Chapter Two
Alliance Colony Eden Prime
Thirty Minutes later
"I've seen diamonds cut through harder men"
Chris Cornell: You know my name
Lt. Commander Kate Beckett and her light element were on the move, seeking cover in the rock outcroppings at the edge of the clearing that had served as their landing zone. Only Corporal Jenkins had stopped to look back as SSV Normandy pulled up and banked sharply away, angling for high orbit, where the IES Stealth system could protect her from prying eyes.
Jenkins' head turned, his eyes reflecting his horror as he took in the vista of his home colony on fire, combat drones buzzing through the air on attack runs and the sound of indiscriminate weapons fire in the distance. His shock and horror giving way to fierce anger at what was being done to his home. The moment of reflection they had allowed him cut harshly short as Lt. Esposito nudged his shoulder without comment.
As Captain Montgomery had told her before the ramp dropped and they disembarked, this was her mission now, there was no more time. With boots on the ground, and the obvious sounds of battle going on around them, Espo was a hard taskmaster. The only other survivor from her CID unit on Elysium, Javier Esposito was as hard and loyal as they came, her solid right arm. Both she and Espo felt for Jenkins, but there was no time for his sorrows. The mission had to come first. With grim determination they set off, with Jenkins on point, comm discipline firmly established.
Moments later, Jenkins' fisted left hand popped up, then straight down calling a halt, hand motions directing her attention at a scene Kate found all too familiar. A smashed comm antenna, surrounded by human bodies twisted in various states of violent death, most not yet gone cold.
Kate surveyed the scene, noting that the man she had seen in the message was absent from the scattered bodies and weapons in the area. Her lips moved in silent prayer to a god she wasn't sure she believed in anymore that he had managed to escape. She knew he would likely have followed standard operating procedure. With comms out, he'd have to fall back from this position and report in to the nearest command authority or possibly assume command himself if he was the senior officer, which meant he'd have tried to make his way back toward the spaceport and the small garrison there.
"They're the ones who sent the distress call," Kate stage whispered, pointing the barrel of her rifle at the shattered comm antenna. "This squad is short a man, he'd have had to really haul ass to get clear. Collect their tags for graves registration, then fan out and search for traces, provided we can find him alive, he might be able to shed light on what happened here."
"Over here, Beckett," Esposito husked moments later from the base of a shattered tree, "this wasn't done with explosives, our boy must be a biotic, and a pretty strong one. Between the way the ground's torn up and the shattered mech pieces, I'm guessing, he used Shockwave to clear his exfiltration route.
"Commander!" Jenkins hissed, pointing his rifle a few meters further away, indicating a nearly unidentifiable mass of mech parts mashed together on the ground like Play-Doh figures in the hand of an angry child, "I think he went this way!"
"Singularity," Kate muttered, "he must have been pretty desperate to use of this much biotic energy in quick succession."
Kate followed the path indicated, drawing an imaginary line through the three scenes of carnage in her head against the map projected on her omni-tool then followed that line toward the rocky crags of a hillside toward which his footprints disappeared. The rough terrain and abundance of cover would have been her first choice for a place to fall back to under the circumstances as well.
"Lets move people, fast and quiet," Beckett husked, pointing the way, "Jenkins, take point."
They had barely covered the distance of the clearing and started up the hillside when three unidentified drones popped up from out of nowhere and opened fire. Beckett and Esposito managed to find cover, but Jenkins had moved too far ahead and was completely out in the open. He took all three drones' massed fire which overloaded his barriers, penetrated his armor and riddled him with antipersonnel rounds. He was dead before his body hit the ground.
Almost as one person, Beckett and Esposito popped up and returned fire, their M-8 Avenger assault rifles - set to carve rounds from their ammo blocks in sledgehammer fire mode - made short work of the three drones with near pinpoint accuracy.
Esposito knelt over Jenkins' body and closed his sightless eyes before slipping two fingers under the collar of his body armor to fish out his service tags. He hadn't had to carry around this many sets of the small computer disks at one time since Elysium and even now it hit him hard. Beckett may have been in overall charge of the mission, but this man had been under his direct command. Corporal Jenkins had joined the Alliance armed services to protect his home and had died within sight of it.
"I'm seeing a lot wreckage out here," Nihlus voice muttered coldly over the comms, "and a lot of bodies. No sign of the beacon. Proceeding toward the spaceport."
"We've done all we can for him, Espo," Beckett said softly, dropping a hand to his shoulder, "collect his gear and let's move out."
Esposito nodded and collected the rifle from Jenkins' hands, deactivating it, then handing it to Beckett when it promptly folded itself up which she affixed to the magnetic hard-point on the back of her armor. When Esposito collected his sidearm and hooked it to his own belt he folded the young corporal's arms over his chest and they set off once again up the hillside.
Espo swallowed his rage and let it turn to something else. Determination. He'd honor Jenkins' sacrifice by finishing the mission. If he neutralized a dozen or so bad guys along the way, so much the better. He practically caressed the rifle in his hands in anticipation of the engagement to come as he took point, his game face on and his head on a swivel. If they wanted to stop him and Beckett from finishing their mission, he'd make the bastards work for it.
Castle hadn't fared much better since battering aside the Geth in his way with a well placed shock-wave, then dropping a singularity behind him as he fell back to cover his escape. The two powerful biotic attacks had done their job, but he was exhausted.
He hadn't expended that much biotic power all at once since BAaT training twenty years ago. As a result, he'd had no choice but to slow his retreat back toward the dig site to conserve what little energy he had left and eat the three high energy bars specifically formulated by the Alliance military for biotics in the field as part of his rations.
He'd then fallen back to Bravo company's tripwire position, only to find them already slaughtered, the Geth collecting the bodies and impaling them on spikes telescoping out of the ground, he hadn't thought twice before he'd opened fire on them, his biotics flaring, eyes clouded over with rage.
But there had been too many and he'd found himself once again on the run, firing his pistol wildly behind him, Geth hot on his heels, peppering his barriers with small arms fire. With his dwindling energy reserves, he knew he couldn't maintain this pace, nor could he long keep his back to the enemy. Eventually his barriers would fail and he would have to find cover to make his last stand. When he did, he would take as many of the flashlight headed bastards with him as he could for what they'd done to the men and women under his command.
His only regret would be to never see Alexis again, to not be there when she graduated from Grissom Academy or to see her grow into the outstanding woman he knew she would become.
He ducked behind a large outcropping of rock and withdrew his M-7 Lancer Mk IV assault rifle, felt its sleek lines as it extended into operational mode. Though the standard issue M-8 Avenger was lighter and had a higher rate of fire, he preferred the Lancer IV's greater accuracy, larger ammo capacity and stopping power. Especially after modding it out to not only accept the newer thermal clips, but also to reduce its recoil.
He was about to turn and fight, when the familiar chatter of two M-8 Avengers opened up on the Geth, taking them by surprise. Castle shook it off, turned and fired, catching the Geth in a crossfire to nail the coffin shut. When the noise of gunfire finally died away and all of the nearby Geth were destroyed, Castle appraised the two Alliance soldiers in front of him. He saw the deference being granted to the woman with the N-7 tab on her armor and snapped to attention, his right hand rising smartly to the visor of his helmet.
"Gunnery Chief Richard Castle, Fourth of the 212," Castle stated flatly as he snapped to attention, "You the one in charge here, sir?"
"Lt. Commander Beckett, SSV Normandy, we were sent here to pick up the beacon." Kate stated as she saluted back, her heart and military formality vying for control of the situation. She was glad that he was still alive, glad she was able to save somebody. She had a mission to complete, though, and she was down a man. "What happened here, Chief?"
"My squad was on a routine patrol to keep civilians from disrupting the excavation of the Prothean beacon when the Geth hit us from out of nowhere. I thought those synthetic fuckers never came out of the Perseus Veil!"
"You wounded, Castle?" she replied.
"No ma'am," Castle replied, guilt lacing his tone, "a few scrapes and burns, but the rest of my unit wasn't so lucky. My squad was patrolling the perimeter when the attack hit. I tried to get a distress call out, but they cut us off. I've been fighting for my life ever since"
"What happened to the rest of your unit, Castle?" Esposito asked harshly, but Kate glared at him, an eyebrow arched reproachfully and he backed off. She knew he was still upset about losing Jenkins, but that was no excuse for taking it out on a man who had fought hard to survive, and was still willing to do his duty. She was a man short and would need every hand she could get to complete her mission.
"We tried to double back to Bravo squad and the beacon, but walked into an ambush." Castle reported, his voice suddenly going quiet, guilt painting every line on his face "I don't think any of the others... I think I'm all that's left."
"Eat that and catch your breath, Castle," she ordered, tossing him a high energy bar from one of her belt pouches, no stranger to leading biotics in combat, "I need you frosty if you're gonna show us to the dig site. We move out in ten."
"Yes, sir!" Castle replied, tearing open the packaging on the energy bar and eating it quickly. He'd used up all of his in the fight to get this far. While he ate, he called up the repair protocols on his omni-tool, using salvaged scraps from the destroyed Geth to fabricate the necessary components to make repairs to his body armor and upgrade his rifle's ammo generation and mass effect field generation protocols, which he promptly transferred to Beckett and Esposito.
Though Esposito seemed to have little time for Castle, Beckett felt something of a kinship for the man. She'd lost a lot of good people on Elysium and not long afterwards most of her officer training corps graduating class had been killed in the bloody meat-grinder that history now referred to as the battle of Torfan while she'd been in the Sol sector for N-7 training.
She didn't envy Shepard, who had been forced by circumstance to take charge of the ground units during that mess. They'd been friends at the academy seemingly a lifetime ago. She remembered a sensitive man who'd led from the front, always with a kind word an encouraging smile, or a boot in the ass when necessary, but Torfan had changed him. The man she'd known seemingly a lifetime ago was gone, replaced by a hardened soldier with a dark disposition and a nasty reputation. Lt. Commander John Shepard would have to live with the title "The Butcher of Torfan" for the rest of his life, a name still whispered with near equal venom by both sides.
The last she'd heard, he was put in command of a frigate on the Batarian border with the Terminus Systems hunting pirates and slavers, along with Lt. Ethan Slaughter and a host of other so-called "bloodthirsty undesirables" that the Alliance brass wanted swept under the rug and out of the public eye.
But that was all the time she could spare for her sorrows. She had a mission to complete.
"Saddle up you two," she ordered, "Mr. Castle you have point, combat spacing, charge and lock. Move out!"
A/N: CID = Criminal Investigation Division. Essentially they are the U.S. Army's version of NCIS. I thought it made sense for Kate to have started off her military career as a detective of sorts. Nor could I help the Commander Shepard reference. I like to give a nod to my source material.