Aggressor: Rise of Man
Chapter 3
Station GARDEN
"I have never seen such savagery anywhere in this galaxy than in the wake of an Asari Reaver raid. Such destruction, it would be magnificent if it weren't so chilling. So random. Nobody knows why they descend on so many worlds in the Traverse, but their actions are harshly condemned by the Funerary State, and they always pay their weregild on time." -from the report on the events on Torfan, Spectre Ka'hairal Balak c 2183
It was a ragged and diminished party of troops that started the climb to the trail back to SRPA Research Station Garden. Lieutenant Montoya, wounded in the leg by a blade and by a brush with an Asari pistol to her left side. The wounds had already closed, new skin showed through the rents in her dark uniform. Balak, unscathed, led the way forward, his wicked harpoon rifle scanning the path, the sky. Two survivors of Montoya's squad sported half healed wounds in half a dozen places between them. The Corporal, Rawlings, pressed the needle head of another ampule of the thick, sickly yellow-green symbac solution to the weeping wound on his shoulder. It hissed and relief passed across the dark creases of his forehead. His helmet was gone, along with the ruined remains of his flak jacket. Standing apart from the rest of the group, and yet untouched, the four members of the X-Ray team that had come to their rescue. Their uniforms were unmarked, lacking even the olive-green SRPA Delta of the other Black Ops troopers. Their leader had not spoken a word, except to Montoya in a hushed whisper. And then there was Shepard himself. His radio set hung heavily from its shoulder straps, it's weight only growing under his growing exhaustion. He was wearing a purloined plate carrier off a dead soldier that only exacerbated his fatigue, its pockets filled with spare magazines for the Razor. The Carbine itself he held in white-knuckled grip; the soft yellow glow of its chimera tech workings oddly comforting.
"Radioman, any luck with raising the Colonel?" Montoya said, suddenly appearing at his side. Her voice was unusually soft. Shepard was, to his relief, able to suppress a startled jump.
"Nothing since the attack started, Lieutenant," Shepard replied in little more than a whisper. His eyes flicked to the men. They regarded him curiously. "That thing has a signals blanket over the local area as thick as navy bean soup." He motioned towards the black metal edifice that still hovered seemingly effortlessly above the colony. "I can't punch through, at least not consistently."
"But you have gotten through?" Montoya asked. She looked over the ridge line at the alien dreadnaught that had heralded the Asari raid and unconsciously let her hand fall to the autopistol at her waist. When she looked back, she was chewing on her lower lip, the stern lines of her face drawn with worry.
"Once or twice," Shepard admitted, his stomach turning at the memory of the short snatches he had been able to unscramble out of the white noise, "only for a few seconds at a time. Nothing coherent. Gunfire. Screaming," he swallowed, "laughter."
"Laughter?"
"The Asari. They're either very loud, or the Command center has been breached." Shepard shivered despite the heat. The big guns of the SRPA base had fallen silent quite some time ago, an ill omen. Still, the air had also been clear of Asari ships for quite some time. Montoya nodded curtly and drifted off to rejoin her men. Just as Shepard had started to unwind, another voice sent a thrill of shock up his spine. This time, he was unsuccessful in stifling the twitch of surprise.
"You're a little out of your element, aren't you... Shepard?" Balak asked. The Batarian Spectre smiled with pointed teeth as Shepard whirled to face him. "I meant no offense; I merely recognized the look of concern you humans make. You are a Navy spacer, yes? How do you like fighting on the ground for a change?"
"You seem to be pretty good at reading human expressions for an alien," Shepard relied, brushing off the Batarian's question.
Balak's smile widened. "My people and yours share a similar array of emotions, do we not? I'll admit, sometimes it is hard to grasp the nuance of a face with only two eyes, but I make it a point to recognize body language. It has served me well in my past endeavors as a trader."
"A slaver, you mean," Shepard said, forgetting himself. His heart skipped a beat as he remembered that the slaver in question had almost unquestioned power back in Citadel space and, as the Inspector appointed by the Armistice Commission, far reaching powers in Earth Space as well.
"I wouldn't expect you to be able to fully grasp the cultural practices of my people," Balak responded, "but yes, I once took merchandise out on the rim. It's part of what allowed me to develop an understanding, even an appreciation of the alien. It's why my people put me forward for Spectre candidacy." His upper eyes flickered to the sky; his lower eyes stayed locked on Shepard's. "Which brings me back to my question. How do you find ground action?"
Before Shepard could respond, one of the X Rays barked a sharp warning. "Object, up ahead." Shepard peered forward along the trail, searching for the object in question. He found it near a small prefab building that clung to the side of the hill they were picking their way down. In a small flattened space that held pair of small ATVs, someone had left a strange device. It was a dark metal tripod, crafted of a dark, grey metal that shimmered like oil in water under the New Eden sun. It stood perhaps waist high, its center held a wide band of metal around a single pointed spindle. The device hummed to itself in a low, insectile drone as they approached closer.
"What it is, LT?" Rawlings asked.
"Nothing good," Montoya responded. They were just about level with it now, mere meters away. Shepard's ears buzzed and his scar itched. "Rawlings, Lowe. I want demo charges on that thing. It might have something to do with our comms jamming."
"Let's not be hasty, Lieutenant Montoya," the X-Rays' leader said, "This is a piece of alien technology. It should be secured for study, not ignorantly dynamited. For all we know it might answer some questions as to just why we were attacked. Why here, why Asari. Don't you want to know who's flying that dreadnaught? Without this... tripod, here, we may remain in the dark."
"Or it might just explode if we approach. Or unleash something worse. I've fought these aliens before. Their leave-behind devices are very rarely gifts."
"Priority Black, Lieutenant," the blank helmeted X-Ray replied languidly. "Secure the device, now."
Montoya rankled under the directive, her hand gripping the butt of her pistol. The X-Ray stood, impassive. Beside him, the heavy trooper held his rotary burst cannon casually at the ready. Montoya broke the standoff, reluctantly standing down. "You heard the man," she snapped, bitterly, "secure the device."
Rawlings shook his head, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like this is bullshit under his breath. He and Lowe picked their way carefully towards the tripod as if they were moving through a minefield, weapons trained on its humming body. Lowe was the first to reach it. The slight soldier stood there, staring at it. He wavered for a second, his head bobbing as if caught by a tune. He reached out with a gloved hand, fingers inches from brushing the strange alien metal. Rawlings came up behind him and gripped him heard by the shoulder, wrenching him backward. There was a tortured shrieking sound like metal on rusted metal. The spindle in the center of the tripod surged skyward, extending into a metal spike near seven meters long.
"Christ on a pike!" Lowe sputtered, falling backward into Rawlings. The spike finished its ascent and the humming dimmed to a mere whisper. "It were in my head, humming. It wanted me to climb on top of it. Would have speared me through!" He dusted himself off and turned back towards Montoya. "Permission to blow this thing to kingdom come, LT."
"Permission granted," Montoya hissed, cutting off the X-Ray's strangled reply, "I don't know what it is, but I think it has demonstrated sure enough that it's too dangerous to leave lying around, wouldn't you think?" She was still staring down the operative when Lowe's demolition charge blew the tripod to shrapnel.
Smoke filled the Eden Valley. The woodland and hill scrub burned with the impact of weapons and around the corpses of a trio of downed Asari vessels. It was into this grey-brown murk that Shepard descended. Visibility shrank to a mere ten meters as the thick blanket closed about them. The smoke-filled valley was eerily quiet, the only sound the burning of distant fires. Every now and again, a sudden burst of sound would rise in the distance. The war whoop of the Asari. A scream from a human throat. A weird, strangled susurration. Each new sound set Shepard's nerves jangling. He peered out into the smog; the thin, weak laser beam of his carbine's markerlight reached out to land on nothing but open air and the occasional broken tooth of a denuded tree or shattered fence post. Prefab structures stood open and empty. Shepard tried not to look at the liberal splashes of blood that newly decorated their doorways. Other, more alien shapes emerged from the gloom as their dwindling party pressed on. Shepard soon became chillingly familiar with the sharp, upward-thrust spikes of what Montoya had bitterly dubbed 'dragon's teeth.' He no longer looked up to see the shapes that hung from their hungry points. He shivered again as they passed another cluster of three of the horrifying things.
"Those things are getting thicker on the ground," Montoya said, her voice taut with wroth, "Damn these pirate bitches. They must be chasing breakaways from the garrison into the woods. Hunting them."
"What do you think they're for?" Shepard asked, curiosity and bile fascination momentarily overwhelming the sick feeling rising in his gut. A slight quaver had worked its way into his voice despite his best efforts and stubbornly refused his attempts to banish it.
"Why do the Reavers do anything?" Balak spat, "they are mad things. Likely these 'dragon's teeth' are to display their kills to their sisters. Or perhaps to drive fear into their victims."
"I'll tell you what, they definitely put the shits up me," Lowe commented. The Black Ops soldier motioned off to the side. "Hold up, those ones don't seem to be displaying anything." He was right. Off to the side of the road, beside the broken and crumpled body of a downed VTOL, a pair of dragon's teeth tripods stood with the spikes partially retracted to the point that they only extended half a foot above the metal ring that contained them. Montoya nodded towards them. Lowe and Rawlings broke off, approaching the macabre fixtures with a healthy dose of caution. Lowe muttered something under his breath.
"You might want to take a look at this, LT," Rawlings reported. Montoya crept forward. Shepard followed her, more out of habit than a genuine urge to get a better look at whatever had been bad enough to put a slight shake in the special forces soldier's voice. As he drew closer, he wished he hadn't. The spike itself was dark with blood, though something about it set Shepard's teeth on edge, something in the way it seemed speckled with dark flecks that glittered with a sharp-edged blue light when his eyes caught one of them end-on. The tripod base was bathed in more of the red turning on black vitae. It pooled below the dragon's tooth. And, as if the sight was not ghoulish and frightening enough, there were footprints pressed into the drying pool, with more leading off into the smog. "Looks like something came back for these ones. You think there's a rescue team out here?"
"A rescue team that's figured out how to deactivate these things, get them down?" Montoya asked rhetorically, "No, I think whatever put them up there came back to take them back. Keep your eyes peeled people. This blood isn't too old. Our Asari trophy taker may still be in the area."
"Unless the body came down and walked off on its own," Shepard murmured and instantly wished he hadn't. Memory of school time images of Earth's distant past floated up unbidden. Cocoons in the old cities of the United Americas cracked open, their grey-skinned occupants ready to rampage across the countryside. He peered into the smog. Was that something moving out there, stalking us in the gloom? The wind shifted and all that was revealed was a broken engine pod, fallen from the wreck and half buried. Then the smoke thickened again and it was swallowed up. Shepard gripped his carbine closer as the troopers departed the crash site with him in tow.
The closer they drew to the Research Station, the more thickly the smoke had spread. And the brighter the glare of the fires. The gatehouse and the bodies of their fallen comrades from the morning was gone, replaced with the gaping crater of an errant bomb blast. The carcass of driver Bahtia's Alvis Samson lay forlornly on its side higher up the track than they'd left it. The flames that licked out from the crew compartment back lit the darkening smoke and threw twisted shadows through the air to maddeningly dance and jerk on the currents. Shepard toed idly at the shattered butt of white metal that stuck out of the ground with his boot. The explosion had swallowed the Asari dead as surely as the SRPA they had slain. He coughed viscously behind the torn blue sleeve of his uniform he'd tied around his face like a ragged bandana in an effort to keep his lungs free from the crud that laced the air. He eyed the fully sealed suits and gas masks of the Black Ops troopers with open jealously. The radio set dug into his shoulders atop the straps of his armored vest. Its receiver pumped out nothing but the omnipresent white noise.
At the foot of the rise that led up to the base, Montoya was in close council with the leader of the X-Ray squad and the Spectre. Planning whether to spend longer stewing in the smoke or risk sticking the squad's heads just high enough above it to get them shot off, he wagered. He wiped his burning eyes and peered back the way they had come. The air stirred, whipping the smoke into strange eddies. Shepard started, raising his weapon instinctively. Something had definitely moved in the smog. He strained his ears, trying to hear over the white noise and the thin, reedy whistle that had started to emanate from his radio as they had neared the base.
"You see something, Shep?" Rawlings asked. The other maskless trooper seemed to be suffering as badly as he was, but his eyes remained sharp as he followed the line of Shepard's markerlight.
"Thought I did..." Shepard took a step toward the stirring smoke. The laser light scattered off something, maybe a shoulder, or an arm. Shepard stifled a yell. The thing had had ashen grey skin almost indistinguishable from the smoke around it. "There's definitely something moving out there. You saw it to, right?" Panic was rising in Shepard again. The fear that he was imagining things in the smoke. The fear that he wasn't.
"I see it too," Rawlings confirmed, "LT, we got movement behind," he said at the same time Shepard reached up to turn off his radio. The eerie ringing was replaced by a blood curdling groan that seemed to bubble up out of the fog. "Oh, shit."
Shepard's finger tightened over the trigger of his weapon of its own accord. The smokey air was suddenly split with the needle-sharp shriek of the Razor, joined shortly after by a half dozen over streams of fire that strobed through the gloom. Shepard could have sworn he saw the shape of a humanoid lit up by the sudden storm of fire, thought he heard a warbling keen that rose and fell behind the wall of gunfire.
"Cease fire! Cease Fire!" Montoya barked. The sound of guns sputtered and died. "Stop that shooting, Radioman!"
Shepard released the firing stud and felt heat rise in his cheeks as the squad rounded on him. Rawlings tried to intercede.
"Shepard saw something moving in the fog, sir! I did too."
"And so you opened fire? What if it was a wounded friendly, or a civvie? And even if not, you may just have revealed our location to an Asari still stalking this fresh hell they've made." The Chimeric officer snapped in clipped tones. "At least go make sure we killed it. The both of you."
Sheepishly, Shepard and Rawlings crept back down the hill. The smoke coiled around them in reaching strands, muddling their footfalls in the loose soil of the shell hole. Shepard stumbled at the midpoint of the crater, skidding almost to the bottom before Rawlings caught him by the arm. The motion disturbed the smoke at his feet just enough to reveal the ground. Blood was spattered there, thick and congealed. Like the gore that coated the dragon's tooth by the VTOL it was flecked in blue. Ichor coated footprints skittered off into the smog.
"Damn, thing got away," Rawling cursed, "Definitely wasn't a civvie. Weren't an Asari either."
"Yeah," Shepard said in reply, reaching halfway to touching the blood before thinking better of it. Was it a trick of the light and smoke, or was it crawling away from him? "But that begs the question." He looked his fellow survivor in the eye. "What else is out here with us?"
By the time Shepard stepped onto the tarmac of Research Station Garden's landing field, his lungs burned. The ravages of the smoke, combined with the exertion of the climb conspired to make his heart beat so loudly in his ears that not another sound could be heard. As he shuffled forward, his gulped a deep breath of relatively smoke-free air with the relish of a Reverb addict. Some of the fog had lifted from the base itself, even if it hadn't completely cleared from his brain. He looked up, seeing the field in front of him for the first time and stopped dead in his tracks. The wide expanse of blacktop was a battlefield, a ruin. The Vultures that had buzzed his window that morning lay splayed like the carrion their namesakes feasted upon, their metal innards bared to the sky. They had died on the ground, still arrayed beside one another. Across from them, two of the Hawks still smoldered. The other two were absent, though their ground crews seemed to have been caught similarly flat footed. But the true horror stood arrayed between the two groups of ruined air craft. A veritable forest of dragon's teeth had grown across the pitted and shell torn landing field, their macabre foliage still impaled upon the lengths of their trunks. Soldiers in their black battle dress, base staff in their baggy coveralls, even stiff coated researchers dragged from the bowls of the Station, all had been spitted for display.
One of the X-Rays loudly vomited in his gas mask, dragging it from his face to clatter on the ground as he doubled up and fell to his knees. Vaguely, Shepard appreciated that the until now silent trooper was, in fact human. And he felt a muted sense of pride that he himself had kept what was left of his lunch down. Not that it did much to salve the horror.
"Police the bodies!" Montoya's voice was high and thin, like a whip crack. "I want any survivors found and given as much symbac as we can spare. Keep your eyes peeled for the Colonel." The orders were forceful, but even Shepard could tell there wasn't much hope behind them. He raced to the nearest body that lay still, leaned against a pallet of Razor ammunition. The fresh-faced woman had blood spattered on her face and a pistol gripped in a gloved hand. Shepard was about to check her pulse when he followed the spatter to where it terminated on the flat metal of the ammo crate. Then he saw the plasma burns on her cheek, the singed hair. Shepard closed the eyes in that terrified face and turned away. What had frightened her so? What had she seen?
"This one's still moving!" one of the X-Rays cried out. Shepard's head whipped around. Sure enough, one of the bodies atop a nearby spike was wriggling like a worm on a hook. "My God! How's he surviving like that!?" Another man rushed over, the one who'd thrown up in his mask.
"Well don't just sit their gawking!" their leader bellowed, "Get the man down! Garrows, prep the symbac infusion!"
At his command, the big fellow with the heavy weapon slung it low on a strap and bounded forward, surprisingly quickly. The two men standing at the base of the impaling stake looked up in bewilderment. The body continued to wriggle and let out a howl that didn't sound entirely human. As if driven by frenzy, the maskless X-Ray began pounding on what might have been a control panel with the butt of his long rifle. It made an almighty crash as grey metal struck alien alloy. As if in reaction, the spike began to retract with a long, sharp rasp of metal on metal. The man held aloft by its point began to move faster, agitatedly, his arms flailed madly and the yowl became a modulated cry.
"Down you come, man, easy. Easy," the X Ray said, moving to take the weight of the man's shoulder as the spike ground to a halt. There was a wet, sucking sound, and the impaled man flopped forward. "We've got you, man. Wait, what's all this blue shit?"
The impaled man's head shot up. A shock ran up Shepard's spine as he saw the man's face. It was the same mottled grey skin he'd seen in the smoke, but by far the greater terror was the eyes and mouth. Or, the bright blue light where the eyes and mouth should have been. It was if someone had hollowed the man out and replaced his insides with crackling electricity. Even as Shepard watched, the figure writhed as if in agony. Deep cracks opened in the skin of his face, burned through the black battle dress he wore to reveal fissures running all along his body. Wires and tubing coiled in the man's exposed guts like a nest of snakes. The thing howled, its voice cracking and rapidly shifting in pitch. Like lightning, it surged forward to strike at the maskless operative. With a wet thump, the unfortunate X-Ray was sent tumbling to the ground. With a speed that belied its clumsy and awkward gait, the impaled thing leapt forward, maintaining its howl. It struck a hammer blow to the young X-Ray's head, bouncing it off the floor. His fellow trooper tried to haul the thing away, but it writhed in his grip, slapping him away with a vicious backhand that was followed by the sound of cracking bones. The struck X-Ray fell back against the tripod of the Dragon's tooth, barely escaping falling on the vacated spike.
The howling thing returned its focus to the downed man. One arm flopped at its side, broken to uselessness by the strength of its backhand, but the other arm it raised for another blow. With a sickening crunch of cartilage giving way, it crushed the X-Ray's windpipe.
The big trooper, Garrows, bellowed in response and brought up his heavy weapon. The barrels whirled to life and with a full-throated burst he sawed the murderous husk to pieces. The sustained fire lifted it off the downed man in two ragged halves. The barrels of the minigun wound down, leaving only the sound of Garrow's heavy breathing. "He's dead, Sarge," the big man stated, his voice hollow. Shepard blinked in disbelief. The entire encounter had happened so fast, it had barely registered that it was happening at all. His hand was still extended towards the dead woman, his carbine still sat on the ground. He scooped it up and eyed the spike around him warily. Behind him, the sound of more grinding spikes began in concert.
"Into the station, now!" Montoya barked. Shepard was already running. He didn't hazard a look back. He didn't have to. About five meters to his side, one of the spikes amongst a cluster of six was already dropping, the hollow woman on its tip already trying to pry itself off. More howls sounded at his heels, answered by the staccato blast of plasma fire, the low pulse of the X-Ray's battle rifle. Rawlings raced ahead of him before turning and firing. A husk just off to his left exploded as charged plasma pulses tore black ichor from its chest. Garrows pushed ahead on his right, firing as he ran and tearing down another husk that had tried to get ahead of us. Shepard skated to a stop and turned, prepared to add his own covering fire. His heart skipped a beat as he saw almost a dozen of the blue fire laced husks scrabbling after him. He loosed a wild burst, taking one of the nearest in the hip. The leg shattered, causing the creature to pirouette to the ground. To Shepard's horror, it kept coming, clawing its past another descending dragon's tooth. Montoya skipped by, bouncing sideways as she grabbed him by the collar. Shepard stumbled into a mad run behind her.
The yawning blast doors of the research station lay open ahead, the darkness of the interior blessedly clear of glowing blue lights. Shepard's lungs burned as he pumped his legs. There was a howl to his right, another husk threw itself in his path. Shepard leapt over it, landing heavily. He pumped a burst of plasma into another's chest. It kept coming. Shepard dodged to the right, narrowly ducking under its reaching arms. Garrows bulled through it, slamming his minigun down on its head. The husk went limp. The door way was mere meters away when a husk caught Shepard by the ankle. He stumbled, fell. His carbine went flying away ahead of him, skating out of his grip. He kicked back at the iron grip around his boot, the husk clung on, reaching up to clamp its vice grip on the back of his calf. Shepard screamed as cold steel fingertips dug into the meat of his leg. The X-Ray's leader ran past him, followed closely by their rifleman. Shepard reached towards them, but they either didn't see him, or had no time to spare coming to his rescue. The husk crawled closer, gripping his thigh with that same crushing grip.
There was a cranking sound and suddenly the husk's grip went slack. Shepard wriggled out from under its corpse and looked back. Balak kicked the thing other, pushing the red-hot harpoon sucking back out of its chest. The husk still writhed, reaching up to grab at the Spectre. The Batarian slammed his boot into its head, crushing the skull and leaving it limp and motionless. He spat on it viciously.
"Off the ground, human!" the alien roared through pointed teeth. He grabbed the navy radioman by the arm and hauled him to his feet. Shepard's wrenched leg buckled beneath him, threatening to spill him back to the ground. Balak uttered a frustrated groan. With a short, sharp motion, he dragged Shepard's arm up and over his shoulder. Shepard clung to the Spectre's neck, wobbling like a ragdoll as Balak spun. He fired his mass-effect harpoon gun one handed, spearing a husk low in the gut. "Come on!" he bellowed. He turned and drove towards the blast doors. Shepard limped along, his arm still around his neck. Behind them, Garrows' machine gun hurled death at the approaching foe. Beside them, Rawlings and Lowe slipped by, disappearing into the darkness. A bolt of sickly green fire blasted out past them, pitching over another husk.
And then they were inside the steel embrace of the Research station. Balak skated to a halt and let Shepard slowly slither to the ground. His carbine was nowhere to be seen. The entrance to the foyer was plain concrete and bare steel, the only furnishing the abandoned front counter that stood before the steel mesh of the great elevator. The X-Ray's leader was off to the side of the chamber, yelling back and forth with the equally agitated Lowe. The rifleman crouched behind the blank white expanse of the counter, firing out through the doors. Rawlings knelt over a body leaned against the counter's base. Shepard's guts grew cold. It was the mustachioed face of Colonel Thomas. The man was covered in blood, some the dark red of his own, some a blue-black of the attacking aliens. His breath came in shallow gasps. With a clatter, Garrows and Montoya burst through the open doors as one, backpedaling and firing as they came. A ravaged husk burst in after them. Montoya took it in the head with a quick double tap from her Deadhand.
"Close the doors!" She yelled.
"We can't!" The X-Ray leader wailed, his voice edging on hysteria, "They've blown the relays!"
"LT, you're needed," Rawlings said shortly. Montoya rushed to his side. Shepard hobbled along to follow, mainly to put some distance between himself and the howling horrors beyond the door. Garrows hauled a heavy box magazine for his minigun and pulled the charging handle. He opened up, driving the husks away, at least for the moment.
"Lupe," Colonel Thomas croaked, his unfocused eyes falling on the lieutenant's face, "Lupe, I couldn't hold them." He coughed wetly. Blood dribbled past his lips. "I sent in all of my boys. They blew the doors."
"It's okay, Johnny," Montoya said, her golden eyes shining with more than just the signs of the Chimera strain, "You did what you could."
"I locked them out of the command center," Thomas said, struggling to look up at the still and silent elevator. "Those blue bastards didn't get any of our codes. Didn't..." he broke off with a strangled cough, "didn't manage to destroy our transmitter. You gotta... you gotta warn the fleet. Bring down the wrath of God on these fucking pirates." The Colonel was fading fast. With the last of his strength, he reached up and grasped Montoya by the hand. His fingers lent slack, slithering out of her grip and leaving a thin metal keycard. With a last, labored heave, the SRPA Colonel breathed his last. Montoya's fist clenched around the key card. It shook with rage.
"Damn them," the officer hissed, "Damn them." She blinked back tears, smearing her face with a gauntlet. When her hand came down, the grief had been replaced with a cold mask. She speared Shepard with a piercing glare. "You're going to call your fleet. Punch through the disruption." It was not a question.
"Yes, sir. But I'm going to need some time..." he looked back at the door. A husk clung to the lip of the thick metal, reaching out. Lowe bludgeoned it in the face.
"We'll give you all the time we can," Montoya said sharply. She clapped Rawlings on the shoulder, the two of them sharing a curt nod that spoke novels. "We'll stop them here, keep them off the elevator. We all try to take that up, we risk them crawling up after us."
"I... I don't have a weapon," Shepard stammered, rising slowly to his wounded leg. He stifled a yelp as Montoya shoved her Deadhand into his chest.
"Magazine has seven more rounds. If you need more than that, we've already failed. I don't have any men to babysit you. Spectre Balak!"
"Yes, Lieutenant?" Balak hissed. His weapon was ringing with overheat alarms.
"I appreciate your assistance today, but I think it is time we part ways. I do not have the authority to order you up top, but never the less I'll have to ask you to escort Mr. Shepard to our comms. suite. As much as it pains me to say it, but we'll need your word if anyone is to believe what's happened here."
Balak nodded. "I think you're right. Die well, Montoya." He turned to Shepard. "Come on then, into the elevator with you."
Shepard nodded, stunned. With Balak's aid, he hobbled into the elevator. He turned, leaning against the mesh as the cage began to rise. The tempo of fire rose also as more and more husks poured themselves against the doors. The lobby strobed with red plasma fire, searing Shepard's eyes as the sight disappeared below the concrete of the elevator shaft.
Intel
SRPA BM-003 Razor Carbine
The BM-003, or Bullseye, for Manufacture, no. 003, colloquially named the Razor by users in the field, is the weapon of choice for SRPA Black Ops soldiers. Originally reverse engineered from the Chimera Bullseye submachine gun during the Chimera War (Earth) by the United Kingdom prior to its amalgamation into the Three Worlds Pact, the BM-003 shares its predecessor's plasma burst operation. As with much of the technology developed from that of the Chimera, the exact mechanism through which the weapon operates is not well understood by human science. However, observation of its individual modules has allowed its manufacturers at lease a basic working knowledge. It is known that the Razor consists primarily of a magazine that contains small, cylindrical feeder slugs and a Chimeran power cell from which energy is pulled with each working of the action to convert a single slug into high energy plasma. From the energizing chamber, this plasma is then accelerated by some means down the length of the barrel and towards the target. This process creates significant amounts of heat, though strangely not from the power source.
In operation, the Razor trades precision for rate of fire, a weakness that is compensated for by another of its inherited features. Underslung on each BM-003 Carbine is a 'tag' launcher. The tag itself is a marker that upon striking a solid object adheres to it and attracts plasma fired from the matching carbine towards it. In the field, this has allowed operators to achieve hits on a tagged target from rounds fired anywhere within a thirty-degree cone of the line of fire, and in the case of more practiced users, even reported hits around corners or over other hard cover. When compared to Element Zero powered magnetic accelerators, the Razor shows similar effective firepower, though its mechanism differs. Contrary to popular belief, plasma weaponry does not operate on directed energy principles, and so interacts with mass effect generated kinetic barriers. However, in an atmosphere it is not the kinetic energy of the low-density plasma that causes injury, but the transition of thermal energy. Concentrated Razor fire has been known to melt armor plating a cook flesh, despite never physically breaking its target's kinetic barriers.
The technology behind the Razor has been replicated for application in the SRPA's handgun platform, the BM-005 Deadhand and for heavy weapons such as the XR-007 'Phantom' Burst Cannon. Non SRPA production pulse weaponry using native components also uses a similar mechanism, though at diminished efficiency.
Author's Note:
And so the New Eden arc drives towards its finale. I hope you won't break out the torches and pitchforks for being left with another cliffhanger.
Sorlian- I expect the levels of shoutouts and other references to rise. I'm afraid I took the opportunity presented by the crossover and ran with it. I might just have pulled through a little more than just the odd reference.
OMAC001- Let the lore continue! Human-Alien relations in Aggressor are going to be... interesting, to say the least. As you've likely gathered, humanity's introduction to a strange galaxy has already released a good bucket of butterflies.
RandomReader- Thank you for saying so. I've always found it more interesting to put constraints on our intrepid heroes. Certainly beats the three or four chapter fatigue that sets in when they're allowed to just run roughshod over the galaxy.