Mass Effect 1

Burnt for Beacons

Chapter 12 – Nepmos

Mayday mayday mayday. This is Lieutenant Marie Durand, 3-14th Infantry Alliance 10th Frontier Division. The listening post has been overrun by unidentified hostile life forms. Request immediate extraction.

Ashley could hear the music playing long before she reached the door of Shepard's room. It was something loud, rhythmic, with, at least in Ashley's opinion, an overreliance on heavy percussion. As Ashley drew closer, she could almost make out individual words despite the heavy door panelling.

"Where did you have it last? Oh, oh no!"

Ashley looked around, hoping for someone to share the moment with, but for once there was no one around and Ashley couldn't help but wonder if the throbbing music had encouraged them to look for tasks in other areas of the ship. She placed her hand against the glowing green display, the door swished open, and she was immediately assaulted by a wall of sound.

"Where did you have it la-a-ast, oh?"

She located Shepard at her desk, surrounded by the ever-present piles of datapads. She was staring at one intently, while air drumming.

The music continued to pulse through the room as the song moved into the bridge.

"Where did you have it la-ast? Oh no!

Hesitatingly: I had them all when I went to the bank, yesterday

And then what did you do?

Where did you go? Oh, oh no!"

During the elcor vocalist's brief solo, Shepard had moved to pick up a pair of pens and joined the drummer by beating one against her coffee cup and one on the rim of the table. Ashley noted with interest that Shepard's foot was also tapping in time. She was clearly enjoying herself, Ashley by contrast, was not. She could barely think for the noise.

She cleared her throat theatrically. "You wanted to see me, Comm—" She instantly raised her hands in defence as Shepard stood quickly and whirled around to face her. With impossible speed, Shepard's hand reached for her sidearm. The sidearm that, luckily, wasn't there.

Shepard's look of bemusement brought a small grin to Ashley's own face.

"And that, Skipper, is exactly why we stow our weapons when on board." It was like trying to be heard in a nightclub. There was no returning smile on the face of her commanding officer, which was now carefully devoid of expression. Glacial.

"I don't know. I don't know, oh oh oh oh oh oh no oh."

Shepard tapped a button on her omni-tool and the room was suddenly, blessedly silent. Until Shepard sucked an audible breath through her teeth.

"Damn, I think I pulled something." Shepard gently prodded her ribcage; her frown was partially obscured by the curls that fell across her forehead.

"What was that?"

"What was what?"

"That—" Ashley gestured vaguely around the room, "music?"

"Hopeful Pleading," Shepard replied, still distracted by her injury.

"Ummm—"

Shepard's focus returned to Ashley's face. "Hopeful Pleading." She said it more firmly this time. "By The Plancks." Shepard turned the last part into a higher note as if asking a question, but it was one for which Ashley didn't have an answer. Shepard continued to stare at her from beneath a furrowed brow. "One of the biggest bands in Alliance Space right now." It was still very much a question; a test.

Shepard held Ashley's gaze for slightly longer than was comfortable and then shrugged.

"It was something Chakwas suggested. Listen, I called you in here because I'm sending you out again. We've received a distress call." Shepard handed Ashley a datapad and pointed to it while she continued. "High temps, dense atmos, magma flows, earthquakes, and some kind of hostile life. I need you to liaise with Kaidan and prepare the armour and weaponry. It means," Shepard squinted at her with what Ashley was forced to assume was a patronising expression, "you'll need to talk him through any concerns you have."

Ashley felt her anger starting to bubble up in retaliation and she fought not to roll her eyes.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am."

Replying seriously and obediently felt like a strange form of revenge. Shepard's jaw muscles flickered.

"We'll be there in a couple of hours. Be ready."

Ashley clicked her heels and left the room before more damage could be done.

"You ever heard of The Plancks?"

Kaidan looked up from his workstation next to the galaxy map. They had been closely examining a map of the terrain and the colours from the lights next to him made his hair shine with orange highlights. She could only assume she was similarly glowing in the darkened room.

"The band? Sure." Ashley frowned down at her datapad and when it didn't seem like she was going to respond Kaidan continued. "Their song about the elcor that lost his sock is really good."

"Those are rachni! Firing!" Garrus called from his seat in the Mako. His cannon made short work of some of the bug-like creatures as they crawled down the side of a bulging nest and began scuttling at speed towards the vehicle. Wrex was manning the machine gun, laughing and muttering as he fired, methodically taking down one after another. Ashley felt strangely powerless sitting at the front with Kaidan. She found more nests through her scope and began marking them so that the crew would see them on their display, then she marked some of the rachni so that the shipboard VI would be able to recognise their specific heat signature in future. With that done, she returned to monitoring the ground scans. They needed the Mako fully manoeuvrable and could not afford to have it break through the planet's thin crust and hit the magma that, in places, marbled the planet's brown earth.

The rachni continued to pour out onto the surface. How they had survived underground on a planet covered in rivers of lava, Ashley could only guess, but their numbers suggested that they were at home in the extreme temperatures. She watched in satisfaction as wave after wave was torn apart by the Mako's guns and could only hope that the shredder rounds she had chosen for their hand weapons would be up to the task as well.

Garrus fired at a rachni corpse and Wrex silenced the machine gun. The crew waited and watched their scanners, and Ashley nearly cried out when a twisted limb jerked in front of her view finder. Garrus had seen as her hand had jerked towards her sidearm and his calm voice broke the quiet.

"They curl up like that because the dead bodies stop producing adenosine triphosphate, the chemical they need to make their muscles relax, and the haemolymph, or the goo inside them, is no longer pressurised. It's rigor mortis for bugs."

"Nerd," Wrex rumbled.

Ashley smiled at Garrus in gratitude. His calm science-speak had allowed her time to recover.

They left the nest site and continued their reconnaissance. Kaidan relayed their findings to the Normandy and Ashley felt her chest constrict when she heard Shepard's voice reply, crackly and distorted though it was.

Driving over a ridge they discovered a small mining settlement that appeared to have been abandoned. The particle bore was not operating, and the shacks were devoid of life.

"They could have hit a rachni tunnel with the bore. That would explain a few things," Garrus mused.

"Those holes don't look like mining tunnels. They look like the same kind of nests we just kicked over," Wrex agreed.

"We won't know for sure until we find the listening post." Kaidan checked his map again. "According to this intel it might be just over those hills. If it is, the main base will be in the flat of the valley."

The lighting was not ideal. Erebus, the star that Nepmos was orbiting was just below the horizon. The sunset was hellish rather than beautiful and Ashley found it rather fitting that it should be named for the personification of darkness and shadow. Cracks in the ground glowed with red hot magma, while sharply pointed peaks loomed darkly all around them. With little to see in the gloomy darkness, Ashley turned away from the view finder and instead focused on the ground scans to better help Kaidan navigate the terrain. It wasn't long before she was able to make out life signs. A small group of human survivors were manning the tiny listening post. Ashley was well familiar with the tedium that would be expected from a job like this one. It would be bad enough to be stuck on Nepmos for months at a time with little to do, the soldiers would have been ill equipped to deal with rachni. Suddenly, the onboard VI began to shriek it's warning as it recognised an incoming hoard. Kaidan accelerated quickly down the slope and into the middle of the fray as dozens of the massive bugs began crawling out of the ground.

Ashley watched as a tired band of soldiers blearily raised their guns and began firing at the nightmare creatures in front of them. One soldier was too far in front of the others and too slow when raising his weapon. There was nothing Ashley could do but watch in horror as an arachnid came on at speed and launched acid into his terrified face. He was dead before he hit the ground. And that's when Ashley saw them. There were human bodies everywhere. Some had been laid out in tidy rows, others were still sprawled across the field of battle or tangled in amongst the limbs of their attackers. Acid had eaten away at their standard issue armour so that many bodies were left without heads, or gaping holes where their chests had been. Bile rose in her throat, and she was forced to breathe slowly and carefully, looking elsewhere to recover. When she did, the fight was over.

The crewmates took a few moments to gather their weapons and secure their helmets before finally stepping out onto Nepmosian soil. They were greeted by three soldiers. One of whom was quick to introduce herself.

"Lieutenant Durand: Third Brigade, 14th Infantry Regiment, and I am damned glad to see you."

"Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko of the SSV Normandy SR1. We heard you needed some back up," he finished.

"Actually, we need to get the hell out of here, but I guess your ship couldn't carry us all. They dropped us here a few months back. We get supplies every couple of weeks. We didn't see anything local that was more dangerous than lichen. Yesterday, these animals started coming out of the ground. No idea where they're from. This is what's left out of 90 men. I'm the ranking officer."

"They're not really animals. They're a sentient species. You study history? They're called the rachni."

"Never heard of 'em. Can't say I care. What we just fought was a probe. Our seismic sensors are picking up a crapload more on their way up from underground. We've got five minutes, tops. We might be able to hold them off if we were at peak. But you can see the fighting's busted this place up." She waved towards some non-functioning gun turrets and a particularly dense pile of corpses, bodies, Ashley presumed, that had once been her friends. She knew what this quality of calmness meant; she'd seen it before. Lieutenant Durand was operating without sleep and was clearly suffering from shock.

"Why are you out here in the first place?" Kaidan had realised the same thing, and was moving on to safer conversational territory, as they started to move away from the Mako and closer towards the makeshift battlements.

"There's been a lot of pirate activity in this cluster. We set up a chain of listening posts in the local systems in case they have a staging base."

"We do have a ship in orbit. We could bombard them."

"Wouldn't do much good. They're moving around deep underground. The only time they come near the surface, and they are right on our position. You bombard them, you take us out, too."

Kaidan nodded and stood quietly before responding. "Do what you can to secure your position. We'll see if we can get some of your defences operational."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

Durand turned to her remaining soldiers and started issuing orders. Kaidan turned to Garrus, "Let's see if we can get the defensive turrets working. Ashley, Wrex," he turned to them and pointed at the makeshift walls. "Find yourselves some defensive positions." He turned away, tapping on his omni-tool as he went. "Commander Shepard? —"

Ashley heard nothing of the Commander's response as he had patched through on a secure channel. She felt a strange emptiness. Wrex had already found himself a spot towards the middle and was readying his weapons, and Ashley found herself eyeing the burrow holes wearily. She could, theoretically reach all of them with her sniper rifle. It would make some sense to station herself in the middle and pick them off one at a time, but Garrus was also an excellent sniper. Better to have each of them on the flanks to avoid the rachni overrunning them with a pincer move. When Wrex looked around, she gave him a mock salute, and wandered over to the far right of the field to ready herself.

Kaidan came over the comms, "The generator's been ripped apart. We've got the automated turrets back online using the Mako's engine, but we won't be able to use the Mako's armaments without more time. Thoughts?"

"Sir," Ashley took her time to get her ideas organised. "It makes sense. Our armour is sound, and it gives us two heavy cannons instead of one, not to mention the firepower our squad brings to the table. "But," she took a breath, "You might consider putting Garrus on the opposite flank to me. And maybe get yourself behind Wrex if you need to team up with your biotics. Your armour is the lightest, and we'll be driving the rachni to the middle."

She could hear the smile in his voice when he replied, "Good thinking, Chief."

There was no time to enjoy the moment of euphoric relief, as a shout of warning announced the arrival of the rachni vanguard. The turret boomed behind them, and the first of them fell, but they were soon followed up by many, many more. Ashley lost herself in the rhythm of the battle. None of the terrifying creatures managed to get close and after a while they stopped being terrifying and became nothing more than targets. During a moment of lucidity, she remembered that Garrus liked to compare kill counts, but she'd never been able to keep score in her head like that. In these moments, it was like she went somewhere else entirely, while her arms and eyes did what needed to be done.

There was a lull between waves.

Ashley watched as Durand and Alenko leaned over a scanner together. The two of them engaged in brief, animated discussion before they turned back to their posts.

Kaidan's voice came through her helmet comms, "40 seconds before the next wave. Be ready."

This third wave lasted much longer than the previous two. When it was over, the seven soldiers gathered. Durand's men sat down immediately. One began fiddling with a scanner, the other simply closed his eyes.

"Holy hell, Sir. Talk about a near-run thing. You alright?" Durand was staring at Kaidan. She'd allowed true feeling to enter her voice despite the exhaustion she must be feeling.

"Never mind me. Are you alright?"

"Still on my feet." She looked down at the two men beside her, and a note of compassion entered her voice. "But we've been fighting for almost 26 hours straight. None of us will be standing for long." She hesitated. "There's one other thing I should mention. One of our other listening posts went offline three days ago. I don't know if it's coincidence, a pirate raid or what. But if you want to check in on them…"

"We'll check on them. We don't know why there are rachni loose out here. But if I know my commanding officer, we'll find out."

"Ma'am?" The soldier on the ground looked up at Durand, "We're getting a signal from one of the ground-scan UAVs. A big, hollow space about five hundred meters under the surface."

"Right, that must be it. That must be where they are coming from. My people aren't in any condition for a clearing operation, though." She looked at Kaidan as if assessing his mettle.

"Just point us in the right direction."

"You don't have to do that, Sir. We've bled them. We can probably hold on until a bigger ship arrives to get us off world." She seemed to reconsider as soon as she'd said the words. Suddenly, for the first time, she looked vulnerable. "If you want to take a throw at it, we'll give you the co-ordinates. But it's your call." Ashley watched Durand's shoulders slump as she surveyed the scene of devastation in front of them. "You saved our asses, Sir. Thanks."

The tunnel was dark and wet. The sound of their footsteps on the rough ground sent wild echoes skittering forwards and back making Ashley, who was taking point with Wrex more nervous than she needed to be. The plan was too simple to work. They'd find the rachni and take out as many as they could. They'd use the tunnels as firing corridors where possible. Wrex and Ashley would take the front, with their heavy armour, and big guns. Kaidan would take the middle and would combine his lift and throw with Wrex's biotic abilities when the creatures needed to be pushed back, and Garrus with his sniper rifle would try to stay out of the way.

The tunnel opened into a large, flooded cavern. The water was about 20 centimetres deep, enough to slow them down. The roughhewn walls were dripping too, and there was the mouldy, mildewy smell of something organic rotting. It had clearly been a mining base at some point as the space was filled with haphazardly stacked crates, lights, explosives, and other mining detritus. Across the cavern, and beyond the gloom of the centre, Ashley could make out two more circular hatch doors, not unlike the one they'd just passed through. If Kaidan could find a way to bypass them, they would need to clear those tunnels, as well. Garrus peeled off to the side. He'd found himself a sniper nest that had a good view of the entire space. Kaidan stood nearby, his hands flexed and ready, his pistol holstered at his side, Ashley took the lead, wading carefully through the murky water and waving her light around crazily, desperate not to be taken by surprise. She inched towards a burrow, but even the gentle splashing must have been enough to disturb the creatures because within moments, a pair of clawed feet launched up and out towards them. She began firing her assault rifle and it seemed to take an age before that first rachni fell. Kaidan had the second trapped in a biotic lift and Garrus took it down with a shell between its eyes.

They fell into a grim pattern as they cleared cavern after cavern. Someone knocked over one of the lanterns and Ashley found herself stumbling in the sudden gloom. It took far too long to see a huge pair of rachni scuttling towards her. One fired acid straight towards her and she was forced to roll out of the way, slamming her shoulder into rough rock. Wrex was busy with the second one and she had time to marvel at his speed as he wove between crates and dived into cover, firing all the while. She didn't have time to contemplate his strategy further. The rachni was scuttling towards her and she was still hopelessly tangled against the rock. It was truly huge, and its carapace was lit up with a bioluminescent glow, that made it noticeably different from all the rachni she'd encountered before. Her assault rifle may as well have been a pee shooter for all the difference it seemed to be making. At the last possible moment, the creature was surrounded in the familiar blue glow of biotics and her weapons were able to penetrate its shell at long last, but the creature's momentum was not so easily halted, and its huge body crashed on top of her.

Ash came to when she could no longer ignore the shrieking of her HUD. That, and a crackling, sizzling noise that she recognised as the sound of acid eating through something important. The rachni's wounds were leaking acid unchecked onto her armour and her shields were completely gone. She called for help and within moments Wrex was there, rolling the shell away from her. They set to work, removing armour panels, and applying medi-gel to her burns, so that when Kaidan and Garrus found their way over to them, Ashley felt she had it under control.

"How're you doing, Chief?" Kaidan was waving his omni-tool over her, but he stopped long enough to watch her face carefully as she responded.

"Nothing Chakwas won't be able to fix, Sir."

She batted his hand away when it looked like he was going to make a second pass with the omni-tool and motioned for Garrus to join her. She'd spotted a likely looking crate. Inside was the replacement armour she was hoping for; the quality wasn't as good as what she was wearing, and it was fluro-orange which she knew would clash horribly with the red of her Colossus suit, but in terms of a patch job, it would do the trick.

Finally ready, they began their long journey back to the surface.

A/N: Massive thank you to Pete Complete's Youtube channel. The detail that guy includes is outstanding and I regularly harvest his work for info. The other place I get detail from is the Mass Effect Wiki. Those writers are gems