XIX: REACTOR EXIGENCE I
London, Earth
White hot electricity crackled through the air.
All around, filling her eardrums, the shattering roar of a Reaper, deep and metallic, creating knives stabbing against her skin.
The streaks of thruster-blaze from Trident fighters spiraled through the clouds above her, splitting the night sky.
Heat through her suit. The afterglow of stepping too close to the ground after plasma had melted it to lava.
It hurt to breathe. It was as if she was choking on her own blood. She could feel the interior of her suit uncomfortably rub where she was bleeding profusely. It felt like blood was sloshing around in her boots, for it was so profuse.
Someone was carrying her, supporting her by her bad arm. She tried to wiggle her fingers—no response. Dimly, she trundled her feet across the blackened ground to an irregular rhythm. Everything was going in and out for her. White and dark. Always out of focus. Her breath was in her ears, a pained and ragged sound. She tried to ignore the various warnings her suit was blaring at her. Breaches. Multiple. Her immune system must be overwhelmed, but strangely, she found herself absorbing that fact with a vague acceptance.
All she had remembered was that tank explosion, a terrible red light washing over her, a brief pulse of heat, and then it had all faded away. Her head had bounced upon the ground then. Maybe… maybe she had a concussion. She was trying to piece everything together desperately, but she could only get bits and fragments that would never quite fit together to form the completed picture.
Suddenly, a tremolo of antiproton thrusters filtered through her helmet's audio speakers. Seconds later, she felt herself ascend as her feet stepped upon a metal ramp. The Normandy—here?
"Garrus—" she heard John say, so close by. He had been the one carrying her, she realized. "—you need to take her."
The pressure at her side began to slip away. Her knees buckled and she began to fall, nothing able to support her anymore, but hands caught her just under her armpits before she could topple completely over.
She was partially blind, but that did not stop her from painfully attempting to turn around so that she could reach out a hand. By some miracle, she managed to clasp Shepard's hand with hers and her fingers immediately clamped down upon him, anchoring the both of them together.
She knew what he was going to do and everything that made up the fabric of her being was switched on overdrive, willing for the opposite to occur. Stay with me, she wanted to cry out, I love you! But the most that she could muster in her bad state was a strangled plea: "I… I can't go… don't leave me behind…"
On that ramp, with Tali being held by a similarly-injured Garrus, Shepard just below, his hand interlinked with his wife's, time seemed to slow for a second. Just beyond, the gleaming splinter of the Citadel beam lay just a kilometer away, cutting a brilliant white line into her fogged vision. If Tali's eyes had not been damaged, she would have been able to see that the man's eyes were shimmering from some deep knowledge that he was going to hate himself forever for what he would do next.
"John—" she begged again, her knuckles aching arthritically as her hand began to shake from clutching the man so hard.
The man gazed at her, holding her image for as long as he dared. The woman he loved, replete in her suit, for that was whom he had given his heart to. "You're going to be safe, Tali. Nothing else could matter more. This was… I think I always knew how this was going to end."
She tried to scream at him. Tears broke from her lashes, trickling down her face. No… no! How could he?! She had just married him—this was not happening!
"Get back to Rannoch," he continued to speak to her. He took two steps up the ramp and placed his other hand upon the cheek of Tali's helmet. "I'm so sorry, Tali. But I want you to have that home built. I can at least give you that."
I don't care about the house! she wanted to cry out, but could only muster a pathetic hiccough.
"Come back…" she moaned, as she felt John's hand began to slip away.
His face retreated into that lightbound fog, boots slipping down the ramp of the Normandy. "This is all for you. Everything that I did… was for you."
No matter how hard she clenched, his hand continued to slide away from her. Apart from her.
"Come back to me…"
She swore she could hear a thin sob wrench its way from Shepard's throat.
But in the next instant, he gave a tug and her hand closed on empty air. She gave a wild howl.
En route – Kamojang XII
Rain lashed against the shuttle, spattering the tinted windows, the sound like a thousand tiny hammers rattling upon the exterior. Even with acceleration dampeners, the turbulence outside was fierce enough to allow small jolts through the interior of the craft from time to time.
Plunging through the clouds, the approach of the shuttle was visually masked. The skies around them were a dark gray, choked with veins of black monsoon voids. Thunder rolled the air, while blinding bolts of lightning cascaded in their jagged forks, some of them striking the craft but harmlessly zapping away.
Tali knelt in the middle of the aisle of the shuttle, the rows of seats that flanked her empty, the duffel bags that she had taken with her from Zurich unzipped before her. The lights had dimmed to a bare simmer, with the quarian's vocabulator cutting a bright pinprick through the gloom, the rest of her body a churning shadow.
Ordinarily, this would have been a craft that had seated a group of up to twenty people on a puddle-jump from one side of the Mediterranean to the other, but Tali had it all to herself. Holo-maps projected the flight route along with topographical readings and overhead infrared arrays arranged in a tableau before her. Information all at her disposal, should she choose.
It was only a two-hour flight to Kamojang XII from Zurich, enough time for anyone to grab a quick nap, but Tali was too hopped up on adrenaline to even think about resting, especially right before what she was planning to do. No, every second of this flight was going to have to count.
She had just finished strapping a set of angular armor to her thighs—she had used both hands to tighten the two straps that adhered the plating directly to her leg. A matching piece had already been applied to her other leg. Quickly, while she was kneeling, she performed one last check of the thrusters that she had installed to her boots back in the hospital. She calibrated the pressure of the propulsive mix—no blockages, green lights across the board. Of all the things to fail, the thrusters were the one item that she needed to not worry about. They could come in handy, if she needed a quick exit.
The quarian stood and adjusted the scratched gray armor that enveloped her forearms. All of the extra protection had been taken from the SolBanc infiltrators that had performed their failed assault on the hospital. The armor was rated for humans, but quarians shared such similar builds that she could wear most human trappings with a little effort.
One of her shoulder pads was loose, a hard-edged piece that broadened her slim frame. She found the straps and tightened them until they burned.
She made sure the ammo pack that was looped across her waist was also tight. From one of the duffels, she slotted in thermal clip after thermal clip, including several grenades, knives, omni-tool power packs, and other assorted explosives. A hardplate covering spread across her chest and abdomen, not a perfect fit, but it would take a few rounds that would otherwise chew through her enviro-suit like paper.
She stood in the center of the aisle for a bit, just existing, breathing. Tali rolled her neck, trying to envision her bulky and jagged form. The rail-thin quarian had now become a fully armored soldier of war. If she saw herself in a mirror, the very image would have given her a start.
Some of the rifles and firearms that she had extricated from the other pack had been laid out on individual seats within the cabin. Tali had checked them all, calibrating their electronics to make sure that they all had a full charge and were loaded to the brim with clips.
An alarm from one of the holoscreens trilled after five minutes. Tali had been attending to one of the weapons and whipped her head up towards one of the screens.
According to the map, she had just passed the island of Belitung and was on course for the Kamojang plant.
"ETA, ten minutes," the autopilot tonelessly chimed, further reinforcing that point.
Ten minutes until she put an end to all of this.
Ten minutes until SolBanc would no longer bother them again.
Her hands had begun to clench as she stared daggers at the screen. A low growl began to worm its way up her throat, but she killed it mid-transit with a huff.
She returned back to her weapons. She still needed to get ready.
Kamojang XII
Landing Pad
The men of SolBanc Squad Tango were bored and miserable. A bad combination.
It had been raining on the island of Java for twelve straight days now. The skies were the same uniform color of basalt. The ground foamed white from all of the rain. The roads here were unpaved, even in the SolBanc compound. The food was terrible, the alcohol extremely limited. All of it added up to an extremely unpleasant mental state for the mercs garrisoned here, the sort where even the exorbitant pay was not enough to get them to tolerate one more hour on this godforsaken part of the planet.
Squad Tango had resorted to taking potshots at wildlife in the jungle for entertainment, the sound of their riflebursts crackling into the dark undergrowth. If they hit anything, they never bothered to retrieve their kills. They just let them bleed out on the forest floor, wherever they lay. Their superiors did not care, they were just as bored and unmotivated as the rest of them, so as long as their men could find amusement wherever it could be dredged up, who were they to stand in their way?
The squad had been directed to go on a lengthy patrol that took them on a sprawling path throughout the SolBanc compound. It was not an easy trek—the path they had to take involved switchbacking through a mountainous terrain that was completely carpeted in rainforest, crossing through several gushing streams, and trampling across soaked farmland. Every patrol involved the squad members marching back to their barracks with their armor completely coated in muck and grime, the sort where one even felt filthy after a long, hot shower.
When the mercs had first been rotated to Kamojang, they had treated this post as if it was a combat zone. Less than a week in, they started taking everything for granted. They no longer bothered with keeping their heads on a swivel every time they went on patrol. Anytime a branch creaked or snapped somewhere in the forest, it was ignored.
Besides, Kamojang was a remote facility tucked deep in an unpopulated part of one of the Indonesian isles. Who would ever come here in force?
It was that sort of mentality that the men of Squad Tango were fostering by the time their patrol took them past the elevated metal landing pad that was an effective survey post for the jungle. They had tromped onto the catwalk that was even with the pad, which splintered out from a sloping cliff wall, letting them traverse over the farmland and trees that had been trimmed short to allow the aluminum pathway carve an unobstructed route across the valley. A concrete bunker on the nearby hill, weathered and dripping with rainwater, marked the entrance to the geothermal facility that had been erected deep underground.
A constant whine cut through the rumbling thunder overhead. This time, the men of Squad Tango looked up. A shuttle was coming in to land on the nearby pad. They would have paid no mind to this, except they did note that Kamojang had been host to a bevy of craft arriving and departing today, which was certainly unusual—they had probably seen enough ships land today for an average week at this posting. So, seeing as the events of the day were already an anomaly, no one in Squad Tango disagreed when they decided to head over to great the newest visitor to the facility. A break from the routine was all they were hoping for.
The squad's sergeant keyed his radio to dispatch when he was halfway across the catwalk that spanned the thin valley, which shook from the footsteps of the armed mercenaries as they walked across it. "Dispatch, this is Recon Bravo. Got a visual on Garvey-3 craft on Pad 2. Squad Tango moving to intercept. Details on occupants?"
"Copy that, Recon Bravo. No information is available at this time," the dispatcher chimed. "Proceed on target, but maintain distance."
If dispatch had intended that to alleviate the sergeant any, it certainly did not work. He tried again. "Dispatch, confirm if craft was scheduled to arrive at this time."
There was a pause as the dispatcher was trying to collect that information on the other end. "Recon Bravo, there is no flight detail that I can provide to you now."
That either meant two things to the sergeant: the shuttle was either carrying a VIP like the last few ships, or an insurgent force.
If the squad had been a little more battle-hardened, they would have taken the worst outcome as the likeliest of the possibilities. However, due to the monotony of the majority of their tour here on Kamojang, plus the fact that no one at the facility even bothered to let them in on anything of note, the sergeant chose not to pass down any misgivings to his squad.
He got off the line with dispatch, reached the end of the catwalk, and was leading his men past the landing pad when he suddenly saw the side door to the shuttle slide open, not the rearward ramp, revealing an expanse of shadows from within. The sort of shadows that the beasts of nightmares preferred to utilize, keeping themselves obscured until the moment to strike came.
For some reason, the sergeant stopped in place. The ground continued to fizzle white at his feet from all the rain. The tall lightposts made his shining armor appear as if it was squirming. He squinted towards the shuttle, the rifle in his hands slowly moving upward.
He made a short gesture with his left hand, pointing towards the craft to his second-in-command. "Take a scan of that thing and let me know if it's in our reg—"
Bright plasma bolts suddenly poured from the opening, the raindrops around the flashes searing a terrifying white like a shotgun blast. Rapidfire. A loud whine from within spooled up like a generator in the throes of burning out.
The plasma shots slammed into the sergeant and burned half of his body away. Then the automatic pulses swiveled, cutting a line parallel to the ground, taking out two more of the squad in less than a second. The rounds spiraled across the landing pad and hit a chainlink fence on the far side, boring holes into the diamond shapes and melting the cheap metal so that it dripped onto the raincongested grass.
The rest of the squad scrambled for cover or dove to the ground in a panic. They shouted orders to one another and sporadic riflefire sparked against the side of the shuttle. They were in the middle of radioing dispatch when their assailant leaped out from beyond the confines of the craft.
The quarian was decked from head to toe in combat armor, almost like a riot trooper. The divaricate plates that encrusted around her body made her appear almost insectoid, a skewed and dangerous predator. The rain streaked down her form, her sehni rippling in the breeze. A protective plate upon Tali's purple visor filtered the glow of her eyes, which sparkled like the plasma that was erupting from the geth Spitfire automatic weapon she held in both hands.
The machinegun's rotary barrel was a blur as the electric blue discharge violently exploded from the muzzle, bright and vivid splashes that caught her form in bluescale.
Rounds spattered upon her shields, but the fire was not concentrated enough to make a meaningful dent. She was rocked back a step or two, but she dug in with a heel and gritted her teeth, her armor protecting her vital organs and making the slap of bullets seem like she was only being attacked by pellets.
Tali whirled the Spitfire upon the squad, advanced in a menacing march, and kept firing, the backburn glow of the weapon partially obscuring her view upon her targets—she had to rely on her HUD overlays and UV sensors to detect if she was actually hitting anything. But her aim was true. With a short sweep of the weapon, the quarian reduced the remainder of Squad Tango to a smoking heap.
The barrel of the Spitfire slowly wound down to a stop, the ends of the weapon glowing an angry red, heat warbling from the muzzle and liquefying the air just above. Steam gave startled hisses as the rain fell upon the blistering metal, emitting a spray of white curls.
The Spitfire's battery had nearly been drained with that burst. Tali chucked it away and swapped to her assault rifle—she crouched, checked the clips again, and stood back up in the rain.
Sharp white flares from the spotlights cut through the storm, cut in by flashes of lightning. Blinding. Tali could see from the elevated position several columns of steam, down the slope a couple of kilometers, transcend from the ground to the point that they looked like they were vital supports for the cloud layer, lest it collapse upon her head. Those had to be coming the geothermal plant's cooling towers. Kamojang was a geothermal facility that generated enough power for not just the entire island, but for three other landmasses. A place like this would have cooling towers that serve as bleedoff for the condensing gas in the form of dry steam, which was superheated and released into the atmosphere. Below, in the valley, she could see the pipe-encrusted buildings of the main facility below, the infrastructural compound dominating the natural area.
Fortunately, from downloading the blueprints of the facility off the mercs she had killed back in Zurich, Tali knew where to go. With any secret lair, especially a lair that made use of a public-works project, there would always be more than one entrance to utilize.
Tali approached the entrance to the concrete bunker that had been embedded upon the summit of the valley ridge. Fixed-place turrets, mounted just above the doorway, snapped in her direction. Tali disabled one with a three-round burst and fired a concussive round at the second, which snapped it clean off of its swivel and sent it sailing into the air.
Another source of light fell across the quarian. She looked up to see an atmo-rotor gunship swivel into play, having moved to her direction while it had been out on patrol. In the dim adumbrations, she could still pick out the SolBanc logo and the co-opted security outfit logo side-by-side upon the paneling. Pretty fast response time. She sprinted across the pad as heavy-caliber fire punched holes into the deck, cutting dangerously close to her heels. Her shields flared as sparks of hot metal pelted at her back.
The gunship tried to swivel in front of her to cut her off. Tali raised her rifle and fired at the cockpit—the canopy was reinforced, so her bullets would not have an effect. However, it did create the desired reaction from the pilot. On instinct, the pilot reared the ship backwards, exposing the underbelly thrust engines. Tali's cyberware suite clenched a green icon—a lock—and she initiated a disruptor burst past the chopper's ice and the shielded electronics. Immediately, the gunship wrenched to the side, its rotors whirring so fast they were turning white, and began to swing in a helpless spiral.
Tali was still running when the gunship made contact with the side of the hill. There was a thick concussive blast and the thunderclap of igniting fuel. Yellow fires sparked through the vegetation in a brief cloud and shrapnel spun in all directions.
Good start so far. Don't relax yet.
She ejected her half-spent thermal clip as she came back up to the door and loaded a new one in a smooth motion. The firewalls embedded in the door's internals were no match for her military-grade programs. They barely lasted two seconds of resistance before she was inside.
The immediate area was doused in darkness as the door slammed shut behind her. Tali's visor automatically adjusted the light sensors in her visor. She was standing in an industrial looking area—concrete floor, exposed rebar in the walls, bundles of wiring sandwiched next to air ducts. An elevator door sat to her left. Just ahead, she could see a stairwell spiral downward.
The only way forward was down, it seemed. As if she expected anything different.
The elevator chimed and Tali froze. She reached for a grenade and thumbed the deadman's switch. Would SolBanc think it would simply be so easy? She raised her arm in preparation, just to be sure.
As soon as the doors rattled open, the grenade left Tali's hand. There was a panicked shout followed by a loud whumpf! Light and smoke poured from the opening. Tali trained her assault rifle at the doors—no one exited. Spasmodic flickers from damaged light fixtures within made it seem like the lightning had made its way inside the facility.
She did not look inside the elevator. As far as she was concerned, the elevator was useless as a route of travel now.
Tali headed for the stairs, crouch-walking with a purpose. Footsteps from down below, tromping on the flexing metal. She trained her assault rifle towards the stairs, giving an inch or two of lead. Flashes of polished armor traveling up the rectangular spiral—above, she opened fire and was rewarded by how the bodies just keeled over and dropped.
Submachine gun fire exploded from below, sparking against the handrail and making her flinch away. She used the opportunity to reload again.
A grenade sailed up from the level below and rolled to a stop. Tali kicked it away, letting it tumble in midair, and the floor jolted again as the device detonated. Had she killed anyone with that blast? Hard to be sure.
Flickers of movement from the stairs. More troops were heading up. Tali had only just enough time to see a series of muzzle flashes, exhaust pouring from the weapons, before a series of impacts smashed into her armor.
A sledgehammer blow across the thigh brought her to her knees immediately. She gasped in pain. Her leg was numb, but that was probably from the medi-gel that had already been applied. Her suit was not breached, but she would have deep tissue damage.
Enraged from the pain, Tali lifted her rifle and split the air with several bursts that sent the SolBanc mercs spinning to the ground before dropping.
Her pulse thundered in her ears. She bent to check where she had been shot. The armor on her thigh had been indented a bit to the point that it was prodding her leg with every step that she took. She was probably bleeding underneath the suit, but counted herself lucky if this was all that she had garnered so far.
As she proceeded down the stairs, Tali reached out with her left hand and an omni-shield spurted around her forearm, a glowing plate of reflective energy. It was curved on the interior end, able to give her weapon a comfortable position to fire around it. It was single-use, her omni-tool could only engage it once before the function disabled itself due to the immense power draw. She had not wanted to deploy it so soon, but things were already getting serious. She crouched behind the shield as she descended, holding her assault rifle with her other hand. Keep going. You're doing this for him. Remember that.
On the next level down, a door opened and a SolBanc merc opened up on her with a heavybarreled pistol. The rounds bounced harmlessly off the omni-shield with a series of scintillating bursts. "Flank her!" the merc called to his brethren. "Get on her six! She's shielded!"
Tali fired her assault rifle, which jerked heavily upward since she was only using one hand to grip it. The rounds tore through the merc from groin to brainpan, and the weapon jammed. While her latest victim was in the process of collapsing to the ground, Tali tossed her rifle away and drew the Reegar carbine that she had strapped onto her weapons bay. She primed the trigger to the carbine, kept it situated at the door the man had just exited through, and jolted the throttle when she saw a larger group begin to push through.
White vines of electricity sprinted from the carbine, creating a jagged web of lightning so intense it looked like the space between the quarian and her targets had turned to a pane of shattered glass. The mercs jerked, yelled, and died, each one coiled by the arcing bolts that sent their muscles into helpless spasms before the voltage finally overcame what their bodies could take. Bolts blew out from where their skulls met their necks and cooked brains oozed from the openings where their helmets had folded outward.
Tali kept going down the stairs. Bullets from below hit the wall above her, pockmarking an irregular line and throwing out geysers of dust, causing her to duck. She fired the carbine again, but the lightning simply directed itself towards the metallic supports and cabling harnesses that spanned the length of the shaft. Useless in this situation, Tali dropped the weapon, but not before activating the failsafe that would disable the weapon if anyone should pick it up behind her.
She now drew a submachine gun of her own and kept going down the steps, her omni-shield out and front with her weapon directed straight out past the lip of her portable cover.
Twisting mechanical sounds meandered from the level below. Red twin-circle LEDs were now cutting through the void of smoke. LOKI mechs, Tali now saw. The bipedal mechs looked like they had been modified with extra armor and were detailed in blue and yellow. The base model could fold like paper with a few shots—how much armor had SolBanc invested in these ones?
"Your cooperation is demanded," the lead LOKI mech called out, a shotgun in their hands. It was swiveling its head around, unable to track its target. "Violence will not be tolerated—"
"I beg to differ," Tali murmured under her breath right before she let out a well-placed burst from her submachine gun that blew the lead LOKI's head to smithereens. Guess SolBanc had not spared that much expense.
She overloaded the next mech, which unintentionally triggered its disassembly mode and caused its limbs to detach like a child's toy. The second-to-last LOKI she hacked and directed it to train its weapon upon its cohort in front of it. It mindlessly fired its weapon into the back of its fellow and paused after its target fell still, as though it was suddenly confused why it had been left all alone. Tali then coded another command to her hacked mech and the LOKI obediently placed the barrel of its pistol underneath its own alloyed chin and pulled the trigger, ripping its head free of its neck mooring with a burst of flame and spurt of lubricants.
"Was wondering when I'd see those again," Tali noted as she stepped over the tangle of mech parts.
The quarian had descended at least seven stories by this point, but it did not even seem like she was even halfway done with her jaunt to the bottom. She was constantly fighting not to start rushing her way down to get all of this over with. Sloppiness came with rushing. She was not on a timetable—there was no need to go fast.
A door banged open somewhere above her and Tali screamed as a shotgun burst partially skipped off her armored shoulder blade, staggering her forward. They were now coming in from behind her. Tali whirled so that she could lay down some cover fire, but then the hallway on this level suddenly became filled with bodies as more mercs poured in to cut her off.
The gunfire in the shaft was deep and relentless. An infiltrator from the level above stepped into view and blew apart the ventilation fan just over Tali's head. She had to dodge out of the way of the still-spinning rotor, which blistered heat and sparks. She tried more suppressive fire, but the belligerent had stepped back into cover again.
Tali then had to rotate to the left so that she could fend off the SolBanc squad on her level. Her omni-shield was taking the brunt of the fire, but even such a piece of tech had its limits.
Okay, screw going slow. Now was the time for going fast.
In desperation, she rushed the wall next to the connecting door. Two SolBanc guards came through the portal—she shot them both with her submachine gun and again in the head for good measure when they had fallen.
Her heel had nearly slipped off the next step that continued downward. Tali had taken an involuntary glance behind her to take stock of her position when she heard a soft ting of metal on concrete.
She turned back just as the grenade exploded.
It felt as if a great hand had suddenly picked her up and flung her backwards. Her omni-shield had been directed towards the blast, but all it did was absorb the shrapnel. The concussive force of the grenade pulsed the fluid of her brain and everything flashed gray for Tali. She was flying down the steps, landing hard on her back midway down the passage, her shield disintegrating around her arm, and rolled down the rest of the stairwell until she reached the end of the bend. She somersaulted backwards and the back of her head hit the dusted cinderblock wall. She unleashed a strangled grunt and her world turned white, as if the polarized shielding of her visor had suddenly dropped to let her look upon a close-range star with newborn eyes.
A spark of pain pierced her head for a moment, like a thin spike of glass.
Before she blacked out, in that tender chaos, she saw John kneel before her, the same smile upon his face the night she showed him her face for the first time. He reached out, as if to graze her cheek with his fingertips.
Tali passed out smiling.
Two seconds later, she awoke with an explosive rush of air. The ebbing darkness retreated back, as if shocked that the quarian had thrown off its spell.
Yelling from the violent throbbing in her head and from a lifetime of indignities all bundled together within her, Tali lurched from her sitting position, her entire body feeling like it was running on autopilot. Everything hurt, but it was a strange sort of hurt, the kind that she could completely dissociate as if it was a sensation happening elsewhere, to another person.
The Scimitar shotgun came unhooked from its moorings at her back. She swung it up just as a SolBanc privateer was starting to descend the stairs towards her.
Her resounding blast turned the man's left thigh into an eruption of glistening meat. He yelled, pinwheeled his arms, and broke his neck when he landed seven steps down at the wrong angle. The limp body slid the rest of the way down the stairs until it was level with Tali's platform.
She rolled, using the body as cover. Fire from above scattered above her with inches to spare. Several bullets plowed into the merc's corpse she was hunkered behind, sending pieces of armor and flesh flying.
The merc's assault rifle was still strapped to his body—Tali grabbed for it, sloppily aimed it up, and unleashed an automatic burst, raking the weapon back and forth without regard for aiming it. A few lucky bullets found their targets and snapped the domes of the SolBanc legionnaires back, their nervous systems destroyed in an instant.
The bank was sending everything it had to her position. Tali did not even know how badly she was hurt—something had dislodged in her suit and her vital readings were now unresponsive.
She ditched the assault rifle, holding her shotgun again with both hands. It belched suppressive fire, giving Tali a moment to rise to her feet. She fired twice more, elongating her moment of quiet—she used the opportunity to place tech mines on the ground and walls, covering her infiltration. She also generated Chatika on the level directly above her and primed the drone to target the closest merc and explode. She heard a dull cry become swallowed up by a crackling explosion a few seconds later.
The slide to the shotgun locked open. Empty. No time to reload it. Tali quickly stowed the weapon and plucked the two pistols from her holsters and held one out, ready to plug anyone that dared cross her path, the other handgun pointed at the ceiling.
She picked up the pace, the pounding in her head refusing to cease. This time, she was hacking into every door that she passed by, locking them tight as a drum before overloading the electronics so that they could not be reset by SolBanc. There was a satisfying slam of metal which each door she shut behind her. One merc had the misfortune of trying to storm his way through a threshold at the same time that Tali was hacking his door. One code initiation later and the upper half of the merc lay bleeding on the ground, his lower half behind the shut door, a grim reminder.
Her calves were now freshly aching. How many levels had she gone down now? At least thirty, maybe. She tried glancing over the side but the smoke was still too thick for her to see the bottom.
Tali neutralized two more gunmen as she raced down the stairs with her pistols. She made sure to double-tap each merc in the head as she left them behind.
A machinegun-toting brute of an enforcer was climbing up from the level below. Tali fired two shots with one pistol, following up with the second. The merc jerked back, sparks leaping from his helmet, disorienting him long enough for Tali to stow one of her handguns and yank her knife free. She rushed the man and shot her arm upward—the blade passed through the soft chin of the man's helmet and speared straight through his jaw, into his brain. He instantly froze and gave a startled gurgle. Tali jerked the blade around a little to ensure she had killed the man before she clutched the grip and yanked the knife from the body. There was a swift gush of blood, almost faucet-like, and the merc lay dead at her feet.
She found another assault rifle on the ground. After checking to see if it was loaded with clips, she mechanically kept going down the stairs, spiraling further and further down this shaft of desolation. She was going so fast now, almost mindless, that when her feet finally touched concrete, she had primed her next step to be one situated downward, only realizing half a second later that downward was no longer an option for her.
Nerve endings fired hot and cold all at once. An intrinsic jitter through her spine. Dread bubbled in her gut, unsure if it should retreat or not.
Had she… made it?
Just getting here was an achievement in of itself. But Tali did not allow herself to calm down fully just yet. She still had not yet come across the architects of her family's pain just yet. When she would be finished with them, she could finally live that life of peace that John had told her once long ago.
The house that was meant for her beckoned in her mind.
"Coming for you," Tali growled, rifle at the ready.
The hallway at the final level of the stairwell was unpainted cinderblock, the wiring looping from one light fixture to the next. Tali kept placing mines behind her as she traveled, unwilling to get bottlenecked so easily here.
It was thick here with steam—a cloud barred her way. Slowly, without breaking stride, she walked through the cloying fog, beads condensing upon her visor. She emerged out the other end, rifle in hand, a dark shape against the white, eyes taking a moment to adjust as she beheld the scale of the expanse that now lay before her.
She had been regurgitated out onto a long metal catwalk that spanned a circular room. The first thing that Tali noted was the height of the room. Two hundred meters tall, at least. This had to be the interior of one of the cooling towers. A hyperboloid shape, the geodesics curved and supported by featureless concrete. She could see the sky all the way at the top from the opening in the roof—a flat gray disc so far above. Steam and condensation poured from pools dispersed in each quadrant of the room from the superheated geothermal water, obscuring the other catwalks that were interspersed on all levels like a spider's web. She looked over the side of the guardrails, but was unable to see the surface of the water. Fall in there and she would be boiled alive in mere moments. Even with her suit on, the heat would be so great that she would lose consciousness and die outright.
Cylindrical pressure vaults made a middle ring around the room—gigantic steam vents that equalized the geothermal system, accessible from another grid of catwalks. Each one had a door that could access the interior. Security-locked, of course. Walk into one of those while it was running and the pressure would vaporize someone into particles so small there would be nothing left to identify someone as a person.
At the center of the tower's interior was a tall metal spindle, thirteen stories high, ringed with orange guardrails. A thin skyscraper. Two massive steam vents at the top pumped more pillars of thick white condensation, the source of the steam that she had seen upon her arrival. A gigantic red duct, the diameter greater than the width of a Mako, angled into the side of the tower. A low thrum vibrated throughout the room, amplified by the shape of the vent.
The catwalk that Tali was on had a bundle of pipes situated parallel to her route. She looked up and spotted an office on the tower—at the fourth floor.
That was where she needed to be. She just knew it.
She crept forward, only for the catwalk to explode in sparks around her.
Squads of mercenaries on the ground floor, situated between the pools of boiling liquid, were firing up at her. A YMIR mech—a massive bipedal warbot—was even chattering its built-in machineguns in her direction. It fired a rocket, but with all of the steam and heat, its infrared sensors had a hard time locking on and it spiraled harmlessly overhead.
Tali bolted through the swirling steam, blindly firing her assault rifle down at her aggressors. Her aim was poor and she only nailed one of them, who went down with a yell. The rest had better luck—her shields scattered and broke with an angry crackle. A round ricocheted off of a nearby guardrail post and spiked into her shin. Tali tripped and fell. Another bullet smashed into her lower back, causing her to spasm. One caught her in the upper visor, producing a stream of sparks and indenting the plating there so heavily that a starburst crack appeared in the glass of her visor.
Groaning, her breath driven from her lungs, Tali mustered the strength the roll out of the mercs' line of sight. A shotgun blast splintered the grating where she had just lay, blowing it upward in a gridded crater. Snipers from the levels above on the inner walls of the tower took potshots at her, crackling more sparks at her feet.
Stars swam across her vision. Adrenaline pricked her skin. She tried to flex her mind outward—was her suit breached? Had her luck finally caught up to her?
She flicked a haptic switch and omni-armor encrusted around her body, protecting her from the waist up. It flashed and splintered from the gunshots that rose from below. The heavy chatter of machinegun fire threatened to split her head open. Molten metal sprinkled from the failing omni-barrier, coating her with flecks of heat. She turned to the side, yelling on instinct.
There was nothing she could do. Fear overrode all of her functions. She curled into a ball, shrapnel and debris scything out just overhead, coating her in a fine layer of dust. She trembled, bringing her knees to her chest. Damn it. There were too many of them. I'm sorry, John… I'm sorry—
The firing unexpectedly stopped. She cracked one eye open, confused.
She was there, under glowing white blankets, the sheeting flapping as if exposed to a faint breeze. Her arm was reaching out, her pale gray skin lit from the sun that seared through the fabric. A hand slid forward and grasped her own limb. The billowing of the sheets increased, revealing his face. Sleepy eyes. A mouth that curled into a smile.
"There you are," she heard him say.
Somewhere in Tali's chest, a volcano plumed ferociously.
With a roar, Tali leaped to her feet, her leg buckling but able to ignore it anyway. She burst through the sheets and was back in the cooling tower, this time with her weapons at the ready. Kneeling in a firing position, she spotted the first of the SolBanc squads coming to her level on the catwalk, wanting to finish the quarian off for good.
Her overlays could pick up the mercs through the steam. They, on the other hand, were still blind.
Tali opened fire, the catwalk providing a killing lane. The column of privateers jerked and fell, the rounds slamming into their bodies and destroying their vital organs. Guns clattered out of slack grips and strange hoops of light played in the steam as Tali fired into the cloud.
Her proximity sensor chimed and alarm and she rolled, evading a merc who had snuck up behind her with a shock stick. "Play time's over, you bitch—!"
Tali sprang back at the man and hit the controls to her boot thrusters. Her leap carried her over the man and she hooked her fingers under the helmet that locked under the man's jaw. Lithe though she was, her muscle mass was far denser than a human's, concealing her true strength. She executed a smooth flip in the air, courtesy of her thrusters, her trajectory yanking the merc clean off of his feet. Aided by the extra thrust, the quarian was able to lift the merc over her head and slam him down upon the ground in front of her just as she touched her boots down upon the grating as a landing, the swift move breaking her victim's neck in the process. The massive bang from the man being pulverized against the catwalk rang out and Tali was left breathing heavily over a corpse.
A LOKI mech poked its head out from nearest staircase in front of Tali as it nearly finished its ascent—she lashed out with the butt of her shotgun and the mech completely spun around, the remains of its shattered faceplate spraying from its head, and smashed itself to pieces as it tumbled down the stairs, taking three more LOKIs with it that had been coming up the same set of stairs.
The emergency lighting threw striped illumination against Tali. Shadows fell in gray sheets from her scorched and gouged frame. The flat disc of sky overhead was becoming more pronounced—the heat down here was probably so intense that the rain from above evaporated before it could hit the ground. She inhaled to straighten herself, to calm herself.
She primed a grenade, threw it back the way she had come. More mercs vanished in a flash and a thunderclap of sound.
One of the doors to the pressurized vaults to her left winked yellow—catching her eye. She turned her head to see a merc in the process of exiting from the inner chamber. Seems SolBanc was trying to use the routes within the vaults to try and flank her. Big mistake.
Tali reached out, omni-tool encircled around her palm, and hacked the door, shutting it closed before the SolBanc merc could fully extricate himself from within the gigantic vent. Locking it with a flick of a finger, she then quickly accessed the vault's controls, priming it to activate it once more.
The results were devastating. The merc was pounding at the door, shouting to be let out, when all of a sudden, the interior of the vault flared bright white, but not before there was a split-second burst of red where the merc had been. The steam pressure had completely obliterated him.
"Keelah," Tali murmured, a bit shocked at the violence herself.
There was still the YMIR mech, as it was trying desperately to get a bead on her with its machineguns. Tali figured now was as good a time as any to deal with it—she quickly located the mech on the network, deactivated its shields and played havoc with its reactive armor. While the YMIR was reeling in response to these virtual attacks, Tali straightened her rifle and let loose a three-round burst that completely blew the mech's head off.
The YMIR had a flaw in its design in which the control chips to its power generators were all located inside its cranium with no temperature control backups located elsewhere on its body. With no electrical signals indicating that it should begin ventilation procedures, the internal heat began to build in the remains of the mech like an overpressurized enviro-suit, finally cumulating in a mini-nuclear blast that flared the entire room orange-red and shook the catwalk so hard that Tali had to cling onto one of the painted guardrails to keep from toppling over. A small mushroom cloud climbed upward until the smoke was swallowed up by the billowing steam.
A lull passed throughout the cooling tower. Tali used the moment to reload her weapons. Groaning, she felt a hand to her waist—a sharp knife of pain there. Everything tender. Bruised and bleeding, as Tali sloughed off one shoulder pad that had shattered from a sniper's bullet, dropping it to her feet, she gazed up at the glass-walled level on the spindle above her. Whatever she was looking for, it had to be up there.
There was a door on a half-level below her position. Tali headed to it. It led to another spiral staircase within the metallic spire, but fortunately she only had four stories to climb, so the jaunt would not be as strenuous.
A few SolBanc soldiers, the last of the guard, had stayed behind as defenders. They opened up on her around the corners of the staircase with their automatic weapons, filling the shaft with momentary bursts of oxidation and a charred smell, but Tali simply bided her time and leaned out of cover only when she heard the telltale sounds of the mercenaries loading thermal clips into their weapons. She fired a pistol methodically, in a two-handed grip, letting the recoil move her aim from center of mass straight to the head. The bodies toppled down the stairs—Tali's glowing thermal clip joined them as she ejected it from her sidearm's port.
She was now midlevel upon the protuberance in the center of the cooling tower. The door to this part of the citadel was not even unlocked. She could just pass right through it.
She was now in the glass-lined room she had seen from outside the fortification, which provided her an unobstructed view to nearly seventy-five percent of the facility. Even the ceiling was glass, which opened up to another room right above her. But this place was where she needed to be—it was full of control stations where console screens and database diodes glittered like jewels. Diffuse light slotted in from the gridded floor. Holograms of the geothermal plant's performance were displayed on nearly every wall, some on suspended screens that ringed around the central area where the plant's director would ordinarily stand. Water flow, thermal temperature, pressure control. The whole place was at her fingertips.
The largest screen in the middle of the room seemed like a good place to start. Tali jogged over, set her pistol down next to the keyboard, and opened it up. Password-protected. Cute. No match for Tali's icebreaker program, the firewalls crumpled and let her in.
The UI was custom, but rudimentary. Low-res, like a BIOs. Built by the lowest bidder, no doubt. Navigation was done with the arrow keys, rather quaint.
Tali toggled her way through the various submenus, frequently having to back out to the main menu after heading down a dead end. The more time passed, the more frustrated she became and the more emphatic were her fingers on the keyboard, now nearly stabbing the poor device.
"What do I do with you…?" she murmured to herself, schemata endlessly reflecting off her visor, drowning her eyeballs in data. "What can I do to hurt you?"
After a minute, she noticed an icon in the corner, a whirlpool steadily spinning. She opened it up—it was a list of programs that were currently running. It was only one program, though, but it was using up an inordinate amount of data. Petabytes of it. Curious, she clicked into the program.
It was a list of bank accounts—she recognized the numbering scheme from her experience working with the insurance's billing specialists—and spatial coordinates. Credit amounts were positioned next to each one. They were transfer amounts, all cycling into a family of SolBanc accounts, from what Tali could see if she double-clicked on the location all the funds were flowing to.
What the hell had she just stumbled onto? SolBanc was increasing its coffers, but from where? And, it was being done through here? This facility had that kind of access?
An idea slowly took root within Tali. She felt something rising in her chest, a sensation that she had only touched a year ago.
If this facility has access to the bank's money, then…
Her program shredded the ice walls that were SolBanc's defense gates. Kasumi would be proud—becoming a thief would have been an easy profession for the quarian. She bypassed several locks, convincing each one of them that they were tightly sealed shut, when in fact they were wide open, with little regard to the digital trail she was creating. Who cared if she left smoldering ashes in her wake? She was a target anyway—she wanted everyone to know who did this.
She deployed a scanning program once she had gained access to the root folder, which was a simple bit of code that could be tailored to find a specific keyword. It found the file she was looking for almost immediately and snapped it open on a separate screen to her left, at eyeball-level.
Patient Record 55-7154-15PSU
Shepard, John
Opening up the file, Tali just sighed as she saw the balance displayed on the screen, over nine hundred thousand credits now. Each individual charge just as frivolous as the last. The rest of the document was threadbare, just a compilation of notes from the doctors as well as the calculations that had arrived at the exorbitant amount for which to burden the storied soldier with.
Were she back in Zurich, having all this recited to her, she would have moped to Shepard's room afterward and bawled in a depressive haze. Perhaps… or perhaps not. Was she that type of person anymore? Or had she found the will to muster through it all?
Regardless, this time, she was the one with admin control.
A fresh start.
Tali accessed the edit functionality, hovered the cursor over the grand total, and pressed the CLEAR key. The smile that filled her face as she saw the large number tick over to a simple zero was fueled by the savage pounding of her heart. All for you, my love. For good measure, she locked the file by placing a password of her own on it and even buried a worm virus in the code so that the password would constantly change every minute. Even the SolBanc tech admins would not be able to crack what she had just done without completely dismantling the database down to its base code, if they even were that talented. It would take a supercomputer to smash Tali's defenses and revert her changes.
However, she was nowhere close to being done.
Returning to the facility's main screen, Tali accessed the temperature control systems for the server farm that was located elsewhere in the building. Quickly, she booted up the schematics—the servers were iso-hardened stacks of modular storage, two and a half meters tall, encased in titanium alloys that were submerged in freezing liquid coolant. They ran so hot that they needed to be surrounded by a supercooled liquid medium in order to properly disperse the thermal stress. Security cam footage gave Tali a window toward the room where they were located, which was a wide rectangular area that was dimly lit, supported by obsidian columns, where a pool the length of the room, filled with milky bubbling liquid, glowed from the machinery it was cooling.
It would take Tali's program time to access the stack controls, so while that was cranking away, she fired up another screen for the steam pressure system—which required no additional access controls—and began closing off vent after vent in the facility, forcing the massive amount of steam to become bottlenecked as it surged through the massive tangle of piping. A gauge at the bottom right of the screen began to climb, steadily and steadily, threatening to redzone in the next few minutes.
Tali lifted her hands away from the keyboard for a moment, observing her handiwork. The panel was beginning to go haywire. Warnings from the increasing pressure in the system were starting to blare as pop-ups marked with bright exclamation points. A system in entropy, about to plunge into a death spiral.
Numbly, she nodded to herself, as if in approval of what she had just done. Red lights bathed her front in frantic strobes. SolBanc was minutes away from being finished. It was over.
Then her ears detected a metallic click of feedback. A speaker system.
"You're nothing if not thorough, Ms. Zorah."
Lightning coursing through her system, Tali plucked up her pistol from where she had set it and whipped it upward, where a man now stood upon the glass ceiling, on the level above. Her weapon barked, reverberating loudly in the enclosed room, but hairline cracks merely splintered at the man's heels. Bulletproof, of course. He was elderly, hair the color of soot, expensive bifocals, and sported a cane. He seemed to be favoring the assistance his walking device provided and his mustachioed face furrowed in annoyed contemplation as he beheld the quarian below him like an insect to be squashed.
"Wrong name," Tali snarled, the sights of her weapon refusing to leave from the tall human's frame, despite the fact that she had nothing to penetrate the barrier. "Your lackey should have informed you by now. I go by something else these days. You are Haas-Mase, obviously."
The financier sneered, as if he was appalled that he could be mistaken for anyone else.
"Yes, I was informed of the surname that you had chosen for yourself. You know, I didn't know what to expect, seeing you for the first time." Haas-Mase stroked his chin mockingly. "For some reason, I pictured you being taller."
"Funny. You're exactly as I pictured you. Ten-thousand-credit suit and all."
Haas-Mase tapped his cane upon the glass floor, as if his next proclamation would be prophetic in nature. "Might as well lower the gun. It isn't as if we're able to solve our problems that way for now."
Tali flirted with hesitation before she slowly lowered her arms, but by no means did she lessen her grip on the weapon. "Maybe your problems are just beginning," she countered before she jerked her head in a backwards motion, towards the screens. "In ten minutes' time, you won't have a company anymore. Whatever money you had in your coffers will be left in limbo, inaccessible to you or anyone else. Your databases will soon fry after that, wiping out all of your records so that you can never harm my family or anyone else ever again."
"You really are cut from the same cloth as your husband," Haas-Mase said. "An idealist, through and through."
Tali shook her head. "I'm just someone who's been pushed far beyond reason."
"Your handiwork to get to this point was proof of that." Haas-Mase made a slow orbit around the square glass panel that allowed him a view down upon Tali's level, never taking his eyes off the quarian as he walked. "This could have all been avoided, you know."
"Really?" Tali asked with no small amount of sarcasm. This was rich to hear from the financier. To think that this could have all been solved with words, if such an opportunity had ever existed.
The man did not seem to understand the predicament, yet he continued to forge ahead. "Perhaps that's the shame of this whole ordeal. It was unnecessary. If you had only gone through the proper channels—"
"Yeah, I'm not interested," Tali turned away with a growl. She would not be condescended to now. Her breaker program was almost done anyway, and soon the screen finally flashed green for a glorious moment, giving her access to the database stack controls. "If this is the best you've got, then I don't need to hear it," she said hollowly, still facing the screens. "I came here to destroy your livelihood, Haas-Mase. I came here to ruin everything you had and you're not going to slow me down now."
"Wait!" the resulting cry over the loudspeaker revealed a wrench in the financier's throat. Tali looked up, intrigued. Haas-Mase was still standing over her, but his face had finally cracked, revealing his true fears and anguishes he buried away from everyone else. "Why?"
Tali's eyes turned dull. She unleashed a snort. "And that's what you ask me…" she murmured to herself. She then raised her voice so she could be heard. "It was never supposed to be subtle."
"Why are you doing this?"
Tali almost laughed. "Do you really not know what you've done to me?" Her hand hovered over the button to rise the stacks out of their coolant bath—they would meltdown in less than ten minutes running at full tilt, destroying all of the data within the servers without a proper cooling system.
"Stop for a minute and we can make this right. Press that button and you'll get nothing."
"As opposed to what? Is this the prelude to a bribe?"
Haas-Mase stepped back so that his body was more into view for Tali. "I'm offering you anything you want."
She did not take her eyes off of Haas-Mase, turning his words over in his head, becoming madder and madder with each second. Anything she wanted. Material or monetary. Whatever her heart desired. Soon, Tali was steaming just as hot as the reactor. That he thought she would abandon her principles for credits was such an insult that she was beyond anger for a moment.
She squeezed her eyes shut before she opened them again.
"I grew up poor all my life," she murmured. The quarian then glared back upwards, reengaging eye contact. "I guess that's why it's easy for me to treasure the things that I have now."
What little hope had been buried in Haas-Mase expression finally burned away like the morning dew. "You think you're above such things, don't you?" he snarled.
"I'm above what you have to offer me," Tali retorted.
"You killed my son," the man's face turned dark. "Shot him in cold blood."
"And I'm glad I did. He would have killed my husband. But you're still killing him, even now. So…"
"You don't have to do this."
"I don't care what you think. You passed the point of return a long while back. I'm just the consequence of your actions, come to collect. This was all over the moment you decided to take my husband for everything he had through his policy. Then, when you tried to take him from me directly, you signed your death warrant. No, I do need to do this. Because you believed that I would just take whatever you had to throw at me and not raise my voice in protest. How many others have you done the same thing to? How many families have you broken with this company of yours? What I know is that after today, you won't be able to hurt them anymore."
Tali paused to breathe, before her smile became feral.
"But to tell you the truth, I'm also doing this for my own satisfaction."
And before Haas-Mase could lay out his next defensive remark, Tali hit the enter key.
On the screen, Tali could see two rows of fifty server stacks, located deep within the facility, rise from their bubbling pools, the thin liquid pouring around them like irregular spigots. Multiple temperature sensors immediately began to blare alarms—the exposed drives were already overheating without their coolant. All that data, an entire station full of it, slowly being corrupted, deleted, and destroyed. Tali could imagine the acrid scent of burning chrome from here—it was a scent she had grown up with, after all.
"What have you done?!" Haas-Mase cried above her.
Tali did not answer him right away. She just stood there, watching the servers begin to steam and smoke. Wherever that room was, it had to be getting rather hot there right now.
She turned, levelling a finger at the financier. "I've protected my family. Now, you're going to—"
A flicker of motion through the windows. Someone at the catwalk outside. Damn, she had gotten too complacent.
Her HUD registered an infrared beam spearing through the glass. In her direction.
Her eyes widened. She reached for where her shotgun was strapped on her back.
On the other side of the window, a cross-shape burst of flame shot from Qual's pistol. Glass shattered all around Tali—she jerked to the side, throwing herself to the floor with a cry. The razor panes tumbled around her, sprinkling her body, lodging within her sehni.
The sound of more shots. Deep, deep thuds.
A bullet whizzed by Tali's head, ricocheting off the floor. Another shattered a nearby screen, littering the ground with more glass.
Her body ached, her eyes drooped with fatigue, but she was still alive. Still alive.
Roaring, with Haas-Mase watching from above, Tali rose out of cover and swung her weapon towards the incoming fire. It was time to end this.
A/N: Back from vacation, into the swing of things once more. The grand finale awaits. Are you ready?
Playlist:
London Goodbye
"Rain"
Jed Kurzel
A Writer's Odyssey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Landing Pad (Tali's Rage I)
"Steel Haze"
Shoi Miyazawa and Kota Hoshino
Armored Core 6 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Stairwell Fight
"The Part Where He Kills You"
Mike Morasky
Portal 2 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Reactor Floor (Tali's Rage II)
"Steel Haze (Rusted Pride)"
Kota Hoshino
Armored Core 6 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Climb the Spire / Haas-Mase / Cliffhanger
"Air"
Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe, Atli Örvarsson, Geoff Zanelli, and Mel Wesson
Angels & Demons (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)