The upper penthouse levels were a terrible firestorm of robots, mercenaries, and flying debris. These floors were just a few twisting staircases and elevators from the office where Nassana Dantius orchestrated her glowy-line-covered iron fist over Illium's Maliwan branch. The elite asari commandos and advanced Lightsuit variants were the last line of defense, and they fought savagely against the WAR Loaders that shot and struggled inexorably through the remains of graceful asari architecture.

But Nassana's elites held their ground. Asari commandos fought with advanced Maliwan weapons and armor, their biotics flaring in constant torrents of dark energy. Heavier Lightsuits, looming over three meters tall and armed with multiple rotary elemental cannons, traded fire with the WAR Loaders.

In this environment, it was both painfully easy and frighteningly hard for the Broker's agent to slip past unnoticed. Easy, because everyone was focused on killing each other and avoiding the same. Hard, because with all the random fire surging back and forth, a few stray rounds had a very good chance of ending the infiltration attempt. But he managed, with a bit of agility and very good timing, to bypass the badass soldiers and war machines, clambering around two mounted gun emplacements, and reached the stairs leading up to the Maliwan CEO's penthouse.

The wide staircase was surprisingly straight and normal, considering the overabundance of flowing, spiraling shapes in the rest of the building. It was also unguarded; he'd expected a rearguard here, but it appeared that Nassana had committed her entire elite guard to defending her chambers.

He advanced up the steps carefully, eyes open and scanners searching for any traps or concealed shooters. None appeared on his scopes, and he paused outside the door to her room. He considered breaking off and moving around to find an alternate means of ingress besides the front door, but the desperation of the elite guards' defense, along with Nassana's mental instability, told him that she likely had nothing left to defend her beyond this point.

Just him and Nassana. Matriarch or not, she wouldn't last long.

The drell reached up and triggered his omnitool, activating the hacking tools, and bypassed Nassana's security in moments. The door slid open, and he stepped forward, revolver raised and ready to-

A metal fist the size of his chest slammed into his shields and went straight through them before impacting his face.

He blinked, and the world spun around him.

Airborne. He was airborne, flying back down the steps.

The drell spun, twisting, and managed to turn an out of control tumble into a semi-controlled landing, bouncing down the stairs and coming to a halt at the base of them. He looked up, shaking his head and ordering his suit's injectors to administer Insta-Health, and then he saw it.

It towered at the top of the steps, four meters tall, all brilliant red lines and dark metal. Less powered armor and more walking tank, it was lean and angular and humanoid shaped. It boasted six arms, four of which ended in rotary cannons. The gleaming red lines came together at the head of the armored platform, shaping into a feminine face: a snarling, sculpted asari visage promising violence and agony in tremendous measure.

"You tiny, filthy, shit-covered savages!"

The voice was amplified and so twisted with rage that it was barely recognizable, Nassana Dantius' battlesuit started advancing down the stairs, legs moving with liquid grace that belied the suit's size, and a flare of blue biotic barriers surged around it.

"You want to screw with the most powerful corporation on Illium?"

The cannons began to spin up. The drell vaulted to his feet and scrambled for cover, right before the floor where he had been crouched upon disintegrated.

"I am Nassana Dantius! And I am fuckinginvincible!"

Yeah, he concluded, the Broker was definitely not paying him enough for this.

He turned to scramble for cover, the rotary guns sweeping after him, and snapped his revolver up, shooting Nassana's battlesuit in the face, for all the good it would do.

Chapter Eleven: People Getting Shot In The Face

Lilith leveled her submachinegun and shot an Eclipse soldier in the face. As the mercenary fell, she bounded over the body, flames chasing her and scorching the metal of the staircase. Bullets cut past her on either side as she wound her way up, firing into the enemy and blasting in and out of reality. Her blood sang with both adrenaline and that endless river of raw cosmic power, and she laughed with manic euphoria.

The Siren advanced up the center staircase, bullets slicing past her from behind. Her team, plus the other mercenaries, were firing around her as she took the lead, bursting between realities. This was only the second time she'd fought alongside Roland, let alone the rest of his crew, but they - particularly Zaeed - knew how to support her as she cut a swathe through the center of the enemy. She wasn't surprised Zaeed knew how to work with Sirens, going by both his reputation and his half-finished anecdotes.

She cut through the Eclipse trying to hold the central spiraling staircase, one merc trooper or Lightsuit at a time. Loaders were firing indiscriminately from the second level overlooking the lower floor, but there were more Eclipse than Hyperion bots at the moment, and most of the mercs were switching to corrosive weapons. Green-tinged bullets flashed into the advancing Hyperion war machines, spraying them with military-grade compounds that tore through their armor. Walls periodically burst in, accompanied by the shuddering crunch of orbital-drop armor ablating off the Hyperion mechs.

"Corrosive!" shouted an Eclipse soldier on the landing, screaming to be heard over the chaos. "Switch to your corrosive weapons! Put away those incendiaries!"

"I thought incendiary was anti-armor!" another merc shouted, even as he fired a red-lined submachinegun at the Loaders. The bullets bounced off and sputtered to little effect. "Burns through their armor, right?"

"No, no, its corrosive now!" the first Eclipse soldier replied. "I don't know why, maybe they changed the comp-"

Lilith interrupted the conversation by punching a hole in reality behind them, stepping into their midst among a torrent of lightning, and blasting mercenaries across the room in a tremendous fiery detonation.

Bullets converged on her before the mercs had flown more than a couple of meters, and she skittered sideways, firing her submachinegun. Both Eclipse organics and Hyperion Loaders prioritized the exploding, fire-winged Siren as the most dangerous threat in the immediate area, and Lilith felt flattered to have earned that regard. Lilith weaved through galleries of precious artwork and showcases of Maliwan technology as the enemy chased her, her own blazing wings scorching the walls and blackening armorglass display cases. Anything remotely flammable within a couple of meters of her went up in a flare of gross incandescence.

Of course, her wings were far from the only thing setting fires. Despite the onslaught of Hyperion mechs, a number of Eclipse troops were still using incendiary weapons, and many of the Loaders were packing incendiary ammunition. Coupled with the sparking power lines and subsequent electrical fires, plus a plentiful number of electrical-elemental weapons spread among all sides, and a healthy number of high-explosive weapons among the krogan contingent…

Well, a lot of shit was on fire.

She fought through the fire and chaos, heat roiling around her. Steam rose from the inverted waterfall nearby as incendiary rounds sliced through it. The krogan and her mismatched pack of allied mercenaries were ascending, both up the center staircases and other stairs to the sides of the penthouse lobby. They had momentum on their side, and Lilith capitalized on that, moving among the enemy and causing as much chaos as she could, and pulling as much attention from the Eclipse and Hyperion warriors as possible.

She didn't realize the problem with this until she spotted a quartet of Eclipse descending the central stairs, their bodies wreathed in the glowing golden panels of tech-armor warping fields. More importantly, they were asari, the gleaming lines on their armor were brighter and thicker, and every one of them bore a weapon that Lilith's ECHO marked as blue or purple-grade. They shot their way through a quartet of krogan, setting two of them ablaze and launching the others into the air with their biotics, but did so with a contemptuous dismissal. The krogan were incidental, an annoyance.

Then, as one, they pivoted toward Lilith. In a flare of biotics, the quartet of asari commandos leapt from the stairs onto the balcony where Lilith was fighting. Dark energy swirled around them as they touched the floor.

"Wondering when the badasses would show up," Lilith muttered as she turned to fire on them.

And as one, the quartet of asari commandos launched a biotic pulse that combined into a wave of altered gravity powerful enough to toss a light tank, converging directly on the Siren.

Angel had hoped the doors into the Decisive Deception's CIC would hold for longer than they did, but the Loaders forced them open within a few moments. Joker was still hobbling toward the elevator as they rammed the doors apart and shoved aside the crushed body of their fellow mech. One of them poked its rifle through the door, electronic sights centered on Joker's back.

Fortunately, Joker was a resourceful one.

"Claptrap!" he shouted, grabbing the panicking robot and lifting him up. "Block their bullets with your face!"

The robot squealed in equal parts surprise and terror as the Loader's shots bounced off the front of his frame, impacting around his cyclops eye. Fortunately, CL4-TP models were expected to take small arms fire, and the rifle rounds bounced off his armored frame without striking the vulnerable optics.

Angel scrambled to get the ship's systems back online. She swept through the Deception's internal network, and one sliver of her awareness noted that the elevator doors were locked down. She spun off a quick trace on that, because she knew they had been unlocked a few moments ago. At the same time she overrode the locks, and the doors slid open.

Her trace reported back as she kept running power to the mass effect core, and Angel realized why the doors had locked down. The same emergency depressurization alert that she had generated had also slammed the CIC doors had gone shipwide, locking down all the doors. She should have seen that coming.

Angel's awareness was stretched too thin. Too much multitasking. She wasn't an AI, she couldn't operate an entire starship at once. At least not without…

No. Jack would know if she went that far. There was no way she could hide that from him.

Angel pulled back her awareness from unnecessary subsystems, and stopped focusing on anything except sensors, power, engines, and watching Joker. She swept through the CIC's emergency systems, and isolated fire suppression as the Loaders forced the doors open and started to pursue Joker and Claptrap. Bullets slammed into the impromptu robotic shield Joker had thrown up as he limped to the elevator.

She disguised it as another malfunction, which was easy enough with all the damage to the interior of the CIC already. Fire suppression systems erupted from the top of the CIC, spraying white foam across the room toward the compromised door. It covered the Loaders' optics, obscuring them for the brief seconds Joker needed to haul Claptrap into the elevator and close the door.

"Huh," Jack's voice sounded, distracted, and she froze up. "Lucky crippled bastard, I'll give him that."

She waited, but he said no more, apparently going back to the insanity raging at the Dantius Towers. Angel released a breath she didn't know she'd been holding, thankful that Jack's love of violence had him focusing on the slaughter at the Maliwan headquarters.

Joker had a few moments. She prepared to trigger a malfunction in the elevators, connected to the depressurization lockdown, and returned to charging the ship up as quickly as possible. If they could get it flying, maybe…

It was a long shot, but it was the best chance Joker and the rest of Roland's team had of getting out of this alive.

The biotic pulse went straight toward Lilith, and she barely had time to register the attack. The assault of altered gravity hit her before she could phase out of reality.

Most people assumed that a biotic throw was a sort of telekinetic impact of raw force. The reality was a bit more complex: biotic throws didn't launch a target so much as they altered what direction gravity was pulling them briefly and violently. It had almost the same effect, and for most purposes it was the same. The target got launched away, often with such speed that they would be hurt or killed on impact with a solid object.

Thus, the first contact with the biotic field didn't kill Lilith. Instead, she tumbled through the air in the field of rewritten gravity, falling toward the far wall at lethal speed. Surprised and disoriented, she barely had any time to react to the brutal, terminal shift in down.

A heartbeat before impact, Lilith blasted her way out of reality. She smacked against the wall, coming to a dead stop with only the faintest sense of pressure against her back, before gravity shifted back to normal and she fell to the floor. Lightning arced through the air around her, scorching the walls and shorting out lights, and Lilith snorted as she sighted the commandos that had nearly splattered her. She ghosted across the room toward the asari, who were firing their weapons into the cascading lightning that marked her rough position.

She ran through the bullets, and electricity washed over the asari. Two of the commandos leapt backward, biotics blazing around them to reduce their body mass and help them leap clear. A third dove straight through the lightning, rolling clear behind Lilith with only scorch marks on her armor and flickering shields.

The fourth caught the full power of the electricity surging around Lilith. She tried to retreat, but blue-white arcs sliced across her suit, blowing out shield emitters and sensors. The tech armor wreathing the asari shorted and the warping fields dissipated.

Lilith raised her off hand, and phenomenal cosmic power gathered, rolling down her arm and into her fingers as she jammed them into the Eclipse commando's eyes. It shot straight into the mercenary's face, and blew apart her skull. The subsequent blast as Lilith returned to reality launched the decapitated corpse end over end through the waterfall in the middle of the lobby.

The Siren was leaping away even as she reverted, and the other three asari commandos' weapons sprayed rounds after her within a heartbeat of the transition. Elemental bullets chased her as she moved from cover to cover, corrosive and shock rounds bouncing off the inexplicably durable artwork. Lilith traded fire as she moved, but her shields dropped rapidly. The shock rounds were tearing them apart, especially with the asari carrying high-quality weapons.

A blue corona flared around one of the asari, and a biotic field ripped a statue up as Lilith ducked behind it. The Siren snarled and Phased immediately, bullets converging on her position, and she ran across the room. Elemental shots slashed around her as she slid over through floor and reached another statue.

Another biotic pull grabbed it and hurled it straight up, right as the energy buildup became too intense and she blasted back into reality. She burst into a sprint as the asari commandos zeroed in on her. Her shields drained rapidly, bullets hammering her and eating into them.

Then a commando's head exploded as a bullet went straight through her face.

Out the corner of her eye, she spotted the turian marksman on the balcony, pulling a lever on a Jakobs sniper rifle to load the next round. Krogan had made the landing behind him, as were Roland and Zaeed, the former deploying his Scorpio.

Lilith slid into cover as the surviving commandos also fled for cover Garrus could hit them again. As she ducked behind another statue, the air shimmering from heat around her, Lilith grinned, reloaded her submachinegun, and took aim.

The ceiling exploded in a shower of stone and metal and masonry, and a massive beast of metal and glowing red lines impacted the floor before them, miniguns spinning and spraying red and green bullets after a dark-clad, green-skinned figure who landed amid the tumbling debris. The drell hit the floor and sprang away, fanning a revolver in midair as he evaded the wild gunfire from the massive Maliwan battlesuit.

"Going to grind you into a fucking flesh-smoothie you skag-shit!" boomed Nassana Dantius, before the battlesuit was wreathed in blue lightning and bolted across the galley after the drell in a column of biotic fury, smashing through walls in a deafening wave of arrogance-driven corporate-executive fury.

"Huh," the drell said, while vaulting backward over the careening debris launched by the battlesuit as it charged through the wall after him. He didn't know Maliwan had adapted biotic support systems on Lightsuit frames yet, let alone one of that size.

The Broker would be disappointed if he didn't get specs on this new suit. Assuming his assassin survived and actually killed Nassana, which was a more daunting prospect.

Behind his goggles, the drell scowled in annoyance, landing and rolling behind cover before the raging executive could spot and resume directing rivers of violence his way. This mission would have been a lot easier if it weren't for the small army of mercenaries, krogan, and volus biotic who were tearing the place up. Get in, kill Nassana, get out, no mess, no fuss, no giant raging doom-suit.

Of course, that didn't account for Hyperion's attack. What the hell would drive Handsome Jack to order such a blatant assault?

Hyperion Loaders were advancing along one side of this level, and they turned to fire on Nassana's suit as the monster skidded to a halt, mechanical legs throwing up plates of mirror-smooth masonry as they cut through the floor. Bullets slammed into her shields, a wall of blue forming over the looming suit, and the sculpted asari visage glanced toward them before two of the spinning cannons sent a line of intermixed incendiary and corrosive bullets into the mechs.

He took the distraction for all it was worth, and bolted toward a door leading to another gallery. He ducked through, putting a wall between himself and Nassana, taking a moment to think.

He found himself staring straight down the barrel of a Maliwan pistol. He acted on reflex, revolver snapping up, and both he and the human female in the black armor shot each other in the face. A single bullet bounced off their respective barriers, sheathing them both in blue for a moment, but they held further fire thanks to both discipline and the doom-suit-clad executive rampaging in the next room.

"Who the hell are you?" the human asked, lowering her pistol slightly. The drell obviously wasn't Eclipse, Hyperion, or any other corporate merc, but that didn't automatically make him an ally. Still, best to get the affiliation out of the way so they could make it clear who should be shooting who.

"Shadow Broker, Wetworks Division, sent here to kill Dantius," he rasped, and nodded. "The name is Feron."

The human canted her head to the side, and then shrugged, lowering her pistol.

"Well, get in the firing line," she said. "We're going to need a lot of bullets to kill that thing."

The Hyperion troops were forcing open the elevator doors, Loaders pulling them apart while engineers accessed the controls to make sure no more malfunctions occurred. Angel was tempted to smash them flat with the elevator the moment they went into the shaft, but shook off that notion. Not only was it too overt for Jack to miss, the elevator was far too slow to catch anyone. Trust that to be the one Citadel regulation Hyperion followed.

An agonizing squeal of wrenched metal and machinery heralded the doors being forced apart. A Loader immediately stepped through the gap, dropping down onto the elevator car. A single vicious stomp by the Loader knocked out the access panel in the lift's roof, and it dropped down inside and stepped out into the crew level. More Loaders followed suit, along with Hyperion soldiers and lightly-armored engineers.

"Joker, they're on the crew deck," she warned, trying to keep her voice calm. She could hear her own fear leaking through, however.

"Dammit," she heard him reply. There was the hissing stretch of duct tape and the panicked but muffled yelps from Claptrap as Joker finished gagging the robot's external speakers. A quick doublecheck showed that he was forward of the elevators, in the gunnery station near the bow. "Okay. okay. Uh, how many?"

Angel checked the cameras and sensors again.

"Count six more Loaders, four commandos, and seven engineers," she said. They were sweeping the crew deck room by room. "You've got maybe a minute before they reach the gunnery station."

"Do you have schematics?" Joker asked, and Angel pulled them up with a couple of quick mental commands.

"I've got a shaft going to the engineering deck three meters aft of the gunnery station, starboard bulkhead," she said, intuiting what he needed, and on the camera Joker nodded, face going pale. Angel checked again, and cringed as she spotted two Hyperion troops heading through the mess hall at the center of the crew deck toward corridor that led to the gunnery station.

"You have to go now," she hissed. Joker swallowed, nodded, and grabbed the taped-up Claptrap with one hand. He rose unsteadily and limped toward the door, while Angel accessed the hatch's controls. It had been locked down like much of the rest of the ship, and she overrode the seals.

The door hissed open, and Joker limp-scrambled his way out of the gunnery station just as the pair of Hyperion soldiers came into sight. They shouted, raised their weapons, and Claptrap let out a muffled squeal as bullets bounced off his frame. Joker grit his teeth, holding the robot before him and awkwardly lurched toward the hatch. His other hand rose and he squeezed off a couple of bursts with his Dahl pistol.

One of the soldiers abruptly stumbled back, blood flying from his facemask and optics.

Angel blinked with surprise, and the second soldier cursed and ducked for cover, firing blind at Joker as he ducked into the open hatch.

"Okay, I'll give him that one," Jack muttered with grudging respect as the Loaders and other soldiers converged, but by the time they arrived, Joker had already closed and locked the hatch behind him and was crawling through the maintenance shaft down to the engineering deck, dragging the hapless Claptrap along with him.

Some of the Hyperion troops tried to force the hatch open, but others hurried back to the elevator, intent on getting below and hunting Joker down. It was only a matter of time.

Angel checked the Deception's systems. If they could buy enough time, maybe she could get everything online and take full control. If not….

If not… Could she? Jack would know. He would know and….

The lights around her dimmed a bit in response as she drew back, trying not to imagine how he would react if he found her actively helping Jeff escape one of his games, and going against his orders.

She heard Joker cursing on his end, Claptrap's muffled complaints echoing in the maintenance shafts, and shook her head. With reluctance, she delved back into the Deception's subsystems, looking for a way to hold off the Hyperion troops long enough to reactivate the ship and give Joker control. Just a few more minutes….

Angel felt the first fingers of a probe, jabbing into the Deception's network, and she bit back a curse. She cut off that intrusion near-instantly and traced it. The origin came back in an eyeblink: The Deception's bridge. Hyperion engineers were trying to take control of the ship from her.

She shifted her resources in a flash of panic. If they managed to take the ship's computers, they'd trace the sources of the "malfunctions." Jack would know she was actively helping Joker.

"No," she breathed, working furiously. "No, no, nonono…."

"Hmmm."

Handsome Jack switched from the feeds inside his ship to the multiple feeds from his Loaders and compromised cameras inside the Dantius Tower. His fingers drummed on the armrest for a few moment, and then he poured a small shot of whiskey. He lifted the tiny glass, twirled its contents, and shrugged.

"You know what we need?" he asked the glass. He lifted it up, peering through the clear liquid.

"Yeah, that's exactly what we need," he said, and laughed. He downed the shot, set the glass aside, and opened a channel to the Dynamic Incident.

"Send in the Constructors."

The defense on the third floor of the penthouse collapsed, mostly because everyone involved shifted their attention down to the floor where the primary target of all the violence was furiously trying to liquify her enemies. Those Eclipse troops who could abandoned their positions to try to get the second level, while krogan and mercenaries kept advancing up to that level. Loaders continued firing in every direction at every conceivable threat, but many of them disengaged and pursued Nassana.

Nassana, for her part, kept screaming threats

"GONNA FORCE-FEED SPIDERWEBS DOWN YOUR THROATS!"

and chasing Feron and Lilith, crushing everything in her path.

"Since when was she supposed to be packing this much firepower?" the Siren shouted as she ran behind another wall, corrosive and incendiary bullets tearing apart around her.

"Don't ask me, I don't know where she got that thing," Feron muttered, popping out the fire a few shots that bounced off her shields. "I didn't expect she'd pull a walking tank out of her-"

He cut himself off and rolled back behind cover as Nassana sprayed their cover with a river of bullets, and the pair went scrambling for another doorway. Lilith phased out and reappeared at the door, her submachinegun blazing, and Feron reached her a moment later, reloading his revolver on the run.

"I didn't think we'd anti-tank weapons," he muttered as he ducked through the door. "Don't know if I have enough ammo - oof!"

He stumbled back a step as Lilith shoved a blocky, bland-brown Tediore missile launcher into his hands, and then a sleeker, red-and-white Maliwan launcher formed in hers among a storm of digistruct motes.

"Right."

They turned and opened fire, putting two rockets into the face of Nassana's battlesuit, and she only became more furious.

Roland made the next level of the penthouse, blasting an Eclipse commando in the chest and shattering her armor, sending her tumbling to the floor. He dove behind a wall, Scorpio dropping and deploying, and a pulse of biotics rippled past, hurling a krogan through the air. Roland rolled to his feet, rifle shouldered, and opened up on a damaged Lightsuit stomping toward him, pouring bullets into the powered armor and sending it toppling to the floor. He spun back toward the asari commando who had hurled the krogan and poured two rapid bursts into her barriers.

She did the last thing he expected and charged, rushing straight toward him. He held down the trigger, putting half a dozen more bullets into her, and the barriers collapsed.

A blast of raw heat and force erupted from her, and Roland belatedly realized that she had a shield with a nova module right as he was sent rolling backward and slammed into the armor-glass railing at the edge of the balcony. He scrambled to his feet, noting that his shields were down and recharging, and brought his rifle up in time to see the barrel of her submachinegun.

Then her face exploded in a spray of dark red viscera.

As the body fell, a skinny blond man in civvies rushed up the steps. Conrad stood over Roland, pistol jerking back and forth, and-

Wait, Conrad?

Seryna was on the landing a moment later, and crouched beside Roland helping him to his feet. A Loader crashed down onto their floor from the level above, on fire, and all three of them spun and blasted the machine apart as it tried to stand.

"Roland, you okay?" Conrad half shouted, half-squealed, and then ducked behind the same pillar that Roland had claimed.

"No, got a bit singed," he replied, shaking his head and running for a nearby pillar. A pair of krogan roared and rushed past them, Torgue-Urdnot shotguns blasting at another Lightsuit. He heard explosions - distinct and huge ones, unlike the rapid-fire of T-U munitions - and the rippling scream of Maliwan-constructed minigun fire.

"Oh, wait, is that what I think it is?" Conrad exclaimed, popping his head up and peeking out. "It is! That thing got out of the development phase!"

"What are you talking about?" Roland shouted, sighting a pair of Eclipse commandos. He got a couple of shots off at them, but they retreated before he could breach their shields.

"Something he shouldn't be excited about," Seryna muttered as her biotics roared out and plucked a Loader into the air. Both Eclipse and the rag-tag horde of invaders shot the Hyperion mech out of the air.

"Nassana was prototyping a big new battlesuit!" Conrad said. "And since its a prototype, its obviously a lot more dangerous than production models, and-"

"Wait, that makes no sense," Roland muttered.

"Eh, its Maliwan," Seryna said, bullets pockmarking the pillar she crouched beside. She shrugged as if that explained everything. "Nassana must be piloting that thing herself."

"Naturally," Roland muttered. "How do we kill it?"

"Bullets," Seryna said.

"Lots of bullets," Conrad added with a sage nod. "And maybe explosives."

"Someone say 'explosives'?" shouted Vega as he rumbled past. The bruiser hefted a Vladof rocket launcher in one hand and a Dahl grenade-launcher rifle in the other. He slowed to fire the former at an approaching GUN Loader, blasting it in half.

"Yeah!" Roland shouted. "Can we borrow some of that ordnance?" Vega tossed the grenade rifle toward Roland, and pulled a Torgue-Urdnot pistol from his SDU. He tossed that one to Conrad, who snatched the heavy pistol out of the air.

"It's an explosion party, jefe," Vega shouted, "and I got presents for everyone!"

Eclipse commandos, regular mercs, and Lightsuits all attempted to flank the combined krogan and mercenary force as they fought their way up onto the second floor, with many trying to work their way through to the galleries where Nassana Dantius battled her many enemies. The most direct route, unfortunately, led through a lounge where a certain volus was furiously debating existential philosophy with a water cooler. In a desperate effort to avoid invoking the wrath of NIFTU CAL, they tried pushing through another hallway, but someone had beaten them there.

"You get a bullet!" Axton shouted as he shot a commando in the face.

"And you get a bullet!" he added as his Sabre decapitated another Eclipse trooper

"Everybody gets a bullet!" he shouted as the corpses fell among half a dozen more of their companions strewn about the hallway, along with several broken Loaders. Between Axton and his Sabre, this corridor was severely locked down.

He ducked back into cover, switching rifle magazines, elemental rounds whipped past or sizzling into the doorframe. It was a familiar feeling, fighting from a fortified position against vastly superior odds, others counting on him to hold the line, just him and the missus shooting badguys. Just like the Skyllian Blitz on Elysium years back.

Something exploded behind him, but that was happening a lot lately, so he only glanced at the noise to make sure it wasn't anything large and dangerous trying to kill him. The remains of a Lightsuit toppled to the floor in a balcony behind Axton, and a moment later a scarred mercenary vaulted over the remains. Axton nearly shot him out of reflex, and then nearly shot him when he recognized him, but held his fire on both counts.

"You little bastard," Zaeed muttered, crouching beside the doorway and firing a couple of shots at the Eclipse. "You never cover your own back."

"Uh-huh," Axton said. "That's why you work with a team." He fired a spray of bullets down the hall, forcing a couple of Eclipse into cover when their barriers dropped. "Oh, wait, right. You don't work with teams, just ablative meat armor."

"Its not my fault everyone else dies around me," Zaeed snarled. "Laws of guddamprobability." He plugged another Eclipse trooper through the neck. "Seriously, where do they get these muppets?"

"I dunno, must use a discount recruiting website or something," Axton grunted.

"Anyway, the queen bitch herself is shooting up the other side of the penthouse that way," Zaeed said. "We ought to go kill her now before someone else robs you and your team of your payback."

"Yeah, I would," Axton replied, firing another barrage and then dropping back to reload. Blue tracers sliced past, and the Sabre retaliated. "But who's gonna hold this side?"

Zaeed activated his omnitool.

"Hey, you fat little demigod!" he shouted. "There's a toaster in the hallway to your left. Thinks he's gonna bring about the apocalypse or some shit."

A couple of seconds passed. Axton raised an eyebrow, and then one entire wall in the hallway beyond exploded. A torrent of dark blue biotic energy rolled and surged among the debris, which was then launched into the hallway and through the gathered Eclipse commandos.

"Such hubris!" shouted the volus deity as he waddled into the corridor. Axton hastily recovered his Sabre, while the surviving Eclipse either (wisely) fled in sheer panic or (unwisely) opened fire in sheer panic. "A toaster is merely a death ray with a smaller power supply, but I cannot let this come to pass! Stand not in my way, mortals!"

NIFTU CAL, BIOTIC GOD, began his smiting.

"Okay," Axton admitted. "You turned God into an IED. Not bad. How did you-"

"Flash-forged remote speakers," Zaeed replied. "Threw them into that room right before I shot that suit." He nodded toward the ongoing smiting. "This is why I don't need a team, whelp. Quick thinking. Improvisation. Use of natural guddam disasters as a force multiplier."

"Okay, I get it, you made your point," Axton muttered. "You're the best mercenary in the galaxy, I know, I know."

"Long as you don't forget that, kid," Zaeed grunted, and then nodded toward the other end of the penthouse. "Let's go kill us a-"

Noise and force erupted overhead, and both mercenaries were knocked off their feet. Over the ringing in their ears, they could hear mechanical legs unfolding and slamming down through the floor, and the thrum of charging weapons systems. They both scrambled to their feet, to see a massive, oblong war machine unfolding itself from the shattered pile of masonry and roiling dust that marked where it had smashed through the tower walls.

It was shaped vaguely like an enormous egg laying on its side, albeit an egg whose gentle curves were replaced with flat, sloping planes of metal and its length painted with the white and gold of Hyperion. A long, flat, boxy missile launcher sat on its back, a trio of thick legs supported it, and the tapering front of the mech ended with a single glowing red eye. There wasn't a single aspect of the robot that wasn't sharp, armored, or military.

"Crap," Axton muttered.

"Hell," Zaeed agreed.

The glowing eye turned to regard them.

"Dammit!" Axton commented.

"Bollocks!" Zaeed replied.

The Hyperion Constructor's eye glowed a brilliant red-gold, and then sent a bright yellow laser beam scything through the penthouse.

Joker crouched in the bowels of the Deception's engineering deck, pistol in one hand and holding the duct-taped Claptrap in the other. The darkened maze of access tunnels that surrounded the reactor and drives were filled with the familiar pulsing of mass effect systems and thrumming energy conduits. The beating heart of the Hyperion frigate rumbled overhead, just a few meters away, pumping energy into the ship's systems.

"How much longer, Angel?" he whispered, while straining to hear movement in the main corridors outside the tiny tunnel he was crouching in.

"Working," she whispered back, despite how unnecessary it was. It was comforting to hear her voice that low, though. "Hyperion has engineers trying to retake the ship from me."

"Oh, wonderful," Joker muttered. "Can't you just, I dunno, flip the gravity on them?"

"I…" she paused, and her voice came back strained. "I can't be too overt here, or they'll catch on to me."

"If you don't get overt, they'll catch me!" Joker replied, and Claptrap let out a muffled agreement. "And I really don't want to get flayed. Gonna ruin my whole month."

"They're more likely to just shoot you," Angel murmured. He heard a click above, and sudden cursing as a fire suppression system kicked in.

"That's reassuring," Joker said in a flat tone.

"I just need a couple more minutes," Angel said. "Then-"

The hatch suddenly opened, spilling red low-power light into the tunnel, and the curving yellow welding mask/helmet hybrid that Hyperion engineers wore poked through the open door.

"Hey, he's in here!" the engineer shouted. Anything beyond that was abruptly cut off by bullets as Joker shot the engineer in the face. As the body fell, Joker scrambled behind Claptrap and began hauling his robotic shield behind him. Boots sounded outside.

"Shit," he hissed as he moved deeper into the ship, and knew his options were running out.

"We got him trapped now!" one of the Hyperion troopers yelled, and Angel grit her teeth. "Get to the other hatches. Anyone got an incendiary mod?"

"Well, that was fun," Handsome Jack said, and she could see him accessing the Deception's feeds. "I guess I won't get to flay him, though. Well, we're all making sacrifices today."

Angel quested through the engineering deck's systems, looking for some way she could help, a way to protect Jeff without alerting Jack. But he was watching now. He'd know if she disobeyed, and with so much of her other resources tied up keeping control of the ship and powering its systems, she couldn't do any delicate work.

"There we go," the soldier shouted, hefting a grenade with a glowing red line running down the side. "Get ready to burn this rat out!"

No. There was a way to save Joker, but the consequences… Jack would stop playing games with everyone.

She saw the soldier prime the grenade, and made the decision.

Angel grit her teeth, and touched the thread of power running through her.

"Jeff, I'm sorry," she murmured.

"Uh, why?" he asked, over the clatter of him dragging Claptrap.

The thread of power became a sudden, roaring tempest, surging through her mind and out into the computer network. The incredibly fast control and data-processing she was capable of before became akin to cavemen tapping on rocks. The lines of Eridian script covering the left side of her body erupted with eldritch light, and she assumed direct control of the Deception.

"...Angel?" Jack suddenly said. "Angel, what the hell are you doing?"

She almost stopped at the disapproval in his voice. So many years of fear and worry about what he would do if she disobeyed nearly halted her in the middle of the process. But if she didn't, Joker would die.

"Initiating Phaseshift," she whispered, and braced herself.

Minigun fire tore through priceless asari artwork, burning and dissolving it, the lines of rounds chasing the flaming wings of Lilith or the darting shape of Feron, when they weren't blasting away at all the other insects that were trying to scratch the paint of Nassana the Fucking Invincible.

"I am going to melt you down!" she screamed, "And put you in the tiniest jar I can find!"

"Okay," Conrad said as he hugged the remains of a wall. "I'm kind of worried with a threat like that."

"Why?" asked Garrus. The turian had taken cover nearby, watching another gallery and periodically shooting any Eclipse or Loader who approached in the face. "Its kind of nonsensical, really."

"Well, its not the content but the intent," Conrad replied, and fired a couple of bursts at the lunatic CEO's battlesuit. "I think Nassana has been, well, dipping too deep into her own keg, I guess."

"Oh, right," Garrus replied in understanding. "You mean she's been gene-modding herself?"

"Well, Maliwan was responsible for a lot of the human genetic-"

The outside wall twenty meters away blew apart in yet another screeching impact, a victory in the Hyperion orbital gunners' quest to knock down every flat plane in the Dantius Towers. Two Hyperion Loaders began to unfold themselves from the crashing debris and flying sparks.

A resounding crack sounded over the echoing rumble of impact and constant howl of gunfire, and one of the Loaders toppled immediately, a leg flying off. The second managed to fully stand up before two rapid bursts struck it in its cyclops eye, shattering it and the machinery behind. The Loader stumbled back a couple of steps, and then crashed onto its back and went still.

"Impressive," Garrus mused, plugging the first Loader in the optics as it tried to push itself up. "Where did you learn to shoot?"

"Oh, here and there," Conrad said as Bloodwing finished ripping the Loader apart. "I learned to use a gun after that raid on Mindoir, a few years ago."

"You lived on Mindoir?" Garrus asked, and turned to shoot someone else, likely in the face again.

"Yeah, but-"

A nearby wall blew apart, and the battlesuit containing the psychotic CEO charged through the gap amid a storm of biotics, spraying flaming and corrosive rounds in multicolored lines of destruction.

"I am going to throw THE BIGGEST RAVE on top of your corpses!"

"So," Garrus yelled as they ran for fresh cover. "Asari psycho?"

"The evidence fits the theory!" Conrad replied, firing wildly behind him. They ducked into another gallery, red and green barrages slashing toward them. A golden beam of light added a burst of its own color to the madness, slashing through walls, krogan, and Eclipse and coming to a halt against Nasanna's barriers.

"Oh, great, Constructors," Garrus muttered.

"Let them come," a deep krogan voice replied, and the pair looked up to see Warlord Okeer standing against the wall as well, switching magazines for his Torgue-Urdnot rifle. "Most of her guards are dead. Her shields are nearly depleted. Once she dies, Hyperion can have this building."

"Yeah, killing her is going to be the hard part," Garrus said, sneaking in a shot against the battlesuit's shields as it turned to shoot at the Constructor.

"-think you have the lasers? I am ALL THE LASERS."

"But that thing doesn't even have lasers on it," Conrad protested.

Reality blew apart a few meters away, arcs of blue-white electricity whipping about, and Lilith emerged. Fire surged around her shoulders, and she held her Maliwan launcher in her hand for a heartbeat, before dismissing it back to digistruct space and replacing it with a shock submachinegun.

"'Sup," she said with a nod to the others, and fired a couple of bursts from her position in the battlesuit's general direction.

Rockets careened past into the battlesuit, prompting another scream of rage. Conrad leaned out to fire a couple of shots as well. The first missed, but the second glanced off the suit's shields.

Naturally, that was when they collapsed, and being a Maliwan suit, the nova system was… impressive.

A fiery blast erupted from the battlesuit, expanding and scorching everything in the room in a torrent of red-gold fury. The few Loaders and krogan in the room with nassana were hurled away to crunch against intact walls, their remains set ablaze.

Conrad and Garrus were sent stumbling back, their shields taking the brunt of the detonation, while Okeer had to crouch, and triggered his armor's emergency fortification systems, wreathing his armor in silvery light. Lilith took the entire blast on her shields, and came out the other end shaking her head in annoyance as she reloaded. The wonders of blue-quality tech.

A dark form tumbled past, trailing smoke, and rolled across the floor. Feron kicked himself back up to his feet, discarding the twisted wreck of metal that was his launcher, and he jabbed an Insta-Health needle into his arm as he ducked close to where the others were recovering.

"Out of ammo already?" Lilith asked, and Feron nodded, drawing another revolver.

"At least her shields are down," he replied, and crouched lower as Nassana screamed in inarticulate fury and started spraying bullets in their general direction.

"-SMASH YOUR FACES through every VID SCREEN I OWN!"

"If they're down," Conrad said quickly, "then I think we can take her out quickly!"

"How?" Okeer asked, his tone eager. "Does it involve prying open her armor and breaking her back one vertebra at a time?"

"Maybe?" Conrad said, his tone uncertain. Lines of corrosive and incendiary fire sliced past overhead, hammering their cover. "Most Lightsuit variants have vulnerabilities, inherent to Maliwan engineering. I'm not an expert, but I know some of their exploits. I think if we-"

A bright red incendiary tracer deflected off a nearby chunk of debris, and slammed through Conrad's unshielded temple. It burst out the other side, leaving a blackened gap.

He fell to the floor in silence.

Mister Torgue stopped pumping iron.

A moment of silence passed through the space van (technically a lightweight luxury spacecraft, but one didn't argue with one so very muscled as Mister Torgue), followed by a faint clang as he set the dumbbells down.

He spun and punched a large red button on the wall next to him, and the holographic projector exploded. Chunks of shrapnel bounced off his iron-hard pectorals, and another holographic projector digistructed in its place. He picked the few bits of shrapnel that managed to pierce his skin (he'd gotten real paranoid about skin piercings after reading those fantasy books about the guys who ate metal and flew around in mists) while the new projector assembled and loaded the livestream from the Dantius Towers.

"Crap, he's still dead," the giant mound of testosterone muttered. He sniffed a couple of times. "I liked that guy!"

After a few moments, he turned and punched a different button. Uncharacteristically, there was no immediate explosion. Mister Torgue recognized that one could generate more detonations by deferring current high-energy chemical reactions in favor of later high-energy chemical reactions.

Reluctantly, he picked up the dumbbells again, and resumed pumping iron as the message went out.

Roland saw Conrad's death on his ECHO. For half a moment he moved to send someone to help him, but the injury report was terminal.

"ANTS ANTS ANTS! I didn't ask for ants, but now I'm going to CRUSH YOU ALL!"

The former Lanceman spun back toward Nassana's rampaging mar machine, and a cold fury settled in his gut. His eyes flickered over the readouts from his ECHO. The penthouse floors were in chaos, and many krogan were dead ("injuries" were irrelevant for krogan, after all). Hyperion numbers were expanding as more and more blasted down from orbit. Eclipse troops were scattered and disorganized, some routing or simply deciding that they weren't getting paid enough for this shit. Even Nassana's surviving bodyguards were fleeing or dead.

But the psychotic CEO was still lethally dangerous. Proof of that fact came as her weapons converged on the Constructor that was still shooting at her, and within seconds the two corrosive guns had peeled apart the Constructor's front end and began eating away at its internals. The machine shuddered to a halt and its power core abruptly exploded, leaving a slagged wreck where it stood.

They had a chance. Hyperion might overrun them, but there was a window to terminate Nassana and escape before that happened. And he wanted the bitch dead. Not just the professional need as before. Now he wanted to see her die.

And within seconds, he had a plan to do that.

"Okeer," he barked. "Position your krogan to keep those Loaders off our backs. And try not to provoke the volus."

"Hm. Understood," Okeer agreed, though from his tone he found those orders more amusing than necessary coming from a human he easily out-aged by an order of magnitude. Nonetheless, he began barking his own commands to his krogan.

"Axton, Zaeed, Vega," Roland called. "Set up on that suit on your side. Put everything you've got into it!" Before waiting for a response, he switched to the others. "Garrus, Seryna, with me, set up here." He marked a location on his ECHO, a section of gallery wall that had yet to be knocked down. He didn't bother issuing orders to the drell, whoever he was. "Lilith-"

The floor shivered from the hollow detonation of a Phaseblast. A second later, another blast erupted just beside the battlesuit, lightning and fire in equal measure washing over the hulking shape. Nassana stumbled half a step to the side, and Lilith emerged back into reality, her fiery wings sweeping up, rising nearly as tall as the battlesuit she was facing. He could easily make out her visor, because it shone with pure golden light.

With a scream of raw fury, the Siren leapt straight up, energy surging through her fingers, and she discharged it directly into the looming battlesuit's snarling sculpted asari face crumpled and twisted under the impact, and the battlesuit took several steps back, as much due to shock on Dantius' side as force from Lilith's explosive punch.

"I'm going to rip you apart for that, bitch," Lilith snarled, her voice barely audible even over the ECHO. Nassana recovered her stance, and bullets and missiles continued hammering the massive war machine's armor from all directions. Nassana lifted a foot to smash Lilith where she stood, but the Siren was already Phaseblasting away to cover. Furious, yes. Stupid, no.

Nassana's leg slammed down where Lilith had stood, shattering floor tiles. A torrent of fire to rival her own weaponry converged on the battlesuit, and Roland added several grenades to the assault. Among the rockets, grenades, and gunfire, the flaming shape of Bloodwing dove and tore at the damaged head of the battlesuit. Roland didn't miss that, and it warned of something else he needed to do. As they poured on the bullets, he sent a message to Angel.

Seconds passed, and no response came among the flood of fire and scrambling mercenaries. Roland sent another message, but Angel didn't reply. That was odd. And maybe bad news.

He isolated Garrus' ECHO and opened a channel.

"Garrus, you guys got here using your own ship, right?" he called.

"Yeah, a shuttle," Garrus replied. "Big enough to get us all on board, including the krogan."

"Go ahead and call it in," Roland said, pausing to fire another couple of bursts of grenades at Nassana. "We'll need to extract fast once we drop her."

"Good idea." Garrus was silent for a moment. "Autopilot engaged. I'll move it in, clear of the Hyperion drops." He paused. "And I might be able to hit that asari psycho with it if I aim right."

Handsome Jack glared at the video feed connecting him to Angel, and calmed the tempest of fury rolling through him as she disobeyed him.

He didn't do too good of a job of it, but he tried.

"Huh, you hear that?" Jack said, and a thin, vindictive smile touched his features. He reached over and pressed a couple of buttons, and then took another small shot from his drink tray.

The shuttle that had borne Axton, Garrus, James, and Bloodwing to the biggest Maliwan-hosted murder-party of the year shot toward the towers. It carried no weapons, but with the ramming prow, it could still force one hell of an extraction.

It accelerated toward the second tower, rising toward the penthouse, ignoring perimeter security thanks to Seryna's codes. Garrus gave it specific orders, planning to drive it straight in, crashing through the damage walls and delivering a hell of a kick in the face to Nassana's war machine.

Then a Hyperion Loader careened off course at Handsome Jack's targeting orders, and smashed through the shuttle's cockpit. A brilliant explosion lit up the twilight over Nos Astra, and debris tumbled toward the street below.

"Shit," Garrus muttered.

The fighting was becoming more frantic, partially because of the abrupt destruction of their immediate extraction, partially because there were still more Loaders arriving, along with Constructors who were digistructing even more Loaders, and partially because Nassana was steadily going more and more berserk at the constant high-velocity attention.

"HOLD STILL SO I CAN MAKE YOU STILL!"

Her fire swept over Axton and Zaeed's position, blasting apart the former's deployed Sabre, and he snarled curses as his significant other was reduced to digistruct light. Before he could retaliate, Lilith reappeared behind Nassana, the very floor scorching around her as she blasted into and out of reality, and the Siren sent a cosmic-powered explosive punch into the back of the battlesuit's knee. It stumbled, but rose again amid so many incoming bullets - a virtual sandstorm of projectiles and munitions - and pivoted to raise its guns.

The Constructor Nassana had killed a minute prior abruptly reentered the fray, wreathed in a shimmering blue mass effect field, and slammed into her already-mangled faceplate. The corpse of the Hyperion robot was immediately pulled back and slammed down into the battlesuit again.

"At long last!" shouted NIFTU CAL, wreathed in biotic power and clutching a toaster in his free hand. He raised the ruined Constructor again and sent it flying toward Nassana once more. "I do battle with the one who tormented me, but who gave me my godly power!"

The wrecked Constructor hurtled down, and slammed to a halt as Nassana snapped one of the battlesuit's arms up and caught it. She skidded back a few meters, ignoring the bullets hammering her armor, and balled the suit's other mechanical fist.

"I'm an atheist," she replied, and punched the mech's corpse. The wreck shot back toward Niftu Cal, whose biotics surged up around him. He let out a cry of surprise and effort, his power closing around the Constructor and slowing it. Chunks of the corpse groaned and shattered as he struggled to stop it from crushing him.

"I am the great wind!" Niftu groaned, setting his feet, and the Constructor ground to a halt centimeters from him. "And I... shall suffer... no HERESY!"

The constructor's remains exploded into a dozen pieces in the grip of NIFTU CAL'S power, and went screaming back toward Nassana's battleshuit. She managed to deflect a couple of them, but others crashed into her, and one jagged piece punched through the armor just to the left of the cockpit. The suit fell backwards tumbling to the floor in a heap.

NIFTU CAL exhaled, waved a dismissive hand, and then fell face forward to the floor, unconscious.

The battle of the titans served as an ample distraction, as everyone else kept firing into Nassana's war machine as she battled the miniscule god. The damage was showing: armor plates were stressed, rents were appearing in the battlesuit's skin, and as it rose, it did so with shaky steps and grinding machinery.

And the Shadow Broker's agent saw his chance.

Feron skidded to a halt next to Vega as he was reloading his grenade rifle.

"Hey, bruiser," the drell agent called. "You got any more grenades?"

"Maybe," Vega replied, and he paused to check his ECHO's SDU display. "Yeah! How many?"

"All of them."

James summoned every grenade he was carrying: half a dozen Torgue-Urdnot-modded MIRVs, bundled together. James tossed them to Feron. The drell caught the bundle and nodded in appreciation, then bolted back out into the warzone.

Crossfire from multiple guns hammered Nassana as she stood, bullets gouging holes in damaged areas such as the legs and the mangled faceplate. Seryna warped armor plating where it was weakest, and well-placed rocket and grenade fire from James and Roland blew apart plating. Zaeed and Axton kept pouring on precise automatic fire. Garrus' rifle found holes in the suit's defenses, and Bloodwing dove between the torrents of bullets to strike at Nassana wherever she could.

Outside the ring of violence converging on Nassana, the krogan held the line, fighting a savage struggle against an ever-increasing number of Hyperion machines. With the collapse of Eclipse's troops, they fought unchallenged against Okeer's warriors, and slowly ground the krogan down.

Lilith practically hugged Nassana's suit, blasting in and out of reality close to her legs and striking at her joints, blazing wings surging out behind her. Raw fury kept her going, ignoring the pain of the power pouring through her body, her eyes brilliant behind her helmet's visor. Lightning and fire cascaded off of her as she kept attacking, punching, shooting, and exploding the psychopathic bitch who had killed Conrad.

Then Nassana screamed, spun, and smashed an arm across Lilith's back just before she could phase away. The Siren was picked up and hurled across the ruined gallery. She spun around as she fell, phasing out just before impact, and reappearing a few meters away, shaking her head. Her eyes burned with fury undimmed.

"THERE'S NOT ENOUGH AMMO ON ALL OF ILLIUM TO KILL ME!" Nassana screamed, and she stood there, a waterfall of munitions washing over her, and she ignored it all.

Feron dropped down from seemingly nowhere, landing on Nassana's back, just above the gaps that Bloodwing had been systematically tearing into the suit above the cockpit. A flare of light surround his left hand, and his right hefted the grenades he'd taken from James. A curving, red-orange blade formed over his forearm, and he jammed it down into the damaged armor. The blade shattered, but it tore open the plating, and a spurt of purple asari blood erupted.

Nassana screamed in pain and confusion, and Feron leapt straight up, grenades gone.

Lilith dove for cover, as did everyone else.

Nassana Dantius, Maliwan CEO and professional psychopath, did not end up being the galaxy's largest fragmentation grenade. But she did rank in the top one hundred.

The detonation would have been deafening, if everyone present didn't already wear ear protection. The battered remains of the prototype battlesuit embedded themselves in the walls and ceiling. Her personal SDU was destroyed, collapsing into itself, and it ejected all of her personal possessions: purple and blue-quality military gear, many of them Maliwan-engineered, joined a collection of credit chits and personal possessions, all of which tumbled to the floor around the crater where the battlesuit had once stood.

Cheers sounded from all directions, and Axton and James scrambled forward toward the raining SDU remains, while Seryna and Garrus moved with a bit less eagerness and a lot more caution. Of course, that was the natural reaction to a big SDU collapse; looting the ejected contents of a big SDU system held by a wealthy enemy or the crew of a war machine was a time-honored tradition. They picked up equipment marked with blue and purple indicators, scanned them with their omnitools, and then broke them down into digistruct motes.

Roland ignored that, however, and looked across the room toward Lilith. The Siren had not joined in the looting. Instead, she crouched next to a body that lay behind some debris, and shook her head. The burning wings were gone, and her posture was exhausted.

"Lilith," he started to call, but her helmet rose toward him. The golden glow had faded from her visor.

"I know," she replied, standing up. She understood. Conrad was gone.

Roland turned back toward the others as they picked over Nassana's remains, and found Zaeed standing next to him, the scarred mercenary giving him a quizzical look.

"Damn shame," Zaeed said, nodding to Conrad's body. "All for the better though, considering."

"What do you mean?" Roland asked.

"Aside from the fact that our extraction's gone, most of our krogan meatshields are dead, and Hyperion's still dropping Loaders?" Zaeed replied. "Didn't you need Nassana intact because she had the encryption key on her omnitool?"

Roland blinked, looked back across the room, and realized that, along with the rest of her, Nassana's omnitool had likely been atomized when Feron killed her.

"...oops?" the drell said over the ECHO.

That was about the time when a pair of krogan mercenaries retreated into the gallery, firing their weapons. Everyone spun toward the abrupt gunfire, to find Loaders approaching the destroyed room from multiple directions.

"Defensive perimeter!" Roland barked, and redeployed his Scorpio. He could hear Axton's Sabre slamming down and unfolding, and Lilith blasted out of reality and reappeared among a group of Loaders. Bloodwing sliced through one machine as it plodded into the room, and Garrus put a bullet into another's optics.

"I thought we just got done with this crap!" Seryna shouted as she hurled a Loader off the balcony to crash down into the floors below. More krogan were retreating into the room, Okeer barking orders at them. James hefted another grenade rifle, putting explosives into the cyclopian mechs. But as fast as they destroyed the Hyperion war machines, more arrived, either dropping from orbit or assembled by the Constructors already inside the penthouse.

Roland didn't reply to Seryna. He keyed Angel's frequency again, but didn't get a response.

The mechanical tide closed in.

Handsome Jack drummed his fingers on his armrest, scowling in anger.

"You see, I had a good reason to keep them alive," he said, holding up another half-shot peering at the liquor. "I was actually going to let them get away after they killed Nassana. Let them think the Loaders were trying to kill them. But then that Broker agent had to kill Nassana without saving the encryption key. And the scientist who could interpret a lot of the data died too."

He shook his head, threw back the glass, and started rummaging around for some pretzels.

"So now," he said, "I've got no reason to not kill them." He chuckled. "Actually, I think it might just be easier to just splatter 'em all and take that data off their corpses. What do you think, Angel?"

Silence.

"Angel?"

No response.

The crack and tinkle of shattered glass filled the office, and Handsome Jack looked down at his hand. Blood welled up from his fingers and palm, where the shot glass had been crushed between clenched digits. Bits of bloodied crystal shone in the red-gold light from the distant star.

He peered down at his own blood in curiosity for a moment, before he started idly yanking the red-stained shards from his skin and turned his eyes back to the display, and waited for his minions to finish the killing.

The Loaders pressed in, ignoring their own wrecked companions. Dozens lay destroyed around the entrances to the gallery, and dozens more pushed over the mechanical corpses, attacking with a relentless fury that Roland swore he hadn't seen just a few minutes ago.

But his team - all of them, including Garrus' group and Okeer's faceless horde of krogan - were fighting back with savage ferocity, tinged with desperation. Seryna was surrounded by a near-constant storm of blue light as she hurled the enemy with altered gravity. Axton and Zaeed fought back to back, cursing and insulting each other as they held one side. Closer in, James drove his fist through a Loader's optics, sending it tumbling end over end.

A few meters away, Lilith blasted into sight, shooting a Loader with a pistol in one hand, and chucking a small SDU she'd looted from an Eclipse corpse toward Roland.

"Ammo!" she shouted, and he caught it. Not bothering to synch it, he simply accessed it with his omnitool and hit the "eject all" function. Piles of munitions - solid ammo blocks, grenades, rocket packs, boxes of bullets - tumbled out in a storm of digistruct lines and motes, and covered the floor around him.

"This would be easier if we had that biotic god backing us up," Roland muttered, calmly reloading from the pile at his feet. He couldn't hear the volus' snoring over the chaos of the holding action. "Okeer!"

"Yes?" the krogan warlord replied, sounding only vaguely perturbed as he headbutted a Loader to nonfunctionality.

"You got in here somehow," Roland shouted as he paused to reload. "You got a way out?"

"My ship has already departed with my precious cargo," the korgan snarled. "I did not expect such resistance when I moved against Nassana."

"So that's a no?" Roland asked, and then ducked behind a chunk of masonry as big as an aircar as a grenade landed nearby. It detonated, and Roland stood up once the shrapnel had flown past. He gunned down another GUN Loader, but the SGT Loader stomping up behind it pushed the falling mechanical corpse aside. Roland, Okeer, and Lilith poured fire into it for a couple of seconds, blasting it apart.

"It is an 'unlikely'," Okeer replied. Roland cursed again, and keyed Angel once more.

"Angel, do you read?" he shouted. "We need extraction now!"

Silence again, and he shook his head. Roland brought up the team channel. Maybe if a couple of them could break through and take out one of the Constructors, it would halt the tide long enough to-

Angel's face appeared at the top of Roland's HUD, her features placid and controlled, in that oddly distorted shape once again.

"Everyone," she shouted, her words in stark contrast to her appearance, "get down!"

No one - human, turian, asari, krogan, or cyber-bird - ignored her warning. They threw themselves to the floor.

Then the world became lasers.

Glorious, eye-watering blue beams slashed through the outer walls of the tower directly behind Roland's team, melting metal and ceramics and what few bits of graceful architecture and priceless art remained in the gallery. They cut into the Loaders, blasting them into glowing ribbons of molten metal.

And then Roland heard the wondrous roaring of spacecraft engines. He rolled over and looked out the gaping hole the ship had blasted. For a moment, his heart froze, as he saw the sleek, aerodynamic lines and black and red of an advanced Hyperion warship. But the dagger-like warship pivoted, and an airlock opened on its port side. GARDIAN laser batteries tracked back and forth, and fired blue laser beams into the penthouse on either side of the embattled gallery, cutting down Loaders.

"You guys better get on board!" Joker's voice suddenly shouted over the ECHO.

Roland didn't argue. Sudden hope and relief battled in his blood as he started yelling for them to evacuate. GARDIAN lasers burned back and forth, blowing apart Hyperion mechs. Roland guessed they had been turned down to near-minimal levels in order to keep from cooking everyone alive from heat transfer.

He expected the escape to turn into a hasty scramble. He expected Hyperion bullets to cut down someone else as they fled. But the GARDIAN batteries covered them as they bounded back toward the airlock, shooting as they ran. Roland and his Scorpio held their position, adding their fire to the laser cannons. He saw the rest of the team rushing to the airlock: battered krogan warriors, hesitant to abandon the fight but urged on by Okeer's shouts. James helping toss people across the short gap. Bloodwing dive-bombing Loaders before Garrus recalled her.

Lilith paused near the airlock as the survivors escaped. Her eyes moved back to Conrad's body, and she collapsed something into digistruct space. Conrad's personal ECHO, holding his data. She shook her head and turned toward Roland, waving for him to follow. He broke down the Scorpio, and turned to run. His legs pumped, his heart pounded, and his barriers flashed as random bullets bounced off. He reached the shattered wall and leapt, body hanging in the air for a heartbeat before he crashed into the metal floor of the Hyperion frigate. He rolled, hitting the wall and pushed himself into a sitting position.

"That's everyone!" he heard Lilith shouting. She stood beside Roland, and jabbed a holographic button by the door. The airlock doors slid shut, cutting off the noise and insanity of the Dantius Towers.

Exhaustion was a physical thing, bearing down on him in the abrupt silence and shifting gravity as the warship started to lift.

"Hey, you get hit?" Lilith asked, and he looked up at her. She reached down with a hand, and he took it, though his arms felt like lead.

"No, I'm fine," he said, standing up with a grunt. "Where did this thing come from?"

"We, uh," Joker piped in from just around the corner. "Kind of stole it. From Handsome Jack's personal berth."

Roland peered around the corner of the airlock, and looked into the forward cockpit. Joker sat in the pilot's chair, and a taped-up Claptrap was wedged into the copilot's spot and plugged into the systems. In the other direction, Roland saw a crew corridor, where all the other survivors were milling about. Okeer and his krogan, Axton, Garrus, and James checking each other over, Zaeed settling down in one of the crew chairs. He spotted Seryna clambering over the remains of a Hyperion Loader crushed in a set of doors further back, which opened into what looked like a CIC. The drell, whoever he was, was with her, peering about in acute interest.

"You look like hell, by the way," Joker said. He was bloody and had enough scrapes and grease on him that he couldn't say much in that regard himself. Roland spotted a bloodstain nearby, and a check showed the splattered remains of a Hyperion engineer in full combat kit slumped in a corner of the cockpit. It looked like someone had smashed the poor bastard repeatedly against the wall at high speeds.

"You stole this ship from Handsome Jack himself?" Roland said, and was shocked at the weary tone of his voice. He settled into one of the bridge chairs. Gunnery station, it looked like. Lilith exhaled, and chuckled quietly.

"I don't think he'll be happy about that," she mused.

"No," Angel's voice cut in. "I highly doubt he is happy at all with what just happened."

Joker suddenly leaned forward, staring at the screen before him. Dots and symbols were moving around what looked like a sensor plot of the skies over Nos Astra. Roland was too tired to make sense of it all.

"Yeah, neither is Maliwan," the pilot said, his tone becoming alarmed. "I've got us on an escape vector, but we've got three frigates and a cruiser in low orbit, diverting to intercept."

"Can you get us clear?" Roland asked, sitting up.

"Got to clear atmosphere before I jump," Joker said with a grimace. Claptrap mumbled something through the tape over his speakers. "Yeah, yeah, I know, screw Nos Astra, but we can't FTL in atmosphere."

"Weapons are armed and charged," Angel added. "Shields at full power. We might be able to blast through them."

"Its gonna be messy," Joker hissed. Roland nodded, keying the team ECHO and ship intercom.

"Everyone, get secured," he called. "We're not out of this yet. Brace for enemy fire!" A torrent of curses sounded up the crew corridor behind them, and he could make out "pyjacks," "bollocks," and some gratuitous Spanish from James.

Roland and Lilith secured themselves at the chairs on the bridge, although Roland himself had no idea what to do at the gunnery station. Lilith, meanwhile, began to bring up the sensor feeds like she knew what she was doing.

He turned his eyes back to the main sensor plot, and frowned. He could make out some of what Joker was talking about, and guessed at the craft that were moving to intercept their newly-stolen frigate. But…

"Joker, you said there were four ships moving to intercept, right?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Because it looks like there's five."

"Huh," Joker looked back to the sensors.

"He's right," Lilith said, but shook her head. "But that fifth one is massive, and…" She paused.

"That's not a Maliwan IFF."

The Maliwan flotilla were running their engines hot to reach a proper intercept vector for the Hyperion ship escaping Nos Astra. The Dynamic Incident was hiding amid orbital traffic, and with Hyperion owning the orbital defense and sensor grids, they couldn't track it down among the confusion of signal traffic. Unable to find the Hyperion cruiser that was bombing their headquarters, they instead settled on the Hyperion frigate carrying the ones who had ransacked the penthouse and killed their CEO.

The ships were flat, sleek craft, with rounded edges and elegant lines, shaped more like fish or sea serpents than the blockier designs of other human corporations. The asari influence was clear in their structure. They were painted in blues and oranges, and glowing lines ran along their flanks and across the narrow, lance-like protrusions of their weapon batteries.

The ships moved through the outer edges of the atmosphere, weapons tracking and preparing to shoot down the Decisive Deception.

Then the lead frigate took a magnetic accelerator round straight through its bow shields. The round punched through the front of the ship and then detonated, blasting hunks of elegant hull and internals into space.

The rest of the Maliwan ships wheeled about to face the juggernaut that was charging toward them, thrusters blazing in a massive wash of raw power. The massive ship was nearly a kilometer in length, and roughly cylindrical in shape, though blocky sections protruded from the hull seemingly at random. It bristled with gun emplacements, small and large, long and short, all covering the hull. The warship was painted with red and black racing stripes, intermixed with enormous black and white checkerboard patterns, and the bow was shaped into the form of a giant metal fist.

Running from bow to aft, in giant black and white letters, were the words TUAKS: FISTING BOOMING SHITPUNCHER.

Abruptly, every comm system in Nos Astra flickered, and Mister Torgue's muscled specter appeared on every vid screen and holographic projector in the city, as well as in most of the ships in orbit.

"I'M GONNA GET FINED SO MUCH FOR THIS AND I DON'T GIVE A F***!" He leapt up onto his chair - a massive throne made of guns and missile launchers - and began playing a thrashing air guitar solo.

"MEEEEEEEEEOWOWOWOMEEDLYMEEDLYMEEDLYMEEDLYOWOWOWOOOOOOOOOOOOWOOOOOWAAAAAAAHWAAAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAAAAAOWWWWW!"

And as he did so, the Torgue-Urdnot Ass-Kicking Ship FISTING BOOMING SHITPUNCHER plowed into the Maliwan fleet, guns blazing and projectiles blossoming outward like a murderous testosterone-fueled flower. The two surviving frigates wilted under the fire, and despite their speed, agility, and advanced weapons, they lasted only seconds in direct combat with SHITPUNCHER.

The cruiser withstood the bombardment, however, and shock cannons raked SHITPUNCHER's shields, massive broadside corrosive batteries hammering its armor. But the Torgue-Urdnot battlecruiser surged in close, its batteries blasting into the Maliwan vessel's shields. Explosive shells struck the hull, blasting deep, hurling debris into the void.

The Maliwan ship's captain realized too late what SHITPUNCHER was about to do, and tried to maneuver out of the way. But the Torgue-Urdnot battlecruiser poured on the speed, jetting toward the wounded vessel, and seconds before it hit, the battlecruiser digistructed an array of explosive panels across the fingers of the bow-fist. It struck the cruiser dead center, and the exploding prow of SHITPUNCHER sheared through weakened hull plating. With a tremendous groan of tortured metal, accompanied by a vast chorus of terrified curses from its crew, the Maliwan cruiser broke in apart, intact sections blasted to pieces by the batteries of SHITPUNCHER.

While the Maliwan fleet was being Torgue'd and Urdnot'd, the Decisive Deception attained orbit. FTL drives spooled up, and the stolen Hyperion frigate jumped away from Illium to the tune of a sick air guitar solo being blasted across the planet.

As Deception escaped the system, Angel closed her eyes, and released that pulsing, singing thread of power. She settled back, but retained her link to the frigate as it went at faster-than-light. She didn't know how, precisely, she was able to maintain that connection when the ship was moving so fast, especially without a comm buoy or quantum-entanglement communicator.

Then again, no one really understood how Sirens worked, even after thousands of years of study.

"Angel."

She grit her teeth again, and took a long, worried breath, before opening her eyes and acknowledging Jack. His face appeared before hers, lips pressed in a thin line, and the eyes behind the mask stapled to his face were smoldering.

"Yes, Jack," she said.

"You and I are going to have a serious talk," he said. "At the dinner."

Angel shuddered. The yearly dinner was only a couple of days away. Things were going to be extra ugly, this year.

"Everyone's going to be there, aren't they?" she asked, and Jack's frown turned into a smile. That was even more worrying.

"Yep. So be ready. This will be fun!" He paused. "Now, I need you come back. I'm worried about you. I think you've been experiencing too much freedom."

"Yes, Jack," she whispered, and felt another chill.

The connection terminated, but Angel didn't relax. The lack of a towering rage at his game being disrupted and the people he tried to kill escaping… well, that just made her more worried about what he was going to do in the future. Still, there was little she could do now.

Angel reached up and pulled the network link out of the port in the implants on the side of her head, and stood. The hotel room - a large, expansive suite on the top floor of one of the many luxury hotels on Illium - went dim as the glow faded from the tattoos on the left side of her body, and the white, ethereal wings faded.

"Wilhelm," she called, her voice tired. "Release the security cocoon. Jack wants us to leave."

She began packing up her equipment, the computers and network systems needed to let her extend herself into the extranet, to turn her particular talents into true power, and tried to fight back her fears regarding Jack's plans.

The others were safe now. Or at least as safe as they could be on a Hyperion warship.

"Begin recovery," Handsome Jack said, his voice tight and angry. Those little shits should have died, even with Angel's help. But, well…

It didn't matter if they lived or died. Either way, they'd serve a purpose.

"I want a full sweep of the entire building," Jack continued, watching as his Loaders began to work their way down through the Dantius Towers. "Recover everything. Corpses, tech. Especially any pieces of that battlesuit Nassana was using. Get everything you can before Maliwan sends backup or other corps start launching their own scavengers."

"What about the volus?" asked the Dynamic Incident's captain.

"He's hilarious. Bring him too," Jack said. "Don't forget that toaster, either!"

He settled back in his chair, and watched the video feeds. Burning Maliwan ships in orbit, and the SHITPUNCHER doing donuts through the debris field. The Dantius Towers in ruins, almost their entire security force killed. His frigate stolen, though that wasn't a big loss. He had a dozen more just like it.

No, if anything, the only real loss is that he had let Angel think she could disobey him. Unacceptable. Everything else though…

He started giggling, and threw back another bit of liquor, before checking on updates from the other side of the galaxy.

Everything else was going according to plan.

Codex - Technology - Hyperion - Constructors

A Constructor is a class of Hyperion heavy assault mech designed to secure high-value areas and support orbital assaults with a combination of massive firepower and localized digistruct capacity. Constructors are built to be orbitally deployed, and carry a sizable SDU system capable of storing dozens of Hyperion mechs and drones. A powerful digistruct module is able to assemble a stored Loader or drone in a matter of seconds. Because of their value on the battlefield - and tendency to draw massive fire upon being discovered - Constructors are extremely heavily armored. "Bolt-on" kinetic barrier generators are often attached by support Loaders or drones upon landing to further bolster defenses.

Constructor armament consists of a powerful but short-ranged cutting laser, a heavy missile launcher, and local ground-shock system designed to disrupt close-range sabotage. Despite this armament, most Constructors prefer to deploy Loaders - preferably out of enemy sight - to secure the area. However, many Hyperion commanders attempt to drop their Constructors in the middle of a combat zone to take advantage of their firepower. Objections from the Constructors' VIs are ignored. Heavier versions of Constructors mount artillery systems or additional lasers. Other Constructor models, referred to as "Overseers" are outfitted with tactical support modules to enable their local Loaders greater coordination and efficiency. These units are sometimes outfitted with extraneous functions, such as the "dance" module (actually a disguised self-destruct system).

Because of the limited storage capacity of their SDU systems, Constructors are not ideal for long-term security. When used on the defensive, they usually are either deployed from orbital or airborne platforms in response to armed intrusion, or stationed at key points where they can deploy Loaders when an attack occurs or bring their firepower to bear. For prolonged engagements, multiple Constructors can be deployed, or Loaders dropped in support can bring additional SDU modules to "reload" the Constructor as it finishes digistruction.

Because of their mass, Constructors are slow to move. Experiments with limited mass effect fields to lighten the mechs have shown some promise, although severe and explosive accidents have occurred when both mass effect fields and digistruction systems have activated at the same time.

BONUS SCENE!

The heat of Therum was oppressive. Lava boiled not half a kilometer away from the pair of parked Grizzly infantry fighting vehicles, their turrets facing outward from the remains of the small camp that had housed a pack of savage bandits. Emphasis on had.

"Are we seriously considering this?" asked the blue-haired Siren. Maya leaned back against one of the Grizzlies, eyeing the rest of her team while keeping an eye out for any of Krom's thugs who had survived.

"NEED IT. WANT. HAVE TO HAVE IT!"

"Hey, its what he's asking for," replied Brick, towering over everyone. He picked a bit of shrapnel from his teeth.

"FACESHOT! BOOM! SQUISH! YAY!"

"Personally," added Nihlus, as he rifled through the dead bandits for intel on what Krom's men were planning, "I consider it a waste of ammunition."

"At the sound of the bell, it will be Face-Shooting O'Clock! DING!"

"Please just make a decision," Tali added as she inspected Chitikka for any serious damage. "I can feel my sanity slipping away just listening to him."

"I know you're weighing the moral pros and cons of doing what I ask, but let me assure that FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST SHOOT ME IN THE FAAAAAAAAAACE!"

"Fine," interrupted the last member of their group. He drew a pistol, leveled it, and shot Face McShooty in his face.

"THANK YOU!"

The leader of their expedition holstered his pistol and turned to the rest of the team.

Commander John Shepard, currently the only human Spectre, renowned war hero, son of Admiral Hannah Shepard, and brother to one of the most notorious Sirens in the galaxy, nodded toward the Grizzlies.

"Can we get on with this story now?"

Author's Notes: Wow. That was a long one, wasn't it? Took me a long time to write it, because it got revised several times. Nassana originally wasn't piloting that badass suit, Conrad died much later, and everything about Handsome Jack and Angel was different in the original version; Angel didn't originally Phaseshift until the very end of the chapter, but she got her spin much earlier in this version. I liked how it turned out, though I had to sacrifice this great scene where Joker kept trying to turn on the Deception's systems while escaping, only for Jack to switch them off with this huge trollface.