Author's Note: First, I was editing the previous chapters in response to one of the reviews (see below) and noticed that none of the scene breaks (***) came through when I copied the files out of Word. That's been fixed now. Sorry about that. Without those, the previous chapters sorta...jump all over the place. Thanks for sticking with me. Should be fixed. EDIT: Okay, it wasn't fixed. Should be now. I don't know why it won't let me use asterisks as line breaks, but I assume the (XXXXX) will work.
Now, A few comments in response to reviews:
EXALT being handled all at once: That's a consequence of operating a total, global war. I really enjoyed handling EXALT in X-Com, but there's no reason a global organization charged with saving the planet needs to be nickel and diming their anti-insurgency work. Instead of chasing down one cell at a time, forces were sent anywhere remotely plausible. We only see the headquarters raid which obviously involved heavy forces, but plenty of perfectly innocent alien enthusiasts, or conspiracy cranks got their doors broken down and the shit kicked out of them, along with the EXALT cells who got their doors broken down and shot a bunch of times (and some innocent cranks got shot a bunch of times, though there it was by accident).
X-COM 2 canonicity with this fic/how teleport works given how psionics work here: Now, obviously X-Com 2 isn't going to happen as written. However, it is indeed what would have happened, but for the intervention of the Quarians. Teleport does exist, but it's not a psionic ability, but is rather technology based off their FTL drives.
Shouldn't psionic jammers cause intense pain and vertigo in non-psionics as well? There's a good argument that they should, but I'm conceptualizing this like high frequency sound emitters used to irritate/drive away animals or teenagers. Without the capacity to 'hear' and act on that level, it doesn't affect you.
Codex entries need something to differentiate more between them on the page: Good idea, edits made. Previous chapters should be updated now.
"Find anything?" Quil'Tana asked, grateful for his suit's air recycling capability as they picked through the remnants of the Ethereal's ground base.
"Lots more fragments. Oh, you meant anything which hadn't been blown to shit? Nah," Lieutenant Duff said, leaning on the wall of the underground base and looking with a mixture of dismay and disgust over the shattered equipment and broken corpses that had been the enemy base. "This is why we should never have come out of the closet. The locals just aren't equipped for this sort of thing and make a hash of it."
Quil glanced at his companion, "Come out of the closet?" he asked, confused.
"Stopped hiding," she glossed, kindly. The blonde Australian lieutenant towered over her shorter comrade and her body armor bulked her out to almost twice his size. Despite the Meld treatment he'd received, he wore his suit, as it hadn't yet been broken down to provide materials for Human body armor and because the odor of the battlefield was likely to be unpleasant. He was an engineer, not a soldier, even if he'd been given a laser pistol to carry here. Even the general odors of the planet gave him trouble, he didn't want to think about how bad the stench of a battlefield would have been. It might even have made him vomit, which was strictly taboo in the all-suited, shipboard life of a Quarian.
"Ah," he added that as an idiomatic translation to the translator. "Well, that's at least guessable from the words, unlike 'cock of the walk,' which did not translate well at all."
"I don't know, 'walking penis' describes Bradford pretty well," she answered with a smirk.
He gave that a slight chuckle, as Humans had trouble reading body language through the suit. "If you say so. I haven't had any luck either. The computer systems are blown to scrap. I've got a few samples of some sort of liquid and what looks like bone fragments, but I can't tell if they're from horrific alien experiments, or from the battle itself."
"Yeah, well, that's what happens when the locals use a regiment in place of a platoon and confuse high explosives with covering fire," Duff said. "And you know you're an alien too, right?"
"From your perspective," Quil countered. Duff sniggered and started to respond, but the small man continued, "And after last night, I didn't think you objected to my experiments."
Duff blushed, an autonomic reaction which continued to both amuse and hypnotize Quil, but her response was firm and lewd as she explained what experiments she had planned for tonight.
Codex: Quarian-Human Relationships, Unlocked.
XXXXX
"What happened?" Bradford asked one of the scanner techs.
"It exploded."
"I saw that! Why did it explode?"
"Some sort of self-destruct mechanism," the tech guessed.
"Obviously, but we had the bridge and engineering! How'd they detonate the damn thing?" Bradford snapped. "That's the third shuttle we've lost. I don't think the Quarians are going to loan us anymore." With the Hatak gone and the Migrant Fleet not yet arrived, they needed more ships. Especially as the Ethereals were nibbling away at the octet of frigates. They'd stopped trying to avoid the planet's defenders, instead engaging whenever they reasonably could. Three of the frigates had already been destroyed and the remaining five patrolled as a single unit, letting more and more ships slip past them, despite their best efforts.
"How should I know?" the tech saw the look on his superior's face and added a 'sir'. Then, inadvisably, continued, "For all we know they're setting the damn things off with their minds."
"Be ser—hmmm…fit psionic jammers on half a dozen of the new Skyrangers. We'll take them in atmosphere."
"They'll blast it out of the sky!" the tech pointed out.
"That's not your problem to solve," Bradford said, stalking off in search of Semmi, Dr. Shen and the Commander.
XXXXX
General Van Doorn huddled behind the remains of the lead APC which had been shattered by fire from the Ethereal scout craft holding position above the road. His soldiers were behind him, defending the civilians, while he kept an eye on the scout craft and tried to summon assistance.
The Quarians were not civilians, but they also weren't ground combatants and they'd surrendered their suits for reprocessing to permit them to be used by Humans. The Ethereals had been trying to capture Quarians since they discovered the presence of the second sapient species on the planet. Peter Van Doorn would die before he let that happen. God only knew what they wanted Humans, and now Quarians, for, but he wasn't about to give his enemies any-damn-thing they wanted.
A few of the Quarians had omni-tools equipped for combat and were using them to send drones forward to attack the X-Rays pouring from the transport ship which had landed behind the convoy (after shredding the rear APC with plasma fire). The drones did well at distracting the wave of Mutons, but the electric shock intended to damage shields didn't do much more than give the giant X-Ray's a little jolt.
Two squads of UN peacekeepers were still alive back there, focusing fire on one X-Ray at a time, while the Mutons were still distracted by drones, though Yofi'Seha vas Wuron, leader of this group of Quarians had done the math and warned Van Doorn that they would run out of materials to spawn drones before the transport ran out of Mutons. Especially since the soldiers had used most of their grenades repulsing the initial assault.
A radioed command had all his rearguard falling back, collapsing inwards on the remnants of the convoy. His radioed demand produced a response which informed him that, so long as that scoutship remained in the air, no conventional support could get to him. A radioed plea got a response that informed him that the remaining frigates were engaged elsewhere. An unradioed curse got him a glare from the (to his mind) overly-religious Quarian.
"We will not be taken and used against our people," the woman said.
Van Doorn glanced over at her and was a little disconcerted to see that, despite her stillness and the dead level tone of her voice, her face was contorted with fear. This was his second trip escorting Quarians and so the complete inability of Quarians to control their facial reactions (as they'd never had to in a society where they always wore helmets) was only mostly a surprise. Yofi was, as best he could tell, a decade older than his own, mid-forties, though her unwrinkled grey skin and un-grey, cropped short, black hair made that a guesstimate at best.
"I'm open to suggestions," Van Doorn responded.
"There's a high explosive in the truck we were riding in. It should be sufficient to vaporize our bodies. However, you will need to ensure that your people are approximately a hundred meters away and that the destruction of a sphere with a radius of 100 meters will not destabilize this road."
It was a highway in the middle of a city on the ground. Quarians didn't really get planetary stability. Fortunately, every civilian in the range had already fled.
Van Doorn wasn't about to kill the people he'd been charged to protect. "Seriously?" he asked, staring at her for a moment.
"The Commodore gave standing orders. We don't know why they want your bodies or ours, but we won't give these bosh'tet any victory," she explained in same tone she'd had when she discussed her religious beliefs and she explained about the wisdom of her ancestors guiding her. That was how strongly the Quarians viewed the commands of the Commodore, Niva'Zorah, one of the honored dead.
Mind spinning, he came to the obvious solution, eventually. "That ship's got guns, right?" he asked her, looking back at the transport.
"Sure."
"Can you or any of your folks use them to blow that ship out of the sky?" Van Doorn asked.
"We can't even get in there. None of us are infiltrators. We got a couple of techs and a couple of engineers, but no one with significant combat capability."
"Getting you in there is my problem. If I solve it, can you use one of their guns to take out that ship?"
Yofi shrugged, "Maaaaaybe?"
The scout ship fired on a police car which got too close, turning it into a melted hulk, fused to the road. A second blast of plasma fire shattered a ground-to-air missile launched by the locals. "That's better odds than we've got so far. You're with me. Bring any of the Quarians who can be useful."
A few typed commands in her omni-tool would summon them. "And the others?" she asked, before deciding whether or not she would follow his command.
Van Doorn's face was completely blank, in the rather disturbing fashion of humans. "They should stay on the truck," he said. 'with the bomb,' he didn't say, but she heard it.
Yofi nodded and gave the orders. Two other Quarians joined them, one the biggest Quarian Van Doorn had ever seen, hefting a giant wrench meant for repairing Bradleys, the other a tiny little man with a combat knife salvaged from one of the dead soldiers (Humans could use Quarian ranged weapons with minimal difficulty, but the reverse was not true, given the arrangement of their fingers). They both glanced at Yofi, who was clearly senior to either of the youngsters, but they asked the question of the General. "What's the plan?"
"Watch," Van Doorn said to them and, "Now," he said to his radio.
With the Quarian engineers back with him, there were no drones on the field and the Human soldiers had fallen back behind a few crashed vehicles. The original convey had been made up of four Bradley Fighting Vehicles full of soldiers, and one truck, full of Quarians and two Tiger attack helicopters on overwatch. The first and last APCs (along with any civilian vehicle that happened to be in the line of sight of the small craft) had been hit with the full power of the invader's weapons, melting them, cooking the crew and passengers alive, and blocking off their ability to either advance or retreat along the road. The helicopters had foolishly tried to engage the enemy craft and lay in smoking heaps beside the highway.
The inner APCs had each taken fire from the transport as it landed, but it didn't deploy the full force of its weapons for fear of destroying the truck which sat at the center of the formation and held the Quarians they had come for. Given the explosions which had followed the impact of plasma fire on the foremost and lattermost APCs, they'd probably made the right call, even without the touchy high explosives on the truck. Presumably they didn't know about the explosives.
Still, that decision had let the soldiers and crew bail out of their disabled APCs. Unfortunately for the enemy, they had failed to recognize that not all of the weapons on the armored vehicles were destroyed. Though neither of the APCs could move, the attacking alien forces ran headlong into fire from the M242, 25 mm chaingun which was the main weapon of the rearmost surviving APC, and from the M240 machine gun which was the secondary weapon of the other surviving APC.
The machine gun wasn't any more effective than the weapon their heavies had carried at the start of the war, except it was more stable, being fixed to the turret and so could put fifty rounds into a target at a time with no difficulty. Even worse for the X-Rays, the chaingun fired rounds three times the size of the machinegun's and its ammunition included high explosive rounds which ripped Mutons apart and armor piercing rounds which ripped through body armor like it was nothing. If they could have kept the vehicles alive under plasma fire, a tank division could have defeated the entire invasion, Van Doorn believed. Of course, Van Doorn had come up as a tank commander.
"With me!" Van Doorn commanded, collecting all eight surviving soldiers as he led them behind the APC whose chaingun was firing. Unfortunately, its turret was partially fused in place, giving it a minimal arc to rotate in, so only by luring the X-Rays into that line could they use it. Fortunately, the Mutons who made up the bulk of the attacking force didn't seem to recognize that. A cluster of Floaters took off from behind the wall of bleeding (and occasionally exploding, when hit with a high explosive round) green flesh. The turrets couldn't rise enough to target the flying X-Rays as they swept over the battlefield, strafing the APCs and the handful of soldiers who were paused in their advance, trying to protect them.
Even the light plasma rifles they carried could melt the armor of the Bradleys, or the pavement of the road, as they peppered the area. The distance, instability of the flying X-Rays and the fact that they were jinking around to dodge ground fire meant that their accuracy wasn't very good. Still, enough were hitting the Bradley, or the ground around it, to begin cooking the crew who'd remained inside to ambush the Mutons. Van Doorn ordered the advance to continue and led the way, hoping to pull the Floaters away from the Bradleys as they slid between the wrecked cars towards the transport. Yofi muttering something into her omni-tool as she followed.
The Floaters ignored the bait and by the time Van Doorn and the troops were in position to make the rush to the entrance to the ship, two of the three remaining Quarians had left the truck and taken up position sitting on the Bradleys, more than making up for the soldiers who'd followed Van Doorn towards the transport ship. Not because of their combat capacity, which was nonexistent, but still the Floaters ceased firing for fear of killing the Quarians they were trying to capture. The third Quarian remained huddled in the truck, regardless of Yofi's order to act as Quarian shields.
As the Quarian took a seat atop the Bradley, Van Doorn finally noticed their presence and glared at Yofi, who ignored the officer's irritation. Given the time pressure, the General didn't bother arguing, instead he glanced around the edge of the cover between them and the transport. A wide open space around the transport, with no cover, but all too many enemies. Van Doorn shouted a command over the sound of short bursts of chaingun fire and longer bursts of machine gun fire, which first targeted the landing Floaters, then when they were ripped apart, turned to join in aiming at the other attacking X-Rays. The crossfire kept most of the X-Rays pinned down, clustered just inside the transport's walls, as most of those outside had been shredded.
A TOW missile burst from the launcher beside the turret and exploded, blowing a hole in the front of the transport. Chaingun and machine gun alike fired to suppress and the General sent a team of three forward. They raced across the open space between cover and the side of the transport opposite to the explosion. The Ethereal's lack of locks came in handy yet again as they breached a door on the other side. The rest of the group crossed as a clump.
The transports all seemed to follow a basic pattern which General Van Doorn had studied, briefly, a while ago. They moved quickly, but stayed out of the main thoroughfare which was still seeing heavy traffic as more X-Rays poured towards the exit of the ship to reinforce the attackers. More TOW missiles fired, impacting the entrance, attempting to collapse it.
The anti-armor weapons weren't great against infantry, but the chaingun was running out of ammunition, as was the machine gun. The surviving crews' effort to swap ammunition between the two Bradleys worked partially, with the crewman able to carry one box of machine gun ammo to the Bradley with the functional machine gun. The return trip ended with the man on the ground, his chest a concave, smoking hollow.
The assault team was in position, outside both entrances to the bridge, having used a few drones as distractions to escape notice until they reached the bridge. While they'd moved, General Van Doorn had quickly briefed the team on tactics for breaching the bridge and neutralizing the crew there, at least as well as he could without any actual experience with the X-Rays and with no idea how many, or what variety of X-Rays would be on the flight deck.
About the time they reached the entrances to the bridge, the chaingun fell silent. The Quarian sitting atop that Bradley hopped down and tried to escort the crew back to the other crippled Bradley, whose machine gun was still firing. A quartet of Muton Berserkers emerged from the transport and rushed forward. Machinegun fire and small arms fire from the panicking and fleeing Bradley crew managed to down one, but the other three reached the cluster and ripped apart the unarmored soldiers easily and captured the Quarian even more easily. She fought, but with neither weapon, nor armor, she was extremely ineffective.
There was a shocking silence as the other Bradley ceased fire rather than hit the girl. The Berserkers turned on the, suddenly-still, second Bradley. Victory gleamed in their dull eyes and one held up the Quarian as a living shield and began to approach the other Bradley. The gunner stared for a moment. There was only one course of action, but the Quarian was just a girl, barely more than a child and she was so scared. It was written all over her face. Still, she'd gone to defend his brothers in arm with no weapons, no armor, no nothing. He couldn't kill her for that. His commander and the other crewman were dead, there was no one else to save. He couldn't kill her to save himself, even if the alternative was them both dying.
Suddenly a thumping and screaming from the top of the APC penetrated his distraction. "FIRE THE GUN, BOSH'TET! IF YOU LET THEM TAKE HER ALIVE I WILL PISS ON YOUR ASHES!"
Codex: Quarian Insults, Unlocked.
The Quarian voice penetrated the momentary fog and the soldier fired automatically, forcing himself to watch. No one would ever know if he was crying as the bullets tore her, and the Berserkers who'd through to hide behind her, apart. If they'd tried to take cover, or charge, they might have stood a chance, but they'd thought they were safe.
Without the chaingun, the single machinegun couldn't hold for long. General Van Doorn knew that and gave the order (after reminding them to do their best to try not to blow up the controls they needed to use). Fortunately, the room only had a pair of Thin Men and an Outsider while the assault team had the advantage of surprise. "DON'T KILL THEM IN HERE!" Van Doorn shouted to the trio of soldiers rushing each of the Thin Men. The last thing he needed was a toxic cloud filling the bridge and preventing the Quarians from using it.
The Thin Men were stronger than they looked, but with one man on each arm and a third behind the X-Rays, holding their mouth shut to prevent them from spitting poison at anyone, they weren't able to do much.
The Outsider was more troublesome, but one of Van Doorn's pair of remaining soldiers tackled him while the other was getting shot in the head. They struggled for a moment before the General arrived and pulled the rifle from the Outsider's hands. Van Doorn pulled out his combat knife and waited for the Outsider to get the upper hand. It did, rolling the soldier onto his back and going for a chokehold.
A knife in the spine killed it as easily as any Human, though getting it in there was a bit trickier and required a great deal more force. Even more bizarre was the part where the Outsider curled in on itself, wrapping its body into a gemlike shard.
While Van Doorn had been handling the Outsider, outside, Yofi had given an order to the larger of her two engineers, then led the other inside. They began to work, three fingered hands dancing over Ethereal controls, omni-tools and the Outsider corpse alike.
Van Doorn considered asking how long it would take, then considered the Quarians outside, acting as living shields for his men and decided that that would be a stupid question. He did poke his head outside to set up the guards (and, incidentally, see what the fuck was going on with the third Quarian). The big man swung his heavy wrench like a baseball bat, crushing the Thin Man's skull like tissue paper. The X-Ray had been propelled forward by the three soldiers who'd dragged it from the flight deck and were now standing far enough back not to be caught in the toxic cloud it expelled when it died, unlike the wrench-wielding Quarian.
The soldiers (who weren't holding the other, writhing, Thin Man) stared in shock at the cloud. They clearly hadn't really believed it would release a green cloud of toxic gas the moment it died, despite the warnings from X-Com and the General. Van Doorn opened his mouth to curse all of them out for being fucking idiots and endangering one of their protectees when the Quarian walked out of the cloud and took up position on the other end of the hall, awaiting the second Thin Man's arrival. "What the hell?" he asked weakly, instead.
The senior NCO of the surviving troops, a Corporal Bennet, replied, "Sir, he said he was immune to their poison. Something about having different DNA? Seems to work."
"All right," the General was stunned for a moment, then glared pointedly at the four (including the one who'd followed him out, soldiers now just standing around. The Corporal got the message and got everyone moving into cover where they could fire on anyone who approached, not that their H&K G36s were great weapons against the aliens. The Outsider's weapon was unusable by them, but the light plasma rifles the Thin Men had carried were usable by people with five fingers. Van Doorn let the NCO determine who would wield those weapons, as they should be carried by the best shots and he had no clue who that was.
The second Thin Man was propelled to where the large Quarian was standing. He tried desperately to avoid the oncoming mass of a four foot long wrench, propelled by a man half a foot taller than Van Doorn's six feet. So, instead of having his skull crushed, he had his shoulder smashed and lived long enough to spit poison up at the looming Quarian. A savage set of stomps killed the X-Ray and the Quarian came out of the toxic cloud without damage to anything but his boots.
"Just like Tel'ro back in the Fleet," the Quarian said cheerfully. Then he almost tripped over his own feet as the blood tried to fuse to the deck. "Well, pretty close anyway."
Codex: Tel'ro, Unlocked.
Before the General could think of a response to that, let alone say it, the engineer was gone to join his fellows in the flight deck. As with the other transport ships, the flight deck was a brief, separate structure built on the same superstructure as the rest of the ship, but separated by an open space, which raised question in Van Doorn's mind about how it was accessed while the ship was in space.
The Corporal placed himself and his six remaining soldiers to guard its approaches. One went topside and watched the sides and back, while the other six of them took position near the entrances to the main cargo bays, where they could pick off X-Rays as they passed through the natural chokepoints of the doors and waited.
Meanwhile, back on the other side of the ship, the machinegun fire had kept the organic enemies at bay, but the X-Rays finally managed to get a Sectopod out of storage and through the narrow halls of the transport. The machine gun didn't do more than scratch the paint and the TOW missile launcher on the surviving APC was nonfunctional. The mech advanced and the Quarian atop the APC began to consider whether she could trigger the explosive on the truck before being cut down, or caught.
A squeak escaped her lips when the top of the APC opened and the gunner grabbed her around the waist, pulling her inside. He sealed it back up and they huddled together inside, hoping the Sectopod would not kill them, the scout ship above would not kill them, or carry them off, and that something, anything, would happen to save them.
The Sectopod stepped forward and disdained using any of its weapons on the APC, for fear of destroying its gooey Quarian center. Instead a solid stomp smashed all the weapons on the APC's turret. After a moment, the more squishy members of the X-Ray force advanced on the truck and dragged the lone Quarian inside from it, kicking and screaming.
The Quarian inside the APC swore and tried to trigger the bomb with her omni-tool, but the device didn't go off. She couldn't tell whether there was a mechanical problem, it had sustained some damage from the firefight, or the X-Rays had finally decided to jam communications. More X-Rays approached and began to pry at the hatch. Fortunately, the one in the turret had been jammed by the Sectopod's stomp. Unfortunately, the one on the back of the Bradley wasn't going to stand up to the muscle of that many Mutons. Not once they managed to get a rope anchored to it.
As for Van Doorn, he'd resisted manfully, but finally caved and went into the bridge to see how it was going. Yofi was working on her omni-tool while one of the men was working on a console and the other working on the crystal that was the Outsider's corpse. He asked the obvious question and received the obvious response, then went back outside.
Van Doorn didn't know if the Ethereals suddenly realized the bridge crew were dead, or the Quarians tripped some sort of alarm, or the crew of the scout ship had finally informed the ground troops that they'd snuck across, or something more esoteric occurred, but suddenly there was movement towards them. Fortunately, the full contingent of Floaters seemed to have been eliminated and the scout ship chose not to destroy the transport's flight deck, so they didn't need to worry about an air assault. Even more fortunately, the Sectopod remained to guard the APC (not that he knew that) rather than attempt the narrow halls of the transport a second time. However, despite the casualties taken due to their own stupidity, there were still a good sized pack of Mutons approaching, led by a few Thin Men.
Their position was good. Their weapons were not. The Thin Men went down easily enough, their toxic cloud poisoning the shock troops which followed them, but the Mutons' armor shed the 5.56 NATO rounds fired by the soldiers' rifles. A lucky hit to the throat, or one of the joints might get through, but the vast majority of the shots produced nothing but sparks and ricochets. The two recovered plasma rifles did much better. Only the fact that they were picking off the Mutons one at a time as they came through the doors let them hold for as long as they did. So when the Muton Elite leading the pack led a group in a brief flanking attack, they were completely fucked.
Inside the flight deck, Yofi was slicing through the Ethereal's computer security easily enough. She'd trained to counter Geth electronic warfare, the Ethereals had nothing on the enemy AI. The problem was connecting with the ship's systems at all. By her side, tiny Tlav'Kinna, who she'd once had to beat the shit out of for setting the artificial gravity in her ex's quarters to five times Rannoch normal, had finally finished the makeshift interface between her omni-tool and the Outsider Shard. Gigantic Garl'Miva had their best translation program running and was handling the other end of the interface, that between the Shard and the computer systems. The hardware connection had been a beast to set up and was almost equally irritating to manage. It would have been impossible if they hadn't studied the Ethereal tech already (indeed, they'd been heading to a lab in Berlin to provide research support before everything had gone wrong).
Even worse was the software connection. The fact that Quarians worked in base 6, while the Ethereals used base 20 was only the beginning of the trouble. If she'd been trying to do anything more complicated than point and shoot, then there would have been no chance of success. As it was, the chance was still minimal and not helped by the fact that she could not get five seconds of quiet.
At least the guns on the Humans primitive armored vehicles had finally shut up and the plasma weapons carried by the invaders were relatively quiet, but the chemically powered guns wielded by the majority of the Humans were almost unbearably loud. She'd never thought she'd miss her helmet once she was finally able to take it off, but she really wanted its sound dampeners as she tried once more to make the system respond.
Finally she was in the right system, brought the weapons online and got the aiming system working. It was simple enough. The plasma cannon placed above the main cargo hold swung into alignment and she could see from the cameras built into it that it was lined up properly, but the ship would not fire while the weapon was aimed at another Ethereal ship.
"Well, shit."
A moment's thought and she brought another cannon online and into alignment and set them to fire as quickly as possible and simultaneously. Shots passed under the scout ship, superheating the air beneath it and lifting it up into the shots coming from the second cannon, which had been aimed the minimum distance above the scout ship which the system would allow.
Through the cameras, she could see the remnants of the smaller craft fall from the sky. Only then did it occur to her to check and see if the plasma rounds would hit anything before leaving the atmosphere, or dissipating. They wouldn't.
Garl headed back out, though he didn't stick his head out of the protection of the flight deck's walls. "Got it. Ship's down," his announcement came about ten seconds before the crack of fire from the soldier standing atop the bridge's roof and his announcement that three Mutons and an 'even fucking BIGGER space-orc, with an even FUCKING bigger gun' was coming around the south side of the ship.
"Radios are still jammed. Can you fix it?" Van Doorn asked, waving a hand at his soldiers.
Moments later, half a dozen grenades flew towards the charging Mutons. Despite not sticking their heads out of cover, with guidance from the soldier on overwatch, four of the six managed to land amongst the enemy. One was kicked away by the Muton Elite, exploding harmlessly in the air between the two groups of combatants. The other three exploded, shrapnel scything down two of the regular Mutons and bloodying both the last Muton and their leader. It did not, however, slow their charge, though it did prompt the last surviving Muton to pound its chest and scream as it rushed them.
In turn, a grenade flew ahead of the Muton Elite as it ran, the plasma fire sweeping away cover and three of Van Doorn's soldiers with equal ease. Garl dropped a drone between the two groups.
"No chance I can do anything about the jammers. I can't even find them," Yofi answered, joining the others outside the flight deck and following up Garl's drone with one of her own as the Muton shattered Garl's drone with a casual punch, ignoring the burst of electricity that flared as the tiny VI driven drone died.
"Anyone got any grenades left?" Van Doorn asked the group at large as a Muton burst through the chokepoint the, now-dead, soldiers had been guarding. A shot from their lone remaining plasma rifle staggered the massive creature and Garl dropped another drone to delay it.
"I'm out," he announced loudly, a few moments after the soldiers announced that they too had run out of grenades (having used most of them in the initial defense of the convoy). None of the Quarians had the right programs to fabricate grenades, not that their omni-tools had much a reserve of omni-gel without their suits and this late in the battle.
"Fall back. Fry their system if you can," he shouted to the Quarian still in the bridge.
"Done. I've pulled everything I can from the system and cooked it," the smaller Quarian yelled back.
"Run for it," Van Doorn yelled, matching words to actions, though he made sure he was behind Yofi and not just for the view. The Corporal took the lead, dropping over the edge of the ship, landing hard, but still moving. "Circle us around back towards the APCs!" Van Doorn screamed before emptying his rifle in the general direction of the, swiftly-growing, pack of Mutons which was bursting off the ship.
Between suppressing fire from him and the two other slowest soldiers and a few drones dropped (by the Quarian engineers who still had whatever they used to create the artificial constructs), they managed to lengthen their lead, until they rounded the corner of the large ship and ran straight into the Sectopod, still guarding the crippled APC.
The mech's chest cannon vaporized the Corporal and the other soldier acting as their vanguard. Garl had the sense to step back, staying in the cover of the ship's body. A shouted warning stopped the others (except Tlav, who was running too fast, overshot and ran right into a shot) but with the Mutons behind them, the situation was desperate. The General didn't want to send them off into the city, for fear of leading the Mutons toward wherever the civilians were hiding.
Still, he had a mission to complete. "Into the city!" he ordered. They made it almost two blocks before the flight of attack helicopters arrived, spitting missiles. The Mutons' plasma rifles took down two of the choppers, but the Mutons died as well. An airstrike took out the Sectopod, miraculously without killing the pair trapped in the Bradley, though it would be several hours before they could be rescued. The escape pod that launched from the transport, carrying the lone captured Quarian was shot down before escaping the atmosphere. There were no survivors.
Van Doorn sat in the parked helicopter waiting for the last two of the people he was responsible for to be pried out of the wreckage of the Bradley. He'd started out with six Quarians, four Bradleys, two Tigers, sixteen crewmen and twenty seven soldiers, plus himself and the driver of the truck. Fifty one people. Two soldiers, one APC crewman, three Quarians and him were all that was left. Seven, out of fifty one. Less than fifteen percent of his people had survived. He'd been there to make sure nothing went wrong while dealing with the Quarians.
He snorted to himself. Well, he'd failed completely at that.
Yofi was trying to prevent Garl from giving directions to the Humans prying his sister out of the Bradley, but after three attempts, she threw up her hands and gave up, leaving the giant to irritate the combat engineers and joined Van Doorn. She took a seat next to him, as if they were old friends. "Well done, Peter," she said, using his first name, as he'd requested when they'd met, was it only six hours earlier?
He glared at the older woman, who smiled back at him. "I don't find this very damn funny. They killed almost all my boys. I'm bringing back three of them."
"And three of us," she noted, looking away from him, trying to keep her expression private. "And you."
"Seven. So impressive."
"There were twenty billion Quarians when the Geth rose against us. There are eighteen million now. You did better than we did. But," she looked back at him, expression odd, "we're still here, even a hundred years later. And now we walk free of our suits again. Your people did that, and we will not forget it, nor will we forget that half of our people survived here, only by the sacrifice of your soldiers. And it was a sacrifice, General, not a defeat, not a failure. They tried to kidnap us, Ancestors alone know why, they want us, alive and dead alike, and they got nothing. And that is how we'll beat them," she leaned against him, taking the support she needed after a hell of a day and offering it in turn.
He relaxed and let his head come to rest against her short-cropped black hair. It helped. Not as much as it should have, but it helped.
Codex: Peter and Yofi, Unlocked.
XXXXX
"What the fuck is that?" Abda'Tova Vas Lorion asked, staring at her monitor.
Her captain leaned over her shoulder and glanced at it. "Might be background radiation?"
"That's what I thought, but look," she flicked up a historical analysis, "it spikes whenever the X-Ray behavior changes, see," she tapped a spike, "this is when the Hatak intervened at Dhaka; this," she tapped another spike, "this was after we took out their fleet behind this planet's moon," a final tap, "and this was just before that battleship attacked Mexico City."
"Localize the source," the captain ordered, leaving her to the horribly difficult task.
"Yes, sir," Abda replied, grumpily.
XXXXX
Lieutenant Kal'Tova, liaison officer between the remnants of the Migrant Fleet present in this system and the ever-expanding Human planetary defense coalition, was a very busy man. Every military leader on the planet had ideas about how his force of five frigates could best defend the planet (even if most of those ideas consisted of: 'defend my country, and, I guess, if you have time, also our allies'). He was, therefore, absolutely ecstatic to be having a conversation about an actual, tactical, operation. If it was one that didn't threaten the destruction of his ships, he'd have been even more ecstatic.
Still, "It's got to be some sort of stealth ship. That's the only thing that makes sense. If we can retrofit it to our ships, we've got a chance to hold out. Sooner or later they're going to get lucky and drop battleship right in the middle of our ships and rip us apart. We need that tech."
Codex: Ethereal Stealth Technology, Unlocked.
"We need our frigates intact. We've captured three ships intact on the ground and haven't managed to get them back off it, except in pieces, carried by other craft. Even if we manage to keep them from blowing themselves up, which I doubt, no offense, Bradford, I think we still end up crashing into the planet," Semmi countered.
"No news from the Berlin lab, then?" Dr. Vahlen put in.
"No breakthrough that will let us steal their ships, no," Semmi responded.
"Still, with the psionic dampeners on a couple of Skyrangers, I think we have a good chance of taking the ship," Bradford argued.
"Maybe so, but those same jammers will screw with the interface we're building between our tech and theirs, even if that interface is just an Outsider charge plugged into an omni-tool," Semmi pointed out.
"We believe they're observing us and communicating with the Ethereal fleet. We can't have that. If they detect the approaching boarding party and move, will you be able to track them?" the Commander asked, after a long moment of thought.
"Not until they communicate again."
"Then blast them out of my sky and we'll get on with our lives."
"Yes sir," the group chorused, except for Dr. Vahlen and Dr. Shen who were already discussing the scientists and engineers who should be assigned to the job of sifting through the wreckage, looking for anything which would be useful, or enlightening.
XXXXX
Codex: Quarian-Human Relationships:
If you're looking for the entry on relations between Quarians and Humans as species, you want Quarian-Human Relations.
Quarians and Humans have the highest rate of interspecies relationships except for the Asari and everyone/anyone else. These relationships are limited by the dextro-levo barriers and, obviously, infertility. Less obviously, they are also limited by the pressure on Quarians to reproduce to ensure none of their, relatively limited, genetic diversity is lost.
Pushing the other way are the close proximity of the two species, similar standards of beauty, the lure of the exotic and societal programming as a vast number of Quarian-Human relationships appear in fiction and amongst the heroes of the Ethereal War. And sometimes both at once.
The persistent rumor of a relationship between the Commander of X-Com and Commodore Zorah survived both of them and the fact that there's no evidence for it, or that they were ever alone together. To true believers, that's just more evidence, as surely those two could have found a way.
Every few years, these relationships result in a well-publicized fatality amongst young people too stupid, or too horny to take appropriate precautions against the potential effects of interspecies relationships, despite the widespread availability of various devices to minimize those risks. Indeed, the interspecies relationships have given rise to a minor industry of such products. It is anticipated that this industry may expand if relations are ever opened with the Turian Hierarchy and the rest of the Council Species.
Codex: Quarian Insults:
Most sapient species share a large number of insults and curse words, revolving around defecation, waste, low status indicators and (with the exception of the Asari) fornication. However, for more culturally specific insults, translators generally don't work, on the theory that meaning would be lost (and that they might provoke unfortunate reactions). For Quarians, this includes the most common insult/curse, Bosh'tet. A literal translation would be something along the lines of 'disgraceful thing, person, or situation'
This is in line with the majority of other Quarian insults, which revolve around the idea that a person has failed to live up to their responsibilities to their ship, the Fleet, their family, or, worst of all, their ancestors. The remaining insults generally turn around more conventional insults directed towards the other party's ship, family, or, worst of all, the corpse or character of their ancestors.
Codex: Tel'ro:
This traditional Quarian game was somewhat similar to baseball, only with multiple routes through the bases, three pitchers and two hitters. The original rules were elaborate, but they required large amounts of open space, which wasn't, generally, available in the Migrant Fleet. So a modified version was created. A player took position at a central intersection, and the ball is thrown. The batter uses a piece of equipment, often, though not always, a wrench, to send the ball flying, then takes off down one of the four corridors, seeking the, predesignated, 'Rannoch' which gives them victory.
The pitcher's teammates then pursue the ball. Once one of them has captured it, they attempt to block the hitter's path, while the hitter's teammates attempt to clear it. However, no one is allowed to interfere with the player who has retrieved the ball and only that player can bring the round to an end by capturing the player. Besides entertaining players and teaching them some hand-to-hand skills, it also provides practice moving quietly throughout the ship, useful in case of boarding.
Codex: Peter and Yofi:
The love story between Peter Van Doorn and Yofi'Seha is extremely famous. Whether for the tragic ending, or its long term impacts on Human-Quarian relations, it has spawned thirteen films, two holo series, three video games, a clothing line and a high-end line of omni-tools over the last century.
*ALERT. UNAUTHORIZED EDITS MAY HAVE BEEN MADE TO THIS ENTRY. ADMIN IS IN PROCESS OF REVIEWING AND EDITTING*
But the only one worth seeing is 2046's The Girl and the General, with Grisham St. James as General Van Doorn. The teenage hottie easily carries off the gravitas of the General and the addition of a subplot about Yofi's familial reaction is just brilliant!
Codex: Ethereal Stealth Technology
Ethereal stealth technology has remained the subject of study by government labs, corporations and independent cranks alike. Despite clear evidence of its existence, no references have been found in any Ethereal database and no working copies of the technology were ever captured.
The current best guess is some sort of combination of known stealth techniques, based around a larger scale, longer lasting, tactical cloak and heat storage technology, based around the higher thermal storage of Alien Alloys. That remains a best guess and is still difficult to believe, given that the one example we have held in place for some months, while current estimates are that after about two weeks the crew would start to cook inside their own ship, unless they could vent heat.
Author's Note: Though usually Outsider Shards only come when they're stunned, rather than killed, the means here used isn't one available in the game. I tend to think that the Outsider's Shard is lost when it dies with the weapon in its hand because some sort of feedback from the destruction of its weapon destroys it. As it doesn't die with the weapon in its hand, that doesn't happen here.
The other question is why the weapons aren't destroyed. I believe that they must be with the X-Ray when they die for that to happen. Once the aliens are captured and interrogated, they appear to be killed (indeed, they seem to be killed during questioning), but their weapons remain intact.
Reviews/comments are always welcome.