C H A P T E R 4
Orieste Star System
The Terminus Systems, 2184 C.E.
The Mercury Star buckled like a wild horse as finally one of the Geth missiles got through her GARDIAN defences and her jamming, detonating in the centre of the second portside cargo module. Debris erupted from the wounded vessel, and leaking atmosphere fanned a brief fire of plasma before automatic safety protocols locked that part of the freighter off. Trailing a thin cloud of immediately frozen air, the ship veered closer to Orieste's fourth planet, spinning erratically to present its pursuers with an uncertain target profile.
"Are your mad? Sending us out in an unarmed shuttle with paper-thin kinetic barriers with two Geth dropships on our heels is suicide!" Nidal Amin protested. He sat behind the controls of the Star's sole drop shuttle and looked incredulously at the intercom speakers from where Franklyn Antweilers spoke to him.
"We can either take our chances out there, where we'd be the least valuable target to them, or we can all stay here and wait till we get shot to pieces," Amos Kenyon replied calmly while he slid through the shuttle's bulkhead and buckled into his seat. "They're down to mass driver range now." As if to underline what he had just said a series of impacts sent shudders through the freighters 120 kiloton frame. "A freighter and a corvette against two Geth frigates. Do the math, Amin," he frowned.
"Listen, people," Frank's voice cut through their chatter. "In about a minute Mellie'll let the Star bounce back from the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere. You need to be ready to launch on my exact mark. We're dropping you right in front of a continental storm front," he explained while the freighter's kinetic barriers shuddered under two further impacts. "You'll need to dive fast, and you'll have to stay right in front of the dust storm. The Geth are a lot more susceptible to the kind of electrical damage that storm front carries with it."
A series of hammerblows struck the ship, and the intercom connection failed momentarily.
"...et ready...n't know how long...okay, Mellie?"
There was a brief, silent pause, then Antweiler's voice appeared again, pained and coughing.
"Fuck that shit and...!" The sound of a fire extinguisher made the rest of the sentence inaudible. "...to do it now! Drop in five! Five, four," the hangar bay slid open.
"Shit! SHIT!" Nidal Amin frantically strapped himself into his seat as the Mercury Star rolled on her side and the planet appeared in full view directly below them, all red and orange and brown plains and canyons cut apart by grey mountain chains and hundreds of wide, round craters.
"...two, one!"
Two hundred metric tons of shuttle dropped from the freighter's bay like a rock, immediately hitting the planet's atmosphere. But while the rapidly shrinking Mercury Star bounced back into outer space, Frank Antweiler had passed off the right moment for the crew aboard the shuttle to penetrate the thin layer of gases that surrounded Orieste IV. Its front glowing with frictional heat, its whole frame rattling and shaking, the shuttle raced downwards through a roaring thunderstorm even though atmospheric pressure up here was less than one ten-thousandth of that at Earth's ground level.
Despite the small ship's inertial compensators and artificial gravity, Kenyon felt his stomach lurch as his senses transmitted the image of a rapid fall and its accompanied feeling of lower gravity to his brain. He pressed his lips shut and tried to keep his pounding heart from breaking out of his chest with slow, deep and controlled breaths. In the seat besides him, Nidal kept muttering a litany of curses in both English and what Kenyon presumed to be his native Arabic, his fingers racing over the vessel's navigational controls in a flurry of motion before he discarded them in favour of the manual steering rudder.
A wide, swirling field of purple and light brown filled the left half of the view from the shuttle's cockpit. Inside it, a white and blue thunderstorm seemed to rage.
"We're coming in too close to that storm front," the pilot muttered through clenched teeth, nodding towards inferno below. "I don't know if I can evade it at that speed and with these atmospheric turbulences. That storm's speed is in excess of 400 kph!"
Amos understood enough of atmospheric flight to realize the dangers it posed. They were dropping like a rock at almost Mach 10. A wrong turn, no matter how gentle, could blow their drive's compensator apart and rip them all to shreds. That, and if they entered that storm he doubted they'd be better off than the Geth. After all, they also needed their electronics to fly.
"Just try it!" he growled and banged his fist against the wall at his back. "Sit tight, people, the hairy part's about to begin!"
They dove closer to the planetary surface, but at an altitude of twenty kilometres the storm front began to fill their whole field of view. Softly, almost delicately, Nidal Amin began to move the small ship's controllers, and immediately the rattling and shaking intensified to what felt like tenfold of the stress the hull had been under only moments before. Warning lights began frantically blink, and half a dozen alarm sounds filled the pressurized cabin. But Amin's and Kenyon's attention centred on the one red dot that had just begun to fade into existence on the shuttle's rear.
"Incoming!"
Kenyon's warning echoed through the teams speakers, but even before they had been able to grasp the meaning of his words Nidal Amin threw the shuttle around in a move ignoring all the alarms and warnings that flashed across the small craft's display. Not a second too soon. A trail of ionized atmosphere appeared to their starboard side where a Geth mass driver salvo had missed them. The pilot hurled his little ship into a roll in the other direction. The engines whined like a tormented animal while metal and carbon fibres moaned under the extreme stress they were put through.
"I'm taking us closer to the storm!" Nidal yelled, and Kenyon tried to make out where that was as the little ship twisted and tumbled. The Chimaera's navigator stabilized their course for just a second with a muscle-crunching move, bringing the apocalyptic wall of dust heated dust and electrical discharges into their plain field of view before the shuttle began a sharp turn to their 'east' at a speed of close to 8,500 kph.
The Geth ladar blip, still significantly higher up in Orieste IV's atmosphere, mirrored its movement, firing its guns. A trail of white and blue appeared squarely in their sights, not a hundred metres off their cockpit. The disturbances seemed to pose some major problems for the machines, but the hornet-like equivalent of an Alliance frigate showed no signs of breaking off its pursuit. On the contrary, trying to keep his eyes steady on the holographic display Kenyon noticed that the ship had indeed accelerated!
But he saw what Nidal was doing. The Chimaera's navigator was using the Geths' own foresight against them. Instead of the normal pursuit pattern a, well, organic attacker would show – that being one that simply mirrored his prey's movements - the Geth rather manoeuvred to where their heuristic algorithms predicted the shuttle would be. In this case, that brought them inevitably closer to the upper layers of the storm. But by now it was only a matter of time until a fatal shot would hit the shuttle as – like pillars of blue and white light – mass driver rounds from the Geth dropship began to rain down all around them.
"We can't shake them off!" Kenyon barked, only to be cut short and proven right by the crunching sound of an impact.
The outer flight path of a 40mm mass driver round merely scratched along the smooth surface of the shuttle, but the effect was the same as if the small ship had been hit by a gigantic hammer. Sparks erupted from nearly all consoles, blue-white flames shot from a cable box above the crew seats, and for the brink of a moment all screens in the shuttle's cockpit simply went blank, throwing it into an uncontrolled tumble before the auxiliaries could kick in. Nidal yanked the controls like a madman, driving the tiny vehicle into the extensions of the towering storm.
Back in the crew compartment, only the two former marines kept pale but stoic faces. Marak had closed his four eyes end seemed to be praying, and Karina Buckley was uncontrollably weeping. Kenyon tried to shut the sounds from his mind and concentrated on the ladar plot.
"Just a little bit further," he muttered.
There was no way he could have seen the electric discharge coming, but it leaped from the fluid wall of the storm front, encasing the small shuttle for just the blink of an eye. Kenyon could feel every hair on his body stand on end – and then gravity slammed him into his seat.
"Inertial compensators have failed!" Nidal somehow managed to croak while he frantically tried to get his ship back under control to steer it away from the danger ahead of it. Despite the sudden high gravity, he and Kenyon managed to stay conscious for the next crucial seconds as the pilot threw his craft into one final turn.
Then blackness enveloped the former lieutenant-commander.
When he opened his eyes again, Magnus Johanson's voice filled the small cockpit.
"That Geth bastard got zapped! They're breaking off! Hell yeah!"
The images transmitted from Dragonfly showed how a scorched Geth dropship very slowly and very carefully was gaining altitude again, heading for space rather than after them.
Besides Kenyon, Nidal Amin steered the small shuttle with grim concentration. The former lieutenant-commander could feel that the inertial compensators were still off-line, but the pilot kept their speed at a low 450 kph, maintaining a safe distance between themselves and the storm without offering the Geth an easy target. It was not exactly a smooth ride, but compared to the last few minutes it was as close to luxurious as one could get. He turned his head to Nidal and winced. His muscles had cramped and his neck ached, making him feel twice his actual age at that moment.
"Well done," his voice was a hoarse croaking sound. "Kept us alive after all." He tried to smile but it came out as a grimace instead. "Keep us here until that dropship's cleared atmosphere, then get us to our destination." He turned his head a little bit further, ignoring the stinging pain. "Everybody alive back there?"
"Buckley's passed out," Corporal Frederica Adams voice was strained but steady, telling him this was not her first combat drop that had turned out to be a dance on a knife's edge. "Puked her guts out, too. Had to take off her helmet and stabilize her, but she should be fine. Though I wouldn't take off your own helmet if I was you. I've got no idea what that girl's eaten."
"Ten-four, Adams. Keep an eye on her," Kenyon told her.
"Will do, sir."
"Good. And Adams? Well done." Amos returned his attention to the man sitting beside him. "How long till our destination?"
"Fifteen minutes, if the Geth decide to play nice," Nidal Amin told him without taking his eyes off his instruments.
Amos Kenyon leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes, trying find his inner calm and to prepare himself for what awaited them on the ground.
"Damn it, those are some persistent sons of bitches," Mellie Antweiler snapped as another series of impacts on the Mercury Star's kinetic barriers brought the same down to 25% efficiency. At 40mm, the Geth mass driver rounds were not exactly the be-all and end-all in the field of ship-to-ship artillery, but they were slowly wearing down the Antweiler's ship's defences. And that long into an engagement they would already have ripped standard commercial grade barriers to shreds. Luckily for Frank and Melissa Antweiler, their ship had been equipped with some milspec tools that – according to Frank – had fallen off the back of an air car. But they were reaching the end of their capabilities now.
"The second dropship's cleared atmosphere again and is slowly catching up on you!" Johanson warned them while Dragonfly danced around the shots the less agile pursuers threw after her. "According to my sensor data they still only got limited operationality."
"That won't help us in the end!" Frank's voice was hoarse from the smoke he had inhaled when the Geths' first missile hit had set off a small fire in a nearby console. "I'm running out of tricks, and we are running out of luck! We can't take many more hits!"
There was a brief pause in their comm channel, then Johanson stunned him with his next question.
"If I buy you guys some time, can you do a 'Chuck Norris'?"
"A 'Chuck Norris'?" Frank Antweiler frowned, then a smile crossed his face. "That could work. Get them off my back for two minutes and we'll be set for it!" He paused for a moment, then added: "And don't get yourself killed, you Swedish oaf!"
"I'll try not to, mum," came Magnus' deadpan answer. "Wait till I'm at the straggler. And Frank, Mellie: good luck to you guys, too."
Frank watched the Dragonfly leave their defensive formation in a turn and at a speed that would have ripped his own ship apart had he ever attempted to do the same. Rolling and almost effortlessly evading the first dropship's fire, the corvette raced past it, swinging her hull around for just a second during which eight hundred projectiles hammered against the Geth's kinetic barriers. It made for an awesome fireworks display in Mercury Star's holoplot, but the pass had barely brought the pursuer's defences down to 70% of their initial strength. Several such attacks would pose a problem for the synthetic attackers, but there was a good chance they'd find a way to adapt to his attack patterns before that. But Magnus Johanson did not turn his ship around for a second pass. He went straight after the second, already damaged dropship that limped fifteen thousand clicks behind its brother. And then, the two Geth ships picked up the active targeting profile of a disruptor torpedo preparing for launch. The dropship following the Antweilers broke off its pursuit and turned around, chasing after the smaller ship.
"Give me all the energy we got on the engines!" Mellie Antweiler commanded, and the battled freighter accelerated as fast as it could, away from the carnage, but not away from the planet. The plump, motherly woman steered it 'up', towards Orieste IV's northern hemisphere while the distance between Dragonfly and the Geth shrunk to less than a thousand kilometres. The slower dropship began to blink red as projectiles and warheads began to fill the space between the three ships, and Magnus Johanson cranked up his ECM to full power while Dragonfly spat out all her remaining decoys.
"Now!" she snapped, and Frank punched the holographic interface as hard as if it had been a physical button. Two dozen cylindrical canisters popped from hidden tubes between the Star's engines. When the freighter had put one thousand clicks between them and itself, the containment fields on those canisters collapsed, and simple compound explosives detonated the miniature eezo cores held within them. The explosions were far too weak to pose any danger to even weaker ships, but the mass of expanding core signatures temporarily blinded even shielded FTL sensor systems. It was an expensive last ditch effort, each canister costing easily ten thousand credits even under the best circumstances. For five seconds, twenty-four new, erratic drive core signatures blotted out the two dropships' sensors.
Dragonfly, faster than the ship chasing it, dove down on the damaged Geth vessel. She was close enough already that her pilot could rely on her optical sensors to guide his attack. With a soft whirr her two railguns pumped hundreds of projectiles into the vacuum of space. None of them was thicker than an old metal coin, the ones that had been used before everybody had switched over to electronic creds, but at nearly six thousand kilometres per second, they did not have to be. The dropship's kinetic barriers had been badly mauled by the effects of the storm front, frying half the systems and leaving the other half badly suited to compensate for that. Dragonfly's onslaught turned the Geth ship's surface into a pockmarked nightmare landscape from which burning plasma leaked. The hornet-like vessel shuddered under the impact of the munitions, but it did not die. Unlike ships crewed by organic beings, Geth ships did not need to take the survival and the comfort of a "crew" into consideration. The space thus saved went into additional redundant systems, systems that now kept it alive. Slowly, like a wounded animal, it rolled on its side, presenting Magnus with its undamaged part. Another salvo ripped into it. The distance shrunk. Unconcentrated defensive fire erupted from the dropship, but Johanson dodged it easily with the help of his own systems.
Three hundred clicks.
One hundred clicks.
Ten clicks.
Four disruptor torpedoes slid from tubes in Dragonfly's short delta wings. It all happened far too fast for the human brain to compute it in the necessary time span. Johanson's ship had already overshot the dropship by a hundred and twenty clicks when he consciously realized he had launched his torpedoes. At that point, the wounded dropship had already ceased to exist. In its stead, a small cloud of debris was slowly expanding two thousand kilometres above Orieste IV's equator. Dragonfly's young captain silently watched the destruction he had wrought on his screens before he returned his attention to the remaining vessel. It was time for part two of the 'Roundhouse Kick'.
Frank Antweiler watched Dragonfly evade the remaining dropship in a zig-zagging, five thousand clicks wide turn, then head off on a course that'd lead directly past them. The Mercury Star sat safely in the sensor shadow of Orieste IV's magnetic north pole. For once, Frank and Melissa were glad their ship was not as well-built or armed as the Geth or even Magnus Johanson's vessel. A military grade drive signature would have given them away. The way it was, however, they used what little time they had to let their systems cool off and recharge while their few helping hands were busy plugging the worst holes in the freighter's hull. He leaned over to his wife and pressed a kiss on her cheek, and she answered with a reassuring smile. It had been a rough ride, but they had been through equally bad encounters before.
Melissa pointed to the holoplot.
"They've swallowed the bait."
Indeed, they had. The Geth dropship, bereft of the much juicier target of the Mercury Star and clearly aware of the danger the small corvette posed, had decided to deal with Johanson in a very permanent fashion. And Magnus Johanson led it right into the Star's path. The Antweiler's ship did not hover precisely over the centre of the planet's magnetic north pole, but rather close to the edge. Close enough not to be detected, close enough to be able to act.
"At their current speed, they'll pass by the outer envelope of the field in forty-three seconds, Frank."
"Got it. Turn her to parallel their approach vector."
Manoeuvring thrusters delicately pushed the freighter's hull to a forty degree angle relative to the planetary surface below, making its cross-section match the flight path of Magnus and his Geth pursuer. Counterthrusters brought the movement to a halt, and the ceiling of the two frontal freight modules tilted up. From within, two blocks full of cylindrical tubes moved out, their matte grey surface soaking up the light from the distant central star of the system.
"Thirty seconds!" came Mellie's warning.
"Got it," he gave the words a bit more emphasis than the first time. "Pressurizing launch tubes. Establishing targeting uplink with main computers and Dragonfly's systems. Warheads set for manual cold launch," he rattled down what he did, his eyes intent on the approaching Geth warship.
"Twenty seconds, Frank!"
"Opening launch tubes one through ten," he flipped down a series of manual switches rather than holographic buttons, and ten silver torpedoes raced away from the freighter, propelled by the oxygen build-up in their launch tubes. "Distance now eight hundred,... twelve hundred..., two thousand... ."
"Ten seconds!"
As if he was watching a tape running on fast forward, Dragonfly and the Geth dropship lunged closer. Frank Antweiler removed the safety cap from an inconspicuous button on his seats left armrest.
"Seven, six, five...!" Melissa Antweiler counted the seconds down.
At 'four', her husband pushed the launch button, and ten disruptor torpedoes awoke to life at a safe distance away from the Mercury Star, hurling themselves into the Geth ship's path. Appearing out of the blind zone above the pole, they approached unnoticed during the first two and a half seconds of their flight. At three seconds, the Geth had realized what was coming and had started to roll the dropship around to present their most effective GARDIAN arrays. At three point eight seconds that cluster had shot down three of the incoming warheads.
The other seven hit.
Orieste IV, Orieste Star System
The Terminus Systems, 2184 C.E.
Kenyon and his team slowly made their way through a natural defile, keeping their heads low to avoid detection. The sky above was a dark blue, almost black, the thin colour the result of the equally thin atmosphere of this once habitable world. Small clouds of whirled up dust blew across the plains to each side of the defile, showering them with a thin reddish layer from time to time. Their target was located close to the equatorial region, in proximity to a large crater region. Millenia of storms had smoothed the cliffs off and created rounded edges on all natural surfaces. From time to time the broken and twisted remains of concrete buildings rose from the rust-coloured wastes, their existence testament to the race that had left them behind more than 50,000 years ago.
Corporals Adams and Tsen moved at the flanks of the defile, Adams on the left front, Tsen on their right rear, both running in a crouch but none the slower for it, their digital desert camouflage blurring into the environment. They had their 'Avenger' assault rifles at the ready. Marak ran behind Kenyon, his four eyes concentrated on his surroundings. A heavy shotgun rested in his firm grip and a pistol was strapped to his leg in a holster. Kenyon himself was at the centre of the group where he had taken up the task of keeping an eye on Buckley whenever he could spare one. She was an example of misery: a straggling, lanky girl trying to keep up with them, her eyes wide with fear. He had secured her pistol - the last thing he needed was for her to shoot someone accidentally - and was pulling her along as gently as he could. He was just glad she did not whimper.
Every hundred metres or so the defile branched out. Despite the marker they had placed on their omnitools' map features it was hard to find the right way. Three times they took the wrong turn only to end up in a ravine that slowly led them up to the very plains they were trying to evade.
Nidal was scouting ahead for them. In their 'everybody has at least two jobs'-team he was the sniper, and his suit had the best optical equipment.
"This is the right way," he radioed in. "But we've got a problem, sir."
"What is it?" Kenyon inquired, but Nidal Amin did not answer the question.
"It's less than a hundred metres. Two turns to the right, one to the left. You'll see."
Kenyon frowned.
"Understood. We'll be with you in a sec."
He motioned the team to follow him and took the lead through the deepening defile. Soft sand and gravel made for treacherous walking here, but he kept his balance. Buckley was less lucky. She slipped twice, nearly pulling him down with her, the mishaps only making her even more miserable. This was unacceptable. Worst of all, he could not even really fault her. It was not as if she had been trained for this. No, he would need to have a thorough conversation with Captain Craster, and if that did not work, with the man who had hired him for this job in the first place. That was, if he survived.
The chances for that had considerably dimmed. Lying down next to Nidal, he stared into a hundred metres deep canyon that had been cut in half by an impact crater three quarters of a kilometre wide, trying to get a feeling for the terrain.
"What is it?" he finally asked the sniper.
Nidal wordlessly handed him his rifle, a semi-automatic M-97 'Viper' and pointed to the convex ridge maybe two hundred metres to their east. He zoomed in on the area and was surprised to find the steep face of maybe eighty or so metres being stabilized by thin concrete pillars every ten or so metres. Half sunken into the rocks behind them they seemed to carry an access course of some sorts that lay half-buried beneath crumbled rocks and swaths of rust-like sand from further up. And on it were Geth.
"Damn it," he cursed. "Looks like a good two dozen of them securing that path, and they have an armature with them!" He handed him the weapon back and called up his map. A quick glance at the display only deepened his frown. "No way to bypass that ridge. The path up there leads directly to the dig site. According to those photos it's less than half a kilometre straight ahead. Which means me must get through those Geth," he concluded grimly.
"We don't have the firepower to take that many on in a head-on fight, sir, not if they have a walker with them," Adams shook her head. She had switched her assault rifle for a compact grenade launcher. "If we try to take that ridge we'll get gutted."
"Maybe we can bypass them through the ravines to flank them. Shouldn't a couple of surprise shots with you grenade launcher be able to kill that beast?" Tsen mused, but Kenyon transferred the overhead map image to the former marine.
"None of the defiles leads to that ridge, and we can't risk getting out into the open. The Geth may have some of their units watch the plains. Anyway, I'm not too keen on getting any of the team into spitting distance of that walker. That monster's main gun can flash-fry you in one shot."
Silence reigned for a few seconds before another suggestion was brought forward.
"Then how about we call in Dragonfly for an air strike? Zap them from the high ground?" Adams suggested, but it was Nidal's turn to shake his head.
"The Geth would pick up our comm signal, corporal. Talking among ourselves here within a limited radius is no problem, but you need significantly more power to communicate with a ship in orbit. They'd zoom right in on us."
"We really need to fucking plan these things better," Amos muttered, temporarily disabling his suit's microphone.
"I'll handle this. Just cover me on my mark."
Marak had been quiet during their conversation, simply browsing his own omnitool. With his voice still echoing in their helmets' speakers the Batarian slipped from their midst and slid into a narrow precipice before they could react. The weak sunlight of Orieste did not reach down there, but if the Batarian had any problems he at least did not voice them.
"Bloody hell, what are you doing?" Kenyon hissed, but the explosives' expert did not respond. "Nidal, do you have him?"
Nidal Amin scanned the canyon ahead through his rifle's scope.
"No, I don't see him, he's not - wait, there he is!"
The former lieutenant-commander pressed the his assault rifle's less capable optics against his helmet, zooming in as much as he could. Nidal was right! The Batarian ran along the bottom of the crag in a ducked posture, his right side pressed as close to the rock and the concrete pillars as he could manage. Marak stopped at one of them, removed the duffel bag from his back and pulled a grey disk from it. He fastened the device to the pillar, then looked up in the team's general direction.
"I can't get back to you the way I descended," his voice was low and the connection was lousy.
"He's limited his emitter output to evade Geth detection," Nidal murmured.
"When I give you the sign, you'll have to distract them from me to get away," the Batarian continued, having moved on to a second and a third pillar, slipping in and out of the shadows. "There's a formation of rocks to the west that I'll need to reach. Preferably without getting shot," he added wryly.
Kenyon tilted his head left.
"Got it. We'll cover your ass." He rolled onto his back to face the rest of the group. "Adams, Tsen, move to the edge and dig yourselves in. Miss Buckley... just lie flat on the ground and keep your head down."
Nidal nudged him.
"I think he's ready to go."
Leaning back over the sights of his rifle, Amos saw the Batarian wave both his arms. Strangely enough his crimson suit blurring him even more into the surrounding rock formations than the marine corporals' camouflage patterns.
"He's just damn lucky those Geth have never seen any commando movies," he muttered to himself. "All right, covering fire on my mark! Fire!"
As one, three assault rifles and Nidal's semi-automatic sniper rifle began to pour supersonic projectiles into the Geth's direction. Only the sniper rifle really had the range and accuracy to hit anything smaller than the proverbial broadside of a barn at the range they were firing, but in full automatic mode that was to be expected without extensive upgrades. Hitting them was not the point anyway, even though Nidal took one down with his first three shots. Forty metres below, Marak was sprinting away from the pillars and the steep face in an erratic zig-zag pattern. The kinetic barriers around a second Geth flared up before critically malfunctioning, allowing another killing shot to get through.
Then it was the synthetics' turn. Sand and rock splinters erupted all around them as the machines returned fire, and did so a lot more accurately than Kenyon's small team had done. Their own fire almost immediately died down as they careened back on the unstable ground, ducking behind the low wall at the end of the canyon's edge. Only Nidal kept firing, mechanically pulling his weapon's trigger. Tsen and Adams simply pointed their guns' muzzles over the edge and returned fire, thermal clips soon littering the rust-coloured ground around them. Karina Buckley, for once, did as she had been told and lay still in the middle of the ravine, both arms shielding her head. That girl was a millstone around the team's neck. He should have asked to bloody Batarian to watch her. He had more eyes to spare!
"Oh shit! Incoming!" Nidal lunged himself away from the low natural wall they had all been crouching behind.
Amos only faintly recognized the blue flicker on the edge of his vision before the Geth armature's powerful main gun hammered into the stone and sand that had so far protected them. The small wall simple disintegrated. However, Amos, Adams and Tsen did not notice. The impact catapulted them into the air like rag dolls. Like in slow motion, Amos saw his own rifle fly away from him, somersaulting around its own centre while he himself did the same. Then his sudden flight ended as abrupt as it had begun, and he slammed into the side of the ravine, frantically shielding his head with his whirling arms. The impact pushed all the air out of his lungs and left him dazed for a few moments, moments during which the pain from his muscles and sprained joints started to throb in every inch of his body. The dulled moans and curses of the others filled their comm channel. Then, belated, his suit's medical systems commenced their duties, pumping stimulants and painkillers into his bloodstream. Almost immediately the pain receded, and his senses cleared as if he had been dipped into a vat of ice water.
"Everybody okay?" he coughed the question out, trying to get on his knees while his eyes tried to peek over what was left of the wall at the end of the edge. There was not really much of a wall left to speak of. The armature's siege pulse assault cannon had simply evaporated a man-sized, round chunk in its centre. And the damn thing was getting ready to fire again. "Get to c-!" A massive explosion cut him off. Like roaring thunder despite the thin atmosphere, a blast wave swept over them, knocking them back on their behinds. Rock and dust and things that looked like tiny pieces of Geth began to rain down from a swiftly rising black and reddish-brown cloud. The wind drove the dust cloud over their position, turning the world around them into a murky twilight. For a minute or so they just lay where they were, waiting for the worst of it to settle down again, catching their breath.
Then their field of view began to clear again. On nearly sixty metres where the pillars and the approach course had been the side of the canyon had collapsed into itself in a massive rock fall. There was no sign of the Geth anymore.
Nidal crawled to the ledge.
"Merciful Allah!" he muttered. "How about you don't try to blow up half the planet the next time you do this, Marak?"
"I'm glad you're alive, too," the deadpan gravelly voice of the Batarian answered him from down below. "Any casualties up there?"
Nidal turned to the others, but Amos shook his head.
"We're all pretty roughed up. Bruises and concussions, but nothing serious. Hold the spot. We're coming down to you."
The former lieutenant-commander later on did not remember which had been more strenuous: slithering down the ravine or climbing up the lumpy hillside Marak had blasted into a steep-angled ascent for them. Again, he pulled Karina Buckley with him. Luckily, she had calmed down a bit and now observed her surroundings with frightened but clear eyes. He felt like a fucking babysitter! The climb itself took them a lot longer than it the battle against the Geth had lasted. The ground was tricky, and a wrong step had the potential to set loose an avalanche that would bury them all. Nidal took the point again, and they all did their very best to trace his steps up to the halfway buried concrete road.
It was wider than it had appeared from the other side of the canyon. The could all easily walk shoulder by shoulder and despite the sand drifts there was enough leftover space for half a dozen more to walk besides them. But this was no parade.
"Tsen, Adams, take point. Nidal, cover them. The rest is with me."
They slowly followed the sunken road, conscious that enemies could be hiding behind every crevice. Their target slowly grew bigger on their scanners. The road took a sharp turn to the right, and suddenly they found themselves facing two faceless statues. Millennia of wind and ionized storms had sanded all features off the two giants, but they were still impressive in their regal positions, arms erect as if to support the massive concrete ceiling looming above them. An unlit tunnel as wide as the road led further down into the mountain, ending in twilight in front of a two-winged metal gate. It stood open.
"And there I was, thinking this was all there was to this job," Tsen muttered sourly, something Adams countered with a chuckle.
"What's this?" Buckley walked past the small marine and bent down to pick up a silvery disk that had been half-covered by the shadows of the statues.
"Don't touch that!"
The marine's eyes widened and he violently jostled her away from her find, only to be greeted by the familiar whining sound of a self-arming laser-tripwire mine. With Buckley staggering out of the way, Tsen tried to lunge himself away from the weapon, but it was too late. With a dull 'thud' it exploded, knocking him against the nearby wall.
Kenyon and the others ran towards him to check on him. Buckley shrieked in horror. That seemed to be all she did, Amos thought in equal parts sourly and angrily. He remembered what Marak had said back on the Mercury Star.
'She'll get somebody killed.'
"Tsen, you all right?" Corporal Adams fell to her knees besides him and gently pulled him around.
The small marine opened his eyes and grimaced.
"I've been better. Feels like a broken rib or two," he coughed, then winced. "Guess I was lucky the thing didn't penetrate the suit. Still, felt like getting kicked by a mule."
"Can you walk?" Amos looked down on him with a concerned frown.
"Yeah, I'll be fine," he pushed himself back on his feet. "Just don't expect me to do any heavy lifting today, sir,"he grunted.
"I'll try to think of it," he answered levelly. "Let's get moving again. Keep your eyes open," he turned around. "Buckley, you're with me. Keep your hands off, well, everything!"
They carefully made their way down the tunnel, flash-lights on and scanning for further mines. At the end of the concrete tube a makeshift blockade had been erected, but none of the guards were still alive.
Marak bowed down to pull one of the dead bodies over. A slug had gone right through the helmet's visor and ruined the face behind it, but the suit was blue with a well-known white crest.
"Blue Suns," he grunted.
"That'd explain the fresh debris fields we found in orbit. The Geth must have jumped them."
"This is getting better and better," Amos muttered wryly. "First the Geth, and now a boatload of mercs. Wonderful." He shook his head. "All right people, stay sharp. Everything we'll meet on our way down there'll most likely be hostile." Jogging back to the sunken bunker entrance, he activated his long-range comm. "Mercury Star, this is Kenyon. We've reached the outer perimeter of the target. There are Blue Sun troopers down here as well as Geth units."
"We've noticed that, Kenyon. We got company."