DISCLAIMER – I do not own Mass Effect franchise, the story, or any of its characters. All rights go to Bioware.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
At the post-scriptum of this chapter, you'll find several notes on technical stuff that I use in this story. It concerns the methods of mass effect-based weapon caliber classificaion, as well as certain notes on vehicles.
Chapter posted on 10.1.2017.
Tags: Action, Sci-fi, Adventure, Friendship building, Love.
Rated M – for mature and adult themes.
Enjoy…
Chapter 13 – The Battle of Feros – Pt. II
..
On approach to Feros; one minute before atmospheric entry;
Normandy's cargo bay…
..
Marcus exited the elevator and walked with a quick step toward the assembled troops. The Mako loaded up with Marcus's specialist team, both of the Tritons, and the remaining squad of foot soldiers were all ready and waiting. Marcus donned his helmet, and after the microfiber actuators sealed it up with a suction hiss, he spoke through the comm link:
"Alright, everybody, listen up," he started as he walked toward the Mako. "We're going for this as if we're doing the combat drop, regardless of the outcome." He grabbed the upper edge of the Mako entrance hatch and swung himself inside with an easy swoop, then continued, "That means that the footmen squad might stay behind if it comes to pass. If not, you six are jumping right after us."
A light tremor of atmospheric entry spread through the ship.
"All teams, prepare," Marcus called as he sat down into the driver's seat and sealed the Mako.
"Mako team, ready," Garrus replied from his seat.
"Triton team ready," came Sergeant Miller's deep voicing Broad Australian accent.
"Footmen team standing by," replied the corporal who was in charge of the foot squad.
Marcus turned in his seat, taking stock of the ground team that was in the Mako with him. Wrex, Garrus, Ashley and Kaidan, all veterans of at least one previous military skirmish, were calm as ice and fully focused. Liara and Tali, though, were not quite.
"Hey," he called to them, putting up an 'older, kind brother' tone of voice that the Special Forces operatives were trained to use with civilians and kids. "Feeling ready for this? I know both of you've dealt with more than one life-threatening situation, but none of you were on the battlefield."
Liara and Tali shared a glance amongst each other before Tali seemed to gather courage and speak up:
"You do not need to worry about us, Commander," she said, putting up a firm tone.
Liara nodded in agreement. "She is right. We will do our part, whatever it takes."
"Well, that's good to hear, but I already know I won't worry about you," he replied easily. "Your job today will be to stay behind and do support if necessary. You are a biotic, and you are tech expert. So, you cover people with barriers from the cover, and you do hacking or quick field repair if needed."
No matter how imperceptive it was, he saw relief and growing confidence filling their chests as their shoulders relaxed and spines straightened out.
"Y-you got it!" Tali exclaimed in eager surprise as she hopped in her seat. "I have numerous hacking suites, micro repair bots, and I have packed extra amount of omni-gel!"
"And I am strong enough to maintain a broad-field barrier for minutes if needed," Liara added readily.
"Good; that much will most likely be your job," he said, nodding, then turned back forward, just a ship began atmospheric entry.
A light sense of vertigo spread the ship when the artificial gravity of the ship mixed with the natural planet's one. A sense of the ship leveling up followed, and a general ship notification ping came next.
"Ground team, prep for soft-drop!" Jaina's voice sounded over the intercom.
"You heard her people," Marcus called over the comm as he revved up the Mako's engines.
Pings of readiness from the other teams chimed in his HUD, and Marcus focused on the cargo bay hatch in front of him. The lights on either side of the exit burned a glaring red as the ramp began to descend. The thunderous roar of air filled the cargo bay, the punishing punch of the air currents mitigated by the deflective mass effect barrier that stretched across the exit area.
The mega-towers of Zhu's Hope rose in front of them. The bursts of gunfire were flashing all over and in between the collection of the massive ancient structures, the hailstorm of bullets flying in all directions could be seen, and the muffled explosions growing louder by the second as they neared.
The lights on the sides of exit ramp turned yellow as the Normandy decelerated. With the handbrake still on, Marcus gave full throttle, making the vehicle tremble angrily as he kept the clutch tethering on that brink of release, his hand ready on the handbrake release.
The green light flared, and the handbrake went down, the Mako jerking forward with a full throttle of its six-wheel drive. A sense of weightlessness enveloped all the occupants as the vehicle stormed downward before Marcus kick-started the descent thrusters.
The armored vehicle landed with a bouncing jolt straight in the middle of the huge and spacious plateau of the skyscraper that was the home of the colony, the two Tritons dropping down with a powerful tremor right after it, and the remaining foot soldiers quickly dropping down on descent mass effect fields.
"Drop successful!" Garrus declared from the main gun's controls. "Activating adaptive camo!"
"No hostiles and no civvies in the area," Alenko reported from the sensors.
"All forces – advance toward the defensive perimeter," Marcus commanded over the comms, throttling up and pushing on toward the front lines as the Mako's adaptive camo system scanned the surrounding area and shifted from its default white into a mix of dirty whites and grays.
The two Tritons advanced right after him with as much speed as they could, with the foot soldiers keeping up on the mechs' flanks with their weapons raised and ready.
Taking a final glance upward as he drove, Marcus saw the Normandy standing off against several geth frigates before he returned his focus on driving. He could do nothing about that, but he had Jaina up there; if there was anyone that could do something about those ships, it was her.
The Mako sped down the straight streets of the colony, banking left as he reached the end of it and advanced toward the area where he could see large clusters of people forming a defense perimeter.
"Frontlines dead ahead," Garrus reported from the main gun's scope. "Heavy firefight!"
He wasn't kidding. A few hundred defenders were spread out in the area in front of the pass that led into the broad ancient skyway, keeping to the cover of numerous concrete blocks, steel beams, and ancient structures as they fought the advancing enemy using whatever mismatched guns they had. Heavy raining of geth gunfire surged all around them from the direction of the skyway, the phasic rounds and plasma explosions blasting against the steel and concrete blocks that served as barricades, raising dust and ricochet sparks all over the place. The pair of armored vehicles that the defenders seemed to have had – an aging M29 Grizzly and a Mako of their own – was the only thing holding the synthetics at bay. The two vehicles were keeping behind massive walls of concrete, dancing back-and-forth as they peeked out only long enough to blindly send artillery shells enemy's way before the heavy AP plasma rounds sent them scurrying back into cover.
With a violent bank and drifting, Marcus rolled the Mako into a cover, shifting into neutral and popping the handbrake in one fluid motion.
"Ash, take the wheel!" he commanded as he jumped up from his seat and popped the hatch. "Garrus, you stay on the main guns. The rest of you with me!"
He jumped out of the vehicle, taking to one knee and grabbing his rifle as he waited for the rest of his team to exit the Mako. Glancing back, he saw the two huge Triton mechs stomping their way around the corner, with foot soldiers following close at hand, and lumbering as quickly as possible toward them.
"Reinforcements!" some of the defending people hollered in relief. "The Alliance is here!"
A series of sudden, thundering booms reverberated above them, giving everyone pause, and as Marcus looked up, he saw Normandy surging through the geth ship formation with one of the geth frigates already engulfed in flames and falling down toward Feros's surface. A swell of pride warmed his chest as he watched their ship dodge geth shots and storm off, no less than all five geth ships turning about, hot on its trail.
As he watched the ship his wife commanded dive down and out of sight, dodging a flurry of incoming geth ship rounds and fired missiles, though, an unpleasant sensation twisted his gut for one impossibly long second. It took all the inhumane willpower he possessed to bash it down.
Live! – he sent a thought, then shifted his piercing gaze across the perimeter, taking a heartbeat to assess the state of the combatants and the overall tactical situation.
The defenders were an odd bunch of mismatched people – that much was clear within a split second. Most of them wore ordinary worker clothes or civilian garb, with a few of the civilians sporting low-grade armor. A platoon of professional security forces seemed to be the one holding ground around the choke point, with militiamen throwing blind suppressive fire around and above cover.
He tapped his comms, broadcasting on all frequencies:
"This is Commander Shepard of the Alliance, here to help! Who's in charge?!"
The comms' crackled and a man's voice came shouting through:
"This is Alex Stavros, in charge of the private security forces protecting the colony! I got thirty good men, but the rest are poorly equipped militia. I saw your ship! You arrived in the nick of time – those geth arrived a little over an hour ago and began the assault on this side of the skyway not thirty minutes after that. I'm already a couple dozen militiamen short, and we can barely stick our heads out. They're pressuring us real bad!"
"I'm on it, Stavros!" Marcus called back. "Give me two minutes to scout the field, and then my team will do what they can."
He cut the comm and hand-signaled for his people to hold ground, then stormed out toward the center of the defensive line where a huge horizontally-placed slab of concrete stood as an excellent impromptu cover at the very center of skyway before it.
Geth suppressive fire surged around him as he dodged the rounds and vaulted obstacles until he dropped into a kick-slide that landed him behind the cover. Glancing at his shield HUD, he noted that it hadn't dropped that much at all, but figured that to the unshielded militiamen, even one bullet was enough; and geth were making sure to keep the fire dense enough for just that.
Glancing over the top of the cover for one second, he assessed the situation before diving back down, managing to scout out everything they were working against.
A whole company-worth of geth soldiers was advancing their way under the cover of a platoon of four-legged armored walkers – four of which the Eden Prime reports had classified as smaller Armatures, with the fifth one at the lead being the gargantuan Colossus. The whole combined platoon of enemy troops had approached as close as one hundred meters, with all quad-walkers hiding behind the numerous concrete rubble that littered the skyway with only their small heads peeking out and sending plasma rounds the defender's way.
He glanced back around the defensive perimeter, scouting out the locations for his troops and began to issue tactical orders not a second later, calling out to his team:
"Listen up! Ash and Garrus – take that Mako into that hull down over there," he commanded, his suit's VI tracking the locations he was looking at and sending the arrow marker into the intended squadmate's HUD. "I want you to shoot at anything you see having a flashlight on that skyway! Miller – get those Tritons on the sides of the breech and pound at everything you see! I want suppressive fire from those machine guns and missiles to flush geth out of their cover! Liara, Kaidan – get behind those mechs and support them with barriers when they need to regenerate shields! Tali, with them! Stay low and hit them with every EWAR strike you have, and deploy those repair bots when needed. Wrex and footmen team – on me to the front! EXECUTE!"
"YES, SIR!" came a loud roar, and the team jumped toward their designated locations.
They surged in all directions as one, the Mako revving up with a screech of armored tires as it repositioned, the Tritons lumbering at a quick pace with Liara, Kaidan, and Tali following right behind their protective bulk, and with Marcus, Wrex, and footmen surging forward toward the thickest of firefight.
The geth weapons turned on them immediately, sending a hailstorm of suppressive fire intended for a quick kill as Armatures and Colossus attempted heavy strikes against the Tritons.
It all broke futilely against the Normandy team's heavily augmented shields, and the professional soldiers and high-end specialists stormed into their designated positions with no shield so much as breaking.
For a second, the first thing that could be heard was the sound of the Triton's mighty machine guns spinning up. And then, the thunderous roar of the two massive 12.7-cal* weapons overwhelmed everything on the battlefield.
A hailstorm of heavy slugs tore into the advancing geth with impunity, stopping their advance head-on and giving the badly-needed seconds for the defenders to regroup. Just as the Tritons became the geth's main target, the Mako's main gun struck in the middle of their assault formations, followed quickly by the colonists' Mako and the old Grizzly joining in a blazing game of whack-a-geth.
The geth assault groups staggered under the sudden influx of decisive counter-suppression, dropping back behind their own cover, only to cause Miller and his wingman to switch weapons on their Tritons and discharge a pair of high-arcing missiles that slammed down straight into the hiding throng. The detonations ripped the groups apart in a shower of shrapnel and oil, knocking them out of their cover straight into the incoming hailstorm of bullets – bullets that exploded on impact.
As he fired his Mattock into the geth, Marcus became distinctly aware of the first surprised, and then overjoyed exclaim of the big krogan as his new massive machine gun began discharging fiery death into the geth lines. Virtually as powerful as another Triton's arm gun, the Devastator began wreaking havoc through the ranks of the synthetics, its explosive rounds tearing apart any geth that got flushed outta their cover together with Marcus's and Kaidan's advanced guns.
Seeing the shift in the flow of battle, Marcus quickly tapped the comms, sending new orders:
"Shepard to all armored vehicles: target their heavy walkers! Don't let them suppress the Tritons!"
With geth troopers heavily staggered and no longer the IFVs' worry, the three armored vehicles promptly followed orders and turned their full and undivided attention to the enemy armor. Switching their ammo from explosive to armor-piercing, the IFVs rolled out of their cover and promptly began to jointly focus-fire one Armature at a time, dropping three of them in quick succession before the remaining ones ducked behind their cover in the now-badly-needed attempt to recharge their shields and repair their armor.
Tali, though, never gave them the chance.
Sending out a group of small orb-drones, she channeled a series of powerful EWAR disruptive pulses that crippled the geth's ability to effectively perform a repair protocol, crippling their ability to provide artillery support to their troops that were now hitting a solid wall.
Within a minute, the entire flow of battle made an 180-shift as the emboldened and no-longer-suppressed human forces broke out of their covers and tore into the badly staggered geth.
The Tritons that had taken the brunt of holding the line onto their backs were joined with a joint suppressive fire from the foot soldiers' guns, hand grenade explosions, armored vehicles' shelling, and the increasing number of militiamen from whom the enemy's pressure was diverted, transforming into a solid storm of bullets and explosions that finally forced the now-decimated geth troops to act.
Like one, the entire half of geth battle line surged back into the set of cover further behind. A few moments passed before the entire second half surged back to join the first.
"Shepard, they're performing a retreat," Garrus called from his position on the Mako's guns. "I've never seen anything this coordinated! I'm having trouble picking targets over here."
"Noted," Marcus said as he kept up a suppressive fire from his M96 into the retreating enemy until they disappeared behind numerous obstacles that were spread out across all of the skyway's length, leaving piles of mechanical corpses behind them strewn all across the field.
"Shepard to all troops: cease fire, cease fire!" Shepard ordered through the comms.
"Cease fire!" echoed from numerous distant mouths through the air, the frontlines promptly turning quiet save for the calls for regrouping and moans of the injured.
"Shepard to the specialist team: status report!"
A moment later, all of them pinged back, their statuses appearing as green outlines on his HUD: all fine, no injured.
"Miller, you and your squad keep watch over the skyway," Marcus spoke. "Send two men to man the Mako and shoot at anything that so much as pops a flashlight!"
"Yes, sir!" the man replied, and Marcus saw two men promptly separate from the sergeant's squad and run and hop into the tank, with Ashley and Garrus leaving the vehicle a few moments later.
Marcus's eyes turned and swept over the people of his team that had gathered around him, and finally settled on Wrex. The huge krogan held a large brown cigar the size of a child's forelimb in his mouth and was lighting it with the heat of the massive machine gun's hot bore.
"Wrex?" Marcus drawled slowly. "The machine gun working alright?"
Wrex took a deep drag of his lit cigar, then chuckled, thick puffs of smoke billowing out of his large mouth in the rhythm of his laughter.
"Does it work?" the krogan repeated rhetorically as he pointed the gun upwards, taking the cigar out of his mouth and holding it between his fingers. "You bet your quad it works!" He then looked at the weapon. "I've never used a weapon this powerful before. I'm keeping it."
"What are you calling that one, Shepard?" Garrus asked.
"Devastator machine gun," he replied.
"Ha! It sure is," Wrex concurred heartily.
Marcus noticed two men approaching their group with a purpose to their step. One of them, a grizzled man with graying hair and an obvious veteran soldier, was clad in full armor and wearing complete battle gear, while the other one was a civilian with nothing but a pistol at his hip. Marcus removed his helmet and showed his face to the two men.
"Commander," the civilian greeted him. He sounded drained. "My name is Fai Dan. I'm the current Mayor of the Zhu's Hope Township. Thank you for coming to our rescue."
"And my name is Alex Stavros," the veteran soldier said, "former Alliance sergeant, in charge of the private security forces that protect this colony. Are you by any chance that Commander Shepard everybody's heard about?"
Marcus simply nodded.
"Well, then, it's a damn good thing to know you're here," he said, then turned his head and nodded up toward the Tritons. "And I'm glad to see those, too! Their guns just mopped the floor with the geth; would've been a lot harder to deal with everything if you hadn't shown up."
"What's the situation here, Stavros?" Marcus asked.
"Not as bad as it could've been, I'll tell you that," he replied grimly. "The call came from the Alliance two days ago about an imminent attack. Good thing it came via the general broadcast frequency, so all of the Zhu's Hope heard it; otherwise, the ExoGeni would most likely just dismiss it right of the bat. Even then, they tried to."
"Are you serious?" Marcus asked with an edge in his voice.
"Wish I wasn't," Stavros replied grimly. "It's that bastard, Ethan Jeong, the Chief of Operations. A real prick, that one. I mean, the other scientists are good people, but this guy's your real corporate douche."
"Alright, where is he, then?"
Stavros barked a mirthless chuckle, then pointed toward the other mega-tower with his rifle.
"Over there, with the majority of scientists, and no less than a whole another platoon of security forces," he spat. "I've barely managed to convince him to post thirty of the forty-five men down here. The bastard wanted all of the security for himself. I pretty much doubt anyone is left alive up there. Those geth ships that I saw your ship drag away from us? They discharged a whole goddamn combined battalion into that other tower, and one whole damn frigate remained attached to the skyscraper's side like a bloody tick! It's projecting a jamming field, and we can't signal anyone off-world."
"Then that's our main target," Marcus spoke with finality before turning to Fai Dan. "You say you're the Mayor? What's the situation with the colonists?"
"Thankfully, good, Commander," the man replied. "We've managed to prepare thanks to the Alliance's warning. The non-combatants are unharmed, but many civilians took up arms… some of them didn't make it."
"How many people do you have here?" Marcus queried.
"Over 1200 civilians," the man replied, then paused. "Several dozens less, now."
"Yeah, other than my guys, barely a dozen of them had shielding units of any kind," Stavros said, nodding sideways to Fai Dan. "Geth had cashed in on it mercilessly."
"Figured as much with the assault methods the geth used," Marcus said before turning to Fai Dan. "Do you have all the facilities needed to provide relief and shelter for the non-combatants?"
"Fortunately, we do," he replied. "The main generator is working steadily, the water supply from the old Prothean aqueduct is stable, and there's a salarian trader who brought a lot of provisions with his ship a few weeks ago; we're not short on supplies for the moment. The only real problem is those geth."
"Yeah – fortunately, the synths didn't have the time to do any real damage or gain a foothold," Stavros added. "If your frigate wasn't here to engage those geth ships when it did, we'd be in much deeper shit right about now. Those ships were maneuvering toward the top of that side tower to discharge troops!"
"I thought you had GARDIAN turrets," Marcus said, frowning.
Stavros barked mirthlessly once more.
"Yeah – those turrets were wisely placed by ExoGeni's "experts" in the middle of the colony. They didn't have the coverage of the other side of those two side towers. Geth were about to exploit that. If you hadn't shown up, we'd be having geth crawling all over the tower right about now, and we'd all be forced to deal with that fiasco as well!"
Marcus nodded. "Very well," he said. "If the colony is as secure as you say, I'll organize my people, and we'll head toward the other Prothean tower across the skyway. That geth frigate will need to be taken care of."
"I'll help you plan your attack," Stavros offered. "I was there until yesterday; I know the layout."
Marcus looked to Fai Dan, and spoke, "Go take care of your people, Mr. Dan. The soldiers will take it from here."
"Of course, Commander," Fai Dan spoke, then walked away in a hurried, purposeful pace.
"Alright, Stavros," Marcus started when Fai Dan was out of earshot, "Tell me what I need to know."
"There's something seriously off about this colony, Commander - that's what you need to know," Stavros growled in a low and grimly serious voice.
Marcus blinked. "Come again?" This was not the report he was expecting.
"In the one day that my men and I have been here, we have noticed an odd behavior among the colonists," Stavros said.
"Elaborate," Marcus demanded.
"It's the little things, sir," the man said succinctly. "They are very evasive, very withdrawn and vague. Many of them have shown symptoms of sudden and severe headaches, conveniently whenever someone asks them of what might be the problem. At first, I thought it was just plain mistrust of armed people, but yesterday evening, we came upon a man in the lower tunnels when we were exterminating a pack of raging varren for the colonists. The man seemed to be in constant pain, and he kept talking about how he's trying to resist it, and whenever he tried speaking of 'it', he was riddled with even more pain.
"To put further suspicion, earlier in the day, when I endorsed for the scientists to move from the Headquarters to Zhu's Hope, that ExoGeni chief, Ethan Jeong, was very adamant against it. And I do mean very."
He took a step closer, and his wizened, grim eyes met Marcus's.
"Sir. I think that ExoGeni was doing some kind of experiments on these people here. And, personally, I don't think the experiment is fully under their control; otherwise, they would have terminated it and came here. Now, I've seen these things when I served. It's textbook behavioral indoctrination, just like batarian slave control chip implants, but this one might be something else. The colonists speak of the colony as if it's a real paradise, but my men and I are not as eager to stay here if you know what I'm saying. I was thinking we might be dealing with some kind of new hallucinogenic drug or maybe something biological in nature, so I had my men inject themselves with the standard Alliance Ferrodex-20 biochem suppressant just to be sure. I've no idea how much time it bought us, and frankly, sir, I'm not eager to find out."
Marcus met the man's grim look seriously, nodded once, and then looked around, noticing how many colonists were fighting as militia.
"Have the militiamen proven to be unreliable?"
"No, and that's the thing," Stavros said. "They actually fight ferociously. I've got more than two hundred armed civs, and thirty trained former soldiers and cops. The militiamen might not be skilled, but they sure have the heart. It's like they have something they want to protect badly."
"Commander," Sergeant Miller's voice came through the comm.
"I'm listening," Marcus replied.
"The Geth seem to be preparing for another assault," he said. "I'm seeing multiple Armature-class walkers and a pair of Colossus-class leading 'em."
Marcus quickly waved his team toward the frontlines, the team quickly dropping whatever they were doing and quickly moving on top of the ramparts for a good look. Garrus was already higher than anyone on a nearby vantage point and was scoping the enemy out with his heavy sniper. Marcus hopped up to him and donned his plate-masked helmet, zooming in with his helm-integrated optics and seeing the myriad of geth in the distance forming up in a massive assault.
"What do you see?" Marcus asked the turian next to him.
"That looks like one hell of an assault pattern, Shepard," Garrus said grimly after a moment. "They move in perfect coordination, one line protecting another. No wasted movements. No sloppy soldiers." His mandibles fluttered slightly. "So… this is what an AI war machine looks like… We might be in trouble."
"Not necessarily," Tali spoke up from where she stood on the ramparts a few feet beneath them. When Marcus looked down at her questioningly, the girl continued: "Speaking simply, when there are many geth platforms near each other, their efficiency increases because they share data, and it's easier for them to compute. To put it even more simply: as you kill them, they will become less and less competent, because no matter how fast their adaptation might be, data will be lost mid-transfer as platforms get destroyed. They'll become sloppy, giving you holes in their defenses for you to exploit."
"Sounds promising," Marcus commented. "Any other helpful info?"
"Yes. Shoot the big ones first," she replied firmly. "They carry the most computing power needed for high-quality coordination."
"Hmm, makes sense," he said, then called out, "Alright people, listen up! Kaidan, Liara, I'll have you repeat the process from before – you two work with the Triton mechs in covering them with barriers when their shields meed recharge and use your biotics offensively only if the geth get close enough. Garrus, how do you feel about taking vantage here?"
Garrus gave him the look.
"Are you kidding? This place is perfect," he said. "I have good elevation, perfect angle, and a thick structural beam right here for cover."
"Good to hear. Now, that anti-materiel rifle is designed to work against lightly armored vehicles, so target heavier geth. Use it with impunity. Stavros, those side towers that support skyway cables – are they accessible?"
"Sure are – that's where some of my men are," the man replied. "Just head to that large entrance and take the stairs on the side."
Marcus nodded. "Wrex, you're going over there. Find a thick entrenchment, and tear their flanks apart!"
"With pleasure," Wrex growled readily, replacing his cigar between his teeth as he stood up and promptly jogging off.
"Tali, you're EWAR support. Throw whatever you have on those geth. Ashley, you're on the frontlines with me and the rest of Miller's men."
Shouts were going everywhere as people scrambled, seeking good entrenchment and building more cover. The tanks began taking shots toward geth armatures whose heads could be seen over the debris, but many of the shots missed the comparatively small protrusions.
But not the shots from Garrus; his rifle's superior distance and his superior skills made sure of it.
Each time a large Destroyer or a Juggernaut came in his sights, a single round of his powerful anti-materiel rifle would break through their shields and smash their heads apart like a sledgehammer. Each time one of the numerous Armatures came into his sights, three quick and heat sink oversaturating rounds were enough – each breaking their shields, armor, and superstructure in quick succession.
"Thirty seconds estimate until they clear skyway debris," Garrus called through comms as he measured distances through his scope.
Marcus watched through his visor zoom as armatures clambered over some of the obstacles as if they were arachnids, the firefight beginning to pick up as both sides began trading shots.
"Ten seconds," Garrus called out as the battle began to pick up.
"This is Shepard to all combatants: target the big ones first, whenever you can!" he ordered over the comms.
The army of geth finally passed the final set of obstacles that sheltered their advance, and everything started blazing. The geth started their charge with smaller shock troopers advancing in a coordinated fashion as they deployed their hexagonal defense shields. More massive geth Destroyers charged between them, rushing straight toward the defensive line as drones buzzed above in a harassing strafe runs as the Armatures slowly advanced, all of them led by the pair of massive Colossi.
They were met with a solid and emboldened hailstorm of gunfire, shells, grenades, missiles, concussive shots, and overloadingareal EMP blasts that dropped geth flyers in droves. The battle had begun.
(Thirty seconds earlier…)
Wrex jogged up onto the third floor of the support tower that overlooked the skyway from its side. He looked around for a good machine gun point, his experienced eye immediately noticing a terrace with a couple of huge blocks of steel-and-concrete making for an effective crenellation. He trotted up to it, looking around for the best way to assume combat position when he suddenly noticed an upright L-shaped piece of broken concrete standing like a conveniently backed chair just in front of the crenel.
Wrex bent over and wiped a bit of dust from it, then sat down and looked upon the perfectly clear view he had at the approaching geth army.
As the first sporadic shots began to be exchanged between the opposing forces down below, he opened a canister that was attached to his flank and pulled out one of the pair of litter-sized cans of beer from the frosty interior. He popped it open, savoring the satisfying pffft-click, and then, removing the cigar from his mouth, he brought the drink up to his mouth and took a long, satisfying:
"*Ssllluurrrrrrrrp, gulp* – Ahhh!" he rumbled in satisfaction as he watched the battle be joined in earnest.
"Haaah. This. Is Life," he declared contently, then put the beer can down, replaced the cigar in his mouth, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
"BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR HUE, HUE-HUE, HUE-HUE-HUE-HEHEHEHEHEHEEE BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"
(Meanwhile, at the colony entrance…)
Marcus nodded to himself as the storm of heavy, explosive machine gun bolts started tearing into the Geth flank from the direction of the tower to the side where Wrex had taken up point. His keen ears could clearly discern the raucous krogan laughter overpowering even the ringing noise of metal piercing metal.
He refocused his attention to keeping up with the short-to-medium bursts from his rifle toward the selected groups of enemies, letting the explosive force of his rounds splinter material and send shrapnel through the tightly packed groups of shock troopers. His experienced eyes picked up the state and the progress of the battleground in the corners of their vision, never needing to turn their full attention that way.
Throughout the din of bursts and explosions, the defenders were holding steady and true. The additional Mako and a pair of Triton mechs, all piloted by experienced soldiers, had proven to be a decisive factor, keeping the pressure away from the militia, and keeping the civilians' morale up. The river of geth was being steadily withered as the dead robotic bodies started piling up at the invisible barrier, getting scattered by a tank round every few seconds that sent them flying over the edges of the skyway.
"Shepard," Wrex called over the comms, "I see a bunch of weird, pyjack-looking geth crawling on all fours on the underside of the skyway, and I don't have a clear shot! They're almost on top of you!"
Just as he finished, odd-looking geth soldiers started hopping up from below, jumping over the frontal ramparts and straight into their ranks.
The poorly trained militiamen immediately lost their cool.
The weapons turned in the direction that they shouldn't have, the men's faces switched from focus to masks of panic, the calmness turned to jolts of fear.
In a flash of a second, Marcus recognized a disaster in the making and clenched his teeth against the sudden flash of frustration as Akuze flashed in front of his eyes all over again. It was like seeing soldiers panicking as the Thresher Maw kept bursting from the ground straight in their midst. Panic, terror, hesitation; death. It all flashed as if he was there again.
And then, before the colonists managed to do something stupid, a flurry of blue auras began enveloping the hopping geth in quick succession, launching the mechs into the air and blasting them apart with a quick application of biotic combos.
Quickly glancing back to the person who he knew had right then and there saved the entire defensive line, he saw Liara. Mighty biotic aura swirled around the young asari as she veritably danced through the biotic combat stances like a flurry of fast-paced martial arts katas. Her lifts and singularities caught geth hoppers like a swirling maelstrom before her warps blasted them apart again, and again, and again, leaving only scrap metal to be had.
The panicking colonists quickly switched their line of fire, raising their guns and firing wildly at the levitating geth even as Tali began sending precision-strike tech attacks the enemy's way.
"Good work, Liara!" Marcus called through the comms so she could hear him. "Keep a lookout for more geth hoppers! Don't let them drop among militiamen!"
"Understood!" the girl replied, her breath panting, but her tone calm and level.
Several more squads of hoppers continued in their attempts at assailing the defender's position immediately after, having even less success when Kaidan joined Liara in catching them with biotic fields while they were still in the middle of their hop.
The pair of geth Colossi was still fighting, however. The Armatures were mostly done for, but those two behemoths kept soaking up the tremendous amounts of damage while their massive main cannons kept ripping the defensive ramparts apart and knocking the hiding defenders away like they were rag dolls.
With geth foot soldiers broken, though, all firepower switched to the two massive, ten-meter tall constructs, concentrating the staggering amount of force their way. With Tali's relentless and continuous EWAR attacks, The Colossi took their first step back. Then another. And another.
And then, their shields burst.
Just like that, the moment they did, an anti-materiel round sliced straight into the weak point between the neck plates of one of the Colossi, sending the mech reeling as if it received a vicious punch the face, its flashlight head explode in a burst of electric sparks as it fell down like a giraffe.
"Scratch one!" Garrus called out merrily.
All fire switched to the final Colossus as it and the remaining geth foot soldiers went into a to retreat, not letting it take a breather nor succor before its shields failed and the combined might of several IFVs, mechs, and heavy weapons took it down in short order.
As the remaining few dozen geth soldiers retreated down the skyway toward their base of operations in the second mega-tower, the battlefield turned quiet of guns' blazing once more.
Only a wild, elated cheer from the colonists filled the air.
Marcus stood up from his cover, taking a long look across the ramparts, feeling the old, nearly forgotten warmth spread through his chest.
He was seeing Elysium again.
People had survived. They were cheering. The few soldiers that he and Jaina had rallied. The police forces. But, most of all, the civilians. They were cheering. And Jaina's eyes that day… they were only for him.
Jaina.
His gaze quickly turned to the direction that the Normandy had disappeared to earlier in the day, trailed by a wolfpack of geth frigates, sensing a cold, twisting feeling fighting its way up his chest before he bashed it down once more. There was no room for that now.
The cold, calculated, ruthless soldier took over again, reaching his hand to his earbud and speaking:
"Shepard to Normandy forces: we need to cash in on this opportunity! We will advance against the enemy in the second mega-tower. Objective: destroy all geth forces, and destroy or disable the geth ship that's jamming the comms. Stavros, your men are to follow us and provide support."
"Understood, Commander," Stavros replied.
"Alright people, the formation is as follows: The Makos up front, the Tritons are taller so they're right behind them providing support from the outside. The infantry is staggered in between with heavy armor soldiers up front, and specialists in the back. The Grizzly stays put to defend the colony."
"Sir, what about the colonists?" Ashley asked.
"Do not worry about us, Commander," Fai Dan called out immediately through the rumble of the repositioning tanks. "We are well entrenched, and well-armed, despite everything, and there are more than two hundred of us. There is nothing that can attack us save from across that skyway."
"Alright, then, that settles it!" Marcus decided. "Move out, people!"
With Normandy's teams being mostly Alliance soldiers, and Stavros's private security forces being mostly former Alliance military, the advancing forces quickly established a firm and solid assault formation, and began their trek across the skyway, firing toward the enemy geth that could still be seen rapidly retreating. The enemy rounds kept wheezing about – both sniper and short burst fire pinging off of the obstacles, concrete and soldiers' shields, followed by occasional Colossus plasma blast, but the solid coordination of the professional soldiers made them quickly find their groove and efficiently dodge everything that the enemy was throwing their way.
The Makos, though, turned out to be a far greater hindrance to their quick progress than he had expected.
The infantry fighting vehicle was designed to be used as a fast and agile vehicle that could perform quick transports and assaults across various types of rough terrain. The problem was that the battle-scarred skyway they were traversing now was cluttered with debris, large concrete slabs, as well as anti-tank barricades that provided practically vertical wall-like obstacle. Geth Armatures had no problem with this; they could climb over it like insects. But it was a whole different story for a wheeled vehicle.
The Mako's springy suspension and unruly differential were making the vehicle beyond difficult to control. More than once, a vehicle almost crushed a nearby soldier when it swerved unexpectedly after scaling an obstacle, even causing one of the tanks' front wheels to go over the ledge. The vehicle's jump thrusters couldn't do much good because their use required a running start – something the Mako couldn't properly do in small spaces – and controlling the jump with thrusters alone was insanely difficult.
By the time they were halfway across the skyway, and when one Mako had to be biotically pulled back from where its front hanged over the ledge using combined might of Wrex, Liara, Kaidan, and him, Marcus had firmly decided that Mako needed to be replaced.
Just as they reached that halfway mark, from where the majority of the obstacles were cleared, a loud roar of ship engines made everyone stop in their tracks and jerk their heads toward the sound, witnessing a geth frigate ascending from below them and beginning to slowly climb up into the sky, completely ignoring the combined platoon that Marcus has been leading.
"Where the hell did that come from?" Kaidan yelled as everyone crouched low, impulsively aiming their guns toward the ascending frigate despite the fact that it wouldn't do any good.
"Must've been attached to the Zhu's Hope skyscraper, somewhere beneath the colony," Stavros said. "It must've been there all this time, ever since the fighting began. We'd have seen it otherwise."
"Did they intend to come up from beneath the colony?" Marcus asked sharply.
"We'd have heard them," Stavros replied. "The only way into the lower reaches of the colony is through the three-meter thick wall of pressed concrete – I've checked, and those cannot be easily broken. You've seen our ramparts; even a Colossus had trouble against them."
Marcus nodded and opened his mouth to order for the advance.
Before he managed to utter a single thing, though, a glaring red beam of destruction descended down from the skies in a flash, lancing into one of the distant Prothean mega-towers almost two dozen kilometers away. And then, another beam lashed down, slicing all the way through the mega-tower's upper half, decapitating it like a guillotine.
In a flash instant, a beacon's memory flashed in the back of Marcus's head, of red beams of death raining down from the skies that were fired by the unseen enemies that the Protheans were futilely firing their rifles at, and his head shot up toward the beam's source, realizing in an instant that this was Saren's superdreadnought.
And the realization, together with the sight of red beams, caused a memory to become loose – one of the numerous Prothean memories from the beacon – solidifying in front of his eyes into an image of the superdreadnought. It was there, in the images of fifty thousand years ago. It was there!
His head shot back toward the distant mega-tower as the rest of the friendly forces watched in shocked fascination the gigantic mega-tower's upper half sliding and falling down into the dust cloud, followed by a flurry of additional red beams blanketing the area until an explosion blasted up from the dust cloud.
And just like that, his brain added two and two and an ice-cold surge went through his body.
Jaina.
He felt like someone delivered the most vicious punch of all time to his guts. A sense of a thousand needles piercing his skin spread across his face as the shock of realization grabbed him in a vice-like squeeze as his heart began to beat like crazy. Horror, helplessness, and rage swept through him like an exploding volcano; the darkest, most horrifying fear that he might have lost the one thing in his life that mattered. The one and only thing.
It took all of his inhuman willpower to pull himself out from the spiral of momentary despair his mind had fallen into.
Diamonds in his vision faded and the color returned to the world. The people around him started moving again from being frozen mid-motion when his mind went haywire. The sounds switched from muffled droning in slow motion to the sound of confused voices.
"What the hell was that?" Garrus asked.
Marcus swallowed the bile, forcing his lungs to take and push air.
"Saren's dreadnought," he replied slowly, his own voice hollow to him. He felt the ring and little finger of his left hand shaking uncontrollably. He couldn't stop them.
"What the hell was it shooting at?" Wrex rumbled slowly.
"Jesus Christ," Kaidan realized. "The Normandy!"
"Oh, no! Sir, we must contact them," Ashley spoke up hurriedly.
"If they're alive, they won't answer," Marcus said in a slow, grim voice, ignoring beads of cold sweat that formed on his skin. "Their position will be compromised if they send a signal."
There was a pregnant pause.
Marcus took a deep, deep breath, letting the shaky inhale purge his chest of dread and clenched his fist hard, forcing the shakes of his fingers to stop. The hellish training he had gone through to become the N7 took over. Whatever had happened over there, he'd finish the job. And then…
"We press on," he said, his voice being an edge of cold steel sending chills down troops' spines. "A geth frigate remains on the second mega-tower, picking up troops. Once they're done, they'll be mobile, and we'll be right in the open for their strafe run."
"If we make it in the first place," Kaidan said hurriedly, turning his head toward the skies. "That superdreadnought might target us any second!"
"If it wanted us dead, we'd be dead already," Wrex said grimly.
"So, why aren't we?" Stavros asked, looking at Wrex.
Marcus brusquely interrupted any further discussion:
"We'll have all the time in the world to discuss 'why-s' and 'what-ifs' later!" he growled, raising his rifle and moving with a purposeful step toward the enemy. "Right now, that other mega-tower waits. MOVE OUT!"
He didn't have the mental or emotional capacity to think about why that superdreadnought wasn't pummeling them down to oblivion. Not now. Not when he didn't know whether the woman he loved was alive or dead. As he brusquely continued issuing orders, all that his mind had the capacity for was the autopilot of the decade-long experience in battle and commanding.
"What's up with Commander?" Stavros asked Kaidan very quietly. "He looks off way more than just losing his ship."
"His wife was on the ship," he said just as quietly. "She was our XO. Long story. Not now, okay?"
Stavros just nodded mutely, when a sudden crackle of static went off in all of their earpieces with incoherent sounds of someone speaking on the other end of the link.
Marcus's head shot up and he jerked, turning his whole body sharply toward the distance where the alien dreadnought had targeted ground. The crackle repeated, but this time, there was the sound of woman's voice he'd recognize anytime:
"Normandy to th *static* ound team: do *static* copy?"
It was like a sun shined in the middle of his chest, sending the badly-needed warmth through his limbs.
"This is Shepard!" he replied immediately, feeling the tension leave his shoulders and the rock in his stomach turn to vapor. "You don't know how glad we are to hear from you, Normandy! We could use help against the Geth ship that's hooked on the side of the ExoGeni building."
"We're *crackle* ground team," Jaina's voice spoke through the crackle. "*crackle * on our way!"
He exhaled in relief and turned back to his people, his voice losing the grim, deathly edge it had had moments before.
"Alright, people, we have a break here!" he called out energetically. "The road in front of us is clear, without any obstacles – ergo, no cover! We're going to use the Normandy to do the heavy lifting, if possible."
"Normandy to ground team, do you read me?" Jaina's voice sounded in his ears.
"We read you loud and clear, Normandy," Marcus replied. "Is it safe for you to be uncloaked?"
"Saren's dreadnought has left, along with most of the geth ships, and we're detecting only a single frigate remaining near your position."
"Affirmative, Normandy! Eliminating that vessel will stop the jamming signal, but there are plenty of geth units on the ground. We could use the air support."
"Roger that, ground team, we'll be there in twenty seconds. Mark the area you need cleared."
"I'm on it!" Garrus called as he peered over the nearby cover and used his rifle's targeting laser to point out the geth troop clusters.
Less than fifteen seconds later, the Normandy came into view from their right, the white wisps of air billowing around it as it moved at supersonic speeds.
"Protect your ears!" Marcus roared, and the troops obeyed, just in time as the sleek warship swooped above them in a thunderous boom, and multiple low-yield Wasp barrage missiles wreaked havoc among the geth troops hiding behind the distant cover of their own.
"All forces, GO, GO, GO!" Marcus roared. "Double time, men!"
The forces charged, the Mako tanks going forth with all the speed they could muster now that the road in front of them was clear of debris, with the foot soldiers and Triton mechs following after them with as much speed as they could.
The Normandy made a U-turn, double-timing back just as the final geth frigate disengaged from the building and flew up into the air, beginning to orient itself toward the ground forces in a preparation for a strafing run. The Systems Alliance warship swooped in from its five o'clock like a bird of prey, though, delivering a deadly salvo from its main gun that wrecked the geth frigate in short order, leaving nothing but a twisted heap of flaming metal in its long drop down to the planet's surface.
The remainder of geth forces had been quickly dispatched. With few of them surviving the failed assault, and many of them having already loaded into the now-destroyed remaining frigate, the forces that were left had quickly been overwhelmed by the combined might of Marcus's ground team.
"Normandy to the ground team," Jaina called from above, "the geth ship is down. The long-range communications have been restored. I'm calling for the Alliance relief forces."
"Roger that, Normandy, we'll be checking this area of the colony out for any geth stragglers," Marcus replied, then turned toward Stavros. "Do you think there would be any survivors around here?"
"Hardly," the man replied as he looked around. "This building was nowhere near as defensible as Zhu's Hope. If it were me, I'd have scoured the building clean in order to secure it. But it's the geth we're talking about; they might be thinking along some different logic. I don't know."
As Stavros finished, Marcus heard a distinctly un-soldierly voice coming from the side. He looked to the far area and saw a civilian – a brunette woman dressed in scientist clothing – running up to a pair of soldiers at the perimeter's edge.
"Sir!" One of them called back. "We have one of the scientists here!"
Marcus and Stavros quickly trotted up to the girl.
"Miss Baynham!" Stavros called out in surprise as he ran up to her and gave her a supporting hand. "How did you survive, for cryin' out loud?!"
"Thank god you're here, Mr. Stavros," the girl spoke with relief. "I hid in the tunnels underneath. The geth never checked there, thank the heavens. Otherwise, I'd be dead."
"Well, thank your lucky stars they had different priorities then," Stavros said, then turned to Marcus. "This is Lizbeth Baynham, one of the researches," he said, then turned back to her. "Did any of the others survive, Liz?"
"I don't know," she said distraughtly as she covered her mouth to stop a sob, then continued, her face contorted in grief. "I got separated from the others when they fled. I stayed to back up the files… My mom… I… I don't know if anyone survived."
"Do you know where did they go to?"
"Yeah, um… Jeong ordered everyone to go to the Weigh Station when the geth appeared."
"A weigh station?" Marcus asked with a skeptical frown.
"No, the Weigh Station – it's just something we decided to call the place," Stavros said.
"Alright, so where is it located?" Marcus queried.
"We've actually passed it on the way here," Stavros said quickly, elaborating. "Remember that large structure in the middle of the skyway? It seemed empty, but there's a large, nicely-tucked chamber in there under the main floor. Very hard to spot. They may have lived if they hid there."
Marcus gave him a skeptical look through his plated mask that somehow still carried easily through. It needn't be said among the veterans about how those chances were slim. Lizbeth caught the silent exchange apparently, as her face scrunched up in grief and she covered her mouth with her hand, pacing aimlessly.
"Damn it!" she choked as she shook her head through a sob. "Damn it all! It's all because of that goddamn Thorian! That bastard, Jeong!"
"Miss Baynham," Marcus called to her in a firm, yet a surprisingly compassionate tone of voice as he stepped up and looked down at the tiny slip of a girl. He knew exactly what she was going through; the memory of the sensation was still fresh in him, too. "Miss Baynham, I need to know what is going on here."
Lizbeth took a couple of deep, calming breaths, sniffed, then turned with a determined look on her tear-streaked face.
"Two months ago, a survey team was searching the lower reaches of the Zhu's Hope tower. They stumbled upon an alien organism there."
Realization could be see dawning on both Marcus's and Stavros's faces as they looked at each other in alarm.
"The strange behavior," Stavros said.
"Is it a virus?" Marcus asked as he looked back at her sharply, dreading the consequences.
"A plant," she replied. "A very old, very long-living, and very huge plant-based symbiotic life form. It's called the Thorian."
Marcus began remembering the lectures and training he received on all possible forms and types of extraterrestrial parasitic threats when he was becoming a soldier.
"Does it release toxins into the air?" he asked.
"Worse," Lizbeth replied acidly. "It releases mind controlling spores. Within a month of exposure, more than eighty percent of the colony was under its control. And do you know what happened, hmm? Instead of evacuating the colony, instead of protecting them, the ExoGeni decided to keep a lid on it; to see what would happen. To see how they could profit from it! They made them into fucking lab rats, and when I tried to appeal to their human senses when I sent a report to the main headquarters on Earth, the fuckers replied by placing me on probation and banning me from using comm gear! The prick, Jeong, told me I'd be first in line to be transferred to Zhu's Hope. And now I don't know if my mother is alive or dead because that bastard didn't want to relocate to a safe place, and all that because they made an experiment they couldn't control!"
She was screaming at the end, tears falling freely from her eyes, but there was ferocity in them that few people could match. Marcus could read her as an open book: the flow of words, the body language, the eyes… the girl was telling the brutal truth.
"You say it controls its victims?" he asked, deciding to make the girl focused on a task, rather than rake her brains on useless wallowing, no matter how justified.
"Uh… yeah," the girl said as she wiped her eyes, then sniffed. "It uses them to do its bidding; to protect it and provide for it."
Marcus frowned in concentration as he looked off to the side.
"Sounds like some primitive fungus on Earth that I've heard exist," he started, "but the way you make it sound this Thorian seems to be much more."
Lizbeth nodded. "True, the Thorian is nowhere near as primitive. Those fungi on earth you talked about control ants and slugs. This thing can control sapient creatures. It knows how. The Thorian itself is very much sentient."
A grave tone was creeping into his voice as he asked, "How sentient are we talking about here?"
"As self-aware as you or me," she replied with finality. "Except that it's a plant, and its motives and ways of thinking are more alien than anything we had ever seen. I told you the Thorian was old. The samples we've picked up suggest that this particular specimen is far older than the Protheans themselves."
"That's… amazing," Liara muttered, her eyes wide.
"You could say that again," Lizbeth continued ruefully. "The creature has a nervous system analogue, centered in one single huge cluster, with many other smaller clusters spread throughout its neural network."
"Just how big is this thing?" Marcus asked.
"The brain or the network?" Lizbeth asked.
Garrus butted in, "Why do I get the feeling that we're not going to like either of those answers?"
"We don't know the size of its brain, but based on what it needs to control, we're talking bigger than a car – that's for sure," Lizbeth said. "But if you're talking about the whole network, we have a clearer picture. A few of our teams had explored the surface of Feros in a vast radius. We've confirmed that the Thorian's neural dendrites spread over most of this entire continent's surface, with numerous smaller neural clusters like ganglia nested all throughout the network."
"How could anything grow so big?" Tali asked in sheer wonder.
"Because the Thorian is not just one plant among many that might grow on Feros," Lizbeth said. "It's symbiotic. The samples we procured had living cells and tissues from thousands of different plant and fungi species! We believe that over the course of its evolution, the Thorian had… merged and melded with every single plant there is on Feros. It is an ultimate organism! It is a living bio-system. We're pretty sure that if the main brain was to be destroyed, one of these ganglia would reform as the new brain in as little as a few hundred years – a couple thousand at the most!"
There was a moment of deathly silence, with everyone too stunned to utter a single word. But a trail of thought was tickling the surface of Marcus's brain.
"So it was here during the times of the Protheans, and it's both sentient and intelligent," he spoke into the silence. "And… if it can control people, that means it can hear their thoughts, too, right?"
"Uh… yeah," Lizbeth replied. "It can 'see' and understand the thoughts of whoever it puts under its thrall. That's how it controls them, and it sure as hell is learning from the experience, getting better and more skilled. When the Protheans were here, it probably did the same thing – analyzing their brain patterns in detail, finding ways how to ensure its own survival. The poor bastards probably didn't even realize they had such creature living in the bowels of their city."
Marcus raised his eyes skyward in exasperation and released a long, tired exhale as he looked all around.
"You've realized something," Garrus stated discerningly as he watched their commander's reaction.
"Yeah, I've realized something, alright," he growled. "I've realized this Thorian is actually what the Cipher is."
There was a pregnant pause.
"This plant itself?" Wrex rumbled. "How could that be possible?"
"If what young Miss Baynham here says is right, then there is no doubt," Marcus said with certainty. "The Cipher is the memories of the Protheans the Thorian had enslaved fifty thousand years ago."
"By the Goddess," Liara exclaimed. "That's the key to unlocking and organizing all of the beacon imprints you have in your head, Shepard!"
"And that's what Saren was after," Kaidan said. "That frigate that seemed to be hooked on the lower part of Zhu's Hope tower – Saren must've been there."
"But how could he have taken those memories?" Tali spoke up. "I know computers and tech, but copying memory banks is one thing, and brain just doesn't work like that! I don't see how he could have taken that data."
"He took that data, alright," Marcus growled. "He has asari in his ranks."
"Mind meld – that's right!" Liara exclaimed. "My mother is with him, and she has two dozen followers. Any one of them could have made the meld."
"Is that even possible with a plant?" Ashley croaked.
"It's possible with the turians and the volus," Liara replied. "And both species have a fundamentally different DNA and different metabolism."
"We need to return to the colony, ASAP," Marcus spoke up as he turned and walked with a quick and firm step toward the Makos. He was interrupted by comm chatter going off in his earpiece:
"Normandy to ground team, come in," he heard Jaina's voice speaking.
"Go ahead, Normandy," he replied.
"Marcus, we've intercepted a high-priority civilian traffic between Earth and Feros," she spoke in a serious tone. "The signal from this end is coming from a structure at the skyway's midpoint. Someone is down there, alright, and I'm not liking what they're talking about one bit."
"Hit me," he demanded.
"The moment the long-range jamming was gone, the local ExoGeni head has contacted the main headquarters on Earth, reporting on the situation and asking for a course of action. Guess what the ExoGeni headquarters sent back: they've sent a directive to purge the entire colony!"
Marcus's response was grim silence as he ground his teeth.
"I'm going to land at the colony's docking bays," Jaina continued in a calmer voice, all too easily recognizing his silence for what it was. "I'm going to stop anyone from hurting those people."
"Be careful. The colonists might not be themselves," Marcus growled. "Meanwhile, I have a conversation to make."
He cut the comm, then turned toward his forces as he shouted orders:
"Listen up people! The people of the ExoGeni seem to be alive!"
Lizbeth's head immediately snapped his way, eyes wide and hopeful.
"It is confirmed that there is a presence at the Weigh Station, and we're going to go there," he continued. "Stavros, you're riding with me. Miss Baynham, you too. We can transport up to eight people in the Mako, and eight more can sit on the rooftop. The rest of you are escorting the Tritons on foot. Move out!"
"Uh, Marcus?!" he heard Jaina's bewildered voice through the comms.
"What is it?"
"When we tried landing on the docking pad, the Zhu's Hope colonists opened fire on us!"
He frowned. "Any damages?"
"Negative, it's small arms fire. They're not responding to hails, and are ignoring our outside speaker broadcasts."
"Stay away from them, Jaina," Marcus instructed as he hopped into the Mako. "I didn't realize that they would behave like that, but the colonists seem to be under influence of an alien life form, and might consider everything and everyone as a threat. Circle around until we solve this mess."
"Roger that," she replied with a sigh, then cut the comm.
Marcus sighed as he hopped into the Mako. "What a day," he muttered.
..
ADOPTED WEAPON CALIBERS AND CLASSIFICATIONS
I've decided that mass effect weapons need caliber classifications for the purpose of differentiating them throughout this story. But I can't really use "7.62 mm assault rifle" or "20 mm cannon", now can I? No mass effect round is that big. They're all sand-grain sized, and their stopping power depends on something else.
Therefore, I've decided to use caliber classification based on the intended role of the weapon, but using legacy system from when humanity still used gunpowder guns for the sake of simplicity and expedience.
As an example, modern-day heavy machine guns and anti-materiel sniper rifles are for the most part 12.7 mm. Their intended role is, essentially, to be used against materiel – vehicles, equipment, aircraft, and so forth.
Therefore, a 12.7-cal weapon in mass effect terms would be a weapon that fits the aforementioned role – of fighting against enemy materiel. Concordantly (and for the sake of simplicity) assault rifles would bear anything from 5-cal (such as the weaker-hitting M-7 and M-8), 9-cal (M-71 Revenant), and even 11-cal (M-99 Saber). The caliber would essentially denominate their stopping power, but not the actual kinetic energy of a single round and the damage it would inflict.
It would be logical, though, to have the guns of ships and vehicles slightly different. Their caliber would be based on gun length (in meters) and the size grade of the ship's eezo core that powers that same gun, because not every ship has the same eezo core size for its length. For example, small freighters might be as big as frigates, but it's certainly logical they don't have the same strength of their eezo core.
Size grade of the core would have eight categories, numbered 1-8, based on its strength and size:
1 – mech walker/small ground combat vehicle;
2 – large ground combat vehicle/shuttle craft/strike craft;
3 – corvette/passenger liner/small freighter
4 – frigate/standard freighter ship
5 – cruiser/large freighter/ark ship
6 – dreadnought/carrier
7 – superdreadnought/supercarrier
8 – special (2000+ m).
(FOR THE RECORD, I'm using ship and vehicle sizes provided by Euderion on Deviantart. If you Google "mass effect ship sizes", you'll find what I use.)
In this way, standard Alliance Alamo-class frigate's main gun is 4 x 232 caliber. The Normandy's main gun classification is 5 x 155 caliber because it carries a cruiser-sized eezo core. Obviously, since mass effect scales exponentially with eezo core size rather than linearly, almost any 5 x - caliber would be more powerful than virtually every 4 x - caliber.
A york-class cruiser's main gun would be 5 x 707, BUT its secondary guns on its sides would be (for example) 5 x 20 - because they are much shorter but still use the same core for power.
The Destiny Ascension's main gun is 7 x 1002 – and, let's face it, the DA's design, from the military engineering point of view, is retarded. I mean – it's taller than it is long? And it has a hole in the middle? Why? What did the asari think?! I don't even… *sigh*… women! ;)
And, obviously, the Sovereign-class Reaper's gun is 8 x 2000. A BFG.