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.

32. Chapter 32: Dark Choir

[The following is a transcript of a classified audio recording from Honora Station; no date has been provided; only one individual was confirmed via voiceprint]

[Playback initiates – sounds of doors opening]

ANDERSON: You're looking better.

UNCONFIRMED: An attempt at humor? I look the same. Hardly a difference.

ANDERSON: You'd be surprised. It's how you carry yourself. There is a marked change in your demeanor. You're becoming used to the mobility chassis?

UNCONFIRMED: I've been told my development is average. But there is nothing average about this.

ANDERSON: [sigh] The medics… we don't want to treat you as an exception—

UNCONFIRMED: I am being treated as an experiment.

[Pause – five seconds elapsed]

UNCONFIRMED: I know why you've come. Or rather, why you've been summoned.

ANDERSON: I assumed the reasons for my presence were obvious. Then again, when I was alerted that you had broken one of the arms of the head technician in what was described to me as a heated disagreement, I made the decision to swing by on my own initiative.

UNCONFIRMED: So you're here to get my side of the story.

ANDERSON: Something tells me there is only one side.

UNCONFIRMED: Then you've traveled a long way for little gain. The summarization is quite simple. The medics insisted on more tests. The intrusive type. I refused, so they tried to assert themselves. I did not find that… agreeable.

ANDERSON: [chuckle]

UNCONFIRMED: Strange reaction. You laugh?

ANDERSON: I apologize. Your bluntness to the seriousness of the situation… it's a contrast.

[Pause – eight seconds elapsed]

UNCONFIRMED: There is another reason for your visit, isn't there?

ANDERSON: Very quick of you.

UNCONFIRMED: It is not the nature of the injuries that I inflicted that concerns you. It is what the incident represents to the current project directors that does. It makes them look incompetent. Provides a clearer avenue for someone to… step in?

ANDERSON: I knew you'd figure it out.

UNCONFIRMED: Ah. All this time, you were just waiting for me to demonstrate some modicum of independence—simultaneously depriving my caretakers of their illusion of control. Now you get to assert your own control of the project in the face of their failure, yes? Well played, Councilor.

ANDERSON: All in the spirit of politics, my friend. There are some areas of the Alliance that I cannot touch, but if proof can be demonstrated of certain lapses in the operational capacity of these units, then that leaves room for people like me to step in. This was not the most subtle of maneuvers, but the results have been effective, wouldn't you say?

UNCONFIRMED: Careful, Councilor. With a mind like that, you may have more of a head for your station than you realize.

ANDERSON: Perish the thought.

UNCONFIRMED: Then is it finally time? Do I finally get to leave this place?

ANDERSON: Welcome to Chimera, Operati #$^^#as/..kh66errorerrorerrorSHUTDOWN

[Transcript cuts off]

---

Rema Orbit
Vakarian

One thing that Sagan never figured out how to quantify was fear.

He understood the concept, that it drove organics to make irrational decisions out of concern for their survival, but he never could fully grasp how this imbroglio of chemicals in the brain could translate into such illogicality. He was geth, and geth carefully constructed each and every decision, melded into place by an intricate calculus, one tiny path within a fern-shaped maze of logarithmic spirals. All of the spatial possibilities lay before it, though the outcomes of each choice gradually become more and more fuzzy the further he looked outward. But this precognitive deficit did not worry Sagan—he knew that he could only predict up to a point where his own individual actions could affect the course of his own fate. To expand such insight outward would amount to prescience, and geth certainly did not have that.

But amidst the torrent of cold blue military screens that acted as the windows into the Vakarian's true heart, sitting within the chair of the frigate that traversed the brutality of the deteriorating space war around it, Sagan found that he could approximate the closest feeling to fear that he had ever formulated before. Amidst the sea of death, a geth found a kindred mind.

There was perhaps a 1/1,000,000th of a second of latency in the geth's actions as his hands smoothly glided over the controls of the ship, but Sagan filed that away as RAM deficiency—easily fixable. In the chilling orbit, the Vakarian powerfully shot forward and spun as it delivered and evaded fire that seemed to encroach on every conceivable axis. But none of it caught Sagan by surprise. With his 360-degree monitoring sensors directly jacked into his own internal network, the geth had a perfect view of the battle, rendered in 12K detail in the non-matter space of its silicon hyperplane.

So perfect that one could say that Sagan was the battle.

Two Radius interceptors broke off from a nearby formation to take potshots at the Vakarian, missiles screaming from their launching tubes. Sagan, seeing them coming, moved his hand forward and dumped a quantum-virus across the b-net. The missiles sputtered and detonated harmlessly—the Vakarian burst through the cooling chaff. The underside cannons pumped twice and soon the fighters were clouds of faintly glowing detritus, composed of the same stardust as what their munitions had been turned into.

The destruction of the fighter screen left Sagan a window to make a dive towards a nearby turian ShardSpan cruiser. The defensive turrets of the cruiser were chattering away, trying to riddle the Vakarian from bow to stern. Sagan tightly rolled the ship, evading most of the fire. Whatever managed to hit merely deflected off of the wing shields. Upon getting in range, Sagan then initiated the firing sequence for the Thanix cannon, having made sure to power it up well beforehand. A bright spear of arctic blue split the entire arena as it surged its way towards its target. The ShardSpan's shields fluttered angrily before one sector collapsed completely. The remainder of the Thanix burst carved a scorching line across more than half the hull before terminating right next to the bridge. The ShardSpan was still functional, as the hull had been Silaris-reinforced, but there were still several dozen areas where the Thanix had melted the outer armor and had caused atmospheric breaches in addition to having knocked out several localized power systems, which included the auto-turrets. Defenseless for the moment, the ShardSpan slowly ambled off to lick its wounds.

Sagan was so perfectly attuned in his own sequence that he was not particularly surprised at its outcome.

Projecting his own attention outward for the moment, the geth now began parsing through the garbage data and the impeded sightlines as he tried to reacquire a troubling contact he had denoted at the beginning of the battle. Ministry, Aleph's personal Reaper, had been curiously absent for the past two hours, rapidly disappearing after the opening minutes of the battle. Sagan had assumed that contact with the Reaper had been sparse as it had been making so many successful strike runs against Congregation ship that he assumed there was not enough data to pinpoint its location—for all of the Reaper's targets had the concerning affinity for not living rather long. But considering that none of the ships, even the ones had been destroyed recently, had registered even a blip of Ministry's profile in the last hour, was a troubling thing to consider.

Sagan forced his runtimes to cease their digital pursuit of the Reaper—he would pick that up at a better moment—for he now picked up a series of Dark Horizon ships moving in that comprised a smaller attack fleet. The PMC vessels maneuvered themselves into a wedge formation, aimed towards a set of Congregation carriers, which were lightly defended at the moment. There were no other friendly ships in the area to provide cover fire and it looked like Dark Horizon was going to break through. Sagan was about to insert an alert across the emergency band until he noticed a spike of energy in one of his carefully engineered wavelength scanning programs.

Friendly contacts.

Three bulbous dots blotted against the planet—asari interdictors—began to have a purple aura ripple around their constructions as they gently pushed themselves into view. Only this was not the universal glow of biotics that enveloped the ships, but the empyrean distortion of gravimetric forces. Tumbling spaceborne debris immediately began floating towards the cyclonic well the three ships were generating—the interdiction field. Drifting fighters, half-charred hulks, even fully-functioning frigates were pulled into the field between the three ships to be ground up into a frightfully churning blender of space junk, one that was growing to mammoth proportions. In the middle of the gravitational tornado, Sagan could perceive just a jagged ball of compressed and diced pieces of starships rotating all at once like a miniature moon, the core at the heart of such an infernal generator.

The interdictors then began rotating the plane of the field to bring it parallel to Rema's curve. The three ships then began to all split off in different directions, pulling the combined interdiction field in more intense angles of rotation before it finally broke with a furious branch of cosmic lightning.

The released debris spat out in a sizzling stream, a massive shotgun blast that hurled on forth at killing speeds.

Right into the path of the PMC fleet.

The Dark Horizon ships died soundless deaths. The unleashed comet of wreckage sliced through space, metal, and obliterated any and all flesh in between. Gigantic holes bored through thick armor in microseconds, gushing away all of the atmosphere of the ships in an instant. It was so quick it was as if voids in the hull simply burst into existence with nary a flicker of flame, all of the lights of the ships winking out to signal their ends. Some parts of the ship had even been cut in half so cleanly a diamond-tipped knife would have trouble doing better, or other parts were disintegrated so perfectly it was as if a grand architect had simply taken an eraser to the area.

The dead fleet floated serenely, the bullets that killed them continuing to push on to the black beyond, beyond the cares of this world to infinitely traverse the cosmos before it.

Even for a geth, Sagan was impressed. There was a level of ingenuity to the tactics of these organics that belied the geth's own calculating nature, but simply being able to observe the diversity was humbling in its own right.

Something then surged in the far corner of Sagan's monitoring program. At the far edge of the battle theater, 312 previously loitering red contacts were now moving toward the battle. The enemy commanders must have ordered their reserves into play, with a quick victory having been snatched away from them by the Congregation's spirited defense. These were not the ragtag militia craft that were hellbent on wreaking destruction for the sake of the destruction, but the heavy military ships crewed underneath former allied captains, operating underneath the guise of governmentally-sanctioned armed forces banners. Some of those ships might have been there for the Earth campaign all those years ago, fighting under those same banners. And now they were coming to fire on what had been their own people, way back in the long-ago.

Multiple alarms then sang on Sagan's console. Half of the ships had just fired salvos of nuclear torpedoes. The geth, gripped by a startled urge, stood up from his seat, but just remained in his spot, as if unsure why he just performed such an action. All of his sensors were now hopelessly honed in on the trailing red lines his predictive analysis was projecting for each of the incoming pieces of ordinance—ten minutes from now, those torpedoes were going to hit and half of the Congregation fleet was going to be obliterated in one fell swoop of destructive fission. Sagan didn't have an open channel for which to hack into the torpedoes—they were all on the secure net of the ships that had fired them. They could not be hacked from his position.

But something else could.

Sagan stepped away from his chair, letting his subroutines take over piloting the Vakarian as his physical body did not need to actually be present for such a process. There was a strata of Radius code-blocking firewalls projected out in the direction of the incoming reserve ships that had just fired upon him. Multiple ships, multiple options to choose from. He only needed one, though.

The geth selected the largest ship, the one with the biggest guns, which was a handsome dreadnought that went by the Cerro Peró, and blurred past its icegate with a specially crafted intrusion program he had written a long time ago. Sagan had managed to crack old Alliance protocols using pieces of stray code it had picked up within the net—it turned out the Radius, in all its wisdom, decided that a cost-saving measure would be to simply repurpose and reuse old codes and hope that no one would know the difference. They may have been undetectable thematic patterns to organics, but Sagan cracked the sequence as if he was reading a children's book.

Sagan did have to admit that no one would have rightfully expected a geth to make a try at breaking their electronics at any point.

There were five more levels of security to the Cerro Peró's icegate. Sagan unleashed several more viral subprograms to bore holes through the walls that had been set up in his way. In cyberspace, the geth existed as only a holographic reconstruction of its base form while it imaged its own hacking attempts as furrowing slashes through tangles of digitized undergrowth. The cold electronic thicket was putting up a fight, but it would not stand in the light of Sagan's radiant form for long as the geth rapidly buzzed through the matrix of subspaces, ripping apart lines of code with its bare hands to get to the command structure.

Sagan was so engrossed in his work that he almost did not notice a crackling form, an outline of brief fragmented shapes and wireframes that orbited around a three-dimension model, come to life just past his shoulder. The geth turned his head to face the source of the disturbance—though the actual act meant nothing in cyberspace. For the briefest of calculable moments, the image of a second geth could vaguely be glimpsed standing next to him, one that appeared to have a large hole bored through his chest armor and a curious red shoulder plate attached over synthetic muscle. The figure of the new geth simply stayed where it was and provided Sagan with a bare nod. The image then faded with a whisper.

"Legion?" Sagan asked aloud, but there was no answer to accompany the stimuli, and his voice merely echoed as shards of graycode.

Thirty seconds later, Sagan managed to punch himself through. He had not been delicate in his intrusion, but he had entrusted a litany of repair programs to smooth out the damage he had left in his wake. The triage appeared to have worked as no violent subroutines had ever antagonized him in an attempt to spit him out of the Cerro Peró's system. Now Sagan found himself in the solitude of the dreadnought's vast command structure, a limitless and featureless black plain. A grid of pale neon lay suspended before him, simple binary symbols flickering upon critical subsystems. Sagan ignored them all—he did not want to destroy the ship from within. At least, not in a physical manner. There was more than one way to achieve a victory.

He found the node for the ship's communications. The geth synced his blackbox to the node and flipped into it, his viral reach extending like eager roots, clawing into the system.

"This will suffice," Sagan said to no one in particular, right before he linked his runtimes to the server.

It must have been quite a shock for the Radius crews on every one of the bridges in the enemy fleet as they suddenly saw Sagan's form appear directly on their holo-dais. The telltale blue warp glowed through the windows of the fleet as the one image was shared amongst all of the apostate ships, thanks to the Cerro Peró's linked connection to every one of the members in its enormous fleet. Before the subversive men and women, Sagan's form towered upon them like the herald of a vengeful deity, who with a mere gesture could reach out and smite those he deemed unworthy.

Several techs on the dreadnought rushed to their consoles to boot Sagan out, but it was too late. He was too entrenched into the Cerro Peró's server to be withdrawn without incurring damage. Given a few minutes, they might be able to deactivate his holoimage from the projector, but that would just switch off a lamp and not completely remove him.

The dreadnought's captain rushed forward with a shaking finger. "Is that a fucking geth?!" he was screaming. "We're compromised! Lock everything down!"

Several of the captain's subordinates were trying to shout over him in a vain attempt to alleviate the situation, trying to raise the rather-untrue notion that all the geth had been destroyed and that there were none left alive to plague them. But the captain was correct, despite the madness of the situation, a claim that was further bolstered when Sagan's image raised a disarming hand right before he spoke.

"Members of the Radius vessels, you are approaching a critical moment."

Sagan made a note that this perhaps was not the best way to open a dialogue, as jeers and curses were now being levelled upon him from across every ship. Heedless, he continued.

"The Congregation ships you have fired upon represent the decisive barrier that is projected to secure your victory. Ten thousand lives are at your mercy—three minutes and fourteen seconds from now, your torpedoes are scheduled to hit their intended targets. This will cause a chain reaction that will transition into the deaths of millions. By eliminating the singular resistance force against the illegal cadres of mercenaries, you will have succeeded in securing a new empire dictated by a lone sovereign. A sovereign who seized power through terror and deceit."

"Your orders were to destroy the defending forces without prejudice. Even now, you proceed to persecute—"

Multiple shouts were now drowning out Sagan's speech aboard the dreadnought by the rather boorish audience. This approach clearly was not working. Halting midsentence, Sagan ceased his speech and appraised the churning throng that was gazing up at him with malevolent masks, obstinately impervious to his presence.

"A pity," Sagan said.

The geth's holoimage then lifted a leg, waited for a very tortuous moment, and walked off the dais. There was no noise as the hologram's feet touched the floor, but there were several sustained gasps raised by the surrounding ensigns. Sagan then continued forward at a steady pace. A few crewmen made hasty grabs upon the geth, but their efforts quickly subsided upon realizing that their hands were simply passing through empty air.

Sagan strode across the bridge with a purpose, his figure clipping through and around anyone who stood in his way. Upon reaching the main weapons station (ignorant to the splutterings of the controller who stood in the seat Sagan was now standing in), the geth lifted an arm parallel to the console, a slender finger reaching out towards the monitor. A firm gesture that pointed directly to the dreadnought's firing controls and the unlaunched torpedoes that sat awaiting in their tubes. Upon the screen, six amber lights suddenly winked to green. The torpedoes were now armed… and still in the ship. Someone in the crowd blurted out, "No!" But no one moved a muscle.

Confident that he had gained everyone's attention, Sagan's holoimage turned to face the command crew.

"I could have obliterated this vessel along with every ship in this fleet without my presence being detected. I could have taken the weapons of your ships and turned them against each other. I could have tampered with the heat bleedoff system of this ship to cause a catastrophic meltdown of the core. I had so many options at my disposal to extinguish your perceived victory, yet I chose to give you a chance. A chance to save yourselves. Because hope is not just a concept that sustains organics. It is more permeable than you believe."

After a beat, Sagan slowly lowered his arm. The green lights upon the console serenely winked back over to amber. A quiet sigh of relief filled the bridge.

"In the final hours of the Reaper War," Sagan said, "it was the will of a collective that defined your ascension from the Old Machines, having surpassed their mandate. But the Old Machines thought that the absence of such governance would only lead to chaos once more. They did not wish to see the galaxy they had built come undone. The cycle has ended, has it not? Or should violence still beget violence? Perhaps we can continue upon our chosen courses and end up proving the logic of the Old Machines correct… or we can come to the conclusion that the war we fight today ended all those years ago. Should the emissary of disarray be the object of your anger or the retaliators to such entropy?"

The geth tipped his palms up, beseeching the crowd before him.

"You have a choice," Sagan urged. The image of his head slowly scanned around the bridge, analyzing each and every face in painstaking detail. Noting their fears. Their unanswered dreams. Their unbound wish to live. "Please," the geth said.

The bridge was silent. No movement was detected. Everyone stared down at the geth's holoimage, their faces like stone.

Alone, Sagan looked up at them all.

"Please."

---

Rema
Kringlau Basin

On the ground, no one would have any idea of the exact moment when the tide began to turn. The death of the PMC fleets was not immediately apparent, not from such a long distance up in orbit. But when the cacophonous salvo of detonating ships appeared as a brilliant phantasmagoria within the speckled band of stars and planets high above, even the areas of most brutal fighting took a pause, a feeling of uncertainty beginning to fall upon the Radius.

The decision for the Radius' reserve fleet to essentially mutiny had not been a unanimous decision, but the disillusioned crews of the ships that teetered on the fence did a swift job in neutralizing their captains, having finally tired of the pointless war. The internal strife and its rapid resolution among those vessels managed to be pulled off without any deaths, but a few broken bones had resulted in the scuffles between the resisting captains and their subordinates trying to restrain them. One such casualty list even mentioned a slashed tendon—upon which side the injury had been inflicted was unknown—but in short order, all of the ships turned off their Radius transponders, now hailing under independent beacons.

The missiles the fleet had launched managed to be redirected at the last second. Instead of hitting the Congregation ships they had initially targeted, the projectiles now flew into the masses of Dark Horizon, Chimera, Star/Mern, and any of the last conglomerated corporations that brought the entirety of their forces to bear upon this predicated slaughter. Most, if not all of their ships disappeared underneath fiery nexuses of destruction, the nuclear bubbles encapsulating the darkened steel silhouettes like an impassive fog front. Upon the dissipation of the explosions, there remained only atomic dust and the faint shriek of radio echoes damned to torturously reverberate their cries for help eternally.

While the breakaway fleet rallied alongside the Congregation in space, the sudden shift in the paradigm was just getting itself communicated to the forces fighting down below. Half of the Radius soldiers stopped in their places as they noticed all communication channels suddenly go haywire—they spun around and shouted into their mics, begging for orders. At that moment, other Radius commanders clasped their hands to the sides of their helmet as new directives came through. The men and women who received these incoming orders were part of the militant guard, comrades who had been part of the Alliance, Hierarchies, Union, and Republics, and still believed themselves to wear such colors proudly. They acknowledged the receipt of these orders and immediately coordinated the companies that they led with precise hand motions—muzzles of rifles were raised, shoulder launches initiated lock-on targets, and heavy weapons turrets swung to face the new enemy.

The PMC mercenaries turned, confused for a second as to why they were now looking upon the weaponry of the soldiers spread amongst them, their allies.

Only they were their allies no longer.

A multitudinous series of flashes consumed the PMC soldiers in fireballs that outshone the glare of the sun. Mercenary bodies fell to the ground in waves, gunned down by what had previously been their comrades. Shreds of meat and twisted metal hunks rained down upon the plain in a grisly haze, thrown up by a wrath of deteriorating explosions.

Chimera shuttles spiraled out of control in the air, their engines clipped by the passing fusillade, only to land amidst columns of Dark Horizon armor. Multiple ruby fireballs exploded into the air—more privateer tanks and men were lost to the furious ignitions, either charred to a crisp or pulverized to a liquid by the immense concussions of the blasts.

The smoke cloud only continued to thicken as more and more ordinance was being expended amongst the slowly disintegrating Radius line. Anyone who was not wearing a helmet or some kind of filter was doubling over in a foxhole, coughing until their throat ripped apart and their spittle flecked the ground red before them. The sharp tang of cordite invaded the nostrils of the combatants, and molten streams of sparks flared with every gunshot. Tanks on both sides rolled through the broken formations with trepidation, their entire chassis jolting with every heavy salvo that punched from their turrets.

The Congregation kept their lines steady against the Radius horde until they could bear it no longer. Resounding with powerful roars of defiance, the valiant defenders bucked and surged against their remaining tormentors, finally, and began dispatching them with abandon, utilizing everything they possibly had. Guns, knives, grenades, rocks, fists. Everything was a weapon to be used and, on this day, they were all used to great effect.

Under the shadow of a smokelit sun, the first burgeoning of a shining future was laid bare.

---

Rema
Kringlau Basin – Battle Line Boundary

Miles out from the heart of the battle, Roahn could see through the digital displays of the Mako the growing cauldron of ash and dirt kicked up into a massive hammercloud towering two miles high to the right. The vehicle rumbled almost serenely as it coasted across the flat basin, its six tires spitting out gray streams of crushed salt behind it. The massive shock absorbers slowly bounced up and down, easily taking the strain of the terrain. The dried-pepper color of the roasted mountains floated above the flats like a ragged storm in the distance, cutting through the timid swaths of cirrus that dared to crest the peaks.

Positioned at the turret, Sam swung the weapon to face the immense cloud. "Damn," he murmured. "Even at a distance it looks terrible."

Korridon maneuvered himself in his seat to also view the sight. "And we were all in that today." He paused for a beat, shaking his head. "This can't be the future that Aleph had intended. I mean… look at that. There just isn't any point."

Hands still gripping the wheel, Roahn turned her head to also look out towards the hurricane of fire and smoke. Through her partition of glass, she momentarily glanced down at the center console in an absentminded state, before she straightened with a new rigor, her eyes finding their luster once more.

"This isn't that future," she affirmed. "We can still make it our own."

A sudden buzz in everyone's ear then seemed to split the air in the cabin, frightfully loud. Roahn and her cohorts all winced in tandem, and the Mako lurched slightly to the right before the driver managed to course-correct. The main display was now shrieking multiple warnings over and over again, but the screen was alternating between its programming and flashing in spastic white surges.

"Contact alert!" Korridon reached for the console. "We've got incoming!"

"How many?!" Roahn shouted back as she clenched the Mako's wheel with both hands. The controls were now starting to vibrate in her grip, as if the tank had suddenly decided to fight its driver. The Mako now wobbled, a furious shamal wind driving against it. "How many?!"

The turian looked over at the quarian, his face aghast. "Only one."

From the turret, Sam looked up and mouthed something. "Oh… shit," he finally got out.

Something momentarily fell across the shape of the sun, dousing the Mako in a long tongue of darkness. A millisecond later, the ground bounced, the control axis of the tank jumping up and nearly impaling Roahn upon it. A vibrant and rolling shockwave hurtled through the cabin so intense that it nearly threw Sam off his feet and felt like it was about to overturn the Mako. With a snarl, Roahn used all of her strength to wrest control of the tank, but now an incoming wave of kicked up dirt consumed them all for a few seconds. The airborne particulates dissipated as quickly as they arrived, leaving a greasy brown stain within the air, while the dappled light of the sun flickered around the monumental spire of the Reaper that had just dropped from the sky at a speed that would have pulverized any living creature housed within its gargantuan confines.

Roahn's heart plummeted and a sharp ache began to build in her temples. "No…" she whispered.

The fabric of reality seemed to ripple as Ministry howled, the noise shaking dust from the very ground in a horrid earthen reflection. In the corner of her screen, the following text blipped to life:

[[WE.- SOUGHT.- YOUR.- PRESENCE.- AND.- NOW.- YOU.- HAVE.- BEEN.- FOUND.- +**!# YOU.- WRONGFULLY.- BELIEVED.- YOU.- COULD.- IMPOSE.- ORDER.- AND.- NOW.- YOU.- WILL.- FACE.- THE.- FOLLY.- OF.- YOUR.- ARROGANCE.- ##AHM55V4##]]

Roahn forced a status reset of her HUD, wiping the Reaper's ramblings off her soft-system. At two kilometers tall, the Reaper was easily the largest object in the entire sector. It seemed to protrude from the very earth like a sleek black spear. The multitude of appendages continuously squirmed and bristled between its main frontal legs—an undercarriage that bristled with weaponry. A titanic surge of sunlight blazed darkly across the polished swaths of obsidian metal, a hideous growl filling the air from the massive machine. One of the enlarged lens was now turning the color of magma, brimming power surging just behind its focused face.

"Incoming!" Roahn screamed as she yanked the wheel to the left.

The ground before them erupted in a quick and savage line of black smoke and raw flames. Ministry's magnetohydrodynamic beam melted the salt flats, spitting up plumes of lava as the molten surge smashed against the granular surface. There was a warbling blast of heat large enough to trip the Mako's exterior temperature sensors, adding a new alarm to the chaos. Thanks to Roahn's quick reflexes, the back of the tank kicked out and it skidded in an unsophisticated drifting motion, the rear of the vehicle barely caressing the new boundary that had been carved into the earth. But now they were turned in the complete wrong direction from where they were headed.

Worse still, they were now pointed directly towards the Reaper.

The quarian did not let off the gas one whit—slowing for even a second would allow that monster to get a bead on them. But she did not make a motion to adjust her heading. She leaned forward in her seat, utterly focused, muscles taut, constitution at war with the dark buzzing presence that sought to invade her brain.

Next to her, Korridon gripped the dashboard for dear life, his expression paling as he saw what they were headed towards. "You're not going to break path?"

"Nope," was Roahn's curt response. "If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it."

"This is just fucking crazy," Sam said from the back, echoing everyone's sentiment, but he offered nothing to counter the current strategy. "It's a goddamned Reaper, Roahn!"

"Yeah, and running away is not going to help us live long. Not out in the open like this."

Sam huffed a laugh of disbelief as he pounded the Mako's ceiling. "Does this thing even have anything that can dent its armor?"

Roahn turned back for a moment. "This tank doesn't," she said, but it was the deliberate pause she let hang afterward that spoke volumes.

Finally getting what the commander was alluding to, the medic haltingly nodded before he stepped back into the gunner's position, muttering a nonsense mixture of cursing and grumbling in the process. Eyes resuming their forward position, Roahn toggled the variable gears of the Mako, keeping it into the high range. Digital control prisms sparkled like cavernous geodes before her, making the oncoming view of the looming Reaper terribly beautiful in its own right.

The massive cloud of vaporous ash rising over the scene, prodigiously eclipsing even the Reaper, the Mako sped on towards the imposing machine, which was in the process of widening its multi-limbed stance, hunkering down to face the paltry insects encroaching within its orbit.

"Here we go," Roahn whispered as she saw a cardinal hue begin to glow between the invertebrate like forest of arms that hung from Ministry's "face."

Heat glowed in the dry air, suddenly lit afire as two spearing red beams shot out from the Reaper. Roahn yanked the wheel of the Mako hard to the left and the beams rippled on by, carving scorching emblems into the dirt, leaving behind blackened trenches of glass. Ministry angled itself downward and let off another two-blast burst—Roahn had to hit the boosters of the retrofitted Mako, and the occupants of the craft all grunted as the sudden burst of acceleration overcame the inhibitors, pushing their eyeballs to the very back of their skulls. But they had shot well away from the answering fusillade as they now embarked in a wide rotation around the Reaper.

Ministry stomped in frustration as it tried to wheel itself around, not intent on letting the Mako hide behind one of its legs for cover. Wanting to rid itself of the tank's pestilence, it opened the vents upon its rearward legs and ignited its thrusters, spraying the ground in a wide arc of blue flame a quarter of a mile wide that stampeded on course for the speeding Mako with its sharpened fingers.

"Incoming!" Sam barked as soon as he saw the wall of fire head on towards them. "Roahn, evade!"

"I got it!" she shouted back.

Roahn immediately hit the controls to the Mako's thrusters. The tank lifted up into the air ten meters, hanging in place long enough for the rippling attack to harmlessly pass underneath it. The power to the thrusters, having held out for as long as it could, coughed into darkness and the Mako plummeted to the ground. The kinetic energy transference nearly knocked everyone into the confines of the tank's interior, but they all managed to secure themselves to avoid being smashed unconscious.

The Mako's turret was now blazing away with rapid chain-gun rounds, but Sam was firing the weapon out of desperation as the bullets were merely plinking off the Reaper's thick armor. Ministry uttered a harsh electronic bellow, right before multiple coruscating orange spheres—point-defense drones—blipped into existence and began firing upon Roahn's vehicle in earnest. Molten earth peeled back as the cannonade from the drones slammed into the ground all around the Mako. A tornado of annihilating energy threatened to rise up and over the vehicle—liquefied dirt and salt sizzled through the shields and hardened against the armor of the tank.

Holding on to the turret's triggers like a man possessed, Sam was whipping the large gun around in quick and savage rotations, trying to destabilize as many of Ministry's drones as he could. "How many weapons does this bastard—?!"

From slots in the main body of the Reaper, circular bombs that glowed a fusion red arced high into the air, ejected from within the massive superstructure, and collided straight into the path of where Roahn was driving, sending up columns of dirt and chewed-up pieces of the planet in sequence like an ethereal pagoda. Roahn whipped the steering column back and forth, evading the blasts, almost lifting the Mako onto three wheels in the process. She drove through the last of the bomb eruptions after she hit the undercarriage thrusters. The tank grazed over the epicenter, riding out the concussion to burst through the smokescreen to gently land unscathed upon the other side of the killzone.

"You know what?" Sam spoke up again, finishing his thought. "I should've just kept my mouth shut."

Following the path of tracers that the medic was carving with his weapon, Roahn swerved the vehicle towards Ministry again, but this time angled her path directly underneath the Reaper. A trifecta of red beams crisscrossed the plain as the Reaper tried to shoot them, but Roahn impossibly maneuvered between the bursts, though the shields of the vehicle dropped by a quarter as they got a little too close to one blast. Ministry's point-defense cannons opened up on them in agitation, but whatever combat algorithms they had programmed in their virtual memory was not enough to account for a traversing object at speed. The Mako zoomed out from underneath the Reaper's legs, the monstrous war machine now facing the wrong direction of its prey.

"Korr?" Roahn asked, addressing the turian who had been frantically tapping away at the console the entire time.

"I've got it!" the turian exclaimed as a light on the dashboard suddenly flared white and a green outline ensnared the dials. "Connection is up! We're live!"

"Sam!" Roahn called back. "That turret has a target locator near the firing switch! Turn it on—point it at Ministry!"

A feral grin split the medic's face. "Yes, ma'am," he said as he flipped the switch with finality. A new targeting screen popped up to the right of his main firing display, outlining the Reaper in a yellowish hue while a blue circle remained focused in the middle of its profile. "Locked and ready!"

Roahn pummeled the universal comm band—it didn't matter who was listening. "All available units, this is Commander Shepard!" she barked into the radio. "Switch targeting frequencies to kilo-seven-alpha! Ministry is on station and we need immediate firing solutions. Orbital strike, planetside fire—doesn't matter! We've got a hardlock on a priority target and require destabilization. How copy?"

The responses that played back were immediate and overlapped one another.

"Solid copy, Sierra-1. Firebird Wing coming out of standby, ready to engage."

"Acknowledged your last, Sierra-1. Sustain consistent targeting on your end. Splashdowns will be constant and imminent."

"Firing lane acquisition in progress, Sierra-1. Will reject all other fire mission requests at this time. Reaper is priority one."

Within the Mako, the riders all shared weary glances with each other, but none inhabited the glow of hope more than Roahn.

"You know we're calling down everything onto our heads as well, right?" Korridon asked, tightening the straps of his restraints.

"I think we're far past the point for half-measures, wouldn't you agree?" Roahn said. She then cracked her neck with a vibrant twitch of her head. "Now, let's kill this fucker."

"Hell yeah," Sam murmured.

Roahn wheeled the Mako around with a screech of rubber upon granulated and rocky salt. Ripping a furrowed turn upon the packed field, the tank roared under a burst of acceleration as it headed towards Ministry once again. The Reaper had finished rotating in place, its massive form sluggishly limited by gravity and the general properties of physics. Off in the distance, Roahn could see a dotted column of armor begin to poke out from behind the smoky veil of the battle, heavy units maneuvering into an even firing line.

Ministry rippled return fire as it unleashed its beams and cannons upon the Mako once more. Roahn returned to the same strategy of boosting and braking to dodge whatever the Reaper had in its arsenal to throw at her. The quarian's bones were aching as a dull fuzz seemed to settle into her brain. The Reaper may have lost its ability to indoctrinate thanks to its severed connection to the mass intelligence, but it still exuded frightful powers that lingered within the savage construction.

Energy crackled in waves of lightning, cresting upon the Mako like it was a ship at sea. At the turret, Sam was no longer firing, instead keeping the barrel of the gun pointed squarely at the middle of the Reaper, tensing his jaw to conceal the shakes that had just started to befall him.

In between making intense course corrections to avoid getting blown to bits by Ministry's beams, Roahn spared momentarily glances at the Reaper that dogged them, a sharp grin overtaking her features. "Come on, then," she whispered. "You know who I am, don't you? I know what you are—just an asterisk. The last of your pitiful kind. It'll only be all the more poetic when I finally get to send you straight to hell."

The warbling metal bellow that came from Ministry seemed to yank the Mako apart at the seams. Even the welded rivets of the tank sounded like they were rattling in their sockets. Roahn whipped her head around at the audible retaliation. Had the Reaper heard her?

Now imbued with a tangible frenzy, Ministry suddenly sprang forward and now began stomping at the ground with its massive legs, trying to crush the Mako. Damn, it really does seem like he heard me. The wheels of the Mako left the ground about six inches with every impact, the engine straining as the tank sought to outrun the Reaper before it could be flattened into a metal pancake.

"Roahn, now or never!" Korridon screamed.

"I agree," Roahn said through clenched teeth. As much as she would have liked to have one moment to satisfy her superiority over this creature, there was only one thing left for her to do. "All units, OPEN FIRE!"

Various affirmations over the radio answered her back, indicating that multiple fire missions were go. Roahn could not listen to them, for all of the sounds around her had been reduced to a droning thrum as she let her heartbeat furiously pound in her eardrums. The seconds seemed to stretch out for eons as Roahn could do nothing but watch as red electricity poured from Ministry's firing chamber, building and building, the Reaper hunkering closer to get off one final shot, when the first pearl of a detonation crackled across its hull in a blistering throb. Immediately, Ministry reared back, its shot traveling wide to engrave a mark somewhere along the mountainous boundary.

"Splash one. Good effect."

Ministry staggered forward, one of the frontal curves adorning the area around its rightmost optic now cracked, exuding a dazzling vein of golden light within. Smoke and a ragged stream of metal trailed from the impact site and the Reaper wobbled back and forth as if dazed.

"Firing for effect. Standby."

"Adjusting blast radius. Pos on target."

Eruptions from the Congregation front crackled once and a surge of onrushing missiles and railgun slugs sliced through the air and battered the Reaper in a near-constant stream of devastation. White flashes split the air and Ministry dropped to a leg momentarily after two Thanix missiles had exploded against one of its upper leg joints. Pieces of broken Reaper tumbled to the ground, but Ministry did not fall. It then quickly stood back upright, ignoring Roahn and instead concentrating on the line of assembled weapons emplacements on the ridge near New Sura.

[[YOUR.- SPECIES'.- CONTINUED.- EXISTENCE.- IS.- MERELY.- A.- CODA.- THAT.- PRECLUDES.- YOUR.- DESTRUCTION.- /?&! YOU.- HAVE.- ONLY.- GIVEN.- YOURSELF.- TO.- CHAOS.- % %/ THE.- CYCLE.- WILL.- RESUME.- BUT.- YOU.- WILL.- BE.- ITS.- ORIGINATORS.- ##Please hold—currently experienciNG %?/CoRRUPTcorruptERROR]]

"Oh, fuck you!" Roahn exploded in the cab, resetting her HUD once more to wipe away the intruding text.

The Mako weaved in and out from underneath the Reaper's legs, which was now hopelessly turned-around on who to target. Red beams flared and sizzled, bisecting distant rock towers, vaporizing far-away tank formations, and occasionally swatting any orbiting craft around its frame like they were gnats. Ministry was going berserk, alternating between stomping its legs to destabilize the multitude of vehicles that were now shooting up at it, coupled with deluging several wheeling shock-chains of flame from its thrusters while its PDCs cycled between ionizing bursts at a maddening rate.

Staring upward at the great sight through his laser rangefinder, Sam uttered a low whistle as he saw the curved spire of the Reaper reach up and spear the sun from this angle. "My god…"

Squadrons of Trident fighters now swept across the ground as they came in from the east. They were mere twinkles on the horizon before they suddenly became black dots and then those dots sprouted wings and cockpits in the blink of an eye.

"Receiving telemetry. Good tone, Sierra-1. Payload out."

Multiple fireballs sprouted along Ministry's armor, staggering the Reaper further. All sound dropped out at the moment of each impact, furious walls of crackling blasts at full volume shunting the Mako to the side as if it had just been hit by a tornado. The Tridents screamed by, the sonic booms in their wake shaking the dust from the ground and completely whiting out one of the Mako's sensors.

Korridon pounded the dash. "Come on, hit that bastard again!"

Ministry abruptly wheeled, its oculus temporarily obscured by its own burning electronics, but it now honed in on Roahn's tank, furious lightning building along its face as it powered up its capacitors, holding the heat bleedoff steady as it increased the rate of reaction, utilizing everything in its power to focus its liquid metal projectile into an accurate ray. The Reaper finally fired and all Roahn saw was white. She let out a tiny cry, certain she was dead.

But then the light faded and warm breath continued to fill her lungs. Her fingers were still aching where they clenched the steel column and her eyes remained torturously open in their agonized sprawl.

"Bandit rocked. Foxes expended. Press, press."

Detonations near the Reaper's apex vanished in frantic wisps of flame, but the combined chain reaction from the Trident fighters (which flew by again to produce another slew of sonic booms), the orbital bombardments, and the focused firepower on the ground was enough to finally tip Ministry forward enough to throw it off balance. The magnetohydrodynamic salvo had furrowed just past Roahn's vehicle to impact squarely in front of her, turning the ground into an active caldera, which sent up gouts of lava into the air. Battered bits of obsidian continued to plink against the tank and Roahn drove through the blistering heat waves, the air boiling around them.

It looked like the Reaper was about to topple completely over, but at the last moment, it impossibly lifted a gigantic limb and sank its clawed foot into the ground in front of it. There was a massive groaning noise of overstressed metal, but Ministry stayed upright, ash dripping from its frame. The Reaper then sat completely still for a moment, allowing the smoke from the battle to shroud it while it dribbled drops of burning metal.

Ministry, curiously, did not resume its attacks. Rather, it righted itself back to vertical, as if the Congregation's attacks had impressed something rather poignant upon it. It gave a slight turn back towards the city, as if staring longingly at it from a distance, before it shifted back into its original position. A fire began to warp near the front thrusters of the machine and Roahn realized that it was leaving.

[[THERE.- IS.- NO.- STOPPING.- WHAT.- HAS.- BEEN.- SET.- IN.- MOTION.- ^#*& THERE.- IS.- NO.- OTHER.- DIRECTIVE.- ##TOOstrongTooSTRONG/CAnnotMA*NTA*N/HuRTShurtsHURTS/HEISEVERYWHERE]]

"Yeah, you'd better run," Roahn said under her breath as she watched the Reaper depart after enduring the shaking of the ground from its liftoff. It raced up into the air only to be swallowed by the clouds, fighter squadrons in hot pursuit after it.

In the back, Sam unleashed a breath as he slumped in his seat. "Holy fuck," he murmured. "Did we just…?"

"Yeah," Korridon uttered a shaky laugh. "I think we just did."

Roahn reached over and clasped Korridon's hand over the center console, squeezing it for reassurance. The turian returned the gesture, feeling the relief and gratitude flow from the woman's palm into his own.

"Lane is clear, Sierra-1," the comm crackled. "You're free to move in."

The quarian flipped the radio toggle. "Copy that. Good show, everyone. Sierra-1, out."

With no one shooting at them anymore, the Mako immediately settled into a steady cruise once more, its wheels seemingly skimming the top of the parched white ground, the dappled sunlight melting into refracted pools off in the distance as the curvature took on a watery outline. The powering chaos of the day dissipated into a mighty calm, one so tranquil it was as if a new day had dawned.

And in front of them, just minutes out, the Normandy awaited on its skeletal plinth, a stolid and unaware observer to the onrushing corsairs traversing the deadly desert for its bounty.

---

The landing pad was just a series of interlinked metal platforms ringed by an array of catwalks and other varied scaffolding, all out in the open. Something that had been built in a hurry, essentially, using only prefab materials. It almost looked like, to Roahn, that they would have no choice but to traverse the five-story-high staircase that spiraled upon itself all the way to the top, but she quickly realized that there was a freight elevator right in front of the Normandy that provided a straight shot to the ship. Naturally, she steered the tank in that direction.

The elevator was sized cargo, perhaps big enough to fit a medium-sized mech upon it, but certainly not anywhere close to a Mako's dimensions. Roahn ended up parking the tank right in front of the lift and everyone exited the vehicle in short order. She was now toting an assault rifle with a medium-range dot sight. Korridon opted for a submachine gun. Taking up the rear, Sam had selected a pump-action shotgun for himself. They maneuvered their way onto the elevator and Roahn hit the button—salt-drenched gears laboriously whined, but with a jolt, the entire apparatus began hoisting its passengers upward.

"Just so we're on the same page," Sam said as he checked the slide of his shotgun just to confirm it was loaded to the brim with thermal clips, "what are the chances going to be that the ship up there isn't filled with bad guys out for blood?"

Roahn rolled an armored shrug, her head tilted to the sky, focused upon the slowly encroaching lip of the platform. "Honestly? Pretty terrible."

"Were you expecting any other answer?" Korridon asked the human.

The medic pulled a decidedly unamused face. "You know, there are some times where I wish you guys would just lie to me."

Then Roahn's comm chose that moment to buzz in her ear. Quickly, she tapped the control on her omni-tool and linked the call to the squad channel. "It's Kasumi," she told Korridon and Sam before she addressed the person on the other line. "Kasumi, what's going on?"

"Roahn!" the former thief sounded panic-stricken. A bad sign if the normally unflappable Kasumi was rattled. "Finally! I've been trying for half an hour to get a hold of you!"

"The Reaper must have been jamming certain frequencies if we couldn't contact her," Korridon murmured.

The elevator continued to thickly clank and churn as it slowly continued its ascendance. Roahn estimated that there was only a minute left until they would be deposited onto the top floor.

"We hit a bit of a roadblock, but it seems we've caught a breather," Roahn said into the virtual mouthpiece. "The Normandy's planetside—we're en route to her as we speak. ETA is imminent, I'd—"

"Listen to me!" the comm blazed. "Whatever you need to do, you need to do it now! The Haxan's onto you—it's headed your way!"

The quarian whirled, trying to get a glimpse back towards the way they came, but the structure of the pad was blocking her way—all she could see were steel columns and ribbed reinforcing beams.

"You're absolutely sure?" she asked, voice deathly dry.

"It must have a lock on your transponder—we see it heading out in your direction as we speak. Roahn… it… it came to the control tower. I think it was looking for you there."

Roahn's blood suddenly ran cold. The tower was where Cirae was and where a lot of her crew had been heading towards. A foul feeling suddenly simmered in her gut.

"Jack and Liara," Kasumi was saying, "they tried to fight it. They're still alive, but they're unconscious. I've got Sagan scheduled to make a pickup—we need to get them out of here."

"And…" Roahn mustered through a numb mouth. "…James and Cirae?"

A doleful pause. "Oh god…" the quarian heard Kasumi mumble through the other line, perhaps an unintentional outburst. "They're gone, Roahn. I'm so sorry. They're… they're gone."

She just stood there, silent. Blank as a canvas. Roahn took her hand away, a distant reaction, disconnecting the call at the same time. A pulsing in her ears grew louder, in time with the roughened scraping of her own breathing. She clenched her assault rifle in her hands, her prosthesis causing the polymer of the stock to buckle. It was as if she was wrestling with her urge to smash the weapon against the guardrail of the elevator, to pulverize it, obliterate it to smithereens. To pound it until her hand bled, for her wounds to drip upon the floor as if in sacrifice to the heavy price already paid.

But she did nothing. Instead, she turned around, gathering her constitution with a dark breath. Roahn's eyes fell upon Korridon's. Then Sam's. She took another breath.

"She dies today," she said to no one in particular. "I don't care how dangerous she is. I'm killing her, one way or another."

Knowing nods bobbed next to her. Nods of understanding, of permission. Emotionless gestures that reflected a resigned admission of their powerlessness up against their commander, but more so because they were in complete agreement with her.

There was not much time for talk. The elevator had almost finished rising.

Three soldiers in Alliance armor were standing guard near the Normandy's open cargo bay ramp, casually watching the battle rage off in the distance. Their attentions turned upon the new trio that had just risen up from the ground floor, all of them surprised to see a quarian, a turian, and a human medic in their midst. Individuals who were decidedly not allied with them. Roahn and her squad lifted their weapons, a clear representation of their misaligned values. Two seconds later, the guards were all dead, their armor smoking.

Sam ejected a spent thermal clip as he passed by the bodies. Roahn took the lead with confidence as she marched up to the open ramp to head inside the ship, her mind a war of two elements—fire and ice—struggling to keep the objective at mind while simultaneously holding her raw emotions back. They all entered the Normandy, their eyes blinking as they were soon shadowed once they came under its protective veil.

The cargo bay was suspiciously bereft of activity. No more guards lingered in the area. It was not at all how Roahn had pictured it, honestly. She had seen images of the Normandy's interior during the war, how one side of the bay had been packed full with a Kodiak shuttle and a spare Hammerhead, while the other side had brimmed with crates of equipment, provisions, and even a weight station had been installed amidst the cargo maze. Now, the crates remained, although they were placed in perfunctory stacks that betrayed a detail-oriented mind at the helm of the ship. Also, a secondary level had been installed on both sides of the bay, right up against the interior door—a thin catwalk that served as an access route for mech pilots to drop into their vehicles. And there were mechs in the bay. Three of them, to be exact, though the ship had four bays. They were light fast-attack models, skinny but bristling with weaponry. Each empty mech toted a 30mm machine gun, an arc generator, and even a flamethrower for anti-personnel measures.

But Roahn was not all that interested in the mechs. It was the lone object standing upright in the middle of the bay that had drawn her attention since setting foot on board this ship.

The gray steel deck seemed to drain further in color as it supported the dominant black pedestal of the Monolith. Just sitting out in the open, no sensors or traps surrounding it. As though it were an offering to be doled out or a casual trinket whose worth had been grossly misrepresented.

While Sam and Korridon covered the hidden angles of the bay with their weapons, Roahn cautiously crept up to the large device. The plinth oozed a sinister power, one that felt to the quarian like she had just been exposed to a charge within the air. All of her hair follicles seemed to stand on end and there was an electric tinge to her breath. She could see herself reflected upon the dark face of the Monolith, a ghostly wisp framed in black ice. As though she were imprisoned in the far-reaching depths of its maniacal creation.

"It's just right here…" she murmured as she placed a hand upon it. She was somewhat disappointed when nothing else happened. No sudden surge of energy flowing into her, giving her the same power that Aleph held, or even the power to reverse the catastrophe that he had inflicted. It was just a beautiful, terrible weapon, but it was also just an inert, dead thing.

"Something's wrong," Korridon joined Roahn up near the Monolith. "There's got to be a trick to this. Aleph wouldn't just have the Monolith out here on the Normandy for someone to snatch."

"I agree," Sam said. "It's too easy. And Aleph has never hinted that he's this stupid."

"Stupid or not," Roahn said, "we can't ignore it now that we know it's here. We've got to destroy it, however possible." She did a quick accounting of her weaponry, patting herself down with a free hand. "I don't have anything on me that can do the job. Anyone got any ideas?"

Korridon seemed to brighten and he dug in his pack for a couple of cylindrical charges. "I've got some plastic explosives. High-yield. Think these'll do?"

Sam tilted his head as he studied the Monolith. "Ring a few explosives around the base and a couple near the top and you could blow the damn thing sky high." He gave Korridon a wink. "Always count on the demo man."

Roahn took a step back, as if to put the cruel device in perspective.

"We've got to move fast. No telling if we're going to have—"

"ROAHN!" a harsh metallic voice bellowed from the open door.

Everyone whirled to face the entrance of the ship, their guns lifting simultaneously. Silhouetted against the hot sunlight streaming in, warped off the yellow basin, a large figure slowly shuffled their way inside, dust shambling off its form as though it had been lost for years out in the desert. It walked with a noticeable limp, one of their feet trailing behind with a tortured scrape across the textured floor, making it sound like nails on a chalkboard.

Roahn lifted her rifle and settled the stock firmly against her shoulder. Behind the dot sight, her eye widened slightly.

"Keelah, Skye…"

The Haxan had now fully made it inside the Normandy. It continued to limp forward, a plodding determination overriding all tactical strategy in its head. It was very much the same cold-blooded machine that had punctuated the beginning of this battle, but a new rabidness seemed to have overtaken the creature, Roahn noticed. Perhaps it was from all the damage the Haxan had accumulated—the quarian wondered who had been responsible for every dent, scratch, and piece of rent armor. A flap of the cyborg's carbon-cowling at its neck was hanging by threads. One of its optics was heavily winking on and off in an erratic stutter. Sparks exuded from multiple cracks in its chassis. But something more than just willpower had been keeping this thing alive, dead-set upon its task.

No weapons in hand, the Haxan was still walking forward, a rasping noise emitting from its vocabulator. Its fingers were twitching, the ruined signals stemming from its brain repeatedly drilling the same command over and over again, bringing it to the brink of madness: KILL, KILL, KILL.

To Korridon and Sam, Roahn said, "Get back. I'll take her."

"Roahn, you can't—" Korridon tried to protest.

"She wants me, not you. No arguments. I'll distract her while you and Sam deal with the Monolith."

With a heavy look, Korridon acquiesced. Both him and Sam headed to the opposite ends of the bay, giving the two combatants a wide berth. The turian looked especially agitated, but Sam's icy look from across the way told him to be calm, a signal that indicated that Roahn knew what she was doing.

The Haxan finally stopped just a few meters from the Monolith. It lifted its perfectly sculpted head, the wounds flaring upon its design acting as travesties upon one so meticulously constructed. "Traveled a long way to find you again," it seethed as it lowered its head a touch, glaring at the rifle-toting quarian that stood next to the black pillar. "Killed a lot of people in the process, too. I wonder how many were your friends?"

It was bait. A gamble for Roahn to lash out in anger. And damn it, it was working. Already Roahn was seeing a tinge of red flare in her vision and a surge of heat welled in her heart. But she let the pulsations ebb and throb until the fusion abruptly died away, leaving her breathing powerfully, her clouded eyes regaining their clarity in short order.

"That's the thing I've always liked about you, Skye," Roahn managed as she readjusted her grip upon her weapon. "You're nothing if not predictable."

There was no time for the Haxan to retort, because Roahn's rifle was already going off in jackhammer bursts. The cyborg threw up an arm to protect its head, as its shields were still malfunctioning, but the quarian's accurate fire chipped away at its armor, spraying bits of metal over the floor. The Haxan quickly recovered and started to plod forward, letting out a frightful howl at the same time, intent on unnerving the quarian with its animalistic analogues. To the Haxan's surprise, its strategy had worked—perhaps a bit too well—as Roahn abruptly spun around and bolted for the elevator exit at the far end of the room. And much to the cyborg's dismay, the elevator door was open and awaiting passengers.

With all of its targeting locks fastidiously adhering to the quarian's departing form, the Haxan mustered past the damage its limbs had sustained and quickly broke out into a shifting gallop. It pounded across the door, frightfully loud, its outstretched hands reaching for Roahn, who had just made it into the elevator. Roahn had been running so fast that her shoulder had hit the far wall with a frightful thud, and now she was bashing at the door controls, desperate for the lift to activate and take her up and out. But the Haxan was already there, its hands impeding the closing doors just in time before they could slam shut.

"Got you now—" the Haxan seethed, right before Roahn poked the barrel of her weapon out between the doors and let off a three-round burst.

All three bullets slammed into the Haxan's forehead, rattling the electronics housed there. The cyborg was so startled that it let go of the doors and backpedaled so quickly that it tripped over its damaged feet and fell to the ground for a moment with a frightful thud. Idiot! The quarian had been in arm's reach and she got away! The Haxan was so infuriated at itself that it could not even muster a word aloud in chastisement.

Clumsily, the Haxan shakily got back to its feet and, growling all the while, limped over to the nearby service ladder that ascended to the next level. It looked up and scanned the width of the passageway hatch that linked the levels together. It was going to be a tight fit, but the Haxan was not going to let any more seconds slip away, not when it had Roahn practically cornered! Growling snarls of electronic feedback rushed out in an unintelligible furl, accompanying the Haxan all the while as it lifted itself up the ladder and after the quarian. To appease its own frustrated mindset, the Haxan opened a task window in its HUD and began playing (in 2.5x speed) all of the ways it had fantasized killing that filthy peasant that had dared to intermingle with the cyborg in its past life. Illuminated by pale emergency lighting, the Haxan's limp pulse smoothed out into an even pace—the style of executions simply became messier and messier as it played through the montage in the diminutive video window.

It was just a shame that real life usually failed to live up to such lofty expectations.

---

Although Korridon had been given no say into Roahn's course of action—not that he ever got much of those chances in the past—he never once stopped feeling those panicked twinges that made the roots of his back teeth turn cold and itch something terribly. That woman was not invincible, even though she constantly tempted fate.

But there was no time to dawdle or worry about Roahn now. She had done her duty by distracting the Haxan off of this level. Now it was time to destroy the Monolith.

Easier said than done—Korridon had a feeling that the device was rather impervious to his comparatively crude explosives he had in his pack, but it was not like he had much choice. As he bent down to remove the moldable explosives and the detonators right at the base of the Monolith, he noticed Sam off in the corner of his eye head behind the racks of mechs, shotgun at the ready in case there were any enemy soldiers lying in wait. Guess the medic had learned something about battlefield tactics after all.

He took out a brick of the metastable compound and was rooting in his pack for one of the detonators when he saw a thin play of the shadows trickle across the lustrous face of the Monolith. Korridon then heard the soft clicking sound of a pistol's slide racking into place.

"On your feet, traitor," a voice behind him ordered, one that decidedly did not belong to Roahn or Sam or anyone he knew.

Slowly he rose, a raging aching flaring in his ligaments. Korridon could also hear the distant rampaging of marching troops flaring out from the elevator where Roahn had come from. And where was Sam? Had he been captured too?

"Turn around," the voice spoke again, but there was the gnarled subharmonics in the words that Korridon was able to pick up, and he soon realized that it was a turian that was speaking to him.

Slowly, Korridon obeyed and blinked as he was face to face with a pitiless black barrel of a heavy pistol that had been levelled right towards his eyeball. Its owner was holding onto the weapon in a practiced two-handed grip, which was a turian with a slightly nicked face and who wore the red and black armored garb of a general. Korridon thought that the man now holding him hostage looked somewhat familiar—but it was the turian's lilac facepaint that ended up jogging his memory.

"General… Corinthus?" Korridon squinted.

The Reaper War veteran stared Korridon down, unperturbed. "You should thank me," he said. "I just saved you from wasting your time."

The general nudged his gun, indicating for Korridon to step down. The younger turian did so, though he still wore a look of confusion. Beyond, he could see five additional turian troops now milling about the area, having been ejected from the lift along with their general. Korridon wondered if they had come across Roahn in her scuffle with the Haxan—was she all right?

"The Monolith," Corinthus elaborated. "That damned Aleph passed it on to us, but never told us how to use it. I couldn't make it work even if I wanted to. You would have destroyed nothing but a glorified paperweight."

Hands in the air, Korridon took on a deathly serious look. "Isn't it worth ensuring that it'll never work again?"

"That's not your place to decide, Sidonis."

Corinthus stepped forward and brutally smashed the butt of his pistol square into Korridon's face. The victim dropped with a hoarse yell, blue blood bubbling from his nostrils. He clasped a hand to the gushing orifice, a sharp pain throbbing from the area, but amidst his own panicked thoughts for his survival, he was repeatedly thinking: Where is Sam?

"Take your hand off it," Corinthus directed, referring to Korridon's gushing nose. "No, no. Let it bleed. Let it bleed." He resumed pointing his weapon at the younger turian's head. "We both made our beds, Sidonis. We're just going to have to lie in them."

Korridon was preparing to shut his eyes, already bracing for the impact at the back of his skull, when all of a sudden there was a horrible wrenching sound of metal at the far end of the bay. Both the general and Korridon looked up to see one of the angular mechs clumsily stagger its way onto the main floor of the bay, disconnected power wires and coolant tubes trailing sparks and clear fluids like severed umbilicals back in its staging bay. The mech swayed in place for a moment in a drunken routine before it finally found its center of gravity. It then lifted its standard issue minigun, the servos in all limbs hissing with sharp squeals of pressure.

Korridon forgotten before him, Corinthus was profoundly flabbergasted as he watched the mech slowly amble forth, towards the Monolith. But his hostage was slowly perking his head up as he realized just what was going on.

"I thought we weren't sending out any more armor!" Corinthus was barking to his men. "Why in the spirits is that walker online? What the hell is going on—?!"

Unseen, Korridon unfurled his hand, revealing the tiny metallic detonator he had scrounged from his pack. Fingers numb, he edged his button upon the deadman's switch and depressed it three times, activating the three-second timer. His body seemingly moving of his own accord, he suddenly spun around from where he was on the ground and tossed the armed device towards Corinthus' face, whose eyes of a dirty ice color helplessly tracked the airborne projectile and only recognized what it was right as it detonated.

The detonator only contained enough ASA compound to create a miniature shockwave, but against exposed flesh, the results could be dramatic. The combusting device sent out a micro-pulse that erupted inches from Corinthus' face. There was a warbling boom and suddenly the general spun away with a scream, blood erupting from the side of his face, his mandible hanging by scant threads of sinew. His pistol bounced off the ground and skidded under a nearby pallet.

Korridon took that moment to jump to his feet and run for cover, but Corinthus recovered quickly, albeit with blood pouring down the side of his face and down the hand that he clasped over his wound. With a roar, the general yanked a ceremonial scimitar free, the blade hungrily gleaming in the starkness of the bay lighting.

"You barefaced bastard! Run all you want," he screamed as he began to shuffle forward in pursuit, "I'll still gut you!"

"Sam, do it!" Korridon yelled as he sprinted past the mech, not needing to see who was in that cockpit to know the pilot.

"Right!" the mech's loudspeakers thundered. "Better cover your ears!"

Whatever caliber type that Sam's mech was rated to shoot, it was clear that its devisors had never intended it for continuous use indoors. The massive assault weapon in the steel paws of the machine became emblazoned with the fury of a sun and a portion of the far wall was punished so hard with white-hot bullets that it actually began to melt. Corinthus and the other troopers dove for cover while Sam piloted the mech around the bay, not letting his finger off the trigger and letting the gun shoot wide, exploding the interior of the ship with light and noise.

"Oh, yeah!" Korridon could hear Sam shouting. "Hoo boy, this is something! Better give me a wide berth—I'm not licensed! Just a mean, mean killing machine. Hah!"

The medic was clearly drunk on whatever adrenalized masculinity that seemed to emit from the sheer notion of piloting a war machine. Korridon would have found the situation rather humorous if there weren't so many people in here trying to kill him.

Sam was clearly not the world's best driver, as his mech staggered all over the place he tried to drive it. Between the insane recoil his automatic weapons were creating combined with his inexperience with piloting a machine so large made him a danger to every living thing in the Normandy's cargo bay. Sam's mech stumbled against some crates—he had to throw out a long arm to catch an exposed pillar so that he would not topple to the ground face-first. He continued to fire the minigun one-handed, causing his aim to bounce all over the place. Bullets carved chunks out of nearby bits of cover and peeled the outer metal layer from the walls. Ricochets pinged off of solid surfaces and a turian soldier cried out as a stray round caught him in the leg right before he sank to the floor in a daze.

"You can't kill me!" Sam continued to taunt. "Only the person who designed this mech can kill me—this control scheme fucking sucks! Seriously, who thought that a four-pedaled, multi-axis walker was the best way to—"

Sam punctuated his ravings, albeit unintentionally, by striding forward and knocking over a set of crates, forcing one soldier who had been taking cover behind them to dive out of the way. This placed the unfortunate troper directly in the mech's path, and soon he became a stain on the ground as the heavy foot smashed down onto him, shattering his ribcage and making mincemeat of his organs.

In the midst of the chaos, Corinthus skirted behind the mech with murder in his thoughts, his dripping and half-ruined face causing him to look like a serial killer caught in the act. He completely ignored the man at the helm of the walker and instead hurried for Korridon instead. He made several wide swipes of his blade and several times the weapon caught off the edge of the grated catwalks, sending out loud clangs and flashes of sparks. Korridon sidestepped or ducked each blow from the insane general, a rising panic furrowing within. He knew he couldn't outlast Corinthus' energy and without a weapon of his own he had no way to defend himself. All of his guns were back near the Monolith, right next to where Sam was wreaking havoc with his walker.

Korridon leaped out of the way to avoid a furious stab from the general and found an opening and ran back out into the fury of the bay. And making things even more disorienting was the sight out of the now-closed bay doors—the world was tilting away in a dizzying and skewed view, with blue sky and pure clouds now filling the viewport instead of the harsh heat of the outside desert. Korridon had not even noticed that the Normandy had taken off. Whoever was helming this ship had ostensibly received the order to depart, most likely due to the presence of the intruders on board. Very rapidly, the blue of Rema's atmosphere washed away to be replaced by a thick blackness and a macrocosm of stars. Korridon swore out loud. This was going to make things all the more difficult. He had not anticipated a potential escape out into space—what were they going to do now?

In the meantime, Sam did not seem to take notice of the change in scenery out the bay windows, as he continue to make a shambles out of the staging area. His walker's alloyed limbs swept forth whenever he brought it into range of one of Corinthus' minions—the ones that Sam had not managed to blast with his minigun sailed through the air after being swept off their feet from the wild swings and sent crashing into the far wall, breaking half of the bones in their bodies in the process.

Another alarm resounded from the other side of the bay—a turian solider had clambered into one of the spare mechs and was now in the process of disengaging the machine from its moorings. Sam turned his walker to face his new opponent, red strobes from the emergency lighting flaring around its armored shoulder blades.

"That figures," Sam grumbled. "Can't go too long without upping the stakes, right?"

With a nudge of the control yokes, Sam barreled his mech forward, the heavy gun jackhammering away while clenched in its solid fist. His opponent's mech flinched backward, its shields flaring in shimmering waves, but quickly returned fire. Bullets smashed upon Sam's machine, its own shields steadily draining. In his cockpit, the momentarily overwhelmed medic hit the button to disengage its chaff. Magnesium flares erupted in white contrails with a singing pulse—half of the cargo bay disappeared in a cloud of frothy smoke and lightning-white balls of pyrotechnics.

In his own cockpit, the enemy turian pilot smirked, having now realized that he was dealing with an idiot, but his smile quickly paled as he noticed that Sam's mech was onrushing his with no intention of stopping. The machines crashed together with the sound of planets colliding and bounced into the loading catwalks, crumpling the scaffolding and gouging the hell out of the walls directly past it. Sam continued to hold down the trigger of his weapon on full-auto, while the infuriated turian pilot was trying to plug away at Sam with carefully timed bursts. But both of the walkers were tangled together, each of their weapons resting upon the opposing shoulders and firing right next to what approximated as the walker's "ear."

The explosive gunfire sparked and ricocheted all over the room, which was now filled with a white haze. They bashed and bounced their way among the bay, the two giants creating absolute havoc as their tangoing legs caught and spilled crates of provisions and weaponry, though the Monolith was miraculously still standing in the middle of the room.

During the chaos, Korridon made repeated attempts to reach his pack that he had left by the Monolith, but the rampaging duel of machines frequently cut him off, forcing him to abandon his plans. At times, Korridon had to even duck a few random swings from the arms of the walkers in order to keep his head fixed to his shoulders. A few spare soldiers in the room fired at the turian and he vaulted over a shattered column of crates, keeping himself low.

Sam was now facing his own troubles, as the enemy turian pilot was far better trained at actually controlling his piece of machinery than he was with his own. Tortured metal screeched as he grappled with the mech, but the other walker kicked out and punched at his cockpit with its free hand, impacting the armor there several inches at a time with hefty and sonorous clangs. One of the screens in Sam's cockpit actually flared out of existence with one punch, the interior began to bulge inward from the multitude of heavy blows, and that was not even mentioning that the man's head was constantly being rattled from the assault as his skull repeatedly slammed against the supporting bracers with each impact. In a frenzy, Sam tried to disengage his mech far back enough so that he could line up a good shot with his weapon, but the other combatant reached for the weapon Sam's walker held and used its rotating grip to twist its wrist 360 degrees. Sam had not disengaged the braking on his own walker's wrist locks, which meant that when his antagonist's mecha ripped the weapon out of his grip, one of his walker's hands came with it. Sparks sizzled from disconnected wires and ripped lubricant tubes dripped clear fluid on the ground—a part of Sam's diagnostic control flared red, indicating that its sensors had lost visibility on its own right hand.

If anything, that just made Sam all the more incensed. "Right!" he bellowed. "You asked for it!"

The medic then proceeded to hit every single button in front of him, without regard to what it actually did. His mecha then seemed to go haywire—flaps upon the back opened, near the thrusters, and expended cold blue flames as more flare countermeasures spat into the air to join the fray. Arcpoint generators popped out and crystallized the air with its frantic undulations of vivid electricity, arcing across every metal surface in the vicinity—a few nearby soldiers were jolted and made groaning noises as they spasmed and collapsed, their brains having fried in an instant.

One such flick of a switch activated the cutting torch on Sam's walker. A thick nozzle popped out from the left wrist—the one that was still functional—and rapidly oxidized into a searing thin droplet of burning fire. Sam angled the torch directly onto the hand of the antagonist mech that still held him and its armor immediately melted into a thick stream that dribbled to the floor. The fire bit into an electronics cluster and something exploded in a shower of brilliant sparks. The turian pilot flinched his mech back, this time.

Sam shrugged behind his controls. "Sometimes I surprise even myself."

But the human was not taking any chances. He lurched his own machine forward and brutally battered his foe with his good hand, slamming the other mecha back several meters with each blow. The turian walker's arm, the one still holding onto his minigun, dangled freely in a daze. Sam groped for it and scuffled his feet until he was at his enemy's back, with his own walker's hand clenched solidly upon the other's arm. Alarmed, now the turian began to open up his weapon in a constant stream of automatic fire, but he could not hit Sam, who was grappling him from behind. In the superior position, Sam pulled back in his direction, yanking the still-firing enemy walker to the right. Heavy rounds blew through the air from the uncontrollable weapon, some of them hitting regrouping soldiers and completely obliterating them into fine clouds of gore, slathering the walls with their greasy bodily fluids. The enemy mech tried to pull back in horror, its pilot clearly aggrieved at inflicting friendly fire upon its own men.

Smashed against one another, the two mechs clashed from side to side upon the bay once more. They dislodged more scaffolding, which fell and crushed another turian soldier after it was knocked off its riggings. Sam and his opponent grappled for the last minigun, but as they yanked and pulled, the weapon split right down the middle, spilling a calamitous stream of parts and coolant fluid between them.

The cargo bay of the Normandy was practically ruined, but the two gladiators were still stumbling within the maze of detritus that they had inflicted. The turian pilot then roared and activated its jet thrusters, propelling it across the bay at eighty kilometers an hour. It slammed into Sam's mecha and propelled it into the large bay door, creating an indentation about half a meter, sized to Sam's cockpit. Together, the two then crashed to the ground, but with Sam's walker lying on the bottom and the other straddling him. The turian pilot directed his walker to apply hammer blows upon Sam's compartment—the armor began to cave in with each crushing blow. Ion canisters cracked and released, unfurling the smell of ozone while blue lightning washed across both of the machines.

"I've got him pinned!" Sam could hear the turian crowing to anyone who would listen. "Focus fire! Focus fire on the pilot—"

Sam then whipped his mecha's ruined arm up, the right one that lacked an appendage at the end, and shot it back in a crude backhand motion. However, a curved piece of ripped metal at the end of the walker's shattered wrist, by happenstance, caught upon one of the hatch handholds that had been directly welded to his opponent's own cockpit. The hatch burst back six inches with a wrenching noise and an abrupt hiss of pressurization. Sam could now glimpse the shadowed form of the turian that had been hounding him, seated at his controls, who now looked thoroughly stunned at being made so vulnerable in an instant.

"Holy shit!" the turian blurted out, with just the tiniest bit of admiration embedded within the statement.

Sam didn't bother trying to parse out the perceived praise. Without wasting any time, he hurled his mech's left fist forward, shunting forward upon the controls as hard as he could muster, and the thick metallic arm slammed through the breached cockpit and pulverized the turian pilot so hard that the back of the other mech suddenly bulged outward. Immediately, the walker that straddled Sam's ceased all motor functions, becoming listless like a gigantic toy.

"Damn," Sam just grunted in relief.

He yanked the controls back and his mecha's arm retracted from the cockpit, which was now completely coated and dripping with a bluish liquid. But as soon as Sam withdrew the intruding limb, the remains of the enemy mech that continued to sit atop his own abruptly pitched forward and fell upon his downed walker, pinning him to the floor. Sam growled as he pummeled every single motor control on his console, but it was no use. His mech lay on the ground like a cadaver. He was stuck.

The arcing haze of battle had diminished and now Korridon sprinted out again, towards the Monolith, desperate to reach a weapon. But as soon as he reached the spot where he had left all his equipment, Korridon skidded to a halt as Corinthus suddenly stepped out from behind the device, his half-stained face frozen in a bloody grimace.

"Got you," he croaked out.

The general made a sweeping cut with his ceremonial sword and Korridon jumped away, but not before there was a fiery pain just around his belly. He clasped his hands to the area and they came away slick—not a disemboweling cut, but the blade had certainly made short work of shearing through his armor. He gave a yell and stumbled to the floor, his back hitting the Monolith as the wind left his lungs.

Corinthus lunged forward, now keeping his blade positioned at Korridon's neck as if they were the subjects of a gladiatorial sculpture. The last soldier in the general's cadre took up a position just behind his leader. The elder warrior looked down at his fallen foe, noting the panic rooted in his gaze. Corinthus had nothing but contempt for his own eyes to reflect.

"You know we didn't have a choice," the general hissed to his prey, whispering the last words that this whelp would ever hear.

Pointed steel glimmering near his throat, Korridon just gazed upward at his soon-to-be-killer, all fear finally having left him.

"Then how come I still made a different one?" he uttered back.

The general accepted the statement with grace, despite half of his face hanging by threads. Ever the good soldier. There was the subtlest tense of the man's muscles, the luster in his eyes dying out as he began the micro-push forward to surge the blade straight into Korridon.

But over by the bay door, amidst the pile of fallen walkers, a shift of movement blurred in the background. The sole remaining hand of Sam's sparking and damaged mech had reached out and had clasped the remains of the fallen minigun that had belonged to the mobile opponent he had just killed. With a strength that overcame the failing mechanical limitations of the mech, the arm rose and fire spat from the muzzle of the gun in a raking burst. Behind Corinthus, his last soldier disappeared from the waist up, showering the turian's back with a frothy slew of gore. The general flinched just as he was initiating his thrust—

—and missed Korridon completely.

The blade made a light toiling sound not unlike a small bell being rung as it touched the surface of the Monolith. But instead of stopping in place, the sword melted where it scraped against the Monolith. The weapon slagged off the side of the slab, an orange glow ringing around the flat blade as it seemed to just sink into the flat darkness of the structure. With nothing to impede Corinthus' weight, the general uncontrollably lurched forward. Korridon sat up at the same time, his own omni-blade hungrily out around his wrist in a reflex reaction.

There was a hissing sound and a faint swirl of sparks twisted from Corinthus' back. The general grunted and dropped the hilt of his sword, the blade now extending only four inches from the protective guard, the rest of it having liquefied away. He looked stunned for a moment, even as he glanced down to discover that Korridon's blade was embedded into his chest up to the hilt. A thick gush exuded from the wound and the general shuddered. Corinthus' jaw worked a few times, attempting to say something and failing, trying to understand how he had lost to this scum, but his eyes began their trajectory up to the back of his head before he could fully comprehend it all.

Corinthus died standing up.

Korridon's blade slid out of the dead man as they toppled over to land with a listless thud near the plinth of the Monolith. The body of the general unceremoniously splattered to the floor. The young turian gave a gasp as air painfully surged back into his lungs. Behind him, the Monolith gave a distant throb, as if pleased at the bloodshed.

Upon the tangle of mecha parts, the hatch to Sam's walker blew open, scattering stray bits of debris across the hangar. Inside, the strapped-in medic, who was still lying face-up and staring at the ceiling from his position, gave a warlike howl as his limbs shook with glee. It was a sound that had been fueled on nothing but adrenaline. It was the sound of a crazed comedown, that animalistic sector of the brain that few dared to touch in their lives.

Korridon got to his feet and raced over to help Sam out of his machine. The grease-stained human was still smiling animatedly by the time the turian got to him. Korridon gave an anxious rap of his knuckles upon the side of the mecha to gain his attention—Sam turned to face him in his drunken euphoria.

"First time piloting, eh?" Korridon asked around a breathy grin of his own.

"That bad, huh?" Sam said around choked peals.

Korridon chuckled as he reached in to help get the seatbelt straps removed from Sam's frame.

"Your technique needs work… but I can't complain about the results."

"Ha. There's hope for me yet."

---

The hatch to the armory access tunnel bashed open and the Haxan quickly extracted itself from the tight channel, crawling up from the ground like something reanimated. The thin passageway upon which had exited from had been left in ruins—the walls had been bent and gouged all out of proportion from the cyborg brutalizing its way through the area of which it had been definitely too big to fit through. Nevertheless, the Haxan leaped back to its feet, leaving the ground panel ajar, not courteous enough about its environment to leave things as they had been.

Now… where was Roahn?

The enforcer barged its way through the doors that led to the armory, which regurgitated it out into the Normandy's main hall access. Immediately, it honed its gaze upon the elevator door, just to its right. It stepped up to the console and noted that the elevator was now heading down, for some reason. That did not seem right to the Haxan at first, but then it did reason that getting through the access passage was an endeavor that would take a multitude of times longer than standing in a lift. The Haxan took note that the elevator was descending from the first floor—Roahn apparently was not very good at hiding.

Still, the first floor, the Haxan thought. The captain's cabin. How sentimental.

As if it stopped in the presence of willpower, the elevator doors opened in a beckoning motion to the Haxan. The box was empty—no surprise there. The Haxan stepped in and pummeled the touchpad button for "1" so hard that it cracked the glass panel. There was a low whirr and the lift began its ascent once more.

The Haxan did not wait for the doors to open fully. Instead, it pried its hands in the first sliver of a gap that appeared between the parting surface and wrenched the entire contraption apart with a crunching noise. As soon as it stepped into the small antechamber did it realize that something was horribly wrong—the door that led to the captain's cabin was still completely locked, as evidenced by the glowing red icon on it. No way that Roahn could have gotten up here and broken the military firewalls in time. Furthermore, even if she was inside, why bother locking the door? The quarian was obviously expecting this fight, so prolonging the inevitable seemed unnecessary.

The realization hit the Haxan like a freight train. It snarled as it realized that it had been made a fool of, and was in the process of turning around, but stuttered momentarily as it saw Roahn rise from the floor of the elevator, having dropped down from the ceiling hatch of the lift. It had been practically riding with the damn quarian the entire time and it had never even noticed.

There was quite an uncomfortable moment in which the Haxan noted that it was too far away to strike out at Roahn—as it lacked a firearm, this put it at a distinct disadvantage when it came to range. Roahn had no such problems, evidenced by the fact that she had the underbarrel launcher of her rifle already out and aimed at her tormentor.

The launcher coughed and the Haxan was flung back through the doors of the cabin as a massive wave of pressure obliterated itself against it, the partition smashing aside like it was made of tissue paper. The cyborg sprawled out upon the floor for a quick second, additional carbon scoring staining its already battered chest armor. Something within its collar—a tube—let go, and the office desk behind it became suddenly stained with a thin black liquid that spat out in arterial bursts before quickly subsiding into a dismal trickle.

Roahn stepped around the corner, rifle trained at the Haxan's head. "I'm done running from you, Skye."

The Haxan rose to its full height, a brooding mass of synthetic muscle and hydraulic power. Shoulders broader than Aleph's. Roahn did not fire upon the automaton—even in the Haxan's damaged state, bullets would have little effect, and while her grenade launcher would bash the thing around, it would do nothing much other than chip off tiny pieces of armor. The quarian ejected all of her clips and threw the rifle to the ground, her sword extending upon her right arm, the firelight from its length flickering upon her side like a hungry inferno.

A synthesized snort emitted from the Haxan's vocabulator. "Indeed," it said, right before it flared its own swords to life along its forearms and rushed forward to deliver a scathing cut that set the air on fire in the wake of its blades.

And the blade stopped as it became crossed with Roahn's own sword. The two weapons met with a cosmic clash and a baleful hiss, but remained in an even lock.

The Haxan whipped its head towards the astonishing sight. Roahn was grunting as the muscles in her arm bulged underneath her suit, evenly matching the cyborg's strength. But… that was impossible, the Haxan thought. The hydraulic actuators in its arms contained more than four times the strength that muscle fibers could hope to attain. If anything, the Haxan should have ripped Roahn's remaining arm off at this point.

But none of that was able to answer the lone question reverberating within the Haxan's head: why couldn't it move this damn quarian's arm at all?

The trickle of liquid in its audio receptors provided it with the answer, combined with the warning sign flashing in the lower corner of its HUD. That spray of fluids across the deck when Roahn had burst a grenade onto its chest had been the entirety of its digital power fluid evacuating from its pressurized tubing. It now had no more power in its limbs than an average human.

The worst part about all that was that Roahn had seemed to have known that before the Haxan did.

Roahn twisted out of the lock first and reached out with her left hand, a haptic mine already unfurling upon her palm. The tech explosion, shaped like a hemisphere, touched the dented chest of the Haxan and immediately detonated. The Haxan was propelled backwards yet again and this time it crashed through the glass case that capped the desk, the one that its previous and storied commander had used to house titanium models of various starships in a mock fleet of his own. The crystal surface shattered around the airborne form of the cyborg, who fell to the lower level of the cabin in a heap as some of the more frightful and wickedly sharp glass fragments landed amongst it. The two of them were now inside the cabin proper—a simple bed and an L-shaped couch along with a sturdy steel table were the only obstacles lining the way of the tiny battlefield. Strangely, Roahn could see that the aquarium was still installed along the left wall—apparently no one could bear to have ripped it out. The water feature rippled a deep blue hue across half the room, while the frigid glow of the space battle from the skylight wafted occasional oxidizing bursts from above.

The quarian ran to engage the Haxan down at the bottom, but the mercenary lashed out, crumpling the table next to it, and grabbed one of its dislocated legs. It hurled the projectile in a flat spin, but Roahn slid underneath the object with inches to spare. As she rose back up, the commander's eyes flashed in hateful slits behind the osseus emblem that marked her visor.

As the Haxan reached for something else to throw, Roahn quickly slammed a control upon her omni-tool and then erupted into a flying leap. She did not come back down. The gut-churning sensation of weightlessness took over as the anti-grav generators for this floor of the Normandy died with a paltry simmer. Roahn floated above the action, arm out in front just as she had done when she had hurtled through space to reach her friends on the Silent Essence. As she passed over the Haxan, she raked her sword arm down and the tip of her blade caught upon the cyborg's face, gouging it and shattering one of its optics for good.

While Roahn used her thrusters to flip herself around and plant her feet upon the wall like she was a spider, the Haxan whipped back up, mag-boots anchoring it to the deck. Its processor was still in the midst of trying to figure out a new strategy, but not before Roahn initiated her combat drone right in front of the mercenary and then immediately activated the detonation sequence.

There was a pulsing cacophony of neon purple and blue hues, and the Haxan was ripped out of its magnetic moorings, the anti-grav malfunction extenuating the arc of its trajectory. Flailing about, the Haxan bellowed as it tumbled in midair until it smashed into the aquarium wall and busted completely through the thick glass surface. Large bulbous droplets of water wiggled from their prison, spilled in the zero-g, some of them containing a few confused exotic fish swimming within them. In an instant, half of the room was filled with the ballooning spheres of liquid like they were props in some extravagant holo-show.

The Haxan extricated itself from the remains of the aquarium, trying to reacquire Roahn once again. However, thanks to the quarian's attack upon its optic, its visible light sensor had been irreparably knocked offline. The only wavelength sensor available to it at the moment was its infrared, and currently its entire view was a flat blur of black and indigo.

The enforcer's vision then quickly exploded with all of the colors from yellow to red as Roahn burst from the veil of floating water that had been blocking the Haxan's view, current emitters now dancing upon the commander's fingers as she stretched outward, as if she sought to strangle the cyborg. The water-soaked Haxan now elicited a powerful scream as several thousands of volts jumped across its frame from Roahn's newest tool, twirling up the coils of wire that rounded every joint, searing the tattered bits of flesh that had been intermingled with the elaborate machinery that kept it alive, and imploding with the very fabric of its brain, filling the void of every cell with a singular and unobstructed pain.

Delirious and half blind, the Haxan lashed out, striking Roahn on the shoulder. The blow was not hard enough to shatter bone, but just enough to bruise. It still had the effect of dislodging the quarian and she spun away, but was quickly able to right herself.

Catching her breath, Roahn made sure to orient herself upright before she activated the gravity back on. She landed on all fours, as did the Haxan. The globes of water seemed to hang in the air, as if suspended by fine threads, before they dropped to the ground, splashing everything in sight and soaking the combatants.

There was a deep silence. Both Roahn and the Haxan looked up at the same time, as if their strings had been simultaneously pulled. Lying on the ground, the two slowly got back to their feet, mirroring each other's movements in a torrid dance. Roahn stood fully first, her mask veiling a frigid and passionless anger. The Haxan also rose, its sole remaining optic a blazing ember.

The two stood where they had previously fallen, hands at their hips like the gunslingers of old, their eyes refusing to break from each other's.

"Well?" Roahn asked. "Let's go, then."

With a roar, the Haxan lashed out with a python-thick limb, but Roahn whipped up her right arm, a slab of holo-armor emitting across in a furious shield. The cyborg's fist hit the brimming surface and rebounded off with a violent distortion like it had just punched a block of rubber. Roahn then used the opening to lunge forward and hurl her prosthetic fist into the side of the Haxan's head. The mercenary's head slammed to the slide with a huge clang and static whipped across its vision in surprise.

Quickly recovering, the Haxan levelled a haymaker, the blow not containing nearly enough power to kill. Roahn ducked the round and pulled up her sword and raked it across the Haxan's abdomen—a normally disemboweling cut, but instead of guts tumbling from the wound, molten metal spat in furious bursts. Emitting another wordless scream, the Haxan tried to grab at the quarian so that it could attempt to rip her limb from limb, but Roahn quickly activated portions of her holo-armor, timed to each physical attack from the cyborg. The grasping metal limbs could not touch Roahn's body—as the reinforced shields repelled any and all matter that would otherwise intrude into her sphere, left to slide across the glowing barrier. Each failed effort from the cyborg resulted in its own strength being deflected away, leaving it open to counterattack from the quarian.

And the quarian would deliver. In spades.

After parrying one last desperate blow from the Haxan, Roahn switched onto the attack for good. She became a whirling dervish as she proceeded to beat the living hell out of the creature. She made raking cuts with her sword that exposed precious electronics through gashes in the Haxan's armor. Her prosthetic punches distorted the mercenary's features and either ripped apart or completely knocked off portions of armor plating. One brutal straight punch to the Haxan's knee crumpled something critical and the cyborg nearly went down. An omni-reinforced blow to the automaton's head dented the upper right portion of its cranium. And a sweeping haymaker of the quarian's own ripped out the cyborg's leftmost cheek plating, leaving it bent all out of proportion like a broken mandible on a turian, exposing a jagged design of the black metal that comprised its jawline and the glimmering silicon that entwined its vocabulator.

Roahn started screaming unintelligibly as she rained down blow after blow upon this devilish thing, upon the construct of a person she once knew so long ago. Everything she had within, everything she thought she could ever conjure, inhabited the fury of her strength as she proceeded to destroy her foe. There was no person before her. There was hardly anything that she could kill, for she had already delivered that fateful blow months back. She had killed Skye Lorne before in her mind. Now, she was going to finish the job. Her intent, like it had been back on the Morningtide, was just as absolute now as it was then.

It was time to tear this thing apart.

She raised her arm for one last strike, but the Haxan overcame the damage it had accumulated and lifted its forearm, deflecting Roahn's cybernetically-enhanced punch at the last moment. Roahn's momentum still carried her forward and the Haxan utilized that to its advantage as it rapidly straightened and reached around, now touching the quarian's lower spine. The cyborg then whirled, now at Roahn's back, and pushed her hard against the wall, nearly cracking the woman's ribs with a harsh grunt.

Helmeted head smashed against the side of the wall, Roahn's eyes widened as she felt the Haxan's hand now move to the back of her head, slowly forcing her towards a jagged shard of glass still embedded in the frame of the aquarium. The piece of glass glittered wickedly, brinewater still dripping from it—Roahn's neck was being pushed closer and closer to the gleaming edge as the Haxan furiously seethed just behind her.

"Am I a weight on your conscience now?" the cyborg whispered, straining to use the last of its energy to push the quarian further and further down, hoping to impale her throat upon the wreath of broken glass.

Roahn had to throw out a hand and hold onto the side of the aquarium in an effort to prevent herself from being speared upon the glass. Her eyes crossed as they beheld the oncoming clear spike, already envisioning the hot pain at her neck followed by the gushing liquid sounds of her own life bursting from her torn arteries. Every muscle in her shoulders and back bulged as she tried to push herself away, but even in its weakened state, the Haxan was too strong. A couple stray tears, leeched by her efforts, trailed down her face. Her breaths turned to frantic gasps and then ragged howls.

"I told you," the Haxan continued to taunt. "This was only going to end in disappointment."

At some level, Roahn was almost inclined to believe the Haxan. She could just give in, let go, and it would all be over. Maybe it wouldn't even last that long—it took only seconds for unconsciousness to set in from massive blood loss. But as she continued to hone in upon the spear that seemed destined to kill her, she could only see what her absence would bring upon those that she cared about. It would only mark the beginning of a darkening age, with the rest of her friends left behind to live in it. The thought of there being a galaxy where there existed people of such bile and hatred dictating the lives of those she loved turned her mind into fire. Maybe she had thought she had been fated for a suicide mission all this time, for it certainly made it easier to push forward knowing that the end was a foregone conclusion. But as she stood here in this ruined cabin, the Haxan inches away from killing her, Roahn remembered the love of her mother and father, the hopes they had breathed into her, and the quiet moments of being held in Korridon's arms and providing her the only haven for which she could finally feel safe. It made her realize the simple and obvious truth.

At no point had she ever wanted to die.

"You have…" Roahn gasped, her right hand twitching as her omni-tool activated, a very old program initiating upon the circular diagram over her palm, "…no idea how right you are."

Roahn then reached up and plastered her free hand directly upon the Haxan's face just as her directed-energy tool began firing millions of high-power microwaves directly into the cyborg's head. She just hoped this trick worked just as well this time as it did all those years ago.

There was a tense moment in which the Haxan completely froze. Then it let go of Roahn completely as its hands flew to its head, shrieking incoherently, completely consumed by an excruciating pain. With no one holding her back, Roahn now fell to the ground, just barely missing having her neck sliced open by the piece of glass, but she kept her microwave beam trained at the Haxan all the while. 100 kW of output power at 95 GHz smashed into the Haxan's body and immediately attacked the organ sacs inside. The cyborg's internal temperature spiked as it already started to register radiation burns—its breached armor no longer afforded it complete shielding from rads.

The Haxan writhed and tried to stumble away from the quarian. It was in complete agony. The microwaves felt like every single atom of its remaining organs were on fire. Blood vessels became swollen and burst, killing off parts of its organs in mere seconds. Unable to take anymore, the Haxan sank to its knees, making vomiting noises, but was unable to purge anything up. Its entire body shuddered and trembled, producing a clamorous clicking sound as its damaged plates knocked together.

Getting to her feet, Roahn started to jog over to the downed Haxan, right palm continuing to be pointed towards it like she was holding a weapon. She then cocked her left arm back before she punched the cyborg square in the face—metal knuckles dented titanium housing and the Haxan fell onto its back. Roahn jumped atop the cyborg and pinned its arms to the ground with her legs. She then clasped her hand, the one with the still-firing microwave tool—to the right side of the cyborg's head, producing a constant slew of pain to keep it in a weakened state.

The Haxan now started to scream—partly from the agony, partly from the indignity of being beaten so handedly—but Roahn was deaf to its pain. The deadly brute that had haunted her since Rotev had now become nothing more than a squealing pyjak. The controlled exterior of the mercenary had long been burned out, revealing the true self housed in that terrible form: the frightened persona of Skye.

When the Haxan had Roahn at its mercy, it made the mistake of not finishing the job. Worse still, it had ensured that the quarian would carry a lifelong grudge against it.

Roahn's prosthetic fist curled. That grudge would be discarded today.

She raised her arm. "For my father," she said coldly.

With that, she surged her fist straight down and plowed it into the Haxan's face. Sparks and metal blew outward, spraying the ground. The Haxan croaked.

Roahn lifted her arm again and repeated the process. Another clang and another spray of sparks. She did it again. And again. And again. Just repeatedly bashing her prosthetic fist upon the thing that had tried to destroy her life, that had hurt countless others in its bid to raze her from existence. Roahn found a powerful rhythm and tried to keep count of the number of times she caved the Haxan's head in further, but at some point she lost it.

One punch ripped open an oxygenation tube—blood spurted out from a hole in the Haxan's cheek. Another punch crumbled the already-broken optic in the mercenary's socket to junk. Tirelessly, the quarian kept on raising her fist, light playing off her scratched alloy knuckles, lubricants and blood from her enemy splattered upon her front. The Haxan had stopped resisting, utterly limp. By this point, the cyborg's head had now been caved almost completely inward, its jawline was skewed at an odd angle, fluids wept from several breaches in its structure, and its breath only emitted as a digital scrape.

Hitting the demon below her until her mind went numb, Roahn sat gasping upon the broken shell of the Haxan, breathing heavily as a terrible ache reached her lungs. She looked down at the pathetic thing that she had nearly beaten to death. Watched as its head tenderly rocked back and forth, trying to swim through the pain that billowed over it in waves.

She was about to hit the creature again, to finally put it out of its misery, when all of a sudden, the Haxan whispered something. Roahn almost did not catch it, but the Haxan repeated it until there was no mistaking what it was.

"S-S-Sor… Sorry. I'm s-sorry… Sorry… S-Sorry… I—I'm… sorry…"

Of all the things it could have chosen to say in its final moments, the quarian could not have ever predicted this.

Roahn was nearly about to ignore the Haxan's last request as she mustered her strength to deliver the final blow, but something stayed her hand. Now, as she looked down upon her would-be victim, she did not see the ruined visage of a crumpled and broken machine. She only saw the flushed and weeping face of Skye, a pool of blood staining from the wound that lined her gut with her two stained hands clasping over it. She blinked again and her view returned to the Haxan, but the switch had already been thrown.

Her fist trembled in mid-air, feeling impossibly heavy. Roahn let out a quiet keen that erupted into a frightful bellow and she slammed it down with a vengeful finality.

WHAM! The floor dented an inch next to the Haxan's head. Roahn was left breathing heavily atop the cyborg, staring down into the frightened glow of its last remaining oculi, as she slowly pried her fist away from where she had struck the ground, her fingers now twitching arthritically.

"Damn you, Skye," Roahn panted at the uncomprehending face of the Haxan. "Damn you—"

She froze upon hearing the door to the cabin open just behind her, but it was too late, for in the next moment something hit her in the small of her back and suddenly it seemed that her entire being was composed of lightning as it blazed out from all her limbs and spat from her fingertips. The arcing pulse vanished as soon as it arrived, but it left the quarian into a shaking and boneless mass. Groaning, she slowly toppled off the Haxan and rolled upon her back, all the energy sapped from her body. Her listless head lolled to the left, and she was now able to see the person that had shot her slowly walk down the stout staircase.

Soft leather boots stepped into view, followed by cleanly pressed navy pants. The soles squished as they treaded onto the soaked carpet and nudged the broken glass strewn about. Admiral Huston slowly rotated around the fallen quarian, a pistol gripped in his hands.

"I'm almost embarrassed to admit that the disruptor ammo wasn't my intention," Huston said as he tilted his weapon and fiddled with a dial upon the side. "As you can imagine, it's not all that often that I have to pick up a weapon, for defense or otherwise."

A yellow-white hologlow now encased the frame of the pistol—set to armor-piercing ammo. Huston walked until he placed himself between Roahn and the Haxan. Behind him, the cyborg slowly began to rise to its feet, but the admiral paid it no mind.

"You are… a curious creature, commander. A valiant example of a race fighting against irrelevance. But just like your people were never meant for the stars, perhaps humanity was never meant to be their true bastion. We've simply overextended our reach and now we're paying the price."

Multiple creaking noises arose as the Haxan finally righted itself, just behind Huston's right side. It stood in a hunched position, tortured and distorted breathing sounds hissing from its mechanical trachea, a ruined and frightful wreck. Huston glanced behind him for a moment, sparing a second's worth of eye contact to confirm that the enforcer was somewhat mobile before he returned his attention back on Roahn.

The quarian, meanwhile, was trying to get back up, but whatever Huston had shot her with had not fully worn off yet. Her muscles were still spasming and her skin felt roasted and crisped under her suit. She sucked air into her lungs in frantic gasps, almost to the point of hyperventilating.

Huston cocked his head, considered something for a second, and slowly holstered his weapon. From his other hip, he reached around and withdrew a combat knife that glinted nakedly in the confines of the cabin.

"I expected more from you, commander," Huston said sadly as he toyed with the blade in his hands. "You know, your parents had the same problem in that they could only see their lives in the basic equation of black and white. Fight or die. Nothing in between. No surprise that their ideas imparted themselves onto you." He waited a beat, now hitting a certain stride. "Commander Roahn'Shepard. Fighting for the so-called freedom of the galaxy. But what is it you think you're fighting against? Tyranny? Subjugation? You think Aleph truly wants to destroy everything? Don't you think that if he had that power he would have done it by now? Your little war has only cost more lives than he has taken—and now thanks to you, he may very well take more lives in response to your continued… defiance."

Roahn made panicked noises as she lay there helplessly on the ground, looking at nothing but the knife in Huston's hand as he approached her. The Haxan's gaze tracked Huston, its own body language rocking back and forth in agitation, trapped in an invisible war.

Now the admiral planted a foot on the quarian's metal wrist, pinning the limb down. He prepared to kneel, blade in a backwards grip, readying to sink it into Roahn's heart.

"Take solace in this fact, commander" Huston's dispassionate voice was murky in Roahn's ears as her vision throbbed with a fearful red, "in the next few seconds, the war will end, the mindless slaughter will cease, and there will be a lasting peace. Only, you will not be among those that witness it."

Huston lifted the knife above his head. Roahn's eyes squinted nearly shut.

The admiral then surged his arm downward.

Nothing happened. At least, not in the seemingly infinite span of time that it took for blade to slice through air en route to its target.

But the knife would never reach Roahn.

Abruptly, shockingly, a metal hand had quickly closed over Huston's wrist, faster than the eye could blink, interrupting the fatal trajectory. The hand that closed around him had squeezed in a microsecond and had crushed his ulna and radius to smithereens and compartmentalized his forearm. But before Huston could cry out in pain, the Haxan, looming over the admiral's shoulder like the devil that it was, viciously yanked back and Huston's elbow folded in half.

The wrong way.

There was a searing crack and a sharp dagger of bone poked out from Huston's suit jacket at the elbow, a horrific spear speckled with red. Huston was now beyond pain. He simply stared at his ruined arm and looked back up at the Haxan, a wordless plea fumbling upon his numb lips.

The knife slipped from the suddenly slack grip of the human's arm, fumbled through nerveless digits to begin its slow tumble downward.

The Haxan reached down and snatched the knife in midair with its free hand, catching it before it could hit the ground. The blade seemed tiny in the cyborg's massive paw. The Haxan then arced its elbow upward, preparing a diagonal strike with its newly acquired weapon. Huston continued staring at the mercenary all the while, nothing but confusion clouding his paling face. Unfocused eyes took in his disintegrating world before him, but comprehension did not land.

Without flair or pomp, with the brutal efficiency that it had been programmed to do since its inception, the Haxan sliced its arm downward. A massive spurt of darkness blasted from Huston's abdomen. Blood pattered about the cyborg like warm rain. Huston jerked once, his jaw gaping.

Roahn heard the sound of something wet and slimy sliding out and hitting the ground. Trails of hanging blood, framed still in the lyricalness of the moment, appeared as disintegrating stalactites.

Huston fell to his knees, jittering hands trying to scoop in his guts from the ragged tear in his belly. Long pale masses of intestine poked from the wound, furrowing past his fingers like fistfuls of pasta. The admiral made a noise that sounded like "gah" and fell forward, onto his face, next to Roahn. His squashed expression looked at nothing, his eyes already glassy and fazed.

Strength suddenly flooding back, Roahn was now able to sit up, though she could hardly look away at Huston's corpse. Her breath fluttered with astonishment and she shook her head to clear it.

"I… I don't believe it."

She was staring for so long at the body that she almost did not notice when the Haxan abruptly dropped the knife, which emitted only a soft thumping sound as it bounced upon the waterlogged carpet.

The Haxan was now backing up, towards the bed, its posture curiously straightening. There was a delicate smoothness in its movements that belied the terrible damage it had accumulated. A well-oiled machine once again. Only this time, there seemed to be a distant hesitation. A brief but noticeable resistance.

Roahn rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up a few inches. "Skye?"

The head of the Haxan looked down, as if it had somehow forgotten about the quarian and had just now noticed her for the first time. Its hands were now starting to crawl upward, towards its chest, each individual digit twitching in anticipation. The body of the cyborg entered a paralytic jerkiness, as if was wrestling with its inner demons.

Then, amazingly, the Haxan laughed.

It was a soft noise, rather curt, but it was unmistakable. Roahn propped herself up even more, not understanding, but definitely noticing that the Haxan's hands were now scrambling closer and closer to the break in panels right in the middle of its chest.

"Skye, what are you doing?"

"Fifty-seven million lines of code was written to make up my persona fabric," the Haxan said, almost lethargically. "One of those lines was a failsafe… in case I disobeyed orders."

Roahn realized what the cyborg meant. "No, no," she whispered as she helplessly watched as the metal upon the Haxan's chest began to crumple inward as its own fingers, moving independently of their owner, began to claw into its own cavity.

"Heh, he really did think of everything, didn't he? Don't worry—I knew what this meant for me all along." The Haxan's chin then lifted, staring out into its destiny. "Sorry, Roahn."

Then, with a great pull, the Haxan's arms wrenched in opposite directions. There was a sound of splintering metal and the cyborg's chestplate was suddenly ripped apart, the damage splintering deep into the chassis, rending apart structural supports, puncturing coolant canisters, and tearing open the gutsac that was nestled by a curve of smooth MedPlastic, spilling a deluge of clear liquid that had cradled the still-beating organ that agonizingly pumped in a deep tremolo right before the splintering metal that encompassed it began to shred into the damaged muscle. Spurts of blood began to burst from the Haxan's chest and a deep howl came from its ruined vocabulator.

Roahn carried forward that howl as electricity seemed to jolt back into her veins, causing her to leap to her feet, her energy restored. This was no way for someone to die, she realized. To have their own body betray them and rip them apart from the inside. Perhaps very foolishly, Roahn surged forward, her omni-sword immediately wrapping around her forearm as she funneled every ounce of power she had into the circuitry of her weapon. There was a harsh whining sound like a buzzsaw and the sword flared from a rippling orange and brimmed into a brilliant sapphire flame in an instant—the energy jolted around the outlines of the sword, unstable and jittering wildly.

Still screaming, Roahn made a singular raking cut. Abrupt stillness took over the deck.

Two seconds later, faint wisps of smoke began to travel from the Haxan and two glowing lines of molten metal now warped near both of its wrists. The hands of the Haxan then began to tilt until they completely dropped away, cut off by Roahn's clean stroke. They rolled upon the floor until they tilted with their palms up, a final plea to the empty air.

Blood still flowing down the Haxan's front, the mechanical being swayed on its feet, as if drunk. Handless, it lowered its arms in confusion now that it was no longer able to hurt itself. It stared at Roahn, its blank expression managing to reflect a modicum of gratitude. Then its legs gave out and it fell into a sitting position with a heavy thud, its back now resting against the edge of the bed, head lolling upon a limp neck.

Roahn also dropped back down to the ground and was now sitting on her knees. The hunched commander faced the fallen and dying warrior, seemingly worlds apart. She looked forlornly upon her former enemy, not knowing what to say. The Haxan wheezed faint breaths, knowing what it was about to leave behind.

The quarian finally found her voice. "Why did you do it?"

"Why?" the Haxan coughed, its voice growing pained. Blood continued to flow out from its burst heart, but incredibly, it was still alive. "You think… I did it for you?"

"I don't know, Skye. I just don't know anymore."

"Blunt… as always," the Haxan coughed, managing to infuse a tone of admiration. "I always did… like that about you… Roahn." Something croaked from its ruined vocabulator and the warrior shuddered. "I ruined everything… didn't I?"

Roahn just looked at the Haxan, steeled and quiet.

The Haxan echoed the quarian's stare pitifully. "Maybe I did it… so that I could finally look upon you… and see something that reminded… that reminded me of our time together. Something other than disdain. Or maybe… I did it because I finally understand. Whatever we had… it wasn't real. I never made it real. And you could never love me… because of it."

Struggling to orient itself, the Haxan put on one final burst of strength, but its tortured nerves could take no more and its body slid slightly downward at an angle. A dark pool began to spread out from where the cyborg lay, almost reaching its knees. Its final breaths approaching, the Haxan cooled towards its approaching uncertainty.

"I hope… it's real… with him," it said, using the last of its strength to minutely nod towards the lower decks.

Roahn provided a solemn nod, her eyes somber past the violent decal of her mask. "It is."

"Good," the Haxan seemed to sigh. "That's good."

The Haxan died without fanfare. No shuddering final breath or a lingering twitch of its remaining limbs. Simply silence. The sole remaining optic that made up its eye just winked out, the only indication of the cyborg's passing, left to dim in the all-consuming darkness. It was just gone, leaving an empty shell behind.

A lump rushed up Roahn's throat but stuck halfway. It was the same feeling that had come upon her when she had held her dying father. When she had watched Garrus be euthanized. She would not weep for Skye, but the feeling angrily throbbed in her gullet, angered at being unreleased. It kept her rooted to the ground, surrounded by the dead and the cauldrons of spilled blood.

Numbly, the quarian stared off into space, trying to imagine a few of those warm memories that she had shared with Skye, even those experienced in their most private of moments, but as she sat there on the cold, wet ground, hands limply perched on her thighs as she continued to sit on her knees, nothing arose for her.

Her memories, much like the metallic remains that lay before her, held nothing.

---

A/N: Okay, I've officially gone off the deep end. 22,000 words is WAY too much for an average chapter, so I'm very much hoping that none of the upcoming ones are going to come close to what I had to write over the past two weeks. The good news is that I expected this chapter to be the longest judging from what I had in my outline, so unless I somehow stumble across Stephen King's drug stash from the 80s, all future chapters should be pared down to a more reasonable length from now on. At least, they shouldn't crack the 20K word mark.

Well, at least this chapter was not all filler, though. And not all filled with darkness - say it ain't so, Rob!

Playlist:

Sagan and the ICEgates
"Zordom and Gloom"
Mark Mothersbaugh and Wataru Hokoyama
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Reaper Domain / Ministry's Ballad
"Navras"
Don Davis and Juno Reactor
The Matrix Revolutions (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Mechwar (Sam's Big Moment)
"Together We Fight"
Daniel Pemberton
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (Vol. 1) (Original Netflix Series Soundtrack)

Brawlers (Roahn v. Haxan)
"It's an Operating Table. And I'm the Surgeon."
Christopher Drake
The Dark Knight Returns (Vol. 1) (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Stunned / Skye Returns
"Space Suicide"
David Buckley
Call of Duty: Ghosts (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Haxan No More
"On Your Way"
Daniel Pemberton
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)