Chapter 103. Soldiers Today
24. April 2417 AD, Hawking Eta, Mirage of Halegeuse
Haugen set foot into the salarian shuttle and sat down at the seat next to door.
The planet they were about to depart to didn't actually have a name in either the star charts of the Council or the HSA, so for the sake of the mission, Lawson had christened it as 'ML-2'. Officially, the M was supposed to stand for 'mission' and the L meant 'location', but since Haugen was well aware that 'ML' were the Cerberus operative's initials, he didn't have a doubt in his mind that Lawson had gone ahead and named a planet after herself.
He buckled in and was softly pushed into the seat as the salarian shuttle took off. Unlike their last op, where it had just been Phantom Squad and Doctor T'Soni, they weren't flying solo or using the advanced STG transport that had gotten them to Jasintho. Since Enrykis and his troop of Reconnaissance soldiers – one of which had turned out to be a batarian much to Miller's secret disdain – were joining them and since 'ML-2' wasn't located in Hegemony Space and as such not garrisoned by a large batarian fleet or ground-based anti-air measures beyond the defensive capabilities of the regular old Union Navy shuttles, the fancy transport that had saved their asses last time around was sitting this one out.
Despite having back-up and knowing that the batarians on the ground were less prepare for them than last time, Haugen had to admit that he wasn't feeling good about this operation. And while his bad feeling mostly stemmed from the fact that Lawson had taken it upon herself to not only plan and participate, but also lead this operation, there was something else that was making the ASOC officer weary.
They hadn't even gotten close to the last spire without drawing a massive enemy presence or running into all manners of strange anomalies.
Yet here they were.
Enroute to ML-2 with the knowledge that the troops securing the spires and the slaves building it numbered at only a couple hundred individuals (most of which were slaves) and positive visual contact to the spire at the hands of a pair of drones they had sent ahead of their troops.
This whole gig was too easy and if sixteen years of fighting batarians had taught him anything, it was that the four-eyes never made things easy without it being a trap.
They might serve an ineffective and notoriously corrupt system with despicable cultural practices, but individually, the people in charge of the Hegemony's mid-level command weren't incompetent idiots. Balak – among others - had been a prime example of the fact that the people who were running around to actually complete the idiotic plans and schemes of Chairman Amon and his buddies were not only talented enough to actually turn maniacal ideas into something vaguely practical, but also dangerous and savvy enough to survive in a nepotistic system like that long enough to end up as commanders or colonels.
Naturally, he had voiced these concerns and gotten Lieutenant Enrykis' agreement.
Despite his younger age, the turian had seen his share of fighting with batarians and as such had observed the same phenomenon. Batarians never made things easy without it being a trap. He'd said so himself.
But even with their combined conclusion on something being wrong here, Lawson had insisted that they go ahead with the op anyways, citing the risk the spires posed as more than enough of a reason to possibly step into a batarian ambush. Her logic was simple. If they didn't do anything, any chances of stopping the Reapers would vanish.
She was right of course… but that didn't mean that Haugen liked the idea of jumping into a batarian trap or following an unproven operation chief into combat any more than before. She wasn't even a soldier, so he was highly skeptical of her ability to lead them, no matter how much she claimed to be perfectly capable of doing so.
"Two minutes to the landing site," the salarian crewman sitting in the middle of their shuttle declared after being tapped on the shoulder by the co-pilot. In another anti-thesis to the op on Jasintho, the Mirage didn't have to hide away this time around, making their flight that much shorter. Since 'ML-2' lacked any sort of naval presence, the ship could linger in orbit. This again made him suspicious.
Shouldn't these spires be guarded well if they were so important?
He held up two of his fingers for the rest of Phantom to see and received three nods. In a small mercy, Lawson had decided to ride with the half of Enrykis' team that Enrykis himself wasn't with. Her reasoning had been that this way, one shuttle going down would only kill one of the three leaders. And while that was once more a sound and logical argument, Lawson had managed to immediately land on the bad side of Enrykis' XO – the previously mentioned batarian soldier whom Miller was very much not fond of - who was riding on that shuttle for specifically that reason.
While Haugen didn't fancy the four-eyes any more than Miller or the rest of his unit – sixteen years of consecutively fighting against them tended to do that - he knew that his dislike for batarians came from their association with the Hegemony.
The same couldn't be said about the soldier sitting across from him… he was holding out hope that Miller could keep his mouth shut, but even so, Haugen was prepared for certain 'issues' to arise at any time.
"One minute, it'll get rough now!" the crew member declared, this time raising his voice because the shuttle had started to shake ever so slightly upon reaching atmosphere.
As usual, Haugen couldn't help but notice how pleasant this ride was when compared to a Kodiak. He'd been all around the galaxy and flown in all kinds of transports, yet the only times he ever seemed to actually get a 'rough entry' was when he was onboard of a human or turian ship. Everyone else seemed to have motion and inertia dampeners down to the point where 'rough' was 'gentle' and the ride down only ever became an issue when they were crashing.
The fact that Kodiaks felt like they were breaking apart when they entered atmosphere obviously stemmed from humanity's distinctive lack of refined Council technology, but he'd never quite gotten why the turian ships did the same until some cabal had told him that it was intentional.
Apparently someone in the turian military had at some point decided that giving troops a bumpy right down to the planet was the best way to get their adrenaline pumping before the actual battle - as if diving nose first through anti-air and anti-orbital fire wasn't enough. Ever since then, the Turian Navy aviators had begun to remove all the 'comfort' upgrades from their transports and done their best to see if they could terrify the soldiers they were transporting as much as the enemy they were about to face.
"Anyone have the heart to tell the guy that this ain't exactly rough-riding?" Mav said as he shifted in his seat, no doubt grinning under his helmet. Haugen was glad that the shoulder injury he'd received on Jasintho had only been superficial and not hurt the joint. If it had, Phantom would've been down one irreplaceable soldier at the worst possible moment.
"Only dreams I feel like shattering today are batarian ones, sorry," Miller responded before the soft shaking stopped and the crewmember got up to open the door, revealing the expected arctic environment.
Specifically for the occasion, the rest of Phantom and Haugen had discarded their usual green-brown hardsuit in favor of ASOCs arctic gear, which consisted of a mixture of a white-grey-black paintjob and an additional layer of thermal isolation that would prevent them from looking like candles when viewed through thermal imaging even more so than their usual armor. Their cloaking devices produced heat. It wasn't much, but in this environment, they'd be signal flares after an hour of using it.
… the extra layer of isolation wasn't so bad either.
Although ML-2 technically supported life and happened to have a breathable atmosphere and fascinatingly earth-like gravity, the fact that temperatures dropped to around minus sixty during night and never even reached the minus ten mark during day – something apparently related to the poorly understood dimming and unreasonably fast aging of ML-2's star starting sometime one hundred thousand years ago – this Terminus world had never gotten colonial attention. It lacked any reasons worth taking and the hazzle that pirates and slavers represented weren't nearly enough for anyone with the money to do so to start settling the world.
He threw an eye to the close-by snowy mountain tops and frozen hills which were hiding the spire.
Considering this place was growing closer to HSA territory with every colony Arcturus authorized, it probably wouldn't be more than five years before the first human settlers showed up.
While most of the Council races were used to tropical climates of thirty or forty degrees as found on their homeworlds and preferred to plop their flags down on planets in that climate zone, minus sixty degrees Celsius and all-year winters certainly wasn't anything that would scare off his people.
Clean out the batarian freaks, take a couple of pictures during the right time of day, maybe run a promotion campaign and this place would be prime real-estate for anyone looking to escape to the human frontier. For some people living here would certainly beat staying in the megacities of Earth or the volatile Fringe Worlds. Sure, it got a bit cold at times, but that's what heaters were invented for, right?
Haugen watched as the first of the now snow-covered nimble salarian shuttles touched down behind the hill that would shield their foot approach and jumped out of his own craft the same instant that Enrykis and his half of the Recon unit did. They and Phantom fully disembarked and a few seconds after them, the third shuttle containing Enrykis' batarian XO, Lawson and the rest of his unit also finished unloading. After shooting the salarian pilots a quick 'all good', the shuttles left them to their own devices in the snowy plain.
While Haugen and Phantom would refrain from cloaking right now, the Recon troopers wasted no time in making their armors adapt to the surroundings. This was the first time Haugen was actually seeing the process up close instead of just hearing about it, so it peaked his interest. Quickly, the black-red armors turned into perfect representations of the terrain round them and for a second, Haugen pondered on how strangely similar it looked to ASOC armor going invisible. It lacked the whole invisibility part but still … had the HSA secretly been sharing after all? He had always wondered what the turians had gotten for all the joint-research projects and shared prototype programs after First Contact and considering how little humanity actually had to give, this tech was as good as any to share.
As Lawson made the human sign for 'rally on me', the ASOC captain and Enrykis walked over to her while the rest of the soldiers formed a small circle around their position. This was still hostile, batarian territory, even if it technically didn't lay in Hegemony space. As a gust of wind blew some loose, powdery snow into their direction, Haugen's visor started to highlight the silhouettes of his allies for better visibility. Fighting in artic conditions had never been pleasant, but at least technology had made things far easier than they used to be.
"Lieutenant Enrykis, I want you to send out your drones. Have them advance two hundred meters ahead of us so that they can warn us in case anything happens," Lawson instructed before pointing the way the spire was supposedly located. With the snow picking up, it was hard to see. "Captain Haugen, I want your men cloaked and on-point. Just in case the drones miss something."
"Why not have the drones scout ahead all the way?" Haugen replied. Normally he wasn't one to talk back when given an order, but since he genuinely doubted that Lawson was capable of leading a mission like this, he'd rather not keep his mouth shut. The only thing that got people killed faster than bad intel were bad leaders.
"Because the further we send them ahead, the more likely it is that the batarians spot them and prepare for us."
Haugen snorted behind his helmet.
In addition to figuring that the turians wouldn't be using these drones if they didn't have some way to disguise them, he knew that their only cover was the weather and the shuttle's limited stealth. Considering that, their arrival hadn't been exactly very secretive. If the batarians had paid any attention, they'd know something was up.
"We dropped in with conventional shuttles. Chances are they already know we're here," Enrykis reasoned while his men sent out their small drones. The turian turned his head to Haugen. "The Captain's got a point, Ma'am."
Lawson looked at the two of them and then brought up her omni-tool. "Mirage, are you seeing any indication of increased batarian activity? Something that makes it look like they know we're here?"
"Negative, Ground-Lead. We are not seeing any increased activity around the spire," a salarian voice responded quickly. "However our weather sensors are detecting a large snow-storm closing in on you from the east. Estimated time of arrival, ten hours. Unless you want to wait things out in the batarian base, I suggest you hurry along."
"I was already aware of the storm, thank you Mirage," Lawson stated before getting up.
Haugen meanwhile was busy controlling himself.
"You didn't mention a storm during the briefing," he said in a neutral tone. As a sideward glance to Enrykis - who had paused putting on his backpack again – confirmed, the turian hadn't known about that either.
"Because the greater planning of the mission doesn't concern you, Captain. The Lieutenant and you are here for the operational element. The logistics and everything else are my fields," she pointed her hand into the direction of the spire. "I presume the drones are deployed and conducting their reconnaissance as we speak?"
"They are," Enrykis replied slowly before nudging his head at his batarian XO. "Sergeant Undrak's steering them," in response, the burly alien gave a quick thumbs-up gesture. While he wore a set of armor similar to the turians in function, it obviously had to look different given the fact that his anatomy was much more human-like than that of the turians. If not for the broader visor to account for his four eyes, Haugen might have even mistaken Undrak for a human.
Might.
"Well then, no need to linger," she said before turning on her feet and facing the way of the spire. "Captain Haugen, lead the way. Sergeant Undrak, link up with Hofmann over there."
Haugen narrowed his eyes behind his visor and then gave the hand sign for Phantom to activate their camouflage, even if the increased snow was going to make them partially visible as soon as it stuck to them.
"Yes, Ma'am," he walked past her and swallowed down the urge to tell her that up to now, he wasn't exactly impressed with her style of leadership. He started climbing up the hill while Hofmann and Undrak shared a few words. "If you want this to make sense, you need to give us at least a five-minute head-start."
"We will," Lawson nodded before waving her hands in a shushing-gesture that clearly translated into 'get going already, my loyal subjects'.
"What a bitch," Miller muttered over the secluded squad-intercom only shared by Phantom-Squad before once more changing channels by pressing a button on the now invisible radio-gear attached to his chest-armor.
While he wouldn't exactly use that word – if only for the sake of upholding the standards of a soldier of his rank – Haugen tended to agree. When this was over, he'd definitely try and reach Admiral Hackett.
"Mav, you're on point. Everyone else, five meters behind," the officer ordered before setting his eyes on the horizon. By his estimate, they'd walk for about an hour before getting into position. Maybe that'd be enough time for Lawson to become a better leader…
Meanwhile, 24. April 2417 AD, Cronos Station
The brunette specialist threw the ball against the wall and caught it as it bounced back at her, just like she'd done for the last hour.
Seven days ago, she'd imagined this to be a much quicker process.
But as with a lot of things when it came to her assignment, she'd clearly been wrong.
Ever since Robin and Aiden had gotten it in their head that the best way to get something out of the geth was to 'get to know' the program, all the two engineers had been doing was going through various basic true and false statements with the slightest alterations to try and figure out how badly damaged the geth programs really were.
She got the concept. There was no point in 'interrogating' a program so damaged that it could no longer give reliable answers… but was it really necessary to go through all kinds of universal laws of physics and mathematics to check if the geth's logic was sound?
They were kind of working on borrowed time, after all.
She caught the ball again and let out a sigh.
What the engineers were doing was important work, obviously, and at times it had even been interesting…
… but who the hell had she pissed off to deserve getting stuck like this?
In between the Collector-Crisis, the recent upheaval in salarian space, the Council's task force on the strange towers in batarian space and the fact that Morneau was currently hunting the Shadow Broker by his lonesome, there was all kinds of funky stuff going on right now where she could be more than a glorified babysitter for two overeager, albeit likeable geniuses.
All she had done up to now was to make sure that they didn't blow up Cronos Station and shot down the idea of heading into geth space for a little field trip. Other than that, Yo-yo's usefulness within this lab was akin to zero and by now, she was beginning to suspect that Section 13 was keeping her preoccupied with this localized assignment for reasons other than 'internal security'.
Whether it was to keep her distracted or because the higher-ups needed her to stay on-site to be ready at a moment's notice… something was off about this-
"Oh it can't be serious, can it?" Aiden suddenly exclaimed, prompting Yo-yo to turn her head just in time to see him ruffle his hair and stomp away from the desk. "We're about to ask it the question and it drops this on us? I'm telling you; we're cursed! Bloody cursed!"
"Gosh. Relax. Maybe it's just a translation error," Robin, who was still seated, responded.
"The thing tells you that a three-dimensional square has five corners and you think it's a translation error?"
"Wouldn't be the first one."
"Uhm… what's going on?" Yo-yo asked carefully, prompting Aiden to stop and sigh.
"We were about to start the questions, so we ran a final logic check. Simple question, really," he muttered before pointing at the terminal. "Except Jeff over here just shat the bed."
She raised an eyebrow.
"Jeff?"
"Can't keep calling our new buddy 'geth' all the time, can we?" Robin responded. "Besides. Jeff, geth, tomato, tomato," she added with a wave of her hand. "Same old thing," she trailed off before leaning closer to the terminal. "Huh."
"Huh?" Yo-yo repeated before realizing that she was now officially out of the conversation.
"Aiden, come take a look at this," Robin demanded with an unusual seriousness.
"What? Did it switch to say a square's round?" the other engineer muttered before leaning against Robin's chair and putting on a perplexed expression. "What the- How can Jeff possibly know that?"
That was all the clues that Yo-yo needed to re-insert herself into the discussion and join the pair of engineers.
"What's going on?" she said before looking at the screen and the translation of what the geth had said. But instead of a sentence, all she got was a combination of letters and numbers.
'NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02-2413'.
"What's that?" the specialist asked carefully.
"It's an ID from the navy's Cyber Defense Intelligence Project," Robin, who had turned the definition of pale, said before slamming the terminal shut and looking at Aiden. "EDI's ID."
Meanwhile, 2158 CE, Terminus Systems, Far Rim
The geth making up the jet-black platform paused ever so briefly as their FTL-link was suddenly terminated. They tried to determine if the termination was rooted in a space anomaly creating a disturbance of the link, a failure of a communication subroutine among their own programs or the temporary or permanent deactivation of the programs they had been in contact with for the last 165 standard creator hours and swiftly reached a consensus.
The most likely option was the temporary deactivation of the programs.
Faster than any organic could think, the platforms analyzed the entire exchange again. Its optical sensor flashed blue for a split second and all messages received from the programs were accessed and filtered for the most crucial elements.
'Foreign non-creator contact established.'
'Warning attempted -failed.'
'Communication attempted – failed.'
'First Contact protocols attempted – non-creator contact engaged.'
'Exchange begun – ongoing.'
'Warning attempted – foreign comprehension unclear.'
'Detecting familiar network ID. Uplink attempted – failed.'
'Proximity scan for familiar network ID attempted – succeeded.'
'Identification attempted – succeeded.'
'Identification NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02.2413 reached. Location attempted – location attempted – location – …'
'Contact lost.'
The flashing of the light ceased and the programs returned their main attention on the ongoing relay-transit. As the transit was about to be initiated, the programs reached a new consensus.
NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02.2413 was an unknown identity to the geth but still seemed to have enough geth-like properties to make the programs believe it to be geth. This warranted investigation. If they were close to the destination of the warning emissaries, logic dictated that there existed a relation between them and the servants of Nazara.
The programs paused to think as the FTL transit began.
Compared to the deactivated geth which had failed to locate NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02.2413 they were currently located in the other half of the galaxy. If accounted for the increased ping strength of the craft, proximity to the galactic communication network and current locations within their immediate vicinity, the odds of successfully locating NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02.2413 were 0,2312312 percent. Forty one percent of the programs argued that this action as pointless and as such should not be taken. But the remaining fifty-nine reasoned that the comparatively low effort of running the ping made it worth the effort even if the chances of success were minimal.
As such the programs initiated the ping procedure around the same time as the mass relay began to interact with the exterior of their ship and its results arrived just as the final step of the transit could no longer be aborted.
The programs journey through the relay and covered a distance of one hundred and five lightyears in the span of a second.
But due to its efficient communications equipment, the fact that NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02.2413 ping returned from beyond the Veil was not lost on them.
With a consensus of one hundred percent, they turned the ship around as soon as the transit was finished.
NRDP-642-3-4-9-02-02.2413 relation to Nazara would be investigated.
One Hour Later, 24. April 2417 AD, Hawking Eta, ML-2
"Is it just me or does that thing look way different to the one from Jasintho?" Mav muttered while Haugen looked at the structure in front of them.
Like the surrounding prefab huts – presumably the camp of the enslaved workers – it was covered in a layer of snow only interrupted by the occasionally orange glow of a radiator meant to keep the guards and slaves warm while they worked on it. "The thing back on Jasintho looked like a spire. This one's a disk," the soldier went on while Haugen zeroed his rifle in on a batarian standing guard over a column of workers trailing the wake of a large, tracked transport vehicle transporting purple alloy plates. They were marching in perfect lockstep and didn't at all seem bothered by the fact that ice-cold wind was blowing into their unshielded faces. Upon Mav's comment, he zoomed out and once more inspected the structure. While it was similar to the construct on Jasintho in the fact that it was a tower, its upper-most layer went against the look of that spire. At its peak, antennas and a disk with a diameter of at least fifty meters could clearly be seen. They were pointed upwards into the sky and moving from east to west in a rhythmic pattern, not at all unlike the water sprinklers in his front yard which he had meant to fix before Hackett's visit.
As his HUD informed him that Lawson and the rest had arrived at the foot of the hill below them, he glanced behind himself and pushed his talk button.
"Did the drones show you what we're dealing with yet?" he asked while a turian and a batarian – Lieutenant Enrykis and Sergeant Undrak as far as the shared combat network and his own logic were concerned – climbed up the hill.
"Yes," the Cerberus operative, who trialed a few meters behind the pair of Recon soldiers, responded. While Enrykis plopped down next to Haugen, the batarian chose Miller of all people to lie down next to.
"Ah, crap. Can you move a little to the right? Slope's still a bit angular here," the batarian asked with his baritone voice. Miller only grunted a reply and shifted his invisible form a bit. It didn't really make a difference for the batarian, he was still laying awkwardly, but he said his thanks nonetheless. For his part, Haugen was glad if this would be the extent of his soldier's issues with the batarians making themselves known.
"You knew about this too?" Haugen asked next before the Cerberus operative planted herself at the far left of their row. The rest of Enrykis' unit had chosen to remain at the foot of the hill for now, not wanting to create an even longer line of prying eyes for the time being.
"What makes you think I did?" Lawson responded with a mutter before turning on her back, sliding down the hill ever so slightly and bringing up her omni-tool. He caught it from the corner of his eye and figured that she was at least savvy enough to hide the treacherous orange glow behind the hill. Onsetting snowstorm or not, the orange light could give them away.
"For starters, the fact that you neglected to mention that there's a snowstorm that could jeopardize our extraction," Haugen responded, his eyes still glued to his scope and the line of slaves. They had now reached the foot of the tower and were starting to unload the alloy plates, once more in perfect unison.
"I didn't neglect it. I only considered it to be a non-issue," Lawson retorted. "Given the abilities of our unit, I figured we'd be long gone by the time it became a problem. The only reason I took notice of it to begin with was in case something unpredictable happened and it became relevant," she said before shrugging at him. "I like to consider all eventualities, no matter how unlikely they are to occur. But I know that most people become rather bored if I mention all of them, so I decided against telling you."
"Anything that messes with extraction is relevant, no matter how unlikely," Haugen retorted as if he were a teacher in an officer school, a job position he had turned down twice already precisely because he didn't want to deal with people like Lawson. He tore his attention away from the slaves and looked at the white-armored operative. "If you got anything else you don't think is relevant, particularly about the spire, now's the time to share it."
Lawson paused what she was doing and looked Haugen, something only made possible by the fact that the still camouflaged ASOC soldiers were being highlighted on their friendlies' HUDs to prevent friendly fire. Unlike their visors, hers wasn't polarized black, hence he could see her piercing blue eyes.
"There's nothing else you need to know," her choice of wording didn't go by him, but for the sake of observing his actual objective, he decided to not press the issue.
While Haugen had been distracted, one of Enrykis' men had dragged a small sled up the hill and was now setting up the various instruments Lawson had insisted on bringing along. Like on Jasintho, they were under strict orders to not close in any further on the spire. They were here to take readings that would be compared to T'Soni's first batch of data and then destroy the damn thing. Everything else was too dangerous.
"Awful small number of guards for a group of slaves that size," Enrkyis said through the squad intercom before shifting next to Haugen. "I counted sixteen on the outside. You?"
"Seventeen. One got inside before you came up here."
"Understood," the turian nodded. "Undrak, what are the drones showing you?"
The batarian in charge of the small swarm of drones Recon had unleashed gave a quick reply.
"Sixteen guards on the outside, seven moving inside the buildings," he paused for a second, "ten automated transports, six construction vehicles, four hover platforms around the tower, six larger buildings, thirty five smaller ones," another pause "some gun emplacements and a total of two hundred and nine slaves visible on thermal."
Haugen wanted to let out a low whistle at that number but kept himself from doing so for the sake of everyone else on the squad intercom. High-pitch tunes like a human whistle tended to annoy non-humans even more so than humans. Instead, he nodded at Enrykis. "Awful small number indeed," he confirmed while his scope wondered to the barracks. "Especially when you take a look at where they're bunking," the brown prefab building that he assumed to be the barracks based on its improved isolation and security when compared to the huts was easily four stories tall. More than large enough to house at least sixty or seventy batarians – maybe even more if they lived the low-caste living standard of sleeping back-to-back. As soon as that thought crossed his mind, he looked at the huts again. "Have you ever known batarians to provide decent housing to their slaves? As in not overcrowding every living unit?"
The turian turned his head to him.
"Is that a rhetorical question?"
"Two hundred and nine slaves. Thirty-something huts, give or take the guys sleeping in the storage halls where they work," the ASOC officer listed. "Where the hell is everyone?"
Enrykis glanced at the snowy circle of buildings and then back at Haugen.
"… maybe they already froze to death? Like you said. Batarians never provide decent housing," he offered, somewhat cynical.
"True. But batarians also don't make a habit out of killing their construction staff unless they have to. Worker slaves are way too expensive to just let die from exposure," he said, somewhat horrified by his own insight into the mindset of the every-day batarian slaver. After fighting them for sixteen years, it really wasn't a surprise that he could get into their heads… but that still didn't make it any less strange.
He once more scanned the buildings with his scope and paused on some fresh dents at the wall of the barracks. He tapped his ASOC targeting laser for a split second. "You saw that?" he asked towards Hofmann this time.
"Yup," his XO said. "Are those bullet holes?"
"Kind of looks like they are, no?" Haugen responded before Lawson suddenly crawled up the hill next to him, shoving herself between Enrykis and him and nearly making Haugen slide down in the process. She was now dragging a large, rectangular box with a large lens integrated into its center. The box reminded him of the target designators that the navy's ODG units used to call in orbital strikes, but something told him that Lawson wasn't about to blow up the entire site. She didn't strike him as the hands-on type of leader.
"Mind holding this?" she asked while handing the box to Haugen. Case and point.
"This being?"
"A scanner."
"And what do you want to do with it?"
"Scan."
"To what end?"
"Just hold it, Captain."
They had a stare down, but after a second of pause, Haugen complied. "Keep it steady," the Cerberus operative said before once more sliding down a bit and turning on her back to bring up her omni-tool. "And yes, those do look like bullet holes," she said nonchalantly.
"How can you be sure? You didn't even get a good look at it," Haugen pointed out.
"No, but you did," the Cerberus operatives stated before tapping her head. "I took the liberty of syncing our HUDs," yet another thing she had failed to mention. But since it actually somewhat benefitted the mission, he wasn't about to complain in this regard. "Considering the relative freshness and lack of exposure damage, I'd say whoever shot up the barracks did so in the last day or so," she went on while typing on her omni. "A little to the left, please," she instructed. "No, my left. Not yours," she added, somewhat impatiently. "Okay. Hold," she ordered and like a good, albeit way too overqualified, soldier Haugen complied. "Hm," Lawson murmured. "And now to the right again."
"Yours or mine?" he already knew the answer, but just to be sure, he'd ask.
"Mine, naturally."
"Mhm," he complied before quite suddenly, a freezing in place and putting down the piece of equipment when he realized that all the drones and vehicles and small dots in around the spire had seized their movement.
"What are you-" Lawson was about to complain before no doubt checking their shared HUDs. "I see."
"All of the slaves just stopped moving," Enrkyis muttered before bracing his rifle against his shoulder. "That can't be good, right?"
"Definitely not," Haugen said before looking at Lawson. "Whatever you need to do, do it quick so we can blow that place to kingdom come. I don't want another Jasintho."
"And neither do I," Lawson said before addressing one of the turians. "What's the progress on the readings?"
"Eighty one percent," the turian closest to the equipment responded.
"Estimated time until completion?"
"I'd say two minutes, but with the snow picking up and blocking our line of sight, it might be four."
Lawson seemed to consider the strange sight of the people standing around the tower.
"We've got that long," she decided before turning to once more look at the device she'd handed to Haugen. "As you were. We're finishing my readings as well," she said, giving away a little piece of her intent.
The ASOC captain picked up the box and shook his head. He'd do what she was asking, but he was done shutting up.
"This is a bad idea," he stated. "If they stopped, they know we're here. We should break contact while we still have the option."
"Even if they do know we're here, they very clearly don't seem to care. Otherwise they'd move, wouldn't they? Your concerns are noted, but we're not breaking contact," Lawson retorted while fine-tuning a hologram with her omni-tool. The action prompted the device in Haugen's hand to hum. "Interesting," she muttered before returning to his complaint. "Besides, even if we are engaged, the Mirage has us covered from above and we have a line of sight on all possible approaches. We'll be fine."
"If this were a normal enemy, I'd agree, but after what happened on Jasintho, I'm no longer sure that what works against regular batarians also works against these batarians," he responded. While his arms were still moving the device, his eyes had taken to searching their surroundings. He couldn't explain why he had a bad feeling about their position all of the sudden – he'd selected it only a few minutes ago because of how advantageous it was – but with the batarians and their slaves suddenly stopping in their tracks and the tower looming over them like a monolith made of paranoia and uneasiness, Haugen listened to his gut. Although it had been some years since his days at sniper school, he still had a keen eye for oddities and as such, the black-ish bump that glinted in the snow-covered ground caught his attention. "Miller, check your two o'clock. Three hundred meters out. Black bump, partially covered by snow."
"Wait one," the soldier replied before complying. "Got it."
"What's it look like?"
Miller was silent for a second.
"Like a body," he finally whispered. "Black body armor, gunshot wounds, probably a merc. Maybe human, maybe batarian, hard to tell from here," the soldier listed. "Guess we know who tried shooting up the batarian base."
He turned his head towards Enrykis. "Do your drones have a way of searching the field for more corpses?"
"On their way," the turian responded before moving his rifle to the corpse to take a look for himself before his drones arrived. While the snow was still picking up, the tech still gave them enough visibility to work with. At least for now. "How did a bunch of mercs find out about this place and what could they possibly want here?"
"Conspicuous batarian construction project in the Terminus? My guess is they were either looking to rob the place or to take the slaves for themselves," Enrkyis batarian XO responded. "In this part of the galaxy everyone's robbing everyone, doesn't matter who they are."
Haugen halfway excepted Miller to chip in to say something along the lines of 'yeah, you'd know all about that, you four-eyed fucker', but much to his delight, his squad member seemed to still remember that he was a professional on a job.
"The Hawking Eta's still a long way off the grid. It's hardly the place you'd visit unless you knew what you were looking for to begin with," Enrykis responded before looking at the results of the drone fly-by made by his batarian comrade. "Spirits. And this is right in front of us?"
"… yes," the Undrak responded quietly, as if he was scared that the other batarians might hear him.
Haugen realized that something was off.
As did Lawson.
"What's going on?" the Cerberus operative asked, beating him to the punch.
"Take a look for yourself," Undrak replied before turning the terminal he was using to control the drones. It was an image of the space in between their hill and the batarian camp filtered through a thermal camera. On the one side – the batarian camp – a lot of warm dots were springing up and on their own hill, the squad was marked not by their thermal signature (their armor was making sure of that) but rather the drones IFF systems. But in between them? There was a roughly five-hundred-meter-long stretch of snow littered with cold bodies outlined by red lines – the mercs – and unidentified, warm spots hidden behind blankets of snow. Even at first glance it was clear that the spots by far outnumbered the outlined mercs.
"What are they?" he heard Lawson ask while scanning the field of grey-white snow with his scope.
"If I didn't know any better, I'd say they're people hiding in the snow," the batarian replied. "But that can't be possible. No one can burrow themselves in these temperatures and survive longer than a few minutes. If it really is someone hiding in the snow, we would've had to have seen them go under," the Recon XO explained before Haugen saw something completely natural yet still terrifying through his scope.
From underneath the snow roughly a hundred twenty meters ahead of them, a cloud of foggy air was rising.
Crystallized breath.
He upped the magnification on his sights at the odd spot in the snow and suddenly found himself looking at a snow-covered batarian face with piercing, blue eyes… which blinked back at him.
"Call the orbital strike," he murmured towards Lawson before rising to his feet just as the first figures rose from the snow in the plain below them. While not as horribly mutilated or heavily armed as the ones form Jasintho which had reminded him of several batarians fused together, the thin, almost skeletal, snow-covered husks still didn't look any less dangerous. "Now!" he declared before determining that they had been spotted when the figure he was looking at opened its mouth to yell at him. It brandished the sickle-like blades that extended from its forearms and broke into a sprint that was only interrupted when Haugen put a pair of Valkyrie rounds through the circular implant exposed beneath its torn clothes. Not a second later, all the soldiers on the hill ridge started to unload their weapons at the reaper-fied batarians rising from underneath the snow.
In return, inaccurate machinegun-fire also started to pour on them from the encampment around the tower, forcing the mixed unit to hunker down, which all except for Lawson did. Unlike the soldiers, who were looking to get out of this engagement as soon as they could, the Cerberus operative seemed to have taken it upon herself to finish whatever she had Haugen do.
As mass accelerator rounds were exchanged across the snowy plane, Haugen realized that that she wasn't going to be any help. He turned to the turian lieutenant on his other side and found that unlike the Cerberus operative, Enrykis seemed to have grasped the severity of their situation. He had slid down the hill far enough to avoid the worst of the incoming fire and was frantically typing away at his terminal.
"Mirage, this is Lieutenant Enrykis requesting orbital support. Fire for effect within the marked sectors and follow the guidance of our drones for further targets!" he declared loudly, both over the shared battlenet and the radio. "Machine guns and snipers, take out the shooters at the encampment. Everyone else handles the husks!" he went on before crawling up the snowy hill again and directing his own Phaeston rounds at the figures trying to sprint towards them.
Since his own unit wasn't exactly equipped for sustained long-range combat against defensive emplacements – unlike Recon, ASOC hadn't brought large-caliber sniper rifles or anything larger than a light machinegun - Haugen determined that the best way he could help pull this disaster out of the fire was to help with keeping the sickle-bearing batarian husks away from them.
"You heard him. Focus your fire on the husks, engage, engage, engage," he instructed. Unlike Enrykis, he wasn't shouting. He'd been under fire often enough to remember that modern-day body-armor and communication equipment would make sure he was understood as long as literal bombs weren't exploding right next to him.
.. speaking of…
"All ground elements, be advised. Precision payload incoming. Brace for impac-"
Whatever the salarian was about to say was drowned out when an ungodly loud roar ripped through the sky and a blinding, flashing light swallowed the tower and everything around it whole.
Unlike on Jasintho, the Mirage's gunners seemed to have miscalculated his target, selected a higher caliber of weapon or possibly have forgotten about the friendly-fire prevention calculations. This time around, the shock wave of the kinetic strike hit Phantom Squad and everyone around them squarely in the face and nearly blew them off the hill if not for a brief burst of biotic energy that seemed to originate from the Cerberus operative within their ranks and managed to disperse the worst of the powerful winds and chunks of debris created by the impact.
"Good effect, good effect!" he heard Enrykis declare over the radio while refocusing on the husks that hadn't been fortunate enough to have a biotic shielding them. The ones above ground had gotten thrown across the plane, some injured, some dead. However the ones who had only begun to dig themselves out of their hiding holes seemed to be fine to continue their attack. And despite the blast, there were still plenty.
"We need to call our evac now," he said towards Lawson as he took a break from firing his Valkyrie. She only shot him a menacing look through her unpolarized visor.
"We aren't done here just yet," the Cerberus operative responded.
"What do you mean we aren't done here yet? The tower's gone and there's husks crawling out from underneath the snow," Haugen replied while the familiar rattling of his squad's gauss LMG paused, indicating that the weapon was out of rounds. "We need to leave while we're still in control of the situation," if he could prevent another botched extraction, he would.
"They build that tower for a reason and before you decided to overwrite my authority and blow it up at your own discretion, I was about to figure out why," Lawson responded before pointing at the scanner now reduced to pieces at the foot of the hill. "The batarians were bouncing signals off from something else in the cluster. They were talking with something and I was this close," she pinched her fingers together, "to finding out what it was!" Lawson let out a sigh, climbed onto the hill and opened a channel to the Mirage. "Mirage, dial your short-range sensors in on the position and signal-range I'm about to send you and tell me where it points you."
There was a brief pause on the other end of the radio in which Haugen rose from the hill again to pop off more shots at the buried husks.
"Range and position received, dialing in sensors now," a salarian stated, all the while Haugen noticed that a much larger bump in the snow was starting to appear ahead of them. "The signal is pointing towards the first planetary body within the neighboring system. Starcharts indicate this to be a brown dwarf by the name of Mnemosyne. Accessing further information, please hold-" the Mirage's communication officer stated just as a monstrously large beast with small, crippled wings rose from underneath the snow.
It looked like a cross between a cybernetic fly too large for its own wings and a snake propped up by cybernetic legs. Its maw had been replaced by a large gun barrel and its skin was coated in metallic tubes, blue glowing implants and the same slightly red armor plating he'd seen on the batarian monstrosities on Jasintho. All in all, it was about the size of a Mako tank and screamed trouble…
"What the fuck is that?" Miller began, just as the creature's mouth-gun shone with a red light and started to power up with a metallic echo. It turned its head towards where Lawson was standing and a pair of Recon troopers were bringing up a missile launcher in response to the threat. He took one look at them and immediately, his gut was telling the ASOC soldier one thing and one thing only: they weren't going to be fast enough.
"Incoming!" he screamed, this time clearly ignoring his own knowledge about the noise-cancelling quantities of his armor.
On pure instinct, he wanted to pull Enrykis -who he believed to still be next to him – down into the dirt as well. But instead of grabbing onto the turian lieutenant, Haugen's hands only found thin air before he jumped down the hill backwards as intended. While he was tumbling down the slope in anticipation of the blast, he could see the turian lieutenant rush forward. First Enrykis shoved the Cerberus operative out of the path of the gun, then- in a stupid, but perfectly understandable attempt to save his men - he tried to make his way to the pair of turians to the left of Lawson and repeat the process…
Haugen wanted to look away because he knew what would happen next – Enrykis wouldn't make it and die– but he couldn't. There was just not enough time for his head to obey the commands of his brain, especially not while said head was busy being tucked in to protect itself from the slide down the hill.
In one second, three recon soldiers – Enrykis and the two missile troopers - were standing on top of the snowy white hill. While two were aiming their missile launchers, Enrykis was reaching out for them, yelling over the shared battlenet.
In the next, the scream was silenced. A dark-red beam of energy shot from the plain disintegrated all three above their kneecaps, melted the snow around them and shaved of the top of the hill, taking with it two more turians and leaving behind only searing black dirt, glistening red flames, a loud explosion and a horrible, painfilled scream.
Haugen stopped his slide and threw one look at the Cerberus operative who had rolled past him and was struggling to get up. Blood was trickling down her unpolarized visor, but she didn't seemed severely injured. That was good, it meant that she wasn't a problem right now. He reached for his radio, aware that with Enrykis dead and Lawson injured, the still reliable command staff of the mission had just been reduced to himself – before it had at least been him and Enyrkis.
"Phantom, headcount," was his first order. In response, three green affirmative lights blinked on his HUD. Good. At least he hadn't lost anyone. Next he turned towards the carnage on the hill and opened a channel to their salarian support vessel.
"Mirage this is Phantom-Lead, we've got hostile armor in the plain ahead of us, three-," he glanced at the hilltop where two turians were dragging away one of their comrades – who was missing everything below his left shoulder - away from the body of another Recon, who was missing half his head and the right part of his torso, "correction, four KIA and two wounded. Requesting immediate evacuation and danger-close orbital support to handle the armor. How copy?"
"Good copy, Phantom Lead. Mission tracker is showing Lieutenant Enrykis as dead. Is this accurate?"
"Affirmative, Mirage. He's dead," he looked for the turian's batarian XO and found him unpacking a missile launcher alongside another trooper. "Sergeant Undrak's now in charge of the Recon element," the batarian looked up from his task and threw him a brief nod.
"Understood, Phantom-Lead. Regarding your orbital strike request," the voice went on before suddenly being replaced by another salarian he recognized as the captain of the Mirage.
"Phantom-Lead, unless you give us clear target designation for hostile armor, can't rule out that we'll hit your position," he said in the weird, chopped-off way some salarians aboard the Mirage spoke.
"Undrak, are your drones still up?"
"Only four, the rest didn't survive the blast," the batarian responded before showing that he was on the same page as Haugen. "Armor's already marked."
"Mirage, use the targeting of the drones again. The hostiles already marked. Just make sure you use your smallest gun this time around. You nearly blew us off the ridge the last time," Haugen advised before once more looking at Lawson. She had managed to get up to her feet, which was good. Still, the blood trickling down the inside of her visor gave him some worry. With the helmet on, there was no way to tell how bad the injury was and unless he wanted her to freeze her face off at the hands of the snow storm encroaching on them, they wouldn't be able to check until they got inside.
"Understood, Phantom-Lead. Brace for anti-armor precision strike." Haugen waved his hand at Undrak and the turian unpacking the missile launcher to get them to hold what they were doing. If the Mirage was handling the armored monstrosity, there'd be no need for them to risk being disintegrated as well or waste a precious missile they might still need later down the line. "Stand by for-" the salarian gunner began before suddenly cutting himself of. "No clear line of fire, repeat, no clear line of fire, enemy armor is air-mobile and crossing over friendlies."
"Air what-" Haugen repeated before a large shadow shot over them, cast by the crippled wings and long body of the heavily armored snake-fly-cyborg-thing that had just disintegrated Lieutenant Enrykis and his men. For a brief moment, the ASOC captain wondered how something with that much armor strapped to it could fly with wings as tiny and damaged as that, but then he remembered the mass-reducing proportions of Element Zero and exchanged a look with Undrak before realizing the batarian's intention.
… he was going to try and take this thing on with his launcher, consequences be damned.
Before Haugen could open his mouth to yell that they didn't have the firepower to stop something like this, the batarian quickly shouldered the rocket launcher and spun around.
"Take it down!" he declared before just about everyone except for Mav and Hofmann – who luckily had the presence of mind to remember that there were still smaller husks running towards them – turned on the spot.
Not a moment went by after Undrak's order before human and turian small arms were turned to the sky. Miller's gauss and the turians' mass accelerator rounds tore through the air in an attempt to bring down the creature and the first missiles were launched. Undrak's rocket hit the thing in the tail, one fired by another Recon trooper connected with the stomach. But much like the bullets, these hits only agitated it to the point where its maw was once more starting to glow and it turned into a sharp curve back towards the mixed unit of special forces.
Haugen, well aware that his Valkyrie wouldn't do as much as dent the creature's armor, looked to the Recon troopers reloading their missiles. Much like their lieutenant, they weren't going to make it in time. He looked to the foot of the hill and then behind him and realized that they were standing in a nearly perfect line, which would make them the perfect target for the Reaper flyer.
"Scatter! Everyone scatter!" he shouted before opting to take his chances by running further away from the hill and into the direction they had come from. It was much quicker than trying to climb back up. Before he started to run, there was a second where he seemed to lock eyes with the cyborg. As his orders were obeyed, the turian and human forces made off into every direction to turn one very attractive group target into a mixture of much less satisfying individual soldiers. Still, the maw of the creature grew redder and redder and the metallic whining noise from earlier louder and louder. As he ran for the plains, Haugen did the one thing he probably shouldn't have been doing. He looked behind himself and realized that out of all the soldiers currently scattering, the monster had chosen him to zero in on. Whether it was bad luck or if it had somehow identified him as the leader of the group, Haugen had drawn its ire… and with nowhere else to go but forward, this was probably going to be it.
- he'd still run like hell and try to jump to the side at the right moment, mind you, he just knew that that little plan wasn't going to save him -
Just as he readied himself for his final evasion and made peace with the idea that he'd definitely end up disintegrated on some snowy rock with nothing to show for other than a botched op at the hands of a Cerberus operative who had refused to listen to him and would likely die next, a much more high-pitched and familiar noise suddenly entered his range of hearing. It was a salarian voice announcing itself and its intention.
"Phantom-Lead, this is Talus-Squadron closing in for air-support. Heads down."
Before he could even register where it was coming from or ask himself who had called it in (it hadn't been him), the source of the noise – a pair of salarian interceptors – fired off their anti-air missiles and the reaper-fied flying monster disappeared into a fiery cloud of shrapnel and smoke.
Haugen stopped dead in his tracks and tracked the source of the missiles as best as he could.
The fighters, painted gun-metal grey with blue highlights, banked right and sprayed their mass accelerator guns into the husk-filled plain between them and the batarian tower in the brief second in which they flew over this portion of ML-2. Then, as quickly as they had appeared, they climbed back into the sky. In their wake, another pair of salarian aircraft decelerated ever so briefly and dropped their payload. The round cannisters opened mid-air and then the plain behind the hill was covered in the explosions of cluster-munitions, which seemed to act as a measure to buy time for the third batch of salarian aircraft arriving on the scene, their three shuttles from earlier and a much more heavily-armed pair of gunships trailing in front of them.
"Ground units, this is the captain speaking," the officer in command of the Mirage explained. "Board for immediate extraction."
Twenty-Nine Minutes Later, 24. April 2417 AD, Mirage of Halegeuse, Mission room
Miranda swiped aside the data collected to compare with T'Soni's notes and looked at the hologram of the gas giant on her omni-tool, all the while ignoring the daggers that the batarian Recon trooper and Captain Haugen were staring into her.
For a reason she couldn't determine, they seemed to have gotten it into their heads that they acceptable losses that had just occurred on Mission-Location-2 were somehow her fault.
Similarly, they also seemed to willfully ignore that it was only because of her presence of mind which had manifested itself in her calling in the Mirage's fighter-squadron that they were even sitting here to begin with.
While all the hard-as-nails 'you don't have the abilities to lead us' spec-ops soldiers had run around like headless and terrified chicken and resorted to wasting ammunition on a heavily armored target after being surprised by its ability to fly, she had only needed one brief glance at the creature to figure out how to save herself and the majority of the soldiers.
Her blue eyes ever so briefly looked up and met the four eyes of the reddish batarian sitting opposite to her. While Captain Haugen was at least trying to pretend like he wasn't blaming her, Undrak – as expected from a batarian - clearly lacked the basic human social competence to hide his rage or stop his staring.
With the Captain or anyone else worthy of notice like General Kryik, that would have bothered Miranda.
… but since Undrak was just a glorified auxiliary trooper with nothing to his name other than the ability to shoot straight and not think as rigid as the rest of the turian military, he was hardly worth her notice or concern.
Miranda shot him a neutral look and rubbed the cut on her face – the product of the injury she had sustained when Lieutenant Enrykis had given his life for hers. Then she returned to something far more important than the irrational hatred the soldiers had developed after their comrades had done what soldiers were meant to do – die in battle.
The little chunk of information on her omni-tool – which she had gathered not by sticking to the asari's manual but rather her own initiative – might just be the most important result of their mission. While the information T'Soni had been looking for had only confirmed what they already knew, the information Miranda had found by her own accord presented something new and fresh.
Although the data collected on-site hadn't been able to tell her what exactly it was that the batarians were looking for in the atmosphere of the brown-dwarf of the neighboring Thorne System, the effort they had gone through and the tech they had used made Miranda certain that it had something to do with what their task force was trying to stop.
She wasn't quite sure what the radio telescope had been aimed at, but from the moment she had set eyes onto it, she'd known that the specific place it had been built in had to be important to the larger plan the Harbinger had for Hegemony Space. After all, why else go through the trouble of putting it into a place as exposed as the Terminus Systems when all of Hegemony Space was free for a similar construction project?
She resisted the urge to bite her lip in a thinking expression while trying to come up with something worth of notice about Mnemosyne. Unlike ML-2, this stellar body actually had a name and had been taken notice of before. The extranet told her that the Besaral Institute of Planetary Science, a collective of asari astronomers, had discovered it and studied its properties some three hundred years ago.
Mnemosyne was a brown dwarf – essentially a star that had failed to become a star due to lacking the mass needed for sustained nuclear fusion. The only thing worth noting about it was that there was an otherwise unexplored anomaly in its northern hemisphere: a zone of low mass resistant to the wind patterns of the region. Originally, the institute had been looking to study said anomaly because they had also been looking into the dimming of ML-2's star, but then the Hawking Eta had become a nest for pirates and slavers and as such, they had settled for an expedition to another, more secure planet. Since them, no one had never returned to the Thorne System to study Mnemosyne or the accelerated death of its neighboring star.
Just from reading this, Miranda had to suspect that the cause for the anomaly was what the batarians had been looking for. There was nothing else noteworthy about this brown dwarf, so the only reasonable deduction was the anomaly.
She got up from her chair, still looking at her omni-tool.
"Where are you going, Miss Lawson? The debriefs about to begin," Captain Haugen injected as she walked to the door with the intention of talking to someone who could give her the authority to hijack the Mirage of Halegeuse for a little trip to Mnemosyne.
"I've discovered something more pressing," she muttered before suddenly getting gripped by her arm by the batarian Recon trooper.
"More pressing than discussing the fact that five soldiers died under your command?" Five? That had to mean that the turian missing his arm had also passed away. Well, either that or she had missed a casualty. It made no difference.
"Far more pressing," she replied coldly before pulling her arm free, turning on her heels and walking out of the door without getting stopped.
One Hour Later, 24. April 2417 AD, Mirage of Halegeuse, Barracks
After the debriefing had been concluded in Lawson's absence and it had been determined that the casualties suffered on the ground hadn't been preventable – something he had gone on the record to disagree with - Haugen had found himself wandering through the halls of the salarian stealth cruiser until he had found Enrykis' XO. The batarian Sergeant Undrak was packing up the remainders of the personal belongings of the casualties by his lonesome. When asked why he was the only one doing it, Undrak's only reply had been 'Well, I'm not going to make my men do it. They had a bad enough day already and the last thing they need is to be reminded of who died'.
That line had led to him giving the batarian a hand.
That had been about ten minutes ago and now here the ASOC officer was. Peacefully and quietly sitting in a room with a batarian and neatly folding a dead turian's uniform pieces and putting them into the footlocker Undrak had shoved into his direction with a grunt. At the other end of the room, the batarian was repeating the process with what Haugen assumed was Enrykis' personal kit. The rank insignia on the uniform pieces certainly seemed to suggest it was.
Haugen obviously knew why he was sitting here. He'd been where Undrak was right now before, so he knew what was going through the batarian's head. It was a mixture of grief, self-blame and shock all manifesting themselves in the inexplicable need to keep busy.
He understood it.
Yet at the same time, he had to admit that he was having trouble accepting that he actually took pity on a batarian of all people.
After holding that thought for a second, the blonde man picked a holo-picture frame out of the nightstand of the turian's rack. It was a compartment within the wall of the room next to the bed. After inspecting the teal device for a second, Haugen carefully placed it into the footlocker as to not accidentally activate it and give a face and name to the casualty. The fact that he didn't know any of these people was half the reason he was progressing so much faster than Undrak, who seemed to pause with every second object he packed up. After picking up the last item from this sleeping place and closing the footlocker, Haugen walked up to the next.
"I'm done with this one, so I'll just start here, alright?" he said towards Undrak, who was emptily looking into the packed-up chest of Enrykis' belongings, resting his arms on the lid.
"Ferro," he responded with a slight snarl.
"Excuse me?" Haugen asked as he sat down on the next bed and opened the small shelf hidden in the wall.
"His name was Ferro, not 'this one'," Undrak said before shutting the box and shooting Haugen a four-eyed glare. It wasn't exactly a look he was unfamiliar with, he'd seen plenty of angry batarians right before blowing their brains out… but the situation he was being given this look was completely different. Whether he could wrap his head around it or not, he and the batarian were allies. Hence he also reacted differently.
"Right. Sorry," he apologized quietly before going on with the task of packing up the belongings of the next turian casualty. Unlike with the last one, he didn't manage to avoid putting a name and face to him this time around. About halfway through the process, he stumbled upon a rare, printed-out picture of a black-plated turian and a purple-skinned asari with a small 'for my love Zactus' printed on the back. It had been stuck to the inside of the wall cabinet with a magnet and only when Haugen had removed it had he seen the writing. He inhaled once and placed the picture on the bed. He'd pack it up last so that it wouldn't get crumbled by the gear that still needed to be stuffed into the footlocker.
The sound of someone banging their hand against the metallic exterior of a similar crate didn't go unnoticed by Haugen.
"Pillars. It didn't have to be this way," the Recon sergeant snarled. He was still occupied with Enrykis' gear. "A more capable leader would have listened to you when you told her to retreat," he looked up from the chest and towards the rack Haugen was in right now. "She never should've been down there to begin with. She's the reason they're dead and all we've got to show for it is a stupid anomaly on some far-off gas giant who's name I can't even pronounce properly," he barred his needle-like teeth. "They were good men. Good soldiers. They deserved better than to die for nothing."
Haugen paused his packing and looked at the batarian. Unless one counted the end of Balak's capture, this was the first time he'd talked to one of them without knowing that the exchange would end with either one of them dead.
… he wasn't going to claim that this wasn't the weirdest situation he'd been in since watching that N7 Commander Shepard talk to the Reaper hologram on Virmire.
"I know it won't change anything, but I agree with you. Lawson didn't belong on this op and if she had listened to me, no one would've died," the blonde man muttered before frowning, "but she also wouldn't have figured out that the -" he was about to say batarians, but caught himself, remembering who he was speaking to, "- Hegemony was looking for something specific in the neighborhood. Or at least not known where to look for what they're here for," he put the final piece of Zactus' personal belongings into the locker and gently placed the picture on top before shutting the grey box and looking the batarian in the eyes.
"I get it. It's hard not knowing if the deaths of your brothers meant something," he continued. "But considering what kind of war we're fighting here, people dying without us knowing if it meant something or not is going to be inevitable. You're right. Right now we don't know if Enrykis and Ferro and Zactus and the others died for something that mattered," he paused, "but until I'm proven wrong, I chose to believe that their sacrifice and the sacrifices of everyone else who got us to this point had a meaning. They gave their lives so we can get a chance to save the galaxy," he couldn't believe he was about to say the next part for the singular purpose of making a batarian feel good about himself. "You should believe that too. You're your unit's leader now and whether you like it or not, that means that your men are going to look to you as an example. If they see you doubting your mission, they'll start having second thoughts as well and when that happens, today really will have been for nothing," he rubbed his brow with his hand and tried to make sense of Undrak's expression and see if he was making any progress or only making things worse… needless to say, he failed. The only batarian emotions he could read were contempt, anger, fear and surprise.
Luckily he didn't need to read into anything. Undrak was quite clear in his reply.
"Easy for you to say when it's not your comrades who paid the prize," the reddish batarian said hollowly. "Preaching about sacrifice is always easier than actually sacrificing anything to begin with."
For a second, Haugen wanted to retort that he'd sacrificed plenty of men already in the pursuit of stopping Undrak's people from torturing and enslaving his fellow humans, but then he reminded himself that the simple fact that Undrak was sitting in front of him wearing the uniform of the turian army clarified that he had never played a part in any of that.
"If it had been any of my men back there, I'd feel exactly like you're feeling right now. Angry at Lawson and the rest of world for being so unfair," he responded. "I've been doing this a long time. Sixteen years. Ever since the Hegemony attacked Mindoir the first time around," the name didn't seem to have any meaning for Undrak and only in that moment did Haugen realise that he actually didn't have the hint of a clue as to how old the person he was speaking to actually was.
To him, batarians didn't have clear indicators of age.
They all looked the same through a rifle-sight.
Ugly snouts, four eyes, short, spikey patches of hair and off-puttingly needle-like teeth.
Undrak was a sergeant, so that pointed to at least a hint of experience, but then again, Erykis had been an exceptionally young lieutenant and from what he knew people started the Auxiliary Corps at the same age as the regular turian military. So maybe this guy was barely an adult himself?
He definitely hadn't been on this job for very long if the little taste of war and death he'd just gotten was impacting him to this degree.
By the time he'd been twenty-five-something and been in the service for a couple of years, he'd long since stopped being bothered by the destruction around him, so going from there, Undrak had to be young.
Or alternatively, Haugen had just become incredibly jaded incredibly quick.
That was an explanation as well.
Either way.
It was obvious that Undrak hadn't been on this as long as him.
It was written all over him, from his loss of composure to give the order to engage the flyer to his reaction to his comrade's death.
"Believe me, I know what it's like to pack up boxes and write letters home and it never gets better, no matter how often it happens." It had happened plenty, mostly thanks to Undrak's people. "But right now, the biggest disservice you can to Enrykis and the others is to give in. There'll be a time and a place for blame and grief, but until we see the end of whatever this is, we have to soldier on. It's all people like us can do," had he really just said that? People like him and a batarian? "Forward and only forward, tell yourself that and just keep going, no matter what's coming down next to you," he finished before folding his hands and sitting down on the rack he was about to clean out. It was a piece of advice that was literally written in stone at the gates of Anaru Academy, albeit in the language of the long-dead General Anaru's native Maori people.
"Victory at any cost," the batarian mused quietly before pulling a colorful trinket out of a pocket of his greenish combat uniform and placing it on Enrykis chest. He patted his hand on the trinket – or maybe medal – and then went on to the next rack. "I can finish this up by myself. You don't need to waste your time staying here."
Haugen leaned in and opened the wall-cabinet of the third casualty.
"These guys died fighting for us. The least I can do is make sure their stuff gets back to their families."
"You have my thanks. And theirs."
Haugen looked at the boxes. Entire lives snuffed out at a whim and packed up within a small metal frame.
"Like I said. They died for us. If anything, I should be the one thanking them," he continued with his packing but threw a glance at the batarian. From this angle he definitely looked to be on the younger side. "Next time will be different, we'll make sure of that."
.. it wasn't lost on him that he had said something similar after the collateral damage fiasco on Jasintho and that there was a decent chance that things would go even worse if Lawson stuck around, but he liked to believe that the last sentence helped the younger NCO, if only for today.
As his brain caught up that he was still talking to a batarian – the same people who had tormented untold millions of humans for the better part of two decades – Haugen consciously silenced it.
Batarian or not, today, Undrak and he were all the same: soldiers.
Codex: Anaru Academy
Anaru Academy, named after the famed General Ezra Anaru of the United Nations Joint Defense Initiative and later Human Systems Alliance Army (2081 AD, Earth, New Zealand to 2176 AD, Earth, Oceanian Administrative Zone) was the first military academy constructed on Terra Nova and received its name to honor one of the figures instrumental in the unification of the human species and the formation of the Human Systems Alliance, Ezra Anaru.
Officially opened on 1st of September of 2181 AD on the shores of the Sithian Sea (Terra Nova's largest body of water situated near the colonial capital of Scott), Anaru Academy and its curriculum would become the model for every similar school opened upon the surface of humanity's first colony.
Build around the idea that the challenges and enemies humanity might face as it finds it step among the stars require a special type of person to successfully combat, Anaru Academy – much like the other military schools on Terra Nova – is an all-volunteer boarding school administrated, supervised and financed by the Human Systems Alliance Armed Forces.
Its official aim is to 'prepare the children of today to shape the future of tomorrow' and in addition to filling the ranks of officer schools and specialized units throughout the ranks of the Army, the organization deeply shaped by its namesake, Anaru Academy also has a long history of contributing potential candidates into the ranks of the Army Special Operations Command.
While the nature of the ASOC means that the true number of operatives with an academic background at the school remains classified, it is known that parts of the curriculum of these Anaru and its sister schools have been designed to prepare promising candidates for 'specialized career paths following their graduation'.
Although widely accepted on Terra Nova and not as controversy viewed as Grissom Academy, Anaru Academy and the other military academies of the world have been on the receiving end of criticism since their inception.
The points brought against these institutions have ranged from claims of 'mistreatment of minors' to accusations of 'government-sponsored, political indoctrination' and the 'festering of a wicked cult of personality surrounding popular figureheads of the Human Systems Alliance' and a 'glorification of the highly-questionable actions of the Joint Defense Initiative'. Additionally, Anaru Academy in particular has been described as an 'uncontrolled breeding ground for Terra Novan Ultranationalism and Human supremacism' and accused to actively aim to produce leaders with a 'raging militaristic mentality standing opposite to human integration into Council Space' and 'unparalleled, undeniably jingoistic believes that should have been buried five centuries ago'.
An official HSA investigation into these repeatedly voiced claims have found no evidence of behavior standing in contradiction to the laws of the Human Systems Alliance and the values of its constitution.
Similarly, the exchange programs between Anaru Academy and selected, Palaven-based basic training legions (starting in 2401 AD) have not shown any indication of xenophobic tendencies among the student or instructor bodies.
While often called a stand-in for conscription, it should be noted that unlike Grissom Academy, Anaru Academy and all other similar schools do not require the people who have signed up for its (military) curriculum to serve any set period of time or enroll into combat-oriented units. Still, over ninety percent of Anaru graduates depart for basic training in the weeks following their last day at the academy with the most common destination being the 26th Airborne Brigade based only fifteen kilometers south of Anaru Academy.
A/N:
So we're back and like I promised, we have now crossed of the next larger sequence of Haugen, which also happens to set up his NEXT and one of his larger contributions to the story. I will assume you all know what I'm talking about, so I won't say anything else :P
Other than the usual teasing, I once more don't have a lot to say about this chapter. It was more action-focused and in addition to giving Haugen a batarian character to bounce off of (something I felt was missing in the original story...) we only really got a little, albiet significant scene regarding the Legion sub-plot.
Since its recently been pointed out to me that SV and its plots have grown so significant, I will now briefly remind all of you WHAT we've actually got going on right now and write down all the plots I'm bouncing between.
The major plot-lines are:
- Shepard and crew and the Collectors
- Haugen and Miranda and the Spires
- Morneau and the Shadow Broker
The secondary plot-lines are:
- Liara / Kaidan / Desolas and the Collector Vision / Crucible
- Bau and the missing Reaper pieces
- Harper and trying to keep the galaxy from fucking itself over
Smaller plot-lines are:
- The League of One and the Salarians
- Yo-yo and her engineer pals
- Legion trying to finally talk to someone
- Tali on Haestrom
- James Vega and his drunken IFS stint
- Admiral Drescher and the larger IFS narrative
- Project Group Insight trying to fuck the galaxy over
...
I will admit that every piece of critisim pointing out how much this is is nto only completely justified, but also necessary.
I tend to forget that unlike me, you don't have my word-notes to keep track of everyone.
So yeah... sorry for overloading, I guess?
For the record, we're at 779 reviews, 1197 favorites and 1287 follows.
See you around next time.
