Mass Effect 2: Interstitial Spaces
By: bsmart
Disclaimer: Rated R (or M depending on the site) for the good stuff, you've been warned. Currently its cursing and violence, we'll see where it goes from there. Mass Effect is owned by whoever owns Mass Effect.
OVO
Chapter 8: Lunch Date
OVO
Alyssa flopped back onto the bed in her cabin on the Normandy. Getting run over by a Krogan wasn't something you just walked off and some parts of her just plain hurt. It was a good hurt though, one she savored. Not the agony and pain inflicted on her in some Frankenstein-esque science experiment she had no control over but the dull ache of an injury she'd taken honestly, due to her own actions. Stupid, stupid actions though they were. As she stared up at the stars something one of her drill instructors had told her kept echoing in her mind, 'If it hurts that means you're still alive.'
'Still alive.' Alyssa snorted. If Cerberus was to be believed she'd been dead for two years. Considering that being starved of oxygen for four minutes or so led to brain death and she'd followed up suffocation with reentry she wasn't seeing how she could have been brought back to life. Obviously Cerberus was lying, she just wasn't sure why Joker was as well.
Alyssa sat up and walked towards her office, getting moving to do something rather than dwelling on a bunch of counter-productive thoughts she had no answers to at the moment. She picked up a few pieces of armor she'd laid on her desk to dry and set them aside.
After welcoming Mordin to the ship and sending him off with the bubbly Yeoman to get situated in his lab Alyssa had gone to the armory to try and clean what must have been two liters of krogan blood off her armor. Whatever coating had been put on it to keep it easy to clean obviously wasn't rated for the blood of a two legged space dinosaur because even a vigorous scrubbing had left a sticky smear of red across her chest plate. She'd finally fallen back on dunking the entire piece in a chemical and enzyme slurry usually reserved for stripping carbonized rifle components and even that hadn't done the trick. While most of the gunk was off it the chest plate still looked stained. At least the mimetic coating on it would cover up the staining when it activated.
Jacob had offered to do the cleaning for her but her snarling dismissal of his offer to let a "Cerberus goon handle my armor," had sent him off looking like a whipped puppy. So she'd cleaned it and was letting it air dry in her room, too paranoid to leave it where someone could mess with it. Their working relationship was off to a wonderful start.
Putting all that aside Alyssa turned to her terminal and activated it. She didn't really know where to start. She knew what her goal was, to find Liara, but she didn't know how to go about it. She doubted that Tali knew where Liara was but she opened up her e-mail and sent her a message asking anyways. She doubted that Timmy really didn't know where Liara was but she knew he wasn't going to tell her. She'd tried to look up some of her old crew but she ran into nothing but dead ends. She left messages with their individual consulates on the Citadel but that assumed they'd ever bother to check those consulates. Things were much easier when if she wanted to talk to them all she had to do was go down to the cargo bay.
She checked her own account with the Earth consulate but every search filter she could think of didn't tease out a message for her from Liara. She settled for downloading the entire pile of thousands of messages to sort through later and slumped back in her desk chair again.
The possibility existed the ship's computer was programmed to prevent her from finding anything useful and there wasn't anything she could do about that, at the moment. She pushed back from the desk and stared around her cabin. Her Cerberus cabin. On a Cerberus ship. On a Cerberus errand. Deep in the Terminus. Cut off from her friends. Cut off from her support. What hell was she doing here? Was this even her body?
Alyssa rubbed her temples and tried to focus. What the hell was she supposed to do? She had no clue where the Collectors were going to be next and until she got a lead from the Professor or from Timmy she had no way to attack them. The only thing she could do was...
…exactly what she was doing.
The urge to break something was overwhelming. "Yeoman Chambers?"
"Yes commander?" the young woman's chipper voice answered from the comms.
"Where did the exercise equipment we picked up at the Citadel get put?"
"The cargo bay ma'am, we set an area aside."
"Thank you yeoman."
"Whatever you need ma'am."
Maybe she could do one thing. She stripped off her duty blues and changed into an exercise tank-top and shorts before getting into the turbolift and heading for the cargo bay. The equipment was there, not really set up in any logical order but it was there. She'd worry about setting things up properly later. Right now she just needed to work some frustrations out.
OVO
"She's in the cargo bay right now."
"And what do you want me to do about it?"
Kelly rolled her eyes. "I want you to go down there and help her."
Jacob crossed his arms. "You're kidding me right? She could barely keep herself from shooting me when we had vorcha crawling all over us. If I go down there while she's trying to relax I don't think she'll be able to keep herself from twisting my damn head off."
"She's not really in a condition to be twisting anyone's head off right now," Kelly assured him.
"She bum rushed a Ymir and killed it with a grenade she shoved down it's neck. She did that while coming down off of enough narcotics to level a krogan."
"Jacob, please. She needs help and we need her. It has to start somewhere."
"You're gonna get me killed Chambers."
"Trust me on this, I know her."
"I bet she likes redheads."
"Just go workout with her."
OVO
Alyssa slowly let the stack of weights down. Her arms were trembling as she fought to hook the bar into the spurs on the rack and not let it fall right onto her neck. She pushed up, as hard as she could but it was a losing fight until a pair of dark skinned hands joined hers and helped set the bar back in place.
"It's not a good idea to lift free weights solo. Be a damned fool way to die."
Alyssa snorted, "Thanks," as she sat up.
"Forty kilos?" Jacob asked. He was wearing a pair of loose silver workout shorts and a similar colored tank top.
"Yeah," Alyssa grudgingly admitted.
"That's impressive for someone who hasn't been off a bed in two years," he said as he set up a pair of dumbbells with nearly as much weight on each as she was just bench pressing in total.
"I used to bench almost three times that."
"No doubt," Jacob said as he started to curl the heavy weights.
Alyssa sat down at the butterfly machine and after adjusting it got back to work. She tried to ignore Jacob and just focus on her workout. Still, Jacob's presence was an aggravation that just wouldn't go away. She had been dealing with being able to work with less than half the weights she had used to before whatever had happened to her. Only now she was doing it with an audience. Yeah, maybe it was impressive for someone to still be as fit as she was after two years on a table but it didn't make the embarrassment any easier to deal with.
They both kept working their ways through the machines arrayed in the bay until Alyssa was sitting down and getting ready to start doing curls with an embarrassing fifteen kilograms on each of them. She only managed to do two reps before Jacob was kneeling beside the bench. "You need to tuck your arm in a bit more. You're going to wind up putting too much strain on your elbow and twist something." Jacob reached out and guided her arm in closer to her body, lining up her joints. "Feel better?"
"Yeah, it does," she was forced to admit.
"Gotta be careful with free weights, too easy to do it wrong and do more damage than good."
"It's been a while," she had to admit. "Muscle memory is gone"
"Yeah, gotta be rough waking up like that."
Alyssa quietly chuckled. "Ya'll would know."
The exact meaning of her quip was lost on Jacob. "I saw you when they brought you in. The fact you're mobile is incredible."
"Yeah well, mobile ain't gonna cut it."
"True enough," Jacob said and the silence returned, but different. It wasn't as uncomfortable, still uncomfortable, but not as much and twenty minutes later, drenched in sweat, Alyssa headed back up to her cabin and it's shower.
OVO
"This is where Archangel is supposed to be?" Alyssa asked as she looked over the barricade's built around one particular building, a rather upscale, for Omega, apartment building. At least it had once been upscale. Now the gleaming white facade was marred by the impact of hundreds of rifle rounds, explosives, and the soot of fires, some still burning.
"According to Aria's sources... yeah," Jacob said.
"Sure, why not," Alyssa groaned.
Miranda looked about, "All three of Omega's merc groups are here. Eclipse, Blue Suns, Blood Pack, they're all here and all want him dead."
"Hey! You! Get lost!" a batarian Blue Suns merc yelled at them as he stalked up the stairs towards their perch. He looked them over and paused. "Wait, are you the new recruits?"
"Yeah, that's us," Alyssa said quickly.
"We'll you're not gonna get paid standing there nugget! Get moving."
"Sure, sure thing," Alyssa said in reply, walking slowly past the batarian. The alien looked them over and started to raise his hand when they didn't hustle but Alyssa walked past without paying him any mind.
The trio made their way through the throngs of mercenaries moving back and forth and inspite of the chaos she could sense the ebb and flow of a military operation in the offing. Surprisingly disorganized, inept, and amateurish, but preparations nonetheless. "Merc's," she groaned as they got closer and closer to the barricades around the building. Off to the left she saw a small aircar lot that had been cleared out and was being used for a gunship landing pad complete with a gunship that had its port engine open and had half a dozen people working on it all taking orders from a batarian. A nearby garage had a few dozen mechs in it.
The batarian dismissed his assistants for something and Alyssa glanced at Miranda, jerking her head towards the mechs. Miranda nodded slowly and took Jacob with her as Alyssa checked for anyone paying too much attention to her before disappearing behind the gunship. The batarian had his head buried in the engine as Alyssa approached.
"Yang?" the batarian asked. "Yang? Do something useful and give me that welder! If I don't get this gunship's barriers up and running Tarrak will have my ass."
Alyssa picked up the welder, a small forked device and hefted it, starting to smile as she did so. "Relax," she said happily as she slapped the batarian on the back. "You're working too hard."
The batarian's head popped out of the hatch he'd been leaning over into. "Wait, you're not Yang."
Alyssa smiled, "Nope," and shoved the fifteen centimeter tines of the welder through a thin, flexible portion of his armor and between his ribs before flicking it on. Thousands of volts and hundreds of amps sizzled through the batarian making his entire body go rigid for an instant before his body vibrated as he lost control of it, trying to scream but finding his lungs and mouth out of his control. She grabbed his load bearing harness on his armor and kept him from collapsing, instead dragging him behind a series of cargo crates as blood began to pour from his nose and his twitching body began to spasm less and less before he went still. A quick scanned confirmed he was dead before she flipped off the welder and went back to button up the engine of the gunship. She moved away quickly as Miranda and Jacob appeared out of the garage and joined up with her.
They followed the stream of new recruits headed towards the barricades and presumably Archangel.
"Why are they recruiting all these newbies?" Miranda asked.
"Cannon fodder."
"For one man," Jacob asked.
"If he's gonna be on the team he'd better be that good," Alyssa confirmed.
They followed the mass until they got to the barricades and fell in as a turian in Blue Suns armor. "The plan is simple newbies!" he yelled. "You push the bridge. We'll support you with the gunship and the Eclipse mechs while the Blood Pack pushes from behind. If you're smart you'll move fast. If you're not, you don't get paid."
OVO
Alyssa had been careful to stay low on the run across the footbridge to the apartment. She kept at least one of the mercs between her Archangel and to her surprise no one seemed to notice or care. Miranda and Jacob followed her lead but the other mercs showed their own inexperience by staying upright, walking, firing like they were really trying to hit something. They blissfully wandered through the killing zone letting Archangel weed them out. Even with the cover fire the professional mercs were giving them the newbies were making it so easy on the sniper he was having no issue at all picking them off one at a time, or two at a time in the case of one rather impressive shot.
And yet for as good as he was he wasn't making a real effort to hit Alyssa, Miranda, or Jacob. The newbies and wannabes were falling left and right yet the closest he ever came to them was winging her barriers with a shot that depleted them a bit, but did no lasting damage. He'd managed to hold off three big mercenary groups for days, this wasn't the type of guy who missed very often. Something was up.
What that was would have to wait though as they got closer to the front of the small apartment complex and the moment their real allegiance showing itself approached. A few of them mercs ahead of them had made it to the cover of the complex and Alyssa could see a bomb laying off to one side with a number of dead mercs. The new arrivals were spreading out while another from before tried to get the bomb working.
"Light'em up!" Alyssa barked as she centered the crosshairs over the upper chest of the merc working on the bomb and pulled the trigger on her rifle. The big borderline antique boomed loudly and the merc's cheap surplus barriers collapsed the moment the first rice grain sized bit of metal slammed into them. The first round was slowed by taking down the barriers but the second wasn't and the lightweight ceramic plate guarding the man's chest shattered under the impact as the rounds tore into him and cast blood, bone, and ruined bits or armor all over the bomb he had been crouched over. She shifted targets and ended another merc's life as Miranda and Jacob took care of dispatching their own targets. "Clear."
"Clear," both Cerberus operatives echoed.
"Let's get in there, we need to extract before they realize what's going on."
The foyer of the apartment building had been decorated by Sir Isaac Netwon as bits of mercs that had made it this far were littered all over the place. Blood streaks laced the floor, all pointing back towards a corner of the building where Archangel had taken to dumping their mortal remains. The lifts were out of order, as evidenced by the doors that had been blown outwards by some explosives so they opted for the stairs, taking them two at a time until they reached the third floor where Archangel was supposed to be.
Alyssa returned her rifle to her back and drew her submachine guns because of the tight quarters as they worked their way down the halls until the found the door at the end standing wide open. Inside was a large family room with a window, or the remains of a window frame looking out over the bridge that connected this apartment to the rest of Omega and standing at that window was a single turian in bright blue armor.
The turian took a shot at someone below before beginning to turn towards them. "You must be getting slow in your old age, two years ago I never would have even been able to hit you the first time," a familiar gravelly voice said as the turian pulled his helmet off.
"Garrus!" Alyssa yelled as she holstered her weapons and grabbed the turian in a bear hug. "You're Archangel?"
Garrus coughed, "That's the name they gave me but uh, it's just Garrus with us Shepard. Where have you been?"
"It's complicated," Alyssa said.
Garrus' eyes wandered over Miranda and Jacob. "I can see."
"So how did you get your ass hanging out this far?"
"Well you kill enough of their men and blow up enough of their stuff and even mercenaries will eventually take notice."
"How'd you get cornered in here?"
Garrus glanced back further into the apartment and Alyssa saw a row of bodies covered in sheets. "Someone sold us out."
"Damn," Alyssa sighed.
"He took off and left us here. They surrounded us and started attacking before we even knew what was going on. Most of my team died without even getting a shot off but the survivors and I drove them off. Didn't matter. We were surrounded and most of the survivors had been wounded. They've been whittling us down ever since. It's just been me for the last few days trying to send a few more of these bastards to their respective afterlives before they got me."
"Well the cavalry is here, so let's bug out," Alyssa said.
"Maybe you missed the part where they have us surrounded," Garrus drawled, "but it's kind of important."
"I didn't miss it, I just don't care," Alyssa said with a smirk.
"Well, at least the attitude's the same."
"What's the situation, beyond the obvious?"
"Well I assume since you came through with the cannon fodder you're familiar with who's on the other side. Blue Suns and Eclipse have been handling bottling me up topside. The Blood Pack is moving through the lower levels. I've barricaded them down there and added a few of my own surprises. It's slowed the Blood Pack down but the main body's of the merc groups have been holding back for the last day or so."
"Probably hoping the bomb we ran into down stairs would take care of the job."
Garrus chuckled, "Getting that over here cost them a lot of men," he reached into one of the many pouches that adorned his armor, "and once they did I took the liberty of making sure it was pointless." He showed Alyssa a circuit board before tucking it away.
"Detonator?"
Garrus gave one emphatic nod. "Without it its as dangerous as Wrex was with a sniper rifle."
Alyssa glanced out the window and smirked. "Jacob, how far could you toss that bomb?"
"By hand, maybe a couple feet, with my biotics? Just tell me where you want it."
"Well then, I've got a plan," Alyssa said with a smirk.
"I think I was less nervous before you showed up and I was just facing certain death," Garrus deadpanned.
OVO
"Are you sure about this?" Miranda yelled as another line of automatic fire chewed away at the corner of the ferrocrete wall she was crouched behind.
"Eh, fifty fifty," Alyssa said as she snapped off a shot then ducked back down.
"What?!"
"I kid, I kid, sixty forty."
Miranda glared at her before leaning around the corner and rattling off a burst with her submachine gun.
"It all depends on how good their demolitions guy is. If he was an amateur he'd try to put in just enough to do the job. If he was a pro he wouldn't want to have to do it twice and would have just put in triple what he needed. Let's hope they didn't get cheap."
"Ready?" she asked over her comm channel.
Miranda and Jacob both confirmed they were before Garrus cut in. "You need to hurry it up. Eclipse managed to put down the last of your little presents and they've got a couple of Ymir's inbound."
"Then let's wait for them to show," Alyssa said as more chips of ferrocrete rained down around them. What the merc's cannon fodder lacked in accuracy they made up in enthusiasm. "I thought you sabotaged them?"
"We did," Miranda snapped. "But half of them had techs crawling all over them so it wasn't like we could walk up and start reprogramming them."
"What's happened to the galaxy when you can't even count on mercs to not have their shit together," Alyssa whined.
"We killed all the sloppy ones," Garrus said.
"Oops. Well no good deed goes unpunished."
"Somedays you almost sound like a turian."
"When you two are done kissing and making up perhaps you'd like to join us?" Miranda snarled as she grabbed one of the mercs on the wall and yanked his rifle away hard enough to drag him with it and over into the chasm beside the bridge.
"Fine Mom," Alyssa shot back as the mercs opened up the barricade, and three Ymir mechs came stomping through in their slow deliberate place. "Get ready."
"This mantis is purely anti-personnel Shepard, I can't do anything about heavy armor with it. This had better work."
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," Alyssa muttered. Whereas the assault rifles of the mercs had ground away at the ferrocrete of their cover the heavier guns of the Ymir's took big ragged chunks out of it. Using their mechs as cover Eclipse engineers were starting to pour out of the gate followed by Blue Suns troops as well. "Ready Jacob?"
"Whenever you are Shepard."
"Wait for it," she intoned. A meter down the wall one of the Ymir's shots blew a hole through the ferrocrete. One passed through the entrance to the apartments and blew a couch in two. The Eclipse engineers were crowding up around the Ymir's to keep out of Garrus' view as he picked them off with shocking speed and accuracy any time the exposed themselves but it was getting harder to do as more and more guns were turned on the building. "Do it!"
Jacob stepped out of cover with his hands glowing blue from his biotics. From behind him the bomb came around and he hurled it towards the advancing mercs with a strangled yell of exertion.
The Ymir's saw the incoming device and deduced it was hostile based off purely where it had come from but none of the three were fast enough to hit it. They were designed for heavy assault, not rapid precision shooting. Their heavy cannons barked anyways hoping they might get lucky but failing and letting the bioticly propelled canister smashing into the ferrocrete at their feet.
"Got ya," Garrus said confidently as he mashed down on the jury-rigged detonator.
The bomb exploded with enough force to knock everyone in sight of it flat on their asses. The lead Ymir simply disappeared in the bomb's flash, the few recognizable bits of it being hurled through the air along with the entire center span of the bridge which had been reduced to rubble, none larger than a wastebin. The remaining two Ymir's were hurled from either side of the bridge in several pieces surrounded with a halo of blue and gold bodies as the relatively unprotected sapients that had been crowded around them were reduced to shreds of armor and organic jelly.
The bridge itself bounced upwards from the force of the blast, the usually solid ferrocrete bowing upwards before coming back down. With no central support to divide the load both unsupported sides of the bridge kept on falling, crackling and ripping the ferrocrete foundations on either side and stretching the rebar reinforcement like so much pasta before it finally snapped.
Alyssa coughed and brushed off bits of bridge, Ymir, and mercenary as she clambered back to her feet. "Anyone dead?"
"Not for lack of trying," Jacob groaned.
"Alright, let's move. They won't stay stupid forever."
"You're clear," Garrus reported. "They're still picking themselves up after that."
"Good let's..." Alyssa started to say as a mechanical whine and the roar of exhaust jets abruptly filled the air.
"Damn you Archangel!" a voice boomed from the gunship's loudspeakers as it shot up into view. Alyssa dove for cover as it's autocannon ripped apart the front of the apartment complex. As powerful as the Ymir's cannon but firing a dozen times faster the column she found wouldn't last long and she followed Jacob and Miranda as the ran into the foyer. Stray shots reduced the furniture around them to splinters that bounced off their barriers but the gunner wasn't aiming, just spraying and hoping for hits.
They made it to the stairs and Alyssa pointed deeper into the building where the underground access was. "Hold here, I'll grab Garrus," she ordered. The walls were thick enough here that they would be protected from the gunship's wild firing. She hit the stairs and took them two and three at a time as she bounded up. "Garrus we're clear! Get out of there!" Alyssa ordered as she turned the corner to make it to the apartment where he'd hole'd up.
"Falling back," Garrus replied calmly. "I think we pissed him off."
Alyssa was five meters from the door to the apartment when it exploded outward, showering her in splinters. Her barriers absorbed the worst of it but she still felt one of the bits of metal from it dig into her neck as she was picked up and bodily thrown down the hall. Her shoulder collided with one of the decorative columns that lined the hall and she spun to the floor, dazed and her ears ringing.
She picked herself up off the floor and found her rifle nearby. As she staggered to her feet as she started to move towards the apartment whose doorway was now shrouded in smoke with flames starting to dance on anything flammable. "Garrus?" she called towards the apartment as she stumbled in. The apartment itself was in shambles, blown apart by what she assumed to be rocket fire. There was nothing recognizable of it left aside from a prone blue form.
"Shepard! What's going on! Answer me!" Miranda yelled at her over the comms but the whine of the gunship silenced any response that Alyssa would have had. She dove for cover behind what was left of a planter as the gunship returned.
"Not so big now!" boomed the voice from the gunship. It chuckled as it slowly paced along the front of the building. Alyssa worried it might decide to finish the job. Her barriers had recharged but they were designed to stop anti-personnel rounds, not anti-armor missiles. "If there's anything left of you come out and die with a little dignity," the same voice yelled but without the speaker back up. Alyssa risked leaning over to take a quick look and saw that a batarian in a Blue Suns uniform was at the gunship's troop compartment door with it open and him looking out. He was holding an assault rifle and a huge grin on his face as he surveyed the wreckage of the apartment.
Alyssa flicked a switch and deployed her rifle's bipod as she rose into a crouch. She dropped the bipod onto the lip at the far side of the planter through the ruined remains of the plants that had been in it and steadied it as she took aim. Her movement hadn't gone unnoticed but she knew where to aim before hand and the batarian didn't. He was still bringing his rifle up as her's was already spitting rice grain sized slivers of metal. Whatever barriers the gunship had left after her meddling faltered immediately and in the face of a medium machine gun's fire the batarian's did shortly after without him ever getting off a shot. His mangled, headless corpse was still tumbling over the side as she drug her point of aim up into the gunship's engines and pulverized them with her rifle. To his credit the pilot immediately pulled away from the source of the fire but as low as he was it was pointless. He lost all thrust to port and his reflexive slide to starboard ended as the engines on that side reversed the slide and slammed the gunship into the side of the apartment complex near street level before it tumbled down into the chasm, burning and mangled beyond recognition.
"Shepard!" Miranda screamed.
"Get up here, that gunship rocketed the apartment, Garrus is down!"
Alyssa scrambled towards Garrus on her hands and knees, slipping and sliding on the layer of broken glass and pulverized apartment that littered the floor. She skidded to a halt at his side and it took all she had not to freeze at the sight of him. His armor had taken the brunt of the impact but the right side was peppered with debris and shrapnel. The color of the armor on that side had been sliced open and peeled back and whatever had done that had not been satisfied with the armor, going on to peel back a portion of his face. Thick blood was spurting forth from wounds on his neck.
She scrambled for her own medkit, pulling out medi-gel patches and other battlefield medicines before recoiling when she remembered his body chemistry. "Shit!"
Miranda gasped as she got close. "He's still alive?"
"Not for long. I don't have a dextro med-kit," she growled as she grabbed him by the side and rolled him over. "Check him, he has to have one on him."
Miranda reached behind him, hunting through some of the many pouches that adorned his armor before shouting, "Got it!" She flipped the pouch onto his chest, unrolling it.
Alyssa snatched a simple compression bandage from her own medkit and used it to mop the blood off the side of his face before peeling off the backing of one of Garrus' medi-gel patches, which had emblazoned on it in big letters, "Dextro-Amino Acid Users ONLY," and used it to cover the bigger wounds on his neck. The little patch hissed as it dispensed it's witch's brew of chemicals.
Miranda was busy using another patch on the wounds on his shoulder as Alyssa returned to the med-kit pulling out several small ampules of medicine. "Fuck! They're all in turian!"
"Give'em to me," Miranda said not waiting for Alyssa to hand them over but just snatched them out of her hand. Her eyes darted over the labels before tossing two of them back onto Garrus' chest before taking the other three and finding a small hatch on the upper chest of his armor. She popped it open and in quick succession jammed the ampules into a small receptacle hidden beneath it. "Whole body injection system. Turians are anal-retentive about everything."
"Whatever you two are doing you need to hurry it up!" Jacob yelled. "Whatever the turian did in the tunnels the Blood Pack are getting through it. We don't have much longer."
"We gotta move him," Alyssa said.
"Agreed," Miranda replied. "But it's gotta be you. Mine and Jacob's skinsuits don't have the kind of augmentations your armor does."
"That's why you don't wear a catsuit to a gunfight," Alyssa griped.
"Too late!" Jacob called from below. "Tunnels are crawling with Vorcha."
"Get down there and help him hold them off," Alyssa ordered. "I'll stash him and come help in a second."
Miranda looked back and forth between the prone turian and Alyssa before nodding and jogging off. Through the comms she heard Miranda contact the Normandy. "Normandy, ground team. Archangel is down. We're cut off and need extract. We need a doctor with turian meds ASAP."
"Understood," EDI replied.
Alyssa grabbed the collar of Garrus' armor and hauled him up onto her shoulders. Her armor's servo's took much of the weight but it was still taxing to pick up the turian and his considerable armor. "What's going on down there?"
"We've got vorcha boiling up out of the underground," Jacob reported. "There might have been a way out before but there isn't now. We've shut the last set of doors leading in here but they've got explosives and they aren't afraid to use them."
She picked her way down the stairs, all too aware of the completely dead weight of Garrus on her back. She reached the ground level and saw Miranda and Jacob covering the main door that led down into the sewers and she headed for the wrecked front of the building, depositing Garrus off to one side, hidden between some walls and furniture. She was just turning around when the door Jacob and Miranda were guarding exploded inward.
"Find him! I want his head!" a voice bellowed from down the corridor as a swarm of vorcha came piling through the ragged hole the explosives had left before the dust and debris even settled. Scrambling like wild animals the vorcha came until Jacob's biotics grabbed much of the debris in the ruined doorway and hurled it back at them, pelting them with a shotgun blast of ruined ferrocrete.
Jacob and Miranda started to fire into the mass of onrushing vorcha but the aliens didn't care. They just crawled over the dead or dying bodies of their comrades in a single minded rush to get to them. Jacob and Miranda's biotics had some effect but the shear number of vorcha was already threatening to overrun them as Alyssa dropped to a crouch behind another heavy planter. She flicked one of the controls on her trigger group and her rifle's bipod deployed. A relic from it's past as a squad level support weapon she'd never removed the bipod specifically because of situations like this. With the rifle braced on the planter she laid her crosshairs over the entrance to the door and let fly, three and five round bursts carefully timed to fill the opening with mass driver rounds and make it impossible to get through. Impossible if the people being suppressed cared about casualties.
Vorcha don't.
Alyssa, Miranda, and Jacob all kept firing into the opening but the vorcha were pushing it. Each one would gain another half meter before being cut down. The only real saving grace was that each body went towards clogging the door. "Get in there and get him!" the voice bellowed again as another wave of attackers was cut down. Alyssa smiled evilly as the next wave of vorcha got hung upon each other as they tried to push through and one went down as the body of one of its comrades rolled over and caught it's foot, twisting it to the ground. He was trying to get up when Alyssa sent most of a burst into his skull. She frowned, two rounds out of five hitting his head at barely fifteen meters was way off where she should have been.
She had no time to ponder her "horrifying" inaccuracy as a boiling wall of flame erupted through the doorway. The churning gout of fire mushroomed out and filled every void in front of it sending Miranda and Jacob running out of the way with flames licking at their heels. Through the waves of heat starting to fill the room Alyssa could make out the shape of a Vorcha with a large tank on it's back picking it's way through the bodies. She snatched a grenade from her belt and thumbed the activator but held it, counting off three in her head before hurling it towards the body clogged doorway and ducking behind the planter.
The grenade's detonation shook the apartment block but there was no secondary. When she peeked over ferrocrete planter the flames were gone, a bloodied and pulped vorcha was laying in the doorway with the tank on his back hissing and sputtering where it had been perforated by shrapnel. Thick smoke and ferrocrete dust filled the portal but behind it more vorcha were sprawled where the grenade had laid them out. A smile was starting to grace her face when a huge dark form started to charge through the smoke. "I'll do it myself!"
The krogan was huge even by the standards of his race. His armor was blood red and thick, covering his entire body and even portions of his neck and upper head. The Bloodpack symbol was emblazoned on his shoulders and he was hefting a large shotgun. Off his back were the beefy turrets of krogan biotic amps and over his craggy scarred face Alyssa could see the hazy purple glow of a biotic barrier.
"Archangel!" he bellowed. "Get out here and die already!"
"Miranda, fry him," Alyssa snapped. "Jacob, slow him down." She flipped the bipod closed and began to rise up to get his attention, intentionally bringing herself up into his line of sight.
"You're not..." the Krogan started to say but Alyssa didn't wait for him to talk, opening up on him with her rifle as soon as the crackling surge of Miranda's attack tried to overload his barriers and shields. Miranda's technological wizardry wasn't enough to drop his protections, one of the benefits of being a two legged dinosaur was that he could carry a much, much larger power supply than any human, but it did soften him up. As her rifle jackhammered against her shoulder she saw her shots clawing at his barriers and shields with some of them getting through to dig at the crimson armor over his body.
The Krogan roared and turned fully towards her, starting to charge her until Jacob grabbed a nearby couch and hurled it at him. The giant alien didn't get to his size by being slow though and he saw it coming, turing and smashing the piece of furniture in midair with his snub-nosed shotgun. "Where's Archangel?!" he roared as he fired a blast at Jacob but the human dodged out of the way as the shot splintered a bench behind him. Jacob and Miranda pelted his barriers with their submachine guns but Alyssa got his attention back on her.
"You're too late," Alyssa called. "He's already gone."
The Krogan snarled inarticulately as he dropped his shoulder and bull rushed her. Miranda shocked his barriers again and Jacob shoved a chair in his way but neither slowed him down. Alyssa's heavy rifle fire made his shields finally flicker and die but he was upon her, not bothering to fire his weapon but just bashing her rifle barrel aside with his shotgun before he brought his other fist around into her chest, punching her and sending her tumbling over a chair behind her. "Then you get to die first!"
Alyssa gasped as she struggled back to her feet. The krogan's punch had threatened to knock the wind out of her even through armor. She drew her shotgun and brought it up but the krogan was already on her. There was a glowing blade under his shotgun and he thrust it towards her face. She threw her gun in front of her and grimaced as the blade shoved through the metal and composite body of her weapon. Then he fired and sprayed her with bits of weapon and sent a burning lance of pain through her shoulder. He pushed again, trying to power through and spear her in the face but Jacob hit him in the side with a piece of debris and Alyssa twisted her own gun snatching the shotgun from the krogan's hands as he staggered from Jacob's hit. She frantically hunted for the grip and found it but at the same time the krogan found her and with one hand lifted her by the collar of her armor into the air between himself and Jacob and Miranda. Alyssa gasped as something on her shoulder exploded, sending more pain lancing through her arm and showering her face with bits of armor shell and ceramics. "Damn humans!" he snarled as he drew back his other hand into a fist getting read to dispatch her but Alyssa acted fast, whipping the shotgun around into his face and pulling the trigger and mashing every button she could hit.
"Ughaaaaaahhhhh!" the Krogan roared as the shotgun boomed centimeters from his face and the glowing blade flash formed into his lower jaw. Thick blood and viscera splashed across Alyssa's face and the krogan dropped her, grasping at his ruined face with both hands. As she hit the floor her stolen shotgun spun out of her grasp and clattered across the floor.
"Shepard, get clear!" Miranda yelled at her.
Out of the corner of her eye Alyssa saw something wrapped in a biotic blue glow hurtling across the room and she pushed herself back looking for some cover but all she could see was an overturned coffee table. She dove behind it just as the body of the vorcha with the still hissing tank on his back hit the agonized krogan and a burst of Miranda's submachine gun detonated the flammable container.
Alyssa was tucking into a protective ball when the expanding fireball of the explosion and the resulting fragments started to bounce of the purple glowing wall of a biotic bubble around her. The explosion rattled the building and bits of debris bounced around for a few more moments before the bubble dissipated and Alyssa clambered back to her feet. She saw the residual glow around Miranda's hands as she and Jacob looked her over. "Thanks," Alyssa said.
"Of course," Miranda replied nonchalantly.
Alyssa glanced back at the blackened and scarred blast point where the krogan was now lying in several pieces. "I need to start packing a Cain," she muttered.
"EDI, what's the ETA on our extraction?" Miranda asked.
"Thirty seconds."
"Let's get Garrus and get out of here," Alyssa said as she went to retrieve her weapons. Her rifle was in relatively decent condition but her shotgun was a total loss, stabbed through with a omni-bayonet, blasted by the krogan's shotgun, and then scrambled by the fuel tank explosion. She dejectedly shoved the remains into a pouch on her hip as she caught a glimpse of the krogan's shotgun. It looked to have weathered the abuse better and she took it with her as she jogged over to where Garrus was laying with Miranda over him.
"He's stable," Miranda reported. She looked up at Alyssa, "And I suppose you are since you're moving."
Alyssa twisted her neck to look down at her shoulder and shrugged, instantly regretting it but trying not to show it.
"We'll get him in the shuttle," Jacob said as he lifted one side of Garrus' body and Miranda got on the other. Alyssa didn't argue with them instead drawing one of her submachine guns and holding it in her off hand, away from her wounded shoulder. The three of them stayed out of view, near the bridge entrance until one of the Normandy's shuttles swooped down and settled into a hover next to the ruined edge of the bridge. The side door whined as it swung open and one of the ship's crewmen urged them on as another took a door gun on the other side and started to pepper the mostly empty barrier on the other side of the chasm with heavy mass driver fire. Miranda and Jacob got Garrus aboard and onto a stretcher where Dr. Chakwas was waiting for him.
"Garrus," she said softly as she knelt beside the prone turian and started to work. An orderly knelt with her taking her orders as they fussed over the him.
Alyssa forced herself to back off and let them work, flopping back into a seat and pounding on the cockpit door frame with her fist. "Get us out of here."
OVO
Author's Notes
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1) I am always looking for proofreaders. If you're interested just let me know. Before you volunteer though be aware that I expect more than, "Looks good." If that's all you've got you won't be a proofreader long. I need grammar, spelling, sentence structure, all that stuff criticised on top of discussions about themes, ideas, and the overall plot.