Chapter 4: Enter the Turian

January 23rd, 2211, 1844 hours – Aboard the SSV Hippocrates, Deck 1, Secondary Engine Room

1 hour, 44 minutes after the outbreak

I heard the tell-tale sizzling crackle that a tactical cloak made when it deactivated.

I looked over my shoulder and saw a suit of black, blue and silver Turian Ghost Infiltrator Armor shimmer into existence atop a raised catwalk three decks up. Stowing his beloved Black Widow on the mag strips affixed to his armor, Cade vaulted off the rails, slowing his descent with the miniature booster jets built into his armor and landing on the deck with barely a sound.

He removed his helmet, revealing his pale, silver face and dark blue tattoos. He dipped his head at Sarah, who was still slightly speechless at the ruthless and efficient manner with which he had dispatched our assailants, and walked towards me.

He held out a gloved hand which I quickly grabbed and pulled him into a brief hug. Neither of us said it but I knew that we were both immensely relieved to know that we had each survived.

I nodded towards the three bodies and the greasy pile of armor and flesh. "You thinking inside or outside?" I asked my fellow Spectre.

Cade pondered silently for a moment. Three of them were still clad in stealth-capable armor the likes of which I had never seen. Sleek, aerodynamic, with built-in tactical cloaks and decent kinetic barriers, they were definitely not cheap and most definitely not something your average run-of-the mill merc group would run around in, not even Cat-6 operatives or elite Eclipse mercenary specialists.

"Hard to tell, I've never seen that kind of armor before, but it could be something that SA R and D could come up with."

He walked over to one of the saboteurs he had shot in the face and nudged him with his boot.

"It's usually about 50/50 for us, what's the split right now?" he asked.

"I think its four-to-five in favor of outside, five-to-five if you count the rogue STG team back on Surkesh."

"Nah, those guys were retired, they count as outside. Let's assume that these guys are Systems Alliance then," he decided.

I frowned. Back during the Reaper War, an indoctrinated pro-human terrorist organization known as Cerberus had been instrumental in the near destruction and harvest of our entire galaxy by the Reapers. What had brought them so close to precipitating our defeat was the fact that they had had deep roots in almost every major Systems Alliance body of power. They had had spies, sleeper agents, and infiltrators in the highest levels of the Systems Alliance Navy, the Earth Government, and the Colonial Administration who fought Commander Shepard at every turn as she struggled to turn the tide against the Reapers.

In our experience, saboteurs generally fell into two categories. Category one was sabotage from the outside. Most often, a shadowy party acquired intermediary help to orchestrate acts of sabotage to cripple another party. Generally, those who fell within category one were low-to-mid level mercenary factions, bureaucrats, rogue military officers, etc. A politician looking to one-up his opponent might hire an Eclipse mercenary team or a Blue Suns spec-ops group to plant a dead prostitute or bomb a public assembly for example. Their sabotage was usually brutish and unrefined, relying more on firepower and force than finesse and careful planning.

The second category was sabotage from the inside. The espionage that Cerberus conducted during the Reaper War had been so particularly deadly because it had been in that category. Originally a pro-human survivalist paramilitary group, their human-first slogan and agenda quickly made them popular with a number of high-ranking military, political, and industrial figures who feared what the galaxy held in store for humans. The influence of these figures gave Cerberus an inside-track on planting a number of Cerberus spies and operatives in almost every level of humanity, biding their time, waiting to strike like a cobra when the Systems Alliance was weakest.

The last time the SSV Hippocrates had been planet-side was nearly eight months ago according to our briefings. No ships other than our shuttle had reportedly docked with it since then, which meant that if it were an outside saboteur group, they had to have boarded the last time the Hippocrates was docked and had to have stayed hidden that entire time –highly unlikely given the security on this ship.

That meant that the saboteurs had to have been already embedded in the ship's crew. As Cade and I now suspected, the saboteurs were not a third-party entity co-opted to destroy the Hippocrates. The importance of the work that SA R and D were conducting aboard the Hippocrates meant that the ship boasted state-of-the-art electronic firewalls, crew identification software, and military-grade weaponized defenses ran by dedicated Virtual Intelligences, making it near impervious to outside infiltration from some tacky mercenary group or a bunch of retired, rogue marines. As were the deep-cover Cerberus operatives that nearly destroyed humanity during the Reaper war, these saboteurs likely originated from somewhere within the Systems Alliance itself.

I sighed. If this was an inside job it meant that we couldn't trust the crew. The only people I could trust were Percival and Cade and maybe the marines.

Why any secret cell within the Systems Alliance would want to disrupt the Prometheus Project was not something I could answer with the clues that I had. It was likely that they could be trying to disrupt another project, or the entire SA R and D itself, but their timing coincided too conveniently with our arrival to be anything other than direct sabotage of the Prometheus Project.

"We could be dealing with a rogue cell within the SA R and D," Cade guessed. "To take down the Hippocrates' communications, the main and back-up generators and sabotage the Prometheus Project all simultaneously would take at least a team of fifteen to twenty saboteurs. The fact that they had the manpower to leave behind a whole fireteam here indicates that they may have even more than that."

Cade flapped his mandibles in the turian equivalent of a shrug and sighed. It was hard to tell sometimes what a turian was thinking solely by observing their facial features. Turians lacked facial muscles –their faces were essentially just a hard carapace. Their anatomical design meant they were incapable of smiling, frowning, furrowing their brows. With their inability to display what humans would call subconscious facial body language, a turian to an uneducated observer would seem perpetually emotionless, passive, or disinterested.

But I had known Cade for a long time. Like all turians, the way they moved their mandibles were a reliable analogue for basic human body language such as shrugging or getting embarrassed. Cade, however, was tapping his trigger guard against his armored thigh like a nervous tic, something that he had picked up from Percival and I. It was something we all did when we were nervous. Like me, he was afraid of getting stabbed or shot in the back by crew we thought that we could trust. Stuff like that tended to seriously complicate a mission.

"You're a sight for sore eyes, Operative Kitiarian. That was quite the entrance you made," smiled Sarah. Her greeting knocked Cade out of his trance. He then turned to her and gave the turian equivalent of a grin.

"Please, Cade will do," he replied. He jerked his head over to where I stood. "Is this oaf treating you okay?"

"Can't complain, havn't been violently murdered yet," Sarah shrugged. Cade nodded to her then turned back towards me.

"Hey, by the way, really digging the sleeveless look. Very macho," he joked as he jabbed a gloved talon at my arm.

"Did you scratch it, Kitiarian?"

He rolled his eyes and unclipped a duffel bag from the back of his armor.

"No, I didn't scratch it. You're welcome by the way."

I grabbed the bag from him, a genuine smile breaking out on my face for the first time since I boarded this damn ship. I motioned for Sarah to begin installing the power cells and began stripping out of the commandeered armor.

"So," Cade asked as I began pulling on my microweave undersuit, "how did you know that I was watching?"

"I wasn't sure. Thought you might be at the Data Archives but I assumed that once the power went out, you'd head here." I started putting on my armor plates one by one, reveling in the feeling of being reunited with my own personalized Ariake Technologies armor set and utterly relieved at finally being able to ditch that Dick-lon Industries shit.

"Yeah," he confirmed, "once the power went out I headed here. I snuck in and noticed the dead techs and figured that the saboteurs had left behind a team to ensure that no one else reactivated the back-up generator. Been silent and stealthed ever since, keeping one eye on the Sabs while I waited for you to make your way here."

"I could have handled them myself," I shrugged. Cade knew better than to dispute my claim.

I clipped my appropriated M-3 Predator to my thigh and loaded my custom M-3 Predator with Disruptor ammunition before clipping it onto my other thigh. "I take it you encountered what used to be the crew, then."

Cade nodded, falling silent. I noticed a few new scratches on his typically immaculately-kept armor. Our eyes met and we exchanged a silent look of understanding.

"I'm telling you, in all my years as a Spectre and in the Legion, I've never seen anything like this, what are these things?"

I shook my head and sighed. "None of us really had much time to ask, we were pretty busy avoiding getting stabbed. It could be a leftover Reaper self-defense mechanism but no one reported anything like this during the Reaper War."

I had seen reports on Reaper husking processes. The Reapers had possessed the capability to turn organic beings into synthetic soldiers for their ground invasions, it was how they produced the bulk of their ground forces. But the way that the creature that had been Dr. Singh had instantly transformed that marine was nothing like what they had seen during the War. This seemed more like a virus or a parasite, maybe something in the Crawlers.

My mind flashed back to the start of the Outbreak. The Reaper core turned on, a bolt of red light had shot out of it and hit the centrifuge that the head scientists had been tinkering with prior to the incident. I remember that greyish-silver liquid shooting out, hitting the doctors and almost hitting me.

"Hey, Sarah. Do you know what these things are?" Cade called out.

Sarah set down the power cell she had been installing and wiped her hands on her coat. She pondered briefly for a moment before tilting her head at Cade.

"If I had to say, they might be some variant of the Reaper troops we saw during the War. Their differing appearance and means of procreation from the original variants could be an unintentional side effect of a corrupted creation process. Perhaps the Reaper Core was damaged or rewritten when Shepard activated the Crucible," Sarah hypothesized. I hadn't considered that, to this day we still don't really know what happened that day Shepard ended the war.

Her eyes dropped to the floor and she went quiet for a moment. "Whatever they are, we need to stop them. I won't let Paul's death be in vain. We need to get to the Data Archives, stop this outbreak, and stop what's happening on Earth and Thessia, it's all connected somehow, I know it," she said adamantly before resuming her installation of the power cells.

Cade and I stood in silence for a moment. There wasn't a doubt in our minds that what was on this ship could destroy whole colonies worse than what was currently happening on earth.

"Did you encounter any turian Corpsers along the way?" I asked Cade. I slipped on my gauntlets and sealed them. I ran a quick diagnostic on my omni-tool to ensure that my kinetic barriers and temperature regulation were activated and began clipping the remainder of my sticky grenades onto my utility belt.

Cade's eyes widened slightly at the name that I had chosen for the baseline variant of those monstrosities. "No, mostly humans. However I had eyes on a few salarians and asari."

"Krogan too," I reported. It was weird that neither of us had seen any turian Corpsers considering the fact that they made up a significant portion of the ships' security detail. "There's also Changers—bigger Corpsers with tubes that can directly transform a victim—and a really big, nasty looking motherfucker called the Chimera. It's basically a giant, wingless metal dragon made up of changed corpses."

"Sounds nasty. Percival?"

"He took the marines and a few survivors and headed towards the Bridge. He's going to establish a strongpoint and triage for ship survivors."

I inspected my helmet for damages and cracks. Once I was satisfied that it was in good condition, I clipped it onto my back and removed my prized Snakebite from the bag.

"Good to know he's still kicking," Cade replied.

I ran a critical eye over my Snakebite, checking the optics, checking the heat sink, checking the ammunition block, checking the finish, basically checking every inch to ensure that Cade had not harmed it.

I heard a loud jolt as the back-up generator turned back on. Sarah whooped in joy as dim emergency lights began powering up all around the Secondary Engine Room, bathing everything in thin, fluorescent light.

"Good job, Sarah," I congratulated her. She grinned at me and began searching for a safe place to stash the spare power cells.

Cade sighed and rubbed his fringe. "So we've got what a ship full of homicidal, synthetic space zombies and a bunch of assholes in fancy armor making shit worse."

He stepped over to the bodies of the three saboteurs and removed their perforated helmets. "Anyone you recognize?"

"Nah dude, there's a fist-sized hole in each of their faces. I thought almost recognized the fourth, but that was before a grenade went off and turned him into ground chuck."

Cade looked sheepishly at me for a moment. "Meera was a bit overeager," he apologized. "Did you run into any more survivors?"

"One," I ground through clenched teeth.

"What happened to her?"

"She died," I simply stated.

Cade didn't say anything else and instead began taking pictures of the dead saboteurs with his omni-tool. We would need all the intelligence we could gather if we were going to do a little Systems Alliance housecleaning after this clusterfuck.

I shook my head and began unwrapping a few of the ration bars I kept in my utility pouch. I wolfed down the first two in about two bites each before taking a swig from my canteen and starting in on a third. I would need every ounce of energy I could get if we were going to make it to the Data Archives and then the Bridge in one piece.

Thankfully they were made by some private corporation and weren't the standard, shit-tasting ration bars that the Systems Alliance gave their grunts. I understood the rationale behind the taste of their their ration bars. We had the technology to replicate and synthesize almost any flavor to near perfection. However, if you made 900-calorie ration bars that tasted like angel sex, sooner or later you'd have a bunch of fat marines.

Sarah finished stowing the power cells and walked over to where I was currently stuffing my face. She looked at me with a bemused expression on her face before stooping to grab one of the M-8 Avengers off of a dead Sab. Cade and I both cocked an eyebrow at her. Well, technically only I did, since Cade didn't have eyebrows.

"You know how to use that thing?" I asked skeptically.

Without answering, she pointed it at a door on the other side of the room marked "Data Archives" and fired a 10-round burst. I squinted closely. Had to say, the grouping wasn't half bad.

Cade must have agreed, because he gave her a turian salute and began walking towards the door.

"No," she responded. "But five years of working with alien tech tends to leave you with fantastically steady hands." Without waiting for my reply, she also began walking towards the door.

"At least grab the one with the largest ammo block left in it!" I called after her. I shook my head. Steady hands didn't mean shit when you don't know how to change an ammunition block or insert a new heatsink.

January 23rd, 2211, 1904 hours – Aboard the SSV Hippocrates, Deck 1, Pedestrian Corridor 26D

2 hour, 4 minutes after the outbreak

Turning on the back-up generators had not drastically improved the lighting situation aboard the ship, although Sarah had assured me that rooms and equipment would be more or less fully operational. The dim emergency light strips made active by the generator did little to dispel the heavy darkness that smothered the corridors, and although life support was now partially activated a thick, greyish smog still seemed to blanket the air.

Cade clipped Meera onto his back and unslung a sleek, dark-blue M-15 Vindicator Battle Rifle. Boasting a 5-round burst function rather than the full-auto capabilities of the Avenger, wielders of the M-15 Vindicator relied on accuracy and precision rather than raw firepower. He further loaded it with armor-piercing ammunition, increasing the chance that he could kill one of those Corpsers in a single burst.

I took point while he covered the rear with Sarah in the middle, rifles sweeping back and forth. Cade and I did our best to sync our footsteps to minimize the sound we made, something we commonly did during stealth missions. Schematics indicated that there was a pedestrian elevator a few dozen meters away that we could take up to deck Seven and the Data Archives.

"Sarah," Cade asked quietly, "if it isn't classified, do you mind telling me what your role in the Prometheus Project was?"

Sarah glanced over at him, understandably reluctant to share what could be classified information. Eventually she must have decided that if she wanted to get off this ship alive, it was in her best interests to share as much as she knew with the people most capable of helping her do so.

"Paul, my husband, brought me in to develop the mini-crucibles we used to jumpstart the Reaper-Core," she began, "I graduated Summa Cum Laude at the University of Terra on Bekenstein and did my dissertation on the modification of precursor alien civilization energy sources for human use. When I was initially brought on, we were still figuring out how to turn on the Reaper Cores we had-"

"Wait, plural?" I interjected.

"Yes, the Alliance managed to salvage a number of Reaper Cores off Earth and a few other planets. We stopped once the phenomenon started spreading, but a large number of cores were removed from derelict Reapers for scientific examination. We were trying to figure out how to halt or even reverse the phenomenon."

My skin crawled at the thought of these things appearing everywhere. Whole colonies could be wiped out in hours or days. Their method of reproduction were equally if not more brutal than the Reapers had used, both physically and psychologically.

During the Reaper War you knew that the Marauder or Husk you were shooting at only might have been your friend and fellow soldier, but with these things you'd know for sure. These Corpsers and Changers largely retained identifiable facial features despite all the embedded metal plates, tubing, metal teeth and arm-spikes. Fuck my life.

"Anyways," she continued, "at first we didn't know how to turn them on, but then I was perusing reports on the Crucible during the war. It was arguably the most sophisticated piece of technology ever created by human and alien hands. Back then, we weren't sure how it worked, only that dozens or hundreds of harvested species before us had added to its design, hoping that someday there would come a cycle that could fully make use of the Crucible to stop the Reapers."

"During the final stages of the war, some scientists noticed that reports of the Crucible's activation during the War were linked to huge spikes in dark energy. They hypothesized that the Crucible wasn't a weapon against the Reapers in a destructive sense, but rather a massive energy source. Shepard's report on the discovery of the Catalyst seemed to support their hypothesis."

"We needed to turn on the Reaper Core's in order to study the phenomenon. We tried fission, fusion, element zero, everything. However, during my Ph.D dissertation I discovered that it was possible to adapt the Crucible to become a potentially variable energy source for human tech. It wasn't until after I presented my dissertation to the Systems Alliance and the Council that we were able to develop the mini-Crucibles. I managed to replicate and change the dark energy wave that it produced so that it would activate rather than disable the Reaper Cores."

I could see tears had begun to slide down her face, her voice had become progressively more distraught as her explanation continued. I had a feeling that I knew what conclusions her mind were leading her to.

"I can't help but think that this is somehow my fault, that somehow the Crucibles I developed were-"

Cade stepped forward and with surprising gentleness drew her into his chest. Sarah wrapped her arms around his armored torso and began sobbing openly into his chest. I watched impassively. I'd be lying if I had said that the thought that somehow the mini-crucible's had been responsible for damaging the Reaper Core and starting the Outbreak hadn't crossed my mind.

"Did I kill him? Did I kill Paul? Did I kill everyone on this ship?" she silently wailed.

"It wasn't your fault," I firmly stated. I suddenly remembered the strange silver-gray liquid.

"Sarah, in the activation chamber, there was a centrifuge that Dr. Landry and Singh were loading test tubes filled with a silver substance. Do you know what was in those test-tubes?"

"N-No, not specifically," she stammered. "Ishmael and Rabhu mainly handled that, I think they said it was just leftover construction fluid in the Reaper Core. The Reapers harvested captured intelligent, space-faring species, converting them into a multi-purpose synthetic-organic construction fluid which they used to build Reaper warships. I believe that when they found the Core, they separated the fluid still found inside because they didn't want any adverse interactions."

"I don't think the issue was with your mini-crucibles."

I briefly described what I had seen in the Activation chamber. Sarah was open-mouthed while Cade pondered silently.

"It moved? We've never had reports of it exhibiting any signs of movement. Commander Shepard's reports aboard the Collector Base stated that the fluid was non-interactive, just a construction material like bricks or mortar that they used to build more Reapers."

"There's a lot about the Reapers that we still don't know," I said grimly.

The corridor opened up into a longer and larger hall about 10 meters wide and 30 meters long. The ceiling was a bit taller in this part of the ship and I could see doors lining both sides of the room with name plates affixed to the doors.

"Wait," Sarah interrupted. "Our personal offices were here, is it okay if I stop and grab something?"

Cade and I exchanged a quick glance, what harm could it do? Might even boost her morale.

I nodded to Sarah. "Sure, is there any relevant data in here that might not be in the Data Archives?"

She pondered for a moment before shaking her head. "Unlikely, all our data entries and reports regarding the Prometheus Project are produced electronically and instantly uploaded to the Data Archives, physical printouts weren't allowed, they were considered a security risk."

"Alright, make it as fast as possible. Do you have the access codes to all the offices?"

"No, only mine. You could try breaking down the doors, but they're reinforced to prevent unauthorized access."

Sarah walked up to an office room that I presumed was hers and tapped a code into the electronic keypad. The door opened with a slight hydraulic hiss and she disappeared inside.

Cade sighed and walked over to her door. He leaned his Vindicator against the frame, placed his armored back against the wall beside it and slid down, landing in a seated position with his legs splayed out before him.

I padded over and adopted the same position, momentarily dropping the inner barriers that I had built to keep my fatigue, fear, and pain at bay. For a second I allowed myself to fully accept the gravity of the situation that we were currently in – that we were stuck on a ship with a horde of synthetic-organic killing machines trying to infect us. I closed my eyes and sighed.

Cade tilted his head towards me. In the weak corona of the emergency lights he looked a lot older than his 25 years. His silvery complexion was almost white in this light, his blue face paint a stark contrast that made his face seem more gaunt than it actually was.

"So Percival's doing alright?" he asked with concern.

I tried to smile a bit to reassure him, but the end result was a grimace. "Yeah," I answered. "We were surrounded by those things outside Containment Airlock 1. What used to be Dr. Singh was about to tear us a new one when Percival suddenly came running out of the Prometheus Labs, throwing inferno grenades and shit. Guy did a superhero leap onto his back and stabbed him in the neck with his omni-blade."

Cade's eyes lit up and he crowed with laughter. "Oh my god, he did the same thing back on Tuchanka to that krogan warlord."

"Because you're a bad fucking influence, dude," I shot at him. "You claim to love your sniper rifle more than life, yet every chance you get I've seen you use your booster jets to propel yourself onto the back of some poor sap and jam your Talon through his neck."

"Style points," Cade said in his defense. "Plus you do the exact same thing, except instead of booster jets you de-cloak out of nowhere before you do it, or you Stasis the poor shit."

"Oh yeah, remember that batarian slaver a few weeks ago?" I chuckled.

"You put him in Stasis, then tripped on a chair and almost fell on your face while moving towards him. The last thing that crossed his mind was that he was about to be murdered by some biotic klutz," Cade laughed.

I had no response in regards to his claim that we both equally loved knives and sniper rifles. In my own defense, if you had the ability to basically turn invisible, virtually immobilize an enemy and stab him whenever you wanted, you'd probably do it all the time too against bad guys, especially child-slaver bad guys.

We both chuckled for a bit before growing quiet. I hadn't heard from Percival or the marines for more than an hour, Cade hadn't heard from him for even longer. Out of the three of us, Percival had been wounded, shot, stabbed, and blown up the most. Not from a lack of skill, far from it, but due to his deep-seated need to put himself in harm's way for anyone who needed it.

Sometimes it got him in trouble, and always either Cade or I were there to bail him out. I prayed that he hadn't done anything stupid on his way to the Bridge, like risk himself to rescue a stray cat or something.

We heard a sniffle coming from inside Sarah's office. Cade nodded towards me before standing back up and shouldering his Vindicator, scanning for hostiles. I stood up as well and softly walked inside.

The office wasn't terribly big, maybe three meters by four meters, with much of it being taken up by a desk littered with papers and files and several filing cabinets that ran from the floor to about chest-high. I saw a potted plant in one corner and a display that took up an entire wall, now powered off.

Sarah sat at her desk, her hands holding a framed photo, not a holo-still, but an actual photo printed on glossy, tree-based paper the likes of which were made popular during the 20th and 21st century but rendered antiquated with the invention and widespread adoption of holo-stills.

The photo depicted her and her husband with a young boy of about five years of age with a mess of blond hair and a wide smile held in her arms. From the looks of it they seemed to be at the beach. She held it reverently with one hand while the other was pressed against her mouth.

I walked to the side, careful to keep myself in her peripheral vision and within a respectful distance.

I gestured at the photo. "Is that your kid?"

She brushed a few tears from her eyes before nodding. "His name's John," she said huskily, "I had him right before I started my Ph.D, he's with my parents right now on the Citadel."

"Father?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Some asshole I met in university. I don't talk to him anymore and he doesn't care about us. Paul has done an amazing job being a father, John thinks the world of him."

She set down the photo and buried her head in her arms. "I don't know what I'm going to tell him," she sobbed.

"Tell him the truth. Usually that works best," I lied. "Tell him his father wanted to save Earth, to save the galaxy, and that he was willing to give his life to do so. But right now, all you need to focus on is making it out of here so you can tell him yourself."

I gently laid a hand on her shoulder, but refrained from saying anything more. She seemed to find that acceptable. After a few more sniffles she picked up the frame and removed the photo, gently placing it in the breast-pocket of her lab coat. She brushed away the last few tears from her eyes and grabbed her M-8 Avenger off her desk.

"I'm ready to go," she firmly stated before walking out the office to stand near Cade. I let out a heavy sigh and took a moment to glance over the office again, checking to see if there was anything that I might have missed that might be important.

I had just walked out of the office when I heard a loud clang. A grated vent built into the side of the hall burst open and the sinewy, twisted form of an asari Corpser tumbled out. Before I had time to shout a warning it coiled and sprang at Cade, tackling him to the ground with an angry shriek.

The Corpser opened her gaping, slathering jaws and began snapping at Cade pinned beneath her. Taken unawares, Cade had one arm pinned beneath her while his other was pressed furiously against her throat, keeping her razor sharp teeth at bay.

Before I could line up a shot with my Snakebite the depths of the shattered vent came alive with red and blue lights. Two more Corpsers pulled themselves over the lip, catching bits of their remaining flesh on the shredded grating and leaving behind a trail of blue and red gore.

I drilled the first Corpser through the skull, the powerful Snakebite round punching through the half-formed metal plates embedded in her face and blowing out the back of her skull in a vibrant shatter of red matter and sparks. I cocked the cooling lever while I drew a bead on the second one, catching it right in the chest as it made to leap towards Sarah. The round completely tore open its chest cavity. In the dim lighting I could see nothing that resembled the internal organs of the human it had once been –just a slurry of viscera and metal tubes and what might have been a human heart at one point.

Cade head-butted the Corpser on top of him, somehow avoiding her glistening, serrated metal teeth. Having bought himself some room he triggered the booster jets installed on his armor, launching him and the asari Corpser sideways into the air.

The asari Corpser lost her grip on him, falling onto her back where she lay shrieking and snarling as she tried to reorient herself. Cade landed a couple of meters away, rolling for a few feet before landing in a crouched position, one arm splayed behind him with the other on the floor steadying himself.

Cade snarled back at the Corpser, ripping a Talon combat knife from his armor and holding it in a reverse grip. Triggering his booster jets again, Cade launched himself at the mutated abomination, this time with him crashing into her and him on top. With one arm pressing the Corpser's bladed limb down, he drove his Talon hard through her skull. Her twitching and screeching immediately ceased.

Cade got up and wiped the blade on what was left of her scientist's uniform before returning it to his sheath. He suddenly flinched as the Corpser at his feet and the ones I shot began twitching and convulsing. Their stomachs burst open from the inside as the spider-like metal Crawlers began tearing their way out.

Before we could react, a wave of rifle fire destroyed them all as Sarah let loose with her M-8 Avenger.

Things finally fell silent, except for the heavy breathing coming from Cade.

"You know, this is the first time in my life that I didn't enjoy having her on top," he quipped. He stooped to grab his M-15 Vindicator that the asari Corpser had knocked out of his hands with her initial ambush and shouldered it.

"Can we please get the fuck out of here," Sarah calmly asked. She backed a few steps away from the fallen Corpsers but otherwise swept the hall with her rifle.

I nodded and moved towards the elevator at the end of the hall. As my hand moved towards the button, Cade called for me to halt.

"Wait! Remember Korlus-?"

"What?" I asked, but it was already too late. My hands had already hit the elevator button.

Immediately a panel flickered to life beside the elevator, the number 25 dimly illuminated. After about 10 seconds it changed to 24. What a slow-ass elevator, must have been the emergency power situation.

"Korlus, remember Korlus?" Cade repeated.

"Korlus? What – oh," I suddenly recalled.

A number of loud clangs reverberated behind us. I turned and saw half a dozen more vents tear open about thirty meters away at the very entrance of the office hall. Immediately Corpsers of every species began pulling themselves out of them, the lights emanating from their bodies casting a grisly sheen on their warped, deformed features.

Cade and Sarah immediately began opening fire with their rifles, Cade tearing the head off of the first one with an accurate burst from his Vindicator while Sarah pummeled another into bits with hers. I snapped up my Snakebite and drilled a shot through another, punching through its gaping mouth and blowing off the killing arm of the one behind it, eliciting an ear-piercing screech.

"Korlus!" Cade snapped, "We don't let you touch elevator buttons anymore, because for some reason every time you do the elevator always starts at the furthest possible floor —," he raged as he put another two bursts into the open jaws of a roaring krogan Corpser.

"—And then we're always stuck waiting for it while a bunch of assholes try to kill us!" He finished as he slammed a new heat into his Vindicator and resumed firing.

I didn't bother apologizing. Sarah was busy laying down a stream of suppressive fire, slowing their advance. The Corpsers had covered about a third of the distance down the hall.

When her rifle overheated, I gently brushed her aside, blue flames shimmering up and down my armor. The familiar metallic ozone taste that summoning my biotics left in the back of my throat intensified as I threw my left arm forward. My amp sparked as I conjured a massive, swirling Singularity that ripped a whole wave of Corpsers off their feet.

I ripped a sticky grenade off my belt and whipped it at the suspended, snarling pack of reanimated flesh and machinery. It detonated in a bright blue explosion that rained assorted deformed appendages around the large hall.

I whipped my head to look at the floor indicator. The panel now indicated that the elevator was on deck 19. I didn't need to look at the giant, painted 'One' printed beside the elevator. I knew exactly which deck we were on and I knew exactly how much of a sadistic fuck that the god of chance could be. Fucking Korlus.

Beyond us more and more Corpsers were stumbling into the hall. A dozen had pulled their way through the vents, while what seemed like dozens more appeared from various side corridors to join their screeching brethren.

"Fire in waves," I ordered. "Sarah, you first, then Cade and I. Grenades when they get halfway down the hall."

Cade and Sarah nodded, and together we began firing in alternate waves, ensuring that that we had a continuous wave of fire pushing back the oncoming horde. Corpsers of every transformed species would start making a beeline for us once they had entered the hall but Sarah would lay down hammering Avenger fire that would scythe through their legs, dropping them to the ground and tripping their brethren behind them. Cade and I—with our slower-firing weapons—would do our best to pull of headshots or center-of-mass shots on the fallen Corpsers.

"Buy us some breathing room, Cade!" I ordered.

Cade tossed a pair of Arc grenades that detonated and sent a mass of electric shocks through the front ranks of the Corpsers, stunning them in place. I followed up with another one of my sticky grenades right in the middle of the stunned pack. The ensuing explosion wiped out a more than a half-dozen of the Corpsers and what seemed like hundreds of Crawlers, buying us another few meters and another few moments.

The elevator was now on deck 5. We had to hold them off for another minute.

I heard the telltale click of an expended ammunition block and the hiss of a rifle's overheat mechanism. Sarah threw her empty Avenger as hard as she could, hitting a Corpser in the face and causing him to stumble. I pulled the spare Predator Rake had given me and pressed it into her hands, which she immediately began to fire into the crowd of approaching Corpsers.

The elevator had just hit deck 3 when my head was suddenly filled with faint, indiscernible whispers and that familiar, ominous chittering.

A large spike of pain suddenly erupted in my head, causing me to gasp out loud. My rifle stopped firing as I grabbed my head with one hand, dropping to my knees from the intense pressure in my head.

"Cloud!" Cade screamed, "What's wrong?!"

I tried to stagger to my feet but failed, falling to the ground with a clatter while painfully trying to keep my eyes open. The whispers in my head intensified in volume and the pressure built and built until I was certain that my head would pop off my shoulders if it grew any worse.

Through my tear-filled eyes, I saw the Chimera squeeze its way through the hall, its four thinner forelimbs pulling its massive, sinewy torso behind it. Any Corpser caught in its way was crushed under its immense, twisted bulk.

Through the debilitating pressure and increasingly loud whispering, I heard a ding behind me. The elevator doors opened and I could feel a hand under my arm pulling me backwards. I felt my boot brush against the open doors and looked up to see Cade standing above me, one gloved hand hooked underneath my right shoulder while the other held a M-6 Carnifex heavy pistol that spat thunderbolts.

The Chimera pulled its way into the hall, its whip-like synthetic-organic tail brushing aside any remaining Corpsers while its lone pincer flexed back and forth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sarah hammering on the door controls as hard as possible while Cade shifted fire onto the massive behemoth, his Carnifex rounds bouncing inconsequentially off the Chimera's massive red, metal headplate. It shrugged off the heavy rounds and began stomping its way towards us.

Just as it was about to reach one clawed, rotten forelimb into the elevator, the doors closed and I could feel the gentle shift in gravity that indicated that the elevator was rising. Sarah let out a heavy sigh of relief before slumping down onto the elevator floor, while Cade had re-holstered his Carnifex and re-equipped his Vindicator, keeping it trained on the doors.

I closed my eyes and sighed.

"Fucking Korlus," echoed Cade.