An expanding mushroom cloud boiled upwards from ground-zero, visible to the now-distant Falcon and its pilot who quickly adjusted the controls on his aircraft to keep the shockwave and disruptive air-currents in this scant atmosphere from tossing him from the sky like a fly being hit by the world's angriest swatter.
He skilfully manoeuvred the Falcon into position as the expanding wave of force reached him and allowed the craft to be carried by it, having angled in such a way that it lent washed over the craft from the rear and lent his conveyance swifter wings.
The sight of the distinctive cloud rising outside of the cockpit glass brought inexorably to mind the Great War and the gut-wrenching moment his Stingray Deluxe was plucked from the air by the first detonations across Washington and Philadelphia. His normally good-natured and eager face became cold and reserved.
"Falcon Two…." Ishmael's voice issued from the communications console and piped directly into his flight-helmet in a burst of static. Nukes played hell with communications.
No-one responded back then…
'Flight control, this is Stingray! We are going down, I repeat, we are going down! Nuclear detonations over Boston have disabled by aircraft's propulsion systems and I am conducting a controlled descent!'
Silence….
"Flight Control, this is Stingray pilot Major Augustine Ryan, requesting guidance to the nearest airfield! Can anyone hear me?"
Below him, the expanding shockwave and resulting dust cloud of the nuclear detonations rippled outwards from around the mushroom clouds, tearing into the skyline of Boston like a tsunami of radioactive particulates and acrid smoke.
How many people were dying down there? How many people were still alive?
A second shockwave hit his hull and tore off one of his wings.
"Falcon Two…. going on… no visual…."
The static interspersed communications from the ground team pulled the fighter pilot back to reality, where he found himself seated once more in the seat of his Falcon and clutching the flight-stick with burnt white knuckles.
He keyed his comms and boosted the signal strength as high as it would go, "Ishmael, Whooo-weee! Wild ride up here, good buddy! I'd recommend boosting your transmit strength, comms always get a bit dicey after a close call like that!"
His affected levity belied the hammering of his heart against his ribs. He still felt the jerk in his Stingray's safety harness as the aircraft was tossed on the waves of air, plummeting down towards the centre of the distant mushroom cloud.
A literal hellscape. The pilot hoped he would die on impact.
There was a protracted delay as Ishmael had Somah and Scott alter the signal strength on their suit antenna and get back on the comms channel at a respectable volume and clarity.
"We can see the mushroom cloud rising out of the canyon from here! Do you have visual on the rest of the ground team, pilot?"
"Swinging around for a flyby now! Give me two mikes and I'll have something for you."
The aircraft banked around and headed back towards ground zero.
And inside the LAV, Courier Six got to his feet.
The interior lighting of the vehicle flickered uncertainly, alternating his surroundings with a dull gloom and a brightness made hazy by disconnected wiring that sparked brightly in the intermittent darkness. He shook his head and rolled his shoulders, like a Yao Guai coming out of hibernation. His ears rang inside the confines of his helmet, but it was not a state that his brain occupied for very long.
The Big Empty had made sure of that.
Inside his metallic skull was a complex lattice of synthetic fibres arranged in a web, that kept his skull from bouncing around too badly inside its confines.
The grogginess was momentary, then his senses flooded with awareness. Reaching out, he checked to make sure that all his weapons were still attached to him via their slings.
They had. The reinforced Kevlar had held together.
"You're awake," his suit greeted him in it's flat, feminine tones, "You know I hate it when you go to sleep. I have to wait and watch until you wake up and put me on again. We should sleep together more often, like the good old days…"
"Not now, spirit."
"Is now not a good time?"
"Is it ever?" He grunted in less than good humour. Being thrown around the interior like a child being rebuked for bad behaviour was understandably anathema to a man of his temperament.
The Stealth Suit OS huffed theatrically.
"You know how to make a girl feel ignored."
Across the hazy interior of the armoured vehicle, Dinky rose to one knee in a doddering, ungainly fashion typical of a creature with vastly more weight in its upper half than on its top. The four-eyed alien followed suit, but it could only manage a half-hearted attempt at hoisting itself up the wall by a protruding mess of metal and plastic that might once have been a seat for the passengers.
It's leg was most obviously broken, the hardsuit bent in entirely the wrong direction and low, guttural moans coming from behind its visor. The Courier eyed them both as he rose to his full height, minus a few crushed inches that could not fit under the rather average height of the roof. The peak of his helmet nudged gently against a hand-strap, hanging down from a spot roughly central to the length of the vehicle, where a groping hand could easily wrap around it for stability.
Dinky was similarly compressed, his remarkable gifts of verticality exceeding even those of the Courier.
The dinosaur's hand reached for his weapon, a squat gun that had been rendered squatter by some means and attached to his hip via a magnetic holster. But the alien, realising that the foreboding figure that faced him down was not reaching for his own arms in sympathy, paused and did not draw the implement; indeed, seemed to have no immediate plans for making a fight out of the proceedings.
From the curiously flat helmet of the dinosaur came a growl that sounded something like a question.
"Ye'll have to try that again, mate. I know a whole mess o' languages but gruntin' an' growlin' ain't as universal as ye might have been given to believe."
The groaning from the four-eyed alien with the broken leg was reaching a distracting volume, prompting Dinky to rebuke him with a grunted word and a threatening dart towards his holstered weapon. The groaning dimmed to a pained moan and the two interlocutors resumed their stand-off.
Out of regard for Lantaya, the Courier had wanted to give the alien a chance for a peaceful resolution of the situation, but in light of the barriers in communication and the already less than favourable circumstances of their meeting, he was inclined to stuff the entire enterprise and kill all involved in a vicious shower of high-velocity shrapnel.
Maybe catch a bite to eat and see if Dinky was as appetising as he looked.
But he was astonished when the large alien began to speak in a language he understood.
"Whoever sold translators, Batarian, you go back and wring discount from their corpse. Did Asari commando buy hers from the same?"
The Courier cocked his head to the side. This was spoken in passable Thessian. This alien had met asari before. Long enough to have learnt the language. Even if his accent was barely comprehensible and he missed every other word.
He dropped into his, posh, university educated accent that he had absorbed through Lantaya and joined the conversation. His customary blend of Irish brogue and elements from every culture he had interacted with in-between was completely absent, his use of the language being assimilated almost entirely from Lani.
"Could never pass up a good deal," he obfuscated.
Dinky chuckled, or what the Courier took to be a chuckle. Listening to this creature talk was like listening to a Supermutant. The same rough undertones and guttural lisp that made conversation hard to follow. It seemed everything here had an edge of roughness. They put him in mind of raiders.
"You sound like professor, Batarian," the bipedal lizard said with a hint of mirth in his tone, something that might be genuine amusement or an affected jeer. The being had widened its stance and was evidently squaring off with the intent of intimidating him. "Like thin-spined, limp-wristed pyjak."
The last word didn't translate, but from the tone he suspected that it wasn't complimentary.
But the Courier merely widened his own stance and bent his knees ever-so slightly, so that he could hold his head level. A fighting stance, game for violence, even eager for it. If his helmet visor had been see-through, the alien would have seen his bearded face break open in a smile as the gleam of adrenaline lit up his steel-grey eyes.
"My spine is stronger than iron."
"And other things too," the stealth suit AI quipped in his ear. He ignored the spirit. It went through phases of being extremely chatty, much to his discontent.
Dinky had evidently expected him to be leerier of engaging with him at close quarters in a confined space. He seemed taken aback. Not surprising.
The sheer size and presence of the hulking alien would be enough to intimidate most. But to a man who could and would gleefully fistfight a Supermutant, the expected reaction was not forthcoming. This and the idiosyncratic mode of dress was confusing the poor alien, who already had a tenuous grasp on the situation.
"No matter. Bend it over my knee, soon. Have Asari friend, Batarian. You lay weapons down. Get on knees. Be slave, now. Tell me what goes on here! Who you?!"
"A slave?" The laugh that bubbled up in his throat was genuine.
He, a slave? It was refreshing to be among those who didn't know him. It gave rise to some truly amusing jokes.
"How about this? I'm going to contact my Asari friend. If she says that you have her, then we'll consider coming quietly," the Courier lied shamelessly, not caring if he was believed or not.
"Or just break you now, Batarian," Dinky suggested now that the noises he was hearing seemed more in line with the kind of debasement and subservience he was used to hearing. He took a step forwards, heavy footfalls echoing off the enclosed walls of the LAV.
"Ahh-ahh," Six held up a warning finger as he jerked his thumb towards the rear hatch. They could hear a faint roaring from outside. The second of the two massive worms. "You need my cooperation. Who knows how long you might take bringing me into line, yes? Faster this way. Then everyone can be away from here."
His voice was confident and sure and without the usual overlay of his accent, it even sounded somewhat gentile. He didn't have high hopes of being able to convince this being of anything major, but he could buy some time to find out what was what.
Not waiting for permission, the tribal opened up a comms connection to the Matriarch and placed his fingers on the side of his helmet to illustrate his open call. The alien seemed frustrated by his continued insistence on not playing by the script.
"Lani, I have an alien here who speaks Thessian," he said through a private channel so the alien couldn't hear. He also didn't bother dropping out of Thessian, "He's trying to take me as a slave. How is your day going?"
There was a pause.
"What a coincidence, Six…."
Lantaya had both hands up by her head in the back of the distant APC. Now that the shockwave of the explosion had passed them by, the great crowd of aliens who had boarded the armoured personnel carrier alongside her now seemed very interested in who she was and why she was here.
To the point where one four-eyed alien had chosen to shove a pistol under her chin and hold up a glowing orange holographic interface with an insistent jerk of his forearm.
"Who are you? Answer my questions and I will let you live."
Her excitement at hearing Thessian again from a mouth other than the Courier's, Letters' or Docter Barrisford's was suitably diminished by the muzzle of a gun so close to her brain. The synthetic, autogenerated voice was obviously some manner of text-to-speech interface, but that these aliens had access to a complete archive of the asari language was proof enough that she was on the right track.
"…I'm in something of a similar situation. I wouldn't worry, however."
Her eyes tracked the three outlines of Charon, Clover and Jericho who remained standing on top of the APC exterior throughout their headlong flight from the shockwave of the Wanderer's explosion. All three of them had weapons out and were currently working out how to get into the vehicle without killing her along with everything else inside.
Something the Courier had said twigged in her brain.
"You said they were trying to take you as a slave?"
The pistol jammed itself more firmly into her chin and the alien on the other side of her on the long passenger bench that was meant to service the majority of the armoured figures that would embark within such a vehicle, now produced a knife from a strap on his thigh and tapped it meaningfully against her visor.
"Aye, clinking chains, just like the spirits predicted. Glad to know that the galaxy isn't that different from home. And here we were, all us humans, thinking that we wouldn't fit in. I feel perfectly at home already!"
Her eyes flickered to her own alien, the one who she had saved from almost certain death from the giant worm's questing feelers. He seemed content to let the current state of affairs play out to it's inevitable conclusion. Predictable, really. Who could expect him to side with her over others of his kind?
No help was forthcoming on that front.
But, really, that made this all the easier.
"Courier," she said past the muzzle of the pistol, "I think we must urgently reconsider Plan B."
"Music to my ears. Make a clean job of it. Just because this whole unfortunate episode went sideways on us, doesn't mean we have to deal with the fallout. After all…."
She felt a whisper of his memories and residual personality in the back of her mind that told her exactly what he was about to say.
"If you eat all the evidence, no-one needs to know."
The Courier severed the connection and regarded Dinky with a wide grin behind his helmet visor. He was dying for a fag, but the interior of the vehicle wasn't airtight. Shame, that. He'd love to take his helmet off, peel Dinky the Dinosaur out of his armour and make a start on lunch.
But you couldn't have everything in life.
A set of predatory steel-grey eyes settled on the alien's thick thighs and the distinctive angles of digitigrade legs. You needed a lot of muscle and bone to hold up all that weight….
"I think I've decided."
"On what?" The alien asked in a base rumble. It brought its meaty paws close to the weapon holstered on its hip, thinking itself cautious in doing so and ready for anything.
It expected a fight, being somewhat in tune with the mood of the room. It also expected to win.
"On killin' ye quickly," the Courier snarled, once more in his native tongue.
The alien didn't see him reach for the weapon that blew away the uppermost bend in his digitigrade leg, just below the thighbone, lighting up the inside of the LAV with bright white light. The shielding system flickered and died as the weapon, meant for usage as an anti-armour system, breached it through both brute-force and the shocking electromagnetic charge that the round carried with it.
It had been in the Courier's hand the entire time; or more accurately, built into the gauntlet of his armour. A miniaturised tesla cannon, of a roughly similar design to what ED-E had received in his retrofit. Small enough to fit in a Duraframe eyebot, certainly small enough to be built into the massive gauntlet of his armour.
Dinky let out a howl of pain, his leg buckling underneath him as he toppled sideways and into the waiting embrace of another ruined seat. It had the presence of mind to unfasten the weapon from its hip, which now extended in a whine of miniaturised mechanical servos as the stubby shotgun grew to its full, though admittedly still rather unimpressive length.
The weapon looked ridiculously tiny in the alien's massive hands, but the roar that it let out as it fired was nothing to sneeze at.
His shielding sparked in multiple places, but the Courier made use of the far-superior protection of his new armour to dart inside the radius of the sweeping muzzle.
Utilizing his helmeted head like a mallet he smashed the alien's headgear with all the force his thick neck and reinforced spine could support, driving his knee industriously into the underside of the squat helmet as the force of his headbutt drove it downwards, to rattle whatever was inside around like a set of maracas.
It tried to bring the weapon around and jam it directly into the side of his body, no doubt intending to make a bloody mess of his insides with a single trigger-pull.
He lent in, grinding his knee into the sternum of the alien pinned underneath him with the combined weight of his body and gear. He towered over Dinky who now sat, jammed in a seated position with his injured leg stretched out in front of him across the gear and debris-strewn ground of the vehicle.
Whatever or whoever this alien was, it wasn't used to being challenged by something that was a match for it, physically. Even less used to a being that knew the ins and outs of close combat so intimately, and so well.
One armoured hand wrapped around the wrist that held the shotgun and tried twisting it around and out of the alien's grasp, but whatever might be said for him, Dinky was as stubbornly rigid as cast iron.
"I love watching you work," his armour's spirit crooned in his ear.
"An' I love workin' me magic."
He drove his boot down onto the mangled kneecap of Dinky's leg, almost slipping in the blood that had pooled beneath and around the limb. Bone cracked, cartilage and sinew crunched and the alien beneath him roared in agony and finally, albeit reluctantly, surrendered the shotgun.
The Courier had the muzzle directed at Dinky the Dinosaur in a moment, his hands experimentally pulling back on the underside of the weapon in a habitual motion drilled into him by years of operating pump-action scatterguns. Overpowering the urge to see why the action wasn't reciprocating, he instead found himself surprised by how light the weapon was. It felt like a toy in his grasp, some cheap amalgamation of plastic and the occasional metal pin.
Not the reassuring weight of steel or hardwood.
Even the newer weapons R&D churned out started at fifteen pounds of weight and worked their way up, durability and recoil control being far more important to their human users than weight.
With most of them being genetically altered and all of them being kitted out in suits that enhanced physical strength, weight was a facile issue.
His preternaturally acute senses picked up a discrete shuffling and a whine of an extending weapon somewhere to his side and rear. He whirled and holding the shotgun outstretched as one might a pistol, he pulled the trigger twice in quick succession.
The four-eyed alien with the broken leg shrank back, pistol in hand as first his shields then himself, died in a hail of mass-accelerated metal. It slumped down to the tune of an obnoxiously beeping weapon, leaving a trail of blood and bullet-holes in the metal wall behind it. Six looked down at the weapon in his hands, grimacing at the piercing wail it had suddenly started emitting.
"Spirits 'bove an' below, what the bloody hell is that?!"
No answer seemed forthcoming. It continued beeping at him. And not a cute, endearing beep as he was used to from ED-E, but the unholy combination of a Vault Alarm system and a nuclear launch alarm, both keyed in an absurdly high register.
He took the weapon in both hands and brought it down on his knee, snapping the infernal piece of plastic like a half-rotted walking stick he'd picked up from the side of a hunting trail. The beeping died with a whine and a confused sputter. Tossing them negligently aside, he regarded the alien below him with the inscrutable visor of his helmet.
Dinky had seen better days, hissing in pain as it tried to reach a pistol holstered on its other leg. Six stepped on the hand and relieved it of the pistol, which was also tossed aside.
"Frightnin' bad luck ye have there," the Courier remarked as his hand unfastened the top of his kidney holster and pulled his GuS2 free from the Kevlar confines, "If ye hadn't been in the neighbourhood or if the worms hadn't been drawn in by our pilot landin' in the canyon, then me an' thee might have met on better terms…."
"What… you?"
The pained grunt, all that Dinky could manage with his crushed leg stretched out in front of him with blood futilely trying to clot around the shards of mangled bone, reminded the Courier that the alien couldn't speak English.
"Bad luck, is what I am."
He glanced down at the ruined leg and grinned behind his mask, before tapping the side of the alien's helmet jovially. "First time I've broken someone's leg and made it straighter than it was before. Funny joke, yes?"
Surprisingly, the alien did laugh. A wry chuckle that the Courier joined in with. They shared the brief moment of black humour companionably as the lighting dimmed and brightened intermittently. Blood spread outward from the two bodies, one dead, the other dying.
"Funny joke," Dinky agreed.
There was a pause.
"I'm…. sad. Over… too quick. Thought I… last longer."
"Every warrior thinks they'll live forever. If you hadn't had run into me, you might have lasted for a good few years more. Can't say. Who can, right?"
"Who can say…"
The Courier waited for a few minutes more, but the roaring of the beast outside and the sounds of distant gunfire pressed upon him. He tapped the side of the alien's helmet again with the muzzle of his pistol and motioned towards the outside with a shrug, "Time for both of us to go, then."
"When meet again… after die…. tell me how battle with… Thresher Maw… went."
"That's what you call the worms, is it?" When this was confirmed, the Courier chuckled wryly, "No, you and I won't meet again. I'm going to live forever, remember?"
Dinky died laughing.
All things considered, there were worse ways to go.
The Courier took the time to pry off the helmet and scrutinise the odd, lizard-like face before taking a few trophies and getting back to business. The first member of this new species he'd had the pleasure of meeting and it turned out to be possessed of a spirit he wouldn't mind carrying with him.
Back within the APC, after the Courier cut the connection with her, Lantaya took a deep, steadying breath. The muzzle of the pistol compressed the synth-muscle around her throat and the knife made an irritating scratching sound as the wielder tried to intimidate her with the wicked-looking blade.
But they were at the distinct disadvantage of being locked in a confined space with a Matriarch-level biotic, who had backup waiting for her outside the hull.
Intimidation only worked on people who were at your mercy. It seldom had an effect on a person who had you at theirs.
She regarded the alien who had his pistol jammed into her neck, silently and privately disappointed by how wrong all of this had gone. First Contact was supposed to be a happy occasion, full of empathy and mutual understanding.
That had been the hope, when she and her university friends had watched plays and vids featuring such things and imagined what it would be like to meet an alien species. The reality was far less gratifying. So far she had met a grand total of four separate alien races and had devolved into uncultured, positively barbaric violence with three of them….
In all honesty, he wasn't sure whether her relationship with humanity didn't count as four-for-four, violence being so much a part of everyday life. She supposed it counted for something that they were unlikely to hold the violent acts she had committed against their own species in an ill light.
After all, they committed violent acts against their own species all the time.
Why wouldn't everyone else feel inclined to do the same?
"Who are you, asari? Don't make me type another message into my Omni-tool."
She sighed, heavily.
"My name is Matriarch Lantaya T'Rali. I was born on Thessia, educated primarily at the University of Serrice, served several centuries in the Huntresses, formerly researcher on the mapping and cataloguing of the Mass Relay network. I enjoy elasa, preferably with ice, cheap romance novels and philosophy. I am…."
She ran some quick calculations in her head and came up with a number that she really could have done without knowing.
"… three-thousand, seven-hundred and forty-three years old. Good Goddess, I'm ancient…"
Lani momentarily fell into a deep, contemplative silence, whereupon they could hear the distant roaring of a lightly fried Thresher Maw and the rumble of their idling engine. In addition to her raging late-life depression.
The embarrassment and disbelief was heavy in the air. Regardless of species, no-one enjoys bearing witness to someone oversharing their personal life.
"But enough about me," she said, eager to be away from the subject of her advanced age, "My friend said something that implies that you and your compatriots might be slavers. Am I right in suspecting this?"
She imagined that she would feel slightly better killing them if they were, in fact, morally dubious characters.
The entire press of rough-looking, heavily-armed aliens looked at her with vastly more eyes-holes than she was comfortable seeing at one time. It was hard to tell their reaction to the entirely unexpected information dump, albeit more than prompted by them, but something about the way they shared semi-covert glances with their neighbours gave her the impression of amusement and aggrieved irritation.
Her interrogator angrily inputted another message into the orange holographic interface emanating from his arm. His evident anger was not at all conveyed in the dry, electronic delivery of the words, "What did I tell you about lying to me? And making me type another message into this Omni-Tool?"
"If I might play the part of the quibbling, overly-punctilious Matron for a moment, you never told me exactly what you would do in either case," she said with an upraised finger to illustrate her point.
The knife-wielder moved the blade from her visor to her upraised finger, letting her mind supply what it might feel like to go the rest of her life missing a digit. Again, the threat fell flat due to the fact that her suit could administer a drug capable of reattaching or, indeed, growing back several severed digits.
She knew that this wouldn't go over well, but at this point she was so used to speaking with humans that casual threats, grievous insults and imminent danger had less of an effect on her than they might have had, otherwise.
More feverish tapping followed, slightly more irritated than previously.
"I will chain you to a wall next to the others of your kind and install a restraining bolt in your spine, you blue whore. Tell me the truth."
The mention of chaining her to a wall banished all regret at the unfortunate mess they had made of First Contact, as she suspected it might.
The 'others of your kind' proceeded to fill her with a mixture of hope and simmering rage so intense that her throat began to develop that curious closed-off sensation that throats do when the owner is so consumed with anger that the emotion manifests a desire to force its way out of their mouth and strangle someone.
By the time the text-to-speech device had finished mechanically droning, 'you blue whore', she suddenly felt very at-home to the idea of graphic, unbridled, how one might say, excessive brutality.
She took a measured breath of recycled air.
"I suppose that answers my question.
Her eyes glowed like beacons inside the confines of her helmet as she let loose her bottled emotions in a Nova that slammed every four-eyed alien inside the APC away from her as though they had suddenly become grossly magnetically opposed to one-another.
Even if she had been a child on a school bus who had just made everyone abundantly aware that she had eaten nothing but garlic, sprouts and red meat for several days running, she could not have managed to clear a space around her quite as speedily or as effectively.
The alien with the knife found himself with the object sticking through his own visor, having accidentally impaled himself as the Nova threw him across the interior.
She lifted her hand to unleash the rest of her boiling anger towards the largest concentration of them, further towards the back of the vehicle where she had thrown them. But as they stumbled and fumbled like a pack of drunken dogs, bullets began ripping into them like metal rain. They jerked as shields flared and ablative armour flew away in puffs of shrapnel and chunks of ceramic. Blood began spewing from numerous ragged holes as Charon, the stock of his light-machinegun cradled in his armpit, let loose on full-automatic.
Right through the roof of the APC.
The MaxCharge ammo pack hummed contentedly as he expended its contents in one long, sweeping burst. Bodies were riddled with holes as 2mm EC slugs passed through them to the alien's they had landed on. Her eyes saw all of this through the lens of battle, coloured by the unspoken expectation that it was her job to end their lives. In that moment, she felt obscurely irritated that Charon had interfered.
As though he had taken something from her, that by right was hers to have.
Something punched her biotic barrier from behind and Lani responded with alacrity, spinning and feeling the rippling impact of another bullet upon her shields as she did so. Her elbow caught the side of the shooter's rifle and brushed it to the side, then her legs pushed her forwards.
Somewhere in the short distance between her and the alien who had tried to blow the back of her brains out the front of her skull, her biotics surged through her and propelled her forwards with shocking force.
The biotic shoulder-charge launched the alien off his feet and into the upraised loading ramp of the carrier, where he clanged against it and tumbled down to the decking with a satisfying crunch of shattered bone and ablative armour.
There.
That felt slightly better.
"Fishtits, pop the door so we can get stuck in!"
Jericho's voice through the comms, reminding her that she was a team player and the team she had to work with were currently assisting her through several inches of armour plating.
Somewhat removed from the situation, so to speak. Though there his outline stood on her visor, putting holes in the side of the APC's armour and blowing holes through the aliens who'd had the misfortune of being thrown between her and the exit. One of them fell flat as he double-tapped it, 4mm slugs tearing through the armoured side of the vehicle as he worked his way through a Max Charge magazine.
Striding towards the loading ramp controls, the Matriarch reached out and plucked another four-eyed alien from her path and slammed him upwards into the roof, then sideways into a bank of storage lockers inset into the interior wall. They, including the alien itself within the confines of 'they', bent with the impact.
Then she slammed the broken body into another alien who tried to stop her, sending both crashing into a wall. The rifle it had been pointing at her clattered to the deck, dropping from nerveless fingers.
Glancing behind her, she noticed figures still moving in the pile of bodies that Charon had cut apart with sustained fire. One alien rose up, blood hissing as it made contact with the shining yellow plates that had sprouted all over his exterior, glowing like holograms. But the way the blood, stray pieces of flesh and shattered armour sizzled as they landed upon them told a different story.
Some sort of forcefield that melted or warped matter that made contact with it. An effective defence against projectile weaponry.
Others where covered in an odd, glowing hexagonal pattern that seemed to push aside everything that got too close. She noticed with her trained eye, used to picking up details in the heat of the moment, that one of these men stepped close to an outstretched leg of a dead compatriot, and the leg moved aside as though pushed by some invisible force.
Defensive countermeasures, she surmised. Of two different types and methodologies. Experimentally, she flexed her biotic power.
It was enhanced to no small degree by the suit she wore, which had nodules of element zero seeded throughout it just like all the other synth jumpsuits that Stiggs had designed. Ordinarily, these served no other purpose than to be used to generate the primary shielding system of the Ironsides suit.
But Doctor Dala had retrofitted a connector for her own biotic amp, already drilled into the base of her skull. There, her own nervous system connected to the element zero in the suit and supercharged her biotics over and above even that of a normal Matriarch.
She had not bothered testing the full potential of her abilities when enhanced by the suit, but now she felt so inclined.
A Singularity formed in her hand like a glowing baseball, quicker than she had ever managed to manifest one previously. It had taken her some time to do so at Fort Defiance. This time, it popped into existence as though it had been waiting for her to call upon it.
The aliens opened fire upon her. Their weapons, while not being as powerful as those she had recently seen in the Armoury aboard Zeta, were shockingly effective when fired on-mass.
Shielding the rapidly growing Singularity, she raised a solid wall of biotics between them and her, bullet impacts spreading outwards like ripples of water on a purple sea.
Abruptly, one of the aliens stumbled as a 4mm EC slug ploughed through the thick armour of the loading ramp and struck him in the shoulder, glancing off as though propelled by an unseen force. The hexagonal pattern rippled and sparked, reminding her somewhat of her own barrier.
Then more bullets struck. The same, odd phenomenon repeated with the bullets striking the shoulders or sparking against the wall behind the alien. It was Jericho firing, she realised. And for all his moral faults, the old raider was a deadeye shot, vicious and surgical in a firefight.
But he kept missing. Hitting off to the side of centre, rounds skipping like stones off the pauldrons and the sides of chestplates. As though the bullets were being guided around the armoured carapace of the alien and off to impact the wall behind it.
A magnetic field, she realised. The hexagonal pattern was an outward indicator for people not to get close, because a strong electromagnetic field was being created to ward off gunfire.
Inspired.
One of aliens fired a streaking projectile that exploded against her barrier with a concussive shockwave, causing her to be pushed slightly backwards by the force of the impact and banish any thoughts of scientific enquiry. Her helmet rang, her ears buzzing with tinnitus. There was only so much the noise-cancelling built in to her headgear could do with an explosion of concussive force in the close-confines of a vehicle.
Gritting her teeth, she looked down at the Singularity.
It had already reached the dimensions of a bowling ball. If she had seen this spectacle before her sojourn on Earth, she would have felt concerned. As it was, she curled a lip ever so slightly and shrugged.
"Good enough," she commented, before tossing it around the side of her barrier and breaking off towards the ramp controls.
Behind her she felt and heard the gravitational well start its relentless pull, sucking at the surrounding universe like the distortion in spacetime around a planetary body in miniature. Her feet lifted and fell as though she was on the surface of a small moon, subject to only half the usual weight of her five feet and eight-inch body, clocking in at ninety kilograms, more than doubled to a hundred and ninety by the weight of her gear.
She felt so light and buoyant that the act of slamming her closed fist into the control panel for the Personnel Carrier's loading ramp made her feel as though the impact would throw her upwards towards the roof. The panel cracked as her fist bludgeoned it into cooperation, letting out an alarmed beep and provoking the ramp to drop down and out of her way as though it too expected a similar treatment.
The second there was enough room to point a gun through, all three wastelanders outside the vehicle jammed themselves and the muzzles of their guns into the gap and began blazing away at the aliens inside, who now found themselves suspended precariously in mid-air like floating clay pigeons at a firing rang.
Charon ripped off short yet lethal bursts of 2mm EC that sparked against the glowing yellow armour that surrounded the physical form of one four-eyed alien, the projected forcefield seemingly melting the bullets in flight to spatter harmlessly against the armour below. But when Clover added the fire from her stubby Guppy, the nasal whine like a industrial buzzsaw shattered the glowing yellow projection and began chewing through armour and into vulnerable flesh.
The two arcing lanes of fire diverged as both of them tracked smoking hot bullet impacts across anything floating inside the vehicle, killing what remained alive and thoroughly mutilating those that had already departed their mortal coil.
Jericho focused his fire upon another, the same one he had been focusing upon whilst the ramp was still up. His shots were having much more effect now that the intervening armour of the vehicle wasn't bleeding off the force and velocity of his fire.
The glowing hexagonal pattern flickered and died as Jericho stepped up onto the almost lowered ramp and into the back of the vehicle, advancing with every intention of finding anything living and correcting that state of affairs with savage glee. His blood was boiling, his rage was almost palpable, and the aching pain that plagued him almost constantly was now shoved to the very back of his mind by the joy of combat.
He drilled the alien through the helmet and zeroed in on the next, another of the ones with the yellow projected armour. Two shots spat from the muzzle of his rifle into the floating alien, who was himself struggling to orient himself in mid-air to return fire with his own weapon. On the third trigger-pull, the gun clicked in ominous obstinacy.
The Dead Man's Click.
A trigger-pull on an empty chamber. Something of a disaster if it had happened to the four-eyed alien who was currently sighting down on the old raider, too focused on killing him to feel relief as the expected bullet did not split his helmet and skull apart like an overripe melon.
But in the next frozen moment the wastelander demonstrated why, despite the numerous scientific advances and sophisticated magnetic holsters, the humble rifle sling and Kevlar holster was still the vastly better option.
Jericho let the weapon drop to his chest and hang from the three-point sling as he unhooked the top of his holster, pulled the laser pistol and switched off the safety in one smooth, fluid motion. The hum of the weapon accepting the initial rush of power from the Microfusion Cell was overpowered by the sharp crack and hiss of the red laser as it lanced forth and burnt a hole right through the alien's armour, projected and conventional, without triggering the mass effect fields that would have blocked a physical projectile.
It was a move that a shooter could not have pulled off with magnetic holsters.
For one, the shooter would have been obligated to waste time holstering his weapon rather than expediently dropping it and letting it hang from the sling. For another, a smooth draw from a holster was far faster when properly practised than waiting for the magnetic lock on the more sophisticated holster to disengage.
What resulted was one dead alien and one very much alive human, who proceeded to put several more double-bursts into his next two helplessly floating targets before he heard the Matriarch shout a warning to duck.
The raider did so, falling to one knee then burrowing behind a body which Charon had practically eviscerated with a sustained burst from the GuLMG2.
Ducking his head protectively behind a biotic barrier he hastily erected, he heard and felt the cataclysmic boom as Lantaya threw a biotic warp into the centre of the Singularity, detonating the anomaly like a small bomb inside the confines of the vehicle.
It shook on its wheels, the suspension rocking with the force of the gravity well catastrophically destabilising. The entire hull of the vehicle bowed slightly outwards, like the barrel of a gun that had been fired one too many times and was expanding at a point of unsustainable pressure.
Clover, who had been in the process of gutting another alien who had been unfortunate enough not to die outright when she expended the last of her magazine through his torso, was launched out the back of the vehicle like a bottle rocket along with her unfortunate victim.
She shot past Charon and the Matriarch, the latter who had the forethought to erect a barrier to shield herself and the ghoul, who had possessed enough good sense to hide behind her.
His light-machinegun was held in both hands pointing at the roof of the APC, but ready at any moment to be depressed back into the horizontal position and fill the interior of the vehicle once more with a torrential deluge of weapons-fire.
That need never emerged.
Jericho, Clover and Charon each got up or stepped briskly out into the open with weapons trained on the interior of the vehicle, to be confronted by a charnel house of flesh that had been blown apart and ripped to shreds by a wild, unrestrained mass of biotic forces.
It looked like the aftermath of the Battle of the Purifier in Washinton DC, where Enclave and Brotherhood soldiers alike had been blown to bits by thrown mini-nukes and Vertibird airstrikes. Only confined into a cold, metallic coffin from inside which blood flooded outwards like a trickling brook.
It pooled in the sand, soaking downwards and dying the rust red sand a darker tint of crimson-brown.
"Teach me how to do that, Matriarch," Jericho said with a hint of real solemnity, for once calling her by her title rather than his less-than-respectful nickname, "And I'll kill anyone you tell me to, free of charge."
She gave the man a sideways look, cocking an eyebrow under her helmet.
"As obliging an offer as that might be, Jericho, I doubt I will have a use for that particular coin that I would not be able to resolve myself."
All four of them reflected upon the contents of the APC for a pregnant moment, during which Jericho nodded in evident agreement, "Fair enough."
Their contemplative silence was so complete that the sound of one of the LAVs turret guns beginning a raucous chattering stood out more than it had previously, along with the roar of the second of the two massive alien worms. Their small group turned towards the distant sound, making use of their helmet optics or those mounted on their weapons to get a better view.
Lantaya, whose stubby little PDW had been removed from her person by the aliens inside the vehicle during their short standoff, took a moment to retrieve it from amongst the mangled remains of their victims.
"Looks like the Courier is going to deal with that last monster. What do you think we should call those things?"
Clover had leant up against the outer hull of the APC and shrugged at the question as the spectacle of the LAVs turret blazing away at the writhing worm with a terrible, fatalistic passion. They could tell from the warped and broken suspension and chassis that the light-armoured vehicle wasn't capable of evasive manoeuvres, which made its attempt to stand and slug it out with the durable alien monstrosity an exercise in self-euthanasia.
"The tribal is going to get himself killed if he doesn't watch out," Clover commented as the distant worm, evidently horribly burnt by the nuclear detonation that had killed its fellow, hacked up a giant gobbet of acid that arced through the unbreathable air of the planet and impacted the LAV like an artillery shell.
It slathered the outside of the vehicle, eating its way inside the wreck like boiling water melting a block of butter.
"Never seen anything like it back home," Clover said as she took her first uninterrupted look at the beast. She had spent a while looking at it whilst bouncing around on top of the fleeing APC, but this state of affairs hadn't been ideal for thoughtful study.
"He'll be alright. I think I know what he's up to. Something raiders used to pull on Brotherhood soldiers, way back when they first came to the Capital Wasteland," Jericho stated confidently.
The worm jerked as a thundering crack of lightning echoed out across the canyon, the distinctive report of the AMRS.
"Boone must be with him," Lani guessed, feeling far less confident with the situation than Jericho evidently was. The distant shape of the LAV was deforming as the acid melted its outer hull. It's small autocannon was still roaring away desperately, but it had little to no effect on the massive titan it was targeting, only serving to irritate and provoke.
"There it goes," Jericho said with great satisfaction as the worm retracted underground in a rumble of displaced rock and shifting sand.
"It can't be retreating," the Matriarch denied the more hopeful possibility almost immediately. She was no fool and remembered what the other worm had done when confronted with the AMRS.
"'Course not," Jericho agreed with a snort of contempt at the thought, "But that isn't what he wants it to do, is it? He wants it to come to him."
The LAVs autogun chattered away for a few moments more before puttering to an abrupt stop. Whether this was because the acid had finally melted away the housing of the gun and rendered it inoperable or because the gunner had lost its target, it matter very little. Lantaya could just imagine the Courier, in his voluminous flapping duster and his armoured carapace underneath, squatting down on the sand with his hand against the surface of the ground.
Feeling the vibrations of the earth, judging the approach of his prey that thought itself to be the predator. The evident satisfaction as it took the bait.
"Any second now," Jericho breathed, before freezing in place.
"I've fucking got it."
"What?" Clover asked at the sudden outburst.
"It's a fucking Tunnel Snake."
The name, so simple and yet so obvious in hindsight, provoked a sincere laugh from both Clover and Lantaya, and a soft chuckle from Charon. They all, independently and uniformly made an internal resolution to mention this to Butch the next time they saw him, to judge of his reaction. It was so perfect and appropriate for the nature of the beast that it might almost have been planned.
In the midst of their mirth, the show continued.
They watched as the massive worm erupted from underneath the LAV, engulfing it in its massive jaws that closed about it with the crushing, overwhelming force of a mouth that spent its time grinding up solid bedrock like so much soft bread. The crumpling of the armoured hull plating was audible to them from this far away, as was the sight of a friendly outline marked on their visors, throwing itself out of the backside of the vehicle and tumbling out of the air towards the ground below.
It struck the ground with what must have been a fabulously hard impact but did not stop the figure from tapping in a hurried sequence into its Pip-Boy.
What followed was not a nuclear detonation.
Lantaya could tell by the distinctive purple tint to the disc-like explosion that blossomed outwards from inside the worm's titanic head, shearing off the entire top half of its skull and spreading outwards in a vibrant eruption of colour.
It was a Nova Bomb. A rippling biotic discharge that threw anything in its path out of the way with concussive force, but far more surgical and precise.
"How the hell did he manage that?"
Clover, who had been expecting a big bang to light up the sky once more and blow apart the giant earthworm in a shower of gore, stared at the spectacle with astonishment. The worm flopped down with a mighty boom of several tons of dead flesh smashing into the ground like a demolished high-rise, sending up a cloud of red sand in a cloud that obscured their view of the proceedings.
Lantaya shook her head and smiled, working it out in her mind.
A Nova Bomb held a number of advantages over a conventional explosion, chief among them was its shaped nature, the way it could be directed to expend all of its force in a given direction. More like a sharp knife than a heavy hammer. R&D hadn't built any Nova munitions, although she had explained the theory to them.
The Courier must have paid more attention that even she had thought he had to that explanation, because the only things she could think of that could have produced such a detonation, was a jury-rigged and overloaded shield generator….
Lani keyed her comms tentatively.
"Courier, are you still alive?"
A foul cursing met her ears, confirming that he was very much alive and far from pleased at this unexpected and very much relieving turn of events.
"O' feckin'-course I'm alive! Stupid, fuckin' oversized earthworm never learnt to swallow its bloody food! Why couldn't it 'ave got the LAV down another few metres 'fore I had to hit the detonator!? Craig, get off me ya great big lump, I'm fine. Are ye well?"
There was a lot of heavy breathing as the two outlines of the two wastelanders came back into view through the sand, the larger of the two checking over the smaller; evidently, the Courier making sure than Boone hadn't been too badly burnt by being outside the LAV when the shockwave from the nuke rolled over them.
"I'm good," the sniper said, as ED-E swooped down from the great height he had achieved in order to escape the blast of the wanderer's nuke, warbling excitedly at the massive cadaver his master had made.
"That armour is good stuff. Wouldn't 'ave trusted a suit of T-51 to weather that blast. What a bloody disaster!"
"You are still alive," Lani said over comms with an evident relief that this was the case, "Things could have been a lot worse."
"Ohh, aye? Sure, but that weren't what I was on about. Fuckin' set off the bomb too early. I cut the head in half! I didn't want to do that! I wanted to cut the head off, not cut it in half!"
Lantaya stared out across the sands with a very blank expression on her concealed face, not quite sure what to make of this. Why would he want the head of….?
Then the obvious answer made itself painfully evident. She sighed and keyed her comms, "Courier, be reasonable. You would never have found a wall big enough to fit it on."
"Could 'ave fit it on a plinth, though," the Courier said with a speculative air to his tone that suggested he was occupied imagining just that. "Sure, we'll never know now. Still, I got somethin' off our pal Dinky I can fit on a wall."
She took another close look at the distant Courier, zooming in with her helmet optics as far as they would allow. This allowed her to make out that he wasn't wearing his duster, but instead had it balled up into a makeshift sack. Something was wrapped up inside it.
"Six, what is it you have there?" She enquired, cautiously.
The Courier was quite cheerful with his reply.
"Evidence! Gonna break out a roastin' tin when we get back to the ship! An' ye can't say nothin' 'bout cannibalism now! They ain't human, so it technically ain't, right? Stands to reason!"
The distant figure of the Courier turned back to the decapitated body of the massive worm and from her perspective, all she saw was his back against the background of dead flesh.
"Hey, Lani," his voice emanated from the commlink with unusual clarity, a gap in the interference from the recent nuclear detonation, "We're at the edge o' the map, where ancient hands first inscribed the words, 'Here there be monsters'."
There was a pause. If he hadn't have had his helmet on, she would have suspected him of using the pause to take a deep drag of a rollup. As it was, all she could see was his back. And the grizzly trophy.
"Too fuckin' right there are."
Across the wide stretch of sand, an armoured fist broke its way out from under a layer of crimson glass that had formed over the top of the sandy dunes as the heat from the nuke melted it into one solid layer. This red icesheet stretched out in either direction, like the Antarctic ice flow had been dyed the rich crimson of fresh blood. Desmond punched out a hole large enough to poke his helmeted head through like a molerat out of its warren.
Cautiously, he surveyed the surroundings.
"Hey, Tejada?" He enquired, "I think we're alive."
A smacking of lips within a temperature-controlled helmet was his reply, along with a muttered, "Cinco minutos más, por favor."
Evidently, Raul was less than enthused by the prospect of returning to the waking world and would rather remain dead until he was finished with his nap.
Grunting in disgust, the ghoul extracted himself into the open air and looked back down into the hole. His prisoner's visor gazed up at him, very much happy to be alive, but not particularly enthused at the prospect of what was to come. He squatted, reached into the hole and pulled the alien out onto the surface of the glass, his heavy boots fracturing its surface and punching through to the soft sand beneath.
"Not sure how I'm going to interrogate you without a language in common, old chum…"
He hefted the alien onto his shoulder and looked up into the sky with one hand shading his visor, tracking the course of Augustine Smiles and his dropship far above them.
"…. but I'll make do."