Interloper Rewrite: Chapter 29

Tunnel Work


"How long?" I asked, eyes glued to the binocular scope, searching for the telltale glint of our unknown observer. The think bank of ash lifted for just a second, revealing the reflection off the spy's glass.

"Since before we arrived," Forrest replied, "that hide is good, very good. That kind of thing takes a lot of time to set up. There's another one to the south, don't look. We don't want to let them know they've been made." The seasoned sniper put down his rifle.

"You think they were sent by Kahoku..." I began before trailing off. No, the Admiral might have gone mad, but everything everyone had said about him said he wasn't sadistic. I could still remember finding him yelling into a terminal, trying to discover the status of his men. No, if he was here, that wasn't his man watching us through that glittering scope.

"Whoever it is, there no friend of ours." Forrest turned his head to face me. His grim expression pulled the lines of his face taut. He looked back out over the battlefield, sharp eyes scanning as if they could pierce the hazy smog that had rolled in to settle amongst the distant shoulders of the black hills.

"Keep an eye out for them," I ordered after a long spell of silence, "I want a report if you spot any more uninvited guests."

"Sir."

I left the marine standing guard and crunched my way back over to what passed for the command post. My boots crunched in the gravel, where bubbling green ichor had fused the stone into glassy sheets. I weaved bast the body of a fallen Rachi warrior that had yet to be dragged off and piled with the others. The last attack had been a close thing, even with the tunnel entrances we'd collapsed on our way in. I tried to ignore the hardsuit gauntlet gripped in the oversized insect's mandibles. I passed wary men and women, the twitching barrels of the outpost's defensive turrets, the agitated form of Wrex. Lieutenant Durand stood in the nexus of this uneasy break in hostilities. She looked up at my approach.

"Ah, Deputy," she exclaimed with a voice worn with fatigue, "anything new from the sentries?"

"No Rachni yet," I responded, "There last attack cost them a lot, perhaps they are licking their wounds?"

"Costly, yes, but maybe not as much for them as it was for us. Five marines down, three for good. Good men who I cannot replace. We could smash these bugs at a rate of ten to one and still end up buried by what's left over." The Alliance officer leaned heavily on the stacked crates that formed her redoubt. "At least your little expedition is ready, though I wish you could have left the Mako here."

"I wish I could, but moving about on foot..."

There was a rumbling beneath the ground, as if a large mass moved below the dusty earth. Durand and I exchanged glances. The Rachni were coming again.


The rumble of movement underground came again. A burst of sickly greenish dust burst from the tunnels across from the outpost, mixing with the fog. Marines got to their feet and fresh ammunition blocks were passed around. In the center of the compound, the automated defenses quivered with deadly potential.

"This is it, people. We hold now, we go home, simple as that. You see something with more than two legs, you shoot it. You keep shooting until it stops moving. You hear me!?" Durand called out.

The marines managed a surprisingly raucous battle cry, each one poised and ready, even the walking wounded. I joined them on the ready line rifle tucked into my shoulder. The scope was gone, torn off at the claws of a Rachni warrior. Three small blobs of omni-gel made a poor substitute for iron sights, but needs must. At least the now exposed circuitry allowed for a little more cooling. A little more tinkering might make a reasonable battle rifle out of the battered sniper weapon.

Behind the steel barricade, Isik, Wrex, and Liara flanked me with weapons drawn. I looked to them for support, just as they looked to me for leadership. I gave them a curt nod; it was all they needed. The first Rachni burst from the gravel. A rocket caught it full in the body, blasting it backwards. More popped up, all across the arc of the tunnel network. I plugged away at one after another. Each time a puff of superheated air blasted past my helmet. The flash of outgoing rounds and biotic bursts lit up a ring around the base.

"Right flank!" a marine yelled. I threw my aim sideways and took a shot that way. The Rachni fell back at the same time my rifle vented. I dropped it in the gravel and drew my shotgun. Its thunder joined that of the soldiers around me. Everywhere I looked, debris of insectoid alien splattered on the ground. More of the wild Rachni piled up in mounds, pushing through their dead to get at us. I unfurled my arm in the motion Tali had shown me to activate her program. I flexed my thumb to toss an incendiary grenade out onto the plain. Fire burst across the ground, blocking the path straight ahead of me.

"Deputy, I see another reflection," Forrest's voice crackled past the background static, "I can see them now, two men in black hardsuits, observation glass, looks like some kind of recording device. Should I engage them?"

"We don't want them to know we're onto them."

"They're moving, looks like one of them…" a shaving of white-hot metal whizzed by my helmet. Forrest stood and fired almost as if by reflex. The crack of his return shot came a second after. "Target eliminated."

"Who's shooting at us?" Durand yelled. Another blast as a rocket tore apart a rachni drone.

"We need to put a team together, go find them." I looked out at the hills, trying to find more flashes. "I can take one, maybe two…"

"Are you nuts? We are in the middle of an attack!" Durand rounded on me. A marine fell into place behind her and took up her rifle. "We need that Mako's power if we are going to hold this point."

"Then we don't take the Mako," I said, looking for another solution. My eyes flicked from the hill, to the charges, to the tunnels. "We go on foot, through the tunnels."

"The tunnels that are full of bugs?"

"They can't be using all of them, and the shot came from the direction of the mine. We take out two birds with one stone." The tired lieutenant regarded me with an incredulous look on her face.

"I can't tell you what to do with your team, but those marines with you are now under my command. You aren't taking them with you."

"Then I'll take the aliens," I shot back. "Liara, Wrex, pull back to the Mako."

"We're leaving the fight?" Liara replied.

"No, just taking it elsewhere."


The thin roof of one of the sealed Rachni tunnels crashed to the dusty floor with a hail of stone fragments and a dusting of ash. Roofs tended to do that when they took a biotically aided body slam from an angry Krogan. Wrex followed the fragments in, dropping to a crouch with a crash. Nothing leapt from the darkness to drag the mercenary away. He turned this way and that, the light beam of his flashlight sweeping the stone tube. He couldn't have been more than seven or eight feet down. He didn't look up, but I could feel his radiating impatience. It was my turn to follow him.

I pulled in a deep, shuddering breath. The ragged hole into the underground labyrinth yawned open, dark, potentially swarming. I flexed my hands unconsciously. There was nothing for it. I dropped down into the hole after Wrex. My knees took the impact with a shock that ran up my spine, but aches and pain could wait for later. My long-barreled rifle flicked up, the mounted light strobing in the dark. The walls of the tunnel were irregular, sharp and flinty where they'd need gnawed from the rock, smooth and fluid looking where the Rachni had apparently applied their acid. The tunnel was uncomfortably organic, the walls threw all kinds of odd shadows that hopped and jumped as we moved. With a light thump, Liara landed behind us.

"It stinks down here," Wrex opined bluntly. He began marching away from us, heading down the tunnel towards where the bouncing ball of the direction marker for the mineshaft lit on our shared HUDs. Behind, the crates of scuttling charges followed us down, eerily buoyant in their wreath of pale blue static. Their minder, Liara, held her arms outstretch to move them.

"How are you holding up, Liara?" I cast the Asari a worried glance. Her biotic amp had already been running hot when we had pulled back to the Mako. She offered a wan smile back at me through her transparent breathing mask.

"I'll be fine," she said in reply, though her voice shook slightly, "What is it you humans say? Don't take a girl on a first date you can't match on the second? I'm not sure I want to know what you have planned for the next one."

"Quit chirping, little birds. We have business to take care of," Wrex rumbled. He kicked at the broken appendage of a dead Rachni. Liara and I exchanged smirks. All together we pushed deeper into the tunnel network, leaving the muffled din of battle behind us. The silence and the dark swallowed us. Here, distant from the fighting, we took a side tunnel. Here dust had already settled on the ground, making it seem less used. At the junction, Liara passed the charges over for Wrex to carry. The tunnels tightened here, become low ceilinged and tight. We crept forward bent almost double for what felt like a mile.

"Hold up." I dropped low to the ground as we neared another junction. The tunnel we had been running through was rough, as if chewed out of the rock by thousands of teeth. The path we had just run into was clearly made by blasting explosives and tunneling lasers.

"This must be the mine," Wrex muttered. Behind us the bombs fell to the ground with a dull thump. Liara, who had taken the weight of the charges back up, fell back against the roughhewn wall.

"That observer was just above the mine entrance, if we can get through these tunnels without being detected…"

"Walk through a rachni nest undetected?" Wrex asked incredulously, "I have a better idea; you and the doctor make your way to the surface. Set the charges somewhere nice and load bearing on the way up."

"And you?"

"I'm going to be moving in the other direction, making as much noise as possible." Wrex smiled in the dark. "That should give you enough room to maneuver in."

I made to dismiss the plan, but the look on Wrex's face quieted me. The aged battlemaster was resolute and proud. His offer gave us the best chance of sneaking by and tracking down the observer and sealing the mine.

"You take care of yourself, Wrex," I said, taking a hold of one of the charges.

"I'm not the one who should be worried." The Krogan jumped into the mineshaft and bellowed a challenge. The yell echoed throughout the complex of tunnels. He sprinted off deeper into the shaft, yelling the entire way.

"Let's go," I said shortly. I gave the bomb a mighty heave. The casing scraped across the floor; the bomb was much heavier than it looked.


"I think I see light," I said in a hushed whisper.

"Huh?" Liara's voice was drowned out by the rhythmic thumping of weapons' fire and the harsh scream of Rachni below.

"I said, I think I see light." I looked up. Sure enough, a feeble shaft of light stabbed through the relative dark of the unlit mine. Squinting, I could just about make out the outline of a circular door at the end of an angled shaft. Unburdened by the hefty demolition charges, Liara and I moved quickly and quietly towards the exit to the surface. With all the noise Wrex was making in the deeper caverns, the attempt at stealth was mostly a wasted effort. I threw myself into cover at the top of the shaft.

"Do you see anything?" I peered into the dusky gloom. The mine entrance led out into a shallow valley and past that over the flat plains that lay between us and the surviving marines. The post was still lit by floodlights, but no signs of battle were evident. I snuck forward past the bent open blast doors. The diffused red light of the planet's night barely lit the black gravel of the hill, but a path could still be seen leading up to the peak. "This was where Forrest saw the observer."

"Why would anyone voluntarily set up a camp so close to a rachni nest?" Liara asked.

"I don't know," I said honestly. The location of the observation post had been bothering me. There had been no such base mentioned on the mission in Mass Effect. It was possible they were survivors of the Binary Helix crash, but then why would they have shot at us? "Move carefully, we don't want them to see us coming." Liara nodded and drew her pistol. Together, we crept up the flank of the hill, stopping every now and again to get a movement reading. The hill was desolate, completely empty apart from us. "What's this?" Just before the crest of the hill, we came upon a hollow in the gravel. "This can't be a natural formation." I reached for the hollow. The side of the hill moved, irising outward to reveal a hole that led down into a brightly lit room. Blinking to clear my eyes in the sudden brightness, I stumbled forward into the tunnel. Before I could catch myself, I was rolling headfirst into the room. I was met with a hail of gunfire.

"Stop or I shoot!" a quavering voice called out, too late. I came up into a low crouch in the open space, gun trained on the hapless man in black armor. He held an assault rifle in shaking hands. His unhelmeted face was pale beneath a head of close shaven brown hair. "What do you want?" he stammered.

"You shot at me!" I growled, trying my best to sound intimidating. My eyes swept the room. It was quite bare, with grey walls that seemed to have been cut straight from the dull rock of Nepmos. Behind the scared gunman stood a bank of computers and above that… My heart skipped a beat. Emblazoned on the wall in pale gold was a double hexagon, the symbol of Cerberus. "We have to get out of here." I muttered to myself. If this was a Cerberus post, it was most likely Cerberus that dropped the Binary Helix transport, and if Admiral Kohoku was in the area… the ground heaved underneath me. I flailed madly to regain balance. The Cerberus observer triggered a short burst over my shoulder. A gun returned fire, knocking the observer backward. The ground continued to groan under a continued pounding. I thumbed my radio on, breaking radio silence.

"Ground team to Normandy, what's going on?" the Normandy didn't answer, but the radio crackled with the voice of Chief Forrest.

"Deputy, someone's bombarding the planet from orbit!" He had to yell over the crash of explosions. "Wait a second, receiving tight-beam transmission from the Normandy…" silence fell on the channel, occasionally punctuated by the crack-boom of an orbital strike. Liara advanced on the downed observer with gun drawn.

"He's still alive." She noted, somewhat coldly.

"Please… I…" the man pleaded. His eyes had grown beady, darting from me to Liara. From the look of him, he wasn't much older than I was.

"What is Cerberus doing here?" I asked. The man's eyes widened slightly at the name.

"Please, I, I, we just, we were only observing. The boss said we had to analyze the Rachni's effectiveness as a bioweapon. I never killed anyone!" his voice rose in panic.

"But you let Alliance soldiers get slaughtered right in front of you." Liara stepped forward. Her voice definitely held a hard edge now. Her normally placid face was set with cold fury.

"No! I mean, yes, but I didn't know when I signed up, you've got to believe me!" the frantic man was now inching back away from us. His arm reached for the console.

"He's flashing the disks!" I tried to aim for a spot near his hand, just to ward him off, but he lunged for a hidden button near the base of the computer bank. The screens lit up with scrolling text, quickly brought up and then erased. I kicked the wounded observer savagely in the gut and stepped to the computer. Dust was now trickling from the ceiling as the far-off explosions grew ever closer. "We need to recover this!"

"Let me!" Liara ran hands over the keys so fast it made me dizzy.

"Deputy, are you there?" Forrest's voice drifted back. "Normandy says it's Kahoku, he's got the whole flotilla up there pounding on the surface. We've been ordered to extract the survivors in the Mako."

"Are we heading to you, or are you coming to us?" I asked.

"Negative, your area is too hot for extract and there's no time for you to come to us. You're going to have to find alternate escape vehicle."


Author's Note:

I'd like to apologize for the gap in posting. I've recently been dealing with some burnout, both at work and with this rewrite project. I have since started a new position with a lot less stress involved and these few weeks have done me a lot of good. I do intend to return to my weekly posting schedule, but I hope you'll forgive me if there's the occasional lapse.