Eternity, Book 1 - "Queen's Gambit"
Chapter 2 Parity violation
Trinity
At the fifth impact Shepard began to see some instability in the red raving torrent. The halt and lame movements of his shredded and bleeding frame seemed to smooth out; time and motion slowed, attention settling like the fall of shot upon the positive flux gate.
Plasma flows departing equilibrium. This was visibly the end, yet he didn't seem to care. Odd. Like one of Williams' sappy bits of verse.
Found her at last. What? The death eternal.
This tide after dark, gone with the sun
– then the world was on fire and his last thought, however banal and inglorious, was Mother -
From human care, collective impulse
Disengage, and so take wing.
Chaos at the boundary
Other than closing the arms to stop another Reaper getting in, nothing went to plan. The fleet had done their best but the Citadel had been taken from them by the simple expedient of attaching Sovereign-class Reapers to the closed hull and waltzing it straight through the mass relay.
At that point, the military focused on preventing the residue of Cerberus, husks, marauders, and what have you from making their way down the wards, which had been under powerful attack, but held. Strangely, the Cerberus coup had helped. There were arms, men, C-Sec, militias, even repurposed Cerberus autocannon, an astonishing number of Turian military, mostly walking wounded. But they would kill reepie-creepies if they had to crawl, reflected Hannigan.
Tactus, for one, whose story was not clear to her, but who carried himself like Garrus. She, he, and Chloe had combined on the crisis teams because he mysteriously had a source of civilian emergency laevo-rations and equipment. The women carefully did not inquire where the old turian warrior had got them.
Two days ago, after the cupola at the tip of the wards had been closed and C-Sec withdrew from the Presidium, Tactus had become worried and puzzled by the little which could be seen of the planet below. LIDAR showed exceptionally low orbit, you could sometimes see scattered fires and city structures through cloud cover, not much else, they were night-side over rubble.
– Is that bad? Dr Michel had asked, over muffled sounds of battle filtering through the walls. "Forced synchronous," said Tactus. "Gotta be. We're not orbiting, we're hovering."
"So?" Whereupon Tactus turned and indicated the bright beam obscuring the view through the Presidium Ring: "There will be counterattacks. What happens if that leash is cut? We need a Plan."
– Next chapter will be #3, "Night and Fog" –
Wednesday, July 15, 2015