I'm so sorry for the delay in posting this chapter. Hell, it's too much to be a delay; more like a rebirth. School and other projects and life popped up. Hopefuly the last bit of this story will be updated as quickly as the first!
Thank you, dear readers for all you patience and understanding.
Strangely angular, windless and damp, the alien catacombs continued to challenge the hunter's intuition and skill. He would've preferred a more familiar jungle terrain or perhaps the long grasslands on a twilight planet over this artificial maze of conduits and passages. These… civilizations had an inexplicable desire to live on worlds that clearly did not want them. As he stalked down the corridors, cloak sizzling slightly in the humid air, he wondered what sort of beings could stand spending their entire lives between rickety, inferior spacecraft and claustrophobic warrens filled with tiny un-suns. Perhaps that explained their fatalistic tendencies and warring; the lives they lived were set in one long series of tombs.
An alert popped up in the corner of his helmet's display; the hunter paused in his stride. Audio sensors were picking up a faint, rhythmic huffing noise coming from behind a nearby wall. He sought out the nearest doorway but it refused him entrance, lock hologram glowing red. Annoyed, he tapped a few buttons on his gauntlet, sending a pulse of concentrated EMF into the door motors. The action shut down his cloaking field and caused the door to groan halfway open, then freeze. His thick arms soon wrenched the two halves wide and he stepped into the darkened room, spear extending in his grip with a smooth steely noise.
The room was empty. Completely and totally empty, bereft of anything except the cluster of tubes on the wall and the leaky device releasing puffs of vapor at regular intervals. How disgraceful, to be led astray by his own equipment! Growling, the hunter rammed his sphere into the device, frustrated, filling the room with a hot mist. He tramped back into the hallway, scanning up and down and failing yet again to penetrate the labyrinth. This would not work. He could not follow after his prey if he was forced into the same maze as it was. The two could be circling each other for an eternity and never meet. He would have to anticipate the oord-naht's next move, meet him at his destination. Why the oord-nahthad been summoned here, he couldn't say, only that he was now leaving with his followers and a captive. There was nothing outside but blistering heat, so the party would be leaving the planet entirely. That meant securing an escape capsule… or a starship.
Without another thought, the hunter took off at a run. He knew exactly where to meet the oord-naht, and this time, his quarry would not escape.
"You're positive that this shuttle has enough fuel to get us into orbit?"
"For the last time, yes." The human sounded as exasperated as was safely possible, given that she was bound by the wrist to an armed turian in the company of two other mercs. She could feel all three sets of eyes boring into her back as she keyed her passcode into the door. Wrex reached out and grabbed her wrist as she finished.
"Wait a moment. Are there any other entrances to this place? Any way that someone could've gotten inside before us?"
"You don't seriously think…" The turian's voice weakened as he considered it. "You think that he's inside already."
"I think that's exactly where I'd be, if I was him."
"Well, there's air vents, but they're not even human-sized," she replied. "I mean, unless he went outside somehow and came in through the surface tunnel-"
"Good enough for me," Chara interrupted, punching the button.
Everything had been left exactly as it was when the emergency klaxon went off. They took cover just beyond the doorway behind a hover-sled loaded with crates, poking their heads out to survey the hangar. The shuttle sat on the far side, perhaps two hundred feet away, with a docking clamp secured to its nose. High overhead, the thick blast doors of the hangar loomed behind a thin veil of haze. Everything was still and quiet save for the rhythmic pulsing of unseen machinery. The human closed and locked the doors behind them, saying they would be proof against anything less than a microfusion charge
"How do we get out of here?" the krogan rumbled, gazing from the shuttle to the tightly sealed concrete overhead. Their escape route was beginning to feel like a dead end.
"Umm… I think that the upper shields can be opened remotely, since the base is in 'emergency' mode. We can use the shuttle's VI for that."
"You think? What if you're wrong, little one?"
Shrinking back from the asari's snarl, the human replied, "I uh… umm… could unlock them from the control room." She pointed one finger weakly at the windowed balcony hanging above their heads.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Maybe 'accidentally' trigger some sort of automated defense system while you're at it?"
"I- I wouldn't-"
"Someone needs to go with her. Korac, uncuff her and hand her to the krogan."
"Why doesn't the turian go with her?" Wrex asked warily. He clenched and unclenched his fingers several times.
"Because his hands are full with the case," the asari retorted. Wrex could hear the slight shifting of armor plates, indicating the briefcase was sliding over the turian's hip. Sliding down and back, where his pistol was holstered.
"So, I take it that you and the turian will prep the shuttle while I take the human far enough away to miss it as you leave?" Wrex could see the twich in the captain's left eye, hear the turian shifting position slightly, but is blood-red gaze never left the asari commando's face and the slight beads of sweat forming on it. "You know the biggest difference between you and me? I'm not quite as stupid as I look."
As soon as the case impacted with the hangar floor, Wrex turned and lunged for the turian's throat. His beefy arm wrapped around the smaller being's neck as both of their hands closed around Korac's pistol. Easily, he forced the turian's finger around it as he brought the hapless merc in front of him as a living shield. The human tripped and fell, her weight immobilizing Korac's left arm as Wrex brought the pistol up to the asari's forehead. Her own rifle had barely risen above crotch level.
Everyone froze, returning the hangar to its state of supernatural stillness.
"New plan," Wrex growled, flexing his arm and hearing the turian's neck crackle. "I kill you both, give the case back to the human and go take every miserable credit you owe me from your boss' stinking hide. I'll give you five seconds to come up with a counter offer."
"You think I can't drop you before you drop him, bastard?"
"Four."
"Overgrown lizard garbage! I'll make a pair of boots out of your ass!" The captain's face was a fetching shade of purple as she foamed and spit in rage.
"One."
Chara heaved the rifle upward, but it wasn't to take a shot. She slung it back over her shoulder and Wrex eased his finger off the pistol's trigger a fraction of an inch. "I'll make sure you never see another job in civilized space again," she hissed, backing away towards the edge of the crates. "You won't be able to get a job bouncing drunks on Omega when I'm through with you." The krogan laughed and threw the turian down.
"Fire up the shuttle, little maiden," he sneered, "and we'll see what you can do when we're all off this forsaken rock."
Chara turned and scurried towards the shuttle nervously, hissing and muttering curses. Watching her go, the krogan reached down, easily snapped the chain binding human to turian and shoved the briefcase in her shivering hands. "At this point I think I can trust you better than either of these clowns," he rumbled, hauling her onto her feet. "Besides, if you try something I know I can crush your whole chest with one blow." He let the turian get up on his own, noting with satisfaction the whipped look in his avian eyes.
"The captain isn't fooling around, you know. She has powerful connections." Korac brushed himself off and straightened up the collar of his under-armor, hurt pride evident in his voice.
"I've used people like her to bludgeon people more connected than her to death. Big deal."
The turian stepped forward, reaching up to point at Wrex with one talon. "Yeah, well you better start practicing, because-"
Wrex saw the air behind him shimmer a second before the turian was cut off mid-sentence by a pair of metal blades erupting from his chest. Blue blood jetted onto the surprised krogan's face as his hearing was blotted out by the human female's senseless screeching. The blades retracted and dumped the turian onto the ground, revealing a huge figure nearly a foot taller than Wrex, nothing more than a ghost made of heat-warped air. His fingers convulsed automatically, sending slug after slug through the Carnifex' barrel and into the thing. It roared, the same earth-shattering sound from the control room, and the next thing Wrex knew, he was twenty feet away on his back, the remains of shattered crates and canisters all around him. Searing pain from a deep gash coursed from his crest to his neck.
Sparks writhed their way up the ghostly killer's legs as it stepped over the ruined crate stack into a puddle of liquid. It paused, seemingly considering the situation, then with one arm motion the cloaking field withdrew. Muscular, scaly skin and battered armor plates slowly vibrated into view. Wrex staggered to his feet, nearly face-to-face with an eyeless metal mask. He'd never seen anything like it in all his travels.
It was going to look damn good on his wall.
He drew his shotgun, managing to fire off two shots single-handed before the brute's strapped-on claws cut it in two. He drew his own knife lightning-quick to block the claw's downward slash. The beast flipped its wrist, snapping the tungsten steel like plastene. It returned the gesture, ramming a dagger into Wrex's thigh. With his blood rage in full swing, he didn't even feel it. A telescopic three-pronged spear appeared in its right hand. The tip shot out, grazing Wrex's jaw as he twisted away from it and grabbed on. He swung it into the path of the incoming claws and they cut the metal shaft in two. Wrex gripped the severed tip in one hand and wrenched the dagger from his thigh with the other, hunkering down into a combat stance. His opponent tilted his masked head as though approving the krogan's prowess, then reached for a device on its waist. A circular saw-like blade appeared in his hand. With a clenching motion of the fist, it began to spin.
Wrex didn't give the thing any time to use it. He threw himself forward, knocking the claws back with the spear tip and jamming the dagger into the spinning blade. His head met the things chest with enough force to make his entire spine crack and compress. Wrex kept charging, trying to pin it against a wall and hopefully crush its ribs, but it grabbed his shoulders and spun him aside onto the floor. Just as he rolled onto his side, its bare foot jammed against his windpipe. He looked up into the featureless grey face wreahed with strange beaded tendrils, hearing heavy breathing behind it. It raised the arm-claws above its head one final time-
A concussion grenade slammed into the mask and the creature lurched backwards. Multiple rifle shots peppered its mask and torso as Chara danced down the shuttle's gangplank, screaming and firing wildly at it. The fiend looked up, directly at her as some sort of intricate tube unfolded from its huge shoulderpad and began to hum and pulse.
Wrex threw himself out of the way as a plasma discharge roared out of the tube and ripped into the shuttle's cockpit, sending a shower of glass and steel and sparks through the hangar. Fuel tanks caught and went up, turning the spaceship into a brilliant yellow fireball that tossed both krogan and asari towards their attacker. Wrex felt a small twinge of satisfaction as his body struck it in the head and sailed into the doorway. He was on his feet in a second, feeling nothing. Once a krogan's body had absorbed enough fight-response neurotransmitters, only death would stop them. Tomorrow he would not make it out of bed, but today, all the broken ribs in the world couldn't stop him. The thing was standing up now, woozy. He was going to feed those big yellow-green arms to it. It was as good as dead.
He was vaguely aware of the asari and human weakly tugging at his body, but it wasn't until the words 'gonna explode' filtered into his conscious mind that he noticed the streams of burning fuel spreading in every direction. Spreading, no doubt, to where the rest of the fuel was kept. He bellowed with rage and backpedaled through the door just as the human punched the lock again. The thing was fast but not fast enough, reaching the steel slabs just as they slammed closed. Next time they met, he'd win. Nothing would take away this righteous kill from him.
Even when the hangar finally immolated itself, moments later as they fled down a hallway, Wrex knew that there would be a next time.
Howling, the hunter slammed into the steel door twice more, budging it no further. Again, his prey had escaped in these infernal tunnels! But, he had finally met the oord-nahtin combat. What a magnificent specimen! Nothing had ever taken two of his weapons, nor thrown him to the ground. Nothing had stood up to that level of punishment and lived, much less remained fighting. Their ship destroyed, these weak beings lost the only avenue of escape. He would find them again, and when he did-
An alert flashed across his visor screen. He turned to see the conflagration of the destroyed spaceship spreading towards a grated channel in the floor. Sensors neatly outlined the channel in X-ray mode, tracing it back to several huge tanks of pressurized, flammable liquid lining the wall. Enough liquid to burn up every molecule of air in the room. There was nowhere to hide. He must escape, or perish.
Scanning the room, his visor computer now picked out a balcony, protected only by thick, clear polymer. Whining emanated from his plasma caster as it powered up again.
The hunter flexed his legs and leaped, following his own plasma blast, just as the entire chamber exploded.