"Actual, Foxtrot and Billy Bob are on standby. Status is green."
"Roger, Raven Two. You are go for insertion."
An audible whoop came from the cockpit before the pilot activated his mic, "You hear that, Turner? ETA two mikes."
"Two mikes, understood!" she acknowledged before standing to open her gear locker.
"Took so long I thought for sure we'd be bingo," Baptiste said as he joined her, dark eyes bright with anticipation.
"Heh," she huffed while turning to climb into a large humanoid shaped set of armor hunched into one corner of the shuttle and sealed her helmet. There was a moment of discomfort as the the suit interfaced with the I/O port just beneath her left ear, but it was soon over. "You want 'em to be sure we're stepping on the right dirtball, don'tcha?"
"Oh I dunno," he said with a calm, comforting drawl, "These new suits are so comfy I could stand a Sunday drive."
They spent the remaining eighty ticks running through test cycles, their voices giving verbal affirmation to various stages for the record. When they finished, Turner took a mechanized step toward the cargo hatch and hit the button with a mailed fist.
As the door to the cockpit slid shut and the rear of the shuttle began to depressurize, Baptiste stepped up beside her and stowed his weapons.
When the hatch opened into space, the outstretched surface of the planet so bright white their viewfinder filters engaged, Turner pursed her lips. "That," she said with a slow release of breath, "Ain't no Sunday drive."
"You think Kravorog is really down there?"
She shrugged, "Intel's Spectre level." They looked at each other for a moment before returning their gaze to the frozen sphere beneath them. "I mean," she said, "If you were trying to hide from 'em, where would you go?"
"Down a really, really dark hole," he breathed, then keyed his mic. "Hawks are perched, Yama."
"You are cleared for HALO infil," the pilot replied. "Grid has been updated and good hunting."
"Roger that."
Turner took two large steps forward, disengaged her maglock and pushed off the deck, aiming her helmet at the horizon with small bursts of maneuvering thrusters while waiting for navigation on her heads-up. In less than a second the shuttle had left them, the planet and surrounding space lit with lines, grid points and flight and threat info. She quickly located the target area and selected the most likely place they could land without being seen.
"At your seven," she heard Baptiste say.
"Course is 265. Initiating burn in three, two, one, burn."
Once they corrected their course and set their speed the thrusters went silent as did the rest of the world, the idea being obscurity from anyone happening to observe. Their current speed would put them into the atmosphere in just a few minutes and at a velocity that wouldn't generate any kind of sonic event. If anyone just happened to look into their small spot in the sky they would appear to be meteorites streaking before disappearing from view.
The rest was just falling, really, until it wasn't; and that slow feeling of acceleration usually caused a lingering, clawing sense of dread as the planet grew beyond the sides of one's visor. Kat loved it, though. It felt like freedom; like...possibility.
Their descent was smooth, details of the surface becoming clearer as they approached with the LZ still close to the horizon. White mountains began to speed by; white plains, all covered in ice, yet the lakes over which they sailed still liquidly reflected the light from Asgard above. That wasn't water down there and it wasn't the air she was accustomed to breathing that gathered in a beige haze close to the ground. Nitrogen and ethane, their briefing detailed. Poisonous. Cold.
The temperature gauge in her heads-up spiked just as she heard Baptiste confirming re-entry. Coolant systems hissed and the air around them began to glow as their shields violently encountered Tyr's atmosphere, slowing them for their long arced approach. Soon after the glow disappeared and they began to fall in earnest, wind racing past them both audibly. Kat grinned and extended her arms out wide. Angled vents detached from the back of her suit and she felt aerodynamic lift turn that fall into a semi-glide, controlled and on-target.
Turner simply thought about engaging stealth-mode and her armor obliged; the colors on her forearms and gauntlets beginning to undulate and change. She pulled one arm back to her chest and balled a fist, watching her fingers curl white against the backdrop of the planet's surface. From below her she knew she'd be a burnt, orange-beige now, the same color as a Tyrian sky.
"We've entered the habitable zone," Baptiste reported as the colors below them and extending to the LZ became a tad warmer.
A bit more brown, a bit less white, she thought as she tilted her head back and forth. "Well damn, I forgot my bikini," she said with a smirk.
She heard him chuckle then sober, "Um, I got heat signatures around the LZ."
"Not supposed to be life here. You sure? Are they tangos?"
There was a pause while they flew and he finally replied, "Sigs ain't matching Krogan physiology. This is somethin' else."
"Big?"
"Mid-size. Bigger than a dog but smaller than a ….bear?"
"That sounds human-sized to me," Turner growled.
"Well they're on all fours, so.." Baptiste explained.
Turner sighed and relaxed. While unusual, these kind of discoveries weren't unheard of, especially on planets inhospitable enough to put off exploration. "Roger that. Let's steer 'round 'em. We'll get some data if we have time." She envisioned a course correction and watched their vector divert on her viewfinder. Who knows, she thought, the data might even be valuable.
"That's better," he declared as his own onboard nav followed suit. "All clear."
Kat's eyes focused on a blinking notification. "Flight deck in sixty seconds, Billy Bob. Prepping jets."
"Prepping jets, aye," her spotter rotely responded.
The land around them was zipping by at this point and their trajectory was strictly downhill. Any mistakes could be fatal and adrenaline made her veins sing, but Kat forced herself to wait until her vector turned full red before pulling up to use gravity as a brake. She could feel the success in her bones as strong as the pull of the ground; nobody would be able to see them this low. When she slowed sufficiently she stretched her arms down by her side, fingers spread wide, and a blast of blue flame spat downward from several small exits in the back of her metal exoskeleton.
Half a ton of mechanized armor lowered to the ground like a feather buoyed by a breeze and her knees barely bent at touchdown. It was a perfect landing. She turned carefully, the suit's 'wings' beginning to slowly retract, and saw Baptiste also settling to the frozen ground. She barked a laugh and began to decouple the entry gear while her companion pumped a fist.
"That ride never gets old," he chuckled while scanning the area.
The rockets had scattered most of the fog that clung to the ground, though it began to seep back in shortly after, slowly engulfing the scattered ice-rimed rocks at their feet, and a wall of it rose at least twenty meters above them in all directions, making it difficult to see anything outside the small space they occupied.
Fortunately they didn't need to. Baptiste's sensors relayed what they saw to Turner's suit, and their viewfinders automatically adjusted to wavelengths that could best penetrate the opacity. It then translated what the human eye couldn't see into holographic representations of objects around them. The technology of these new sets of armor was fifty years ahead of what they had during the war thanks to advances gleaned from the Reaper data hoard, and the irony wasn't lost on anyone who'd survived the apocalypse.
With the entry gear detached from their armor they were smaller and sleeker and with stealth mode engaged they could sometimes only see one another as a hologram in the fog. Turner watched Baptiste turn toward the target he so eagerly sought while that gear folded and shrank into unassuming cubes. There it would stay camouflaged and silent until it could be picked up for refueling.
"'Bout five clicks out," he grunted while extracting a beat up Mattock from where it was slung in a backplate.
Kat just shook her head and scoffed, "Really? You broke regs for that thing? You must get off on hot angry breath in your face."
Her partner just inserted a thermal clip and let the muzzle hang defiantly. "I get to smell that breath each and every time because of this baby rightc'here. Don't you throw in with them now!" he declared with furrowed brows. "It don't suit ya."
"Just watch my back, old man," she grinned while unslinging her ASUM sniper rifle, "I come home with so much as a scratch I'm pitching that thing out a damn airlock."
Turner set off in the direction indicated by their suits and heard the heavy steps of Baptiste behind her.
"Make you kiss the ground first!" came the retort, tainted with exertion.
"Never happen," she laughed as they picked up speed, multicolored obstacles sliding by in her peripheral.
They made good time. When their illuminated target grew and changed color indicating proximity they began to slow. What appeared to regular vision as vague lumps and small hills between clouds of toxic gas turned into holographic caverns and corridors outlined below the surface.
"There's movement around the entrance. Sentries by the look of it," he said with his head and eyes fixed on something ahead.
Turner nodded and turned to slowly circle the complex, both keeping a sharp eye while she searched for her spot. She was methodical and discarded several sites along the way, once because they saw heat signatures that turned out to be a herd of the creatures Baptiste spotted on the way down. If they weren't so close to their objective they might have investigated but she refused to take any chance of a negative response from the creatures that could alert others to their presence. Instead they froze, prone at extended range, until the creatures moved away. Finally, after more than an hour's search, they found a likely position; some rough boulders piled to offer cover and an elevated view a couple of kilometers away from their target.
"This'll do," she said gruffly before taking a knee by the rocks and beginning to set a shooting position.
Twenty-seven hours later, little had changed but the blanket of icy particulate on the ground in front of them.
"Gawd this tastes like baby shit."
"You picked the flavor, genius," Kat teased while her eye was peeled through her scope at two Krogan exiting a sealed entrance into the tunnels. "I mean, I went with vanilla but...whatever tickles your pickle."
He chuckled, but he really wasn't wrong. The nutrient shakes coming through tubes in their helmet scarcely tasted as they'd been advertised but at least it kept them going.
Turner shifted where she lay on her stomach, curling her feet and flexing her calves and quads for relief while she watched for any sign of their target in the place they'd affectionately named 'Turtletown'.
There'd been no sign of Kravorog but several members of his krantt had come and gone, confirming the location as a POI. Nothing in the last hour had changed her mind about targets, though, and with a chew of her lip she admitted as much.
"Your call," Baptiste said unnecessarily, no doubt enjoying the sound of his own voice in a place where the only other noise was the wind and your own breathing.
She sighed and with a thumb, selected her ammo. "Going with the bedbug. Spot me on that crosswind, will ya?"
"Roger." She heard him settle and she waited for him to link up with her scope. "Lock and load," he said in a low voice when he was set.
"See 'em?" she asked.
"Target at Sector Two Bravo, walking ahead at forty-five degrees with secondary contact to his nine," came the suddenly professional voice.
"Contact," she replied right away. "Dispersion check?"
"One point four meters," he called after a moment's pause.
She leaned in and turned a dial on her rifle, then followed the fully armored and environmentally suited Krogan as they walked, talking to one another and gesturing amiably. They were heading for another entrance at the eastern edge of the clearing, a semi-circular depression with the entrance to multiple caverns on the other side. They were only seconds away now; she'd have to be precise.
"Ready," she said clearly. There could be no misinterpretation here.
Less than two seconds later came the words she'd been waiting for. "Left, two point seven."
She adjusted her crosshairs right, completely past the Krogan she was aiming at, and fired.
Her round took almost eight seconds to arrive, long enough for her to take a full breath after the long pause while she pulled the trigger and start another. It popped in the air with almost no sound at all, just bits of debris that immediately swept left in the wind...and across both Krogan.
"Direct hit," her spotter confirmed and Kat nodded in satisfaction.
Both Krogan stopped and looked to their right to see what the sound had been, but after a few seconds' inspection shrugged and carried on, oblivious to the microscopic surveillance spiders crawling over their suits and finding appropriate places to settle where they'd be least likely to be disturbed. Several more bedbugs missed their target and landed on the ground around the path the Krogan walked. They'd spread out and around, looking for crannies best suited for their purpose...or simply squat and record once they ran out of fuel. In this environment, nobody trundling along in an environment suit would even notice the tiny bots among the rocky terrain, especially if they had no reason to think they were there.
The pair of Krogan entered the next den without incident and both the Marines triumphantly activated their feeds to watch what the bugs saw. It was a bit chaotic until the pair got through the airlock but cleared up quickly after. They were even kind enough to remove and leave their bugged helmets near the door so the Alliance could have a nice view of everyone coming and going while their unwitting spies walked deeper into the complex.
"No net," Kat said with a smirk while uploading the unit addresses to Raven Two.
"We're in business," Baptiste agreed then paused before continuing, "But it also looks like our friends are back."
Turner sighed. These creatures were beginning to become an annoyance. "Close?"
"Edge of sensor range but closing."
"Random pattern or on an intercept?"
"Not sure," he said with a mix of concern and curiosity, then looked over to her, "I know you're silenced but they might've heard the rifle report from that distance."
She swore under her breath and called up her partner's longview to see them coming while switching ammo. When he turned his helmet toward her in silent question she explained in a voice that was suddenly quiet and cold, "You ever heard of a wild animal running toward a gunshot?"
"Shiiiit," he groaned when realization hit then dropped to a knee behind the wall of their camouflaged hole behind her. His Mattock raised then lowered with a thump onto the piled rocks before he clicked off the safety. "Raven two, this is Billy Bob. Be advised, we may have enemy contact, over."
The problem with gathering intelligence is that you typically have to go somewhere no one is supposed to be. Sometimes that means you've just got brass balls and are showing off in an active theatre but other times….other times you're someplace you're not supposed to be for political reasons, reasons that mean nobody on your team will admit they ever sent you there in the first place or they lose points. This was one of those times. The second kind. The Alliance soldiers didn't expect a reply to their communication and didn't get one, but it was important that Raven knew. Just in case.
Turner took up position where their foxhole curved by her right side and rested her rifle there.
"I count….twenty three," he said in a wooden voice.
"Focus on the left half and I'll focus on the right," Turner tersely replied. Emotion got you nothing in the suck. "Bring down the leaders, they're big enough to slow the ones behind."
"Grenades?" he asked with his hand wandering to his belt.
Kat chewed her lip again. The cameras were in place now without the Krogans' knowledge. If there was any hope of not tipping off their presence at this point, grenades would literally blow it away. She steeled herself for what that meant, then said it with a taut jaw. "Negative."
He grasped what that meant as well as she and they were both silent for a span before tightening their grip resolutely on the weapon in front of them.
"Give 'em hell, Bembe," she said, saying his first name meaningfully.
"Aayy-ffirmative," he said calmly while the shapes began to appear as holograms through the fog. The holos couldn't supply any real detail but they could see that they were big. Big like cattle big. There was no longer any doubt...the herd of beasts was headed straight for them at a run. Their bodies were heavily muscled in the front and they had large heads that hung low enough to ram whatever was in front of them.
Turner had no desire to see what that might look like in action and lined up a shot to the right of one of those ponderous heads. If they were built to ram they might have armor and she wasn't about to waste a round. She let fly as soon as she had a shot and saw it stumble then fall, tripping one of the creatures behind it. The others swept around it and picked up speed, though. They knew exactly where she and Baptiste were now.
She dropped three more before they could get into Baptiste's range, then switched her rifle to automatic fire.
Even silenced, his Mattock barked when it opened up to her left. Her rifle then joined his and the stampede began to slow on the right but not on the left, her ammo apparently able to penetrate whatever armor the creatures had while his was not. She saw him switching to shotgun moments before the line broke over his wall.
Things went south pretty quickly, after that.
"Back up!" she yelled, and they quickly clambered up and out of their foxhole, their temporary home in this inhospitable world becoming a pit for their attackers to drop into before having to scale the wall to reach them. From this position, their combined firepower made it into a death trap for several of the creatures.
She could see them better now but her brain was more focused on targeting than any kind of scientific curiosity. She saw that their skin came in different colors as they streamed into their clearing. Red, orange, green…. Their blood was purple when it splashed and their eyes...their eyes were wide and white when they got within arm's reach. White, through and through. They'd come around the pit now and she could hear Baptiste grunt, then saw him bash one of them in the face with the butt of his shotgun in her peripheral vision.
Turner turned her rifle on one of the creatures that slid around behind Baptiste and she opened fire on it just as it raked back her partner's head with three wicked claws. It fell to the side but the swipe was, unfortunately, still enough to pull him down. Baptiste rolled to his back and blasted upward with his shotgun at another attacker in a direct hit before the full weight of it landed atop him and he fell out of sight.
Those claws! They were identical to a Krogan's hand, she could swear! But then she was rammed from the side and had no time to think. The massive head lifted, cords of muscle running down the neck and back, launching her into the air and just out of the creature's late slash of its own claws as she flew. To land would be to have its full fury upon her, so she instinctively twisted on the way down so that she could roll and roll and roll away. She pulled the rifle to her body as she spun and then pushed hard against the rocky ground to give her a backward boost to her feet. She was immediately forced to dodge a claw and pulled the rifle low against her hip before squeezing the trigger. The creature staggered, this one a sickly yellow color, but it shrugged off the shot through its abdomen and leapt at her again. At the same time, she heard Baptiste, screaming.
Kat rolled to the side, activated her cloak and scrambled to her feet in a sprint back toward her spotter. In the back of her mind she knew it wasn't a good call. There was likely nothing she could do even if she got to him in time but what else was she going to do? Try and outrun them all? She wasn't about to leave him behind, even if their destination was the afterlife.
She heard him scream again as she got back to the site and saw two of the creatures pulling him in opposite directions by his limbs. She leveled her rifle at the nearest head as she ran and she could see the resemblance, now; the same brow and jaw, even if the coloring and teeth were different….these were Krogan. Krogan that could survive where nothing should. Her heart hammered in her chest and time slowed while she aimed… but watched in horror as his leg in full armor came apart from his torso, the crack of the shot and the hole sprouting in the beast's head coming too late to spare Baptiste from a grisly end.
"Bembe!" she yelled, drowned out by the pain and terror in his voice while her momentum carried her toward the Krogan holding his detached leg by the ankle. Her cry was desperate, the last syllable carried long in anger and grief until she connected the fat end of her rifle with the thing's leering face. The momentum of that cybernetically enhanced blow crushed its nose into a spray of lavender and it stumbled backward, releasing Baptiste before rising up on its hind legs, higher and higher until it towered twice her height, then took in a great breath before roaring at her in animal fury. By every god ever named the thing was huge! She saw movement all around them now, including Baptiste as he writhed in pain and suffocation, his personal atmosphere now full of poisonous gas. There were too many around her for the number they'd brought down. Unless maybe they hadn't really brought them down? A quick count showed more than fifteen left. Too many...just...too many.
"Get...outta...here..." Bembe gasped as he lay dying with his body going into painful convulsions. "Kat! Get out!"
One of the shapes became fully visible as it dragged in the corpse of one of its companions, dropping its heavy leg to the ground with a thud as the herd surrounded her. She remembered killing that one, for certain, but there it stood just the same. Her own upgrades could heal serious damage in days instead of months, hours instead of days, but that thing had no armor and two rounds put in it at short range. It shouldn't be up and certainly shouldn't be dragging damn near six hundred kilograms in a matter of minutes. When the Krogan all stood on two legs instead of four, knowing the chase was over, it suddenly occurred her that they were naked. All male. Was this some kind of ritual, she wondered? Some tradition they'd interrupted?
The giant leader blew forcefully out of its nose and a clump of clotted purple ooze fell to the ground. It sized her up for a moment, the pause pregnant, and she took that precious moment, likely one of the last before her inevitable death, to point her weapon at Baptiste's head and grant her friend a final mercy.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly before pulling the trigger.
The rest was violence...and the numb darkness of defeat.
She woke to the coppery taste of blood on her tongue and shortly afterward the realization that she couldn't hear the steady rasp of her own breath in her ears. That meant no helmet. Was she out of her armor? She tried opening her eyes to find out and was alarmed when only the right one managed the job.
For a long moment she was elsewhere among crumbled buildings and demolished people, drawing jagged glass breath while waiting doubtfully for medical transport. The cries and moans of the dead and dying always dimmed after awhile, the only thing wanted alongside sweet life itself being peace and quiet; but the noise came back louder each time they heard that terrifying Reaper sound, the one they made while taking everything away from someone...somewhere, and their miserable cacophony took on the hopeless flavor of dread.
But she wasn't in the wet, sour smelling jungles of Brazil anymore, another panicked breath confirmed with dry, acrid certainty; and the same icey calm that brought her through that hell five years ago asserted itself again deep within and brought forth the question that most needed asking.
Where was she, then?
Her surroundings were dim and having only the one eye able to peer into them made it difficult. She was on her back on a table and just to her right was a tall pane of glass separating where she lay from the larger room beyond. An attempt to sit up made it clear that she was strapped down, and stretching the restraints caused a soft alarm to sound.
The alarm brought an Asari woman around the corner, her brow knit in concern. "Oh dear, you aren't supposed to be awake yet. Just relax, alright?"
Kat did relax a bit at the sight of her and watched her fiddle with a machine nearby. "What happened?" she asked groggily, the words not forming quickly or well. "Something's wrong with my eye."
The asari smiled warmly and moved to her side. "Nothing we can't fix. Just give it some time."
Her vision went soft again as the drugs kicked in. There were things she wanted to ask but they didn't seem very important anymore. She turned her head to watch the attendant as she moved away and noticed something she couldn't make much sense of. Her left arm was lifted, palm up and presented on a higher platform, the skin spread and splayed to reveal the bone and sinew inside. That was intriguing, for sure, but as she followed the limb back toward her shoulder she became confused. It wasn't attached to her, at all. This all had to be a dream, she thought. Just a bad dream. She willed it to be a husk dream, again. She knew how to kill Husks in her dreams.
"I thought you corrected the dosage," Came a new voice from the door. A much larger figure, this time. Krogan Female.
"I did, Ma'am." The Asari replied. "Her physiology is simply adjusting. I'm keeping her under close observation."
"See that you do," was the reply as she turned to depart, "Kravorog is expecting my report, mid-week."