Notes: Ordinarily I wouldn't reference specific songs within the story itself, but parts of this chapter were screaming for a diagetic soundtrack. Listening to these songs could enhance your experience, though results may vary. You can find either of these on YouTube (I can't include links here, sorry!)
I Would Do Anything For Love (by Meat Loaf)
A Farewell to Grog (Traditional Naval Song)
11: Come Down Hard
Garrus
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
Not only was Shepard refusing to look at Garrus, she seemed to be avoiding the proximal volumetric space that surrounded him, as if the very air was guilty by association. The tense, strictly controlled expression on her face spoke of a woman who feared that allowing her eyes within ten meters of a naked body - even the memory of a naked body - might trigger an explosive hull breach.
Last night, after Garrus had experienced the most mind-melting mutual orgasm of his life, he had thought that all of his problems were over. Red had bathed him in stunning, radioactive affection. They had cooed and kissed and cuddled. Without a single reason to believe that she wouldn't still be glowing like a supernova come morning, Garrus had slept like the dead.
Blind faith in the bliss of sexual afterglow had been his first mistake. While Garrus had been naively drifting on a higher plane of consciousness - full of joy, empty of all earthly doubt - Red had disappeared all over again. Without a single clarifying word as to how they ought to proceed, she had silently retreated back to her fortress and been inaccessible ever since.
His second mistake had been trying to greet the Commander when she had dragged herself - ice cold and hard as a steel - into the conference room behind Kyrik's heels.
In response to Garrus' carefully neutralized, "Commander," Shepard had said nothing. Not one peep. Instead, her gaze had passed over him, phased clear through him, then never returned to his side of the room.
"Woah," said Williams, as she once again claimed the seat to Garrus' left. "How did you manage to get on the Commander's bad side before the first day?"
As far as omens went, that one made him especially nervous.
"Good question," he said, staring a bright-red bullseye into Shepard's stubbornly turned back and wishing the spin would stop rooming.
Alenko took the seat directly across from Garrus and gave him a polite nod. Moreau and Zorah trailed in last, heads bent together, giggling about some wondrous new feature of the Normandy.
Tee hee, she let me touch her drive core. Har har, I blue-shifted her IES system. La dee da, I fell into her mass effect pocket face-first.
They'd been at it all morning. Yesterday, Garrus might have joined in. Now, in the wake of Shepard's silent treatment, the twittering stream of bullshit and childish innuendos was enough to make his plates itch all over.
"Therum," Shepard announced loudly, commencing the meeting without the tiniest hint of her customary tact. The room went silent.
Zorah hadn't even finished sitting down. The quarian sank into the seat on Garrus' right with a startled squeak.
Even Kryik seemed momentarily surprised, but he also seemed eternally eager to get this mission on the ground. He didn't miss a beat, and called up a global terrain overview so that the two Spectres could run through the specifics.
"Therum is a remote mining installation, covered in nothing but boiling hot lava and a dozen looted Prothean ruins. According to my information broker, decades of pilfering opportunists have nearly picked the place clean to the bone, but somehow they overlooked the real prize."
He zoomed the map to the designated mission area: a narrow, winding canyon with a river of lava on one side and a wall of geth on the other - a death trap, in other words. Kryik pointed to a blinking location marker in the northwestern corner.
"There's something at the end of this passage that Saren wants very, very badly, and he's losing patience quick. He's got a whole geth platoon entrenched, trying to beat the door down into this mine. Luckily for us, there's some considerable firepower holding up the other side."
Shepard tapped the communications panel and summoned the hulking image of a scarred, ancient face, then explained:
"One of the Shadow Broker's best agents, a thousand-year-old krogan battlemaster named Urdnot Wrex. Apparently the archaeologist who hired him has deep pockets, because that's one hell of a personal bodyguard."
Nihlus picked up where she left off.
"Wrex has been fending off Saren's forces almost single-handed. He's protecting none other than Doctor Liara T'Soni: treasure hunter, information broker, and only child of Lady Benezia."
Another tap to the panel. The image of Wrex was replaced by a young, wide-eyed asari. The picture had been snapped at a considerable distance, as if the photographer had feared for their own safety. No wonder. Liara wore a dirtied researcher's uniform and was holding a Prothean artifact in one hand, a ball of biotic fire in the other.
Chief Williams leaned back in her chair and muttered, "The plot thickens."
Nihlus bowed his head and his mandibles quirked at Williams in resigned amusement.
"Just as you say. According to multiple sources, Liara and her mother had a falling out and haven't spoken in decades. Whatever the case, there's no conceivable scenario in which Benezia's daughter is down in that mine by accident."
Nihlus studied the image of Liara for a moment, and then added:
"Liara has excavated more Prothean artifacts than anyone living - and has sold most of those priceless treasures to the Shadow Broker. The doctor might be trying to save her mother, and then again, she might be in this for her own reasons. Until we know more, assume she's hostile."
Shepard sliced through the air with one hand and cut right to the point.
"We need her in our arsenal. Regardless of who she's working with or why, she knows something we don't, and we need to get to her before Saren does. That goes double for Wrex. Quadruple for Wrex."
Kryik turned to Shepard, looking a mite stunned by her forcefulness. After a moment's consideration, he reached over and patronizingly jostled her shoulder.
"This will be a touching reunion for you, Commander. After all, Urdnot Wrex is an old sweetheart of yours, isn't he? I heard you left that old krogan with two broken hearts back on Akuze."
Williams jumped in unexpectedly, and Garrus turned his head towards the Chief so suddenly that a nerve exploded along the side of neck in a burst of white-hot pain.
"Oh yeah?" Williams goaded. "I heard he was the one who broke up with her. "
"Excuse me, but you're both wrong." Alenko held up a demurring hand. "I was there, saw the whole affair with my own eyes. It was an amicable split, they both got half in the divorce."
Apparently even the quiet, polite Staff Lieutenant - by far the most clear-eyed and sober of any of these raving psychopaths - was in on this clusterfuck of a revelation.
Garrus could hardly breathe, never mind think straight.
It was a joke. Obviously, it was a joke. More goofy innuendos from a bunch of jumpy soldiers trying to distract themselves before dropping boots into a hot zone. Typical banter, the sort he usually revelled in.
Not this morning.
Ha ha ha, let's all laugh about that time Shepard broke both hearts of a rock-hard krogan battlemaster. A bloodthirsty warlord with skin thick as tanned leather and a millenia of life experience under his massive belt. If someone like Urdnot Wrex was capable of having a schoolboy crush on Shepard, even as a joke, what chance did the comparatively baby-faced Garrus Vakarian have of surviving this woman's terrifying allure?
None whatsoever. Sink with the ship or jump in the ocean. Either way, you were going down and dying slow.
Shepard, meanwhile, rolled her eyes and made a disgusted noise at her Marines, then brushed Kryik's hand away.
"Are you three quite finished? Also, are you all in some kind of Urdnot Wrex fan club that I didn't know about?"
Kryik laughed. It wasn't much, and it ended quickly, but he laughed all the same.
"Speaking of which, I have something for you. I know that flashy mercenary get-up Urdnot gave you was an important facet of your warrior pride. It was my fault it got trashed back on Eden Prime. So. Lieutenant Alenko was kind enough to aid me in finding a suitable replacement on short notice."
Without any further explanation, he nodded to Alenko.
"Major? Would you pass me the ceremonial apology, please?"
"You got it."
Alenko leaned over the curved guard rail and opened one of the small cargo compartments that was set flush into the wall. Grinning, he pulled out a impressive set of mirror-smooth, jet-black, Spectre-status ceramic armor. It was the good stuff: the rare stocks. Kassa Fabrication, by the look of it. Fully-specced. With red accents.
It was a kingly gift. Garrus ground his teeth together.
Lieutenant Alenko handed the bundle of armor to Shepard with a friendly nod of his head, then looked to Kryik and said:
"Gotta say Nihlus, wrapping it up with a bow was a nice touch."
Kryik jumped. "What? I didn't -"
"And this... lovely card," added Shepard in a dry voice, lifting it from the package. It was bright pink and plastered with holographic images of grotesquely infantilized terran animals. Shepard stared in offended awe, as if it were covered in elcor pornograpy.
The Commander read the contents aloud in a slow, flattened tone.
"Dear Shepard, sorry for your loss. I may not be able to replace your intestines, but I saw this terrifying suit of armor and thought of you. Hugs and kisses, Nihlus."
"Who -" Nihlus stuttered and peeked over Shepard's shoulder at the contents of the card. "Moreau! Damn it all!"
Moreau tipped his hat, smug as ever.
For a moment, Shepard was silent. Then she threw her head back and laughed, long and loud and throaty. A genuine, sensuous sound that Garrus had mistakenly believed belonged to him. Exclusively.
A wave of laughter roared across the room, clearing the air like a power-washer. Afterwards, the relief was so palpable there was a cute round of applause. Even Garrus clapped. Once.
"An extra ration of Nelson's Blood for Joker," Shepard said, gifting the pilot with a surprisingly warm look. "Two brimming nor-westers."
Moreau clenched his fist and eagerly whispered, "Yesss."
"Alright grunts, you've all had your giggles," Shepard muttered, setting the armor at her feet. "Now get back to work. This a stealth frigate, not a party bus."
"I've been given to understand that driving the party bus is your job, Shepard." Nihlus turned back to the map and called up a tactical overlay. The M35's projected route dotted through the canyon.
Oh great. Kryik was bantering now? Was Garrus going to have to watch his rapport with Shepard swell by the hour, full of expensive gifts and double-entendres and inevitable hand-holding?
Stop being such a mewling puer, Vakarian. The least you can do is sit up straight.
Garrus shook himself and tried to remember what it felt like to comport himself like a professional. He had known, once. Right? He considered all of the reprimands in Executor Pallin's office. The long, unbroken silences he had often shared with his father.
Nevermind.
Kryik was wrapping up, and getting excited, by the sound of things. Garrus forced himself to listen to the Spectre's giddy under-tones without putting his hands over his ears and screaming.
"Thanks to the terrain, there's only one way in or out of Liara's dig site, and it's covered in geth. Wrex and the Doctor are pinned down, about to be trapped forever under a pile of debris, unless we punch a hole through that blockade.
"Alenko and Vakarian - you'll be with Shepard. Zorah and Williams - once Shepard's team has paved the way, we'll lead the infiltration into the mine and extract the Doctor." Kryik looked to the quarian. "Zorah, I'm going to need every bit of intel you've squeezed out of that geth you picked up, and then some. Weaknesses, schematics. Every advantage you can give me."
"No problem sir," she said, nodding confidently.
"Any questions?" Shepard looked around the room, but the duties were clear. "Alright. Joker, get off your lazy ass before Butler steals your job. I need you to swoop in and drop the Mako right on top of their heads like an early Christmas present. Chestnuts roasting in my open fire. Once the geth are sufficiently startled, sneak around back and stuff the extraction team down the chimney.
"Mako Squad, I'll meet you belowdecks in five for the christening. Move out."
She chose to acknowledge Alenko only, and then they were all summarily dismissed when the Commander picked up her shiny new armor and marched herself out of the room.
Garrus turned to the Chief for an explanation.
Despite her habit of dipping into knee-jerk xenophobia, Williams was rapidly turning into Garrus' most reliable translator. He got the feeling that Williams reveled in the opportunity to outsmart a turian from C-Sec, but her ribbings had the familiar ring of an annoying little sister, not a bigot.
Williams took one look at the stranded dipshit expression on Garrus' face and leaned in with an evil gleam in her eye. Yeah, there was definitely an air of Solana about her.
"Christening a Mako with Shepard... that takes guts. Buckle up, Vakarian. Express elevator to hell, going down!"
Jane
Akuze
Valentine's Day, 2181 CE
The ground was a long way down.
Much like falling in love, there was a drop that could kill you.
Shepard had ample time to worry about the skeleton-splattering deadliness of that distance as the Mako idled ten stories above the crater floor, clutched in the belching gullet of a thresher maw. Shepard spun her wheels against wet meat and empty air, but it was useless. There was no purchase to be found.
Delirious and giddy with fear, she couldn't stop staring straight down at that drop. Hey, how about that? She could see Uncle Urdnot's house from here.
The krogan warlord's fortress might have been a lot friendlier looking if it hadn't been sitting directly on top of the mouth of hell. The mercenary outpost was now smack-dab in the middle of a rampaging thresher nest, having gone from 'habitable' to 'hell-hole' overnight.
A week ago, Shepard had been comfortably grounded, babysitting fifty deeply filthy colonial Marines, swerving a baker's dozen tanks across the rugged landscape of Akuze. Under cover of a remote M35 field driving course, they had been covertly pursuing a tip from Admiral Hackett, trying to find and neutralize "a mad-scientist superweapon."
Armed with little more than the vaguest estimates as to the location and scale of the threat, things had been tense. All they knew was that they were after a sizeable terrorist splinter cell that had named themselves Cerberus, as if calling dibs on the underworld. What a bunch of assholes.
A week into the search, she'd intercepted Clan Urdnot's distress call.
It was a sorry excuse for an S.O.S. - just a long, seemingly accidental broadcast bursting with imaginative profanities and the sound of an entire krogan mercenary company dying loudly in the background.
So - much - screaming.
Speaking of loud noises. The thresher maw that currently held Shepard's tank in its drooling jaws was through with waiting for its snack.
Inch by squealing inch, the tank crunched down around Shepard's ears, little more than a tin can in a suckling vice. There was a deafening roar of tearing metal, and then a massive glowing polka-dotted tongue crashed through the starboard hatchway. It flopped around with a ferocious slap-slap-slapping, like a great white shark leaping from the water to flail hungrily across a beach of screaming tourists.
Without even the courtesy of asking to be her Valentine, the thresher deepthroated the M35 and then spat out a throatful of acid.
It was no miracle that Shepard was spared: someone paid the reaper in her stead. Her gunnery officer - Private Sheb Wilhelm - took the whole hit of acid full on the chest. He blasted out a wild high-pitched scream before he bubbled, melted on his own bones, and died in tortured gore behind her, the sixth Alliance Marine to perish on Akuze under her command.
Engineer Apone drew unlucky number seven. He was pushed out the acid hole on the far side of the cabin and fell to his death in silent surprise before he even got a chance to turn his head and see what was coming.
As she suspected. Exactly like love, a fall like that could definitely kill you.
The thresher bellowed: a thousand quaking octaves of pure noise. Then, just as suddenly as it had rushed up from below, it abruptly let go of the tank, dropping Shepard ass-backwards into a skyrise worth of empty air.
She fell. And fell. And kept falling. There was no way to know when it would end - all she could see was the sky.
Shepard wasn't proud. As death rushed up to meet her like a bat out of hell, she clutched the steering column and tearfully remembered sleeping in her pari's arms… Then she breathed in deep and screamed her lungs bloody. If this was curtains, she was going to fucking announce herself all the way offstage.
The Mako and the ground reunited at terminal velocity, with a sound as loud as it was painful. Airbags deployed from every angle, scrambling her with enough force to break all the ribs on her left side. Just for kicks, her head slammed against the seat back in a sudden explosion of ugly stars, and then everything got real fuzzy.
Shepard was still screaming when someone wrenched open whatever was left of the starboard hatch and clamped their massive hand around her forearm with bruising force. Those brutal, groping fingers rattled her so violently that she stopped screaming entirely out of annoyance.
She turned and saw him. Urdnot Wrex. Huge, red, and lit from behind in glorious technicolor like a god of the sun. With her head in a fog, all she could do was stare.
Sweeping in to rescue the krogan band had been Shepard's call. Luckily, her Marines and Wrex's mercs had fallen in love at first sight, and after the initial raid cemented the marriage, nobody had questioned her orders. Wrex was especially infatuated with his rescuers, and he expressed his affection with blended gifts of heavy weapons and heavy drinking. The touch of intoxicating love in the air had only been enhanced by the looming proximity and subsequent arrival of Valentine's Day.
You haven't heard poetry until you've heard a krogan merc reciting a hand-written sonnet to the Alliance Marine who just pulled his ass out of the fire.
Shepard's ears were ringing - she was in a stupor. Wrex shook her again.
"Shepard! Stop gaping like a baby salarian and let go of the wheel! Is this what you call a rescue?"
Oh yeah. She was supposed to be rescuing him, not the other way around. Things had not gone according to plan. How had things gotten so backwards? Somewhere between the thresher maw's mouth and the ground, presumably.
The thresher maws just kept coming. There were dozens. Every five feet, they seemed to spring from the ground like man-eating dandelions, and there was no weeding them. Shepard's Marines had been forced to attack in shifts, pulling out a few more half-eaten krogan survivors with each crazy, desperate trip into the central compound. Taking turns to dart back to the few safe inches of perimeter, they ran like hell, slept in bursts, and drank themselves numb in between.
Now on day three of the assault, Shepard had been leading the very last wave. Then - whoops - everything had gone straight to shit when Wrex had run back into his fortress, drunkenly screaming that he'd forgotten his piece-of-shit family armor. She should have cut him off after that fifth mug of ryncol. But then again, how do you tell a thousand-year-old battlemaster that he was too deep in his cups? She could use a stiff drink herself right about now. Her whole body roiled with pain.
It felt... sort of… purple. A royal hue.
Wrex, for his part, was through with gentility. He reached into the cabin and slapped Shepard right across her stupefied face.
"SHEPARD! Wake up! It's time to get your pretty ass in gear! I don't remember giving my future queen permission to die!"
During one of those scanty breaks between raids, Shepard may have accidentally gotten blinding drunk on ryncol and promised to bear a krogan battlemaster twenty fruitful daughters. Or something.
The thought of being heavily pregnant with exterrestrial offspring was what finally brought her back to her senses. Her head snapped up and she looked outside. Oh god.
Half a dozen thresher maws were writhing in the distance beneath the unending hellfire of turrets, rockets, and mortar squads camped along the western perimeter. Tanks were scattered across the crater floor like discarded toys, most of them reduced to little more than smouldering clumps by concentrated bursts of acid.
Wow, it was loud out there. If she sat on her ass a moment longer, she would surely, surely die.
Undoing her harness as fast as she could, she checked for broken body parts - there were several, but none that mattered - and then she grabbed two fistfulls of rippling krogan neck and let Wrex yank her out of the tank like a bad tooth. Perfectly at ease amidst an exploding hellscape, with the sun setting behind him in a blinding flash of orange, Urdnot Wrex pulled Shepard from the still-steaming wreckage of an Alliance M35 and held her against his chest in a bridal carry. He was seven and half feet tall. Covered in mountainous scarlet plating and scarred even on his good side. Two hundred and fifty raging kilos of pure berserker muscle. Urdnot Wrex: a thousand years old and still not ready to die.
The two of them together made for one hell of a spectacle.
That is, until Shepard beat him firmly on the hump and forced him to set her down.
Every instinct in her body told her to run for the perimeter, but she knew her best chance of survival was to stay perfectly still until she could get her ass back into a functioning Mako. Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm... that had been the motto of the week.
She radioed her lieutenant.
"Alenko! Report!"
The voice on the other end was breathless but ready for anything.
"Commander! Glad to hear your voice. Perimeter squads are holding, but the tanks are getting ripped apart. Saw yours go up - said a prayer."
She skipped the reunion. Time for that later, over a mug of tasteless swill.
"Do you have the Cerberus intel?"
"Negative. Ferro's squad went dark right outside Urdnot HQ. They barely made it out the door."
Goddammit. Ferro, Drake, Spunkmeyer. Just like that: eight, nine, and ten.
Without the data that Engineer Ferro had mined from the Cerberus satellites, she had nothing solid to bring back to the Admiral. Just a fistful of thresher maws and a ten dead Marines.
"I'm still standing. I've got Wrex. We'll get that fucking data. Wait for my signal, then pull everyone back."
"Roger that, Commander." She heard him calling to the troops before the comm cut out. "Keep dancing, princesses! Move-move-MOVE!"
There were shouts, a few well-timed explosions, and then a tsunami of furious gunfire rang out in stereo surround across the canyon floor as the Marines continued to lure the thresher maws away from the base.
"That's more like it, Shepard. Let's show Kandros how to choke on a quad."
Despite Wrex's blustering, he and Shepard were doomed unless one of those tanks made a rapid detour to pick up some extra passengers. There was no survivable way to do this on foot. She whipped up her omni-tool and did a quick roll-call. Who was about to pull the short straw?
Private Hudson was the closest. Halle-fuckin-lujah.
Private William Hudson, whose first words to her had been: "Hey Shepard, have you ever been mistaken for a turian?"
"I don't know, Hudson. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?" had been her unenthusiastic reply.
She radioed him for pickup and then turned to Wrex.
"Private Hudson is on our nine and closing fast. Says the ultimate badass is about to take me for the ride of my life."
"Ultimate badass? He must be talking about me."
Wrex wrapped his arm around her waist and pumped the action on his shogun with a forceful, single-handed throw.
Hard to argue with that.
The Urdnot clan leader was magnificent. A rare krogan biotic leading a ragtag clan of social progressives, Wrex had been bunkered on Akuze for years. Said he'd been trying to trigger a krogan cultural renaissance - but Akuze was an obscure Terminus shithole of interest to few, and Wrex's conclave of misfits had attracted little interest. Still, he had secured himself a cozy little headquarters, a towering scrap heap where an old warlord could sit pretty on his massive hoard of weapons, credits, and loyal mercenaries. When a seemingly endless hive of thresher maws had ripped his world to bits, he'd barely blinked an eye.
She let Wrex hold her while they waited for Hudson, but only because she felt marginally safer with a krogan battlemaster girding his arm around her in the middle of the apocalypse. Really. It wasn't because she had a crush on him. That would have been ridiculous.
In comparison, Hudson was a measly posturing blowhard. Green and wobbly as a bowl of medbay gelatin. Exactly the type of touchy-feely, sludge-spewing, barrel-chested man-boy that Shepard's pari had caught her sneaking out to drink with on more than one occasion.
She'd always had a soft spot for any loudmouth with a heart of gold. Even so, unlike the harmless farm boys back home, she wouldn't have let Private Hudson anywhere near her own privates, not with a ten-foot pole.
Scratch that. Especially not with a ten-foot pole.
He was obsessed with two-hundred-year-old rock songs, not to mention naval shanties that stretched several centuries even further back into obscurity. While they'd been digging for Cerberus' trail, he had found a way to broadcast his own private radio channel into the internal sound system of every Mako along the caravan. How many torturous rounds of "Sink the Bismarck" and "Farewell to Grog" had she endured?
By the end of that first week, the Private had led enough enthusiastic rum-fueled sing-alongs for the entire platoon to know every word of Hudson's Choirbook by heart. To spare her own sanity she might have put a stop to his nonsense, but Hudson was to morale what a shot of tequila was to a margarita. Necessary.
Hudson's tank skidded to a noisy stop behind them, spewing rocks and dust ten feet into the air. The hatch opened and a wall of sound spilled out.
Oh great. Meat Loaf for dinner. Again. I Would Do Anything for Love, Hudson's choice anthem for hardcore romantics on this most auspicious holiday.
"Happy Valentine's Day, lovebirds! Your horse-drawn carriage has arrived!"
Shepard and Wrex dove into the tank. Hudson was driving solo. His squad had been obliterated early in the day, when numbers four and five had been called to Heaven.
Shepard manned Gunner Ripley's post at the turret, sliding her hips into the channel of the gunnery pillar, where Wrex's massive hump was too big to fit. The krogan was forced to sit in the bitch seat and do his best impression of the small-boned Engineer Newton.
Shepard had to shout at the top of her lungs to be heard over the music.
"I need this party bus to make one more stop, Private. Get me back to Urdot HQ - we can't leave without Ferro's Cerberus data!"
Hudson screamed right back at his usual volume: eleven.
"Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, Commander, but we just got our asses kicked! I would do anything for love, but I won't do tha-"
"Shut the hell up and drive me to Ferro's tank, Hudson."
To his credit, the Private shuffled his armor around his shoulders, smacked himself on the helmet for resolve, and then screamed:
"Aye-aye Ma'am! Next stop: the real pretty shit! Anything for love!"
The bulk of the threshers were busy trying to eat everyone on the western edge of the crater, but there was always the risk of a new one popping out from beneath with no warning.
It was the rumbling that gave it away. You could always feel the tremor first, as if the earth were sucking in a starving breath.
Speak of the devil. There it was now.
Hudson had felt it too.
"Ahhhhhhh shitttttt thar she blows..."
After watching his squad dissolve in a rain of acid, Hudson knew the risks better than anyone. Without delay or finesse, he slammed down the accelerator and raced to the mercenary compound, redlining at whatever level was beyond top speed. The Mako's wheels jumped and skittered over the terrain, barely making contact with the crater floor.
Shepard's teeth rattled in her skull to the beat of sex and drums and rock and roll, and she was instantly aware of all the injuries she'd sustained in that fall. The pain was enough to make her puke.
She clung to the handles of the turret's periscope and held back a scream. Instead of passing out, she sang at the top of her lungs - it was the only distraction insane enough to keep her on her feet.
"As long as the wheels are turning…"
They were within spitting distance of the compound. Hudson joined his voice with hers at a blistering pitch.
"As long as the fires are burning!"
Hudson pumped the boosters and skipped them like a rock over a lake, pushing the Mako well beyond the advisable heat tolerance, roaring forward as fast as the tank's six exhausted wheels could carry them.
They sang on, "As long as your prayers are coming true!"
Private Hudson clutched the wheel, shrieked like a little girl, and then screamed:
"YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!"
The thunderously sentimental chorus of the song burst out around them as the thresher maw surged from below, glancing against the port quarter. The impact popped the back of the tank like the tab on a beer can, and with a startled hiss of spinning wheels, the Mako flew forward and crashed into the flimsy wall of barricades surrounding the mercenary compound.
A hard landing, but not the worst she'd had today.
They had wiggle room around the base's perimeter: a scant circle of solid ground that the thresher couldn't slither beneath.
Safety was still a long way off. 'Spitting distance' was a measurable quantity out here, not just a catchy turn of phrase. One hundred meters. Two hundred, if you wanted to avoid getting acid splashed in your eyes by accident.
Ferro's tank was an arm's length away, upturned and smoking. On foot, totally unprotected with a thresher maw hovering nearby, that distance might as well have been interstellar.
Without waiting to be asked, Hudson kicked open the port hatch.
"ANYTHING FOR LOVE!"
Then he ran for it. He had a handful of seconds to get there and back. Ten, if an optimist was counting.
01 - 02 - 03
(Frost - Dietrich - Crowe)
Limbs flailing wildly, screaming the entire time, Hudson made it to the other Mako and ripped open the door in three seconds flat - a world record if she'd ever seen one.
04 - 05 - 06 - 07
(Ripley - Newton - Wilhelm - Apone)
He spent four seconds rummaging in the tank. The thresher maw had seen the Marine's crazy, pinwheeling approach, and now it turned its head in ravenous anticipation.
08 - 09 - 10
(Drake - Spunkmeyer - Ferro)
Hudson's hand emerged, data pad hoisted triumphantly. One second later, his head followed. The Valentine's hearts he'd painted all over his helmet flashed like perfect, pink targets. The thresher roared and lined up a flesh-eating loogie.
11
"Hudson!"
Shepard threw herself out of the hatch to rescue him before Wrex could do so much as close a contrary hand around her heels.
Hudson was halfway out of Ferro's tank, scrabbling for purchase along the chassis. The thresher was a lousy shot, and the main acid projectile missed by several feet. Even so, the splashback was deadly enough on its own.
Shepard got lucky. A footlong gash of acid slapped across her thigh guard. As she ran, she popped the seals and tore off the plating before the acid could reach skin. Hudson had been knocked to the ground, and he wasn't fast enough.
There was a six-inch hole bubbling through his abdominal guard, sizzling and steaming through layers of ceramic and underplating, and then...
The only advantage of a thresher acid burn was that it cauterized as it went, so you never saw much blood.
She locked her arms under Hudson's sweating, hairy pits and dragged him kicking and screaming back to his tank. She threw him to the floor behind the gunnery perch in a wailing pile of his own guts and pus, and then turned to Wrex.
"DRIVE!" she screamed.
Wrex, despite his age, experience, and superiority to Shepard in every conceivable sense, obeyed like a docile spouse. He clambered across to the driver's side, slid the seat all the way back with a crunch of gears, and then the Mako slammed into full reverse.
The wheels smoked beneath them as Shepard ripped the medkit from the wall and dosed Hudson with every last ounce of medi-gel she had left.
"What were you thinking?" Wrex shouted over his shoulder. "That whelp wasn't even worth the drag!"
Hudson wasn't dead yet, and he wanted everybody to know it. Between his endless pealing screams, he managed to spit out, "What the hell, man? I'm right here!"
Then, in defiance of all sense or reason, Hudson abruptly stopped screaming and started to read.
Until seeing it with her own eyes, she wouldn't have believed him capable. Ferro's datapad bounced crazily in front of his face, and his eyes were as round and cartoonish as the hearts on his helmet.
"Game over, man!"
"What?"
He pushed the datapad into her hands, and she saw. A Cerberus breeding facility built into a solid pillar of bedrock right beneath Wrex's outpost. There was the mad scientist superweapon in all of its apeshit maniacal glory. It had been directly underneath them the entire time.
She scanned Ferro's report, glanced at the schematics. The ring around the rosie was vulnerable - little more than sediment and worm holes - the thresher maws had been churning the dirt for days. The whole thing was ready to cave.
She let the Mako rattle around her head for a few seconds, and then made up her mind.
"Wrex, how about a little vengeance? Can't guarantee your hoard will survive, but I can promise you one hell of an avalanche."
The krogan looked at her, narrowed his eyes, and then barked out a giant, rocky laugh, like a boulder smashing down a mountainside.
"I knew there was a reason I liked you. Let's blow this place wide open."
"Alenko!"
"Ready!" The Lieutenant was on a hair-trigger.
"Pull everyone out. Prep every weapon we've got for one final, unified blow. I'm sending coordinates. Once I'm clear, hit them all at once, right where it hurts."
"Roger that, Commander. We'll bang on the drum all day."
The Mako stumbled over a pocket of soft earth, and Shepard's head hit the gunnery pillar with a hollow clap. An unfathomable shade of yellow sparkled in the back of her retinas.
Wrex was a lot of spectacular things, but a good driver was not one of them. Being three sheets to the wind was hardly improving matters. As he tried to shift without easing down the clutch, the Mako groaned and creaked, then let out a tortured squeal.
Despite his injuries, Hudson reached for the wheel and cried, "Ease up, man! You're killing my baby!"
Shepard's Marines were a lot closer to the perimeter line than she was, and unlike Wrex, they were professional drivers. As each tank pulled back over the edge with a ballerina's twirl, the threshers refocused their ire on the remaining targets. Soon, Hudson's tank was the only moving thing in the field. A ripe fruit dangling on the vine.
Their best chance was to make a suicide run for the nearest edge of the crater - the unguarded eastern periphery. Wrex was too busy focusing on the tantalizing firepower to the west - he was going in exactly the wrong direction.
One by one, the threshers vanished beneath the shifting sands. They were going to come up from underneath. God only knows how many at once.
They were never going to make it. Not with Wrex behind the wheel. With half a dozen thresher maws closing on their location, there was not a single second left to get the krogan out of her way.
She screamed "STAY ALIVE" in Hudson's face, and then she flew over the transmission box and landed directly between Wrex's enormous thighs, stealing the wheel right out of his hands.
In a flash of lunacy, Shepard reflected that this would be a difficult Valentine's day to beat: sitting on a krogan's lap to take a trip through the thresher maw tunnel of love.
The threshers raged up from all sides, one massive hoard surging in every direction at once. Hudson's unasked-for soundtrack made a roaring comeback in much the same way: with no warning and a torrential howl of noise. Sound so loud that it filled her pores and forced the fear right out of her.
She couldn't risk a look into the rear cabin, but she could hear the mass accelerator cannon firing, could feel it shuddering the wheel beneath her hands. Somehow, with his guts spilling out behind him in a sizzling pile, Hudson must have hauled himself up into the turret, and he'd queued up a tune to whistle while he worked.
Just as she had trained her Marines to waltz with their Makos like glittering princesses, so Shepard did now. The only way to successfully steer an M35 was not to drive - but to dance.
With that overpowered eezo core glowing under her hood, the tiniest flinch could send a Mako bucking like a wild bronco. Not much mass and plenty of juice meant the controls felt fidgety on a good day. Only with a lover's patient hands massaging those thrusters, all care and tact and precision, could you truly see the vehicle's combat potential. If you treated her like a lady, a Mako could float like butterfly and sting like a bee.
She tried to keep all of that in mind while the thresher maws heaved before her, a frenzy of tentacles so vast that their sheer bulk blocked out the sky.
The cannon overheated, and Hudson switched to the coaxial machine gun without pausing for breath. He tore Shepard an exit route through sheer grit and determination - stubborn, ceaseless, and screaming all the while.
Right before her very eyes, Hudson's machine-gun buzzsaw hacked down the thresher directly ahead, felling an undulating thirty-meter slab of living flesh like it was a dried out tree. Shepard pumped the thrusters and rode over the steaming corpse. The resulting thump-thump-thump of metal-meets-flesh was startlingly rough - her ass bounced against Wrex's lap in a way that the krogan was enjoying far too much for comfort.
No time to be a prude. She could see the solid ridge of the canyon just ahead.
One hundred meters.
The mako smoked with exertion as the damage readout flashed cherry red.
Fifty meters.
Burning fumes filled the cabin, a choking black steam of hot metal, torn belts, and eezo.
Twenty five meters.
POP-POP-POP
The thrusters barely had enough hydrogen to burn, and the Mako hopscotched drunkenly to the edge, barely catching her front wheels over the lip of the canyon.
"C'mon, beautiful! So… close!" Shepard grunted, slamming down the throttle and milking the dwindling fuel reserves for every last drop.
A rocky voice groaned directly in her ear: "You're telling me," and then Wrex thumped his fist against the dashboard with such a whomp of muscle that the Mako gave one final, sputtering hurrah.
Her engines flared to life and then immediately died, but it was exactly enough. The tank tipped to safety with an anti-climactic mewling sound, like a baby kitten landing in a basket.
Alenko must have had them locked in his sights. The moment Shepard's Mako was resting on solid ground, she heard him screaming over the comms:
"Marines! The Commander is clear! FIRE EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT!"
Shepard spun in place and craned her neck to look out the port hatch. The fireworks display was spectacular.
It started at the western edge of the canyon, where the Marines' concentrated firepower was dense enough to crush half a planet. The soft, sandy earth sucked itself down and away, transforming into a churning abyss, a grinding whirlpool of rock and stone. The thresher maws, despite their titanic size and strength, were sucked into the tumult like twigs. Howling and thrashing, they spit artful fountains of acid half a mile in the air, until in a single startling flume of earth, they vanished to the last.
A mile-wide crater of earth flushed itself down to hell like the universe's filthiest port-o-john, and then everything went dead silent.
Standing in the center of the bottomless pit was Clan Urdnot's base, gleaming like a solid-gold trophy in the sunset. Not only had her Marines just saved centuries of the krogan's collected loot, she had just turned Wrex's podunk mercenary outpost into an impenetrable fortress.
Behind her, Wrex let out a gasp that could only be described as sated.
His gratitude was obvious. She could feel it jabbing into the small of her back, and her eyes went wide. Equally difficult not to hear the groan of unmistakable full-throated arousal that he unleashed right in her ear.
"Hey Shepard, was it good for you?"
She allowed herself a single, disbelieving laugh before careening back to reality.
All the pain rushed back at once, an instantaneous gutpunch of broken bones and acid burns. Ripping Wrex's hands away, she turned abruptly from the krogan's lap and flopped in battered agony towards the rear cabin. If she'd had the luxury of succumbing to her wounds, she might have blacked out.
Instead, she yelled an incomprehensible mish-mash of turian curses and scrambled over the transmission, dragging herself back towards the aft gunnery perch, where she saw Private Hudson slumped within the pillar, twitching and quiet.
When she approached and gently pulled him off the turret, he reached for her and flapped his lips noiselessly. She eased him down into her lap and wrapped a comforting arm around his shoulders to see him off.
Despite her noblest intentions, she couldn't stop herself from giving him an angry shake.
"Goddammit Private! I ordered you to stay alive!"
The phrase I would do anything for love - mouthed in silence by a dying asshole - was the loudest sound she'd ever heard. Private Hudson, perpetual eleven. She let him put his hand in her hair and drag her down to hear the rest.
"…but I won't do that."
Jane
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
Thank goodness for small favors.
Nihlus' gift of a new set of armor had afforded Shepard the perfect excuse to walk into the cargo bay fully suited up with her helmet already locked and ready, with nothing but a wall of black glass where her face should have been. Unfortunately, donning that inscrutable disguise had also forced her into the startling realization that she and the turian Spectre had traded places overnight.
All quips and good humor at this morning's meeting, Nihlus seemed to be warming to the crew like a summer dawn spreading its fingers down a frosty hillside. Meanwhile, Shepard had done little more than stew in her own guilt, at risk of capsizing morale on the most important mission she'd ever faced.
If only she and Alenko had gotten this laugh-a-minute memorial service out of the way back at Arcturus, when the Normandy had still been in dry dock. Christening the Mako in a combat zone with lives on the line was already a bad idea. Adding Garrus to the jumble of conflicting interests, after she and the ex-detective had spent last night breaking in the M35 the old fashioned way…
Nevermind reaching a new low, Shepard was spelunking a hitherto unknown sub-terranean cavern of unprofessional behavior. Ever since Torfan, she had scarcely allowed herself to dabble in friendships across lines of rank. Romance? That was a cardinal sin.
And it was romance that she was at risk of committing. There was no mistaking the foul aroma of tenderness and affection in the air whenever she so much as glanced in Garrus' direction.
He smelled like bellari? Seriously? She couldn't have engineered a more dangerously sentimental crossing of wires if she'd hunted through a stack of romance novels. If she'd written out a love poem on one of Joker's cutesy animal-splattered greeting cards, it still would have had more subtly than that.
No amount of perspective shifting, over-thinking, or flat out ignoring the situation would change it: she had feelings for Garrus Vakarian.
Goddammit. She'd always known that a weakness for tender-hearted loudmouths would get her into trouble one day.
Growling all the way into her seat, Shepard installed herself behind the wheel of the Mako and stared into the viewport, catching a glimpse of her own faceless reflection. Joker had gotten his joke dead-on target: this armor was terrifying.
"Ready, Commander?"
Alenko was as unflappable as ever. He sat to her right, spreading his hands across the engineer's console and telegraphing his hallmark expression: cool, calm, and ready for crazy.
Alright. Fine. There was no getting out of this superstitious ritual. She opened her fist to reveal the dog tags. They glinted against the deep black fabric of her glove, stamped with the standard military biography, which she read aloud:
"HUDSON, WILLIAM
895-42-0997
B POSITIVE
PARTY HARD"
How the Private had managed to sneak party hard into the religious preference slot was anybody's guess, but it made for quite the inspiring pep talk when read after his blood type.
After a moment of silence, Garrus spoke up from the rear, where he was poking his head out around the turret and wearing an expression of pure, factory-distilled bewilderment.
"Okay, enough with the evasive human mysticism. Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?"
Shepard swallowed an involuntary laugh like it was covered in razor-wire. To distract herself, she looped the necklace chain through a cargo strap in the ceiling. She remained silent and fisted her hand around Hudson's dog tags to shore up her resolve.
Alenko was more generous. He explained, "A customary tribute to a fallen comrade. Always gotta break in an M35 with operation Party Hard, or it's ten years bad luck."
Operation Party Hard was one way to honor Hudson, sure. To be perfectly honest, the Private probably would have liked the previous evening's method of christening the tank a far sight better. Hell, if the Private had still been around to give her shit, he probably would have baked her a bright blue cake shaped like Garrus Vakarian's flawless dick and piped out, "Congratulations on your new CuttleBONE" in curleque icing.
Joker chimed in, his perpetually blithe voice breaking across Shepard's brand-new suit comm. The sound crackled in her ears, fizzy and effervescent.
"Commander, I've got a squad of geth right below you. Tali's specs show rocket troopers and armatures. Nothing you can't handle."
"Bring us right on top of them, but stay high. Keep your altitude out of their firing range, I don't want any scratches on Normandy's paint job. We can handle the slam. Running drop check now."
She turned the engine over. As Joker hovered the ship into position, the loading ramp began its timely descent. She taxied the Mako to the loading platform and indulged herself one long, bracing inhale.
Alenko put his hand over his heart, and then in a sweet, clear voice, he led the choir with ringing enthusiasm:
Bill's happy days will soon be gone
To return again, oh never!
For they've raised his pay five cents a day
But stopped his grog forever
Shepard did her job. Though her voice was serrated, she joined Alenko on the refrain:
For tonight we'll merry be
For tonight we'll merry be
Oh for tonight we'll merry be
Tomorrow we'll be sober
She taxied the Mako further down the ramp and fired up the eezo core launch protocols. The chassis hummed with anticipatory energy while Alenko sang the second verse unaccompanied:
Yet memory oft' will backward turn
And dwell with fondness partial
On the days when gin was not a sin
Nor cocktails brought courts-martial
It was too ancient and reptilian a feeling to name, a deep, foolish wrenching of the vulnerable meat below her solar plexus. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't tamp it back down. Something feral possessed her to turn and look at Garrus.
His face was carefully emptied of emotion, and she could only imagine what he saw in the blank mask of her helmet. He stared into her for a long, hard second, and then whatever detective gears mechanized his brain spun fervently to life, and he seemed to understand.
She waved her hand at him, prompting him to add his voice to the sing-along.
For tonight we'll merry be
For tonight we'll merry be
Oh for tonight we'll merry be
Tomorrow we'll be sober
When it was finally over, she said, "Not bad, Vakarian. You catch on quick," and then turned back to the console, hoping her suit mic wasn't broadcasting the thundering obviousness of her heartbeat.
Alenko readied Hudson's Choirbook, cranking the volume to eleven.
Shepard took one last breath, clenched the wheel with both hands creaking, and announced:
"Commencing Operation Party Hard in 3 - 2 - 1 -"
Music blasting, guns blazing, Shepard slammed the throttle forward and dropped the Mako into a quarter mile of open sky, knowing full well that love was a fall that could kill.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
- Patrem/Pari: Father/dad
- Puer/Pueri (plural): Child
Yes. That Hudson, from Aliens. The entire Akuze flashback sequence was brought to you by the letters F & U, the number 69, and blockbuster action films of the 1980's. That scene has a fucking Wilhelm scream in it.