A/N: So, uh, I'm not dead. This just took a little longer to write than I thought it was. It's also been written over the course of, like, a month, so apologies for any inconsistencies in style or theme.
As an aside, I think I'm going to deviate slightly in terms of specifics. While originally I thought I'd hold very closely - line by line closely - to the original game's dialogue, that's really not workable, not without a lot of stuffing square pegs into round holes. So I'm releasing myself from my promise to keep the wording the same. I'll stay close to the original story in terms of events, and use the original dialogue where it makes sense, but I'll stop stressing myself out over small changes.
The big advantage of this, of course, is that I don't need to have a billion saved games at different points through the ME1 campaign to play. Yay, writing from memory!
Flight has been a unique point of fascination for humanity since the first proto-human looked skyward and felt jealous of the birds.
From ancient civilizations to modern ones, an almost universal constant in lore has been the presence of flight. The ancient Japanese wrote often on the freedom of the birds, while the biblical angels were literally winged humans in their later incarnations. Philosophers and common men alike both dreamed of taking to the skies.
It is no surprise, then, that with the discovery of element zero that humanity would leap upon the idea of trying out mass effect assisted flight for soldiers.
It was during the early combat trials that humans also (re)discovered a second, slightly less poetic term used to refer to flying targets, especially ones that were intended to be shot at:
Skeet.
There's no cover in the sky.
Humanity had spent almost as long learning how to knock things out of the air as they'd spent striving to put themselves up in it. The element zero assisted personal jet and hover packs worked flawlessly... but enemies on the ground took immediate advantage of the completely exposed, very obvious, and incredibly clumsy targets to blast them out of the sky with extreme prejudice.
The flight programs were almost universally scrapped, since being able to fly in the rare situations where external air support was unavailable and the ground troops wouldn't be blown to pieces for sticking their heads (and bodies, and legs...) out in the open wasn't worth the expense, weight, or bulk of the equipment.
While some experiments were done with reconfiguring the mass effect systems used in shield generators to provide a kind of crude "parachute" to every soldier, those systems were also quickly abandoned. The superconducting capacitors used to power a soldier's shield pack had more than enough capacity to power to negate the mass of a soldier for a short span of time, but unfortunately a five kilogram soldier falls at the same 9.8 meters per second squared as a one hundred kilogram soldier. Without some kind of parachute or opposing force directed downward, you either traveled as if in free fall, or you got blown around by every gust as your effective mass was reduced to practically nothing.
Still, this wasn't to say that element zero saw no use in airborne battlefield insertions: It had been possible to drastically shrink the size of a parachute, reducing both the visible cross-section of airdropped soldiers and the bulk hauled around later. You couldn't quite fit a modern parachute and mass effect field generator in your shirt pocket, but it was close, and they were common equipment in survival packs.
So when Shepard's team hit the ground on the edge of a marsh in Eden Prime, they simply reached up and grabbed the few square meters of synthetic cloth to stow it quickly in their rucksacks, rather than clamoring awkwardly out of huge swaths of heavy canvas.
Shepard didn't like fighting in marshes.
It was hard to move, solid cover was rare, stealth was impossible, and there was little in the environment that she could use to her advantage. Any fires she started could be doused with ease, anything heavy enough to inflict damage was too deeply embedded in the muck to throw, and cleaning swamp out of her armor always took hours. Still, at least it was a non-toxic swamp. If she had the poor luck to get injured, she'd need to seek medical attention in hours rather than in minutes.
She finished tucking her parachute into a pouch, then readied her shotgun. "Ready," she said over the short-range communicator.
"Ready," Alenko's comm-distorted voice echoed back. He sounded tense, but not panicked. That was good. Tension would mean he'd stay alert and focused, and in a situation where they were walking into an unknown hostile force, keeping one's head in the game was crucial.
"R-Ready," Jenkin replied, a hitch in his answer. Unsurprising, Shepard figured, given that he was watching his home burn.
Even she would be upset seeing that happen.
A quick glance around their landing zone had Shepard admiring the methodology of whoever had assaulted the planet. The attack had taken place in the late afternoon – a rarity against humans, given that most knew of their relatively weak night vision – and the unknown attackers had made full use of the psychological warfare opportunities that presented.
While night assaults are convenient if an attacker wishes to utilize the element of surprise, a daytime raid is preferable if the goal is to dominate and demoralize the target. Just as poor night vision makes it difficult for humanity to react to threats in the dark, it also prevents the victim from seeing the true scope of the devastation being wrought.
For that, a daytime raid with heavy weaponry and incendiary devices is far more effective than a night assault... and that had obviously been employed here. Thick plumes of smoke drifted through the sky, dense enough to give the fading sunlight an almost infernal cast. Between the large-scale excavation that had obviously been under way long before the assault started and the ominous red glow bathing the landscape, the "garden world" more resembled a scene from Dante's inferno than the chapters of Genesis.
Whoever orchestrated this attack knew humans well. Jenkins was already breathing hard, loud enough to trigger the voice activator on his commlink, and even Kaidan was gripping his weapon more tightly than he had in all the training exercises.
Shepard flicked the red-light filter on her helmet on.
"Move out," she ordered crisply, and began stomping toward a gap in the rocks.
"Gah! What the hell are those?!" Kaidan's almost strangled cry was startlingly loud in her ear, and she glanced in the direction her HUD indicated he was looking. A pair of floating...things... drifted lazily across the marsh's surface, completely unfazed by the destruction going on around them.
She scowled. Kaidan had the same wildlife briefing she had, which explicitly mentioned the native fauna they might pass by while on the mission. The "gasbag," as they were known locally, was a harmless animal that lifted itself by performing electrolysis of water and storing the resulting hydrogen gas in a heavily-muscled bladder. By loosening the muscles and allowing the bladder to expand slightly, it could float up slowly, and by contracting it, it could float down.
In fact, she knew he'd read that part, because he was the one who had been marveling at the peculiarities of evolution that would produce such an animal. So what in the world-?
"Gasbags," Jenkins said with the almost arrogant tone of a native explaining something well-known locally to a foreigner. "Don't worry, they're harmless."
She smiled to herself inside her helmet as she glanced at the biometric feedback from her squad's armor suits. Kaidan was smarter than she'd given him credit for: In a single moment of apparent ignorance, he'd managed to put Jenkins in a position where he was in control and on familiar ground... which had, in turn, helped distract him from what her HUD told her had been a rapidly approaching panic attack.
All without the biometric readouts she, as the CO, had access to.
She quickly re-evaluated her short estimation of the Lieutenant from "bumbling skilled biotic technician" to "surprisingly insightful bumbling skilled biotic technician."
"Eugh," Kaidan said quietly as they passed by a charred skeleton on a nearby rock.
Shepard looked down at the body. "Lieutenant, you're trained in first aid. Don't most people contort when they're burned to death?"
Kaidan walked closer while Jenkins turned to cover the two. "Yes, ma'am," he said thoughtfully. "Unless..." he trailed off.
"Unless?" she prompted, and he shook himself.
"Sorry, ma'am. Unless they're burned too quickly to have time for the muscle tissue to contract with the heat." He knelt closer and pointed at the bones. "See these shiny parts here? Molten metal droplets. If I had to guess, I'd say he was standing close to an exploding mech or power plant."
Shepard nodded, then shook her head. "That doesn't make sense. If he'd been near something like that, we'd see debris, blast marks, the like."
Kaidan stood and shrugged, dusting his hands off. "Perhaps he was moved here after he died? As a warning?"
Shepard flicked a finger at the skull, half of which crumpled into flakes of carbon and ash at her touch. Kaidan sighed. "I'm stumped, ma'am. Maybe a proper forensics team can go over it when we're done here."
"Just stay sharp," she warned before heading over to pat Jenkins on the back. "You alright?" she asked, her voice gentle. It was a violation of the "handle your own shit" code many of the marines – especially the male ones – bought in to, but as a woman, she could get away with asking without hurting their egos overmuch.
Sexism was sadly alive and well in the 22nd century... although it had its upsides now and then.
Jenkins wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and nodded shakily. "Yes, ma'am," he said hoarsely and latched his helmet back into place.
She gave his shoulder a rough clap. "Good," she said, readying her shotgun and walking for the rock spires down the path.
Shepard was not a strong believer in "trusting her gut" or "getting a feel for the situation." She got far better results by analyzing what she saw on the fly, filtering things into categories, and classifying them based on their likelihood of posing a threat.
Her instructors at the ICT had scoffed at this, saying that she wasn't an AI and should stop pretending to be one. She'd politely listened to their directions to hone a "gut instinct" for situations, ignored it completely, and continued doing what had kept her alive as a small girl in a down-on-its-luck street gang for a decade and a half.
Still, when she rounded the corner leading down along a beach past several large rocks, both her "gut" and her coolly analytical mind screamed ambush.
There was nowhere to dodge. To the left was a cliff leading to the ocean, to the right was solid rock.
There was no way to get back out of the depression without getting exposed to enemy fire.
There was a convenient ledge on the right that would be a perfect firing position for an enemy flanking attack.
There were a series of tall stones at the far edge of the dip that would make a perfect place to put a gunner.
If she knew people would be moving toward the settlement from the cliffs, this is exactly where she would put an ambush of her own... probably involving explosives and tripwires, although she doubted whatever force attacked Eden Prime had had time to do so here.
She held up her fist quickly, and her two subordinates stopped shortly behind her. A grim nod from Kaidan told her he saw the same thing she did – that this wasn't going to end well.
Unfortunately, they didn't have a choice. The only other way to the settlement was back through the swamp, and it had been impassable, or over the jagged rocks... which was suicide, as they wouldn't be able to fight back in addition to being completely exposed.
Walking into the ambush it was, then.
She made a brisk pointing motion – Jenkins taking point up to the cover at the center, Kaidan coming up on the left, while she moved up along the right side next to the cliffs.
It wasn't cruelty, but simple practicality: If they had whatever kind of weaponry had vaporized the skeleton they'd seen earlier, she didn't know if she'd be able to stop it with her barrier... and her presence was more important, to the mission, to the Alliance, and most importantly to her than Jenkins' was.
In the end, however, it wasn't her orders that got Private Richard L. Jenkins killed, but his own blithering idiocy.
While she tucked in against the rocks on the right and Kaidan hunched down in the center, Jenkins threw caution into the wind and charged straight down the open center corridor.
Right into the guns of a pair of small, oddly-colored turret drones.
Stupid, Shepard thought coldly as she watched the private's spine tear out the back of his armored suit. I know it was your home planet, boy, but you prove nothing to nobody by dying pointlessly on it.
Kaidan's pistol parked twice and a pair of dents appeared in the corner of the left drone. Shepard's quick pull smashed the right one into the rocks, eliciting a small explosion and the sound of metal shrapnel ricocheting around the rocks. Four more shots later and Kaidan's drone sputtered and crashed, smoldering slightly in the sandy ground.
Kaidan leapt out from cover to check Jenkins' pulse, before shaking his head and closing the private's eyes. "Ripped right through his shield," he murmured to half to himself. "Never even had a chance." He glanced at Shepard, as if asking her what to do.
She fought the urge to roll her eyes at him. A soldier died. It happened. Especially when they decided that glorious charges were a sound battle tactic against unknown foes.
She leaned over the body and took his stash of grenades. She hadn't used any of hers, but since whatever force they were fighting appeared to be making use of drones and likely other armored units, she would want spare explosives.
She tucked the small discs onto her belt and stood, glancing at Kaidan, who was still staring at her. "Leave him," she said, gesturing at the corpse with her shotgun. "We have to finish the mission."
It was blunt, but he needed to be shaken out of his daze. More importantly, she was right. If there really was a working prothean beacon on the planet, and some unknown hostile force got it before they could, it could lead to a war that would kill billions. The loss of a single soldier, no matter how dear, was nothing compared to that.
His eyes tightened, but he nodded. "Aye aye, ma'am," he said levelly, and Shepard began jogging up the hill without a backward glance.
The drones, as it turned out, were not terribly dangerous.
Or smart.
They hovered out of cover, intermittently pelting them with bursts of powerful but not terribly dangerous fire. They were accurate, and whatever accelerators they were using packed a wicked punch – a full burst actually tore right through her barrier and was barely stopped by her shield generator before she reinforced it – but the downtime made taking them out a simple matter of baiting their shots and hitting them during the cycle time.
It was almost like they were using old clips of ammunition, but nobody had used those for decades – not since mass accelerators had gotten cheap and powerful enough to serve as primary firearms.
They were dangerous enough, though. The corpses they'd passed on the way through the hill attested to their lethality, at least when used against standard issue weapons and armor.
Without their native guide, their going had been slow. Shepard was trained in many things, but orienteering with inaccurate topographical maps and no GPS locator while in the middle of a war zone wasn't one of them. They'd had to backtrack several times as a clear pass on their map turned out to be wrong or blown up, and the sun was nearly set by the time they finally caught sight of the main excavation site.
"About time," Kaidan said with a gasp, lowering his pistol and pulling his canteen out to take a deep drink.
Shepard nodded, but kept her shotgun trained at the path leading down toward the messy dig. They'd been passing more and more enemy equipment and technology, and even if it seemed inert, she wasn't comfortable around the strange collapsing tripods. They didn't have a clear purpose, which worried her. Nobody deployed useless equipment to battlefields. Even the religious armies of old performed their rituals to keep faith and morale strong.
A sudden burst of all-too-familiar mass accelerator fire sent them both diving for cover, Kaidan's half-empty canteen sailing through the air to land on the ground with a thud.
Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the Eden Prime 212th Infantry Division was not having a good day.
It had started out well enough – boring, like any "safe" planetside posting – but nobody could have imagined how it would have ended.
Ever since the Skyllian Blitz, groundside postings had gained a lot of prestige. Nothing like a ship posting, of course, but it was the brave actions of a few off-duty groundside soldiers that had held off the batarian forces long enough for reinforcements to arrive that let the fight end in a close victory instead of a brutal defeat. That had bumped up "dirt" postings like hers a fair bit in the eyes of the public, as it wasn't just the intrepid space marines that would save humanity from the dangers of the galaxy.
As a result of the attack, they'd bumped up training quite a bit. Drills were held on a regular basis, colonists were trained, and militias were organized – even on fairly safe planets like Eden Prime. Nobody wanted to get caught with their pants down again.
Still, there was only so much one could train for. Slaver attacks, enemy raids, a restarted war with the turians, the list was huge... but assault by a force of what everyone kept saying were geth was completely off the radar.
And there had been so many of them!
They'd done their best to improvise, but they'd lost most of the unit in the first wave before they'd realized that their shield units couldn't take a full burst from whatever weapons the robots were carrying. It was only worse when the hordes of drones had swept over their positions, ravaging them from the skies even as the craggy rocks and heavy concrete prefabs had shielded them from the eerily clicking and whirring ground forces.
They'd fought as best they could, of course. Bought time for the civilians to make it to shelters... at least, the few who had survived the initial assault. "Shock and awe" didn't really do the geth airdrops justice.
Her unit commander had determined – amid heavy protest – that there was no way to effectively fight back against whoever was attacking, and that their best bet was to take what few people were still alive and head for the hills to hole up until reinforcements arrived.
It sounded like a good plan at the time. They'd run into just one major hitch: The geth had simply been everywhere.
One by one her squadmates had fallen, and the civilians with them.
When they'd walked into the ambush near research dig site, her CO had told her to take the last civilians and run. She'd gotten maybe two hundred yards before running into even more of the metallic horrors... and this time, there was no way out.
The last of the civilians died on one of the tripods that the geth hauled in with them, and she knew she was soon to follow. It was only a matter of time.
She gasped for air, unpacking her barely-cooled assault rifle from its clip on her back as she listened for the telltale whirr of whatever the geth used for muscles. No matter what else happened, she thought savagely to herself, the Alliance troops that retook the planet would know she didn't die a coward.
Shepard and Kaidan stood quickly when they realized the gunfire wasn't directed at them.
Peeking over the heavy stone rock at the crest of the hill, Shepard quickly surveyed the hill that had been so recently quiet. A single battered survivor – female, by the looks of it – was tucked into a half-crouch behind a rock similar to theirs as three humanoid-looking robots moved smoothly on her position in a perfect pincer maneuver.
She ignored the startled noise Kaidan made upon seeing the machines and squinted into the sunset glare down the hill. She hadn't been expecting to see survivors still fighting – the transmission they'd received on board the Normandy wasn't exactly reassuring.
Survivors were good. They might have valuable information... and given that the armor was the same as the suits worn in the transmission they'd intercepted, she was likely a local. That was better – she needed a native guide after Jenkins died.
Contrary to popular belief, shotguns were not actually room-sweeping implements of exclusively close range destruction. You could make a shotgun do that by hacking off the barrel (or, for modern mass accelerator weapons, installing a highly-illegal "Street Sweeper" mod), but most shotguns remained effective on single targets even at reasonably long ranges.
Which is why Shepard was quite surprised when the machine advancing on the woman below barely flinched as her heavily-modified shotgun spread hit it square in the upper torso. The incendiary rounds she used flickered faintly against its gray body before guttering out, leaving scorch marks but inflicting no real damage.
The thing's single eye twisted up toward her, a small outer lens spinning slightly as it focused on her.
"Take out the other two," she said quickly to Kaidan as she quickly ran through the phantom muscle tugs that would send electrical signals coursing through her nervous system in just the right way to flicker through the element zero nodules in her body. "I'm capturing mine intact."
He grunted acknowledgment as her skin glowed with a pale blue light, and she grimaced as the taste of copper filled her mouth once again.
Ashley didn't know where the shotgun blast came from, and frankly, she didn't care. All that mattered to her was that it wasn't aimed at her, and was aimed at the geth.
Fragments of little adages drifted through her relieved mind as she spared a moment's glance back up the hill where the blast had come from. Any port in a storm, the enemy of my enemy is my friend...
There were soldiers up there, at least two, a man and a woman. She couldn't spare more than a moment, however, as the frontmost geth had to be right on top of-
Her thoughts were cut short as the geth rounded the side of her cover, its rifle already leveled straight at her chest.
Time slowed to a crawl, and as she began to bring her own weapon to bear, she knew she would be too late. The clarity granted by adrenaline and the bracing knowledge that one was about to die let her focus all too well on the slowly-tightening grip it had on the trigger of its weapon.
She looked into the geth's glowing eye and waited for the inevitable.
She was surprisingly disappointed.
The geth trooper jerked into the rock next to her with astonishing speed, like it had been struck by an invisible aircar. She staggered back slightly as bits of rock and geth machinery flew around in all directions, some even moving fast enough to elicit small sparks from her shield generator.
The strangely pale blue biotic glow that now wreathed the geth trooper didn't fade, even as a staccato series of shots and a pair of explosions indicated that the other two geth had been handily dispatched.
Ashley aimed her weapon at the captured geth, sighting carefully on its head.
"Hold fire!" a high, clear voice called out, and Ashley glanced up the hill.
She scowled slightly. These things had just wiped out her unit, and this woman wanted her to spare the thing?
"Hold your fire, soldier," the woman said to her again as she approached. "Alenko, open that thing up. I want to know where to shoot them."
"Aye aye, ma'am," the square-jawed man said with a nod and fabbed a quick omni-blade to cut the case of the geth open with.
She removed her finger from the trigger, but didn't lower her rifle. She had no idea who this biotic was, and even if her buddy trusted her she'd known far too many biotics that had overestimated their ability to keep things under control to be entirely trusting.
Speaking of which... just who are these people, anyway?
They certainly didn't look like they were from Eden Prime. They weren't wearing standard issue Eden Prime infantry armor, at least. The man with his arm buried to the elbow in geth looked like a technician, judging by his skillset and heavily-laden tool belt, but the biotic amp tucked into the base of his skull marked him as a biotic, as well. A small insignia on his shoulder marked him as a lieutenant, which meant that the woman – who was obviously giving the orders – outranked him.
Two high-ranking biotics? Without backup? What the hell?
She shifted her gaze to the woman, and noticed quite a few details that she'd missed in her first adrenaline-tinted glance up the hill.
To start, her armor was nothing like the gear normally worn by biotics. It was too well armored, for one. Most biotics preferred the lightest possible armoring they could get away with, both to cut down on the amount of weight they had to carry and to keep their range of motion free for the mnemonics they used to activate their abilities.
Instead of the woven carbon fiber and non-Newtonian fluid packs favored by most biotics, she appeared to be wearing a full suit of combat gear, complete with alloy impact plates over her organs and limbs.
Her left arm was also nonstandard. Instead of the usual plate-and-padding approach used on the rest of her gear, her entire left arm – from the shoulder down to the glove – was heavily reinforced, with actual metal spikes sticking out of it. It looked like something she'd seen in an ancient gladiator video, and it would be ridiculous if she didn't wear it like she used it.
Rounding out the oddities were her outrageously heavy armament – no fewer than six grenades clipped to her belt, a high-caliber pistol, what had to be a custom shotgun, and she saw the boxy butt of a heavy assault rifle and a rubber-padded sniper stock sticking over her shoulder.
Most important of all, however, was the complete absence of rank bar or identifying mark beyond a single blood-red N7 logo sewn above her left breast.
Oh, shit.
She knew of the N7s, of course. Everybody did. They were like the special forces' special forces: The absolute pinnacle of fighting talent available to the Systems Alliance, and they were only sent when the situation was so far beyond "clusterfuck" that nuking the entire field of engagement was actually considered a reasonable tactical choice.
They shared no common tactic, no modus operandi, or even rank. Some were leaders, some were assassins, others still were biotics of the highest order. The only things they had in common were frightening skill... and an absolute dedication to the task at hand.
If an N7 was deployed to Eden Prime, it meant that shit was about to get real in the worst possible way.
She paled slightly and lowered her rifle from the geth, still gasping for breath after her fight. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212," she said respectfully, not turning away from the pinned robot. "Are you the one in charge here, ma'am?"
Shepard watched the winded soldier give her a quick once-over. She didn't begrudge the woman her skepticism... she'd obviously been through a lot.
"I'm Commander Shepard of the Normandy," she said, leaning back slightly and lowering her shotgun. Appearing nonthreatening while holding the struggling automaton against the boulder wasn't a trivial task, and her arm twitched slightly while she did it.
She didn't think that the soldier – Williams, she said her name was – noticed, though.
"Can you tell me what happened here?" she asked, her voice gentle. The woman had obviously escaped death by a hair's breadth. She saw no good reason to traumatize her further, at least, not unless she was the type that responded to abuse.
Luckily, that appeared not to be the case, as the pink-armored woman – did they not believe in camouflage here? – took a shuddering breath and wiped her brow, pulling herself together admirably quickly.
She spared a wary glance at the still-trapped machine, but faced Shepard. "We were mobilized a few days ago to guard something the scientists dug up," she said. "Didn't look like much to me, just some old electronics, but it had the eggheads real excited."
She shrugged. "Whatever it was, they had the entire unit on lockdown for it, same as when we lose someone. No messages in or out without approval, and all that."
Shepard sighed. Comm blackouts had gotten far better recently, as the Systems Alliance had started a (long-overdue, in Shepard's opinion) education campaign on the importance of operational security. Those improvements, however, only went as far as the military training went... which handily didn't include the entire private contracting industry or the civilian attaches that were routinely tossed alongside military deployments.
"Anyway," Ashley said, pointing down the hill she'd climbed up, "a quarter kilometer down there is where they found whatever it was. It was supposed to get moved to the spaceport today, though, something about getting secure pickup."
"That was supposed to be us," Shepard said.
Ashley flinched. "You mean you're not reinforcements?"
Shepard shook her head. "No. When we landed, news of the attack was maybe halfway to the buoy at the edge of the system. They won't even know about it for a few hours, at least."
"Shit," the worn-out woman said with a sigh, her shoulders slumping. "Figures."
"Williams, we need to get to that beacon," Shepard said, an edge creeping in to her voice.
"Yeah. Yeah," Ash said, with a tired laugh. "Shit. Figures. Okay. Yeah, I can show you the way."
"Good," Shepard said simply, and nodded at the still struggling automaton. "Any ideas, Alenko?"
The technician stood up and dusted his hands off, shaking his head. "No clue, ma'am, but they're not terribly resilient. Aim for the eye or center of mass and use slugs or a close choke."
"I think they're geth," Ash said. "That's what one of the guys in my platoon said, at least."
"Geth? The geth haven't been seen outside the veil in nearly three centuries," Kaidan scoffed. "Why would they be here now? How did he even recognize it?"
Ashley cracked a smile. "Truth? The guy was a complete horndog."
Kaidan blinked in confusion while Shepard burst into laughter.
"I mean, you name it, he probably spent some private time in his bunk fantasizing about it. Human, alien, male, female, he didn't care. Guy was a pervert of the highest order." She gave the lieutenant a sly grin while Kaidan continued to stare at her, mouth slightly agape.
"He knows more about quarian culture than most of our ambassadors. So when he says 'holy shit, that's a geth' before getting sniped, I'm inclined to believe him," she finished with a slightly defiant glare.
Shepard shook her head, laughter trailing off. "Okay, so they're geth. Did he have any idea why they were here?"
"No, ma'am," Ashley replied. "Like I said, he got shot right afterward."
"Right." She glanced at her lieutenant. "Finish that thing off, Lieutenant, and let's get going. I don't want to fight in the dark."
"Uh, yes, ma'am."
"Williams?"
"Ma'am?"
"Take us to the dig site."
"Ma'am."
Several more easily dispatched geth later, and the trio was standing at the edge of an obviously rushed excavation in the open ground of Eden Prime.
"This is the dig site, ma'am. They must have moved the beacon this morning," Williams said.
"Figures," Shepard said absently, glancing around the strange vertical decorations.
"How far to the spaceport from here? Our topo maps are a little out of date," Kaidan said.
Ashley pursed her lips, thinking back to the frantic escape she'd made only hours earlier. "I don't know. Maybe four or five klicks, but there's a tram over by the loading bay only a klick or so from here. It was shut down when we ran, but..."
"Is the tram far out of the normal road to the port?" Shepard called from a nearby wall.
"It's not exactly on the way, but it's not that far beyond it," Ashley said with a shrug.
"Then we head for the tram," Shepard said. "Worst case, we can run the tracks faster than we can the road. Which way?"
Ashley gestured up an earthen ramp. "Up there, past the dig offices."
Shepard's radio crackled to life, carrying a series of unintelligible syllables in a strange clipped tone. Alenko blinked in confusion, while Shepard cocked her head to trigger her implanted throat microphone, speaking slowly and clearly.
"Repeat that, Nihlus, our translator can't make that out through the interference."
"-said I, spaceport of interesting," Nihlus' metallice voice said in her ears after a moment.
Shepard glanced at the pair. "Either of you catch that?"
Kaidan lifted his omni tool to his mouth. "Copy that, Nihlus. Watch yourself, we think there are geth here."
"That."
Shepard raised an eyebrow at Kaidan, who shrugged. "He said he saw something interesting up by the spaceport tram and that he was going to check it out."
Shepard nodded. "Okay." Note to self, Shepard thought, update translator.
Ashley glanced at the two of them. "That sounded turian," she said suspiciously.
"It was," Shepard said, hefting her shotgun to her shoulder. "We're working with a turian SPECTRE named Nihlus."
Williams shifted slightly, then nodded. "Understood, ma'am."
Shepard glanced up the dirt road. It seemed clear enough.
"Move up."
Shepard had seen the strange tripods several times along the long path to the dig site, and had been given a front row seat in seeing how they were used to impale the corpses – or prisoners – taken by the geth.
She hadn't really given them a second thought, writing them off as a simple intimidation technique. An effective one, but easily filed away in a category and dismissed.
She wouldn't make that mistake again.
As the trio crested the small road, the spikes with corpses suddenly retracted with a grinding metallic noise, pulling out of the impaled corpses fast enough to cause them to bounce slightly upon hitting the top of the tripod.
"Jesus-" Ashley shouted, leveling her rifle at the structures.
Shepard held up a hand, moving forward slowly with her gun drawn and barrier active. She wouldn't put it past the geth to booby trap the corpses somehow, getting a kind of final piece of utility from the enemy's fallen. If they'd taken the time to study humans at all before assaulting, they'd know that it would be typical to collect the dead. Planting explosive charges in the corpses of the fallen, especially the desecrated fallen, would be an easy way to inflict more morale damage and cause casualties among the support crew. She was right, it turned out, but not in the way she expected.
The corpses here appeared... desiccated was the best word she could come up with. They had been drained dry, sucked of all moisture with various pieces of wiring embedded in their skin.
She scowled, pushing more power to her barrier and watching as the typical blue paled slightly to a turquoise as the gravitational field intensified.
It was a move that saved her life.
She was just reaching out to touch the skin of the corpse when it jerked to life, twisting around on the spire in an alarmingly close facsimile of agony while blue light began coursing through the twisting electronics sewn into its skin.
The light grew quickly to a searing brightness before erupting in a shower of arcing lightning that skittered up and over the dense air held in place by her barrier, channeling what would have been a lethal shock into a hair-straightening near brush with electrocution.
"Commander-!" Kaidan's voice called out, followed almost immediately by the staccato bursts from Ashley's assault rifle. The creature... the husk... that was crawling off the tripod in the back twisted and jerked, its form riddled with countless drops of high-velocity molten metal.
Shepard wasted no time, bringing her shotgun up one-handed and squeezing off two rounds into the creature in front of her. The high powered armor-piercing slugs blew clean holes right through the thing, which promptly ignored them as it tried to slam into her through her barrier.
She gritted her teeth, ignoring the overwhelming taste of copper and smell of ozone as she sent the thing flying head over heels into the dirt berm behind the machine that had created it.
It was very quickly followed by a biotically-propelled incendiary grenade.
The wave of heat crashed over her, and she felt its intensity even through the sealed environment suit. The husks, sadly bereft of protective armor and a heavy biotic barrier, were far less comfortable. Their anguished cries – Shepard tried not to think of them as such, but they were very convincing – trailed off quickly into the sickly sweet smell of burning human flesh.
The trio lowered their guns, glancing at each other and the zombies that had just attacked them in mute horror.
"Make sure they're dead," Shepard said coldly after a moment's pause. She walked over to the nearest husk. Five quick shotgun blasts separated its limbs and head from the torso.
"I won't even pretend to know what those were, or how to stop them," she said to the still-stunned pair. "Take their heads off, take their limbs off, and toss all the bits in different directions."
Suiting actions to works, she jammed her fingers in the empty eye sockets of one of the skulls and gave it an underhanded roll down the hill into the excavation pit.
Kaidan looked green.
"I don't have time to cut one open and see what makes it tick," she snapped, aggravated by the almost painful pulse of adrenaline in her veins. "I don't know what they take to kill, but even if they can still function when dismembered I don't think hands finger-crawling on the ground will be able to threaten us. Move."
Ashley stifled a giggle.
"Yeah, funny image. Now help me with those," she said, gesturing at the remaining bodies, both on and off the tripod structures.
"Uh, ma'am," Ashley said nervously. "Some of those aren't... I mean... they're still..."
"Chief, we have no idea how this stuff works and no idea whether we're going to be flanked by more geth as we move forward. I don't know about you, but I do not want more zombies crawling up my six."
"I guess not, ma'am," she said.
"Good. Now both of you... get to work," she ordered, and tossed another arm away into the hill.
"I think... I think that's the last of them, Commander," Kaidan said as he gave a biotic shove to the last torso, sending it flailing through the air into the bush.
Shepard sighed, wishing she could rub her forehead. "Good. Let's clear these habitats before we move on – I thought I saw something moving in them when we were cleaning up."
Ashley nodded. "Some of the science team might have hidden in here. Most of the doors are still closed..."
"Right. Kaidan? I'll cover you. Get that lock open." Shepard moved to Kaidan's left, fanning the approach with her shotgun while Ashley comfortably settled in on the right side.
"Aye aye, ma'am," Kaidan acknowledged, kneeling down and popping the cover off of the door control.
The door slid open moments later, and Kaidan stepped back. Shepard threw up another barrier and stepped inside, her shotgun held ready.
"Oh, thank the maker," a relieved voice said from inside. "Humans."
Shepard lowered her gun.
A nervous-looking man in a lab coat crawled out from underneath a desk. "Are they gone? Is it safe?" he said in a voice edged with panic, wringing his hands.
Great. Panicking civilians. Just what I needed.
"It's okay," she soothed, clipping her shotgun to the holster above her butt. "They're gone. Nobody's gonna hurt you."
"When that big ship landed... I thought it was all over," the woman said. "The soldiers tried to get us to the shelters, but... I don't think many of them made it."
"Some did," Ashley said fiercely. "I know it."
Shepard held up a hand, forestalling further comment. "We're looking for the beacon you dug up," she said. "Do you know where it was taken?"
The woman nodded. "Yes. It was moved to the spaceport via the tram this morning."
Shepard smiled, her shoulders dipping slightly. "First piece of good news all day," she said. "We're heading for the spaceport. Stay here where it's safe."
"Nowhere is safe!" the man blurted, his eyes wild. "the age of humanity is ending! Soon, only ruin and corpses will remain!"
She glanced at the lead researcher, who was shaking her head behind him. "What's wrong with your assistant?"
The woman gave a long-suffering sigh. "Manuel has a brilliant mind, but, well... genius and madness are two sides of the same coin, after all." She glanced at the twitching man, a concerned expression ghosting her face, before looking back at the commander. "I've given him an extra dose of his meds. They should kick in soon."
Shepard nodded, understanding, and stepped forward toward the man, reaching out her left hand to pat him on the shoulder.
Then there was a blue flash, a loud crack, and the assistant – Manuel – suddenly lay in a crumpled heap on the ground against the wall.
For a moment, nobody moved while Shepard shook out her right hand.
"What the hell?!" the woman exclaimed, kneeling to check the man's pulse. "You can't just go whacking people upside the head!"
Kaidan gave a slight cough. "That... might have been a little extreme, Commander," he said awkwardly.
She rolled her eyes. "Give him a hypo of painkillers, Alenko. As for you..." she glared at the woman. "You know it was only a matter of time before he did something crazy... and dangerous."
She met the N7's gaze for a moment, before sitting in defeat. "I suppose you're right. By the time he wakes up, his meds will have kicked in."
"You can give him an apology from me when he wakes, if you like," Shepard said. "But we have to go." She turned back to face Ashley. "Williams, take us to the spaceport."
Ashley wiped the smirk from her mouth and saluted smartly. "Aye aye, ma'am."
"Ma'am? Mind if I ask you a question?" Ashley asked as they were moving slowly toward the tram station.
"You just did, Chief," Shepard replied.
"Ha, ha, ma'am. Really."
Shepard chuckled. "Go ahead, Williams."
"How'd you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"The researcher. Back in the habitat. I know when you punch someone out in the vids, they go flying like that, but... no offense intended, ma'am, but even with all that armor you can't weight more than ninety kilos. He looked to be at least a hundred."
Shepard laughed, vaulting over a roadblock. "Actually, Chief, when I hit him, I massed just under five hundred."
Ashley blinked. "What?"
"Williams, I'm a biotic," Shepard explained. "It's not difficult to change my own mass. I just made my fist much, much heavier right before it hit him."
Alenko blinked. "That's... pretty unusual, Commander, if you don't mind my saying so. Most biotics can't ramp a field up that quickly."
She shrugged. "I have a few advantages, but it's not impossible for the general public, either. I imagine that the next generation of implants will make it possible for pretty much everyone. The L3s already ramp up faster than the L2s, even if the L2s do spike higher."
"Advantages?" Alenko scowled. "What kind of-"
"Sh," Shepard said, stopping suddenly and holding up a fist. "Did you hear that?"
"I heard it," Ashley said. "Single shot, probably a pistol. From the tram."
"Didn't sound like a geth weapon," Shepard said.
"No, it didn't," Ashley confirmed. "There must still be survivors down there!"
Shepard frowned. "Maybe," she said. "Or maybe not. Let's go look."
"I still think you should have let me grill his ass," Ashley growled as they tossed the last limp geth body off the tram.
"Then it's a good thing I'm in charge," Shepard said mildly.
"He screwed us over! We could have used those-" Ashley snarled.
"Williams." Shepard's voice was empty, and Ashley gulped.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," she said quickly
Shepard nodded, pushing the last broken synthetic carcass off the tram. "There was also a reason I didn't 'grill his ass,' as you put it."
"Ma'am?" Williams looked up at her, confused.
"If you go after him, make him think we're cracking down, he'll wipe his tracks. Claim the records were damaged in the attack, or something."
"Bullshit," Ashley scoffed.
"Maybe. But he'd get away with it. If he thinks we're too busy to investigate because of the attack, he probably won't. Normally, he'd be right."
"Normally?" Ashley asked, and Shepard nodded as she walked to the tram control.
"Somebody leaked the presence of the beacon here," she said. "It's why we were already on our way when the attack hit. Now which is more likely? That a soldier worked extra-hard to violate training and orders to break blackout, that a scientist with full understanding of the impact of the discovery here broke blackout, or that some bored civilian contractor in military supply told a story about some crazy thing they dug up to his drinking buddies back at the depot?"
She threw the lever on the tram, which jerked forward with an angry hum.
"No, Williams," she said, "I think I know exactly who broke blackout here... and if he thinks he got away with it, the investigation won't take long. Not long at all."
She stowed her shotgun, lifting her rifle to a resting position against one of the seats to cover the front of the train. "If you're the vengeful type, Williams, I'll remind you that willfully breaking operational security in such a way as to cause casualties counts as treason."
"So by all means, go back and yell at him if you'd like. Put the fear of God into him, if you believe in that," she said dismissively, ignoring Ashley's awkward wince. "If vengeance is what you want, I think you'd be better off waiting until it reaches the traditional temperature for serving."
"Ma'am?" Ashley said in confusion, settling down on the tram to cover the opposite side from Shepard.
"Cold, Williams. Vengeance – like revenge – is a dish best served cold."
Ashley blinked, then nodded, an almost predatory smile ghosting her lips. "Aye aye, ma'am."
Kaidan Alenko was many things.
He was a technician, skilled in the use and even development of many combat cyber warfare suites. He had a head for code, and was good at getting everything he could out of his short range wireless broadcast units.
He was a biotic, one of the Alliance's best. He was an L2, with all the advantages and disadvantages that carried with it, and combined with his technical skills he considered two of the four fundamental forces of the universe subject to his beck and call.
He was a soldier, again, one of the Alliance's best. While he wasn't a master of arms like some soldiers were, he knew how to use nearly everything in the Alliance's infantry arsenal, and he was a fair shot.
He was a medic, capable of actually helping people heal instead of just slapping on medi-gel to keep them stable like most soldiers. While he wasn't a true doctor, he would pit his emergency response medical skills against those of any trained civilian responder any day.
With all the talents he had in his possession, one thing he was decidedly not used to was being outclassed to the point of feeling like a FNG.
Shepard managed to do it to him, though.
She moved through the battlefield with an unsettling and, quite frankly, unearthly grace. It wasn't that she moved particularly quickly, although she was reasonably nimble despite the armor she was wearing.
No, it was the pacing. Most ground commanders would move up, stop, secure a position, determine an enemy's likely points of counterattack, order covering fire, and move forward when an opportunity presented itself.
Either Shepard didn't believe in that kind of warfare... or she went through the entire process faster than anyone had a right to. He'd initially been terrified that she was going to get them all killed by an enemy they'd missed, but despite the breakneck pace she set through the spaceport he never saw a single active geth after she passed by a point... only their broken and literally shattered remains.
He'd taken care of the explosives they'd left behind, of course. The bombs were – despite being obviously geth technology – quite simple in their design, and it wasn't difficult to snip the appropriate wires (or, more accurately, smash the right circuit board with the butt of his rifle) before sprinting to catch up with the carnage that his commander was wreaking.
Even with that task assigned to him, however, he still felt like a little kid being humored by an adult on "take your child to work" day. He had no doubt that, despite whatever lack of technical knowledge Shepard might have, she'd have figured out a solution in no more time than it took her to fling the geth heavy troopers into the electrified tram line.
Come on, Kaidan. You're an accomplished soldier, not some green kid straight out of boot camp. You're important to the mission, and Shepard would be inconvenienced if you weren't here.
He snorted to himself. Even in his self-reassurances, he couldn't convince himself that he was doing anything more than alleviating a minor inconvenience for the Commander.
Well. At least I'm not slowing her down, he thought morosely as he smashed his pistol butt through the last bomb's control circuitry with a little more viciousness than was really necessary.
With Kaidan covering the last bomb, Shepard allowed herself to bleed down the leftover energies she had wrapped herself in during her push through the spaceport. It had been a fun exercise, she thought, a kind of stretch that an athlete might perform before a heavy workout.
Not that there were many athletes who measured their success in number of ancient enigmatic automata destroyed per unit time, but the metaphor remained.
Smiling slightly at the elegance of the destruction she had just wrought, she turned to her two squadmates as they caught up.
Kaidan looked... wary. She smiled to herself. Trust a biotic to recognize it, she thought to herself. The power she'd fielded while clearing the spaceport tram dock wasn't particularly great for her, but it was far above and beyond what most biotics could sustain. It was also, she admitted to herself, unnecessary given the scope of the foe they had been fighting. She could justify it with all kinds of "unknown enemies warrant as strong a reaction as possible" line, but the honest truth of it was that she could and should have been more conservative in her assault. It was so nice to get out and play, though.
Ashley's expression was far easier to decipher: She was simply awestruck.
Poor woman's been stuck dirtside too long, Shepard thought. She was good, yes, but that wasn't exactly a difficult advance, even for a fresh team. The geth – if that's what they really were – weren't exactly the terrifying opponents that she'd expected from the stories the quarians told.
"Bombs are defused, ma'am," Kaidan said.
She nodded. "Good. There are more of those... what did you call them, Williams? Husks? Down in the spaceport loading bay."
Both of them winced. They didn't like fighting the freakish zombie-like creatures, not least because they were the desecrated corpses of their former allies.
"I know," she said sympathetically, and pointed down to the dock. "At least they'll have to come up that ramp to get to us. We'll toss a grenade to get their attention and gun them down as they move up."
Ashley spat on the ground. "Like fish in a barrel," she said, checking the ammo block on her rifle. Kaidan nodded in agreement, pulling his own mostly unused rifle out.
"Right," Shepard said, lifting one of her grenades up and activating it with a click. "Frag out!" she shouted, hurling the beeping disc down into the middle of a group of the blue-laced abominations.
Ashley barely remembered to close her mouth before reporting to the Commander. She knew her awe was showing, but she didn't care.
No wonder the N7 teams are feared. Jesus Christ. She didn't swear much, but it was warranted here. It's like... like watching a cat play with its food.
Except that the cat was armed with enough weaponry and power to level a small battalion, and the food consisted of some of the most feared synthetic enemies ever to exist in the galaxy.
She shook her head to clear it as Shepard tossed a small explosive discus expertly in the center of a group of husks on the dock.
"That got their attention," Shepard said with a grin as she knelt down between her and Kaidan, drawing her pistol. Her rifle she set down on the decking in front of her in easy reach.
She would normally question anyone who drew a pistol when faced with a charging line of what were , in her book, zombies, but if the last hour of fighting taught her anything it was that the Commander never did anything without a reason.
So she sighted down her well-tended rifle's sights and began putting an intermittent stream of well-aimed shots into the torsos of the husks. They didn't drop like a normal unarmored civilian would – although the small flashes when her rounds connected suggested that in addition to whatever those tripods did, it also gave them a shield generator – but they certainly didn't like it, either.
They kept coming, though.
Shepard had held her fire, waiting for the foremost husk to close to the last leg of the ramp before squeezing off a single round from her pistol.
Ashley had expected a high-caliber, possibly antipersonnel round of some kind. The tumultuous explosion that tore the husk's head clean off and sent the three behind it flying head over heels back down the ramp was decidedly not typical of a handgun.
Much to her credit, she thought, she managed to keep firing without more than a momentary pause. It was a near thing, though, especially as the shockwave of whatever unholy explosive round she was using rolled over them.
"Aghk-!" Kaidan sputtered, nearly dropping his weapon. "What the hell, Shepard?" he nearly shouted.
She flashed him a quick grin before sighting back down at the remaining husks. "High-explosive contact explosive," she said over their moans of the husks and the ringing in all of their ears. "Overloads the suspension coils almost instantly, but if you need more than one shot..."
Three more explosions cleared the lower leg of the ramp, sending a small avalanche of husks rolling back down toward the spaceport proper.
Ashley readjusted her aim at the pile of tangled limbs and bodies, firing more rapidly now that nearly every round was guaranteed to be a target. Shepard tried as well, but was rewarded with a quiet beeping and flashing red light on the butt of her pistol.
"Case in point," she said, holstering her pistol and lifting her rifle from the ground in front of her.
Ash snorted as the heavy thump of the Commander's rifle joined the higher-pitched crack of hers and Kaidan's.
"I guess that's where the big ship landed," Kaidan said as Ashley wrinkled her nose at the acrid smoke drifting from the literally glowing crater where most of the spaceport used to be.
"Probably," Shepard said. "It gives me an idea, though."
Kaidan raised an eyebrow at Shepard as the telltale glow of a mass effect field coalesced around her arms once again. Behind her, the bullet-ravaged corpses of the husks slid along the battered spaceport dock to tumble into the red-hot pile of rubble. "There," she said, brushing her hands off.
Ashley and Kaidan stared at her.
Shepard rolled her eyes. "Until someone figures out exactly what those are and how they're made, I'm not trusting them to stay dead. Unless you feel inclined to take them apart by hand..." she trailed off, and the pair shook their heads quickly. "I didn't think so. Now, this beacon..."
She glanced at the ominously humming relic sitting untouched in the center of a small platform, then shrugged and flicked on her radio. "Normandy, this is shore party. We've secured the beacon and need immediate extraction."
Joker's voice crackled back. "Roger that, shore party. ETA about five minutes. Anything else?"
Shepard glanced around. "Nihlus and Jenkins are KIA. We encountered hostile synthetics, tentatively identified as geth by the planetary defense forces. Said synthetics appear to have the ability to mechanize and re-animate our dead as shock troopers. Recommend full armor and environment seals for any ground troops."
She paused for a moment, letting that sink in.
"Uh... roger that, shore party..." Joker's skeptical voice echoed over the radio. "I don't suppose you saw the Easter bunny, too?"
"Funny," she snapped. "Make sure that nobody touches anything. We defused four nuclear devices alread-"
She was stumbled by a sudden pulse of vertigo, the same instability she felt whenever a starship's mass effect drive powered up to full strength.
Spinning in an instant, she turned to the beacon, which was glowing with an eerie green glow as Kaidan was pulled inexorably toward it by a great invisible hand.
So it's not dead. No wonder the scientists were excited, she thought calmly as electrical charges flickered through her own element zero tainted nervous system, forming the subtle dark energy fields that twisted gravity to her will.
Let's see what you've got.
The answer, as turned out, was "quite a lot."
Getting a "taste" for the field being used to carry Kaidan toward the beacon was trivial – it wasn't particularly strong. She easily overwhelmed it, nullifying it in a loud explosion and yanking Kaidan back from the prothean relic.
Shepard smiled as the lieutenant sailed through the air, his limbs flailing, to crash unceremoniously into the deck. Her smile vanished, however, as she felt the same phantom grip she'd pried Kaidan from reach for her... and with a far stronger pull than she'd just fought off.
She dimly heard Ashley's shout as she was tugged toward the beacon, gritting her teeth as adrenaline flooded her body with its time-dilating illusion.
Her first attempt to nullify the field by generating an oppositely-charged effect ended with a deafening detonation that shook the entire deck and sent the nearby steel shipping crates flying like toy blocks.
Whoa, she thought somewhat woozily as the echoes in her head subsided. Bad plan.
As the relic dragged her closer and upright, she focused on trying to disable the device. Valuable ancient relic or no, her life was in danger, and that took priority.
Unfortunately for her, it, too, was guarded... and a slowly growing noise in her head wasn't helping her focus, either.
Her first strike – a thin series of rapidly shifting mass effect fields known as a warp – tore a great furrow in the reinforced concrete decking, but diminished in strength as it neared the beacon, to the point of barely shaking it when it finally contacted. Unperturbed, Shepard bit her tongue and tried again.
If only that stupid buzzing would stop-
Her train of thought was derailed by a hallucination so vivid, it blotted out the world entirely. She was standing on a world, an alien weapon in her hands, firing at vaguely insectoid creatures with similar markings as the husks they'd fought earlier. The smell of smoke was strong in her nose, and her three-fingered hand squeezed the trigger rapidly.
Wait. Three-fingered?
The image vanished, and she twitched in the beacon's iron grasp. She threw another warp at the beacon, but only succeeded in blowing the damaged railing next to the crater halfway across the crater.
No!
An alien voice spoke in her ears, in words and syllables she had never heard and didn't have the first clue how to decipher. Six-sided flakes of green fluttered before her eyes, and the screaming sound of the condemned pounded in her head as the image of machines burrowing into flesh floated across her sight.
Desperation lent her an unnatural strength, and she fought on even while the world faded slowly into madness.
"Shepard!" Kaidan shouted as soon as he picked himself up from the ground. He'd been careless. The thing had been glowing, for crying out loud, and like an idiot he'd walked right at it without the first clue what it really was.
He started forward, desperate to help his commander before Ashley's strong arm grabbed him and held him back. "No!" she snapped, "leave her! It's too late," she said angrily. He ignored her, reaching out again, this time with his not insignificant biotic power to pluck Shepard from the thing's grasp just as she had done for him.
His "pull," a small burst of energy that upon impact would coalesce into a short-lived and powerful attractive field, splattered against an invisible barrier harmlessly.
"Get back, lieutenant," Ashley said, dragging him for the ramp as the first of Shepard's heavy salvos struck.
Holy...
He didn't know if Shepard was aware of what was going on or simply lashing out, but in either case, the results were devastating. Thousand-pound steel shipping crates were shredded, torn apart like wet tissue paper, the pieces tossed aside to crash into the concrete of the decking. The deck itself warped and buckled, rippling unnaturally before crumbling into pieces around her.
A hideous screeching and grinding noise erupted from the right side of the spaceport as one of the damaged radio towers collapsed on them, resulting in a shower of sparks and a deafening crash as it bounced off the same barrier that had deflected his biotic assault.
And all that chaos is only the splash from whatever she's trying to use on that beacon, he thought to himself with a shiver, as he unconsciously began scooting backwards with Ashley.
Strong as she was, though, he didn't think she was winning. She was managing to thoroughly destroy what was left of the spaceport, but the beacon itself looked mostly unaffected.
At least until it exploded, flinging the Commander's limp body through the air onto the ramp behind them with a sickening thud.
So! Next: The aftermath, more aftermath, and then the citadel! It should be a wild ride.