"Team Alpha Leader, I have sight of the target," said the woman into her collar, and her response was the click of acknowledgement over her comm unit. Looking towards the sight before her, the woman wiggled her fingers, the sensors in her arm taking the commands, and zooming in her view, while also painting targets in her HUD. For the most part, what stood in front of her were basic troops, infantry and the like, but there were also a dozen or more tanks, at least twice the many wanzers, and worst of all, behind them was the massive shape of the cruiser that had brought this lot to the desolate landscape on which they stood.
"Connection established, we've got a read out on them. Looks to be a joint Eclipse/Bloodpack operation, with a few Syndicate goons mixed in," said a voice in the woman's ear, and she nodded at the statement. The two merc companies had been working together for a while now, which made sense, the Eclipse were specialized for tech deployment, and the Pack tended to be more about brute force. The Synners were the big problem though, as it was their wanzers which would prove to be the most problematic to take down.
"Shepard-Corporal, there appears to be movement," said an electronic voice behind her, and she looked where a robotic hand pointed. Zooming her view in, she spotted what he meant right away, as one of the wanzers that hand hands instead of guns was using said hands to dig up something. It didn't take long to figure out what either, as they quickly unearthed several drop pods, things made to be dropped from orbit with their contents remaining intact. Opening one, the green glow of protoculture washed over the sandy night.
"Oka, we've got confirmation on the canisters, I repeat, we have visual on the stolen protoculture," she said, and then got another click of confirmation as the info was passed up the chain, while she and Legion just waited and watched. Their view soon became very heated, as apparently one of the merc groups was arguing about how the profits would be split for this venture, but it didn't last longer than a single shot to the head, whereupon the remaining mercs began to haul the canisters of protoculture out of the pod, and place them onto transports that moved into the cruiser.
"Oka Nieba to Shepard, orders incoming. You are to keep position, I repeat, stay put and watch," said the voice in her ear.
"What? Why?! We're here, right now, and we've got a perfect line of sight on them. Give me and Legion five minutes and we can tear these guys apart," she growled in protest.
"You have your orders Corporal," said the voice, and then a click signaled the end of communication. Still fuming a bit, Shepard took a moment to look out over the enemies in front of her. Some four eyes, stone faces, and wildmen, with a smattering of frogs and blues in the mix. She even thought she saw one midget out there too, though that might just be an actual short person.
"Shepard-Corporal, you are considering defying orders, are you not?" asked the robotic voice behind her, and Shepard turned to face the speaker. Like herself, he wore armor, or rather, he was armor. The geth amalgamation that dubbed itself legion was wearing one of the more modern warframe bodies, large, powerful looking mechanical thing, with a blocky look and hard edges. The single cyclopean eye on a head that was otherwise a solid metal block stared at her, the color in it shifting from red to blue as it spoke to her as Legion turned off certain sensor in it to look her in the eye, as it were.
"Right in one, Legion," she told him, reaching behind her, and pulling out a pair of pistols. The weapons felt nice and heavy as they unfolded to their full size, and she could feel their low hum through her armor as she turned them on, the engines inside spinning up to power.
"This unit must remind you, the Captain has said that one more defiance and you will be demoted," he informed her, and Shepard nodded, looking over the ridge they were hiding behind at the targets. They were still messing with the protoculture, one of the canisters slipping from the grip of the hauler, and nearly spilling the energetic green goo on the desert floor.
"The Captain is underestimating our combat ability again. We can take them, right?" she asked, and then looked back towards Legion, whose eye turned green to show it was processing for a good three seconds as it ran the data.
"There is a sixty-four percent probability of victory over the ground forces," admitted the unit, and Shepard nodded, smiling under her armor.
"See, we just do this one thing real quick, and the Captain will be eating his words," she told him, rising up and looking over the ridge. She and legion were almost a mile away from the target, and despite her size, she was still distant enough, and cold enough, that none of the sensors were picking her up. Motioning for Legion to rise, she considered her options, before stepping back from the ridge.
"Board and then air support," she told him, and Legion nodded, leaning forward again, seemingly going into a laying on his front position. However, as he lowered down, the blocky body of his began to fold and reshape, individual parts spinning into place, as other bits popped out. Most noticeably his feet hollowed out, and then lengthened, and his back became flat as small wings popped out of the side of his body. The process, taking only a few seconds, resulted in an otherwise humanoid shape made of blocks, transforming into a hoverboard thing, which hummed with the anti-gravity field giving it lift.
Sadly, while the shadow and general coolness had kept them hidden visually, the sound of that metal man changing shape was distinctive, and it echoed over the empty desert night. Every merc at the ship knew something was coming, and they sprang into action like one would expect of three well trained merc armies. Namely they were tripping over each other as they each ran to their own preparations, the wanzers even crushing a few of their allies as they got into position.
Shepard smirked at the hustle and bustle from that simple sound, and leapt forward, her feet landing heavily on the back of Legion's form, which gave a bit under her weight, but then, as the crackle of her boot soles locking on him could be heard, Legion shot forward. The warframe body was visible the instant it took off, mostly because it was hot as soon as the jets fired, though the angle meant they couldn't see the thrusters as it approached. After only a moment of hesitation, the wanzers and tanks began to fire out into the desert, rains of metal, both slugs and liquid streams, came down around them.
The fire was wild, with little cohesion to it. If they'd tried to lead her, or otherwise trap her somewhere, the idiots might have been able to do it, but as it was, none of them had the skill to target her and her partner as the board would shift, spinning around the fire and explosions, creating quite the sight as the night lit up around her. The silhouette of a war goddess flying through the air was probably responsible for at least some of the cries of fear she heard, and that made Shepard's wolfish grin even broader as she kicked off of Legion, doing a flip into the air.
"ALALALALA!" she let loose her war cry as she came down, her boots finding two of the four eyes on the sand, and crushing them to paste beneath her heels. Batarians had a satisfying crunch when you stepped on them, she'd always found, but she didn't allow herself the satisfaction of knowing they were dead before she whipped out her pistols, and began firing. These guns, some of the new models, fired out slugs, totally unlike the streams of blue reflex energy that their predecessors did.
The slugs were as large as your average sophent's head, and streaked with a dozen warning labels. Not that you could see them as they sailed through the desert night, slamming home into the barrier's of two of the tanks. Said barriers would have, had Shepard been firing the old style weapons or her hand blasters, blocked anything she threw at them. The slugs, however, buried themselves in the layered barrier, giving the pilots a single moment of hope that maybe the weapon had failed, before the slugs broke, and blue light exploded outward from them.
Spheres of blue destruction came from where the slugs had been, consuming the tanks, and any ground troops unlucky enough to be nearby. When the blinding flash passed, the only thing remaining of their targets were bowls in the sand which quickly began to fill with more of the stuff. The fear in the eyes of their comrades was a nice after effect though, and Shepard spun as she dodged more fire, and dealt out her own, not a single shot missing as she fired at each tank in turn.
When the last slug had been fired, Shepard made a motion with a finger, and her armor popped open at the hip, two long cylinders coming out of it. Pushing release buttons on her guns, she tossed the clips out, the long pieces of metal aimed precisely to slam hard into one of the hauling transports, causing it to fall over and block the ramp into the cruiser. She then slammed the guns now empty chambers into the cylinders, which locked quickly into place, reloading and calibrating her firing arcs, before she began to shoot out again.
Better, even as she danced in the middle of them, picking off tanks, Legion had taken to the sky, his form changing again as he pulled up, with the wings becoming thicker, and his thrusters opening up more, transforming him from something that could be ridden into a jet that soared high into the sky. Once Legion gotten enough altitude, the geth warframe spun on its axis, and pointed straight down, as arms emerged from beneath it, arms that ended in a set of gatling guns instead of hands which rained fire on the cruiser and the ground troops as the geth shrieked down towards both.
Destruction all around, the screams of her foes on the wind. Beneath her helmet, Shepard's grin had turned feral, and as the last of her slugs ran out, she tossed the weapons aside, deliberately striking some of the ground troops, one of the asari barely using her biotic power to buffer herself against the impact, and a vorcha being crushed instantly by the other. Around those two, the pellets fired by Legion's gatlings found target after target, more than three in four of the ground troops dead in the first pass, and the remaining ones scrambling up the ramps, as around them the flaming wrecks of their tanks smouldered on the desert floor.
Pulling a shape from her waist, Shepard unfolded her blade, the sharp end of it gleaming wickedly in the firelight. The things was newly honed, made to a molecule thin edge that could slice through anything, and with the tanks and ground troops around them dead, only the two dozen wanzers remained to taste her steel. They screamed, in fear, in rage, in pain for fallen comrades, who really knew? All she knew was their screams were the music to which her blade danced.
Above, Legion launched missiles, the projectiles burying themselves into the defenses of the mechs around his partner, before exploding against them, each strike destroying them. None of the pilots seemed to notice, however, as they fired everything they had, cannons, gatlings, and even missiles of their own at the Terran goddess of war. Not a single shot seemed to hit her, however, their fire merely churning up the sand around her as she charged, and blade flashing as she passed by the first pair of them.
For a moment, everyone on the ground held their breath, the moment seeming to freeze in place, before the two mechs fell, one chopped completely in half horizontally, the other vertically, both pilots dead before they'd realized the attack had come. The remaining pilots instantly began to retreat, knowing the battle was lost, despite their still quite large advantage in numbers. They got barely to the ramp before it started to retract, and the savage woman tore them to pieces, stabbing one straight in the back, and tossing it forward so it exploded inside the cruiser's hold as it started to take off.
"This unit's firepower lacks sufficient force to disable the cruiser before it exits the atmosphere," said a voice in Shepard's ear. It was hard to tell if she heard it, however, as she continued to end the lives of those who had been abandoned to her. Still, when the last one, a salarian she literally ground under heel, was slain, she took a look to the sky, and roared defiance at the ship that was slowly trying to flee her. She quickly snapped her sword closed, a small wash of gore sliding off it as it retracted into the bar shape she but on her waist, and then she leapt into the sky, palms pointed downward as the glow of her thrusters could be seen coming from them and her feet.
The cruiser was an eezo tech ship, fast in space, but slower in an atmosphere. Worse, for it anyway, the ship's barriers couldn't be turned on while flying through the air, the bubble would have created far too much drag, and would have overheated the engines as the barrier literally tried to push the entire atmosphere out of their way. So the ship was slow and without its major line of defense as she came after it. The pilot was good enough, however, to know that her leap would have a low ceiling to it, and so yanked the ship upward, trying to climb above where the monster couldn't reach.
"Perfect shot," she said, and then aimed her hands upward. A few twitches of her fingers and she adjusted their output and aim, getting that nice vibration in her palms as power built up inside the armor, before blowing outward in twin streams of blue light. The bars of force struck home within seconds, the armor of the cruiser melting beneath the assault. The shots were true, as well, and both engines on the left side of the cruiser found themselves with extra holes, holes that spouted flames in the wrong directions, and caused the ship to begin to falter in its flight.
She was knocked out of the sky as well, of course, as the force of her blasts pushed her backwards, causing her arc to angle almost straight down. She quickly adapted though, her fingers flying through the motions, and then her palms and soles pointed straight down towards the ground below. Her descent, formally at terminal velocity, was slowed to about half that, but her mass was just too much for her jets to kill her momentum completely, and the ground was coming up much too fast for her to land uninjured.
"May this unit offer you assistance?" asked the geth warframe as it flew close to her, and Shepard reached out a hand to take the one the mech offered. The thing, rather than pulling straight away and tearing her arm off, simply began to angle the descent, jets and boosters firing to kill as much momentum as possible until, just about a hundred feet off the ground, she let go of Legion's hand, and then rolled to a stop, the jet transforming back into its humanoid form and settling beside her as she finally stopped, and looked upwards.
"Hah, thought you could get away from me, didn't you!?" she shouted up at the falling cruiser. Flames were now large and visible as apparently the pilot had tried to gun the engines to continue the ascent, only causing the thrusters to warp and break farther, as the arrow shaped vessel began a controlled fall towards the planet. The pair watched it fall, and Shepard whooped once when an explosion tore through the side of the ship as one of the thrusters broke off.
"The Captain is never gonna believe this," she told Legion beside her, and then watched as the ship, after a minute of freefall finally slammed down onto the planet's surface, before exploding in a huge ball of blue light, which consumed the mountain it had struck, leaving the thing looking like a bite had been taken out of it.
OoOoO
"Shepard, Legion, I don't believe this," said the ebony skinned man in front of them, his green uniform a nice counterbalance to the tone of it. Mind, said skin had tinges of red in it, as he'd been shouting at aides for the last half hour as the two ground troops had been shuffled from the loading bay almost directly into his office. No one was around, luckily, for this particular dressing down, and so Shepard stood strong in front of him, at a ready stance, out of her armor, though with her blade still clipped to her side.
"It was my decision to go on the offensive, sir," she told him, and Legion beside her shook his head, putting a hand on her shoulder.
"Shepard-Corporal, this unit's rank exceeds your own. If there is blame to be had, it should fall on this unit," said the electronic voice, and the Captain before them just sighed, rubbing his temples with his fingers for a moment.
"Did it even occur to the two of you that you were both ordered to stay put?" he said, and the two just stared at him for a moment.
"Sir, it was a bad call. We're the best team in the Fleet. You sent us down there-," she began, and the Captain held up his hand to silence her.
"I sent you down there because if they discovered the two of you, you'd have the best chance of fighting them off. I didn't want you to slaughter the whole ship and her compliment," he explained.
"Anderson-Captain, we accomplished the mission that was dictated to this ship, did we not?" asked Legion, and Anderson stared at the geth.
"No, no you did not. If they two of you had done your job on the planet, which was to confirm they were picking up the protoculture, this ship would have followed the cruiser out of the system using a tracker planted in the stash, and we would have found out who they were selling to," said the Captain, and the two ground troops just went blank faced at that, as the information processed.
"Sir, if we'd known that-," and again, Shepard was cut off by Anderson's hand.
"It's not the job of the ground troops to know every little thing, Shepard. You have orders, you follow them, isn't that what the Federation Fleet is all about?" he asked, and she nodded without hesitation.
"Then why do you have such a problem doing that?!" he demanded, and then threw her file onto the desk in front of him. Out of the folder poured a ton of paper, on which one could see her five year career, from Rannoch's guard, to her current posting. Most of the remarks in her file were about how skilled a warrior she was, with many very much calling her a reborn Zentraedi. Of course, those tended to be followed up with remarks of where she'd gone against orders, getting the job done, but typically leaving no living witnesses in her wake.
"If one of them were still alive, I'd say this was at least salvageable, but at this point, our entire mission is a bust," he told the two before him, and then placed his hand in front of his mouth in a thoughtful gesture as he leaned forward in his seat.
"This unit insists it accepts any discommendation from the actions that took place on the planet," said Legion, stepping forward, and Anderson pulled another file out from his desk, with much the same result, papers spilling all over the desktop, most of them rating the geth very highly, but others talking about how easily he was influenced by the 'Heroes of Rannoch'. Still, his battle effectiveness with the pair had been shown to improve markedly. In all truth, Anderson could think of no other two soldiers he'd ever commanded who could have destroyed the cruiser and everyone aboard.
"We'll see. I'll have to contact Gloval Station for new orders. In the meantime, you're both confined to quarters. My advice, however? Pack your bags, because after this report goes in, I doubt Breetai's gonna want the two of you serving on a front line vessel," he told them, and they saluted, before exiting the room. Sighing again, Anderson went back to his report, typing it out slowly, deliberately. This would likely demote Shepard again, if not Legion as well. Those two rose like shooting stars, only to fall down again in a month or two. Still, despite their disdain for orders, they were likely to be kept together for now.