was about to head out when a curious text alert—an RSS burst—blipped onto her omni-tool. A map of New Sura popped up, a wire-frame diagram of the city cut into its separate districts. And one district near the base of the cliff wall was scattered with several red flashing exclamation points. Contact alerts. The Radius was in the city.

But how could that be? Roahn scanned the fragmented and watery horizon. Last she saw the front lines, the Radius had not made it to the city's walled boundary yet. No way they could have made it through unless—

Skye.

The cyborg had been clinging onto Roahn's pod when it had been spiraling out of control, flailing in all directions. The Haxan had let go during one of those rotations, flung past the Congregation defenses, past the city walls, and deep within the congested blocks of pulverized stone. Frantically, Roahn checked the map again—the contact dots were organized in a ragged line, a blazing trail mechanically pushing its way through convoluted streets, spirited defenders, and its own self-hatred to dig itself out from behind enemy lines.

In horror, Roahn realized where the Haxan was going. She looked up at the glittering spire of the control tower, still looking pristine even as it lorded over the field of carnage that rapidly uncoupled beneath it.

"Cirae!" Roahn yelled into her comm as she broke out into a limping jog towards the city. No response. Was she on the right frequency? Desperate, she flipped up more contacts. "James! Jack! Anyone on this frequency! Get back to the tower! The Haxan's heading there now! Do you hear me?! GET TO THE TOWER!"

There was no way to tell if they had heard her or not. All the while, mortar fire from the Radius lines punched out of the towering embankment of smoke, sending up massive bubbles of fractured and white-glowing sand less than a hundred meters away. Roahn dove to the ground to avoid getting decapitated by some of the larger stone chunks. When it was over, she raised her head. Things were not looking good out here—the Radius was making another push. The closest flank was failing. Lose too much ground here and the Radius would waltz into the city anyway. A sour pang constricted the quarian's heart. She knew where she belonged but damned if it didn't hurt her all the same. Still, she typed in a frantic text order to double-time it to the control tower and set the alert to send at ten-second burst intervals to her entire squad—they were closer to Cirae than she was, and they didn't have the entire Radius army blocking their way. They needed to reach the director. Now.

As she slid into the nearest trench and prepared for the bite of recoil against her shoulder, her mind was only filled with the dimmest of hopes that her friends could make it to the tower in time. Congregation soldiers saluted her as she ran by. She shouted at them to cease such motions and, with a long wave of her arm, ordered them to fall in behind her. Her friends needed time… and she would give them as much of it as she could.

This flank would hold. It would not fall.

Winner take all.

---

A/N: 6 days from now will mark the day 1 year ago when I started Mausoleum. Probably means that I've collectively spent almost 3 years writing this entire series. That is crazy. And to think this was only supposed to be one standalone entry.

Playlist:

Space Battlefield Rema
"Heat Her Up"
Clinton Shorter
The Expanse [Season 2] (Original Television Soundtrack)

Tanks, Walkers, and Shuttles
"Brothers in Arms (Extended Version)"
Junkie XL
Mad Max: Fury Road (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Sam Takes Charge
"Budgie"
Hans Zimmer, Jasha Klebe, Bryce Jacobs, Mel Wesson, and Martin Tillman
Rush (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Grunt, the Frenzy
"'Trust Me'"
Brad Fiedel
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Korridon and the Sniper's Nest
"The Fire Rises"
Hans Zimmer
The Dark Knight Rises (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Roahn's Entrance (ViPR Mayhem I)
"Dogfight"
Jack Wall
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Roahn/Haxan (ViPR Mayhem II)
"Neodammerung"
Don Davis
The Matrix Revolutions (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)