Rubicon
Kaidan only half listened to Balak's rant as the batarian leader, flanked by two of his men, poured his invective down onto Commander Shepard from the raised dais in the middle of the room.
He scanned the wide open area, picking out the dozen or more combat drones hovering near the freight elevator. The central plaza connected three floors of rooms, intended as administration and living quarters for the eventual mining crew that would inhabit Asteroid X57 once it was pushed into its intended orbit around Terra Nova. The space was large, but still bore an unfinished quality, as only a small number of engineers had been stationed there to guide the asteroid on its course.
That was, until the batarians had arrived, killing some of the engineers and taking the others hostage. The alien leader, stark in his blood-red armor and pistol in hand, was pacing back and forth as he roared his accusations at the human race as a whole.
From where Kaidan stood at the top of the stairs behind Shepard, he made sure not to glance in the direction of Garrus, who, unseen, had crept away along the inside of the concrete retaining wall. The commander, meanwhile, answered the batarian leader in clipped tones, simply letting the alien whip himself into a rage.
Garrus' voice finally came softly over the comms. "In position."
"Drop them," Shepard ordered abruptly, and a chill crawled up Kaidan's back at her tone.
Balak's diatribe was cut short as a burst of gunfire lit up his shields. A sniper rifle cracked, narrowly missing the batarian leader but hitting one of his companions in the shoulder, spinning him down to the ground. Balak staggered out of the way, shoving his second toward the cover of the loading gantry.
Above them, the floating drones suddenly snapped into motion. Kaidan dodged behind the railing as the air filled with the shrill chatter of high-velocity rounds hitting metal. To his right, Nayar dropped into a low crouch and shimmied along the railing towards the better cover afforded by the open doorway close by.
The sniper rifle cracked again, and the wounded batarian, crawling desperately after his leader, crumpled into a heap. But wherever Balak thought he might be escaping to, only death found him.
Shepard vaulted up the stairs and crashed into Balak's second, spinning the batarian around before shoving him contemptuously aside. Backpedaling frantically, Balak managed a few wild shots in the commander's direction before being slammed off his feet by a monstrous storm of dark energy. Flaming blue, Shepard snatched her shotgun off her back and bore down on the writhing batarian terrorist, firing a steady stream of rounds into him as he thrashed and flailed.
Behind Shepard, the second staggered to his feet, pawing for his gun. Kaidan bit off a shout of warning as he spotted the flash of pinpoint lights between the batarian's shoulders. The unfortunate alien must have heard the telltale whine of the grenade priming, because he froze, then made a desperate grab behind his back. An instant later, a violent concussion tore the batarian's torso into flying gore and twisted ceramic composite, his head sailing almost majestically across the room to bounce off the far wall.
"Lieutenant!" Nayar shouted from his doorway. "There's a bomb in here!"
Kaidan gritted his teeth as he rammed a primed ECM grenade into his pistol and rolled to his feet, picking out a group of three drones and firing it at them. He dodged quickly behind a support column and then ran toward Nayar's doorway, his shields hissing from scattered impacts.
The bomb rested in the middle of the dimly-lit room, an ominous four-foot cylinder framed with metal bracing struts.
"Get out of here!" Kaidan barked at the corporal, waving him away. He couldn't read the batarian numerals flickering in the display, but it was obvious they were counting down. He dropped to his knees in front of it and popped up his omni tool, sweeping the device close to the bomb's casing. Under his armor, cold sweat prickled his skin. The tool beeped, informing him that the bomb was transmitting a network signal, routed to three others exactly like it.
"Commander!" he called out. "They set off timed charges! I've got one here, but there's three more scattered in the building!"
"Locations!" she answered instantly.
Kaidan quickly uploaded the approximate locations into the team's network. "Look for red cylinders, they should be broadcasting a weak signal on this band!"
"I'm closest to number two," Garrus said.
"On one!" Wickham chimed in.
"I'll get to three! Go!" the commander ordered.
Kaidan ran his fingers down the side of the outer casing until his omni-tool beeped. In response, a small panel swiveled smoothly open. He quickly scanned the readouts from his tool, recognizing the overall layout of the bomb. Simple but rugged and effectively destructive, they didn't appear to have any kind of failsafe- the batarians weren't expecting interference.
Kaidan set his teeth and stabbed the small, balefully glowing square inset under the panel. To his relief, it instantly turned green. The numerals on the top of the cylinder stopped.
"They're B460-type demo charges!" he said over the comms, jumping to his feet. "Side panel, red button!"
Kaidan ran back to the doorway and peered
through. Down to his right, Nayar was firing at the drones from
the cover of a column. As the lieutenant watched, a drone's
a-grav lift failed and it tumbled out of the air.
"This
one's down!" Wickham called out.
Kaidan pulled out his pistol and fired at one of the remaining drones, while he palmed another ECM grenade with his other hand. Not unlike the geth, the drones did better in numbers. Without a controller, every loss from their networked cloud made the remaining ones correspondingly less effective.
"Two down!" Garrus announced.
A heartbeat later, the ground under Kaidan's feet convulsed with a sharp explosion. He lurched sideways and grabbed for the railing as dust rained down from the ceiling. Though it didn't come over the comms, over the rumble of cracking concrete he heard the wordless bellow of rage from inside the outer offices.
As the building stopped shuddering, Kaidan took off at a dead run toward the sound. All around him, the concrete walls showed a spiderweb of cracks, but the metal bracing held firm. The single charge wasn't enough to bring down the whole complex. The lights flickered, and suddenly amber emergency lighting bloomed throughout the building. An alarm klaxon blared.
Lungs burning, Kaidan dodged inside the hallway toward the staircase and took the stairs two at a time. He rounded a corner at the top to find Shepard standing in front of a dark doorway, her hands up on either side of the opening, shoulders heaving. The automatic portal had seized up halfway closed, distorted in its frame. The lights flickered and sparked, throwing lurid shadows through the drifting smoke.
She'd been too far away. Kaidan's blood froze with horror as he realized where the remaining engineers must have been.
"You... they..." he stammered, stumbling to a halt, his mind racing. "What... What the hell were you thinking? They had hostages!" The words burst out of Kaidan before he could stop them. "Killing batarians won't bring your parents back! You-" He stopped dead as Shepard's head snapped around to face him.
For an interminable second, her face was a mask of such raw, naked hurt that his throat constricted. Then the gates slammed shut, her expression hardening to stone as she whirled around and stalked past him out the door. Kaidan stood in stunned paralysis, fighting to breathe as the sickly smoke eddied around him.
The comms clicked. "Commander...," Joker sounded hesitant.
"What is it?" she answered in a tight voice.
"The asymmetry of the torches is causing an axial rotation on the asteroid... its course is tightening. Toward Terra Nova."
Kaidan sucked his breath in through his teeth, groping for an outcropping of shattered concrete to steady his suddenly weak knees. This new input seemed to skip off the edges of his mind, refusing to process.
"But we're shutting them down!" Wickham's shout cracked across the comm channel. "What the hell?!"
"It's... it's too late," Joker said. "The rotation pushed it off course."
"Options?" Shepard said tersely.
"Uh, I don't have enough firepower on board to make a dent in that thing, Commander," Joker said. "No big ships in-system."
Woodenly, Kaidan made himself turn around and walk out after Shepard. He rounded a corner to see her leaning heavily against the railing of the walkway overlooking the plaza. The very sight of her caused him to stumble to a stop, still numb with shock.
The few seconds of terrible silence stretched out, then Nayar's voice clicked into the comms. "What if we blow one of the torches?"
Kaidan could almost hear the sudden grin in Joker's voice. "Like, boom, big nuke? Hmm..."
"Fusion burns are precisely controlled reactions," Wickham interjected. "You can't just light a match and expect-"
"Chief, be quiet!" Shepard snapped, her body straightening. "Joker, would it be enough to achieve deflection?"
"Stand by, gotta run some numbers."
"Do it," the commander said, turning suddenly and heading away along the curving railing. "Now, how do we blow a torch?"
"Well, the chief is right," Garrus said carefully. "This isn't a fission reaction. We can destroy the magnetic containment, but the failsafe will shut down the fuel feed and it'll just burn out."
"Systems can be overridden," Nayar pointed out.
"It'll be an analog failsafe, not something we can hack...," Wickham said doubtfully. "With redundant backups."
"Well," Joker crowed, "didn't that guy you found in the first bunker call himself lead engineer? I think I'll have a quick chat with him..."
The warning klaxon blared again. "Structural breach," a smooth, computerized voice echoed through the plaza. "All personnel, Emergency Life Support Apparatus protocol is now in effect. Repeat-"
"Looks like we're losing atmosphere," the chief said.
"Seal up," Shepard ordered. "Vakarian, Wickham, go get the number two bomb and bring it down to the service tunnel. Everyone regroup there." She set off toward the plaza at a brisk trot even as she spoke.
Kaidan trailed along behind her on heavy feet. At the base of the stairs, Nayar fell into step beside him.
"Sir? The, uh, civilians?" the corporal asked. His tone suggested he already knew the answer.
Kaidan shook his head, clenching his jaw. He absently cycled his visor shut. Hostages. You don't... you don't risk hostages!
Nayar gripped his assault rifle. "Shit. Goddamn alien slime..."
Kaidan glanced at the young marine, who was closing his own visor, his eyes bright with furious intent. The two of them rounded the cargo elevator shaft to see Garrus and Wickham setting one of the cylindrical bombs down on the ground. Shepard bent to examine the device as Garrus pointed out the relevant buttons. Dark batarian blood oozed and dripped onto the floor, leaking from Balak's mangled corpse sprawled on the edge of the central dais.
"Commander, it might actually work," Joker said excitedly, abruptly coming back on the comms.
"I don't like maybes, Joker!" she answered.
"Sorry, Ma'am, it's the best I can do. The axial rotation will bring the adjacent torch into the ideal position in under five minutes. I'm downloading the relevant instructions to you now."
"How nice of the batarians to leave us some ordinance," Shepard said absently as she reached down and grasped the cylindrical bomb's containment bar and hefted it bodily, staggering slightly under the weight. Nayar stepped up behind her and helped shoulder the bomb.
"All right, all of you, get to the Mako," she said firmly, pulling away from the corporal. "Minimum safe distance."
Kaidan clearly heard the undercurrent of weariness in Shepard's voice. His stomach writhed, his mouth opened reflexively, but he couldn't find the breath to speak. Across from him, Garrus rocked uncertainly on the balls of his feet, his faceless helmet showing nothing else.
Nayar spread his hands. "But-"
"This is not up for discussion!" Shepard snapped. "Move out!" Without another word, she turned on her heel and doggedly walked toward the service tunnel that led to the torch control bunker, tottering under the heavy load.
Feeling like he'd been punched in the stomach, Kaidan could do nothing but turn and make for the exit, his feet moving of their own accord. The team was silent as they made their way quickly through the complex. Just as they exited the airlock, a symbol popped up in Kaidan's private comm channel.
"Boy, the martyr is turned up to eleven today, isn't it?" Joker drawled indolently.
"Shut! Up!" Kaidan grated between his teeth, finally finding his voice. Impotent rage climbed up his throat as he marched stiffly toward the Mako. His hands twitched with the desire to twist the pilot's scrawny neck.
"Oh, don't get your armor in a bunch," Joker continued blithely. "I've been chatting with your friendly engineer, Simon, is it Anyway, we're looking at causing a backdraft into the fuel supply, which is stored underground away from the bunker. The place is built to take some serious punishment."
Kaidan couldn't decide who between them the pilot was trying to reassure. "That does not fill me with confidence," Kaidan growled, smacking the opening pad on the Mako door hard enough to send a jolt of pain up his arm. "Call it bad past experiences with nukes!"
"Hey, asshole! You think I'd forgotten that?" Joker shot back angrily.
The comm channel snapped off, leaving Kaidan alone in his sealed helmet as he threw himself into the driver's seat and began quickly punching buttons. The tank's engines whined to life as the door shut behind the last of the team.
"This... this is stupid," Wickham said in a querulous voice, cycling her visor open as she buckled herself into her seat. "One of us should have gone with her. All of us! What if something goes wrong? We'll be too far away to be of any use."
"I don't like it either, but we're obeying orders!" Kaidan snapped into the team channel. Yeah, what a good little soldier you are. He gunned the engine and the Mako lurched into motion, kicking up a plume of dust and rocks. Just run off to die, is that it? Is that it? Godammit, no... Not like this...
Plotting a course down the smooth side of a rocky hill, Kaidan took a deep breath, then flicked the command for Joker's private channel. "Look, just make sure she comes back, okay?" he said, straining to keep his voice steady.
"Uh, duh!" was the curt answer before the channel closed again.
The lifeless gray asteroid rolled by under them. Kaidan tried to force himself to concentrate on driving, even though every meter that opened up between him and the bunker behind seemed to strip a layer off his heart. The lone plea to Joker felt utterly pathetic.
"What the hell is minimum safe distance here, anyway?" Nayar asked after a minute.
"I'm not exactly rolling in data on fusion torch explosions," the chief said testily.
"Over the horizon should be-"
The turian's comment was cut off when the Mako suddenly slammed into its shocks and then rebounded hard, the light gravity sending them sailing awkwardly into the air.
"Hold on!" Kaidan barked as he felt the tank lose its level trajectory. An instant later the nose crashed into the rocky ground, sending the Mako into a shuddering pirouette. He wrenched the steering around hard as three of the six broad tires hit the ground, slewing the Mako around into the spin. The tank gave a jolt as Kaidan locked the brakes, then finally skidded to a halt. Nayar swore between his teeth as the Mako rocked on its shocks.
"Argh... my arm," Wickham complained. Then her voice dropped. "Oh crap."
Kaidan blinked and focused on his HUD. The betraying, nightmarish little transponder indicator next to Shepard's name was dark.
Joker's voice crackled into the comm channel. "Everyone all right down there?"
"Joker, where's..." Kaidan breathed.
"Bunker's intact, but there's a ton of interference," the pilot said hastily. "Radiation and debris. Stand by..."
"Some warning might have been nice," Wickham grumbled.
"You and me both, Chief," Joker responded. "But Commander Shepard doesn't like to piss around."
"I noticed."
Kaidan scanned the starry sky, picking out the distant, tiny wedge of the ship rim-lit by the light of Asgard, Terra Nova's sun. With the Mako over the horizon of the asteroid, they relied on signal bounce from the Normandy to get comms and transponder images. Toward where the main plaza lay, rocks and dust filled the airless sky, drifting and spinning in the light gravity.
The air inside the tiny cabin throbbed with tense, breathless silence. Seconds dragged, then the comms suddenly buzzed with static.
"Commander?" Joker asked. "Say again?"
The comm crackled again before resolving itself into a weary voice. "I said 'ow', dammit."
In Kaidan's HUD, Shepard's suit transponder flicked back on, green. Behind him, Wickham let out a whoop of relief.
Kaidan startled when Garrus reached across and briefly gripped his forearm. The unexpected act of solidarity snapped Kaidan out of his trance. He unclenched his death grip on the Mako's control columns and forced himself to inhale, leaning back in his seat.
The pilot chuckled. "Had a fun ride in there, Commander? Hey, you picked up some rads. Going to have to cozy up to the decom chamber for a few minutes."
"Joker, just tell me if it worked or not."
"It better have, because it was one hell of a show from up here," he answered brightly. "VI's working on new course projection now- Hey! Where d'you think you're going?!"
"What's going on?" Shepard demanded.
"Just a sec!" The comms clicked off.
"He's got some balls, talking to his CO that way," Nayar said dryly.
"He earned the benefit of the doubt," Garrus answered.
A flare of light bloomed over the horizon of the asteroid as Terra Nova itself crested the rocky hills, looming a dark basaltic blue through the floating debris as it tracked slowly upward. Kaidan dropped his gaze to the dashboard, searching for something to distract himself. Robotically, he reached out to the steering columns and eased the Mako into motion, turning back the way they had come.
A slow minute dragged by before the long-range comm channel clicked back on. "D'you want the bad news, the good news, or the great news?" Joker asked.
"Just please tell me the damn colony is safe," the commander said wearily.
"They'll get a nice meteor shower, but yeah, the asteroid was deflected," Joker crowed happily.
Murmurs of relief went around the cabin. Kaidan heard Shepard breathe deeply.
"As a special one-time bonus," the pilot continued, "I just crippled a batarian scout frigate that was trying to sneak around behind us."
"And the bad news...?" Shepard asked.
"There were two, but the other ship got away. I winged him, but the little weasel rabbited to FTL."
There was a moment of silence. "Well... a bird in the hand, right?" Shepard said finally. "Lieutenant, come pick me up. We're going to pay them a visit."
"... On our way," Kaidan managed.
"Sweet," the corporal murmured in a predatory tone. "Time for some payback."
"We're not out for revenge, Nayar," Wickham said pointedly.
"Oh, give me a break, Wick," the corporal answered irritably. "They murdered a bunch of civilians and tried to vaporize a whole colony!"
Kaidan stopped listening as the two marines continued to bicker, if only to suppress the urge to yell at them to shut up. He focused doggedly on his task, forcing down the nauseating turmoil of anger and guilt boiling in his guts.
His private channel clicked on. "Do I get to say I told you so?" Joker drawled.
Kaidan sighed heavily. "If I said no, would it make a difference?"
"Nah, probably not," the pilot answered jovially. "I told you so."
"Feel better now?"
"Yep!"
Kaidan shut down the channel, leaving him alone again in his sealed armor.
Well, that makes one of us.