Author's note: This chapter, I'm afraid is sure to disappoint many who are accustomed to the content of the chapters I have been known to write. This one features no sex, no swearing, and it's quite short to boot. The reason for this is I grew tired quickly writing the original draft. That style of writing has, I feel, finally run its course with me.
There was a deliberate style, (believe it or not) to the seemingly dumb Mass Effect: Black Rain content; I sprinkled about dirty, salacious adjectives like they were going out of style to draw simple clear pictures, step by step and from every possible angle and interpretation to give the reader no doubt of every motion that was being performed and what it felt like. And based on the figures for that story, it worked.
But I'm growing tired of that style, and so spawned from that, comes this. It's not something I'll necessarily continue, but I wanted to at least get some decent writing out before the story ends.
I hope you enjoy it.
Additional note: To make things more interesting, this time around I invested more than a moment's worth of thought into names and locations, and so some changes have been made. Lander, for example, is now a booming industrial metropolis, instead of a pre-industrial seaside port-city. Also a completely inconsequential character has been cut and the crew has been thinned out.
In the time that passed, Joker had walked in, vocal chords a'twitter, shaking at the already quaky knees and admonished by Anderson. Fingers interlaced, firmly against his desk, eyes the black of bedrock. And not a word was uttered since.
Operative Miranda Lawson had climbed from under the desk. She climbed back into her clothes. And she climbed back onto her ship.
The Black Rain, it was called. As the Normandy SR2 that lay hundreds of chunks of hull and engine on a memorial site back on earth, 'The Rain' was acquired and provided to the slimmed team. A Class 1 Fighter-Craft, equipped not for reconnaissance, long-range cruising and easy living that the SR2 was, but lightening probing operations and strafe attacks with the under-mounted gatling-rails and revolving 'pellet punchers.
The body was 100 feet long and sloped at the tip. The hull underneath bloated and drooped as if swollen by the guns and wheels it carried. Where It rose back up at the rear and met the tail there could be seen the four most complex engines ever built for a craft of that size. Two long arms were attached to hips of the ship angled (currently) at 10 to 4. At the apex of both arms were the ball mounted, swivel engines at 28 feet a piece that could function on two types of propulsion: Mass Effect fields for FTL travel and nuclear ION plasma for local travel within systems.
Inside the ship was a cramped mess of electronics, antenna control, gun calibration stations, star-bloom-proof observation ports for tactical observation, ION plasma refuelling stacks for the engines, ready packed meals and guns. Lots of guns.
On a zero-G trip down the tunnels and lanes that made the innards, one would come across 9 rooms; 3 Bedrooms accommodating 4. A cramped eating area. A single unisex bathroom servicing 4 a time. A wash room. A pilot's quarters. A Captain's quarters. And a weapons room. All interconnected by thin tunnels to float through and a flat floor at the bottom when landed.
The team, save Shepard, was on-board.
Joker, the Pilot
Miranda, the soldier.
EDI, the AI.
Shiala, the Information Specialist.
They were on their way back to Lander, taking it slowly as Joker's resolve and concentration was not what it should be. Miranda drifted into the bathroom and stripped for a long hot shower to wash away the scent of the Admiral.
Inside the shower cabin, the water began to bubble up from the floor under her feet and rise slowly. She grabbed an oxygen mask from the ceiling and held it between her lips as the water level passed her navel, her breasts, her chin and consumed her head whole. She scrubbed and washed herself down, floating in thick hot water.
When her skin was red raw and her arms tired from repetitive scrubbing, the water drained out and she floated free from the shower, soft and warm, over to her steam washed, uniform hovering, stationary above some taps. She reached for it and pushed her feet to the floor. When she looked up, the condensation had cleared and looking at her from the mirror was herself. She stood straight at it and tilted her chin. Twitched her cheek. Lifted her arm. Some curiosity held her here, just looking at herself experimenting with body movements.
Miranda Lawson stood 5 foot 9 in bare feet. From head to heel, a milky consistency to her complexion. Her lips were plump and pale, the colour of cyclamen and her eyes that of polished steel. She stood on thin legs, packed of little but muscle and held with fully capable arms. Her stomach was thin and solid. Mostly smooth from breast to pubic. But to the touch, light definitions of a deep plane of solid muscle lay beneath the skin. Her backside were two tight bubbles, stuffed of thick malleable muscle. Between, a crevice inches deep.
For a moment as she spun around weightless in the bathroom, seeing the gunmetal shade of grating that made the walls and floor spin around her, she caught a blink of her teeth between a modest smirk in the mirror.
Moments later she was in her uniform as tight and economical as herself drifting out of the bathroom carrying her old industrial rags to the wash-room.
- Miss Magram - 2100 hours - Lander - walking -
Commander Shepard and Isabella were racing on horseback over the shallow, rolling hills and farmland spread out from the immense industrial city of Lander towards the great forest, known as The Hordes.
The city behind them rang and cranked and smoked and screamed for miles. Smoke rolled up the sky from the depths of factories and tall commercials alike, like the breath of some concrete, coal fuelled, crane-lifted monster on its last legs groaning at the sky.
As they past the first tree to The Hordes and then a second, the city's grating sound diminished to nothing, then the rustle of leaves and bounding of hooves in the soaked mud
Back in Lander a burst cloud overcast the city and battered it muddy and wet. Miss Magram stood on the pavement, a big golden arch behind her blooming with rows of electrically powered bulbs and lead cut-outs of lettering that read MAGRAM MILKY ACADEMY. She looked up into the sky through her bifocal round-rimmed glasses, and let the misty pellets of rain hit her face.
She took a step forward and looked back at the arch. Two steps up, she thought, two steps up and back through those doors. Back home. Back in the warmth. And the chaos. She took another brave step out into the night and looked around. She was being passed unnoticed on all sides by gloomy gaunt men in cloaks and top hats, passing one moment and lost the next. An occasional woman in tow dressed to the nines in utterly unflattering, thick, slumping frocks in colours as moody as the dark sky. She spun around and looked herself in a curtained window to her own building. She was no better she thought. Her skin was just as coarse. She lathered herself in just as much thick paint hide it. and her wide black dress was just as obtrusive and people went to just as many pains to drag a compliment forth.
She hurriedly walked away from the windows and through the hustle of the street. Her fingertips pulling the skirt from the wet concrete.
The buildings loomed over head. Great long, wide constructions, bellowing smoke, grinding, pulsing light through the dense misty windows. Cacophonous were the sounds. Howling, squealing, indistinguishable conversation, a crash here and a clang there. A light bulb bursting overhead. A motor car spluttering and choking on oil. A train rattling rails overhead hissing thick streams of smoke.
Just above her, when she looked, ran above-ground rail and was carrying a screaming, burning, smoking coal train into a building 30 stories up to be unloaded. All over the city gaping holes were cut into buildings to make for docking points like those.
She made her way for a train station, paid her 9 credits and took shelter under a glass roof to dry off as the rain beat down all around. A train trundled to a stop and bellowed a great horn and everyone got on. She made for her own leather two-seat and pushed up against the window.
Then she produced a piece of paper and pencil from her tight sleeve and flattened it's creases against the rainy glass as the train made off from Crime-way Station. She leaned into her pencil and began to write as the dense jungle of buildings and flashing lights and and the crowds fell dancing through the dew and she rose into the mix of overhead rails.
The ride was far from smooth. Writing wasn't easy. But stations came and went and her small stubbornly elegant handwriting filled the page. The note was to Commander Shepard. She wished him well. And for the Hordes' holy winds to carry him the way. "I hope you have bought the man to justice, Shepard." She wrote over and over as if to make it true. "You do not know his importance. I regret with a heavy heart that I did not tell you, but I couldn't. Surely if you are reading this you have learned my reasons." And she continued.
When she looked up she saw a familiar plume of smoke in the distance outside the city between two tall skyscrapers. Unwieldy. Blowing and curling and licking at the sky. Below it a long pit of fire. She clenched the paper in her hands and rested her forehead against the window as the rain fired down and a tall building suddenly swallowed the carriage. She got up and hurried onto the platform with about 15 others and saw the train off back into the muddle of the city.
Highway Station stood over 40 floors and below 25 more. Either side passengers flooded in and burst out two gates towards the elevators beyond or the platforms where Magram stood. She walked up to a glass cubicle where a gaunt, sallow, bespectacled man sat hunched smoking a droopy cigarette. He spun around on his chair and scooted over to her, "yes?" He couldn't have been older than 25.
"Could you hold this note for me?" She gently placed it crumpled up against the slit, threatening to force it through onto his lap.
"Wussit for?"
"You can't read it."
"Alright. I'll take it."
His eyes were the colour bodies turn in a mortuary. He dragged his sagging shirt back across his shoulders into position and wiped his nose and took a drag with a perfunctory that would be laughable if not for Magram's wrinkled sincerity looking back at him like a hostage into a camera.
She decided against trusting him and he rolled back to his newspaper. She looked around helpless. The people all satisfactorily filtered into elevator or station. Everything was still.
She walked over to the golden railings that stopped people from tripping off the edge and looked down. Motor cars and people, and smoke and rain and steel and iron and glass and golden bulbs.
She unclenched her fist and looked at the scrunch of paper. It had developed a soggy tear.
Another train came and she caught it.
- Shepard . Isabella - 2200 hours - The Hordes - Horseback -
They had ridden clean of the rain and mud and deep into The Hordes following leads of the man Magram made mention of. The man who burned the mining village. But within 2 miles nearly every line of inquiry ran dry. Every pertinent forest-village went silent. All tracks had been erased by the wind. Their only remaining lead was the direction. North.
"North. Just keep going north" Magram would say.
Isabella's thighs were sore, her wrists were cramped, her chest throbbed from the bounding up and down and her resolve was diminishing with every tree she passed. It went on endlessly. Ahead, a wall of bark and leaves getting only darker. Above a weave of tree limbs getting thicker, branch by branch, now the two-moons and the distant supernovae blossoming against the nightscape became harder and harder to spot.
They rode on. North.
3 hours later they were threading through the trees in the pitch darkness holding lanterns out over the horse's heads. Looking warily for the shape of something, anything that wasn't dark and tall and sprouting leaves from heavy, crooked arms.
The woods receded meaninglessly as they rode limply, the bumps and long round shoulder movements of their steeds. Only their deepening tiredness and ache to tell time was moving at all. Everything remained unchanged for miles, save one moment when a gentle flicker of golden light that passed bloomed and receded between the trees.
"Look." Isabella said, swinging her lantern in it's direction.
They rode up and found a small clearing of trees. The first for hours. A modest hut of slatted oak wood and a rough, thatched roof with a big burn patch like a birthmark from one side to the other. The door, frail, unfitting in its frame, spilled light under and pooled on the step-beaten soil. Small port hole windows were at the sides, and back, and beside the door, but were all curtained with rags.
They very slowly rode around the back and found a small hairless man with glassy eyes uprooting deathroots and tossing them into a rickety wheel-cart. Shepard called for his attention. And so did Isabella. He was wearing a torn and stained tunic as green as dead leaves. It bloomed at his neck and sagged at his wrists, a formless shadow of it's former design from years of wear.
They called for him again and he looked up at to two proud steeds padding at the ground mounting soldiers.
"I don't want no trouble."
"We're not here for trouble." Shepard said.
"Well ya won't get none from me. Anyway."
Shepard got down from his mount.
The man grabbed his cart and wheeled it around back to the front of his hut. "No trouble." He said.
Isabella rode up and walked along side. "Sir. We're looking for a man."
The man looked up at her. The clouds in his eyes seemed to part for a moment. There was an intent in his look. "No. No trouble. Leave me land. Go on. Off wit'ya."
They rode off his land for about 30 seconds and hid behind some trees and constructed some shelter from the equipment hanging from the hips of their mounts. They jabbed 8 sharpened iron poles into the ground at an angle that made contact 5 feet above them then draped a heavy cloth over the top. Shepard crawled in first and tossed two thick laying-mats at the end and removed his loose fitting white shirt and leather buckles.
Isabella stood by her horse and stripped herself of all of her clothing and stuffed it in her horse's satchel.
Lean and tanned; a body of 5 foot 8. Thin ankles and wrists punctuated two tall slender legs and lean capable arms. Her waist sloped away from her stomach, which had hints of perky, tight muscle in the form sharp little shades laddering up to her rib cage. Further up her moody, tall, golden body were great boulders of tumbling breast; unblemished by white patches where cloth might conceal a sunny day. Thick and stiff nipples persisted, stubbornly in the cold. Above her swollen young breasts, a protruding set of collarbones, thin shoulders and a tight young neck that lead up to a head of chestnut hair and a face of experienced youth. Wide eyes and small unobtrusive nose. Lips often parted in the middle just enough for the white pierce through. Her hair a ponytail. Always a ponytail.
She stamped in on all fours, the mats were laid out and Shepard was asleep on his side in his underwear. Isabella fell into her own mat and lay face down. Within Minutes she was asleep.
- Miranda - 12.78 Km/h - Orbit over Trident - Black Rain-
Miranda drifted down a tunnel from her sleeping quarters, weightless, tapping at the walls to keep her trajectory true. She clasped the cold steel rim of an observation port and swung flag-like as she brought herself to a stop.
The two moons Miranda only knew as 'the big beige one', and 'the one with the burn' were passing above and below each other and parted to reveal the 'Six-Second' supernovae. It's core was steel blue and around it wrapped two bright green arms of pure energy locking it from the sprouting dragon-red plumage reaching behind the dissolved edges of the planet.
The ship was cold to the touch. The engines were whirring dully. There was no movement save the swirling of clouds across the blue below. Miranda counted her breath and saw it dissolve as mist from the air. She tapped the metal, she just wanted to hear something in the hollow.
She swam off down the tunnel into the Centre-Sphere. A spherical gape in the hull of the ship where all the tunnels and rooms were connected.
Joker was motionless in the eating quarters alone before a crumpled carton of water by his ear, looking off out the porthole ahead of him idly.
"Joker."
"Hey Miranda."
"It's really quite quiet."
"It's really quiet. I miss the Normandy."
"So do I."
"The Black Rain is fine, but it's-" He bit his lip.
"Cold." Miranda said.
"Well, yeah. And uncomfortable."
"And gravity-less"
"But mainly it's not the Normandy."
"I just miss gravity." Joker looked at her, she was rigid on a chair and breathing heavily at the small round table focusing on the swirly aluminium pattern.
"Well everything is much easier if you stop forcing yourself onto surfaces in zero-g."
"I don't feel like I should be able to breathe. This doesn't feel natural." There was a pause between the two. "I grew up in stasis." She paused like she expected Joker to say something. "My father made me and my sister sleep in stasis chambers from I think 6 or 7 to 11 years old. So we could grow into our bio-modifications. And it was liquid stasis, so we floated. We had to learn to breathe through the oxygen drip in our necks." She rubbed the pale skin over her trachea. There was a pin prick; a small red dot. "My windpipe keeps pulling on itself when I'm not paying attention." The moment the last word left her mouth she tightened and struggled to breathe again. Should not have said that, she thought, feeling suddenly naked and bare in front of him.
Joker tried to come up with something to say but tripped over his own tongue.
"We really are a pair of idiots aren't we?" When Miranda delivered that axiom, braced to the table edges with her hands counting her breath, the ship began to shake and buzz.
"EDI." Joker called out loud.
"Yes Joker. I have spotted 13 enemy vessels ahead. All uncloaked. I don't think they know we are here." The 4 rear engines began to sing like some portal into an angels choir had opened. "I'm bracing engines for sudden evacuation." Then the portals turned around and the pits of hell screamed out. EDI made mention of a few more functions as Joker swam up to the cockpit and Miranda to a porthole. "Antennas extended. All weapons primed." The Black Rain bulked up and sprouted all manner of sinister, sharp instruments along its frame.
They may well have been nigh on an outnumbering force of larger ships, but only a group of fools would challenge something with so many guns and engines and so little space for captives.
It trucked along in low-orbit, a nasty, malefic fighter ship, nose-dipped, shaking with energy, ready to pounce.
A messy formation of ships swung into view. The entire crew had their face planted against a porthole, watching them as they grew larger and slipped overhead. No one fired and no one attempted a communication.
"They're cold." Joker reported.
"And." EDI added. "In geosynchronous orbit with Lander."
"Well, are there are people on them?" Miranda replied into the empty room.
"Yeah, I'd guess so. But they're all cold. Nothing is running."
"Planning an attack? How long have they been cold?"
"Can't say."
There was an expectant, pregnant pause.
"I cannot say." EDI said.
"Well swing around again, and we'll get another look. Any information we can gather on them at all?"
There was another pause.
"A ship is turning on." Joker said. "We're getting readings. It's following. Cloaked."
"Let it follow." Miranda said.
Lagging far behind, imperceptibly small, its behaviour suggested a very capable reconnaissance ship. It followed them half way around the planet's orbit doing nothing other clinging to the Black Rain's tail.
"Miranda, I'm reading activity on the other 12 ships. They're all lighting up and dispersing." Joker reported.
"Don't put the weapons away. Keep the engines spinning." She pushed away from the porthole and travelled up to the cockpit where EDI's body and Shiala were already. She looked out the front screen along with everybody else and thought.
"Miranda." Joker tapped at a screen beside his stick. It was crammed with jumbled information and scrolling data too fast for her eyes. "This graph here." he said, "They're closing in around us in a spherical formation"
"Keep everything primed."