Tanaerum
Liberties taken with the Cerberus bases on Binthu:
To add a little more flavor to the fight scene with the rachni encountered on Binthu, I completely ignored that there were those exploding workers at one of the bases and changed the rachni soldier into a rachni Brood Warrior-type. I didn't want to have to deal with the acid-spitting soldier-types or the exploding worker-types prior to their encounter on Noveria (I haz plans for those; kind of), and I liked the idea of Cerberus having a thing for biotic experiments. Sadly, there will be no maimings of main characters this chapter. I did use cryo rounds though. Thank you, everyone, who participated in the 'cold ammunition headcanon' post at the Mass Effect community on LJ. You gave me much food for thought. Thank you, thank you.
Also, thank you readers and reviewers. I still have not fixed grammar errors, typos or lore inconsistencies (names, mostly) on FF dot net, but I have fixed them on AO3 and added some extra (and fun!) technobabble Codex Entries to various chapters there… if anyone is interested. FF dot net is irritating to update, but I'll get around to it. Eventually.
Biotics.
Kaidan was dumbfounded. The alien bug could use biotics. The Cerberus base was in chaos. Commandos shouted orders; others thought they were being attacked from all sides.
"Enemies everywhere!" one shouted only to be thrown across the room by the giant alien bug. It impaled another human with one of its many claws then tossed the body aside.
"This is insane," Shepard said from beside Kaidan. Crouched in what little cover they could find, she met his gaze briefly. Her odd-colored eyes assessed him. They had yet to give away their position as the bug made short order of its captors.
"I'm still hoping this is some kind of dream," he told her with a wry look.
"You dream of biotic bugs?" she asked, eyebrow rising in amusement. "Dr. Chakwas must be giving you the good stuff."
He chuckled. "Yeah, well. Don't tell my CO. She might restrict me to light duty."
"Your secret's safe with –"
A warp field flew over their heads and struck the nearest, and final, Cerberus commando. The man let out a scream as the undulating force of gravity bent his limbs in directions they were never meant to go, joints and bones audibly splintering. He dropped like a brick once the field wore off, blood pooling beneath his twisted and broken frame.
"Shit." That had been one hell of a warp field. No less than asari-grade. Kaidan swallowed. Going up against human and humanoid biotics was one thing, but this was an animal. Or insect. Or… hell, he was going to give himself a headache trying to relate it to anything he'd seen before. It was alien; it was strange; and it terrified the hell out of him. How the hell did you kill a big biotic bug without getting yourself killed in the process? The thing didn't seem to have any strategy, just survival instinct. Like an animal. Or an insect. Or—
"Think it's amped?" Shepard questioned bringing him out of his circular reverie. She had her omni-tool up.
Kaidan followed suit –anything to keep his mind off the alien bug, really— running a hacking suite on the base's computer mainframe to find out just what the hell the rogue BlackOps group had been up to prior to their arrival. He received a warning shortly before the system began flashing its data.
Damn it. "No way to know what they were doing here," he told the Commander as he ran as many subroutines as his omni-tool allowed without overloading the 'tool's VI and memory. "They're deleting their data. Looks like an automatic failsafe."
It was Shepard's turn to curse. "Shit."
"Yeah. What I've managed to get will probably take weeks to decode. Hopefully the specialists at FLEETCOM can make some sense of it."
"Meanwhile we're stuck in the Traverse in an underground bunker with a hostile biotic alien bug," she said drily. "Great first date, Alenko. Thanks."
Her flippant remark caught him off guard. With the other members of the squad split into pairs and taking out the other two Cerberus bunkers, it was just the two of them. Shepard's penchant for flirting in the heat of battle aside, he couldn't help what came out of his mouth in response.
"In my defense, you don't seem like a flowers and candy-type girl." He grinned at her surprised expression and felt like he'd scored points in whatever flirting-pissing contest they had going on. He turned his attention back to the situation at hand. "Just wait till you see what I've got planned for the grand finale." One of them was going to have to flank the creature. He steeled himself, searching for enough cover to get around the thing.
She gave an unladylike snort and gestured with her shotgun when she saw his unspoken plan. "Well, as long as there's a big gun," she retorted suggestively.
He holstered his pistol and unclipped his assault rifle. "Yeah, well. I have it on good authority you like things that go boom. Especially since you keep enough plastic explosives on you to make it into orbit without a vehicle." He gestured with his rifle. "And as far as big guns go," he added with a chuckle, "mine's bigger."
He darted out of cover and sprinted for the nearest medical station to hide behind while Shepard drew the creature's fire.
Zombies.
It was right out of some horror vid. Rear Admiral Kahoku's frantic message about BlackOps was fresh in her mind. But this? What the hell was this? The zombie-things looked like Thorian Creepers.
"Fucking hell," Ashley breathed, then sank lower against the large potted plant, away from what looked like a very well-armed commando as she paced around the containment field.
"Creepers," Tali commented quietly after they waited until the commando had walked away.
Ashley nodded. "Creepers alright. Or at least they look like them."
"I've never seen or heard about them before Feros."
"Can you hack that field?" Ashley asked after a moment of silence.
"And let the Creepers damage most of the bad guys?"
Ash nodded as she unclipped her sniper rifle. When it unfolded, she thumbed the switch to turn on the magneto-optical trap to supercool the shaved metal slugs into cryo projectiles. The MOT worked in conjunction with the magnetic apparatus of the rifle's micro-scaled mass accelerator and had been a bitch to mod and program. She sighted the back of the commando's un-helmeted head, took a breath and held it.
"With my eyes closed," Tali remarked.
"Do it."
As soon as the field dropped, Ash took her shot, the impact of the projectile blowing the top of the commando's head off, spraying blood, bone and brain matter. The corpse fell with a thud, and the super-cooled shell froze the smaller chunks before they reached the ground.
Huh. No shields.
"Idiot," she growled. The other Cerberus commandos were much smarter, but the acidic sludge from the Creepers' vomit kept their shield generators near overload. A few rounds with the assault rifle and Tali's pistol finished them off.
The Creepers they kept at bay with sledgehammer rounds and shotguns.
Because: "Oh my God! Ew!"
And: "Oh, Kee'lah! That's disgusting!"
A big bug and human biotic commandos.
The day had started off lackluster. Now it was exciting. Except when the krogan battlemaster charged into the fray and got thrown across the room by the bug, which was apparently biotic and no one bothered to tell them beforehand. Then the day became chaos.
"Well this should be interesting," Garrus remarked as he hammered another commando with cryo rounds from his assault rifle while keeping an eye out for the biotic bug. It seemed content on helping him with the commandos for now, but he figured just as soon as it was done, it would turn on them. The cryo rounds managed to hit in all the right places, stunning the commando enough to stagger for a headshot.
The primary rule for taking out a Cabal of biotics was to take only headshots. Garrus thought it was a stupid rule. Headshots were reserved until after barriers were down. Shields were easily penetrated by overloading the generator; biotics could outlast a shield generator. At least it held true for turian and asari biotics. He wasn't as sure about humans, come to think about it.
Wrex charged it again, barrier up this time. He picked the bug up with a roar and threw it at the nearest commando.
"That's not fair, Wrex," Garrus shouted from his position. "Didn't your parents teach you not to throw your toys?"
"My father tried to kill me," Wrex grunted. "His tribe wiped out the only soldiers loyal to me." So much for friendly banter, Garrus thought as the krogan blasted a commando in the face with his shotgun, and then biotically threw another one into the bug. Its claws made short work of its new play toy and it turned back to Wrex who pumped shotgun blast after shotgun blast at it with little effect. Its biotic barrier was unusually strong.
Unusually.
Because I always encounter alien bugs with only mediocre biotic barriers, Garrus thought with no small amount of amusement.
"Shepard to Team Hazmat," Shepard's voice came over Garrus' visor commlink.
"Garrus here." He flattened himself against the deck as a biotic… whatever the hell that was flew at him. He rolled to his feet and leapt over a container to get away from the alien as it tossed another glowing blue blob of energy at him.
"You encounter any bugs?" There was gunfire on her end.
"Yeah. Big, ugly and biotic," he affirmed, managing to duck in time before Wrex diverted its attention with his shotgun and a biotic attack of his own.
"F!systemerror[To aggressively engage in the act of intercourse. Of ill-repute. Present tense. Human standard slang. Mindoiran accent noted. Reiterating in the presence of human offspring Not of Age is discouraged for diplomatic reasons. See your Hierarchy representative on the Citadel for more in-depth explanation of human offspring disputes.]" Garrus' translator seemed to always glitch on that word, but it caught the rest of Shepard's words effortlessly. Maybe Tali could recommend a better program. For all he knew it was the damn VI causing a feedback loop. "Looks like they were either studying them or going to use them as weapons. …Or both."
"Rogue Spectres, rogue BlackOps group, rogue geth, rogue… bugs. You know how to show a guy a good time." He rolled away and fired at the bug to draw its attention away from Wrex. "Just as soon as we're done with this thing, we'll meet you at the Mako."
Shepard made her usual snort-grunt-laughing sound. He wondered how she never had mucus run out her nasal passage when she did that. Also: It just sounded painful.
"Belay that," she told him. There was a screech over the comm and her voice cut out over a blast. "Secure your bunker, download what information you can if it isn't already flashed, and rendezvous with us here."
"Will do." He drilled a hole through the bug's chitinous side with the cryo rounds. The sound it made nearly bored through his skull from the inside out. He shook his head to clear it.
"Hng. Damn thing was telepathic," Wrex commented. He gave it a kick.
Garrus blinked. Telepathic, biotic bugs? "Not even asari are telepathic."
"Scared, Garrus?"
"Worried," he said with a decisive shake of his head. "Look at this place, Wrex. You're a merc. You've been around. You know damn well this is a lab." It reminded him a little of Dr. Saleon and the elcor serial killer's diabolical labs of body parts. "A butcher's parlor." When he booted up his omni-tool to hack the system, he wasn't surprised that the data in the system had already been flashed. He did manage to save what looked like a partial email from another base complete with a trans-code for tracking.
His surprise came when Wrex nodded in agreement. "No good could ever come out of this. Could see why this 'blackops' group had to go rogue though."
"You think the human government just wants to cover this up? Sent Shepard to clean it up to keep their hands clean?" The idea pissed him off. Why Shepard insisted on plying by the rules when her government very clearly did not…
Wrex guffawed. "Guarantee it won't be covered by their media… or any other aliens' newscasts. That Kahoku fellow seemed pretty adamant about the 'rogue' part though." He and Garrus looked around for more eezo cores and hardsuit signatures. All they found was some human Phoenix armor. Lot of illegal weapon and wetware mods, too.
"Fifty creds says he's already dead," the krogan said as he nosed through yet another bin for salvage and ammo. "Probably died right after he managed to get the word out. Encryption was crap on that message."
This kind of shit only happened in the vids.
Kaidan scanned Rear Admiral Kahoku's body. Multiple, visible injection sites. Untreated, festering wounds. Foam around the mouth. There were no markings that Kaidan could see that indicated an attack on the body by the bug.
"God damn it."
Shepard's quiet curse drew his attention to her. The commander's posture was rigid, her face a mask of… of what? Shock? Horror? Revulsion? All of the above? She shut her eyes and looked away. He watched as her throat worked and she moistened her lips.
"Who the hell is this group?" Williams asked. The Chief's posture was just as rigid, but she didn't look as sick as Shepard did. She looked angry, vengeful. He knew he could count on Williams to temper revulsion with a heavy dose of anger. "And what were those… giant bug things?"
Shepard shrugged. "Hell if I know." She huffed a sigh. "Thorian Creepers and… and bugs." She shuddered. "Better than bats, I suppose."
"You… don't like bats, ma'am?" Williams asked.
"Ask anyone from Mindoir about bats and you'll get the same story," was all Shepard said.
She knelt down beside Kahoku and pressed a finger to her commlink earbud. "Joker, radio Fifth Fleet. Tell them we've found Rear Admiral Kahoku's body in a base on Binthu in the Voyager Cluster."
"Damn," Joker said before correcting himself. "Ah, yes ma'am. Message away. Awaiting further orders from Fifth Fleet."
"What now, Shepard?" Garrus asked.
"We wait for orders from Fifth Fleet," Shepard replied. "Then we get back to the Citadel."
"You think this is connected to that doctor on the Citadel?" Williams asked. "The one in the Wards?"
Shepard lifted her shoulder.
Kaidan didn't remember a doctor on the Citadel with any connection to this group. "Who now?"
"Dr. Michel," Shepard supplied. "You were pretty out of it when we met her. She was being blackmailed by someone named Armistan Banes. The marines on Edolus were investigating him when they ran into the thresher nest."
"Only he was already dead," Ashley pointed out. "Explains why they needed the medical supplies though. Maybe. Or maybe he was acting alone, and they shut him up permanently."
Kaidan nodded. "Nothing says permanent like Death."
"I doubt Dr. Michel knows anything," Garrus said. He sounded defensive. "She would have said something more than thinking Banes worked for the Alliance. She would have given us a heads up."
"Would she?" Kaidan asked. Garrus stared at Kaidan, an unreadable look crossing his alien features.
"This just got bigger than covering up fucking blackmail, Garrus," the Commander replied, her mouth forming a thin line. "It won't hurt to question the doctor." She ran a hand through her hair. "Whatever this group is, it's as much as a threat to galactic peace as Saren and the geth are." She suddenly looked like she had the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders.
"Think Banes was part of this group?" Kaidan asked.
Shepard nodded. "I'd be willing to bet on it."
Trivia/Geekery: Tanaerum: According to Greek myths, it was the home of Hades and the entrance to the underworld where Heracles journeyed to ask the god of the underworld permission to bring Kerberos to the surface for his Twelfth and final Labor.