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It took less than an hour for he and Aralakh company to skip back up to orbit. Much of that time was spent travelling by Tomkah out of the range of the orbital cannon's fire. As hard as it would be for a cannon meant to annihilate warships to hit a Kodiak, no one was willing to risk Wrex - and all he entailed - on even the slightest needless gamble. Setting aside, of course, that Cerberus could have something else nasty waiting at the orbital battery just in case - which Shepard and the Normandy's crew debriefings had more than forewarned the Alliance, and thus the Clans, they were fully capable of fielding.
Which stacked up to plenty of reasons not to fuck around, and no reasons to find out.
In orbit, the situation was… Ironic.
Had Cerberus taken the ground-based defensive station a month from now, or even a couple weeks, numerous planned satellites would have been in the firing arc. Transport relays, orbital warehouses, temporary docks and more would have been in place in part if not in whole, and subsequently destroyed. Which would have been hundreds of lives, Krogan and otherwise, and a lot of lost material and the effort that had gone into scavenging the majority of it. Instead, the defensive battery had fired three times, destroying a few construction-site skeletons and killing dozens alongside a Turian warship that had come for safe harbor and, lacking much of its engine power, had been ripped in two by a well-placed shot.
"And the birds are pissed about it, too." Wrex rumbled as John shoved another pair of ration bars into his armored pack and closed it up. He flicked the warlord a look and he shrugged. "What? Figured you'd rather know than not."
"I suppose…" He sighed, looking around himself at the crews busily thronging the launch deck.
The pod-bay looked more or less identical to how he'd seen it last, aside from a distinct lack of exposed wiring and pipes - mostly - which lead him to believe that it was mostly done. Which at least offered him some mechanical confidence, buoyed by watching the long arms holding the pods lift them up and lower them, then move them forward and back into place in a series of last-minute tests on their systems. Dozens of technicians were scattered at a safe distance around them while they worked, taking scans, watching the mechanisms and staring at their 'Tool displays to whatever ends they had.
He was just glad they seemed ready and like they'd work.
"Specialist?" He turned at the title and found the once-more masked and helmeted Specialist Beau a foot away, holding a data-pad in one hand and a toolkit in the other. He paid her a nod and she sat down the latter and stepped forward, offering the data-pad. "Your update, Sir."
"Thank you." He grunted, skimming the information and frowning, "The Mass Effect generators aren't functioning at peak?"
"N-No." She shook her head, hand curling and uncurling at her side anxiously while she tried to keep a flat voice, "We were tuning them when the attack happened, a-and-"
"We don't have a choice." He cut her off, acknowledging the failure by turning to Wrex and adding. "Barriers are fluctuating around thirty percent. Still more than I ever had."
"It'll do." Wrex grunted, "When do we drop?"
And here went this mess… "We don't drop, Chieftain Wrex. I do, preferably with the team you assigned me but, frankly, a handful of Marines would be just as prepared for the drop itself."
"Not the fight after."
He shrugged, ignoring the deep scowl warping the Krogan's face to add, "Like I said, preferably with the team you assigned to me."
He could see the argument on the Krogan's scowling face. Feel it, too, to an extent, borne out by the errant discharges of Biotic static that rolled off of him unconsciously. From his reading, powerful Biotics like Wrex had to be careful about their emotions because their bodies were unable to distinguish Biotics from most other demonstrations of stress or emotion. The blue haze rolling gently off the warlord's shoulder was, in all honesty, not much different to a Human scowling and squaring their shoulders, or a Turian perching their mandibles.
It just took some education to know how to read it.
Finally, though, Wrex seemed to accept - or at least get over - the anger at the decision and nodded, turning and looking at the pods with a sigh, "Damn… They look like a fun ride."
"I wouldn't call it 'fun' per se." John shrugged, turning to join him in watching the final checks on the pods themselves go through - at least for the technicians - and humming. "And nothing says you can't go on a later one. We just can't risk you on the first proper test."
"Ah, but you get to gamble?"
"I'm just a soldier."
"Shepard wouldn't agree."
"No." He sighed, flicking him a look and then shrugging as he turned back to Beau. "When is drop-time?"
"One hour, more or less." She answered quietly, flicking the Krogan an understandably wary look. When he just huffed and scratched at his chin, most of the Biotic static fading away from the air around him, she seemed to relax a bit and picked up her data-pad to run him through the last handful of technical issues. He tried not to smirk at how nervous she still was through it all, because he couldn't rightly blame her for her nerves.
An irritated Krogan was bad enough - but a Biotic warlord, and the fact you were sending most of the soldiers away to be alone with it?
He didn't judge her at all.
The hour and ten minutes the final checks wound up taking passed fairly quickly and, with them done, he stood in front of the Krogan volunteered to make the drop with him. He'd had zero time to properly train them, but they'd done… Well, they'd done a field exercise. He only hoped that, when they were allowed to actually rip and tear like Krogan were famously good at, they'd fare better than they had in the relatively restrained test he'd put them through. Admittedly, any shaped charges that went off in their faces on this field mission would rip them apart, too, but…
He had to hope.
Unlike the pods he was used to, these were not loaded while hanging or resting, with their bottoms or tops angled down, these rested as they were while he and the Krogan climbed the walkways beside them. Properly finished and painted, they looked like large, midnight-black teardrops with smaller ovals at the apex of their curves where the cockpits rested. The cockpit glass itself was reinforced glass, the kind used for fighters, with a hexagonal structure and a single metal strut that curved up and over the center like a cross-strut, armoring it against impacts. But, inside, they were virtually the same, albeit more filled out with systems, storage and defensive supports.
Idly, he wondered at the weight of it and the disadvantage there, but…
"Mass Effect." He muttered idly to himself as he climbed the walkways. "Bullshit…"
"Kinda, yeah." One of the Krogan rumbled from another walkway. "But it's bullshit on our side, eh?"
He just shrugged and grunted, "Fair."
With two seats to a pod, the load order had come up almost immediately. Ultimately, though, it turned out to be a simple conversation. Urdnot Grunt, the technical commanding officer of Aralakh Company, would lead from Alpha Pod with his chosen bodyguard. Which, as he'd been informed, served as an analogue of a lieutenant or sergeant in supporting, conducting and measuring combat commands. Meanwhile, John boarded Delta Pod with the old Krogan he had, in Grunt's words, 'humbled'. This also had cultural significance, apparently - by forcing them to rely on each other, Krogan culture hoped they would bury the proverbial hatchet and move on. Or kill each other out on the battlefield, where excuses were simpler to come up with.
Either or worked, according to Wrex - who advised he 'aim really good' if it came down to that.
Which was… Just wonderful.
Taking his drop-weapon, he weighed it in his hands. It was a Mattock, painted a matte-black to match his armor and serve more subtly, with a scope integrated to his VISR and HUD systems. Ultralight material reconstruction meant it wouldn't weigh him down in a fight, and a barrel shroud that stuck out from the weapons frame and surrounded the barrel entirely would mitigate muzzle-flash, though that meant he would need to measure his shots more carefully to avoid overheating the weapon. An internal 'suppression' system that captured gas from firing and released it more slowly to avoid most of the sound only made that worse, but unlike the flash hider, a simple button press was all that was needed to turn that off.
The other weapon was, judging from the note that read 'Get close, and shred - S', a gift from the Commander.
A Kassa Locust, aged and nicked in places and with another, smaller integrated sight. It was light, deceptively so in fact, and had a foregrip that fit neatly into his palm. Part of him doubted it could 'shred' though.
But, when he'd seen it, Grunt had just laughed and told him, voice echoing jovially around the drop bay, "That was her gun on the Collector base raid, months ago. I saw you pointing it my way and I'd get out of the way, and quick."
"Hmph…"
He climbed into his seat first, easing into it with his weapons locked to either side of him. After a brief systems check, he raised a single thumb and gripped the control sticks. A few seconds of quiet passed before, somewhere above and behind him, Specialist Eclair called out, "Key ME fields and rotate!"
The feeling of turning upside down and hanging, head towards the floor, while gravity pulled him 'up' was… A strange one. Intellectually, he understood the mechanics and sciences that did it. And that, strictly speaking, there was no 'up' in space. However, instinctively, in what of his brain had never escaped being a simple-minded ape sleeping in a tree on Northern Africa a hundred thousand years and more ago, it unnerved him. Made his stomach turn and twist.
Like with every time it happened though, he tamped it down - something ODST training had more than prepared him for.
After a few more moments, he heard the Specialist's voice in his ear, "All pods are loaded and reading green. Coalition Special Vessel, Aralakh orienting and moving away from construction gurneys. All drop-troopers, prepare for launch.
A chorus of green lights flicked along the edge of his view-port, where the squad-info relays had been installed. A simple button press on his control console added his right in the center as well. Another heartbeat passed before, with a barely discernible lurch, the pod was clasped directly by the manipulator claws - for redundancy over the mag-fields, which could fail in numerous instances - and pushed forward. Upside down, he watched crewmen in full enviro-suits working at consoles along the wall to either side of the bay doors. Soon, he could only see their feet, and instead watched the bay doors open, a translucent barrier filling in the void to prevent decompression as they were held outside of it.
Finally, as they passed into space, Grunt spoke up, "Alright, whelps, listen up. Cerberus took one of our orbital arrays, and we're going down there to politely ask them in our native tongue to get off our rocks. But you already knew all of that."
"More importantly," Wrex spoke up, voice echoing over Krogan comm-lines, "you're the first in what we want to be a long line of Krogan Shock Troopers. As long as half of you make it back, and take that cannon, the test'll go down well. Besides that, with the Reapers coming, we want everyone to know we aren't sitting here on our laurels while they get cut up. So don't get stupid down there, and make us proud."
"Yes, Chieftain." The Krogan echoed loudly, eagerness and energy electric in their voices.
"And Doe, don't get dead." Wrex added quietly, "Shepard will skin me alive if you kick the farm, and she's the only one I think could actually manage it."
"Buy the farm." John corrected.
"Maybe if you do good enough to get a bonus." Wrex laughed, ignoring him, "Get ready to drop."
He sighed, rolled his eyes, and looked forward along the gentle curve of his pod as they were all angled slightly to the side. In front of and - loosely - below them Tuchanka hung like a ruddy brown and greenish gem in the black, hundreds of kilometers away. Normally, a launch from such a range would have taken hours to traverse, moving at simple fall-speed or, if the ship depositing them turned and pivoted just right, hurl-speed - neither were technical names, of course - but he knew their engines and Mass Effect would work in tandem to make it an hour-long traversal at worst.
Finally, though, they launched and the void surrounded them in utter silence.
Quietly, almost against his will, he humed and muttered, "Helljumper, helljumper, where you been…"
"Doe?" Grunt rumbled, "You green?"
"And mean." He answered on pure, nostalgic instinct as he gently turned his pod to get a better look at the others. They were clustered tightly and he frowned, "Spread out a few dozen yards - lower our visual sig."
"Good idea." Grunt rumbled, adding the advice as an order as the pods' lateral thrusters burst and pushed them away a bit more - where they were less likely to smash into each other if something happened.
"What's the song?" Grunt asked after a moment.
"Just… Something from home."
"Well," his Krogan buddy rumbled, "is it a war song?"
"A war song…?"
"My clan sings as they ride to a fight." He answered quietly, "We have fifteen to landing. Sing, if you like."
He weighed the idea for a moment, running it through his mind and considering it more than he had expected to. Back home, it had seemed… Embarrassing, whether or not his friends and family had always said he was decent at it. But, for all their failings, the Krogan were a… Passionate species. Surprisingly so.
And, frankly, he didn't have many people in the galaxy to give a damn about laughing at him.
So, humming and drumming a finger on his control stick, he repeated and went on in an admittedly more quiet, subdued version of the old song, "Helljumper, Helljumper, where you been… Feet first into hell and back again! When I die please bury me deep! Place an MA5 down by my feet! Don't cry for me, don't shed no tear! Just pack my box with PT gear! Cuz one early morning 'bout zero-five! The ground will rumble, there'll be lightning in the sky! Don't you worry, don't come undone. It's just my ghost on a PT run!"
"Hah!" Grunt rumbled, "I like that!"
He just smirked and grunted, "Alright, someone else take a turn…"
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Is it incredibly self-indulgent to insert the Helljumper song in like this?
Yes. I don't care though lmao. I wanted to christen the first proper Drop right. And, like in the original, I intend to do a LOT with building out the Krogan culture and shaping it. Which is why I have spent so long here and they aren't even landed on their first combat drop yet.
I am taking my time.
Hope y'all like it.
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Crimsonthe12 :
I know that now but I didn't when I wrote the original and kept John Doe as is as a sort of… Reference.
RandomReader :
Funnily, iirc, the UNSC fielded both - ODPs were just more easily oriented and relied on for that reason. Also, firing a MAC of the scale needed for its job would make cities shake. As for here - yes, a city would largely hide the Krogan installations. But these are modelled off the in-game one which, if you look around, rest in ruined cities and tower over them. Which makes them easier to detect.
Mr Tiny Seal :
Snarky AND singing!