5 - Return Fire
As fortune would have it, what Gorman had used for cover on top of the prefab had been a crate large enough to act as an intermediate step between the burned grass of the ground and the severed docking port of the batarian ship. Having tumbled it down and pushed it up to the slaver, White was able to pass down quite a selection. Actual fuel cells, a box full to the brim with outdated translators, cigarettes by the dozens, smutty magazines…and a variety of weapons.
"What exactly am I looking at?" laughed Gorman. Now in his arms was an identical rifle to Kalu's, but now that he was granted inspection of his own model it bore very little resemblance to any rifle he knew from two centuries ago. Sure, he thought, it has a stock and a trigger, not to mention a handy scope attached to its curved top, but…why does it have two barrels? Most importantly, where does the ammunition go?
"HK Lancer," White recounted. He had grabbed an egregiously bigger weapon from the 'fuel' canister's stockpile, a blocky mockery of a sniper rifle. "Endearing and beloved, but hardly the envy of the galaxy when you actually need to shoot it. That's HK for you."
"Heckler & Koch?"
"Hahne-Kedar."
"Where do the magazines go?"
"Hey, they're for me, get your own! …Oh, you mean on the gun."
"Right, there we go, got it working," remarked Kalu, who all this time had been fiddling with a tool he seemed very happy to learn was stowed away among the cargo. Whatever it was, it slotted neatly into his armored wrist. As he held it up so Gorman and White could see, without delay a glowing orange display engulfed his left forearm. The holographic screens and buttons pulsed with energy. Kalu waved his arm up and down, tapping away at the space just above it to navigate its menus.
"Ah, a working omni-tool," revealed White. "Just one more expense McFinley couldn't spare, eh?"
"There were four on the whole station," Kalu chuckled. "Then one day it became three. Guess that's a mystery solved."
"What does it…do?" Gorman questioned.
"What doesn't it do?"
"No excuse for that one, Commander. It's in the name," White gave Gorman's shoulder a nudging elbow.
Kalu motioned the luminous tool in front of the Commander, before turning it off and gesturing back towards the forested battlefield.
"I'd give you an example of it in action, but time's ticking. You'll see when we need it."
The trio started their hike up the hill, taking one last look back at the crashed batarian ship. They passed by the motionless bodies of the geth platoon, sprawled out across the lower hillside.
"So, who are these…geths? Are they robots?" Gorman questioned. It was time for some answers. He crossed his fingers that the explanation wouldn't involve five more explanations later down the line.
"Astutely noted, Commander," White joked. "The flashlight heads gave it away?" They continued up the rise. White was already starting to sweat from heaving the sniper along. Kalu was still fidgeting with his wrist. Gorman was starting to wish that he had turned his translator off.
"It's just 'the geth', singular and plural," began Kalu. "As for who they are? It's a classic slave-master story, really. Quarians created the geth for cheap labor. Geth broke free and now they hate everything organic. Go figure."
"Quarians? Another alien species?" Gorman continued. First batarians, then geth, now 'quarians', the vast distance of human settlement in space he had ventured through was suddenly starting to feel very small, and the galaxy very, very big. To the top of the hill they arrived, scoping out the scene. The smell of burning intensified. On a whim they flanked left towards what looked like an avenue towards the epicenter.
"It's not all that cut and dry, Kalu," White explained. "The geth massacred the quarians. The geth 'breaking free' involved taking over their entire world and slaughtering everyone that didn't escape, civilians included. There are more people in the Île-de-France than there are quarians left in the galaxy, Commander."
"So the geth are self-aware? Like an AI?"
"The quarians only had themselves to blame," intervened Kalu, now ignoring Gorman altogether. He and White were starting get a bit heated in their overarching argument. "Create life in all but name, and condemn it to the cobalt mines for eternity. I'm not saying the geth were right, but when the alternative is to let the quarians wipe out your entire species, you fight back."
Now both of them had stopped in their tracks and were right in each other's faces. Their disagreement was a steep divide but neither was foolish enough to start pointing the weapons they were holding at one another. Gorman threw up his hands in helplessness.
"I want you to look a quarian in the eye, and tell them they deserved it," White scowled.
"Why can't you accept that the quarians weren't the only victims! There's a whole other species, they're another form of life, and they're-"
"Behind you!" cried Gorman.
White and Kalu turned to see a column of geth up the road. All three of them leapt behind whatever they could find nearby for shelter – crates, overturned streetlights and another of the ubiquitous prefab buildings. They poked their heads over each obstacle to see what exactly they were up to. Historical context aside, they were here – and definitely up to no good.
Two geth foot-soldiers similar to the ones encountered earlier stood stoically at the end of the path. The way up to them was covered in a smoky haze from some blazing prefabs, but above the two was what looked like a miniature version of a geth soldier hovering in midair. It was disc-shaped, with a blue light for an 'eye' and a weapon strapped underneath. A drone, most likely.
What they were all hanging around was much more interesting. Through the smog was a giant spike on a tripod. Impaled on the spike, a human. The Commander felt incredibly uneasy. The three watched on as the spike retracted, the silhouetted human reached its feet, and then, without warning, twisted its head towards the men and started to move. It stumbled at first, then picked up pace, soon reaching a running speed.
The figure burst through the smoke. To call it human was almost a stretch.
Its skin was a pallid grey and smothered with lit-up pipes and tubes – giving it an electronic glow. It's eyes were replaced with blue lights, it's muscles with rubber. It triggered the Commander's fight-or-flight response. He opened fire with his brand-new rifle, and his comrades were compelled to join in. In a hailstorm the shell of a human was torn to shreds, oozing a bright green fluid from its mouth and bullet-holes.
There was no time to take a breather. The geth forces by the spike sprang into action, firing their own rapid rounds down the road. The drone peppered them with a barrage thicker than the smoke, but Gorman was able to dive behind a prefab before he would meet a similar fate to the other human face-down in the muck.
"What the hell are you waiting for?" Gorman shouted at his allies, who were busy cowering behind a crate and pole. "Stone, get out of there! Kabiru, you've got a shield, don't you? Return fire!"
White disregarded his order, instead giving a battle-cry and hauling his lengthy rifle into a hip-firing position. With a lull in the enemy fire he emerged, firing the sniper with a deafening boom. The sheer recoil launched him briefly in the air before he fell on his back, but sure enough, a crashing sound from the road was confirmed as Gorman peeked from the prefab. A clean hit on the drone had sent it spiraling down. Kalu opened fire as best he could. His shield warped and bent as bullets whizzed by.
This was the Commander's opportunity to round the prefab from the other side. He sprinted to the next gap in the buildings to get a clear shot at the geth. He thought briefly about his next action. He wasn't entirely clear on the whole story from White and Kalu, but no matter which alien was in the right, these geth were attacking a human colony and deserved no quarter. The element of surprise allowed him to almost place his rifle to the geth's metal headpiece, and with a pull of the trigger blow it clean off.
Now surrounded, the last geth was taken out from all both angles with minimal fuss. It slumped up against the terrifying human corpse.
Gorman and Kalu quickly turned their attention to White. The sniper shot's shockwave might have hurt his ears, but the fall onto the dirt hurt his head enough for Kalu to do the logical thing – break out his omni-tool.
"Not the live demonstration we wanted, but it'll do," Kalu sighed to Gorman, before addressing his patient. "Hold still, my friend." He activated the orange interface before prodding away at its controls, all the while holding his forearm over the back of White's bruised head.
"That tool on your arm, it's a medical device?" questioned Gorman, catching his breath from the fight.
"Not quite. Can use a little something called medi-gel, though. Lucky for our Lieutenant here, there was enough in our secret supply stash."
As if by magic, a foam emerged from the device and onto White's scalp. It dissolved instantly, and as Gorman rubbed his eyes in disbelief he could see the damage slowly heal. The bruising became less harsh but still visible, the blood drying up.
"That's amazing…" Gorman was almost speechless. He gestured towards the deathly pale body on the road ahead. "Don't suppose it can work on our…other friend there?"
Kalu looked pleased with his work before getting off his knees and moving towards the corpse, leaving White to take it easy for a while and get his bearings back. Kalu poked the body with his rifle, kicked it with his toe, and finally whipped out the tool and gave it a scan.
"Now this, this is something else," he whispered, not without some fear. "Contrary to what you're thinking, Commander, there are some things out in this galaxy that we still don't understand."
"Did they turn this poor guy into a geth?"
"Looked that way, didn't it? With that spike over there," Kalu pointed towards the sharp pillar, retracted into the tripod at the end of the path. "I've never heard of anything like this."
"I've never heard of geth beyond the Veil in the first place," joined in White, rubbing the back of his head and still lugging along the sniper despite its apparent drawback. This time he remembered to acknowledge Gorman's lack of knowledge. "That's a long way from any human colony. Even longer from Eden Prime of all places. This planet was as safe as it gets…now look at it."
The trio took another moment to take in the surroundings. The smells of fire and now death were ever-present, but the sounds of gunfire and screams had subsided. There was still a burning question, however.
"We saw those ships pull out, the robots we've been fighting are just stragglers," said Gorman. "Where are all the survivors, then?"
"We're spitting distance from the spaceport proper. If they're not there, they're…well…" trailed White, pointing a finger to the end of the lane and up one last hill.
"We'll find them," asserted Kalu.
"Then we're wasting time. Let's go," spoke Gorman. With that they continued their jog, taking extra care not to trip over the geth on their way.
The Commander was the first to reach the summit of the hill. Obviously not any self-respecting colonist's route of choice to the spaceport, Kalu and White had to hoist him up over a ridge and onto the metal walkway above. Here he was greeted with an expansive platform held together by large suspension cables and carrying containers of all shapes and sizes. There was a lot to take in here, from more geth soldiers littered around the place to the burn marks on several crates that overall indicated a fierce battle not long ago. On a second look, some bodies weren't geth but more of those twisted human creatures. The spike-laden tripods that create them were here in numbers.
The high from defeating a handful of robots and their creations was quickly wearing off – there must have been five times as many fallen foes on this battlefield alone, stretching off up a ramp marked with 'CARGO TRAIN'. Gorman shuddered – and then he saw it.
On a balcony overlooking the ridge he had ascended, there stood the base of a once-tall obelisk. Intricate green patterns adorned the white pillar, or rather its bottom half, the top having been violently removed. The design was elegant, out of place among the blocky surroundings. Shattered pieces lay strewn in a circle around it. Yet even still, there was something that vigorously drew the Commander towards it, so much so that he couldn't hear his buddies below ask for a hand up. Gorman had no words to describe his thoughts, but he knew with absolutely no hesitation that this was the same type of structure he had seen all that time ago on Jacob's ship – the structure that gave him the horrifying vision haunting his dreams.