All Along the Watchtower Chapter 5: A Shot in the Dark, a mass effect fanfic

Mass Effect: "All Along the Watchtower"

Chapter Four – A Shot in the Dark

The redundant, infuriating ringing continued. It cracked through Tarius' mind and brought him tumbling back to the reality before him. His claws scratched his frustration into the steel flooring and he felt as though his fangs might splinter by the very anger that clenched his jaw shut. To save his teeth and clear his head, he simply roared into the cockpit of his ship.

This was not the way things were supposed to go.

The turian pushed himself onto his feet. Emitting a low growl, he made his way through the sparks and exposed wiring that had pushed through the walls by his sides and approached the pilot. Whatever the Alliance ship had hit them with, it had been devastating. And it should have never happened. The pilot was still stunned; hunched over the console his face had smacked into with small drops of blood falling from his mandibles.

"How?" Tarius hissed. "How did you let that happen?"

The pilot managed to pull himself out of his stupor enough to wheeze out his defense. "Alliance frigates don't maneuver…don't maneuver like that." He began to pass out again. "Ever…"

Tarius brought the turian pilot's head tilting back over the seat so they could look eye-to-eye. "Did you not hear my orders while this ordeal was taking place? That vessel led you into a trap! A wide arc to lure gullible pilots in close so they could get a clean shot. And it worked, at that!" His claws pressed in on each side of the pilot's face. He needed some outlet for his anger, and this was his favourite so far. "Even if experience tells you differently, what made you think my orders carried no weight here? You are free of the Hierarchy, pilot, but on this ship, you're my thrall. You know how I like to talk about this sort of thing. How did you fail to take it in?"

The pilot's heavy, foggy head just couldn't find the words. He fought the wanting to black out and his eyes struggled to not roll back into his head. "They don't…They don't maneuver like that, sir…"

Tarius' eye twitched. "Of course, they don't." He looked around the shattered cockpit to make a silent point. "Of course they don't. Ka'hyra Velotto doesn't usually fly them, after all." He violently whipped the pilot's head further back over the seat, snapping his neck before any protest arose. The body jumped into spasms and flopped neatly onto the floor.

"Another pilot!" Tarius shouted in the corridor. Nearly instantly, another young turian entered the cockpit.

"Sir," the replacement said with a professional salute. "We were able to get most of the primary systems back online. But we'll be working with drift on our x-axis." He quickly took up the pilot's seat, sidestepping around the body as he did. "It'll be tough, but we can give chase—"

"If you were about to give me options, I assure you, there are none," Tarius snapped. "Get us back into firing range! I want that vessel destroyed, and I want to see its crew's space-frozen bodies pulverized into shine-matter!"

The engines were back online, and he could see the stars around them begin to shift away behind the viewports. The Pathfinder left no loose ends. He knew Ka'hyra was aboard that vessel. Invisible to his crew, the dark energy that shadowed him rippled with disruption. Another powerful biotic was near. A presence he had not felt since the end of his old life

Joker angled the Shiloh's approach only a little bit so that he could see, through his viewport, the bright metallic shine against the curtain of blackness. The telltale blue-tinted gleam of a Mass Relay. He couldn't help but feel lighter in his stomach every time he saw one of the alien constructs.

"It won't be too long now, sir," he whispered to his view.

"Good," Captain Bryant said with a nod. "How many jumps between us and Palaven?"

Joker looked over his readout. "Four if we're going by the books," he said. "Three if you want to get naughty."

The captain made no move to hide his conflicted reaction. "Just get us there quick, Moreau. I leave it entirely in your hands."

"Does that mean any punishment from trespassing on hmmhmm space will fall to me?"

"Like I said, just get us there. This prisoner's leading trouble around with her and I won't have that burden on our shoulders for much longer." Bryant turned to leave the cockpit. "Call me when we're on final approach."

"Aye, Cap," Joker said with a salute.

Captain Bryant hardly had a foot out of the room when a proximity alarm flared up behind him. Joker swiveled around in his chair and said, "Captain, please report to the cockpit."

"What is it?" Bryant demanded with a tone that suggested he didn't appreciate the humor.

The pilot turned back to his console. "Trouble, closing fast on our six." He growled. "The damn she-turian was right."

The Shiloh didn't have much of a brig, though it was bigger than the bunk space the crew was allotted. Soldiers were known for stealing naps in the wide-open space, and for the resulting pranks that typically ended with the cell being locked up. However this was the familiar price for serving aboard an Alliance warship; there was room enough to do one's job, but little else.

Kaidan slid the cell door open. "In you go,' he requested of the turian prisoner. "And don't even think of using your biotics to escape. The escape pods are coded and there will be an entire squad of L3's between you and anywhere else."

He slid the door shut. Ka'hyra laughed under her breath. "That's not entirely true, is it?"

"It's more than true. None of the soldiers onboard are very pleased with the chief's death. All it will take is one wrong move on your part to bring that particular storm bearing down on you like…"

"No, no, no. That's not what I meant," she said. "About the L3's. That's not exactly the entire squad, is it? You failed to mention the crown jewel, as it were."

"I don't…"

"Anyone who has become sensitive to dark energy disrupts the space around them with that connection," Ka'hyra explained. "The entire squad aboard this ship has a nice, stable output. But you, however, are latched onto subspace like a jaw-trap on an animal's leg. Your output is raw and intense. I don't feel a steady breeze in your wake, I feel a sandstorm."

Kaidan shrugged. "I suppose that would be on account of my dated implants."

"An L2."

"Yeah. An L2. So what?"

The turian looked over Kaidan with a confused gaze. "You don't seem to be as impressed with your abilities as I am."

"Why should I be impressed with something I didn't ask for?"

"What?" Ka'hyra was genuinely aghast. "Oh, Kaidan. If only the sails guided the wind and not the other way around. Wouldn't that be a marvelous day?"

Kaidan rubbed his forehead. The day had taken more from him than it had promised and he just wanted to relax and take stock of it all. Kaidan could deal with as much pressure as any man or woman in the Alliance Navy, but he didn't like being rushed. Battles were quick and decisive, and he had learned to deal with that back before he signed up. He could fight for his life quite well. But he disliked arguments. He fared poorly if he did not have time to consider every viewpoint fairly and work out the best answer. Ka'hyra evidently didn't care to waste time when making up her mind.

"I don't know why I keep bothering with you." He honestly didn't. "If you knew what I've gone through because of this implant configuration, you wouldn't be giving me a smug lecture about my destiny."

The turian pressed herself up against the door. "As long as there is light in this existence we all share, then we are bound, by law, to walk in the shadows as well. Don't make the mistake of thinking your life is more troubled than another simply because you have to live it."

"I was tortured!" Kaidan shouted, slamming his fist against the door. "Three years of ignorance, death, and the knowledge that I might as well be a monster in quarantine! You cannot possibly know!"

Again, Ka'hyra looked quizzically into Kaidan's very form, as if she were searching for something she couldn't find. All at once, it came to her, and her hand flew up to her mouth, pointing. "You were on Jump Zero."

Kaidan's arm was consumed in dark blue vapors of energy. His eyes itched with anger and his body tensed as it anticipated the act that he knew he could not follow through with. He quickly turned away and left the brig behind, knowing that staying there any longer could mean something regrettable. Kaidan was losing his grip today, but he still had enough military training left in him to walk away from the prisoner's irritating tone.

The turian woman called after him. "I know what you are, Kaidan! I have answers that you seek. Please return to me soon!" But Kaidan was already gone behind a hatch at the end of the corridor.

"Activating the Mass Relay," Joker said, sending the signal to the construct that would ready it for the Shiloh's jump. Beeps of confirmation merged with proximity alarms and made the atmosphere within the cockpit more chaotic than it needed to be. But Joker kept his calm, adjusted the ship's pitch and spun her downwards out of the way of a magspec missile. When the projectile lost its target, it self-destructed and bumped the Shiloh off course for a moment.

"I need Alenko up here," Joker told the captain, as he directed the ship back on the correct heading.

Bryant took up the copilot's seat. "He's down with the prisoner. What do you need? I can help."

"No offense, but that's a matter of opinion, sir."

"Dammit, Joker, tell me what you need me to do—Jesus!" The captain braced himself in his seat as Joker snapped the ship into a tight spin. They spun over and over with thrusters running hot and the stars in the viewports, blending into a spiral. Another alarm clicked on, alerting the pilots to a shift in the artificial gravity field. The captain felt butterflies in his stomach for the first time in years.

The second missile passed by and detonated harmlessly in the distance. Joker leveled the ship out, and the settling gravity field nearly knocked Bryant from his seat.

"Don't do that again," the captain growled, his skin flushed.

Joker shrugged and took his hands off the console. "If that's an order, sir, I hope you like being dead."

"Look! Just…I'll go get Alenko…"

"No need, sir," Kaidan said as he entered the cockpit. "What do you need, Joker?"

A small grin crawled up the side of Joker's face. "I need you to talk me out of attempting what I'm about to do."

Kaidan relieved the captain from the copilot's seat. "What are you talking about?"

"I can't make the jump through the Mass Relay if I have to dodge all these missiles."

"What about going to light speed? Maybe we could lose them that way."

Joker shook his head. "Maybe if they were a few minutes behind us, but they're right on our tail. They'd just follow us through any jump we'd make. No, the Mass Relay's our only shot."

"What do you want me to do then?"

"Take over Gardian duties while I do this."

Kaidan was punched a few buttons and got Gardian warmed up. He was clearly frustrated; punching in the commands as if he was trying to break the console. "This'll be the second time you've asked me to use this thing. You know there are others on this ship with more training with Gardian than I'll ever have."

"Yeah, but the rest of the crew tends to piss me off rather easily," Joker replied. "Kinda sucks all the motivation out of the room when you're trying to save a ship filled with people you'd much rather see stepped out into the cold vacuum." He turned back to Captain Bryant. "Don't worry, cap'n, you're alright in my book."

Bryant nodded hesitantly, almost smiling. "Glad to know you'd rather not eject me into space." He pointed towards the viewport. "Get us out of here, Moreau. That's an order."

"Aye, sir." Joker's indifferent tone belied the flight plan within his head. He made no moves to prepare himself and there was not a sound or warning that came from him. Just calm, steady breathing, as if he engaged in frenzied chases with terrorist starships twice a day.

All he offered was a smile, directed out through the viewport and toward the active Mass Relay, which pulsed brightly with dark energy as its gyroscopic capacitors began to draw upon the element zero core within. The construct lit up; faint signs of a mass effect field surrounding it, which reached out and subtly vibrated the hull of the ship beneath Joker's feet.

"The Relay is hot," Joker said. And there was no more warning.

He turned the Shiloh downward, letting it drift helplessly towards the alien superstructure until he slammed on the thrusters, causing the ship to do an inverted backflip over the top of the Relay and down into the shadow of the thing. Explosions followed close behind them as the magspec missiles from the turian ship lost their lock and self-destructed.

The concussions slammed into Shiloh, sending her into a spin down and across the width of the Relay. Joker had planned on this. He used the raw momentum from it; letting it sling the ship down at a random trajectory. This interfered with the next set of missiles' approach, giving Kaidan just enough time to take them both out with Gardian. The concussion sent them careening in a different direction, across the opening of the Relay that housed the capacitors and the element zero core, and into a rapid spin that shifted the gravity more than ever before.

Kaidan was feeling motion sickness creep up on him. He turned to the viewport, but only saw flashes of space and metal that blurred together into static. His mind raced harder than he could manage, his body rocked around in his seat. Passing out seemed like a very good idea.

Joker turned briefly and saw this. "Alenko!" he shouted as loud as he could manage. "Keep your eyes on the console and not on the viewport! I don't want you going space crazy on my watch."

"I can't…" Kaidan's vision blurred. "I can't see anything."

"Alenko, now!"

Kaidan reflexively activated Gardian. The bright beam of light swept across space in their death spiral, grazing the starboard engines of the turian vessel—the Pathfinder, Ka'hyra had called it. What a silly name, he thought. What a damn silly name these aliens give their…

He turned to Joker. "Shiloh's a stupid name, Jokey," he slurred before losing balance and dropping his head loudly onto the console.

Joker smiled. "That'll do, Kaid. That'll do."

The Shiloh continued its erratic spin, with Joker gently guiding it into position via maneuvering thrusters. They came around in a wide arc back into the sunlight once again. He only had the span of a second in which to react, and he was able to hit that mark better than he believed he could. The ship aligned with the proper jump coordinates and the Mass Relay propelled her into a mass effect field and out across the galaxy. He laughed.

Tarius watched the Alliance vessel disappear from the radar in an instant, as if the machine were faulty. Moving only his eyes he glanced out of his wide viewing window and confirmed the readout.

All aboard the Pathfinder felt the momentum on their shoulders as the mighty battleship slowed its breakneck pursuit and began to aim more sensibly for the Relay. The room fell silent and everyone but Tarius found something to do. For the moment, he needed to think. This was taking far too long. Mistakes had been made and he had been, to some extent, defeated.

When he began to apportion blame, he stopped himself, amused. He had not felt this overly-familiar mix of bitterness, tension and guilt in a long while. Not since his last mission with the fleet, in fact. Especially for a female, Ka'hyra had done a fine job of eluding him.

He had captured battlemasters and Matriarchs since the maiden voyage of the Pathfinder, but only now did he find his first challenge. Only now that he hunted a lunatic female and her human rescue ship.

Flashes of electric blue light shot upwards through the viewport and washed over Tarius' face. With each he found motivation to slow his breathing. One of the men seated at his side grunted very slightly as a spark bit into his leather cheek. The commander's hands reflexively balled into fists before one of them relaxed and reached for the pistol at his side.

"Another pilot!" he called through his throat, and a few seconds later he was able to concentrate fully on his retribution.