PHOENIX RESURGENT
A Mass Effect Story by Vyrexuviel
Disclaimer: The author of this story does not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Thunder screamed. Tali screamed within it. Struggling to stabilize her patient, Legion's calm voice inquiring how it could be of assistance, focusing entirely on stopping the blood. So much blood! She's trying not to think who this is, what he means to her, what he meant to her, to them all. She's trying to stay on task, stop the bleeding, keep him conscious, forcing the medigel down his throat if she had to, to keep him from slipping from her grasp. Keelah, she's trying so hard...
The sounds of thunder echoed and ricocheted around the room, the shattered glass shattering again under the deafening onslaught, its faint tinkle lost in the maelstrom of noise.
"Hold on, Garrus, just hold on!"
{Earlier}
Shepard's hands were fast, damn fast. She'd honed her razor edge of reflex until she could shatter seconds with gunfire. Even before her transformation, she'd been clocked at just a shave under three hundredths of a second for draw-aim-fire-holster, and that with an ancient relic that didn't fold away when it wasn't in use. Fixed-barrel weapons were old, but still serviceable when needs be, and she could still hit the right wing off a fly in mid-flight.
Now, her hands were blindingly fast, snatching at the cold butts of her new guns and ripping them from the magclamps on her thighs with inhuman speed. Her fingers were still wrapping into place before she had them pointed at the nearest freelancers, and the sudden bass thunder of them, small little bolts of electricity tasting the air as the slugs left them, ripped new holes in the tattered silence. Seventeen shots were fired in two seconds; a blistering tempo if there ever was one, and the human firebird snapped a fresh clip into the cooling port in her left gun, still firing with the right. More gunfire joined the symphony, heavy, slow bass provided by Legion, and a throaty roar offered by Tali's rebuilt shotgun, spewing clouds of whirling slivers to chew through shields in heartbeats.
Startled by the unexpected assault, the mercs started to turn. Shepard's eyes were all-seeing, spotting the looks of shock forming on their faces as they turned, the thunder of her guns smashing through shield, armor, flesh and bone with terrifying ease. The screams of the wounded briefly drowned out all else, for each and every bullet had taken out either an elbow or a knee. What was the point of being that bloody good, if you couldn't use it to save some life in a hellhole like this?
Tali worked the pump rapidly on her new, larger shotgun. Legion and the Geth had helped her with a few refinements to recoil-based reloading mechanisms that the Geth had been working on over the past few decades. They had started off with the recoil-based systems used back when chemical explosions were the preferred methods of weapon propulsion in quarian society, using a bit of that explosion to ready the next bullet and charge for firing. They'd used something similar to help reload their rifles a trifle faster, but anything that got rounds downrange with as much accuracy faster was worth a look, even if it was geth designed. The new system broke off a segment of the crystalline-metal ammo block and pre-cracked the slug so that it'd explode into a shower of fine, spinning shards when fired, making it -extremely- effective at breaking shields and shredding unprotected flesh.
She'd initially been horrified when Legion popped out of cover on Freedom s Progress, her shotgun pointed at the Geth's sensor cluster and about to pull the trigger when Shepard stepped between them. It had taken the once-more-living spectre several minutes of talking and actually physically restraining the quarian to keep Tali from killing the geth construct, but eventually Shepard had talked her down. She was still skeptical even when Legion took off with the two of them, heading to the advance base (and boy, had that been a nasty shock!), but one thing stood out in her mind like a sine wave in static: The Geth Didn't Want Rannoch!
They'd been programmed originally to keep the planet clean and tidy, domestic servants and maintenance drones, given rudimentary AI to help them keep things tidy without being told how to go about it. The military applications had been realized instantly, of course, but that core programming was so basic to the Geth programming language that it was difficult to eradicate completely. So, after they had driven the Quarians off-world, the Geth had returned to their original duties, keeping the cities clean and well stocked, even if no quarians were there to eat the spoiling food, keeping the refresher units clean (hardly that difficult anymore, with no organics using it), and repairing the damage done in the Geth Insurrection.
And now, they wanted to give it BACK!
Tali had spent a good long time in shock when Legion had proposed such a trade: a backing down of the Quarian military force, at least towards the Geth, in return for their homeworld. Her father would freak, so would most of the admiralty board, but Admiral Koris would be a strutting peacock (she'd seen vids of the gorgeous birds from a Terran zoo once) over the coup. His apologist faction would be dancing in their ships when the news broke. She wondered what it would be like to stand on a planet she could call her own
A bullet whipped past her hood, notching the soft fabric, and Tali swore vehemently as she ducked behind cover. Her scream followed a splintered second later as her helmet faceplate suddenly crazed from the impact of a high-velocity round.
Archangel stared through his scope, madibles slack, at the picture before him. He didn't know who the Quarian was, though the way she worked that shotgun of hers put him in mind of the imp who usually hung out in the engineering spaces back on the Normandy. Tali had been a perpetual thorn in the side of his image as a tough-minded no-nonsense soldier, and had actually had him laughing so hard at one point with her particularly amusing tales of misshaps on the Migrant fleet that he was forced to lean against the Abomination that was the Mako for support. The fact that she had a captured Geth platform in tow, and was using it to snipe her enemies pointed either to a truely remarkable change in the fortunes of the Migrant Fleet, or overwhelming luck on the side of the hooded Quarian.
But what really had him staring through his scope like a rookie was the figure that was out in front of them. He knew her. KNEW her. Past tense. She had to be dead now, but here she was, dancing the old familiar dance that he and she had danced so often two years prior. Her stance, her easy grace, the almost acrobatic fighting style Everything about her triggered that indefinable sense that lets a warrior identify his comrandes in arms on an evershifting battlefield, and right now those senses were screaming at him. In a single glance, he knew that the human woman whirling through the confused and panicing mob of freelance mercs could be no one but Her.
It was only fitting that at that moment, his helmet's music system began to softly play a more recent tune: "No matter what scars you bear, whatever uniform you wear. You can fight like a krogan, or run like a zephyr, but you'll never get the better of Commander Shepard."
Shepard's world slowed at the sound of Tali's scream. Her mind, already running a million miles a moment, switched into some sort of overdrive, and things slowed still more. Almost without thinking about it, she switched her suit's cryo system to max, the added cold increasing her physical speed as more of her body's neural structure transitioned to its superconducting state. Electrons flowed freely through her nerve waveguides, activating piezoelectric muscles with a speed unequaled by any organic race. Electricity was her lifeblood, and combat her element. Her eyes traced the battlefield, scanning for targets with almost mechanical precision, as her arms and legs danced a complicated whirlwind, always maintaining her center, but twisting, ducking, diving, spinning, flipping to the beat of war.
Locating Tali s assailant was hardly difficult, and Shepard quickly zeroed in on the merc with the assault rifle. It had been a lucky shot, one the man couldn't have repeated if his life depended on it, which unfortunately for him, it did. Her arms swung, bringing to bear both guns. Electricity sparked from their muzzles as she sent arc after arc through them, partially-molten slugs screaming downrange from their maws and into the unfortunate mercenaries shields with trip-hammer force. A few seconds and several devastating rounds of amunition later and the man fell back, hacking blood from the round that had blew through his chest. Shepard then fell sideways, one arm dropping as another merc swung a slow, lazy fist at her. An armoured leg pistoned out, catching the man off-balance, just under the armpit. A sickening crunch and the man's suddenly-shocked expression told the tale of a dislocated or destroyed join. Then she spun, her other leg coming up and around with terrrifying speed, catching the back of his helmet and silencing his scream before it could begin as his neck shattered. She completed the cartwheel, bringing both guns up and blazing.
They. Had. Hurt. Her. Teammate.
Her eyes blazed with barely contained power and fury. They would PAY.
'Step one: check suit integrity.' The voice of her old instructor cut through Tali's incipient panic. She fumbled at her left wrist for the omnitool readout and gave a huge sigh of relief. Despite her cracked faceplate, she hadn't lost suit containment, a miracle in itself. That round certainly had her name on it, but it didn't quite have the punch to reunite her with the ancestors.
'Step two: initiate repairs' She didn't have a full clean-room in which to remove and replace her faceplate, so that was out. She was just damn lucky the metaglass hadn't shattered entirely. She fumbled for an emergency repair kit as she slithered behind cover, almost dumping the contents in her haste to find and apply the quickseal to her faceplate. It wouldn't do much for the integrity of the fractured metaglass, but it'd reduce the visibility problems a damaged faceplate would impose. The thick, oily paste was easy to smear on, and quickly seeped into the cracks, making them less visually jaring. Her in-helmet HUD was shot to hell, but at least she could still see.
Unfortunately, she'd left her shotgun where she'd fallen. Five meters out of cover with a fusilade of gunfire keeping it company. With the softest of curses, Tali braced herself and rolled out of cover, snatching up her shotgun and coming up in a crouch beside a crate, just as a merc broke and fled, trying to get back across the bridge. She didn't hesitate, putting three rounds into him at knee level. The tiny metallic splinters probably wouldn't cause any serious lasting damage to a hardsuited target, they lacked the mass and velocity to chew through armor, but it did put him out for the count with his shields down and his right leg badly chewed by the several dozen spinning splinters.
'I hope you were the one that shot me, bastard.'
Archangel's rifle barked and another merc fell, a neat hole drilled through his helmet. While the target-rich environment was a pleasant change from the long-distance and sparse field he had before, he knew that with this number of mercs headed this way, it was only a matter of time before some of them made it past his field of fire and he was forced to retreat to his next line of defense. Among the screaming, shouting, crying, and other goings on down on the bridge, a very familiar shriek sounded. He knew the voice. His head snapped around to stare as the hooded quarian crawled behind a crate, fumbling at her waist.
"Tali?" His mandibles parted wider, a Turian smile, his scope tracking her for a second.
"Nah, couldn't be." She returned to the Migrant Fleet shortly after Shepard was awarded the Nova with Clusters, the highest military commendation the Council offered, after the Battle of the Citadel. It had been a tearful parting on many sides, with Liara, Shepard, Ashley and Tali all spending a great amount of time together in the few days before she had to leave.
Movement caught his other eye, and he shifted the scope. His mandibles sagged slightly, watching the figure he knew was Shepard. "Spirits, she's FAST!"
She spun, kicked, cartwheeled, and fired her weapons with preternatural speed, no longer like a soldier on the battlefield, more like a goddess stalking her prey. The sight left him a little breathless. Then her open faceplate tilted up towards his nest. That sight took his breath away entirely. It was indeed Shepard's face within that open metaglass enclosure, but she looked... 'Frozen. A bluish skin tone that wouldn't look too out of place on an asari, hair the color of driving snow, and eyes...
'By all the spirits, her EYES!' They glowed with an inner fire that had nothing to do with battle-lust. They held a leashed power that struck a primal cord deep within him. Turians had been a predator species for too long to have so quietly given up their instincts, and on more than a few occasions such instincts had kept him alive. Right now, every fiber of his being told him that the woman down there was an Apex Predator, one that wouldn't hesitate to kill him if he so much as breathed wrong. And every merc down there had apparently breathed wrong, as her impossibly loud guns barked at a blinding tempo, tearing through shield, armor, flesh and bone, mowing them down like wheat to a scythe. He lost sight of her as she strode beneath his nest, and sat shivering slightly for a few seconds.
"Shepard, if that really is you, I hope you kicked the Devil's ass before you came back..."
BOOM!
The thunder of that monster gun in her hand was deafening in the enclosed space. The last merc fell, Shepard holstering her gun with insane speed, one hand gesturing towards the open balcony as she glanced over her shoulder in Tali's direction. Legion nodded and stalked off over there, as she nerved herself and took the left side of the stairs as Shepard took the right. The top was an open concourse around to another balcony, overlooking the bridge. Tali gripped her shotgun tighter as Shepard spun around the column, but it seemed that the last merc had indeed fallen before they got to the stairs. She stepped around behind Shepard as the former ('or is she still?') Spectre stalked cautiously down the corridor and into the larger lounge area that encompassed the overlook.
Shepard twisted around the last corner, noted the lone figure against the far wall, long-barreled rifle in hand, and lowered her guns a little. "Archangel?"
The figure raised a hand, taking one last shot at a straggler that had found cover and somehow survived the carnage. It turned, setting the gun down, and taking a seat on the edge of a planter before unsealing the helmet. Tali's eyes widened as the turian face came into view. a very familiar face indeed.
Garrus set his helmet down, sounding weary as he murmured back, "Shepard. I thought you were dead."
Shepard's eyes widened in surprise, "Garrus! What the heck are you doing here?" Her lips spread in a wide smile, her arms flung wide as she stepped toward him. A number of minutia clicked home in that motion, little things about how he carried himself, how he sounded. 'He's tired. Bone tired. I wonder how long he's been awake, fighting this holding action...'
Her old turian friend's mandibles twitched slightly. "Good to see you too."
"I'm just surprised to see you!" She gave him a wry, half grin.
"You and me both. Still, it's good to see a friendly face. Killing mercs is hard work, especially on my own."
Shepard opened her mouth to reply when a distinct clanking whine came from the bridge. Garrus reacted sluggishly. 'He really is bone-tired. Exoskelleton. Whatever.' Shepard moved to the edge of the balcony, crouching and glancing swiftly over the edge. "Ahhh, fuck, not another of those heavy mechs..."
Tali slipped up next to her, Legion moving to the far end of the balcony from Garrus, to cover more of the bridge that the other sniper couldn't. "Eclipse markings?"
Shepard peeked again as the mech was set down, "Yeah."
Tali's snicker drew both Shepard's and Garrus's gaze, the turian's mandibles parting slightly in amusement. "Hacked it on our way here. Just wait."
True to the quarian's word, when about fifty Eclipse mercs had fortified the far end of the bridge, the mech had finished running through it's startup sequence. It scanned the several armored forms around it for IFF signatures. Checking rapidly against it's "friendly" list, it couldn't find a single match, therefore it began prioritizing it's targets based on threat level. Heavy weapondry was targetd first, followed by biotics, then techs, and lesser threats as opportunity presented. Fully activating at last, it swiveled it's heavy upper torso, it's rocket launcher targeting a heavy weapons squad.
The Eclipse never knew what hit them. Fire and thunder filled the opposite end of the bridge, the quartet up on the balcony watching with assorted glee, smugness, amusement, and interest. The mech was thorough, taking out the high threats almost before the Eclipse knew what was happening, suffering damage as it found itself in a ring of guns. Biotics were cut in half with streams of hypersonic splinters, or blown up by rocket fire. More and more Eclipse fell, though the mech suffered severe damage. Unfortunately for the Eclipse, someone got in a lucky few shots and blew the mech's sensor pod away.
The last act of the comedy of errors at the far end of the bridge, the mech dropped to it's knee-joints, and detonated it's power core in a vast pyrotechnic display that incinerated the remaining Eclipse at the far end. Legion's massive rifle barked once, and the lone surviving Eclipse merc didn't long outlive the mech.
Tali turned to Shepard, her luminous eyes narrowed slightly with her wide grin. Garrus piped up from behind Shepard, "And that, is why you never piss off a Quarian."
A thunderous boom echoed up from the lower levels, the building rocking slightly and dust sifting from the ceiling. Shepard spun, guns in her hands before Garrus could even see her draw. "Legion, Tali, with me. Garrus, can you hold the fort up here for a while?"
He nodded, "I've got it, Shepard." He shifted back to the rail, keeping an eye on the carnage on the far side, "Kick their asses, Shepard."
A soft chuckle as his former CO slipped out to deal with the intruders. He offered up a heartfelt prayer to the Spirits, thanking them for his duty, and for his continued life. And for returning the best commander he ever had from wherever she had been lurking. "I'll burn an offering at the next shrine I come across, by my name, I swear." He shifted his grip slightly, inhaled, held, and pulled the trigger. One less merc.
Shepard motioned Tali right, and Legion left when they got to the lower-level garage. Parked aircars and hoverbikes and lift vans and assorted other conveyances were parked down here, making a sort of haphazard maze. At the far end, the twisted wreckage of a heavy-duty security barrier lay on the decking, still smoking slightly. Figures poured in, but at this angle and distance, they were impossible to make out. Shorter than herself, which wasn't saying much, but a few of them hulked larger, probably krogan.
Shepard checked her loads and switched out the tungsten ammobloc for an incendiary. Krogan tend to get back up after being shot with armor-piercing rounds, but even they tend to go nuts when set on fire. The soft chak of the ammoblock reciever snapping home provoked a loud shrieking howl. Her head snapped up, and she spun to the side as a vorcha charged her. Her elbow smashed into the side of it's head, her ankle caught it's, and the idiot fell sideways, her other gun smashing the pitiful armor asside and igniting it's flesh. The screaming, writhing corpse rolled away as Shepard stalked forward, murmuring into her comm. "Tali, Legion. Blood Pack."
Tali smashed the butt of her shotgun into a vorcha's face, reversed it quickly, and pulled the double trigger. The gun bucked and roared, and the top half of the vorcha's head vanished. She ducked back behind the van she had been using as cover as another vorcha sprayed liquid fire where she had been. The sudden base note of Legion's big gun momentarily silenced all other nose. There was a heartbeat of silence, then a full-throated roar that could only come from a krogan in bloodrage.
Tali peeked out from behind the van even as she was fumbling new thermal clips into her shotgun. The krogan had cast asside it's gun as it charged, huge and massive and intimidating as all heck. She squealed and zipped back into cover, running around the other end of the van as the Krogan smashed into the one next to it. She spun as he struggled to reorient, find his target. Her gun whined up as she held down the trigger, and just as the Krogan found her, she let him have it.
If she hadn't been bracing the gun on her cover, it would have broken her shoulder. The solid slug, almost a tenth of an inch across, smashed the air asside, starting to glow visibly by the time it struck it's target, punched a hole through the hapless krogan's armor, and shattered into hundreds of sharp-edged shards.
The result was mincemeat being blown out the back of his armor. His primary heart entirely gone, secondary lacerated, most of his lungs torn to shreds, and his stomachs leaking digestive juices. He stood there in shock for a bit as Tali quickly ejected the spent clips, fumbling in new ones. He fell like a tree toppling, slamming into the floor with a deafening thud. The three vorcha that had seen him fall looked at each other, and fled. Tali hefted her gun and peeked around cover again.
Legion's thunder was slow, but even. Each shot, braced by two hundred fifty kilos of metal, had the penetrating power to sometimes take out two vorcha with each shot, though that was hard to do with consistancy, since the targets kept shifting position. Still, the Geth platform attempted to conserve each shot for maximum effect, though it was optimizing it's reload routines for greater and greater speed with each shot. Three krogan lay dead next to it's current cover, all of them having charged at once. It had managed to reload after the first one, but the second and third had been too close, and it had had to fire at the third without a heatsink installed. The thermal overload had been almost enough to melt the delicate internal workings, and had done permanent damage to the gun's efficiency, but it would continue to function adequately for the moment. It would need to be replaced when next they reached the Zero Eight.
Shepard snapped her head around at the sound of slow, heavy treads. Her left gun spat at the vorcha with the flamethrower, not even looking to make sure that the tank had ruptured and sprayed flaming fuel all over the hapless creature. The second most massive krogan she had ever seen had stepped into the garage. "Heads up, heavy inbound."
As her team acknowledged, she surveyed the krogan. He didn't wear a helmet, and his scared, pitted face reminded her of Wrex. 'Battlemaster for sure, possibly a biotic.' She remembered him now, she had gotten a glimpse of him as she walked through the gathering of merc groups back at the other end of the bridge. Garm. That was his name. She stood in the open, between two rows of aircars, the same open row he strode down. He held a heavily modified heavy shotgun casually in one hand, 'Eviscerator.'
He stopped about twenty meters from her, "You made a mistake, freelancer. No one doublecrosses the Blood Pack."
She turned to face him, both guns ready, but not yet aimed towards him, "Better check your facts, friend. I'm no freelancer."
Krogans really do have stupid-sounding laughs. "You fight for money, but aren't a member of a group. That makes you a freelancer." He clicked in a clip, his shotgun giving a high-pitched whine as he readied it. "And pretty soon, you'll be a dead freelancer."
His shot roared out, spiinning shards of metal whickering towards Shepard, but she had dropped prone the instant he snapped up the gun. She flipped back to her feet and stood with both guns firmly aimed firmly this time, "I don't fight for money, Merc." Her chin lifted defiantly, "Spectres don't need to."
'Goddamnit, I have got to learn how to stop grandstanding.' Rapid hammerblows smashed into the big merc's shield, making him stagger, and one shot struck the eject switch for his thermal clip. He fired twice more, then found out the hard way he couldn't reload. Roaring in anger, he charged, and god he was fast, faster than Wrex at any rate, but her friend had been around longer, probably, and had thicker skin. She kept firing up until he was almost on her, then cartwheeled asside, her left boot snapping out in a powerful kick that staggered him back a few steps.
He paused, turned, spat orange blood, "You'll pay for that."
She didn't reply, only slapping her guns into their's magclamps as she flipped over to her feet, facing the krogan again. She murmured to the comm, "Legion, if you get a shot, take it. Tali, mop up."
The krogan was fast! He had her right arm in a vicelike grip as he brought his other fist in for what he obviously though would be a killing blow on Shepard's faceplate. Instead of smashing her head off, however, he only succeeded in shattering her faceplate. Shards of glassteel burst against her face, her eyes shutting instantly in a reflex too old to resist.
The look on his face when he saw her real face, though, that she'd remember for a good long time. His hand almost flash-froze as she kicked in max cryo, venting heat furiously into the surrounding air. The thermal ports at the small of her back and up her spine glowed red-hot as she brought her own fist around in a blur, too fast for the eye to see, smashing into his arm with all the force of a shotgun blast. He staggered back, his left forearm broken, and she twisted free of his weakened grasp, pivoted, and brought her right leg around in a stunning arc, booted heel impacting just forward of his right eye.
He spun entirely around, stunned for the moment, then, roaring in true rage, thundered forward. She danced back out of his range, skittering backward, then dropped into a crouch, pistoning both legs backward hard as she brought up both hands, slamming her laced fists into his throat with all the power her considerable body could muster, added to his own momentum.
The result was predictable. His head snapped back, and she felt his windpipe crunch. He stumbled to the side, his momentum spent, dropping to one knee and wheezing painfully as he switched over to his alternate windpipe. She didn't give him a chance to get up. She whipped her hands to her guns and stepped around in front of him. Before he could get his wind back, he could see the huge muzzles of her guns pointed into his eyes, angled wide enough to be sure of smashing into his brain.
"Looks like you have the upper hand, Freelancer. But not for long. BLOOD PACK!" he thundered, several vorcha squealing and snarling as they emerge from cover. Three rapid blasts, two the throaty roar of shotgun fire, one the deeper boom of a sniper rifle, and all three of them fell.
"Looks like I'll be keeping it, Garm. Stand down, and I'll take you into custody. Resist, and you'll die. Don't try it," she murmured as he tensed to spring, "I can pop your eyes before you can twitch a muscle. I'm faster than you could believe, Krogan, and harder than Tuchanka's bones. Don't try it."
Tali slipped from cover, "That's the last of them, Shepard." She glanced to the side as Legion stepped clear. With a roar, the Krogan Battlemaster wrapped both arms around Shepard's waist. That was as far as he got, as Shepard's guns spat, putting out both of his large, red eyes. the semi-molten slugs ignited a hundredth of a second later, bursting into flame as they crisscrossed through Garm's brain.
He thudded to the floor on top of Shepard's lower half. Tali and Legion sprinted to help her roll him off. She was dusting her hands off, when Garrus's voice crackled over the comm. "Better get up here Shepard, looks like the Blue Suns are back."
Shepard almost flew up the stairs, Legion right on her heels, Tali lagging slightly as her cracked visor had started to give her a bit of a headache. She stumbled and thumped against the wall of the stairwell just as she heard a familiar whine. "Shepard! Minigun!"
The ex-Spectre dove, fetching up against the wall beside the door to the upper landing, peeking her head out and jerking back. "Shit, I thought Cathka hadn't finished fixing that thing!"
Legion was crouched low on the other side from Shepard, the huge-bore rifle held vertical as it waited for an opening. An amplified voice shouted uninteligibly, but through their commlinks, Garrus's sudden cry, and the even more sudden cessation of that cry was clearly audible. Tali's spine froze. 'Oh no. Oh, Keelah, no.'
Legion was in a perfect position to monitor Shepard's reaction. It saw her face partially drain of color, then turn a darker blue than it had been. Her eyes suddenly blazed with bluish-white light, her fingers gripping the twin guns Tali had made for her so tight the metal actually creaked slightly. Then she was a blur of motion, rolling to the side as the window's shattered shards were still tinkling inwards from the far bay window overlooking the side of the building.
Process 0103: Chemical and electrical potentials increased considerably.
Process 0157: Electrical conductivity and magnetic fields in the vicinity have spiked.
Process 0054: Conclusions?
Process 0110: Shepard has accessed untapped potential.
She knelt beside Garrus. She wasn't sure how she had got there, or how she had managed to slaughter over fifteen hardened, armored, and shielded mercs so fast, but here she was. The gunship was still flying around out there, she could hear the whine of it's engine. She knealt beside the bleeding, broken body, both legs shot, right arm broken, left almost shattered. But what focused her attention, what trapped her gaze like a gravity well, was Garrus's face.
She remembered his face in many ways. Serious, angry, or merely frustrated at first. Then later, as the team had knit itself together like a broken bone, she saw his face as happy, relaxed, even jocular, a friend's face. After Virmire, though, when they lost Kaiden... Then, she had seen fury. Savage, ruthless, destructive. She had managed to get Garrus out of the dark rut he had been carving for himself, but only with difficulty. She and he had had a shouting match on the Citadel about a week before she had left port on the mission to clean up the remaining Geth. Things had been said then, hurtful things, nasty things. But things that -had- to be said. She had shaken his worldview then, gotten him to look at what he was doing, to realize that Kaiden, who had been a special friend of the Turian, would have been disgusted with what Garrus had become. He had sent her a message just two days before...
Now, his face was barely recognizable. His left mandible had been blown entirely off by the grenade, the left side of his face badly scored and scortched. His armor's collar had been holed and notched, and his bright-blue blood was welling out of him with shocking speed. She stared down at her dying friend, and something, deep, deep within her, surged. And snapped. They had done this. THIS. To her Ragh'tak. Her Uurosai. Her Brother.
Her element had been fire. Now, she added ice. And thunder.
Gordan "Mack" Mackenzi whimpered and dragged himself another few feet back towards the barricade. He'd been one of the freelancers that had been on the final push toward Archangel's bolt-hole. Then all hell had been let loose. A team of three mercs had decimated them, torn through them like a bullet through unprotected flesh. His right knee had been broken, and he had a bullethole through his left shin. He had to drag himself on his hands, sitting on his butt, and whimpering with pain. The first initial shock had been so total he hadn't even felt the shots hit him. He only started hurting when he came to, having hit his head hard on the decking when he fell. That had been just time enough before that mech had gone berzerk and slaughtered the Eclipse mercs that he had managed to get into a foetal ball in a little alcove off the entrance to Archangel's place. He'd been crawling back across the bridge ever since, slowly, carefully, not wanting to either attract attention or jostle his legs too much.
He heard the whine of the gunship and looked up in time to see it shatter the main window over the bridge. The minigun unzipped long and loud, the grenade launchers and missile launchers filling that room with explosive death before it moved around the corner of the building and started unloading Blue Suns mercs through the larger bay window on that end. Evidently the Blood Pack were down too, if Tarak was seeing to this personally.
Suddenly, from the inside of the balcony room, there was what sounded like multiple explosions, almost as loud as the minigun, and almost as fast. The gunship suddenly reared back, a last merc falling out of it's open troop hatch, already dead from the way it fell, silent and ragdoll-like. Mack's eyes widened as the gunship swiveled back around to the 'front' of the building again, Tarak screaming away into his bullhorn as he opened up with the minigun.
Mack's face was suddenly lit with lightning-light. He screamed, his hands clapping to his ears as the thunder slammed over him like a physical thing, impossibly bright, impossibly loud, impossible period.
Shepard's outstretched hands lit with thunder. Bolt after bolt of rage-powered lightning arced across the space between standing woman and gunship. It ignored the shields entirely, slamming into the metal hull and heating it with the speed of an arc welder. Millions of volts pulsed across the air, tearing long, twisting holes in the atmosphere, leaving the gas ionized and leaving the stench of ozone in their wake. Thunderclap upon thunderclap echoed in the room, and Shepard didn't even know she was screaming as she strode slowly forward. Each stride was accompanied by a dozen full-fledged lighting bolts, each pounding the gunship with an impossible amount of voltage. The shields overloaded with a sparkling tinkle, and the armor started to glow red-hot, white-hot.
The pilot began to pull back, the nose starting to pitch up. Shepard didn't let them get far. She focused her attention on one spot, hammering it over and over until the superheated armor, crackling and sparking with the unvented charge, at last burst open. She directed the lightnings into the engine housings, shorting out circuitry, fusing delicate moving parts, and igniting the fuel tank. The starboard engine exploded with a deafening roar, spraying the side of the gunship with molten fragments. The force of the detonation tore a small hole in the armor, and Shepard exploited it instantly.
Tens of thousands of amperes smashed through the much-abused air and into that hole, igniting the insulation layer that had been designed to keep external electrical effects from affecting anything inside the crew cabin. It didn't work. Fire blossomed like a hellish flower, burning the insulation away in heartbeats. The pilot was screaming in terror now, but Shepard couldn't hear it. Nothing existed save the power flooding through her, the rage, grief, shock, and fury. She pounded through to the inner hull, electrifying it and frying what circuitry was vulnerable.
More bolts were sent on their way, thunder so loud as to seem a living thing, bellowing in agony. Now the inner hull was cracking, not being rated so tough as the outer hull, tearing open to her ceaseless fury, exposing the warm bodies within to her rage. Lightning walked the inside of the gunship, arcing and sizzling into anything and everything it could reach, guided by a mind consumed by the urge to destroy. Limbs, torsos, chests, hearts, it found them all, and sent enough power arcing through their spasming forms to charbroil their puny, squishy, easily-burned flesh. More blasts, and still more, the gunship falling now, and Shepard standing on the edge of the window as she followed it down, her eyes locked on the canopy, which suddenly lit from within with witchlight.
Mack's ears had been stunned deaf by the constant thunderclaps, his eyes protruding with shock. The gunship's right engine blew appart as the lightning caressed it, tearing open the side of the gunship, which the crackling bolts eagerly speared into. He couldn't process this, it was just too much. The gunship began to fall, and as it cleared the window, he saw something he wouldn't forget to his dying day.
A woman was standing at the edge of the balcony, her hands open, palms outward. And lightning was pouring from her like water from a busted feeder pipe. His mouth was open from his scream, but now it fell open in shock. His mind was almost gone, his eyes seeing, recording, but unable to process what they saw. Suddenly the canopy of the gunship, now tail-down, lit from within with a wierd blue-white light. The light was there only for a second, the thunderclaps still trying to batter their way through his hands and into his numb ears, when two more lightning bolts arced from the woman's outstretched hands. One dipped around and into the torn-open hole in the side of the gunship, the other smashed straight down and into the canopy, just as it lit inside again.
The result was a terrific explosion, jagged chunks of polysteel and metaglass whickered every which way, some partly, some wholly molten. Those last two blasts had been nearly as thick as Mack's wrists, and their combined thunderclaps sounded like the end of the worlds. The gunship split nearly in half as the twin bolts thundered home, detonating the ammo stores and the remaining fuel. A piece of glowing-hot metal slammed into the pillar he had been propped against, hard enough to sink half its length into the stone. Mack stared at it, only four centimeters from his nose.
Mercifully, shock, exhaustion, and pain at last separate himself from reality as everything went black.
Mordin lurched and grabbed at a bulkhead as the extremely intriguing Geth-built ship suddenly broke dock and sped skyward, weaving between Omega's towers with a skill no flesh-and-blood pilot could dream of equaling. His comm crackled and he tapped it, "Yes?"
"Mordin!" It was that charming young quarian's voice, "Get your medical gear and be ready to recieve a patient!"
He took the opportunity that another barely-compensated turn gave him, and almost fell through the door into his private space, "Condition?"
"Bad. Very very bad. Keelah, too much blood. I've pumped him full of medigel, but there's just too much blood lost. He's taken a grenade to his face, I've got his mandible." She seemed almost giddy with shock.
Very serious then. Modern standard grenades use an explosive to fragment a mass-effect-compressed casing and send razor-sharp slivers of ultra-dense metal spinning every which way. A grenade that detonated too close to one could tear a man in half. And if a turian had had one go off too close to his head...
He grabbed up his medkit and headed to the airlock, sorting through his supplies. He had quite a bit of dextro-specific antibiotics and other compounds to combat shock and blood loss, but not enough to deal with someone who's lost a significant fraction of their total blood supply. His blood synthesizer was still in his clinic, since David would need it more than he would, and there wasn't room for the delicate, expensive equipment aboard the Zero-Eight.
"Keep pressure on the wound, despite medigel. Will have pain blocker and dextro general anesthetic ready for immediate injection. Turian?" He fumbled through his supplies as the quarian confirmed his hypothesis, "Keep mandible in place and stable. Chances likely will re-integrate, if not too long."
The little ship slewed around suddenly, and he braced himself with one foot against the far wall of the airlock, which suddenly popped open just short of an open window. He hopped through, his booted feet crunching on shattered safety glass, the Zero-Eight hovering behind him as he dashed to the two figures on the floor. Turian indeed. He instantly administered the pain blocker and knockout drug, nodding his thanks to the Quarian, who's hands were pressed tightly to the turian's neck. The geth held the turian's mandible in place, almost cradling the male's head in it's lap.
He spotted a familiar figure at the window, Shepard, standing with legs appart, hands outstretched, "Shepard, assistance please?"
She turned slowly, almsot creakily. Her helmet's faceplate had been shattered by some titanic blow, revealing her unusual appearance. Now was not the time to begin scanning, despite his itch to do so. 'patient first, curiousity later.'
She gave him a slight grin, "Don't think so doc. Feel...tired..." She slowed, her voice fading, almost grinding to a halt, frozen in mid turn. Slowly, like a magestic oak, she tilted, overbalanced, and crashed to the floor. Still in the pose she had been in.
Mordin groaned inwardly, 'Two patients. At least one I know how to treat.' He turned back to the turian, just as the battered man gave a sudden, convulsive breath. Despite the knockout drugs coursing through his system, his eyes snapped open. Sharp and clear, despite the pain that must be agonizing for a turian. He gazed up at them, unseeing, clutching convulsively at the rifle he still held in his good right hand.
Mordin almost jerked back in surprise, "Must reach clinic. Have equipment there, blood synthesizer."
Tali, her voice thick and choked, "I'm not sure it's safe to move him."
"No time. Injuries too severe. Blood loss extreme." The Zero-Eight actually crashed through the window, it's thrusters sending chairs, tables and couches flying as it ground it's way through the ceiling towards them. Legion slipped around to lift the turian's legs as Tali and Mordin steadied his back. Tali was sobbing audibly as they got the turian, she called him Garrus, into the ship
Mordin was about to head back out when Legion returned, carrying the stiff, unyielding body of Shepard in over it's shoulder. "Detail directions to clinic."
Mordin was only too happy to do so.
Aria T'Loak waved a hand, and the vid froze, showing the figure standing at the balcony rail, and with lightning pouring from her palms. She glanced over at Grizz, who gave a shrug, then at Anto, who flinched from her direct, scathing gaze. She lifted one elegant, perfectly manicured finger, and pointed at the frozen vid display.
"What. The. Fuck."
Both of her henchmen exchanged a glance. Things were about to get interesting.
AN: So very sorry for the long delay this time, I hope this chapter makes up for it! ^^ Please, if you've read down this far, please review!