Chapter 8 Downtown Eden Prime, a Nice Place to Visit
Commissioned by Mace Shepard
Written by Blood Raven
Kaiden was right.
That is a lot of drones.
Shepard's shoulder ached as she fired as fast as her trigger could pull. The haste in her fire was made up for the volume of targets, with single rounds destroying one drone and downing the shields in the nearest.
This made the occasional near-miss shot all the more painful, and the burst of explosions all the more satisfying, as the first one exploded, then their neighbors when hit by a different round causing the occasional chain reaction.
Of course, despite all that, it was akin to spitting into the ocean as it were, as the drones madly fired at the fireteam of ICL Marines and lone Spectre. They moved like a swarm of birds, and as Shepard dove behind some shipping crates to reload, she understood that they weren't fighting to their strengths.
A swarm like this should be coming in at them like a dome, firing at so many angles they would have no possibility of finding safe refuge from the incoming fire. This was not the dispassionate work of artificial intelligence. This was an all too human error borne of operator failure.
Then again, Shepard didn't know how the Geth thought, so maybe they just sucked dick at fighting. Who was she to look a gift horse in the mouth?
She slapped in a fresh magazine and peaked around her crate and let off a burst of fire, shattering a cluster of the machines. She sought her next target and saw the diminished swarm disappear behind the terminal's cargo ramp where the trains would be.
"Status check sound off!" Shepard barked as she hefted her rifle, counted the magazines left on her combat webbing, and checked her body for bullet holes. Thankfully she had avoided most of the fire and come out of it with only lowered kinetic barriers.
Kaiden checked himself then gave a thumbs up, "All good boss! At a quarter of ammo levels though."
Ashley twisted and turned, her massive oversized body looking like a contortionist with how it bent, "Suit shows green commander! Visual confirmation is good too. But I'm very light on ammo."
Nihlus checked himself over, and pulled his hand free showing the blue glistening of blood, "I'm wounded, still have three-quarters of a combat load. Applying medigel now." Nihlus sighed as the combat medical adhesive was slathered on his bleeding side, "All good I think."
While Shepard would have loved to detach Nihlus and Jenkins and get them out of the fight, she also knew that she couldn't spare the extra rifle for the upcoming battles. If that drone swarm was indicative of the resources available to the geth, they needed more ammo.
"I got movement behind those crates ma'am!" Kaiden called out, raising his rifle towards the errantly stacked containers. Everyone else raised their weapons and began to move in formation to flush it out.
"Wait wait we're human!" Someone cried.
The squad held up their advance as slowly a man peeked into view, "Thank the marines!"
Another head popped up, "Hey… Hey! You said you needed ammo!?" Two more joined this one, looking like farmers.
The leader of the group looked like a dock foreman, the others looked to be farmers who would have tended the nearby fields. All were sooty and covered in blood. "Blake pull out that crate, yes the special one!" The foreman shouted, and two of the other men pulled out a crate marked with ICL equipment tags.
Nihlus looked distinctively nervous and stared at them, and the dock foreman met his stare with dead eyes, before switching to Shepard. Ashley broke in first, however, "Where did you get this stuff?"
"From the ICL obviously, now stop questioning your good fortune and get as much as you need."
Shepard did as told and said nothing as she pulled out an ammunition cartouche and pulled the stripper clips free. Grabbing her first empty magazine she hooked up the cases's automatic loader.
Everyone else did the same without comment, Nihlus letting Shepard do his empty clips as he tended to his wound in more detail.
By the time five minutes had passed, they were loaded back up with ammo and supplies. Including a small crate of grenades and a MANPAD that Shepard knew she was going to use liberally.
"Right now that we're armored up," She raised her finger and gave the civilians finger guns, "You're not going to get in real trouble, but I do gotta ask why this shit was just lying in your depot."
The foreman shrugged, "Well we have two companies of League Lagunari just patrolling this area like witches and tanks. I got literally tons of ammo lying about." He folded his arms.
Shepard didn't believe his story, but she had priorities and honestly didn't care.
"Well keep your nose clean and your head down. If you think you can manage it, there are two survivors at the dig site just over that hill we just cleared." Shepard commented off-handedly as she flicked some tinsel sticking to her armored fingers
The man shrugged again and flapped his hand, "Yeah yeah, go on get the bastards who did this." That notched up Shepard's suspicion, the man was acting too nonchalant.
But again, fuck it.
"Right, team they've had some time to prepare the welcome mat, but we've got the initiative. Kaiden, get that drone in the air and get me some numbers on enemy strength, Nihlus, stay back and provide overwatch and grenade support. Williams, I want covering fire from you, and make sure Nihlus' ass isn't hanging out you hear me?"
Ashley sneered at the Turian, "Aye boss, we'll stick together like two screamers."
Shepard nodded and set out with Kaiden. The train terminal was a pretty enclosed space with some ramps leading down to a cargo elevator that was situated to the side and was currently closed down. Kaiden's drone provided telemetry on the Geth positions showing that there was a lot less geth than she expected but enough to provide some stiff resistance if she played her hand badly.
That was the thing in war, it was cold and calculating. Her objective, and she assumed the Geth's objective, the beacon, was pretty far away from here, and their forces were likely now concentrated around it, which meant leaving a screening and harassment force to oppose her in lieu of a more powerful and dangerous force better spent tying down the rest of the garrison.
"We've just received word that Eden Prime has been attacked."
The room fell dead silent. Councilor Tevos mid-speech to a conference call of Asari interests across the galaxy, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut this meeting short." She declared, professional to the end.
She looked up to her assistant, and the poor girl continued the report, "Councilors Sparatus and Valern are being informed as well. Preliminary reports indicate the aggressors as geth."
Tevos could be forgiven for paling at that. The geth had never before ventured beyond the Perseus Veil in any meaningful capacity. Certainly, they had sent scouts and electronic invasions to the extranet, but that had been nothing more than what the Citadel Council did in return, conducting reconnaissance was an accepted intergalactic policy.
An invasion of a world however was a different matter entirely. The last time that happened the Batarians and humans had been skirmishing in the Attican Traverse over eezo mining sites, and that had never been more than a few thousand soldiers on both sides.
Tevos pulled on her official clothing and began to hastily make her way toward the council chambers. This was bad. After the Relay 314 War, the Council could only get the Humans to agree to preliminary associate status with the Citadel after promising a mutual defense pact.
The humans to this point had been tactful in its use, suffering Terminus and Batarian raids stoically while building up their force projection infrastructure and navy. The humans had been a mix of isolationist paranoia with far-thinking leadership, at once distant and dismissive of the wider galaxy, and infectious in its grasp for resources and intelligence.
Not that Tevos could blame them. As she stepped into her personal elevator, she remembered those terrifying days when the full span and breadth of humanity's grievances had been made manifest.
The average asari could hardly believe that the protheans would do something as callous as set up a bioweapons research facility and then detonate a mutagenic plague across a pre-spaceflight species. But Tevos knew better, she had read the restricted archives and knew just what kind of people the Protheans were.
Infecting a species with a bioweapon to advance their evolution to be a better soldier was exactly the type of thing the Prothean empire would do. To see its effects in person, however, had been terrifying and heartbreaking. The sorrow of seeing families kill each other as they were infected with the disease, of humans slaughtering untold millions of their own kind in directed extermination campaigns across continents in the follow on years. The hard-hearted decision to sacrifice millions to the horde to save millions more.
That the humans had embraced this mutagenic nature, had modeled themselves to whatever their hearts desired, and their minds came up with, had been revolting. But the benefits of partnership had paid out in dividends. Bending the Council's rules on genetic engineering had been risky, but it had produced a multi-species variant of medigel, multi-spectrum antibodies that made people near immune to disease, malarial symbiotes that destroyed cancer cells and produced anti-aging enzymes that regenerated your body. Even the eventual promise of immortality was within reach.
It was all too good, all too convenient. The evidence had been obvious, they had been discovering unknown spy ships for over a decade by that point, and the Relay War had gone too well in the human's favor to have been an unplanned response. The humans had been preparing for just such a conflict and outcome. Perhaps they hadn't intended to lose an entire reservation world to the green flu, but the willingness for callousness was there in human political thought and military planning.
The elevator stopped and Tevos took a deep steadying breath.
Special Ambassador Anita Goyle stood on the supplicant's plinth. She looked placid as she always did.
This was exposed to be a simple pick up and drop off, now they may have a new war on all their hands.
"Welcome ambassador, we're sorry for the unfortunate circumstances regarding this meeting but I imagine we have much to discuss." Tevos began.
Shepard blew apart another geth's optic shroud, then another, then another. She had ambushed them perfectly as they tried to advance on an open-topped cargo train. Kaiden and Ashley were currently mopping up the remainder of the defenders in the train station itself, while Nihlus was with her acting as a spotter as she picked off the incoming reinforcements.
A whole platoon of fresh troops was desperately firing at her position. The pellets struck the earth all around her and even touched her shields occasionally but the seasoned veteran didn't even flinch as she carefully took aim and blew the geth invaders apart.
"Kaiden, Williams, get ready to get enfilade on them as they enter the terminal," Shepard announced into her throat mic.
"On it boss!" Kaiden shouted, "We've finished up the last of the guys here."
Shepard was a good shot and had nerves of steel, but as a lone rifleman, she had little means of eliminating an entire platoon of rapidly advancing synthetics. She kept firing into the stragglers and those who unwisely peeked out of cover to fire at her.
"Good shot Shepard." Nihlus complimented as she accidentally got a collateral kill through some cover the Geth were using. She didn't correct him as she adjusted for a new shot
The sound of fighting crescendoed in the terminal, and Shepard flicked her eyes to Kaiden's helmet cam, showing him drawing the attention to the first squad who entered and Ashley gunning them down from behind. She'd have to admonish him later on for being so reckless but it was working.
As the second squad entered they were more thorough in their breaching, covering both flanks as they went in through the doorway, using disarmed and damaged members of their unit as meatshields.
Shepard paused, that was actually very clever. She didn't know how exactly the geth hivemind worked, if they had a soul, thought, were immortal, or were just mindless automatons. But any way you swung it, using your injured team members as the frontline to absorb gunfire to further the mission was pretty dedicated.
Didn't help though.
Williams' size meant she could lug around a lot of equipment, including a small box of shaped mines.
Shepard closed the camera feed just in time for the terminal's entrance to explode into a cloud of smoke and shrapnel, "That'll be the last of them." Shepard grinned as she scanned the tram car the geth had so thoughtfully brought to them. Unfortunately, the threat of any stragglers, particularly drones, made using it slow going, requiring the team to clear each platform, you just can't rush a good job.
Anita Goyle still sported that undisturbed look as the details flew in on the state of Eden Prime.
Even Tevos found her utter placidity offputting. Just a thin-lipped look of boredom as the reports came in and the messages played, even while her people died. Now, she wasn't always like this, decades ago, when she had been the negotiator for the humans in the first contact war, she had shown emotion and vigor. Now she was like a corpse, animated by some heartless spirit. It's like she had a switch to turn into a heartless machine.
Anita looked over to Ambassador Udina and nodded, "We have high confidence the priority asset will be retrieved councilors, we have our best field commander and strike team in place."
"Your confidence is not in question special ambassador." Tevos said, "But we are worried about the response your government will have to this attack." A question that very soon would be relevant. With batarian and human tensions heating up, the last thing they needed was the human public getting skittish and starting a war with the Terminus while in a cold war with the batarians.
Least of all because the humans would have good cause and reason to pull the council into the wider conflict. The big three were always willing to overlook low-level and peripheral pirate raids and skirmishes, the Attican Traverse and the Skylian Verge had always been no one's land, and the low level of warfare caused by human colonization had hardly changed that.
But Eden Prime wasn't in the Attican Traverse, Skylian Verge, the peripheral of council, or even human space.
It was in the same star cluster as the biggest human anchorages and colonies, Eden Prime was one of the first human colonies ever settled. It would be like if Digeris, or Cyone, or Jaëto were invaded today.
To be blunt, you'd have to be stupid or deliberately be antagonistic to accuse the humans of not sufficiently protecting it. And you'd have to be stone cold to not have any reaction like Goyle.
The human woman looked Tevos dead in the eye, "That can't be anticipated."
Shepard looked up from her impromptu spider nest at the head of the train, "We got incoming!" She shouted to the rest of her squad. Kaiden and Ashley were trying to get a few winks of sleep while she and Nihlus had been keeping watch.
But like the seasoned soldiers they were, the two marines started up and grabbed their guns, just in time for Shepard to sight down her scope and see the rapidly approaching dot of a geth dropship, "Williams get the MANPAD!" Shepard barked out.
Williams did, pulling out the amalgamation of tubes and sensor arrays and laying out the tripod. Privately the sergeant doubted the few missiles they had would down the dropship, but it would at least hurt it, and possibly drive it off.
The first missile was fired, like an ancient Javelin missile system, a brief spurt of jet power to leave the tube, then arced upwards into the sky, tendrils of the squidlike form of the missile trailing after it.
Williams reloaded with hesitance, undoubtedly she had been familiar with the weapon system, but as a garrison marine, she'd have hardly needed to use the weapon. The ten-second delay as Williams double-checked she was reading correctly was forgivable, if unfortunate.
The second missile arced out thirty seconds later, just as the first kamikazed its way into the dropship, the kinetic barrier burst the squid's shell casing, instantly mixing the compounds within the missile to form a hyper-acidic goo that splattered across the ship in a focused cone.
The ship's exterior started to be digested, but it kept on coming. It received two more missiles, as it closed within a kilometer of their position, the last one impacting a maneuvering thruster and associated fuel line, but still, it kept coming.
Shepard cursed inwardly and was about to shout an order to disembark from the speeding train before it was forcibly disembarked from its rails, when the bug-like front of the sip was sheared off.
The sonic scream of a mass accelerator echoed from the hills and plains of Eden Prime. In the vague distance, Shepard caught sight of the Normandy banking behind the curve of the horizon.
The Geth dropship screamed and howled as if it were alive, careening into the tilled fields, rolling over and shredding its fuselage, spilling its contents across six hundred meters of earth.
Stopping just short of the train line to the combined relief of everyone aboard.
Narta Var Harjya tapped his foot impatiently as the geth worked to finish powering the beacon. This endeavor had turned into a disaster of Mourning proportions. That was what they got for underestimating the response time of the humans.
Sure they'd taken the garrison and population by utter surprise, and had seized the dig site and starport, but it had taken too damned long.
"Harjya Creator, the beacon is ready." Askellon chirruped into his radio earpiece.
Harjya nodded, gently patting Askellon's blood shroud, then stood before the relay as Nazara commanded he do.
He waited, and after an uncomfortable moment, he was lifted into the air, senses assaulted with the power of the prothean's technology. Visions of death and horror assaulted his mind, and he resisted as best he could.
As quick as it started, it stopped, and he fell to the ground in a heap, mind-boggling from the experience. Askellon helped him up as he rubbed his helmet. He'd tried to stay in character as much as he could, but after Nihlus Kryik killed Lokse, he had a sinking feeling the humans and the council wouldn't buy that Saren Arterius was responsible for this.
Not unless they caught Nihlus in the blast zone.
Harjya felt bad for this order, the humans didn't deserve to be caught up in this matter, but progress and ascension demanded it, "Set the charges, and begin evacuation."
The car entered the station and met with a flurry of gunfire.
That wasn't surprising, Shepard expected their entry to be met fiercely by the geth to maintain their defensive line.
What she didn't expect was an active firefight happening all around as League Lagunari and garrison troops fanatically threw themselves into the teeth of the geth defenses. Bodies, civilian, military, and geth were piled into a carpet around hotly contested areas. The grim reminder of mortality was overtaken by a warning on Shepard's HUD.
Warning, radiological devices detected
Nukes, the geth were going to nuke the place!
She looked to the rest of the squad and saw the determination on Williams and Alenko's faces, "The geth are going to nuke the place." She explained to Nihlus who was checking over his weapons, he looked up, surprised, "We aren't going to let that happen."
The tram stopped, and the team exploded from the carriage towards the loading ramp. Incoming geth fire rained down on them in light smatterings, inaccurate as they were fired in haste and distraction, as soon as a squad tried to move against them, they were overtaken by suicidal resistance from the other humans.
Shepard wasn't surprised by this tenacity, if you were here, there was no way you could fly, let alone run away fast enough to escape the blast zone. Everyone's only hope would be to disable the nuclear weapons. It was with this threat that Shepard recklessly barged into the terminal scattered with crates and fired on the nearest geth trooper who had been taking cover from a motley assortment of militia and soldiers firing down on it from the far end of the facility.
The geth were swift on the uptake and as one they threw up deployable kinetic barriers to guard their backs and turned on her squad. But it was too late, Shepard and Alenko took cover beside a box as Williams fired upon the nearest squad and Nihlus sprinted after her.
They bounded forward, geth after geth falling in their fireteam's wake as they were pincered between Shepard's squad and the active resistance from the rest of the colony. It was with surprise that they tripped over the first nuke, and Shepard took cover behind it as the geth sent a fresh wave of drones to try and control the battle, "Alenko-!" She shouted, before a fusillade of rounds pierced her shields and impacted her sides.
"On it boss!" Alenko screamed oblivious to his commander's wounds as he set his omnitool on the device.
Shepard tore open a packet of medigel and applied it to her wounds, unwilling to use her suit's internal reservoirs unless necessary.
"It's disabled, Shepard, help me remove this panel, I need to remove the firing device!" Kaiden called out, trying to pry open a welded access port. Shepard coughed as she pulled out her cutting torch and began to make the hole bigger for their hands, and with their combined strength tore open the aluminum paneling.
"Shepard what the fuck are you doing!?" Nihlus shouted across the cargo aisle as a group of geth troopers tried to close on them.
"Removing the firing device!" She shouted in return, peeking to the side of the bomb and shooting out the legs of the closest geth trooper.
"Got it!" Kaiden barked as he tore an American football-shaped device, and then gave it a prone throw not too dissimilar to a football.
Nihlus snorted in both derision and discomfort as concrete dust exploded into his face.
Anderson looked to Joker, "How many?"
"By the looks on the scopes, twenty nuclear devices sir, at least half have been disabled but Commander Shepard is in the spaceport, and five are still within geth lines elsewhere."
Anderson sighed, it was dangerous, but with the geth ships leaving the planet in haste, the Normandy had a lot more free reign to perform fire missions now, "Do it, Joker." The rejoinder, "and make sure the ship isn't shot down" was left unsaid.
"Aye aye sir. Pressly get me a course."
Down on the planet, a squad of police, or what was left of it, were finally making some headway into the geth defenses, having lost half their number to a swarm of drones and combat platforms they had tentatively named "frogs".
They'd been sent to the Eden Prime Community College stadium with a platoon of militia volunteers to secure it for a triage clinic, to deal with the wounded and dead.
Instead, they had found a company of geth and a nuclear weapon in the middle of the field. They'd lost half their number in the initial ambush and routed, only returning after rounding up several hundred students and other police to assist in the assault, despite the danger. If the nuke went off the entire college campus would be gone.
So it was with some anti-climax that a mass accelerator shot came in from the south and turned the nuclear bomb and the closest geth defenders into indiscriminate scrap metal, making their sacrifices moot.
Nihlus' chest ached from the previous bullet wound but he fought on stoically with Shepard, who was now also sporting a chest wound of her own. This last push had been a bit of a mess. Normally humans fought with a methodical determination of overwhelming firepower and absolute annihilation.
The massive headlong rush of crazy exhibited by the locals was more similar to their primeval origins of the green flu sufferers than right-thinking sentients.
Then again a quartet of nuclear bombs about to blow up in the heart of the colony made self-preservation obsolete.
It had been costly but-
The ground shook underneath their feet as distantly a mushroom cloud grew. Everything fell deadly silent, everyone thrown to the ground didn't move, and those who remained standing were petrified in fear. When no more explosions came everyone relaxed.
Then went back on guard as the threat of the geth hadn't been neutralized. Except, they were gone, or at least, dead. When William and Alenko bounded to the next geth hardpoint they found nothing but pristine combat platforms, laying where they fell.
Realization dawned on Nihlus after a moment's thought, they'd evacuated! It made sense in retrospect, they could flee through the extranet and radio signals to their ships, some of whom were still leaving the colony now if the specks on the horizon could be trusted. The combat platforms before them were just that, platforms, not actual beings.
"Stay on alert!" Shepard barked and then motioned for her team to follow her toward one of the landing bays.
Finding no more hostiles hardly did anything to let up their guard, Shepard coughed wetly, "Kaiden, Williams, secure the bay," she cleared her throat then spat a globule of coagulated blood and greenish phlegm, "Nihlus, please tell me the beacon is still good."
Nodding, the Turian jogged up to the device.
"I don't know commander." Williams started, "It didn't look like that when they dug it out of the ground."
That set alarm bells off in Nihlus' head too late, as suddenly he was gripped in the throes of the machine. Visions of death and destruction overcame his visions for a second before he impacted the ground, Williams picking him up and shouting, "Commander!"
Author's Notes:
So yes Tevos saying "You'd have to be stupid or deliberately antagonistic to accuse the humans of not sufficiently protecting it" is a dig at the game's early installment weirdness. Because for one, honestly, does anything bar a major military installation or homeworld have the ships to repel a fleet and dreadnought?
Considering Eden Prime was in canon one of the first colonized worlds and is in the heart of human territory if I was the council in the games I'd be a lot more worried the geth had developed a way to bypass relay travel, especially because humans tend to group their forces AT RELAYS for quick reaction to threats over a wide frontier.
To not honor agreements with humanity for protection, when part of the council charter is mutual protection, is incredibly damaging to their institution.
But again, early installment weirdness, since this was before a lot of the setting's lore, rules, and ideas had been cemented. Similarly, the fact the geth aren't throwing everything they got into Shepard's path, including stronger units and swarms of drones is odd. So is the idea that they imply the 212 and 232 marine garrisons were wiped out or otherwise heavily engaged to the point of being unable to maintain control of the spaceport, which is one of two targets that said garrison would focus all their effort on defending. By all their efforts I mean word of god from the codex.
This chapter has been uploaded alongside 4 others, from This one to chapter 12. If you're confused that is why.