Mass Effect 1

Burnt for Beacons

Chapter 9 – Armstrong Nebula II

The person who stared back at her from the washroom mirror looked haggard. Her normally bronzed skin looked waxen, there were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair looked greasy and lifeless. Ashley picked up her kit and walked into the shower, she turned the water up as hot as she could, as if she were trying to boil away the top layer of her skin. She let the water roll down her back, massaging her head and shoulders, and when absolutely sodden she began to scrub. Using her fingernails, she drove the shampoo into her scalp, then picked up the soap and began to do the same to the skin on the rest of her body. She was ruthless and methodical and when she finally turned off the water, she stood under the dripping shower head imagining her skin cells were begging for mercy. She padded across to a dry area and began towelling her skin with the same unforgiving speed that she had done everything that morning. Dressed and dried she marched to the mechanical bay to start her shift.

Things had been going well. She'd decided that what she needed was a carefully curated routine since she'd been woken by Joker after the Maji mission and sent to bed like a needy child. Ashley had decided then and there to take control of herself. Breakfast, morning shower, first shift, lunch, PT, second shift, cockpit time with Joker, do something else with someone, read, bed, no comm time, no comm time at all. The others would tell her anything she needed to know. She was a few days into this new routine and things had been going well. Very well. The combat crews were around somewhere, but she'd managed to largely avoid them; and she'd continue to avoid them by switching up her shifts and spending a lot of her time in the fabricating room. That's where she was heading now as there was inventory to sort, and armour that could be retooled. Things had been going well. Just, so, so well.

She waved to Tuck and then headed straight to the armoury storeroom to pick up the squad's armour. Her omni-tool had sent her a list of all the damage done during the last mission and cross-referenced it with the replacement parts they had in inventory, then it was just a matter of replacing the old with the new and painting it up to match. Normally, she thought, she'd do the work at her bench, but it was right there, out in the open, better to move into the little fabricating room today. She loaded her trolley with four suits of armour and the replacement pieces, then wheeled it out the door and switched off the lights. The door, when it shut, disappeared into the panelling, just like the door to the tiny firing room beside it. She made her way up the ramp and around the Mako, which had taken a beating. A team of engineers and mechanics were circling it, a few of them looked up as Ashley passed, and she nodded a greeting.

The lights flicked on as she entered the fabricator room, and she was pleased to shut the door against the excited voices beyond. Looking over the inventory, she decided to start with Garrus' armour which needed two separate plates replaced. She chose Bach's Cello Suite no. 1 to listen to while she worked. It was an unabashedly hopeful piece that forced you to think of uncharted starscapes, fern fronds uncurling, ocean waves rising and falling, the unveiling of new ships, a faithful weapon in your arms and a friend by your side. The music swelled around her and she lost herself in the work. It was a simple task, no more complicated than the Lego Technic sets she'd built as a child. The cellist paused before changing their flow into something darker, more hesitant. Ashley linked the connecting electronics to the first of the new plates as the music built steadily into the climax. Ashley found herself consumed by the cellist's powerful strokes, then the ending, the blazing return of the starting theme but now at the very top of the cello's register. It was a triumphant conclusion. She picked up the second plate and fitted it carefully into the gap on the existing armour and wired it up. Then she connected the armour's interface and began testing it as the second piece of music began. She heaved up Wrex's suit onto the bench to inspect it. The heavy armour that he wore, coupled with his biotic shields meant that his suits typically required very little maintenance. He had told her on many occasions that he liked his armour to look scuffed up, but Ashley, as always, ignored these protestations and added it to the pile to be repainted.

Picking up Shepard's armour she felt an all too familiar clenching of her chest. It is one thing to read that a chest plate needs to be replaced and another thing to see the plate itself and know that the person wearing it couldn't have survived another hit. The plate was wrecked, cracked through, and browned where the shield's wiring had fried. Running her hands over the spiderwebbed impact cracks and towards the central point of impact, she couldn't help but imagine what it would have felt like to absorb the shell before the HUD begun shrieking its warnings. She turned the plate over and removed the padded underside. Her fingers traced along the hexagonal markings of the burnt-out shield and she shuddered slightly before consigning the plate to the scrap pile. Music was still playing but she was barely conscious of it. She went through the motions of connecting the new plate and testing the systems were fully operational and once satisfied she added it to the pile next to her. She picked up the discarded pieces of armour all the while making a catalogue of suits that might better protect the commander. She'd have to do more research and then get Tuck to pull whatever strings he could. She fed the first set of armour into the laser painter and selected the preferred colour scheme. Shepard had already programmed in the pre-sets, so all Ashley had to do was not get the suits muddled.

While she was waiting, she connected her omni-tool to the secure mission folder to review the footage from the latest mission. Rayingri was another red planet surrounded by a red sky. It didn't have a moon, instead it had a planetoid trapped in a decaying orbit. She had heard a rumour that some asari travel agents were already taking bookings for tours to see the dreadful moment when the two planets were due to meet and tear each other apart, but at this moment, she was more interested in the fact that the planet regularly experienced cyclonic winds and earthquakes. Ashley reviewed the Mako's exterior footage, the air was calm, not much more than a breeze. She fast-forwarded through the footage until the point of contact. She watched the team crest a hill lined with beacon lights and stop as they reached a base bristling with towering dragon's teeth and surrounded by abandoned crates, presumably those had been left by the previous occupants. Garrus' voice on the comms was feeding the squad readings and estimating the number of hostiles inside the low-lying circular building. None of the numbers sounded good. She fast forwarded again until the moment Shepard stood next to the entry hatch. Her commands were brief, they'd all done this countless times and the team knew the drill. Inside, the tunnel-like passage was clean and industrial, with prominent joins where the sections were fitted together during construction, but with nothing to provide any kind of cover. She continued to watch as the squad readied their weapons and checked their suits, and then she switched to cycle the footage through the team's helmet cams.

The entranceway to the main section of the base looked like so many others, the brown and grey colour scheme that was so popular with prefabs 20 years ago, plexi-glass windows with a view of nothing but the cold earth that the building was dug into, hard wearing noise-damping wall panels. All so familiar, but Ashley felt her palms sweating as she listened to the team discuss their plan of attack. There are husks in the next room, she heard Shepard say. I'm going to try and lure them to this entrance and if we're lucky it will act as a firing corridor. The simple idea worked flawlessly, and the team was able to eliminate the husks from that room with relative ease. The team picked their way carefully over the now still corpses, piled at the end of the corridor. The room beyond was a huge maze of stacked crates and machines, even without the husks it felt haunted. After a careful walkthrough, the team found another corridor ending in a T junction. Shepard signalled that she was going to attempt the same trick, and it worked as flawlessly as it had the first time. The office rooms that branched off proved empty. Ashley frowned knowing from the stack of busted armour beside her that there was worse to come. She watched the team poke at different wall panels, looking for hidden rooms and passageways, weaving between strange round black and brown platforms and white, elongated consoles that from the side were shaped like the pope's hat. In amongst all this technology, large, grey and cream coloured shipping containers were piled everywhere, forming walls that were almost maze-like, and just occasionally, the jumble would be broken up by the incongruous green livery of a pot plant.

Finally, she heard Tali's voice cry out in alarm, Geth! The big room!

The team took up firing positions opposite the entrance. Wrex aimed his shotgun at the opposite wall and with a volley of pellets, was able to trick geth destroyers into walking into the line of fire, but after that, the rest of the geth learned their lesson and waited. Shepard's team was trapped. They had no choice but to try to fight their way through, but they were badly outnumbered. The only thing going for them was that there was so much cover, and that worked both ways. Ashley watched in awe at the speed in which her friends were able to get a handle on the situation. Despite everything, they worked as a team while playing to their individual strengths. The battle, which by Ashley's estimation could have taken hours, took only minutes. What had been a messy, disorganised lab was now a scene of abject destruction. Bullet holes riddled every unarmoured surface, most of the consoles were fried and smoking, some of the crates had been knocked over by charging geth and almost none of the pot plants had escaped unharmed.

She watched in trepidation as the squad clapped each other on the back and compared stats, their voices high and cheerful as the endorphins kicked in, when Joker's voice screeched over the comms. A geth dropship was headed their way. Get out of there, now! They sprinted through the tunnels, the cams bouncing up and down at speed as the group made their way back through the maze. The cam Ashley was watching took a second to adapt to the change in light as the external door opened, and by the time the view cleared the team had found cover. Shepard had the worst position of the squad, and it was obvious that she had willingly put herself in harm's way to allow her team to get into the safest spots. Idiot. The cam swung around wildly scanning the sky for the ship and suddenly found it, focusing on a strange insect-like vessel that hung in the air and began depositing geth onto the planet's surface. Better that than just drop a big bomb, I suppose, Ashley thought as the geth just kept on coming. Garrus took aim at the ship with his sniper rifle, but it had no discernible effect, so he gave it up as a lost cause, instead focusing his attention on a rocket trooper. At first, Ashley wasn't sure what Tali was doing until a hacked shock trooper started firing on its buddies. Wrex was in his element. He'd managed to take out two troopers. But the commander's shields were taking hits from two sides, as the geth had split their forces and managed to isolate her in some patchy cover. She had just finished shouting her instructions for covering fire when a geth sniper, unnoticed by the team, moved into the perfect position, and as Shepard was making a run for safety, it fired and made a direct hit on her chest. She was thrown back but somehow managed to roll into comparative safety. She was badly winded, her HUD was screeching its warning, and the crew's HUDs were alerting them to the commander's downed shields. They all moved into a protective block and followed the orders that they'd been given before she went down. Galvanised and co-ordinated, they quickly destroyed the remaining geth.

The dropship retreated over the horizon. Joker's voice came over the speaker, much calmer now, to warn the ground crew that the Normandy was firing on the alien craft. There soon followed a huge explosion, and the helmet cams vibrated slightly with the earth-shaking ground impact. Ashley held her breath as she fiddled with her omni-tool and muted all audio except for that coming from Shepard's helmet. The commander's breathing was shallow and ragged, painful to listen to. She keyed in a few different things and brought up the readings from Shepard's armour. Health scans showed massive bruising from the impact, but no broken ribs.

Ashley found her hands were shaking as she ended the program, so she wrapped her arms around herself and tucked them under her armpits. Hunched up protectively she slowed her breathing and turned to find the first set of armour had been ready to remove from the machine quite some time ago. She unclipped it, and hoisted it out and on to the bench, before lifting in the second suit and beginning the process again. Tchaikovsky's Symphony No.6 filled the room, but it was only really when the eerie low notes of the bassoon became audible that Ashley really recognised it for what it was. All of Tchaikovsky's works have an element of sadness in them, but this piece was dedicated to his nephew with whom he was in a secret relationship, at least, that's the story her mother had told her. It spoke of loneliness, resignation, regret, and heartbreak. It spoke of death too, of curling up in the snows of a Russian winter, because that is all that there is left to do, before breathing your last breath. He died nine days after its premiere. Ashley stared off into the middle distance, seeing nothing, until the beeping of the machine roused her. She replaced one suit of armour with the next mechanically, barely registering her own movements. The next piece of music started, she could neither name it, nor recognise the opening bars and she turned it off before it could upset the unhappy quietude in which she was swaddled.

She turned to watch the machine that was gently hissing behind her. The armour was suspended behind a Perspex shield. Little spray guns attached to mechanical arms, crisscrossed their way around the armour plating according to the sensor's readouts which determined which part of the armour to paint, and which should not be painted. Light colours first, then dark. Shepard's armour was the most complicated, because of the N7 stripes and Spectre logo she wore, but the pre-sets made it easy enough. All Ashley needed to do was feed in the armour, hit the program for that squad member's preferred colour scheme, and once all the armour was shiny and new looking, she just had to hit the button to begin the cleaning cycle. The machine beeped expectantly. Ashley took out the armour and picked up Shepard's. She held the unfinished chest plate and gently rubbed at the finely dimpled ceramics with her thumbs. She made her decision. She readied the armour and instead of selecting Shepard's pre-sets, she chose the same pre-sets as anyone else's. She was not going to be the one who painted an N7 target on Shepard's armour. Consequences be damned.

Ashley was fiddling with the old silver coin. Flipping it into the air, time and time again. It kept coming up heads.

"You should visit her, you know. She's still in the med bay. Being a real dick about it, too." Joker busied himself with the controls.

Ashley let out a puff of air through her lips, and hunkered lower in the comfortable flight chair, the coin now hidden in her clenched fist.

It was the only answer she knew how to give.