Interloper Rewrite: Chapter 35
Waves of Steel
"Fire team, this is Shepard. Drone control and refueling site located and destroyed. You can expect those skies to clear up shortly." the Commander's voice filtered through the static of battle. I felt a flutter of hope in my worn-down heart at the report. There was no time to celebrate though. Shepard may have taken out the refit and repair facility for the flitting Geth air platforms, but it would be up to us to clear away the swarm already deployed against us. I stalked down the muddy forward trench, hunched to keep my head below the parapet. My shotgun was at the ready, my eyes upturned to scan the rapidly descending blackness. Above, shapes moved in the squall, their telltale buzzing hidden by fierce winds that had blown in form behind us as the storm reached a fever pitch. Behind me, the rattle of mass effect rifles rose again, the Geth undoubtably making another push up the beach. But I hunted a different prey.
"Trapper 1-2 to Trapper 1-1. Pull." I whispered. I took a knee in the muck and raised my weapon to my shoulder. In the fallback trench, something moved. A helmeted head peeking over the edge, followed closely by the barrel of a rifle. The overhead buzzing increased in volume. I held my breath, as if the rise and fall of my chest might give away my position. There was a whirl of motion above. The flat disk-shaped head of a geth drone stooped into a dive, it's tripod like legs and weapon mounts trailing a tail of water as they cut through the rain. Bright fire lanced out from beneath it, punching holes the size of my fist in the helmet poking above the trench behind. "Gotcha." I pulled the trigger once, unleashing a deep throated thrum and a hail of tungsten laced spikes. At this range and relative speed, the shotgun blast tore a dinner plate sized circle in the vulnerable underside of the Drone, puncturing the mass effect core. The Drone was devoured by its own flaring fuel supplies as it plowed into the beach meters forward of my hiding place. Sand pattered down on my shoulders. "Very good, Trapper 1-1. That makes three in the bag for us."
"As you say, Deputy," the high-pitched voice of STG Operative Tarel replied, "though perhaps next time you can be the bait. That last shot managed to crease my actual helmet." The Salarian let the now ruined empty armor fall to the floor of his trench with a splash. The drones were getting better at tagging our lures on their first run.
"Perhaps. If we can get another drone to even take another run at us. Took a few tries to bring down that last buzzard."
"Networked intelligences," Tarel agreed, though he made the world sound like something foul in his mouth. "At least the weather seems to be lightening up." My new alien friend was right. The howling rain was dying out, seemingly spent on our little patch of soggy hell. With it, the rain didn't lash so hard against my face, and high above, the first handful of stars timidly peeked through holes in the ugly clouds. The firestorm on the trench line's flanks also seemed to be slowing down. Without their drones, the Geth seemed less sure of themselves. "My men and I have this zone under control, thanks to your aid. If you are needed elsewhere..."
"Thank you, Operative," I replied. "We hold the line." I turned away from the chorus of replies and headed back towards the Alliance held sections of the trench. My boots splashed in the foul water that seeped in despite our best attempts at sandbagging the walls of the trench. Thankfully they were sealed against the murky water, unlike my open-faced helmet. I held my breath as I stepped over a ruined body, careful not to look the former Marine in their glazed eyes. Ahead, another body lay back against the wall of the trench, half submerged. Thankfully, this one was still breathing.
"You done playing duck hunt with the Frogs?" Steiner said. She was breathing in sharp, hurried breaths through gritted teeth. She held up a block of dark metal. "You dropped this." I accepted the folded form of my fallen rifle, rescued from the sucking sand and Steiner accepted my offered hand up out of the water that lapped around her waist. She sucked in a sharp breath as she landed on her wounded leg. She kept her feet, standing shakily and leaning heavily on the scored and scorched sandbags of the firing step. I heard the telltale hiss of medigel injectors and the drawn look left her face slightly. She let out a long, shuddering breath and gazed out over the battle-scarred hill we had hunkered down behind. In the distance, the fires of the Geth refueling station glowed blue-orange beneath a tower of black smoke that rose to join the diminishing clouds. The underlighting drew spiraling patterns in the column, ever shifting in the dying wind. It was hypnotic, even beautiful in its own way. The rifle fire died out almost completely, leaving only the sound of the nearby sea and the soft cries of the wounded, though even those were slowly fading as either their injuries or the medics won their races against time. Steiner and I stood there silently for a while, she staring out at the star-lit battlefield, me quietly working the fouling from my rifle with my Omni-tool. The sand had crusted the heat sink and fused. It would fire, but the beaches of Virmire would likely be its last outing. The knowledge set of a pang in my chest, like I was losing a new friend. Still, the routine cleaning was enough to quell the shaking in my hands. With the gunfire gone away, hope stirred. Hope for my own survival, hope for a path that didn't lead to The Choice.
"This was always the hardest part of a combat op for me," Steiner said, jolting me from my thoughts, "the quiet part, I mean." She didn't look away from the burning fire. Her voice was quiet, pensive. Very different from the sometimes detached, always sarcastic Marine I knew from the Normandy mess hall. The sentiment too seemed strange. In my mind, the quiet space was as close to refreshing as could be found on sweltering Virmire, the first time I'd been able to stop and think since the drop.
"Really? Compared to that last bit, this seems pretty easy." I snapped the rifle closed and blew the last of the water from the exposed optics port. The weapon gave me a status light that flickered weakly in the gloom, but at least it was green.
"Fighting's easy, you fall back on your training and you stick at it till they're dead or you are. They never train you to stand the quiet." Steiner continued; her eyes still fixed umovingly forward. Suddenly I saw her in a new late, not the cool and collected combat veteran above it all, but a tired woman who bore the weight of her experience with straight backed determination that none the less was not the unbreakable steel she presented to me, Jenkins, and the others. Beneath her flippant and blasé affect, she was as tough as concrete, but even concrete and stone crumbled around the edges under pressure.
"I guess so, I like being able to hear the sound of my own thoughts."
"That's often the problem," She replied grimly, "Looks like it won't be quiet for long though." She stood up straighter and pulled what looked like cut down binoculars from her belt. Something was kicking up a lot of sand on the other side of the hill. "Shit, that can't be what I think it is."
"What is it?" I peered through the storm, trying to get a clear look at whatever was stampeding towards us.
"See for yourself, I'm calling this in." she roughly pushed the binoculars into my free hand. I pressed them to my face and fiddled with the controls that lined their upper surface. Beside me Steiner's communicator crackled. Her words reached my ears at around the same time as the binoculars focused. Both shook me almost to the core in a way I couldn't have imagined before my fall onto Eden Prime.
"Chief, we've got Krogan." I pulled back on the zoom until my view covered our entire front sector. The crest of the hill was now covered in red armoured Krogan warriors in full charge, giving the illusion of a tide of blood coming to wipe us from our pitiful defenses.
"Well so much for that." I muttered to myself. Already a yell was going up from the other trenches. A smattering of troops were already engaging the Krogan, but what few rounds made it past their shields were shrugged off by their insane regeneration. I readied my own rifle with the fervent hope that the sand wouldn't foul the action. My first round went well wide; there was still some distance between us and the crushing wall of muscle. I swore and adjusted my aim. My second shot missed even worse. By now my hands were shaking. I took a few breaths, closing my eyes. When I opened them the Krogan were closer. Buckle down Liddle I silently chided myself. I drove the rifle butt into my shoulder and fired again. I was rewarded with a hit square on the Krogan's jaw. Krogan regeneration might be powerful, but catastrophic cranial trauma put them down well enough to keep them there. I fired again and again as the horde continued its headlong charge. Someone further back must have trained the mortars on the sandy plain, because a plume of sand erupted in front of the closest chargers. It knocked them backwards but failed to stop them completely. The chatter of Steiner's gun joined my own now, the bright needles spitting out to meet the red monsters. Somewhere back and to the left, a distinctly alien cry came as one of the STG must have caught some of the ill aimed but voluminous return fire.
"We need to get out of this trench!" Steiner called at my elbow. I looked away from my rifle to see her already limping of toward the ladder someone had thrown over the back wall.
"Wait, Steiner!" I followed behind, still firing over the lip. The scrabble back to the next trench would be hard enough without a wounded knee. Steiner tossed her rifle up and out of the trench and started to climb. I went up backwards behind her in an attempt to provide cover, for what good it did. It was unlikely these specially bred warriors even knew the meaning of the word 'suppression.' A round pinged off of my shoulder, almost spinning me around and off the ladder. A hand steadied me enough to roll up and into a prone position on the sand behind the first line of trenches. I hurriedly shimmed sideways until I was able to slip into the second trench, landing none too gracefully on the equally slimy floor. Strong arms hauled me up and to the firing step without comment. Hurried thanks were all I had time for before I was firing madly at the Krogan again. They were very nearly at the front trench, and would surely have caught us had we not bailed out. As it was, they hopped down into the hastily dug slit, standing chest high to the back wall. A position that presented a particularly inviting target. The men and women around me unleashed a volley into the exposed heads of the rabidly scrabbling Krogan. A handful were cut down as more jumped in to fill their place. A low angled mortar round caught one dead in the chest and showered his comrades with a mixture of dirt and meat. It only seemed to drive them onward more ferociously.
And then, all of a sudden, the Krogan were out of the first trench and approaching the second. One landed roughly off to the left. By the looks of things, he had already caught the softer side of hell on his way in. It was time to show him the harder side. More than three rifles trained on him in seconds, razor sharp shards seeking his redundant vitals. The heavy Krogan thudded backwards, hopefully dead. I trained on another one, much fresher looking. He charged directly at me, lining up perfectly with the barrel of my rifle. An extremely close ranged shot put him down before he could jump down on top of me. I ducked another as he sailed over me to impale himself upon the rear trench's fire. A third Krogan dropped in behind me. I whirled to avoid its wild swings and dropped the long rifle, too cumbersome for the trench, to draw my shotgun again. Another splash signified a fourth attacker landing to the left. The Krogan I was facing swung again, faster this time. The blow caught me in the gut and lifted me off my feet. I sprawled backward into the fourth Krogan, opening me up for another savage punch. The blow was hard enough to sap my shield capacitors, leaving me naked to a follow up. I didn't give them a chance. I pumped two rounds into the Krogan before whipping grenade at the warrior's chest. The Krogan stared dumbly at it for brief seconds before it detonated. The Krogan behind me grabbed me in a tight grip. I let my weight drop to the floor and squirmed into a position to knee the attacker. The maneuver was ineffective. The Krogan tossed me. I landed roughly a few feet away. The Krogan ducked as if to charge, but I recovered more quickly this time. I shifted my waited and pushed off. I thrust my shotgun upwards, pummeling the Krogan in his mask. The punch didn't do much, but the follow up pull of the trigger certainly did. I hunched over double, gasping to catch my breath. The sounds of battle swirled around me in a confusing whirlwind of sound. Two words pierced the cacophony.
"Pull back!" My eyes snapped up. Marines and Salarians alike were scrambling to haul themselves up and over. One stopped to give me a hand, but an errant shot made a ruin of him. I jumped up, abandoning my shotgun in exchange for a quick escape. More men were cut down in the mad dash for the dubious protection of the final line.
"Watch it, Liddle!" I landed close to where Ashley was yelling into an unfortunate comms man's ear. "Sorry, Commander, we're all but overrun here. We'll hold as long as we can, but it doesn't look good."
"Hold on chief, we're almost in. Help is on the way."
"Thanks Commander. Williams out." She let go of the comms man and turned to me with grim determination etched on her face. "Drop your rifle, kid?" I nodded. "Look around, there's plenty spare to go around." She slogged off to rally some scattered men on the far flank, leaving me alone in the wide command trench. The forward two trenches seemed to be acting as a fair brake on the Krogan advance; slowing the tide just enough to keep them at arm's reach. The mud back here was thick with the fallen and broken equipment. I fished an intact looking lancer and cleared the barrel as my eyes scanned the trench. I recognized a few marines; Rahna stood at the fore, lifting Krogan off their feet and tossing them back, Steiner leaned heavily on the wall and steadied a mortar for a pair of salarians, and Jenkins stood fast despite the scoring that marked the armor under his arm. I made my way towards him, avoiding the dead. The whole ordeal was almost unreal, something from a war film turned horribly, terribly real. I lost my field rations on the way over, mercifully not in my helmet, which had been left down in the forward trench.
"You look terrible, mate." Jenkins slapped me on the back. He looked a little green himself. "Still kicking though."
"Yeah, still kicking." I said tiredly. "When do you think the cavalry will arrive?" somewhere in the storm of battle, I still looked for the ray of hope that I could change the odds, that we could get off this rock with the whole gang still in one piece. Jenkins just shook his head. Coming from the usually unnaturally cheerful Jenkins, the gesture sent a chill through my already soaked body. Somewhere in the din of fighting, I heard Ashley yelling, seconds later, her voice rang more clearly in my earpiece. Her commands almost struck me dumb.
"All men, form ranks! Afix, bayonets!" the men around me stood to, pulling long metal knives that tradition still dictated they carry from their belts. A short rattle of steel on steel rang and ten men and women prepared their ancient weapons. The salarians looked on horrified but resolute. They drew strange curved daggers from their own belts. I looked across, expecting to see Ashley grasping a sword, standing beneath some woven banner out of history, but I saw only a tough young woman gripping a rifle. She nodded to me and turned to face the Krogan who were just now escaping the mire of the second trench. "Front Rank! Volley Fire!" she barked. Guns fired until they overheated all down the short line. After the last rifle fell silent, Ashley uttered a single word, just above a whisper. "Charge."
