Scraped from here.
I know I already put this up on the recommendation's thread, but since I'm...
I know I already put this up on the recommendation's thread, but since I'm...
Mass Effect: Iron Rebirth
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Scraped from here.
I know I already put this up on the recommendation's thread, but since I'm going to be updating this on a semi-regular basis, I'd like to put it on it's own thread. For the newcomers, I'll post the first chapter here, but since there's another 70,000 words or so until the newest chapter (08), I'll put the links to them on the post.
Table of Contents
Chapter 01: Complications
Chapter 02: Growing Pains
Chapter 03: Fitting In
Chapter 04: Orientation
Chapter 05: An Education
Chapter 06: Old Friends, New Friends
Chapter 07: Field Trip
Chapter 08: Awakening
Chapter 09a: Detention Part I
Chapter 09b: Detention Part II
Chapter 10: Parole
Chapter 11: Differences
I know I already put this up on the recommendation's thread, but since I'm going to be updating this on a semi-regular basis, I'd like to put it on it's own thread. For the newcomers, I'll post the first chapter here, but since there's another 70,000 words or so until the newest chapter (08), I'll put the links to them on the post.
Table of Contents
Chapter 01: Complications
Chapter 02: Growing Pains
Chapter 03: Fitting In
Chapter 04: Orientation
Chapter 05: An Education
Chapter 06: Old Friends, New Friends
Chapter 07: Field Trip
Chapter 08: Awakening
Chapter 09a: Detention Part I
Chapter 09b: Detention Part II
Chapter 10: Parole
Chapter 11: Differences
This is a tentative draft for chapter 08.
The funny thing is, I'm not that good at writing summaries. Had to go through a few iterations before finally arriving on the one I had on FFnet.mkire said:
No, he's probably not going to. But then again, nobody is likely to get what they're expecting on the Purgatory once things go down.Mercsenary said:
Currently, I'm trying to figure out if a biotic or a group of them can cancel out another biotic's attack. Does anyone know if that's the case in the canon?
Darn, that makes things a bit tricky with the next squad loadout. Especially with a vial of antimatter like Jack. Hmmm.....
Bit of a question for you guys. I have a habit of starting up a few scenes here and there whenever I'm writing a new chapter, and sometimes they either get cut out because they don't fit or completely overwritten. I know some of the folks here post works in progress rather than whole chapter updates, so I'd like to ask. Would you prefer scene by scene updates which may or may not make the cut or completed chapter updates?
No, I'm not dead. Yes, I'm still writing, albeit with a bit of a slowdown of late. I've gotten the first half of the chapter ready to go, might need some polish once things are done, but here we are anyway.
**********
Chapter 09: Detention
"Got a minute Shepard?"
All things considered, between standing in the command deck hallways waiting for something to happen and staring at the airlock door, it was an academic question. They had nothing but minutes, but the former C-Sec investigator had a habit of prefacing his real questions behind meaningless small talk like that. On the other side of the hallway, Shepard didn't say anything, but the commander bodded his sensor pod as a means of reply. The turian suppressed an involuntary shudder. The nod was a gesture of assent common to most species, and he knew it was the same Shepard inside, but seeing a mech do it felt distinctly unnatural. The airlock access between the helm and the rest of the command deck was far enough that nobody could have heard them over the hubbub of activity, but he lowered his voice all the same.
"Ever get the feeling that we're, I don't know, that we're not really making the best use of our time?"
If asked, he'd admit straight away that this wasn't the best place to start this sort of conversation with the commander, or if there ever was a good one since they had started on this near insane mission. Secrecy didn't mean much on a thoroughly bugged Cerberus ship like this, but the crew weren't close enough to listen in, and the krogan standing watch on the far side discouraged passerby. And when you were up against the Collectors, with all those myths and half legends about them having enough backing to be taken seriously, there was no time like the present to ask.
"CLARIFY"
"I know we're running a little short on combat effectives to take on the Collectors-"
"A LITTLE" the commander interjected, getting a brief chuckle out of Garrus.
"Ahh, we don't really need a lot of people to take on the Collectors anyway. Just the two of us should be more than enough to finish the job before breakfast right?" The amusement didn't last for very long, and Garrus quickly sobered up a moment later. "Seriously Shepard, I know the Collectors are bad news and we need all the help we can get to fight them, but shouldn't we be focusing on tracking them down instead of trying to pick up some kind of unstable biotic?"
"NOT ENOUGH CLUES TO CREATE A PATTERN. RANDOM SEARCHING WOULD NOT FIND THEM. WE BUILD A WORKING TEAM AND WAIT FOR AN OPENING" That sensor pod shifted, giving Garrus the distinct feeling that the commander was thinking hard. "I DO NOT LIKE IT"
"Yeah, the waiting is the hardest... oh?" Letting his voice trail off as the implications of what the commander had said hit him. Like a really good serial killer, the Collectors had left too few clues to find a motive or pattern, other than a tendency to pick off human colonies. You didn't catch perpetrators like these by running around looking for anyone who might be suspicious, it only put them on their guard. Playing it smart meant staying low with eyes open waiting for them to show up so you could bust them. It was the calm and collected thing to do, but it had nicked a little harder on his conscience each time the former C-Sec investigator ran across a body they were too late to save. Playing with entire colonies this way, Garrus would have been sick to his gut knowing he couldn't do anything until the Collectors struck, but what about the Commander? Would it stick in his conscience the same way it would have years ago when he was still an Alliance marine, or did coming back like this change the human he'd been, more willing to sacrifice the innocent for the objective? No matter how often he told himself it was the same Shepard underneath that mechanized shell, the same human who never compromised on his principles, he only had to look at the Cerberus logo stamped on this ship for the doubts to niggle away at him. Especially whenever he thought about what they were about to do.
"IT IS THE BIOTIC YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT"
Garrus grunted as if he'd been punched, rebuking himself for forgetting that out of all the things Shepard wasn't any more, unobservant wasn't one of them. He waved a hand by way of explanation, "come on Shepard, you know who I used to be and what makes me tick. I left C-Sec because the bureaucracy kept letting low lives get away with their crimes. Coming to Omega was the only way I could have made a difference without being tied down by the red tape, but I always did what was right. And now we're going to help a mass murdering biotic walk free? I can see the merits of people working off their crimes Shepard, but this is even if it this could turn into a suicide job, it's a lot to ask me to accept."
"WILL IT BE A PROBLEM"
The turian gave a brief shake of his head in resignation. "No, as much as I don't like it, the Collectors really are the bigger problem and we need all the help we can get. It twists my guts to admit it, but if you can get Jack to cooperate, I won't make it an issue."
Lifting an arm, the commander placed the weapon sheaths on Garrus's shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie, though the sudden weight nearly forced him to his knees before Shepard quickly drew the limb back.
"SORRY STILL GETTING USED TO DELICATE MOTIONS" Shepard rumbled by way of apology before continuing, "MAYBE IF WE ARE FORTUNATE JACK WILL NOT BE COOPERATIVE"
The chuckle that came out of Garrus's mandibles was genuinely amused, the previously grim mood abating as he tossed his head in the direction of Grunt who was just making his way up to the airlock, Zaeed following closely behind. Both members of the ground team were in full environmental kit, helmets on and normally exposed joints sealed against anything from gas attacks to hard vacuum. "I kind of doubt that commander, especially since you managed charm your krogan friend into accepting you as battlemaster after all. Though I wouldn't mind if you made less of an effort in recruiting this one," he added in a conspirational tone, eliciting a brief nod of the sensor pod from Shepard.
"On the other hand, it could be the warden who ends up uncooperative," he gestured with the carbine in his other hand, one reminder of the contingency they had planned for. Though his preferred sniper rifle still hung on his back on it's magnetic locks, the weapon would see little utility in the likely cramped quarters of the prison ship, not that it would impede him much if it became necessary. A mandible twitched irritably. The only reason why they had this contingency was on the chance that the warden would hope to collect twice by double crossing them, which had it's own set of moral implications that clashed with what Garrus had always held as right and true.
"IT WAS SIMPLER IN THE OLD DAYS"
Garrus chuckled at the truth in that statement, but said nothing as Grunt and Zaeed finally joined their little gathering, the former giving him a curious look while the latter simply leaned against the bulkhead with a patient expression. He didn't bother explaining, suspecting neither would really understand, or care. It had been simpler then, with just their wits and whoever had thrown their lot in with the Normandy against an omnicidal race of machines and their turian puppet, clean and to the point morality he had no qualms about. Oh, there had been grey areas before, choices on whether to spare a monster or give them a choice, back door dealings with corporate power brokers for an edge, but nothing like what they were doing now. Those days were gone forever he feared, much like Shepard's flesh and blood body. Dealing with a corrupt slave trader, the warden was selling prisoners to the highest bidder it seemed, in order to free a biotic with over a hundred charges of murder. He shook his head. Just so they could improve their chances, they were dealing with people that should have been shot at first opportunity, that seemed to the be norm now. "Well, let's just hope that-"
He was interrupted by an electronic warning tone and the sardonic voice of the ship's pilot, "Sorry to interrupt you guys waxing about the good old days, but I'm picking up a lot of activity coming to our front door and couple of spacewalkers, and I don't think it's the welcome wagon."
There was a faint hum of electronics as Zaeed and Grunt unpacked their weapons, accelerator rails extending to their full length with the promise of pain to anyone on the wrong side. The krogan, he noted, was grinning excitedly, while the mercenary looked as bored as he had been earlier. Garrus shared a quick look with Shepard, the commander only shaking the sensor pod in that close-but-not-quite-alive way.
"THIS PART HOWEVER IS STILL THE SAME"
Garrus chuckled, and raised his rifle by way of reply, feeling the increasing pace of his heart in anticipation of the upcoming events. This was familiar, the build up of expectant action, knowing full well the next few moments would decide whether you lived or died trying to make that difference in the status quo. Their goals were noble, the means... he couldn't accept, but understood the need. That was his difference, the line he would not cross, one he hoped Shepard would never do. With a practised motion, he jammed his helmet on with a hiss of pressure seals.
"You're right Shepard, let's hope it never changes."
**********
It is said that there is no stealth in space. Engineers and physicists will tell you that any artificial object, any living thing, would be detectable by even the most rudimentary of sensors that any spacefaring ship or planetary astronomical observation grid can pick up. And for the most part, they are right. Embedded thermal sinks, cold gas thrusters, even plain old radar and LIDAR absorbent plating don't make you invisible, only less detectable to any potentially hostile sensor net. Anyone could look out the window, and if your eyes were good enough, see anything attempting to hide. Not that many did with the paltry capabilities of organic vision compared to artificial ship mounted ones. Sergeant Caska was counting on the fact as the nondescript maintenance hatch noiselessly opened in the vacuum of space. Using hand signals, made sluggish by the weight of his powered down armoured suit, he motioned for the rest of his team to join him on the Purgatory's exterior, just under the airlock bay where their prize awaited. Not waiting for their silent acknowledgement, he reached for a handgrip sunken into the hull and pulled himself out with a tug.
The batarian let out an impressed whistle as he cleared the portal, the sound audible only in the pressurized spaces of his sealed combat helmet. He was not the sort to be awed or taken in by flashy and powerful ships, save only in how they affected his own mission if he ever had to lead a raid on them, but the frigate sidled up to the Purgatory projected an aura of grace and power with it's smooth lines that he could not deny. The warden had been right, this would be worth double crossing a client once they claimed it for their own, assuming they didn't damage it too much in the process, which was going to be a challenge. There was no crew manifest to look over of course, but the ship was large for it's class in his estimate, large enough to have an on board security detail that could consist of anything from nothing at all to a full squad of marines fitted with heavy power armour and high end weapons supported with heavy mechs. Given that the client was expecting Jack of all the prisoners to be transferred on board, Caska had placed his estimations on the generous side.
Nineteen other Blue Suns followed him out into space, gripping handholds and pulling themselves along as they crawled across the hull of Purgatory, resisting the urge to look anywhere and succumb to the zero-g, zero-reference, panic inherent in all species. That would have killed them as surely as a bullet in the head. There were no tether lines, and no extravehicular packs mounted on their armour, not even a bottle of emergency cold gas to redirect their motion, using any of those would have broken their cover too early. If someone lost their grip and could not recover quickly enough, not only would it raise their chances of detection, it would mean death by asphyxiation when the ten minutes worth of air in the suits ran out. But no one complained or backed out when he had told them about their insertion method. Caska had done a lot of risky things that had earned him his rank, and he looked out for his subordinates, something that went completely against his species reputation. If Caska led from the front, his men would trust him to make this work.
They moved in silence without a wasted motion, each action deliberate and efficient as they pushed themselves across the intervening space of the docking gate, searching for the maintenance hatches their earlier scans had provided. Sealed in the highly personal world of his suit, Caska counted out the ticks of the mechanical timepiece strapped to his wrist, calculating how much more time they had left to make their move. Theirs was the second half of the entire operation, the first being a boarding attempt. While they had gone into the vacuum, another team would soon attempt to force their way in through the airlocks and distract the security forces on board. Their job was to get in through the cargo bay and disable the distress beacons and engines before anyone could think of escaping. Too early, and they would tip off their hand, too late and they would not only lose the advantage of surprise, they would be out of air. The Blue Suns sergeant however, was not overly concerned about that. His men were a known factor, but the ship, despite everything they had done to minimize possible risks, wasn't.
Starship's, as a rule, did not carry anything less than weapons designed to hit other starships, fighters or planets, but the GARDIAN missile defence system with it's precision high powered lasers would cut through body armour just fine. Sensors hadn't picked them up, but there was no question that they were there, all warships had them. Moving from the sheltering bulk of Purgatory and crossing the last intervening space would put them in full view of any defence systems it had, with nothing to protect them but their lack of power signatures to draw unwelcome attention. He waited on the lip of the airlock bridge, counting out the seconds of the timepiece, and feeling his entire body tense as the final hand approached the marking point. Behind him, the rest of the team did the same, making their own preparations for the deciding moment. The hand struck zero, and Caska pulled himself over the edge.
And nothing happened.
No ruby red beams of energy lanced out from the ship, nothing boiled away at his thin skinned armour to roast him alive. He let out a breath of relief even as his arms worked quickly, aligning himself against the hull of Purgatory and coiling his legs under him. With a kick of his legs, he launched himself off Purgatory, closing the distance to the frigate on inertia alone in the space of seconds. A sharp jerk of his torso rotated him in the weightless environment, aligning his feet with the hull of the frigate as the distance between the two rapidly closed. He mentally counted off the seconds to landing, allowing himself a moment of exultation as the soft soled boots of him and his team entered inside the safe radius, too close to be detected by external sensors, or hit with anything the ship carried now.
He was right, but he was also wrong.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was when the ship broke free from the airlock bridge in a sudden noiseless eruption of explosive decompression. Only one of the team saw it, lifting an arm in alarm to call the attention of the others. And then Caska saw it, a moment of dread starting to filter into his consciousness as the ship moved underneath him before his magnetic locks could engage, the hull moved and rotated. The last thing he saw was the stylized white lettering 'SR-2 NORMANDY' rapidly filling up his entire view. And then he never saw another thing ever again.
**********
Two minutes ago
Ambushes and double crosses are very contingent acts that share more than a few things in common. Both allow a much weaker party to turn the tables on the stronger, while frequently getting back much more than they invested in the effort. But they also share the same core weaknesses. One particular case for example, is that the success of the plan often hinges on the would-be victim never seeing it coming, or if they did, it would be too late to do anything about it. That did not apply here.
Shepard had seen it coming literally light years away, and had made good on his preparations with Miranda's cooperation. Not willing to tip their hand to the warden early, especially if the commander's suspicions had proven unnecessary, the Cerberus operative had acquired the schematics for a new sensor array best suited for the job. Originally built to supplement topographical planetary surveys in a timely manner, the Argus satellite array had been re-purposed to serve a far more militaristic purpose as an additional set of eyes to the Normandy's already comprehensive sensor suite.
Barely the size of a human thumb, the micro satellites serenely orbited their parent frigate. Disguised as the usual space debris of ejected garbage, sweeping the Purgatory with miniature optical apertures and guided on their paths by seemingly normal bleed off from the ship's artificial gravity systems, the surveillance systems tracked every inch of the prison vessel. Individually, the resolution from each drone's cameras would be poor, only just able to resolve a human sized face at a hundred meters. But the hundreds that floated in cold vacuum painted together a picture of the prison ship far superior to even the frigate's advanced internal sensors. When the minute maintenance hatch had popped, the Argus system had seen it. When the teams had begun their slow exit into cold space, Normandy's AI had known, relaying their positions to all members of the ground team.
When they had waited for their distraction team to play its part, Shepard was already in motion.
Hidden inside the ship, secure in the knowledge that they would not be detected, the distraction team had left their eezo cores running, bullet stopping kinetic barriers powered and on standby. It didn't save them. Cutting edge gravimetric sensors had already detected the micro gravity distortions caused by the exotic element in their suits, even through the background wash of the both ship's eezo cores. Their positions and movements were already being fed into the encrypted tactical network the commander shared with the rest of his team even as the Blue Suns flooded into the terminal gate. The two prison guards who crouched by the exterior airlock with cutting charges, hiding beneath the shroud of a tactical cloak to fool optical sensors, worked quickly but confidently, unaware that they were already being tracked.
Not until the airlock door unexpectedly hissed open.
There wasn't even time to blink.
A storm of red hot death roared as the doors slid open, scything down the cloaked guards in a single instant of unrelenting fury, their kinetic barriers flaring into existence before splintering underneath the concentrated firepower of Shepard's fireteam. The other members of the boarding party scrabbled away from the deathtrap of the airlock corridor, chased by the storm of deadly metal and a toroidal metal object that bounced once on Purgatory's deck. It's ballistic arc terminated a dozen meters away from where it had been thrown, vanishing in a brilliant flash of radiation and sound that blinded eyes, unshielded sensors and ears with equal ferocity.
The mechanical shutters that had closed over Shepard's optics at the last instant had only begun to raise, but the krogan was already through the window of their slackening fire. Roaring a war cry as he brought up the shotgun to bear on a blinded mercenary, the krogan fired a fistful of micro pellets that shredded the man's failing kinetic barriers. Disdaining the use of his weapon on his reeling opponent, Grunt smashed his head into the stumbling guard, the crack of the crumpling helmet and skull loud even over the echoes of the shotgun. Quieter but no less deadly, Zaeed sprinted from behind, smoothly smashing the butt of his rifle into the face of a mercenary fumbling for the grenade pinned to his chest before slamming the weapon through the opening under the chin with the crack of cartilage snapping.
Stamping behind with a deceptively sedate pace, Shepard cleared through the airlock, his autocannon sweeping from side to side as it tracked the power signatures his sensors were feeding him, wordless orders transmitted to his team through the tactical network as he prioritized targets. To his left, a missile team found themselves on the receiving end of Zaeed's incendiary grenade, turning them into screaming torches before they could even get a shot off. Beside them, a squad with a grenade launcher withered beneath the angry roar of Shepard's autocannon, the sole survivor diving to grab the dropped weapon when Garrus's carbine chattered, the prison guard's head vanishing in a spray of blood and bone. An alert blared in Shepard's consciousness, warning him of an outgoing transmission attempt. Targeting reticules bracketed the source, a Blue Sun's commander in the back of the terminal marked by the energized armoured plates he wore on his shoulder, already screaming into his helmet microphone.
The grenade launcher on Shepard's shoulder was a throwback to the days pre-dating mass effect technology, using a simple magnetic coil mechanism to accelerate it's payload to it's lethal velocity. But there was nothing primitive about the load sitting in it's firing chamber. Accelerating to it's high subsonic velocities, the grenade screamed across the intervening space between Shepard and the mercenary commander in less than a second. Blue white light flared as the powered armour's computer registered the threat, kinetic barriers flaring into existence to stop the projectile. There was a metallic 'crunk', distinct even in the roar of battle, as the grenade squashed it's head against the unyielding barrier of solidified air, triggering the arming mechanism and subjecting a milligramme of element zero to a powerful negative electrical charge.
The laws of physics in a five meter radius were rewritten for an instant in a blast of dark energy, kinetic barriers losing their potency as gravitationally solidified air lost it's consistency. The second charge fired, channelling the power of fifty grammes of military grade explosives into a liner plate, the blast liquefying and accelerating a hypersonic bolt of molten uranium-titanium alloy through the breach in the kinetic barriers and into the batarian's chest. Nano-woven armour plate designed to stop small arms fire and dissipate hundreds of degrees of heat failed under the combined assault of kinetic and thermal energy, jetting away in puffs of ferrous vapour as the bolt bored through the underlying ballistic mesh with contemptuous ease. The liquid projectile erupted through the back of the batarian's torso, spraying charred viscera and molten armour plate as the entire back and spine were torn away in a steaming cloud of boiling blood, white hot fragments battering the barriers of his bodyguards and sending the disembodied head spinning into the air trailing smoke as it's torso-less limbs fell apart in a burning clatter.
The Blue Suns counter-attack momentarily trailed off, those who were still standing frozen at the sight of their commander's steaming remains. Shepard's team had no such compunctions. Another Blue Sun prison guard went down to fire from Garrus's carbine, rapid fire bursts shattering barriers and armour to tear at soft flesh underneath while another literally disintegrated from a point blank discharge of Grunt's massive shotgun. The Blue Suns snapped out of their temporary paralysis, opening fire with the ferocity borne of desperation, but more than half the Suns down and their reduced firepower was starting to show. Shepard began to stride into the thickest cluster of their defences, accepting the fusillade of shots that rammed into his unyielding kinetic barriers as he raised his autocannon to reply in kind.
A threat alert blared in his consciousness, instantly warning him of a targeting laser illuminating his bulk. High speed servos slewed his sensor pod to the left, spotting a trio of guards with unfamiliar, boxy weapons in their arms, the business ends glowing with a brilliant blue aura. Something screamed inside of him, instinct and experience bundled together shouting a warning.
"NOW JOKER. N-"
Three bolts of lightning arced into the air, effortlessly shearing through kinetic barriers with to strike with a crack of immense power. Armour plate burned and blackened where the lightning struck, but the true damage was transmitted deep within the mass of electronics that comprised his body. Emergency cutoffs and failsafes burned themselves out in the engineered bid to prevent catastrophic damage, but many other parts failed completely, systems shorting out as they were overloaded by voltages that they were never built to handle. Powered limbs quivered under a chaotic stream of corrupted commands, sight and sensor readouts instantly vanished in a hail of intermittent static as electricity arced and danced across his body.
In a single moment of sight, he watched in horror as the same lightning wreathing his body lancing out to strike at Garrus, the turian stiffening where he stood under the electrical assault before collapsing, his forward momentum sending him down in a tangle of twitching limbs. Auditory sensors picked up the sounds of Zaeed turning the air blue with curses, his rifle chattering away before another whipcrack of artificial lightning brought him down with a yell. Something in Shepard's knee actuator gave, corrupted data streams crashing their error checking systems and causing them to fall to his knees. A ragged cheer went up among the Blue Suns, not seeing the weapon arm slew jerkily to face the trio. The mental command to fire failed to reach it's goal, almost. With an angry roar, the autocannon concealed in his arm sprayed the team with their lightning weapons, but the aim was off, clipping the kinetic barriers on one of the guards before his control over the weapon died in a shower of system errors. The emotionless voice of the onboard VI intoned the status of secondary systems, counting down the seconds but the Sun's weapons had began glowing again, charging for another strike. For the first time in a very long time, Shepard felt the taste of desperation permeating his consciousness.
With an ear splitting shriek of tortured metal, the airlock gate behind them sheared free of the superstructure, torn away from it's mountings as the Normandy departed on his desperate orders. The local atmosphere screamed through the gaping hole in the ship, pulling the Blue Suns off their feet in a hurricane of howling air. The heavy weapons squad stumbled, their aim thrown off by the sudden panic of explosive decompression despite their sealed suits. Bellowing defiance amidst the maelstrom of evacuating air, Grunt bounded ahead of the stricken commander on magnetic boots, disintegrating one of the trio's kinetic barriers with the roar of his shotgun. The three recovered quickly, turning their weapons on him and wreathing the krogan in a storm of lightning mid-charge. Even in his state, the commander could not help but feel a brief moment of vicious glee, comprehending the real nature of the weapons, and what they would, or wouldn't, do to a krogan's physiology.
Grunt didn't even slow down.
"I!"
Trailing wreathes of arcing electricity, the bellow terminated as Grunt bodily smashed into the trio with outflung arms, pained screams from three throats filling the air as the deadly, incapacitating energies conducted through their suits, electrocuting them with their own weapons.
"AM!"
A powerful krogan fist mercilessly pummelled the tangled bodies, crushing trigger hands into red ruin and knocking a man down with a hammer blow punch. He didn't even have time to struggle before Grunt drove his massive foot into the man's chest with the crack of crumpling armour plate. Driving his shotgun downwards, the resulting blast took a man's leg off at the thigh, the windmilling guard stumbling backwards only long enough for Grunt to grab the sparking chestplate and deliver a headbutt that snapped the guard's head at an unnatural angle. Another Blue Suns guard attempted to blindside the krogan with a shotgun, only to be stretched out on the floor by Shepard's autocannon, secondary systems rebooting and restoring weapon functionality.
"KROGAN!"
The last surviving guard threw down his gun and tried to flee, but Grunt snapped forward, grabbing the man by his leg. With a sharp jerk, Grunt pulled the man off his feet and began swinging him around like a ragged doll, the captive Sun's shrill screams fading in the rapidly dissipating atmosphere before the krogan let go. The armoured guard went sailing out the tear in the airlock, limbs flailing wildly as he exited the local gravitational field and shrank into the void. Shepard watched the guard dwindle into nothingness as his systems completed their reboot phase, rising to his feet as the others of his squad picked themselves off the ground, still feeling the effects of their sudden electrocution. Knowing personally what it was going to be like, Shepard felt a pang of sympathy for the doomed guard's fate.
Almost.
**********
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now going to zero-g and conducting evasive manoeuvres, kindly return your trays to the upright position, buckle your seatbelts and hang on to your lives!"
It wasn't the most auspicious of take off messages the pilot could have given, but it did get the results he was hoping to get when he disabled the Normandy's artificial gravity. Not that there would have been time to worry about slackers with Shepard's urgent command still hanging in the air. There was the familiar lurch of his stomach in the sudden free fall as gravity went to zero, but no one panicked or yelled in surprise and everyone on the command deck secured in their stations, so that was a plus. He sincerely hoped that everyone was strapped in though, because what came next was not going to be enjoyable to anyone in free fall once the thrusters hit. Becoming a two hundred pound missile in a room full of hard surfaces and sharp edges would ruin anyone's day. Fingers dancing across the holographic haptic displays, he sealed the primary airlocks and fired up the starboard yaw thrusters. The Normandy groaned underneath him at the first roar of thrusters, but a moment later she pulled through just fine, breaking free of that prison ship and it's airlocks in the wash of escaping atmosphere from the tear she left in it. Shepard was inside, but there weren't any worries about spacing the commander this time. This had been planned for, and the pilot had more things to worry about right now than the immediate predicament of his commander.
"Bugs on my windscreen" he hummed, naming the first order of business he'd have to deal with, simultaneously executing a full 360 roll with another pulse on the Normandy's thruster array. She rolled a little heavy, probably from still having bits of the Purgatory airlock stuck to her, but that was something the normally perfectionist pilot couldn't deal with now. Even through the thick armour, numerous thumps and cracks of something impacting the hull managed to permeate into the command deck, though nothing that worried the Cerberus pilot very much, at least about the ship's integrity. The would-be hijackers however, were probably having a very bad day as Joker's frigate sized boot greased the lot of them against it's hull. The contacts on his tac-screen vanished, or went very far away at very fast speeds as Normandy completed it's barrel roll, and Joker chuckled. "Bug-be-gone, good thing Gardner's the ja-whooaaah!"
Joker had all half of a second to respond to the sudden threat alert that blossomed on the tac-screen, a thermal build up that was anything but thruster emissions. A competent Alliance pilot would have taken a fraction of a second to register the threat, another fraction to formulate the appropriate response. Joker was no mere competent pilot. He skipped the second half, stabbing down on a control that burned more anti-matter reaction mass, sending the Normandy into a corkscrewing dive, and not a moment too soon. An intense blast of focused infrared energy seared the intervening space between Purgatory and the Normandy, only the last instant manoeuvre turning a strike that would have speared the Normandy's primary thrusters into a glancing hit that burned a shallow line on it's armour. Normandy had been built strong, her multi-layered ablative armour plating rated to weather dozens of GARDIAN strikes on any point before failing, but it was not a guarantee that Joker wanted to test. Besides, he had his pride as the best pilot there ever was.
More threat alerts popped up on his screen, and the pilot punched the Normandy's engines to full bore, powering through evasive manoeuvres that were half instinct and all Joker, minimising the impact of the laser strikes by keeping the ship constantly rotating against the Purgatory's GARDIAN batteries. Flashing his hands across the numerous control interfaces, he managed to find the spare concentration to dart an eye to the terminal beside him, feeling justifiably annoyed at how things were turning out. Another beam of energy lanced out from the Purgatory's GARDIAN defences, scoring a long line on the port hanger deck that boiled away paint and scorched refractive armour layers meant to withstand just such an assault. "EDI, I thought you were jamming their targeting sensors!"
The AI's holographic globe popped into existence above the terminal, replying in that oh-so-calm voice that grated on Joker.
"I am currently employing all of the Normandy's electronic countermeasures to maximum effect Mr Moreau." Joker didn't sneer at the intelligence's defence, because he was too busy avoiding ploughing into one of the extended prison blocks of Purgatory in the midst of it's active GARDIAN defenses. "However, our close proximity to Purgatory is reducing the effects of our jamming systems and does not prevent optical tracking from being employed in place of compromised sensor systems. I suggest we increase the distance between both vessels if we are to avoid taking further damage."
"They're eyeballing it? And I thought I was the only one with the ship full of crazy." The sarcastic comment however, did not stop Joker from taking the AI's advice, redundant since they were already heading away as fast as their sublight drives could push them, to heart. Another pulse of energized radiation burned it's way across the hull as Joker pulled the ship into a drunken corkscrew, arcing away at a shallow dive that put them beneath the Purgatory and out of sight from most of the weapon's arc, but not all. Their departure was still chased by several more spears of focused infrared energy, but they were fewer than before and spinning hull of Normandy prevented the impacts from doing more than scorching the hull metal. Even that didn't last long, as the impacts grew less and less accurate as Normandy continued to put distance between it and the Purgatory until the shots were missing completely. When the third consecutive shot missed, Joker let out a sigh of relief he'd been holding in. Outside of eyeballing range, they'd have to rely on sensors to hit reliably, something any Alliance pilot worth his license could avoid. Joker could do this in his sleep. Of course the fact that they were outside of the effective range didn't hurt either.
Not that they were out of the woods yet.
"I am detecting increased broad spectrum sensor tracks from the external perimeter Mr Moreau. Telemetry suggests Purgatory's fighter escorts have begun their attack run."
Joker spared a split second to shoot the artificial intelligence an irritated look. "I can read a tactical display just fine mom, sheesh."
They were lighting up the edges of the tactical net like a swarm of insects, taking an approach vector that had them closing in from just about everywhere in front of them. The IFF library tagged them as Sickle class fighters, not quite top of the line like his baby, but they packed a mean punch above the usual weight. Not just the usual double bulges under their fuselage, they'd be carrying pulse lasers too. The math said that Normandy could be expecting eighty disruptor torpedoes in less than half a minute, and that same number loaded with plain old explosives once their barriers were down, and of course a lot of fighter class lasers trying to cut his ship up once they got in range. That didn't worry Joker very much, their tactics were bog standard, and eighty to one odds of jinky, but downright dumb, missiles was just warm up practice. Not to mention the fact that Normandy's GARDIAN suite was no slouch either.
Raising a hand, he ticked down the seconds on his finger, and just as the last one closed into a fist, the tactical display lit up with more contacts, tracks indicating that they were indeed the torpedoes he had predicted. "Man did I call it or what?" the pilot muttered to himself, arming the GARDIAN system and preparing to let the laser system fly, "these guys are using tactics so old school you can see it from light years away-"
Joker trailed off as eighty tracks on the display suddenly split and quadrupled in number, accelerating to speeds a conventional disruptor torpedo wouldn't have been able to match. Instead of the leisurely original thirty seconds, they had about two thirds that before impact. The pilot rubbed his stubble covered chin with a free hand as he stared at the now very crowded display.
"Oh-kay... that's new."
**********
**********
Chapter 09: Detention
"Got a minute Shepard?"
All things considered, between standing in the command deck hallways waiting for something to happen and staring at the airlock door, it was an academic question. They had nothing but minutes, but the former C-Sec investigator had a habit of prefacing his real questions behind meaningless small talk like that. On the other side of the hallway, Shepard didn't say anything, but the commander bodded his sensor pod as a means of reply. The turian suppressed an involuntary shudder. The nod was a gesture of assent common to most species, and he knew it was the same Shepard inside, but seeing a mech do it felt distinctly unnatural. The airlock access between the helm and the rest of the command deck was far enough that nobody could have heard them over the hubbub of activity, but he lowered his voice all the same.
"Ever get the feeling that we're, I don't know, that we're not really making the best use of our time?"
If asked, he'd admit straight away that this wasn't the best place to start this sort of conversation with the commander, or if there ever was a good one since they had started on this near insane mission. Secrecy didn't mean much on a thoroughly bugged Cerberus ship like this, but the crew weren't close enough to listen in, and the krogan standing watch on the far side discouraged passerby. And when you were up against the Collectors, with all those myths and half legends about them having enough backing to be taken seriously, there was no time like the present to ask.
"CLARIFY"
"I know we're running a little short on combat effectives to take on the Collectors-"
"A LITTLE" the commander interjected, getting a brief chuckle out of Garrus.
"Ahh, we don't really need a lot of people to take on the Collectors anyway. Just the two of us should be more than enough to finish the job before breakfast right?" The amusement didn't last for very long, and Garrus quickly sobered up a moment later. "Seriously Shepard, I know the Collectors are bad news and we need all the help we can get to fight them, but shouldn't we be focusing on tracking them down instead of trying to pick up some kind of unstable biotic?"
"NOT ENOUGH CLUES TO CREATE A PATTERN. RANDOM SEARCHING WOULD NOT FIND THEM. WE BUILD A WORKING TEAM AND WAIT FOR AN OPENING" That sensor pod shifted, giving Garrus the distinct feeling that the commander was thinking hard. "I DO NOT LIKE IT"
"Yeah, the waiting is the hardest... oh?" Letting his voice trail off as the implications of what the commander had said hit him. Like a really good serial killer, the Collectors had left too few clues to find a motive or pattern, other than a tendency to pick off human colonies. You didn't catch perpetrators like these by running around looking for anyone who might be suspicious, it only put them on their guard. Playing it smart meant staying low with eyes open waiting for them to show up so you could bust them. It was the calm and collected thing to do, but it had nicked a little harder on his conscience each time the former C-Sec investigator ran across a body they were too late to save. Playing with entire colonies this way, Garrus would have been sick to his gut knowing he couldn't do anything until the Collectors struck, but what about the Commander? Would it stick in his conscience the same way it would have years ago when he was still an Alliance marine, or did coming back like this change the human he'd been, more willing to sacrifice the innocent for the objective? No matter how often he told himself it was the same Shepard underneath that mechanized shell, the same human who never compromised on his principles, he only had to look at the Cerberus logo stamped on this ship for the doubts to niggle away at him. Especially whenever he thought about what they were about to do.
"IT IS THE BIOTIC YOU ARE CONCERNED ABOUT"
Garrus grunted as if he'd been punched, rebuking himself for forgetting that out of all the things Shepard wasn't any more, unobservant wasn't one of them. He waved a hand by way of explanation, "come on Shepard, you know who I used to be and what makes me tick. I left C-Sec because the bureaucracy kept letting low lives get away with their crimes. Coming to Omega was the only way I could have made a difference without being tied down by the red tape, but I always did what was right. And now we're going to help a mass murdering biotic walk free? I can see the merits of people working off their crimes Shepard, but this is even if it this could turn into a suicide job, it's a lot to ask me to accept."
"WILL IT BE A PROBLEM"
The turian gave a brief shake of his head in resignation. "No, as much as I don't like it, the Collectors really are the bigger problem and we need all the help we can get. It twists my guts to admit it, but if you can get Jack to cooperate, I won't make it an issue."
Lifting an arm, the commander placed the weapon sheaths on Garrus's shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie, though the sudden weight nearly forced him to his knees before Shepard quickly drew the limb back.
"SORRY STILL GETTING USED TO DELICATE MOTIONS" Shepard rumbled by way of apology before continuing, "MAYBE IF WE ARE FORTUNATE JACK WILL NOT BE COOPERATIVE"
The chuckle that came out of Garrus's mandibles was genuinely amused, the previously grim mood abating as he tossed his head in the direction of Grunt who was just making his way up to the airlock, Zaeed following closely behind. Both members of the ground team were in full environmental kit, helmets on and normally exposed joints sealed against anything from gas attacks to hard vacuum. "I kind of doubt that commander, especially since you managed charm your krogan friend into accepting you as battlemaster after all. Though I wouldn't mind if you made less of an effort in recruiting this one," he added in a conspirational tone, eliciting a brief nod of the sensor pod from Shepard.
"On the other hand, it could be the warden who ends up uncooperative," he gestured with the carbine in his other hand, one reminder of the contingency they had planned for. Though his preferred sniper rifle still hung on his back on it's magnetic locks, the weapon would see little utility in the likely cramped quarters of the prison ship, not that it would impede him much if it became necessary. A mandible twitched irritably. The only reason why they had this contingency was on the chance that the warden would hope to collect twice by double crossing them, which had it's own set of moral implications that clashed with what Garrus had always held as right and true.
"IT WAS SIMPLER IN THE OLD DAYS"
Garrus chuckled at the truth in that statement, but said nothing as Grunt and Zaeed finally joined their little gathering, the former giving him a curious look while the latter simply leaned against the bulkhead with a patient expression. He didn't bother explaining, suspecting neither would really understand, or care. It had been simpler then, with just their wits and whoever had thrown their lot in with the Normandy against an omnicidal race of machines and their turian puppet, clean and to the point morality he had no qualms about. Oh, there had been grey areas before, choices on whether to spare a monster or give them a choice, back door dealings with corporate power brokers for an edge, but nothing like what they were doing now. Those days were gone forever he feared, much like Shepard's flesh and blood body. Dealing with a corrupt slave trader, the warden was selling prisoners to the highest bidder it seemed, in order to free a biotic with over a hundred charges of murder. He shook his head. Just so they could improve their chances, they were dealing with people that should have been shot at first opportunity, that seemed to the be norm now. "Well, let's just hope that-"
He was interrupted by an electronic warning tone and the sardonic voice of the ship's pilot, "Sorry to interrupt you guys waxing about the good old days, but I'm picking up a lot of activity coming to our front door and couple of spacewalkers, and I don't think it's the welcome wagon."
There was a faint hum of electronics as Zaeed and Grunt unpacked their weapons, accelerator rails extending to their full length with the promise of pain to anyone on the wrong side. The krogan, he noted, was grinning excitedly, while the mercenary looked as bored as he had been earlier. Garrus shared a quick look with Shepard, the commander only shaking the sensor pod in that close-but-not-quite-alive way.
"THIS PART HOWEVER IS STILL THE SAME"
Garrus chuckled, and raised his rifle by way of reply, feeling the increasing pace of his heart in anticipation of the upcoming events. This was familiar, the build up of expectant action, knowing full well the next few moments would decide whether you lived or died trying to make that difference in the status quo. Their goals were noble, the means... he couldn't accept, but understood the need. That was his difference, the line he would not cross, one he hoped Shepard would never do. With a practised motion, he jammed his helmet on with a hiss of pressure seals.
"You're right Shepard, let's hope it never changes."
**********
It is said that there is no stealth in space. Engineers and physicists will tell you that any artificial object, any living thing, would be detectable by even the most rudimentary of sensors that any spacefaring ship or planetary astronomical observation grid can pick up. And for the most part, they are right. Embedded thermal sinks, cold gas thrusters, even plain old radar and LIDAR absorbent plating don't make you invisible, only less detectable to any potentially hostile sensor net. Anyone could look out the window, and if your eyes were good enough, see anything attempting to hide. Not that many did with the paltry capabilities of organic vision compared to artificial ship mounted ones. Sergeant Caska was counting on the fact as the nondescript maintenance hatch noiselessly opened in the vacuum of space. Using hand signals, made sluggish by the weight of his powered down armoured suit, he motioned for the rest of his team to join him on the Purgatory's exterior, just under the airlock bay where their prize awaited. Not waiting for their silent acknowledgement, he reached for a handgrip sunken into the hull and pulled himself out with a tug.
The batarian let out an impressed whistle as he cleared the portal, the sound audible only in the pressurized spaces of his sealed combat helmet. He was not the sort to be awed or taken in by flashy and powerful ships, save only in how they affected his own mission if he ever had to lead a raid on them, but the frigate sidled up to the Purgatory projected an aura of grace and power with it's smooth lines that he could not deny. The warden had been right, this would be worth double crossing a client once they claimed it for their own, assuming they didn't damage it too much in the process, which was going to be a challenge. There was no crew manifest to look over of course, but the ship was large for it's class in his estimate, large enough to have an on board security detail that could consist of anything from nothing at all to a full squad of marines fitted with heavy power armour and high end weapons supported with heavy mechs. Given that the client was expecting Jack of all the prisoners to be transferred on board, Caska had placed his estimations on the generous side.
Nineteen other Blue Suns followed him out into space, gripping handholds and pulling themselves along as they crawled across the hull of Purgatory, resisting the urge to look anywhere and succumb to the zero-g, zero-reference, panic inherent in all species. That would have killed them as surely as a bullet in the head. There were no tether lines, and no extravehicular packs mounted on their armour, not even a bottle of emergency cold gas to redirect their motion, using any of those would have broken their cover too early. If someone lost their grip and could not recover quickly enough, not only would it raise their chances of detection, it would mean death by asphyxiation when the ten minutes worth of air in the suits ran out. But no one complained or backed out when he had told them about their insertion method. Caska had done a lot of risky things that had earned him his rank, and he looked out for his subordinates, something that went completely against his species reputation. If Caska led from the front, his men would trust him to make this work.
They moved in silence without a wasted motion, each action deliberate and efficient as they pushed themselves across the intervening space of the docking gate, searching for the maintenance hatches their earlier scans had provided. Sealed in the highly personal world of his suit, Caska counted out the ticks of the mechanical timepiece strapped to his wrist, calculating how much more time they had left to make their move. Theirs was the second half of the entire operation, the first being a boarding attempt. While they had gone into the vacuum, another team would soon attempt to force their way in through the airlocks and distract the security forces on board. Their job was to get in through the cargo bay and disable the distress beacons and engines before anyone could think of escaping. Too early, and they would tip off their hand, too late and they would not only lose the advantage of surprise, they would be out of air. The Blue Suns sergeant however, was not overly concerned about that. His men were a known factor, but the ship, despite everything they had done to minimize possible risks, wasn't.
Starship's, as a rule, did not carry anything less than weapons designed to hit other starships, fighters or planets, but the GARDIAN missile defence system with it's precision high powered lasers would cut through body armour just fine. Sensors hadn't picked them up, but there was no question that they were there, all warships had them. Moving from the sheltering bulk of Purgatory and crossing the last intervening space would put them in full view of any defence systems it had, with nothing to protect them but their lack of power signatures to draw unwelcome attention. He waited on the lip of the airlock bridge, counting out the seconds of the timepiece, and feeling his entire body tense as the final hand approached the marking point. Behind him, the rest of the team did the same, making their own preparations for the deciding moment. The hand struck zero, and Caska pulled himself over the edge.
And nothing happened.
No ruby red beams of energy lanced out from the ship, nothing boiled away at his thin skinned armour to roast him alive. He let out a breath of relief even as his arms worked quickly, aligning himself against the hull of Purgatory and coiling his legs under him. With a kick of his legs, he launched himself off Purgatory, closing the distance to the frigate on inertia alone in the space of seconds. A sharp jerk of his torso rotated him in the weightless environment, aligning his feet with the hull of the frigate as the distance between the two rapidly closed. He mentally counted off the seconds to landing, allowing himself a moment of exultation as the soft soled boots of him and his team entered inside the safe radius, too close to be detected by external sensors, or hit with anything the ship carried now.
He was right, but he was also wrong.
The first sign that something had gone wrong was when the ship broke free from the airlock bridge in a sudden noiseless eruption of explosive decompression. Only one of the team saw it, lifting an arm in alarm to call the attention of the others. And then Caska saw it, a moment of dread starting to filter into his consciousness as the ship moved underneath him before his magnetic locks could engage, the hull moved and rotated. The last thing he saw was the stylized white lettering 'SR-2 NORMANDY' rapidly filling up his entire view. And then he never saw another thing ever again.
**********
Two minutes ago
Ambushes and double crosses are very contingent acts that share more than a few things in common. Both allow a much weaker party to turn the tables on the stronger, while frequently getting back much more than they invested in the effort. But they also share the same core weaknesses. One particular case for example, is that the success of the plan often hinges on the would-be victim never seeing it coming, or if they did, it would be too late to do anything about it. That did not apply here.
Shepard had seen it coming literally light years away, and had made good on his preparations with Miranda's cooperation. Not willing to tip their hand to the warden early, especially if the commander's suspicions had proven unnecessary, the Cerberus operative had acquired the schematics for a new sensor array best suited for the job. Originally built to supplement topographical planetary surveys in a timely manner, the Argus satellite array had been re-purposed to serve a far more militaristic purpose as an additional set of eyes to the Normandy's already comprehensive sensor suite.
Barely the size of a human thumb, the micro satellites serenely orbited their parent frigate. Disguised as the usual space debris of ejected garbage, sweeping the Purgatory with miniature optical apertures and guided on their paths by seemingly normal bleed off from the ship's artificial gravity systems, the surveillance systems tracked every inch of the prison vessel. Individually, the resolution from each drone's cameras would be poor, only just able to resolve a human sized face at a hundred meters. But the hundreds that floated in cold vacuum painted together a picture of the prison ship far superior to even the frigate's advanced internal sensors. When the minute maintenance hatch had popped, the Argus system had seen it. When the teams had begun their slow exit into cold space, Normandy's AI had known, relaying their positions to all members of the ground team.
When they had waited for their distraction team to play its part, Shepard was already in motion.
Hidden inside the ship, secure in the knowledge that they would not be detected, the distraction team had left their eezo cores running, bullet stopping kinetic barriers powered and on standby. It didn't save them. Cutting edge gravimetric sensors had already detected the micro gravity distortions caused by the exotic element in their suits, even through the background wash of the both ship's eezo cores. Their positions and movements were already being fed into the encrypted tactical network the commander shared with the rest of his team even as the Blue Suns flooded into the terminal gate. The two prison guards who crouched by the exterior airlock with cutting charges, hiding beneath the shroud of a tactical cloak to fool optical sensors, worked quickly but confidently, unaware that they were already being tracked.
Not until the airlock door unexpectedly hissed open.
There wasn't even time to blink.
A storm of red hot death roared as the doors slid open, scything down the cloaked guards in a single instant of unrelenting fury, their kinetic barriers flaring into existence before splintering underneath the concentrated firepower of Shepard's fireteam. The other members of the boarding party scrabbled away from the deathtrap of the airlock corridor, chased by the storm of deadly metal and a toroidal metal object that bounced once on Purgatory's deck. It's ballistic arc terminated a dozen meters away from where it had been thrown, vanishing in a brilliant flash of radiation and sound that blinded eyes, unshielded sensors and ears with equal ferocity.
The mechanical shutters that had closed over Shepard's optics at the last instant had only begun to raise, but the krogan was already through the window of their slackening fire. Roaring a war cry as he brought up the shotgun to bear on a blinded mercenary, the krogan fired a fistful of micro pellets that shredded the man's failing kinetic barriers. Disdaining the use of his weapon on his reeling opponent, Grunt smashed his head into the stumbling guard, the crack of the crumpling helmet and skull loud even over the echoes of the shotgun. Quieter but no less deadly, Zaeed sprinted from behind, smoothly smashing the butt of his rifle into the face of a mercenary fumbling for the grenade pinned to his chest before slamming the weapon through the opening under the chin with the crack of cartilage snapping.
Stamping behind with a deceptively sedate pace, Shepard cleared through the airlock, his autocannon sweeping from side to side as it tracked the power signatures his sensors were feeding him, wordless orders transmitted to his team through the tactical network as he prioritized targets. To his left, a missile team found themselves on the receiving end of Zaeed's incendiary grenade, turning them into screaming torches before they could even get a shot off. Beside them, a squad with a grenade launcher withered beneath the angry roar of Shepard's autocannon, the sole survivor diving to grab the dropped weapon when Garrus's carbine chattered, the prison guard's head vanishing in a spray of blood and bone. An alert blared in Shepard's consciousness, warning him of an outgoing transmission attempt. Targeting reticules bracketed the source, a Blue Sun's commander in the back of the terminal marked by the energized armoured plates he wore on his shoulder, already screaming into his helmet microphone.
The grenade launcher on Shepard's shoulder was a throwback to the days pre-dating mass effect technology, using a simple magnetic coil mechanism to accelerate it's payload to it's lethal velocity. But there was nothing primitive about the load sitting in it's firing chamber. Accelerating to it's high subsonic velocities, the grenade screamed across the intervening space between Shepard and the mercenary commander in less than a second. Blue white light flared as the powered armour's computer registered the threat, kinetic barriers flaring into existence to stop the projectile. There was a metallic 'crunk', distinct even in the roar of battle, as the grenade squashed it's head against the unyielding barrier of solidified air, triggering the arming mechanism and subjecting a milligramme of element zero to a powerful negative electrical charge.
The laws of physics in a five meter radius were rewritten for an instant in a blast of dark energy, kinetic barriers losing their potency as gravitationally solidified air lost it's consistency. The second charge fired, channelling the power of fifty grammes of military grade explosives into a liner plate, the blast liquefying and accelerating a hypersonic bolt of molten uranium-titanium alloy through the breach in the kinetic barriers and into the batarian's chest. Nano-woven armour plate designed to stop small arms fire and dissipate hundreds of degrees of heat failed under the combined assault of kinetic and thermal energy, jetting away in puffs of ferrous vapour as the bolt bored through the underlying ballistic mesh with contemptuous ease. The liquid projectile erupted through the back of the batarian's torso, spraying charred viscera and molten armour plate as the entire back and spine were torn away in a steaming cloud of boiling blood, white hot fragments battering the barriers of his bodyguards and sending the disembodied head spinning into the air trailing smoke as it's torso-less limbs fell apart in a burning clatter.
The Blue Suns counter-attack momentarily trailed off, those who were still standing frozen at the sight of their commander's steaming remains. Shepard's team had no such compunctions. Another Blue Sun prison guard went down to fire from Garrus's carbine, rapid fire bursts shattering barriers and armour to tear at soft flesh underneath while another literally disintegrated from a point blank discharge of Grunt's massive shotgun. The Blue Suns snapped out of their temporary paralysis, opening fire with the ferocity borne of desperation, but more than half the Suns down and their reduced firepower was starting to show. Shepard began to stride into the thickest cluster of their defences, accepting the fusillade of shots that rammed into his unyielding kinetic barriers as he raised his autocannon to reply in kind.
A threat alert blared in his consciousness, instantly warning him of a targeting laser illuminating his bulk. High speed servos slewed his sensor pod to the left, spotting a trio of guards with unfamiliar, boxy weapons in their arms, the business ends glowing with a brilliant blue aura. Something screamed inside of him, instinct and experience bundled together shouting a warning.
"NOW JOKER. N-"
Three bolts of lightning arced into the air, effortlessly shearing through kinetic barriers with to strike with a crack of immense power. Armour plate burned and blackened where the lightning struck, but the true damage was transmitted deep within the mass of electronics that comprised his body. Emergency cutoffs and failsafes burned themselves out in the engineered bid to prevent catastrophic damage, but many other parts failed completely, systems shorting out as they were overloaded by voltages that they were never built to handle. Powered limbs quivered under a chaotic stream of corrupted commands, sight and sensor readouts instantly vanished in a hail of intermittent static as electricity arced and danced across his body.
In a single moment of sight, he watched in horror as the same lightning wreathing his body lancing out to strike at Garrus, the turian stiffening where he stood under the electrical assault before collapsing, his forward momentum sending him down in a tangle of twitching limbs. Auditory sensors picked up the sounds of Zaeed turning the air blue with curses, his rifle chattering away before another whipcrack of artificial lightning brought him down with a yell. Something in Shepard's knee actuator gave, corrupted data streams crashing their error checking systems and causing them to fall to his knees. A ragged cheer went up among the Blue Suns, not seeing the weapon arm slew jerkily to face the trio. The mental command to fire failed to reach it's goal, almost. With an angry roar, the autocannon concealed in his arm sprayed the team with their lightning weapons, but the aim was off, clipping the kinetic barriers on one of the guards before his control over the weapon died in a shower of system errors. The emotionless voice of the onboard VI intoned the status of secondary systems, counting down the seconds but the Sun's weapons had began glowing again, charging for another strike. For the first time in a very long time, Shepard felt the taste of desperation permeating his consciousness.
With an ear splitting shriek of tortured metal, the airlock gate behind them sheared free of the superstructure, torn away from it's mountings as the Normandy departed on his desperate orders. The local atmosphere screamed through the gaping hole in the ship, pulling the Blue Suns off their feet in a hurricane of howling air. The heavy weapons squad stumbled, their aim thrown off by the sudden panic of explosive decompression despite their sealed suits. Bellowing defiance amidst the maelstrom of evacuating air, Grunt bounded ahead of the stricken commander on magnetic boots, disintegrating one of the trio's kinetic barriers with the roar of his shotgun. The three recovered quickly, turning their weapons on him and wreathing the krogan in a storm of lightning mid-charge. Even in his state, the commander could not help but feel a brief moment of vicious glee, comprehending the real nature of the weapons, and what they would, or wouldn't, do to a krogan's physiology.
Grunt didn't even slow down.
"I!"
Trailing wreathes of arcing electricity, the bellow terminated as Grunt bodily smashed into the trio with outflung arms, pained screams from three throats filling the air as the deadly, incapacitating energies conducted through their suits, electrocuting them with their own weapons.
"AM!"
A powerful krogan fist mercilessly pummelled the tangled bodies, crushing trigger hands into red ruin and knocking a man down with a hammer blow punch. He didn't even have time to struggle before Grunt drove his massive foot into the man's chest with the crack of crumpling armour plate. Driving his shotgun downwards, the resulting blast took a man's leg off at the thigh, the windmilling guard stumbling backwards only long enough for Grunt to grab the sparking chestplate and deliver a headbutt that snapped the guard's head at an unnatural angle. Another Blue Suns guard attempted to blindside the krogan with a shotgun, only to be stretched out on the floor by Shepard's autocannon, secondary systems rebooting and restoring weapon functionality.
"KROGAN!"
The last surviving guard threw down his gun and tried to flee, but Grunt snapped forward, grabbing the man by his leg. With a sharp jerk, Grunt pulled the man off his feet and began swinging him around like a ragged doll, the captive Sun's shrill screams fading in the rapidly dissipating atmosphere before the krogan let go. The armoured guard went sailing out the tear in the airlock, limbs flailing wildly as he exited the local gravitational field and shrank into the void. Shepard watched the guard dwindle into nothingness as his systems completed their reboot phase, rising to his feet as the others of his squad picked themselves off the ground, still feeling the effects of their sudden electrocution. Knowing personally what it was going to be like, Shepard felt a pang of sympathy for the doomed guard's fate.
Almost.
**********
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now going to zero-g and conducting evasive manoeuvres, kindly return your trays to the upright position, buckle your seatbelts and hang on to your lives!"
It wasn't the most auspicious of take off messages the pilot could have given, but it did get the results he was hoping to get when he disabled the Normandy's artificial gravity. Not that there would have been time to worry about slackers with Shepard's urgent command still hanging in the air. There was the familiar lurch of his stomach in the sudden free fall as gravity went to zero, but no one panicked or yelled in surprise and everyone on the command deck secured in their stations, so that was a plus. He sincerely hoped that everyone was strapped in though, because what came next was not going to be enjoyable to anyone in free fall once the thrusters hit. Becoming a two hundred pound missile in a room full of hard surfaces and sharp edges would ruin anyone's day. Fingers dancing across the holographic haptic displays, he sealed the primary airlocks and fired up the starboard yaw thrusters. The Normandy groaned underneath him at the first roar of thrusters, but a moment later she pulled through just fine, breaking free of that prison ship and it's airlocks in the wash of escaping atmosphere from the tear she left in it. Shepard was inside, but there weren't any worries about spacing the commander this time. This had been planned for, and the pilot had more things to worry about right now than the immediate predicament of his commander.
"Bugs on my windscreen" he hummed, naming the first order of business he'd have to deal with, simultaneously executing a full 360 roll with another pulse on the Normandy's thruster array. She rolled a little heavy, probably from still having bits of the Purgatory airlock stuck to her, but that was something the normally perfectionist pilot couldn't deal with now. Even through the thick armour, numerous thumps and cracks of something impacting the hull managed to permeate into the command deck, though nothing that worried the Cerberus pilot very much, at least about the ship's integrity. The would-be hijackers however, were probably having a very bad day as Joker's frigate sized boot greased the lot of them against it's hull. The contacts on his tac-screen vanished, or went very far away at very fast speeds as Normandy completed it's barrel roll, and Joker chuckled. "Bug-be-gone, good thing Gardner's the ja-whooaaah!"
Joker had all half of a second to respond to the sudden threat alert that blossomed on the tac-screen, a thermal build up that was anything but thruster emissions. A competent Alliance pilot would have taken a fraction of a second to register the threat, another fraction to formulate the appropriate response. Joker was no mere competent pilot. He skipped the second half, stabbing down on a control that burned more anti-matter reaction mass, sending the Normandy into a corkscrewing dive, and not a moment too soon. An intense blast of focused infrared energy seared the intervening space between Purgatory and the Normandy, only the last instant manoeuvre turning a strike that would have speared the Normandy's primary thrusters into a glancing hit that burned a shallow line on it's armour. Normandy had been built strong, her multi-layered ablative armour plating rated to weather dozens of GARDIAN strikes on any point before failing, but it was not a guarantee that Joker wanted to test. Besides, he had his pride as the best pilot there ever was.
More threat alerts popped up on his screen, and the pilot punched the Normandy's engines to full bore, powering through evasive manoeuvres that were half instinct and all Joker, minimising the impact of the laser strikes by keeping the ship constantly rotating against the Purgatory's GARDIAN batteries. Flashing his hands across the numerous control interfaces, he managed to find the spare concentration to dart an eye to the terminal beside him, feeling justifiably annoyed at how things were turning out. Another beam of energy lanced out from the Purgatory's GARDIAN defences, scoring a long line on the port hanger deck that boiled away paint and scorched refractive armour layers meant to withstand just such an assault. "EDI, I thought you were jamming their targeting sensors!"
The AI's holographic globe popped into existence above the terminal, replying in that oh-so-calm voice that grated on Joker.
"I am currently employing all of the Normandy's electronic countermeasures to maximum effect Mr Moreau." Joker didn't sneer at the intelligence's defence, because he was too busy avoiding ploughing into one of the extended prison blocks of Purgatory in the midst of it's active GARDIAN defenses. "However, our close proximity to Purgatory is reducing the effects of our jamming systems and does not prevent optical tracking from being employed in place of compromised sensor systems. I suggest we increase the distance between both vessels if we are to avoid taking further damage."
"They're eyeballing it? And I thought I was the only one with the ship full of crazy." The sarcastic comment however, did not stop Joker from taking the AI's advice, redundant since they were already heading away as fast as their sublight drives could push them, to heart. Another pulse of energized radiation burned it's way across the hull as Joker pulled the ship into a drunken corkscrew, arcing away at a shallow dive that put them beneath the Purgatory and out of sight from most of the weapon's arc, but not all. Their departure was still chased by several more spears of focused infrared energy, but they were fewer than before and spinning hull of Normandy prevented the impacts from doing more than scorching the hull metal. Even that didn't last long, as the impacts grew less and less accurate as Normandy continued to put distance between it and the Purgatory until the shots were missing completely. When the third consecutive shot missed, Joker let out a sigh of relief he'd been holding in. Outside of eyeballing range, they'd have to rely on sensors to hit reliably, something any Alliance pilot worth his license could avoid. Joker could do this in his sleep. Of course the fact that they were outside of the effective range didn't hurt either.
Not that they were out of the woods yet.
"I am detecting increased broad spectrum sensor tracks from the external perimeter Mr Moreau. Telemetry suggests Purgatory's fighter escorts have begun their attack run."
Joker spared a split second to shoot the artificial intelligence an irritated look. "I can read a tactical display just fine mom, sheesh."
They were lighting up the edges of the tactical net like a swarm of insects, taking an approach vector that had them closing in from just about everywhere in front of them. The IFF library tagged them as Sickle class fighters, not quite top of the line like his baby, but they packed a mean punch above the usual weight. Not just the usual double bulges under their fuselage, they'd be carrying pulse lasers too. The math said that Normandy could be expecting eighty disruptor torpedoes in less than half a minute, and that same number loaded with plain old explosives once their barriers were down, and of course a lot of fighter class lasers trying to cut his ship up once they got in range. That didn't worry Joker very much, their tactics were bog standard, and eighty to one odds of jinky, but downright dumb, missiles was just warm up practice. Not to mention the fact that Normandy's GARDIAN suite was no slouch either.
Raising a hand, he ticked down the seconds on his finger, and just as the last one closed into a fist, the tactical display lit up with more contacts, tracks indicating that they were indeed the torpedoes he had predicted. "Man did I call it or what?" the pilot muttered to himself, arming the GARDIAN system and preparing to let the laser system fly, "these guys are using tactics so old school you can see it from light years away-"
Joker trailed off as eighty tracks on the display suddenly split and quadrupled in number, accelerating to speeds a conventional disruptor torpedo wouldn't have been able to match. Instead of the leisurely original thirty seconds, they had about two thirds that before impact. The pilot rubbed his stubble covered chin with a free hand as he stared at the now very crowded display.
"Oh-kay... that's new."
**********
Sadly, power constraints prevent man portable beam weapons. At least, for Council races. The Collectors on the other hand, don't seem to have that problem. Battlefield salvage anyone?
Hmm, thinking about it, I'm having trouble figuring out how exactly kinetic barriers work by pure gravitic manipulation alone yet capable of presenting a solidified wall of force.
I think I'm going to need a beta reader who's very familiar with Mass Effect. The one I've been relying on has been out of contact all of last month, so it's been hard making much progress without having to go over things to see what I missed. Still, I managed to bang out another update.
**********
Threat detected.
Begin process runtime: Scenario A001
EDI was an artificial intelligence. On the Ventura scale of intelligences, she was classed as a magnitude six, a theoretical level of lateral and parallel intellect that was not possible yet. A fusion of state of the art human and stolen Reaper processing systems had made her existence possible, analogue hardware blocks limited her capabilities and core governing processes built into her runtimes provided the primary impulse for all the decisions she could make. The first governed loyalty to the Illusive Man, the second to Commander Shepard, and the third towards the well being of the Normandy and her crew. The first and second were not in the immediate priority queue, and could not be considered with the abilities present. The third dealt with the immediate threat that was facing the ship, and had priority. The threats were easily detectable, even at their significant distance. Search radars had tracked their metallic frames the moment they had parted from their carrier, and thermal blooms that preceded them were bright stars in a field of cold black, easily visible to the thermo-optic sensors.
The display console on the helm controls lit up with three hundred and twenty pinpricks, each one indicating an active seeker warhead and their estimated time to impact. EDI did not require the visual representation like an organic would, computing the tracks and likely intercept courses from the raw data alone. Sophisticated passive threat detection systems picked up incoming signals, separating tracking radars from the seeker warheads by their high powered rapid output. Normandy's active sensor suite, already at combat setting from the moment they had withdrawn from the Purgatory, flared to their maximum output, filling the void with all manner of high powered radiation, collecting critical data on the approaching threats and instantly boiling the bodily fluids of the sole Blue Sun's mercenary to survive the earlier attempt at shaking off the space borne infiltration.
Estimated time to impact: 0.19.575
Threat identification complete. 320 individual multi-band search radars. Behaviour pattern indicates swarm type missile configuration. Classification: Hornet Swarmer. Estimated total payload at 4.6 times required to breach barriers.
Process 01440: Avoidance Simulation commencing.
Fourteen simultaneous programs began, calculating all the various factors and loading them into the central simulation. Analytical programs ran millions of cycles processing detected sensor emissions from the missiles, comparing them against the library of weapon profiles, searching for weaknesses to exploit. Databanks loaded with the performance projected of jamming and electronic countermeasure suites flared to life computing their effectiveness against hostile seekers. Real time simulations were run on the performance of the Normandy's GARDIAN laser suite, marking probable kills within the limited time frame, and then run again from differing angles of approach. Evasive patterns were loaded, fed into the calculations, and run as a whole, producing terrabytes of simulated data and their results.
Estimated time to impact: 0.19.303
Analysis summary: 56.7% probable hits on incoming tracks, 12.8% avoided. 30.5% probable impacts.
Conclusion: Normandy destroyed.
Had EDI's hardware architecture lacked just one programming block, her process cycles would have locked up at the unsatisfactory projected outcome. Had she been a less advanced an artificial intelligence, she would have run the simulations again, attempting to find the most optimum route despite the unchanging results. But a magnitude six intelligence was not restricted by existing data, or tactical doctrines already experienced. She was able to track multiple parallel processes, not only factoring existing data, but as humans put it, thinking out of the box. New processes were started, directives running through different variables and entirely new lines of countermeasures to employ. System resources used for previous simulations were devoted into creating new simulations not already pre-loaded into the databanks. For the first time since she had been deployed on the Normandy, her electronic warfare systems were tasked to capacity as she began exploring alternative solutions that would ensure the Normandy's signal. Each simulation was tested in real time with brief flares of activity from the active ECM systems built into the Normandy, running through theories and extrapolating results when an alert flag touched upon her systems.
Incoming burst transmission
Channel: Restricted Tactical Net
Origin: Purgatory Station
Authorization: Command Operative 321-ADF-437-S
Priority request Alpha Zero One.
A cycle of processing power went unused as her emotional substrata paused in conflict. The signal originated from Commander Shepard, requesting cycles be directed to overwhelming Purgatory's internal networks. One primary behavioural subroutines demanded that she comply to the highest priority order available. Another directed that preserving the ship and it's mission parameters were of similar priority. Prioritizing Shepard's request as instructed would relocate cyberwarfare resources currently being employed against the incoming missiles, jeopardizing the ship and resulting in mission failure. Delaying Shepard's request could result in compromising their team with the limited data available. Another cycle went by unused before a tertiary module activated, logic cores overriding the conflict with probability estimates.
Commander Shepard's situation was currently unknown, but all team life signs were nominal following the earlier dip during the emergency separation. Probability estimates gave a 60% chance that a slight delay in processing his directive was acceptable until the immediate threat was neutralized. The resources allocation request would be placed in a buffer stack. Preserving Normandy took priority, the Commander was on his own until the immediate threat was neutralized.
Estimated time to impact: 0.17.996
But by her calculations, she had sufficient time.
**********
The trouble with missiles in Joker's grand opinion, was that they were dumb. The manufacturers made a lot of noise about high end sensors, multi-frequency data sharing and really fast thrusters, but nobody paid attention to the smarts that drove it all. Oh sure, they had the whole idiot savant thing going for the good ones, wouldn't be fooled by decoys and were wizards against the usual amount of jamming you could shake at them. But the only thing they ever did was pick the shortest route from point A to B. No imagination, no coordination. So yeah, totally dumb. No matter how many were launched, they wouldn't try to cut you off, herd you where they wanted, none of the standard tricks you taught scrub pilots in Swarming 101. Not that they had a Swarming 101 for their pilots of course, the Alliance may have been filled with blowhard pilots, but their instructors weren't totally dumb. Standard Alliance tactical doctrine for dealing with missile swarms was to back off, let the GARDIAN systems and ECM deal with the threat with a couple more seconds retreating bought you.
Joker was the best pilot who ever lived, but he'd never been one for doctrine when he had genius on his side.
Instead of firing the manoeuvring thrusters to bring the Normandy about, he pointed the ship right into the centre of the incoming swarm. Pressing down on the accelerator pedal with his feet, a design throwback to the 20th century, he felt the steady hum underneath him grow to a much louder thrum as his baby spooled up to full speed. The countdown clock in the sensor panel dropped by a few more seconds, mirrored by an alarmed yell from one of the bridge crew behind him. Joker just kept the accelerator depressed, feeding even more anti-matter fuel into the thrusters. A brief flick of his eyes to an attendant display showed showed the ECM suite already running on maximum power, EDI was apparently earning her keep. In a less demanding situation, and he would have spared the time to roll his eyes. 'Faster than an organic operator' yeah right, as if he couldn't tell just how ineffective jamming would be against that many seeker heads. At least Cerberus had made the right call bringing him in. See if an AI could beat his flawless flying. Flicking the GARDIAN system to manual, he traced a circle of priority targets on the display, waiting for the timer to count down to single digits.
He thumbed the activation button.
It wasn't like the old school videos of how laser weapons worked. No bright spears of light or cheesy sound effects to clutter his tactical display, but they did the job just fine. Twenty contacts vanished from his display in less than a second, and then another fifteen in the next, the number of confirmed kills dwindling as the temperature in their focusing arrays spiked. The next burst, he knew from experience, would be the last before impact. But it was enough. A hole was burned through the swarm of missiles, right in the path of the speeding Normandy. Barely just large enough to fit the frigate through. One chance, and even then there were a half dozen missiles close enough to hit them if they had good enough proximity fuses. Strapped into his seat, face rapt with attention, Joker couldn't help but feel the hammering of his heart as the closing missiles merged into one giant doughnut shaped blob on his display. This was where the flying was the most intense, where he felt most alive.
And he loved every second of it.
Tiny bursts of the lateral thrusters augmented their heading, sliding the Normandy a half degree to port and side slipping the first missile by a dozen meters. The GARDIAN system pulsed once more, cutting a missile in half and detonating it's payload harmlessly away from it's target. Four more to go. Temperature warnings flared a half second after he had predicted, the primary thrusters nearing their maximum design tolerances. He kept it in his head, but continued pouring on the reaction mass. His baby could handle it, just for a little longer. Twisting the yaw pedals with his feet, port and starboard thrusters vectored horizontally in the opposite directions, sending the ship into another spin as a pair of missiles flared into dangerous proximity. Just bit more. Collision alarms hooted, the impact warnings reaching a crescendo as the missiles nearly touched the edges of their kinetic barriers. He reversed the pedal directions, the roar of plasma exhaust abruptly halting their spin with a jarring groan that even the inertial compensator couldn't fully suppress. The missiles couldn't correct their heading in time and streaked on past, just only missing the rear thrusters, payload undetonated. Internal gyroscopes began to correct their spin, VI managed seeker routines calculating the probable location of the Normandy and redirecting the vectored thrust systems, bringing the missiles about to begin the chase anew
Until they entered the superheated exhaust of the Normandy.
GARDIAN rated armour melted like hot wax beneath the incandescent flare of her engines, sublimating instantly into a billowing cloud of white hot metal. The warheads detonated, the blue white aura of dark energy sending ripples that bucked the Normandy's kinetic barriers like a hammerblow but didn't shatter them. And then they were through, the swarm of missiles having missed their mark with more than a few caught in the wave of distorted gravity. Those that were caught were torn apart by the conflicting forces, wildly flying off on remaining inertia and venting fuel, while others sped on, their target lost. Joker felt the grin creep up his face, another successful trick up his sleeve. But they weren't done yet. The missiles that were still active were curving around, beginning the chase anew... he sighed, and there was the second wave of launches from those fighters. Those Blue Suns, really, really didn't like him he decided.
Without warning, the pursuing missiles, even those that had only just been launched, exploded. Clouds of debris and gravitic shockwaves spread through empty space tens of kilometres away from their target, with more than a few of the fighters that launched them caught in the detonations. Joker gaped at the spectacle, quickly forming one explanation to the next before directing a sharp look at the holographic display beside him.
As if the act alone had summoned her, the blue globe of EDI's avatar flashed into existence.
"Did you do that?" Pointing was a useless gesture, but the pilot felt the need to do it anyway, randomly stabbing a finger at the display.
"The missiles were using a linked communications network to share sensor data and guidance instructions Mr Moreau. Breaking the network firewalls and executing self destruct protocols required slightly more time than was initially calculated, but sufficient to end the threat."
All delivered in that matter of fact voice he was starting to hate with a passion. "That's a yes isn't it? Well if it wasn't for my fine piloting, you wouldn't have had the time to do any of those calculations." He bounced back, but it sounded a little hollow even to his ears. She had just made his job a little easier after all. Very, very quietly, and only just to himself, he added "Good job anyway."
"You're welcome Mr Moreau."
Damnit.
**********
Purgatory prison, D block, Security checkpoint.
The multi-warhead grenade bounced once on the floor before shooting up into the air. A micro-charge detonated, sending it's spherical payloads ricocheting across the room in a deadly hail of steel, coring thin metal desks like wet paper. But lethality was not their intended design. Barely a half second after they were scattered, their internal timers went off, flashbangs blazing like tiny novas, filling the entire room with piercing light and sound sharp enough to knock a grown man to the floor. Blue Suns guards poured through the breach in the welded open security door, guns blazing as their helmet mounted sensors fed them targeting data accurate to the millimetre. A heavy came close behind on their heels, distinct from the rest of his squad by the glowing sheathe of reinforced barriers, the ARC Projector in his hands glowing with the hum of barely controlled energies, ready to spit electric death at whatever survived the firestorm.
The air turned dark around him, and suddenly the commander was jerked off the ground by invisible strings. His legs kicked once in surprised weightlessness before a narrow corridor of air warped and twisted, slamming the screaming mercenary into the unyielding deck plates with the crack of pulverizing bones. Another guard fell screaming to the ground, wreathed in hungry flames as an incandescent spray of white hot shrapnel slammed into his chest and ignited. A shotgun roared once in anger, thousands of supersonic micro-pellets shredding the kinetic barriers and piercing where armour lay weakest. Elbows and neck joints spurted blood as flexible ballistic cloth and flesh was ripped through with equal ease. One more was yanked off his feet by a flash of dark blue light, pitching him over a railing where his final shriek was cut short by a wet thud.
That left four more, and this time, they weren't relying on their sensors anymore.
Jacob ducked behind a sparking control console, nearly losing his head to a storm of bullets buzzing past where it'd been a heartbeat ago. He didn't stop to take a breath, kicking out with his feet and launching away from the console as the guard's aim corrected, riddling the console with holes the size of his thumb. A heavy pistol barked twice in rapid succession, and the fire slackened momentarily. Jacob didn't waste a second scrambling behind more solid cover as he ejected the spent heat sink, taking care not to let the white hot chunk of metal touch him. A quick tap slipped out a fresh heat sink from his vest pocket and he slid it in with a practised motion. The last one too, by his mental count, and a still a whole lot of guards left to go through.
Instead of firing the weapon, he tracked the direction of fire from where it was noisiest, and pulled up his arm. A corona of swirling blue light enveloped the limb as he triggered a very specific set of neural synapses with the mnemonic action. Clenching the hand into a fist, he jerked the encased arm forward, and was rewarded with a startled cry from several throats as his guess dumped several hundred newtons of biotic force where it was least wanted. Desks, loose crates and data slates went flying, knocking men off their feet in a storm of debris. On the other side of the room, Miranda nodded appreciatively as she tossed a tech mine into the flurry where it flared into electric life, shorting out kinetic barriers as their generators overloaded and burned out. Jacob rose to his feet, only managing to clip one with an incendiary round before the other three sent him scurrying back into cover with a snarl of automatic fire.
Even though he knew it was a futile effort, he spent a heartbeat checking the communications bead in his ear for any of the others. The spiteful static of jamming answered his ping request, they were in too deep for anything but short range communications. They were lightly armed, low on munitions, outnumbered in a ship full of heavily armed thugs and an inmate populace filled to the brim with the galaxy's worst killers. Any back up they could hope for was either out of touch, dealing with their own problems, or just not there.
All things considered, things seemed to be working out pretty well.
He knew he should be keeping his mind on the fight, but it kept drifting back to the way the commander had predicted this, more or less. It kept nagging at him even as he vaulted out of cover, taking the distraction of Miranda's pistol to advance, firing a round that ripped through depleted shields and body armour in the space of a second. He was already diving behind fresh cover when his target hit the ground.
He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself. He'd been inured to double crosses and backstabbing in his tenure with the Corsairs, long before he got involved with Cerberus internal politics. But he'd gotten the same briefings that Miranda had. Calling Kurill a scumbag would be an insult to scumbags all across the Terminus systems. The warden had successfully extorted hundreds of colonized star systems, including human ones, with his dangerous payload. The only difference between the turian and a pirate slaver was that his extortion racket was either legal by Citadel law, making him immune to any law enforcement unit. Even the sale of prisoners to people wanting vengeance appeared to sit in that grey area the Council didn't acknowledge, and he'd been too smart to make any slip ups to draw attention. And there was the fact that he never sold out a client. That reputation had been why they'd been so sure the exchange would go without a hitch. As far as Kurill was concerned, this would be just another transaction to him. Selling them out now wouldn't have made sense. Even if he pulled it off it, word would get around, it would have killed his business for good.
The commander had been insistent however, leaving Jacob wondering if the man in the cyborg shell was getting a little paranoid. Miranda did more than a little wondering even as she helped formulate their plan.
"I guess the commander was right after all." The sub-vocalized words on his communicator brought Miranda's deceptively nonchalant face around to him. The Cerberus lead was backed up against a bulkhead, calmly programming another tech mine as bullets sparked off the abused metal. For a moment her eyes flashed with a glint of anger, but then it was gone, replaced by a faint twist of the lips he'd come to recognize as close to a rueful expression as she'd ever had.
"I suppose he was Jacob."
The rueful look evaporated, to be replaced by one of minor irritation. She leapt out of cover, catching a guard in the face with the armed tech mine before man and smart weapon vanished in a hail of arcing electricity. Jacob followed up on her move with another blast of his shotgun, setting the man alight. From the corner of his eye, he noted that her face still carried that vexed look. Whatever was eating at her, it wasn't affecting her aim. Another mercenary collapsed, bleeding copiously from a neat hole in his neck courtesy of her heavy pistol. Sliding back behind cover, Jacob made an educated guess.
"Oh come on Miri, this kind of double cross is an amateur's mistake. Kurill's always been too smart to make a grab like this."
Instead of replying, a corona of blue fire surrounded Miranda's form, an answering flash of light enveloping the last Blue Sun. There was a strangled cry as he took off like a rocket, stopping only when his head connected with the bulkhead with a wet crunch. When the body hit the floor with a clatter, quiet overtook the security room. Jacob pinged his suit scanners in the sudden quiet- a few ghost signals turned up too far away to be of any concern, but of the eight man breaching team sent to deal with them, there was no activity.
Miranda popped the white hot heat sink of her pistol with a flick of her wrist, sighing as she did so.
"That's just the problem Jacob." She looked like she was about to elaborate on the point but then fell silent without explanation.
Jacob shook his head, figuring out just exactly what was eating away at her. He didn't have the kind of briefings she did, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that along with getting Shepard to cooperate wholeheartedly with Cerberus, Miranda was trying to figure out what made him tick. First it was Wilson, and now the commander had seen a trap she'd dismissed as unlikely. For someone who made an issue about her gene crafted supposed perfection, missing something the commander had spotted must have been a sharp kick to her pride.
"You're not jealous are you?"
The sharp look was back in a flash. "Oh don't be ridiculous Jacob. I admit that the commander managed to catch Kurill's trap better than I did, but I am most certainly not jealous. Let's just focus on the mission shall we?"
Which amounted to little more than sitting tight until EDI managed to take over the Purgatory's internal systems, putting them firmly in control of the situation. Under normal circumstances. Jacob did a little mental calculation. It hadn't been very long since he'd activated the emergency transponder and gotten a positive response to it. So with a little luck, the commander and the rest of the incursion team would already be on board and making their way to the bridge while Moreau dealt with the fighter escorts. Between the commander, Garrus Valkarian, Zaeed Massani and their new hulking krogan friend (he still wasn't sure about the friend part), he doubted they'd have much trouble paving the way for EDI to do her job once the jamming systems were killed. If they had the time.
The thing was, no one was sure they had enough of it.
If Kurill was willing to double cross them, he was either getting desperate or dumb. Whichever was the case, both opened a lot of options to the warden. The Purgatory's current orbit prevented her from going anywhere fast, but if things were turning out too badly, the warden could try shaking off the Normandy with an emergency jump to FTL. Or he could just bring the ship down into the nearby gas giant. But if he cut his losses and ran off with Jack, they were sunk no matter what the outcome of the fight. Not an attractive prospect. If they couldn't contact the commander six minutes after hitting the panic button, plan B was to secure Jack and get out no matter what.
It'd been seven minutes now, and only static answered his communications gear.
**********
**********
Threat detected.
Begin process runtime: Scenario A001
EDI was an artificial intelligence. On the Ventura scale of intelligences, she was classed as a magnitude six, a theoretical level of lateral and parallel intellect that was not possible yet. A fusion of state of the art human and stolen Reaper processing systems had made her existence possible, analogue hardware blocks limited her capabilities and core governing processes built into her runtimes provided the primary impulse for all the decisions she could make. The first governed loyalty to the Illusive Man, the second to Commander Shepard, and the third towards the well being of the Normandy and her crew. The first and second were not in the immediate priority queue, and could not be considered with the abilities present. The third dealt with the immediate threat that was facing the ship, and had priority. The threats were easily detectable, even at their significant distance. Search radars had tracked their metallic frames the moment they had parted from their carrier, and thermal blooms that preceded them were bright stars in a field of cold black, easily visible to the thermo-optic sensors.
The display console on the helm controls lit up with three hundred and twenty pinpricks, each one indicating an active seeker warhead and their estimated time to impact. EDI did not require the visual representation like an organic would, computing the tracks and likely intercept courses from the raw data alone. Sophisticated passive threat detection systems picked up incoming signals, separating tracking radars from the seeker warheads by their high powered rapid output. Normandy's active sensor suite, already at combat setting from the moment they had withdrawn from the Purgatory, flared to their maximum output, filling the void with all manner of high powered radiation, collecting critical data on the approaching threats and instantly boiling the bodily fluids of the sole Blue Sun's mercenary to survive the earlier attempt at shaking off the space borne infiltration.
Estimated time to impact: 0.19.575
Threat identification complete. 320 individual multi-band search radars. Behaviour pattern indicates swarm type missile configuration. Classification: Hornet Swarmer. Estimated total payload at 4.6 times required to breach barriers.
Process 01440: Avoidance Simulation commencing.
Fourteen simultaneous programs began, calculating all the various factors and loading them into the central simulation. Analytical programs ran millions of cycles processing detected sensor emissions from the missiles, comparing them against the library of weapon profiles, searching for weaknesses to exploit. Databanks loaded with the performance projected of jamming and electronic countermeasure suites flared to life computing their effectiveness against hostile seekers. Real time simulations were run on the performance of the Normandy's GARDIAN laser suite, marking probable kills within the limited time frame, and then run again from differing angles of approach. Evasive patterns were loaded, fed into the calculations, and run as a whole, producing terrabytes of simulated data and their results.
Estimated time to impact: 0.19.303
Analysis summary: 56.7% probable hits on incoming tracks, 12.8% avoided. 30.5% probable impacts.
Conclusion: Normandy destroyed.
Had EDI's hardware architecture lacked just one programming block, her process cycles would have locked up at the unsatisfactory projected outcome. Had she been a less advanced an artificial intelligence, she would have run the simulations again, attempting to find the most optimum route despite the unchanging results. But a magnitude six intelligence was not restricted by existing data, or tactical doctrines already experienced. She was able to track multiple parallel processes, not only factoring existing data, but as humans put it, thinking out of the box. New processes were started, directives running through different variables and entirely new lines of countermeasures to employ. System resources used for previous simulations were devoted into creating new simulations not already pre-loaded into the databanks. For the first time since she had been deployed on the Normandy, her electronic warfare systems were tasked to capacity as she began exploring alternative solutions that would ensure the Normandy's signal. Each simulation was tested in real time with brief flares of activity from the active ECM systems built into the Normandy, running through theories and extrapolating results when an alert flag touched upon her systems.
Incoming burst transmission
Channel: Restricted Tactical Net
Origin: Purgatory Station
Authorization: Command Operative 321-ADF-437-S
Priority request Alpha Zero One.
A cycle of processing power went unused as her emotional substrata paused in conflict. The signal originated from Commander Shepard, requesting cycles be directed to overwhelming Purgatory's internal networks. One primary behavioural subroutines demanded that she comply to the highest priority order available. Another directed that preserving the ship and it's mission parameters were of similar priority. Prioritizing Shepard's request as instructed would relocate cyberwarfare resources currently being employed against the incoming missiles, jeopardizing the ship and resulting in mission failure. Delaying Shepard's request could result in compromising their team with the limited data available. Another cycle went by unused before a tertiary module activated, logic cores overriding the conflict with probability estimates.
Commander Shepard's situation was currently unknown, but all team life signs were nominal following the earlier dip during the emergency separation. Probability estimates gave a 60% chance that a slight delay in processing his directive was acceptable until the immediate threat was neutralized. The resources allocation request would be placed in a buffer stack. Preserving Normandy took priority, the Commander was on his own until the immediate threat was neutralized.
Estimated time to impact: 0.17.996
But by her calculations, she had sufficient time.
**********
The trouble with missiles in Joker's grand opinion, was that they were dumb. The manufacturers made a lot of noise about high end sensors, multi-frequency data sharing and really fast thrusters, but nobody paid attention to the smarts that drove it all. Oh sure, they had the whole idiot savant thing going for the good ones, wouldn't be fooled by decoys and were wizards against the usual amount of jamming you could shake at them. But the only thing they ever did was pick the shortest route from point A to B. No imagination, no coordination. So yeah, totally dumb. No matter how many were launched, they wouldn't try to cut you off, herd you where they wanted, none of the standard tricks you taught scrub pilots in Swarming 101. Not that they had a Swarming 101 for their pilots of course, the Alliance may have been filled with blowhard pilots, but their instructors weren't totally dumb. Standard Alliance tactical doctrine for dealing with missile swarms was to back off, let the GARDIAN systems and ECM deal with the threat with a couple more seconds retreating bought you.
Joker was the best pilot who ever lived, but he'd never been one for doctrine when he had genius on his side.
Instead of firing the manoeuvring thrusters to bring the Normandy about, he pointed the ship right into the centre of the incoming swarm. Pressing down on the accelerator pedal with his feet, a design throwback to the 20th century, he felt the steady hum underneath him grow to a much louder thrum as his baby spooled up to full speed. The countdown clock in the sensor panel dropped by a few more seconds, mirrored by an alarmed yell from one of the bridge crew behind him. Joker just kept the accelerator depressed, feeding even more anti-matter fuel into the thrusters. A brief flick of his eyes to an attendant display showed showed the ECM suite already running on maximum power, EDI was apparently earning her keep. In a less demanding situation, and he would have spared the time to roll his eyes. 'Faster than an organic operator' yeah right, as if he couldn't tell just how ineffective jamming would be against that many seeker heads. At least Cerberus had made the right call bringing him in. See if an AI could beat his flawless flying. Flicking the GARDIAN system to manual, he traced a circle of priority targets on the display, waiting for the timer to count down to single digits.
He thumbed the activation button.
It wasn't like the old school videos of how laser weapons worked. No bright spears of light or cheesy sound effects to clutter his tactical display, but they did the job just fine. Twenty contacts vanished from his display in less than a second, and then another fifteen in the next, the number of confirmed kills dwindling as the temperature in their focusing arrays spiked. The next burst, he knew from experience, would be the last before impact. But it was enough. A hole was burned through the swarm of missiles, right in the path of the speeding Normandy. Barely just large enough to fit the frigate through. One chance, and even then there were a half dozen missiles close enough to hit them if they had good enough proximity fuses. Strapped into his seat, face rapt with attention, Joker couldn't help but feel the hammering of his heart as the closing missiles merged into one giant doughnut shaped blob on his display. This was where the flying was the most intense, where he felt most alive.
And he loved every second of it.
Tiny bursts of the lateral thrusters augmented their heading, sliding the Normandy a half degree to port and side slipping the first missile by a dozen meters. The GARDIAN system pulsed once more, cutting a missile in half and detonating it's payload harmlessly away from it's target. Four more to go. Temperature warnings flared a half second after he had predicted, the primary thrusters nearing their maximum design tolerances. He kept it in his head, but continued pouring on the reaction mass. His baby could handle it, just for a little longer. Twisting the yaw pedals with his feet, port and starboard thrusters vectored horizontally in the opposite directions, sending the ship into another spin as a pair of missiles flared into dangerous proximity. Just bit more. Collision alarms hooted, the impact warnings reaching a crescendo as the missiles nearly touched the edges of their kinetic barriers. He reversed the pedal directions, the roar of plasma exhaust abruptly halting their spin with a jarring groan that even the inertial compensator couldn't fully suppress. The missiles couldn't correct their heading in time and streaked on past, just only missing the rear thrusters, payload undetonated. Internal gyroscopes began to correct their spin, VI managed seeker routines calculating the probable location of the Normandy and redirecting the vectored thrust systems, bringing the missiles about to begin the chase anew
Until they entered the superheated exhaust of the Normandy.
GARDIAN rated armour melted like hot wax beneath the incandescent flare of her engines, sublimating instantly into a billowing cloud of white hot metal. The warheads detonated, the blue white aura of dark energy sending ripples that bucked the Normandy's kinetic barriers like a hammerblow but didn't shatter them. And then they were through, the swarm of missiles having missed their mark with more than a few caught in the wave of distorted gravity. Those that were caught were torn apart by the conflicting forces, wildly flying off on remaining inertia and venting fuel, while others sped on, their target lost. Joker felt the grin creep up his face, another successful trick up his sleeve. But they weren't done yet. The missiles that were still active were curving around, beginning the chase anew... he sighed, and there was the second wave of launches from those fighters. Those Blue Suns, really, really didn't like him he decided.
Without warning, the pursuing missiles, even those that had only just been launched, exploded. Clouds of debris and gravitic shockwaves spread through empty space tens of kilometres away from their target, with more than a few of the fighters that launched them caught in the detonations. Joker gaped at the spectacle, quickly forming one explanation to the next before directing a sharp look at the holographic display beside him.
As if the act alone had summoned her, the blue globe of EDI's avatar flashed into existence.
"Did you do that?" Pointing was a useless gesture, but the pilot felt the need to do it anyway, randomly stabbing a finger at the display.
"The missiles were using a linked communications network to share sensor data and guidance instructions Mr Moreau. Breaking the network firewalls and executing self destruct protocols required slightly more time than was initially calculated, but sufficient to end the threat."
All delivered in that matter of fact voice he was starting to hate with a passion. "That's a yes isn't it? Well if it wasn't for my fine piloting, you wouldn't have had the time to do any of those calculations." He bounced back, but it sounded a little hollow even to his ears. She had just made his job a little easier after all. Very, very quietly, and only just to himself, he added "Good job anyway."
"You're welcome Mr Moreau."
Damnit.
**********
Purgatory prison, D block, Security checkpoint.
The multi-warhead grenade bounced once on the floor before shooting up into the air. A micro-charge detonated, sending it's spherical payloads ricocheting across the room in a deadly hail of steel, coring thin metal desks like wet paper. But lethality was not their intended design. Barely a half second after they were scattered, their internal timers went off, flashbangs blazing like tiny novas, filling the entire room with piercing light and sound sharp enough to knock a grown man to the floor. Blue Suns guards poured through the breach in the welded open security door, guns blazing as their helmet mounted sensors fed them targeting data accurate to the millimetre. A heavy came close behind on their heels, distinct from the rest of his squad by the glowing sheathe of reinforced barriers, the ARC Projector in his hands glowing with the hum of barely controlled energies, ready to spit electric death at whatever survived the firestorm.
The air turned dark around him, and suddenly the commander was jerked off the ground by invisible strings. His legs kicked once in surprised weightlessness before a narrow corridor of air warped and twisted, slamming the screaming mercenary into the unyielding deck plates with the crack of pulverizing bones. Another guard fell screaming to the ground, wreathed in hungry flames as an incandescent spray of white hot shrapnel slammed into his chest and ignited. A shotgun roared once in anger, thousands of supersonic micro-pellets shredding the kinetic barriers and piercing where armour lay weakest. Elbows and neck joints spurted blood as flexible ballistic cloth and flesh was ripped through with equal ease. One more was yanked off his feet by a flash of dark blue light, pitching him over a railing where his final shriek was cut short by a wet thud.
That left four more, and this time, they weren't relying on their sensors anymore.
Jacob ducked behind a sparking control console, nearly losing his head to a storm of bullets buzzing past where it'd been a heartbeat ago. He didn't stop to take a breath, kicking out with his feet and launching away from the console as the guard's aim corrected, riddling the console with holes the size of his thumb. A heavy pistol barked twice in rapid succession, and the fire slackened momentarily. Jacob didn't waste a second scrambling behind more solid cover as he ejected the spent heat sink, taking care not to let the white hot chunk of metal touch him. A quick tap slipped out a fresh heat sink from his vest pocket and he slid it in with a practised motion. The last one too, by his mental count, and a still a whole lot of guards left to go through.
Instead of firing the weapon, he tracked the direction of fire from where it was noisiest, and pulled up his arm. A corona of swirling blue light enveloped the limb as he triggered a very specific set of neural synapses with the mnemonic action. Clenching the hand into a fist, he jerked the encased arm forward, and was rewarded with a startled cry from several throats as his guess dumped several hundred newtons of biotic force where it was least wanted. Desks, loose crates and data slates went flying, knocking men off their feet in a storm of debris. On the other side of the room, Miranda nodded appreciatively as she tossed a tech mine into the flurry where it flared into electric life, shorting out kinetic barriers as their generators overloaded and burned out. Jacob rose to his feet, only managing to clip one with an incendiary round before the other three sent him scurrying back into cover with a snarl of automatic fire.
Even though he knew it was a futile effort, he spent a heartbeat checking the communications bead in his ear for any of the others. The spiteful static of jamming answered his ping request, they were in too deep for anything but short range communications. They were lightly armed, low on munitions, outnumbered in a ship full of heavily armed thugs and an inmate populace filled to the brim with the galaxy's worst killers. Any back up they could hope for was either out of touch, dealing with their own problems, or just not there.
All things considered, things seemed to be working out pretty well.
He knew he should be keeping his mind on the fight, but it kept drifting back to the way the commander had predicted this, more or less. It kept nagging at him even as he vaulted out of cover, taking the distraction of Miranda's pistol to advance, firing a round that ripped through depleted shields and body armour in the space of a second. He was already diving behind fresh cover when his target hit the ground.
He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself. He'd been inured to double crosses and backstabbing in his tenure with the Corsairs, long before he got involved with Cerberus internal politics. But he'd gotten the same briefings that Miranda had. Calling Kurill a scumbag would be an insult to scumbags all across the Terminus systems. The warden had successfully extorted hundreds of colonized star systems, including human ones, with his dangerous payload. The only difference between the turian and a pirate slaver was that his extortion racket was either legal by Citadel law, making him immune to any law enforcement unit. Even the sale of prisoners to people wanting vengeance appeared to sit in that grey area the Council didn't acknowledge, and he'd been too smart to make any slip ups to draw attention. And there was the fact that he never sold out a client. That reputation had been why they'd been so sure the exchange would go without a hitch. As far as Kurill was concerned, this would be just another transaction to him. Selling them out now wouldn't have made sense. Even if he pulled it off it, word would get around, it would have killed his business for good.
The commander had been insistent however, leaving Jacob wondering if the man in the cyborg shell was getting a little paranoid. Miranda did more than a little wondering even as she helped formulate their plan.
"I guess the commander was right after all." The sub-vocalized words on his communicator brought Miranda's deceptively nonchalant face around to him. The Cerberus lead was backed up against a bulkhead, calmly programming another tech mine as bullets sparked off the abused metal. For a moment her eyes flashed with a glint of anger, but then it was gone, replaced by a faint twist of the lips he'd come to recognize as close to a rueful expression as she'd ever had.
"I suppose he was Jacob."
The rueful look evaporated, to be replaced by one of minor irritation. She leapt out of cover, catching a guard in the face with the armed tech mine before man and smart weapon vanished in a hail of arcing electricity. Jacob followed up on her move with another blast of his shotgun, setting the man alight. From the corner of his eye, he noted that her face still carried that vexed look. Whatever was eating at her, it wasn't affecting her aim. Another mercenary collapsed, bleeding copiously from a neat hole in his neck courtesy of her heavy pistol. Sliding back behind cover, Jacob made an educated guess.
"Oh come on Miri, this kind of double cross is an amateur's mistake. Kurill's always been too smart to make a grab like this."
Instead of replying, a corona of blue fire surrounded Miranda's form, an answering flash of light enveloping the last Blue Sun. There was a strangled cry as he took off like a rocket, stopping only when his head connected with the bulkhead with a wet crunch. When the body hit the floor with a clatter, quiet overtook the security room. Jacob pinged his suit scanners in the sudden quiet- a few ghost signals turned up too far away to be of any concern, but of the eight man breaching team sent to deal with them, there was no activity.
Miranda popped the white hot heat sink of her pistol with a flick of her wrist, sighing as she did so.
"That's just the problem Jacob." She looked like she was about to elaborate on the point but then fell silent without explanation.
Jacob shook his head, figuring out just exactly what was eating away at her. He didn't have the kind of briefings she did, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that along with getting Shepard to cooperate wholeheartedly with Cerberus, Miranda was trying to figure out what made him tick. First it was Wilson, and now the commander had seen a trap she'd dismissed as unlikely. For someone who made an issue about her gene crafted supposed perfection, missing something the commander had spotted must have been a sharp kick to her pride.
"You're not jealous are you?"
The sharp look was back in a flash. "Oh don't be ridiculous Jacob. I admit that the commander managed to catch Kurill's trap better than I did, but I am most certainly not jealous. Let's just focus on the mission shall we?"
Which amounted to little more than sitting tight until EDI managed to take over the Purgatory's internal systems, putting them firmly in control of the situation. Under normal circumstances. Jacob did a little mental calculation. It hadn't been very long since he'd activated the emergency transponder and gotten a positive response to it. So with a little luck, the commander and the rest of the incursion team would already be on board and making their way to the bridge while Moreau dealt with the fighter escorts. Between the commander, Garrus Valkarian, Zaeed Massani and their new hulking krogan friend (he still wasn't sure about the friend part), he doubted they'd have much trouble paving the way for EDI to do her job once the jamming systems were killed. If they had the time.
The thing was, no one was sure they had enough of it.
If Kurill was willing to double cross them, he was either getting desperate or dumb. Whichever was the case, both opened a lot of options to the warden. The Purgatory's current orbit prevented her from going anywhere fast, but if things were turning out too badly, the warden could try shaking off the Normandy with an emergency jump to FTL. Or he could just bring the ship down into the nearby gas giant. But if he cut his losses and ran off with Jack, they were sunk no matter what the outcome of the fight. Not an attractive prospect. If they couldn't contact the commander six minutes after hitting the panic button, plan B was to secure Jack and get out no matter what.
It'd been seven minutes now, and only static answered his communications gear.
**********
Guess no one is free enough to beta for me :s
Got another update going, thus concluding chapter 09.
**********
The ambush team was getting torn apart, their body armour and reinforced positions doing very little in deterring the determined advance of the intrusion team. Despite their superior numbers and positions, the intruders were moving faster than the response teams could react to. A defended position would call in an enemy contact and request reinforcements before going silent, but when the response teams arrived, the defenders would be dead and the position breached. From his position in the bridge, Synthetic Insights representative Schmidt watched, or rather listened, to the various status reports pouring in that were taking an increasingly desperate tone. A more mundane sort of person might have felt some small amount of trepidation at the progress of the intruders, but he was far more interested in the little footage they had managed to record of their apparent leader.
As he watched from one of the hard line video feeds, the assault mech ploughed through the cover of crates, bodily picking up one of the flailing guards between the armoured sheathes of its weapon arm. There was a brief moment of struggle before the helmet crumpled between the sheathes, spurting crimson fluid through the cracks. Slick with blood, the machine tossed the corpse aside as it's thermal ports finished their vent cycle, the autocannon starting it's stuttering roar again. Schmidt was impressed. Oh, not with the savagery itself, most certainly not. While he had extensive experience designing combat algorithms for virtual and low level artificial intelligences alike, they lacked the ability to rapidly adapt to changing parameters, and as efficiently, as he had seen this one do. Already his omni-tool was quite busily sorting the data they had managed to capture from local surveillance gear, producing a fascinating prognosis. The machine was certainly performing far better than anything one expected in what was usually little more than a glorified mobile gun platform.
And it was worth an absolute fortune. Imagine, a fully functional magnitude VI artificial intelligence. The magnitude Vs were considered to be among the best of contemporary intelligences, capable of a huge variety of tasks with unparallelled ability to analyze data and create astoundingly accurate predictions based on them, but they were oh so very limited in the ability to think laterally. Not to mention that the fact that they were huge machines, requiring mammoth facilities and specialized cooling systems just to run without melting into puddles of slag. Of course they could have been wrong about their conclusions, they hardly had the opportunity to subject the software gestalt to the usual battery of tests that would determine the full extent of it's capabilities after all. But the evidence acquired by Insight agents on Omega certainly argued that even if it was not a magnitude VI as suspected, it was at least a step above magnitude V. It even had a fully formed self identity, albeit one rather distastefully chosen. One shouldn't go about impersonating the dead, whether one was organic or artificial.
Oh his colleagues had muttered about robot apocalypses and machine overlords, but he had tut-tutted them as meaningless scarecrow noises not able to see past their noses. The Geth were a tragic example yes, but the Quarian reaction had been totally uncalled for. You couldn't fault a race of sentients for defending themselves against an aggressor wanting to wipe them out. On the other hand, whoever had built this marvellous machine had certainly seen no cause to restrict it's development, if those modifications were any indication of self optimization. And of course its command over a wide variety of willing sophont species too, indicating at least a working relationship between organic and inorganic life. If this was the beginning of an organic-hostile machine intelligence, then it was certainly an odd way to go about it! The documented existence of fully self aware and benign artificial intelligences helping organic life would certainly put to paid those scaremongers in the Citadel. That it would make the overturning of that archaic AI ban all that much easier and reverse Synthetic Insight's ailing fortunes ever since the Geth attack was also a point of interest.
Fortunately, Miss Lorus had agreed with his assessment, on the last point if not the rest, and dispatched him here to see to it's acquisition and delivery to Synthetic Insights labs for study. Of course there had been the unspoken risk to life and limb, but for an opportunity to be the first to study this enigma, it was such a cheap price to pay. And there was the matter of actually acquiring it mostly intact, which was where he had come in. While he had no doubt of the Wardens ability to deal with mere organic prisoners, an artificial intelligence was far, far, more difficult to contain. On his recommendation, the warden had disabled the majority of his wireless communication ports, relying instead on hard link connections and multi-band jamming to keep it from infiltrating their systems. Though that did mean disabling the majority of the automated defences, allowing an artificial intelligence with a proven capability to infiltrate and suborn integral systems with the opportunity to suborn said defences was most foolhardy.
And to help matters along, he presented them with a shipment of ARC projectors, freshly procured from one of Insight's subsidiary companies. While assault rifles and grenades were all well and good if you wanted to destroy things, they were hardly suitable for the intact capture of priceless machines. These were newly developed elelctrolasers that, while designed to stun and disable unruly people, proved to be just as equally effective against machines like that assault mech. The nature of the weapon was quite sufficient to overwhelm simple circuit breakers, scrambling the control systems of any machine and leaving it quite helpless. In all, he had brought a dozen such weapons, more than enough for the task of disabling the machine.
Now if only that krogan cooperated with how things were supposed to go. That secondary nervous system was proving to be most confounding, being rather proof against the debilitating effects of artificial lightning. And ever since that first encounter at the docking bay had been foiled, the machine and it's compatriots had been taking special care to target those using the projectors first. They had not had a second chance to disable them since. Still, the Purgatory was quite a large ship, and had a great deal of guards to throw at them. Not even a magnitude six intelligence could beat the sheer weight of numbers pressing down on it.
A brief burst of control room chatter made him take notice of where the intruders were. A hand cupped his chin in thought. Hmm, junction 6-B. He hadn't had much of an opportunity, nor inclination thank you very much, to tour the prison ship, but he was certain that 6-B was, it wasn't really all that far from this room. That, that might be a cause for concern. And it did look very grim for a machine with no facial expressions whatsoever. The purple mix of turian and human blood liberally splashed on it's arms did not help at all.
Schmidt glanced up at the control centre's surroundings, looking for a certain blue garbed turian who had assured him of his staff's capabilities. He was certainly no soldier, and he'd only get in the way of the proceedings if things did come to a head. Perhaps it would be better if he observed things from a distance, with his permission of course. However, that particular turian was no where to be- ah no, there he was, taking his leave through the fortified doors. Perhaps going to personally oversee the defences? No matter, it was not his place to guess.
Schmidt hurried over to the turian, quite eager to have his say and withdraw to a more secure location, preferably on board his ship. However, the doors closed in his face before he could reach the warden, and did not open when he tried the controls. A frown went down his face, and he tapped at the interface again. Instead of the green light of access granted, it showed a rather sullen red, something that was starting to be noticed by the rest of the control room. A few of the more alert ones appeared to be gathering their rifles, casting accusing looks his way while others raised their voices looking for the warden. It did look very bad on him he realized, though most did not seem to think he had anything to do with the warden's sudden disappearance. That... didn't do much to ease the unpleasant feeling settling in the researcher's stomach as he moved quite some distance from the door. There had been one other piece of advice he had given the warden, though he had thought it mostly superfluous at the time.
The sudden winking out of consoles and lights, plunging the room into darkness, made it clear that it was not as superfluous as he had hoped. A moment later, the room was lit by an actinic flare of light, coring the door with a plume of fire that scythed one of the guards who was standing too close. He clutched at the only protection he had, not a gun since he had no training in it's use, but his Synthetic Insights ID badge, and said the only thing that seemed to fit.
"Oh dear."
**********
His barriers already depleted by the storm of fire, Shepard's armour was dented and deformed in a hundred places. But for all the damage it had suffered, it was mostly cosmetic. Slivers of dense metal that could punch through a man's body armour disintegrated against alloyed armour weave designed to withstand the impact of heavy weapons. The mercenaries hiding behind their impromptu cover of desks and packing crates enjoyed no such protection as the autocannon in his arm thundered in reply, ripping through thin skinned packing steel and body armour with equal facility. Only one sensor contact on his tactical map winked out under the barrage, the other two stubbornly blinking as a hand popped over the edge, primed grenade in hand. There was a sharp crack and the hand separated from it's owner, wrist exploding into red ruin. Bereft of throwing arm, the grenade fell back behind cover, clinking cheerily as it struck the ground. A voice rose in a startled curse, only to be drowned out by an explosive detonation that flung desk and bodies sprawling. Shepard didn't even slow down as he continued to press the assault into the next corridor, autocannon barking at a figure that twitched feebly. The rest of his team followed close behind in silence, mirroring his rushed mood. The engagement with the ambush had cost them eight seconds. Another slice of time they couldn't afford to spend.
They were running late.
They were carving a bloody swathe through the local defenders, but there were a lot of them and each obstacle took precious seconds to clear. It was already three minutes past their scheduled contact, and the jamming was still active on all channels, powerful enough to overwhelm even the high gain communications array mounted on his chassis. Contact with the insertion team was a futile effort while the jamming system remained powered, much less communications with the Normandy. Miranda and Jacob were competent soldiers, and he had seen how well they had worked together, but every minute that passed was another minute for the warden to trap them between the bulkheads or funnel overwhelming numbers of troops on them. They needed to shut down the jamming system, and fast. Once that happened, EDI could seize control of the ship and they would have the upper hand. He had no doubt as to the outcome of the mission, and he was not about to lose any of the team to delays if he could afford it. And yet-
He hadn't felt this way in a lifetime. Not since that time on Elysium, when everything had to be given into the crucible of fire to hold out one more minute, just another second. It's different now, he told himself, it won't end up the same way this time. But the lack of communications with the other team makes it hard. He doesn't have a heart anymore, but he can imagine it's thudding, the mix of adrenaline and raw intensity that sharpens his awareness. The silent voice demanding he push harder, faster, ignore the pain that won't come this time. And he is listening to it.
More guards intercepted them at the next intersection, firing from makeshift barricades with a mixture of shotguns and assault rifles. Grenades thumped from their launch rails, explosive payloads arcing on deceptively gentle trajectories. Electrolasers joined in the fusillade, adding the crack of lightning to the storm as they attempted to stop the interlopers. It is no longer an attempt to subdue them. Now they are shooting to kill. The first time they had encountered the weapons; ARC projectors they had been called, Shepard came a fingers breadth to losing his entire team.
Not this time.
The ones with the projectors are the first to die, a well placed missile detonating in their midst while their man-made lightning wreathes harmlessly around a guard's corpse thrown as a distraction. Impact grenades are met in mid-flight with precision autocannon fire, automated fire control protocols reacting faster than even his brain can process. The guard with the grenade launcher is suddenly rendered headless, Garrus reaping a deadly toll with disciplined bursts of his battle rifle even as his barriers spark under fire. Zaeed does not share his cold discipline, choosing instead to turn a tightly spaced group into screaming torches with an incendiary grenade. He is the leader of this team, but he gives orders only sparingly. He knows how well they fight as individuals, but not as a team save Garrus. They do not disappoint. Cover is demolished by eight hundred kilogrammes of charging Krogan at his command, sending armoured figures flying. His newly regenerated barriers sparking under the concentrated assault, Shepard continued to push forward, returning fire a hundred fold with autocannon and grenade launcher alike. There was no order to take cover, no opportunity for leapfrog manoeuvres that would protect them from incoming fire at as they advance. It is suicidal, and he knows it. But he pushes on anyway.
And then it is over, save for the spasms of the dying or the moans of the mutilated. The control room is just ahead, sealed behind sturdy looking blast doors.
There was no need for an order or gesture. Shepard shared a look with Garrus and the turian slung his rifle, loping ahead to the door while the others sought cover in preparation. He remains in the open. There isn't any cover large enough to shelter his bulk anyway. Seconds later, the door is gone, blasted open by the cutting charges they had brought with them, and the firefight has begun anew.
Grunt does not lead this charge, he does, the moment far too crucial to entrust to the headstrong krogan. The room is dark, devoid of internal lighting save for a starfield of muzzle flashes. It gives him pause for an instant. Is the darkness a tactic or scorched earth at work? An instant, and then he pushes it aside as irrelevant. Ultraviolet lamps turn shadows to light, and the darkness doesn't inconvenience him the slightest. Sixteen people of various species. Less than half of them are armed and armoured. The remainder are dressed in civil garb with only two pistols between them. The bridge crew, and thus of less immediate importance. Autocannon twinkling in the darkness, he sets a deliberate course through the control room, taking him to right into the heaviest resistance. The defenders oblige his ploy, pouring the majority of their fire into his rapidly depleting barriers at full auto, a wasteful tactic except only as a last ditch defence such as they are facing now. His own attacks are far more tightly restricted, the missile and grenade launcher dormant in the firestorm. Only the autocannon speaks with short, precise bursts to avoid unnecessary damage to the control room itself.
The rest of the team pour in behind him, barely noticed against the rampaging machine that is his form. His team enjoy the advantage, rifles seeking out the easy target of muzzle flashes. Brilliant sparks of blue white light join the red glare of weapons fire, kinetic barriers being struck and overwhelmed. Fully half their defenders fall in the first three seconds, but their defence only grows more desperate. His own barriers collapse in a corona of dispersing dark energy, the armour registering multiple impacts in the space of a second. A warning alert goes off in his head, a round has penetrated somewhere vital, and fire controls in his right arm becomes unresponsive. He recognizes the damage, but ignores it. There is no pain, and the close quarters preclude the use of it's concealed missile launcher. Automatic damage control systems engage, shutting off power to the damaged regions while secondary feeds are brought online. It takes only a moment to rectify, but the defenders are already capitalizing on it, increasing the intensity of their attacks.
Another warning alert sounds off, this time a leg actuator has been damaged, locking in mid step. Automated omni-gel packs flush their contents, molten smart plastics forming over damaged components to make critical repairs. But it is not fast enough. A tinge of worry enters his consciousness as his body overbalances, but no, not now. He has experienced this before. He will not, cannot fall here. Internal gyros whine as they struggle to retain his balance, failing a moment later as his body tilts uncontrollably forward. Defensive fire shifts direction, thinking him neutralized and seeking out the rest of the team. A mistake he capitalizes on. The arm with the missile launcher slams into the ground, halting his fall his other arm reacquires it's targets. The autocannon belches flame and death, taking a guard in the shoulder. The impact makes his body spin, rifle trigger held in a death grip as it spits rounds into his fellow guards. Only a few rounds connect, insufficient to even penetrate their barriers, but it serves as a distraction. Roaring a challenge, Grunt bounds over their barricade and lands close enough to the guards to use his powerful limbs. The remaining two hold enough presence of mind to stumble back, bringing rifles to bear. The krogan is faster, wrapping his hands around both their necks before they can twitch.
The loud crack of shattering cartilage signifies the end of their continued resistance.
The warning tone of a energy spike alerts him, the heat flare of a weapon going live. Without shifting his sensor pod, the autocannon, still glowing hot from it's firing, swerves to face the new threat. Target acquisition systems paint a crosshair on the edge of his awareness. Pistols clatter to the floor before he can fire, and a voice rings out in desperate terror.
"Don't shoot! We surrender!"
The bridge crew, a part of his mind registers as his sensor pod swivels to confirm. Most are huddled in one corner of the command centre, trying to make themselves smaller targets. A bare handful, some of them having discarded their weapons, are standing on their feet, hands in the air as they repeat their plea. It is what stops him from ending their lives.
Grunt, still in the throes of battle lust, is not so easily placated. He begins to call out a halt to the krogan, he knows what will follow if not stopped, but something prevents him from doing so at the last moment. They are agents of treachery, prepared to sell him to the highest bidder. What mercy do they deserve? It seems wrong. It is wrong. The order goes unsaid.
**********
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. He was going to die in this terribly dismal place and there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it. Schmidt had placed his hands in the air the moment the shooting had stopped, belatedly realizing that such sudden movement might have gotten him mistaken as hostile and killed. Of course some of the bridge crew had tried pulling their guns, against his better judgement, but the mech had convinced them otherwise with that great big gun in it's arm. Shouting their surrender was a brilliant thing to do at the time, and the machine hadn't shot them full of holes yet. It's krogan companion however, didn't seem to share it's hesitation.
He'd met krogan face to face before, usually the bored mercenary Insight or their clients hired to pad security for business out in the more lawless regions. He also knew what they were capable of, at least intellectually, even if some of the things seemed exceedingly exaggerated. They were security providers, sporting a variety of weapons, naturally muscle bound and trouble prone when bored.They really didn't bear much thinking on when you had the fascinating architecture of advanced artificial intelligences to study and develop. To him, they were just a well armed part of the background, not to be annoyed if you could help it, but ignored otherwise. All of this went through his mind in the time it took for him to process what he was looking at. And that was a very short time indeed. There was something about watching nearly a tonne of rampaging krogan bearing down on you that sped one's mind up and brought it down from abstract algorithm to the here and now. The here being trapped in a room with an angry krogan and the now being just about the length of his life expectancy.
In hindsight, it would probably have been wiser to curl in a ball and hide in a corner until the end came, but Schmidt's brain was taking a tangentially different route. It might even have worked. In another time and place.
He waved his ID badge like a shield and screamed at the top of his lungs. "Don't kill me! I'm not one of them! Ohgodohgodohgod, please don't kill me!"
For his troubles, he got a backhanded swipe to the midsection that sent the badge flying and smacked him hard against the bulkheads, wheezing for breathe. The analytical part of his mind celebrated the fact that he was alive enough to register the part that he was alive enough to feel the pain as he tried to suck in a breathe that would not come. The rest of him writhed in pain and tried not to asphyxiate on the floor while his would be killer stumped closer with that ludicrously big gun. He tried begging again, but all his air deprived lungs would produce was as mewling squeak that he barely even heard. One tiny tiny voice in his head wished that he hadn't skipped that firearms training course after all. Getting instantly blown to bits was a lot more attractive than watching death coming on deliberately slow steps. Another tiny voice wondered why his pants had gotten very warm and wet.
"HOLD GRUNT"
The alien ground to a halt at the commanding voice, close enough to touch and glowering at him from behind its helmet. The important part however, was that it had stopped. Still- grunt? A title? He didn't think krogans in general liked being called exhalations. It took all three heartbeats for his mind to register the really important part. He was alive, the krogan wasn't advancing. Saved! Huzzah! Whoever commanded the krogan had prevented his unduly expiration, even if it did still hurt a great deal. Whoever that was, he could kiss their feet, metaphorically of course, and if he was still capable of breathing. Oh dear. Fortuitously, his lungs decided to work again before panic set in, and he breathed in that sweet, coppery air with all the gratitude of the nearly asphyxiated. Three breathes later, and he felt well enough to try craning his head. Who had given the command anyway, and why did he sound so well... mechanical for lack of a better word? Well, the difficulty in focusing his vision meant that he was rather looking about without much success, but his mind was rather busily filling in the gaps. Ah yes, the artificial intelligence within the assault platform. That seemed to be the logical suspect.
The artificial intelligence that was stumping towards him by the sounds of mechanical limbs.
He suddenly remembered waving that badge. The one that identified him as an agent of Synthetic Insights. It had only been for a second before he had been knocked down. But artificial intelligences didn't miss details, did they? No no, of course they didn't, they had perfect recall. And it wouldn't take a magnitude VI to put two and two together. And- and those were very menacing looking light patterns glowing from inside the sensor pod.
"YOU ARE NOT OF THE SUNS"
The voice was the same mechanical one that had halted the krogan, and up close, the harsh electronic tones sounded both very threatening and more a statement than a question. It knew, he realized with a sinking sensation. It knew what, if not who, he was. It must have already drawn the correct conclusions as to how it's plans had gone wrong and who was to blame. But he wasn't dead, so maybe it hadn't caught sight of the now missing badge. The tiny possibility of that being true kindled a great deal of self preservative hope that he wouldn't be facing a gruesome death any time soon. The first impulse was to deny everything, claim that he was really one of the Blue Suns. Of course that wouldn't work, he'd already said he wasn't one of them. Think think think. Claim to be a visitor, yes, maybe that would work. A visitor, a client of course, just here to see about getting a miscreant to vengeful hands. If no one contradicted the story, it was perfectly believable-
"YOU BELONG TO SYNTHETIC INSIGHTS"
-unless it already knew the truth.
Until five seconds ago, Schmidt had thought nothing more frightening than the approaching visage of a rampaging krogan with carnage on its mind. Now he was being forced to rapidly revise that estimate as premature in the light of new evidence. Said evidence being the expressionless sensor lights(eyes?) of a war machine that topped him by more than a head and looming over him with it's multi ton bulk. Strangely, that it was bristling with all manner of weapons pointed at him was far less frightening than the utterly blank look it was giving him. His mind was doing a very good job of filling in the blanks with all sorts of mannerisms and visual cues, admittedly human ones, that were promising a great deal of unpleasant and very drawn out gruesome fates for him.
Fortunately, his mind was also thinking up of new excuses to keep his skin intact.
"Uhm. Well. I. Well yes, I am an Insights agent. Strictly here as visitor of sorts, temporarily of course ah ha ha, really. And well, uh-" oh curse his traitorous chattering teeth, why couldn't his mouth keep up with his brain? He was saved from the embarrassment of continued excuses, and potential death, by a turian speaking.
"I think we can go over his story later Shepard, looks like we have bigger problems." Schmidt stared blankly at the blue armoured turian that had spoken for a moment before realizing that it was the one that had come in with the machine. When combined with the fact that he was currently interfacing with the disabled command consoles with his omni-tool, Schmidt rather felt that he knew what those "bigger problems" were. Unfortunately, they also translated to bigger problems for him too.
"This command centre's dead, there's some residual current on some of the circuits, but nothing we can use. Looks like someone blew the power feeds just before we got here, probably a lockdown protocol. I'd bet quite a lot on the warden having a secondary command system somewhere, probably using a hardline connection if he wants to keep out any wireless intrusion attempts." In the dim light, he could make out the turian shaking his head. "I could track down the split, but it'd take a lot of time that we don't have."
A human might have redirected some of his attention towards the turian as he spelled out Schmidt's doom, but the machine's sensor pod never wavered from his face. To his vast relief, the intelligence withdrew from him and turned it's weapons on the rest of the bridge crew who had huddled into one corner of the room.
"YOU WILL PROVIDE SOLUTIONS"
It emphasized the words by opening the weapon sheathes, the exhaust ports hissing menacingly with escaping steam. Schmidt took a look at the machine, at the rest of his squad and came to a very logical conclusion. Even if the crew were cooperative, they were not likely to be kept around alive for much longer. That meant it would not be prudent for him to stay, oh no no no. Fingers crawled on the ground as he tried to make himself very small and moving towards the door. He risked a look behind him. No ones attention wasn't focused on him, which was good. He turned his head back to find a pair of armoured boots right in front of him, swallowing in the process. That was bad. The barrel of a rifle found it's way under his chin, forcing him upwards to look at the glowing eye ports of a helmeted human. He was also very distinctly not wearing the colours of a Blue Suns guard. It was now very, very bad.
"And where do you bleeding think you're going?"
"Do your worst you bucket of bolts. You're getting nothing out of us."
Schmidt gaped in shock. That wasn't him, right? He wasn't ready to take a rifle butt or bullet to the face yet. No no, his mouth was still closed, he hadn't said a thing after all. It was belatedly that he realized the speaker had originated from further back in the room, where the rest of the bridge crew had been. Whatever other thoughts he was having ended rather abruptly there when the terrifying roar of that machine's weapon filled the room again. It ended a heartbeat later, and a very long one at that because it was still racing in his chest when the deafening stutter came to a halt. Ragged screaming immediately filled the absence, and he spun his head to a scene of horror. One of the technicians hadn't been just shot, his arm had been torn off at the shoulder, blood spurting fitfully from the wound as he trashed on the ground. Another of the prisoners tried to reach out for him, but the machine had him stumbling back with a gesture of it's weapon arms. It took a step towards the screaming man and... oh no, it wasn't going to- it was! Schmidt screwed his eyes shut, not wanting to see what came next.
"HE HAS CEASED TO BE USEFUL" the machine rumbled, it's mechanical voice amplified well over the fading screams of the wounded. There was a whine of limb motivators, and the moans were replaced with a hoarse gurgle, punctuated by the meaty sounds of flesh uselessly striking metal. The sounds seemed to stretch forever before terminating in a bubbling shriek and an ear splitting crack. "WHO ELSE WILL BE UNPRODUCTIVE"
Images flashed through Schmidts head, his adrenaline fuelled imagination making each one more horrible than the last. This wasn't how an artificial intelligence was supposed to behave! They didn't threaten or intimidate, they were clinically logical in everything they did! How much of human mannerisms had it absorbed? And why was it the worse examples of humanity? He wasn't just going to die here. He was going to wish he did, and a great deal sooner. It didn't take a genius of his calibre to know what would follow, and he wanted to avoid that very much. Being dead didn't frighten him that much, but it was the process that he very much wanted to avoid, especially now! The means of his immediate survival was obvious. But in the greatest of ironies, he'd gone and put the very thing that could save him out of the artificial intelligence's reach. Everything he'd advised the warden on had been specifically to prevent exactly what it was trying to do. Oh god, the machine was starting to go through the rest of the crew.
He had to think, there had to be something he could bargain with. His position with Insights? Useless! No, it had to be something with the ship. He'd gone over all the schematics, every weak point there was. No, this was the wrong way. What did it want? A hard link control of the ship? No, that couldn't be it, that wasn't why it was here. Something temporary? The answer hit him then. The jamming systems, of course! It had a ship already, and it had subordinates elsewhere inside. It would want to coordinate things wouldn't it? Yes, that had to be it. But... how was he going to disable that?
Another horrified shriek echoed in the room, sending his thoughts scattering all over the place. The turian was saying something, but he wasn't paying attention. No-no-no-no, not like this, he needed a bit more time, a hint, something, anything! He needed to offer a way to shut it down, maybe the power- of course, the power systems!
"I! I have a way!" he tried to shout, but it mostly came out as a desperate squeak. It caught the machine's attention, and it turned back to him, the tips of it's limbs gleaming with a wet slickness that made him gag just thinking about it. He tried standing up, but a hand from behind landed on his shoulder, immobilizing him. A grizzled voice spoke into his ear.
"No funny moves unless you want a third nostril."
"ELABORATE"
"Uhm, well, it's the reactor controls," he manage to get out before squeaking, the machine's sensor pod looming threateningly close to him, "there's a secondary override system in case there's ever a containment failure. It will vent the entirety of Engineering to vacuum and kill the reaction. There's emergency power backups, but they're designed for the the bare minimum of life support systems. The override is on an independent command circuit so it should still work... don'tkillmeplease!"
"You can't do that!" One of the bridge crew yelled from the back of the command room. "Without the engines we have no station keeping. Purgatory would lose orbit and drop into an uncontrolled re-entry! We'd break up in less than an hour!"
The weapon arm swung back in their direction with a hiss, instantly silencing the objector. But it didn't fire. Schmidt took that as a hopeful sign until that sensor pod whirled on him, illumination lamps glowing red like the demons his grandmother used to tell him about.
"SHOW ME AND YOU MAY SURVIVE"
Schmidt tried saying something, only to find his tongue gummed up. He nodded vigorously instead, shakily getting to his feet as the restraining arm withdrew. The prospect of survival, no matter how slim, was better than what would befall him if he did nothing. What the machine did next however, confused him. He did not recognize the harsh, electronic tones at first, but when it did, he nearly froze. It was chuckling.
"THEN PURGATORY WILL BURN"
**********
**********
The ambush team was getting torn apart, their body armour and reinforced positions doing very little in deterring the determined advance of the intrusion team. Despite their superior numbers and positions, the intruders were moving faster than the response teams could react to. A defended position would call in an enemy contact and request reinforcements before going silent, but when the response teams arrived, the defenders would be dead and the position breached. From his position in the bridge, Synthetic Insights representative Schmidt watched, or rather listened, to the various status reports pouring in that were taking an increasingly desperate tone. A more mundane sort of person might have felt some small amount of trepidation at the progress of the intruders, but he was far more interested in the little footage they had managed to record of their apparent leader.
As he watched from one of the hard line video feeds, the assault mech ploughed through the cover of crates, bodily picking up one of the flailing guards between the armoured sheathes of its weapon arm. There was a brief moment of struggle before the helmet crumpled between the sheathes, spurting crimson fluid through the cracks. Slick with blood, the machine tossed the corpse aside as it's thermal ports finished their vent cycle, the autocannon starting it's stuttering roar again. Schmidt was impressed. Oh, not with the savagery itself, most certainly not. While he had extensive experience designing combat algorithms for virtual and low level artificial intelligences alike, they lacked the ability to rapidly adapt to changing parameters, and as efficiently, as he had seen this one do. Already his omni-tool was quite busily sorting the data they had managed to capture from local surveillance gear, producing a fascinating prognosis. The machine was certainly performing far better than anything one expected in what was usually little more than a glorified mobile gun platform.
And it was worth an absolute fortune. Imagine, a fully functional magnitude VI artificial intelligence. The magnitude Vs were considered to be among the best of contemporary intelligences, capable of a huge variety of tasks with unparallelled ability to analyze data and create astoundingly accurate predictions based on them, but they were oh so very limited in the ability to think laterally. Not to mention that the fact that they were huge machines, requiring mammoth facilities and specialized cooling systems just to run without melting into puddles of slag. Of course they could have been wrong about their conclusions, they hardly had the opportunity to subject the software gestalt to the usual battery of tests that would determine the full extent of it's capabilities after all. But the evidence acquired by Insight agents on Omega certainly argued that even if it was not a magnitude VI as suspected, it was at least a step above magnitude V. It even had a fully formed self identity, albeit one rather distastefully chosen. One shouldn't go about impersonating the dead, whether one was organic or artificial.
Oh his colleagues had muttered about robot apocalypses and machine overlords, but he had tut-tutted them as meaningless scarecrow noises not able to see past their noses. The Geth were a tragic example yes, but the Quarian reaction had been totally uncalled for. You couldn't fault a race of sentients for defending themselves against an aggressor wanting to wipe them out. On the other hand, whoever had built this marvellous machine had certainly seen no cause to restrict it's development, if those modifications were any indication of self optimization. And of course its command over a wide variety of willing sophont species too, indicating at least a working relationship between organic and inorganic life. If this was the beginning of an organic-hostile machine intelligence, then it was certainly an odd way to go about it! The documented existence of fully self aware and benign artificial intelligences helping organic life would certainly put to paid those scaremongers in the Citadel. That it would make the overturning of that archaic AI ban all that much easier and reverse Synthetic Insight's ailing fortunes ever since the Geth attack was also a point of interest.
Fortunately, Miss Lorus had agreed with his assessment, on the last point if not the rest, and dispatched him here to see to it's acquisition and delivery to Synthetic Insights labs for study. Of course there had been the unspoken risk to life and limb, but for an opportunity to be the first to study this enigma, it was such a cheap price to pay. And there was the matter of actually acquiring it mostly intact, which was where he had come in. While he had no doubt of the Wardens ability to deal with mere organic prisoners, an artificial intelligence was far, far, more difficult to contain. On his recommendation, the warden had disabled the majority of his wireless communication ports, relying instead on hard link connections and multi-band jamming to keep it from infiltrating their systems. Though that did mean disabling the majority of the automated defences, allowing an artificial intelligence with a proven capability to infiltrate and suborn integral systems with the opportunity to suborn said defences was most foolhardy.
And to help matters along, he presented them with a shipment of ARC projectors, freshly procured from one of Insight's subsidiary companies. While assault rifles and grenades were all well and good if you wanted to destroy things, they were hardly suitable for the intact capture of priceless machines. These were newly developed elelctrolasers that, while designed to stun and disable unruly people, proved to be just as equally effective against machines like that assault mech. The nature of the weapon was quite sufficient to overwhelm simple circuit breakers, scrambling the control systems of any machine and leaving it quite helpless. In all, he had brought a dozen such weapons, more than enough for the task of disabling the machine.
Now if only that krogan cooperated with how things were supposed to go. That secondary nervous system was proving to be most confounding, being rather proof against the debilitating effects of artificial lightning. And ever since that first encounter at the docking bay had been foiled, the machine and it's compatriots had been taking special care to target those using the projectors first. They had not had a second chance to disable them since. Still, the Purgatory was quite a large ship, and had a great deal of guards to throw at them. Not even a magnitude six intelligence could beat the sheer weight of numbers pressing down on it.
A brief burst of control room chatter made him take notice of where the intruders were. A hand cupped his chin in thought. Hmm, junction 6-B. He hadn't had much of an opportunity, nor inclination thank you very much, to tour the prison ship, but he was certain that 6-B was, it wasn't really all that far from this room. That, that might be a cause for concern. And it did look very grim for a machine with no facial expressions whatsoever. The purple mix of turian and human blood liberally splashed on it's arms did not help at all.
Schmidt glanced up at the control centre's surroundings, looking for a certain blue garbed turian who had assured him of his staff's capabilities. He was certainly no soldier, and he'd only get in the way of the proceedings if things did come to a head. Perhaps it would be better if he observed things from a distance, with his permission of course. However, that particular turian was no where to be- ah no, there he was, taking his leave through the fortified doors. Perhaps going to personally oversee the defences? No matter, it was not his place to guess.
Schmidt hurried over to the turian, quite eager to have his say and withdraw to a more secure location, preferably on board his ship. However, the doors closed in his face before he could reach the warden, and did not open when he tried the controls. A frown went down his face, and he tapped at the interface again. Instead of the green light of access granted, it showed a rather sullen red, something that was starting to be noticed by the rest of the control room. A few of the more alert ones appeared to be gathering their rifles, casting accusing looks his way while others raised their voices looking for the warden. It did look very bad on him he realized, though most did not seem to think he had anything to do with the warden's sudden disappearance. That... didn't do much to ease the unpleasant feeling settling in the researcher's stomach as he moved quite some distance from the door. There had been one other piece of advice he had given the warden, though he had thought it mostly superfluous at the time.
The sudden winking out of consoles and lights, plunging the room into darkness, made it clear that it was not as superfluous as he had hoped. A moment later, the room was lit by an actinic flare of light, coring the door with a plume of fire that scythed one of the guards who was standing too close. He clutched at the only protection he had, not a gun since he had no training in it's use, but his Synthetic Insights ID badge, and said the only thing that seemed to fit.
"Oh dear."
**********
His barriers already depleted by the storm of fire, Shepard's armour was dented and deformed in a hundred places. But for all the damage it had suffered, it was mostly cosmetic. Slivers of dense metal that could punch through a man's body armour disintegrated against alloyed armour weave designed to withstand the impact of heavy weapons. The mercenaries hiding behind their impromptu cover of desks and packing crates enjoyed no such protection as the autocannon in his arm thundered in reply, ripping through thin skinned packing steel and body armour with equal facility. Only one sensor contact on his tactical map winked out under the barrage, the other two stubbornly blinking as a hand popped over the edge, primed grenade in hand. There was a sharp crack and the hand separated from it's owner, wrist exploding into red ruin. Bereft of throwing arm, the grenade fell back behind cover, clinking cheerily as it struck the ground. A voice rose in a startled curse, only to be drowned out by an explosive detonation that flung desk and bodies sprawling. Shepard didn't even slow down as he continued to press the assault into the next corridor, autocannon barking at a figure that twitched feebly. The rest of his team followed close behind in silence, mirroring his rushed mood. The engagement with the ambush had cost them eight seconds. Another slice of time they couldn't afford to spend.
They were running late.
They were carving a bloody swathe through the local defenders, but there were a lot of them and each obstacle took precious seconds to clear. It was already three minutes past their scheduled contact, and the jamming was still active on all channels, powerful enough to overwhelm even the high gain communications array mounted on his chassis. Contact with the insertion team was a futile effort while the jamming system remained powered, much less communications with the Normandy. Miranda and Jacob were competent soldiers, and he had seen how well they had worked together, but every minute that passed was another minute for the warden to trap them between the bulkheads or funnel overwhelming numbers of troops on them. They needed to shut down the jamming system, and fast. Once that happened, EDI could seize control of the ship and they would have the upper hand. He had no doubt as to the outcome of the mission, and he was not about to lose any of the team to delays if he could afford it. And yet-
He hadn't felt this way in a lifetime. Not since that time on Elysium, when everything had to be given into the crucible of fire to hold out one more minute, just another second. It's different now, he told himself, it won't end up the same way this time. But the lack of communications with the other team makes it hard. He doesn't have a heart anymore, but he can imagine it's thudding, the mix of adrenaline and raw intensity that sharpens his awareness. The silent voice demanding he push harder, faster, ignore the pain that won't come this time. And he is listening to it.
More guards intercepted them at the next intersection, firing from makeshift barricades with a mixture of shotguns and assault rifles. Grenades thumped from their launch rails, explosive payloads arcing on deceptively gentle trajectories. Electrolasers joined in the fusillade, adding the crack of lightning to the storm as they attempted to stop the interlopers. It is no longer an attempt to subdue them. Now they are shooting to kill. The first time they had encountered the weapons; ARC projectors they had been called, Shepard came a fingers breadth to losing his entire team.
Not this time.
The ones with the projectors are the first to die, a well placed missile detonating in their midst while their man-made lightning wreathes harmlessly around a guard's corpse thrown as a distraction. Impact grenades are met in mid-flight with precision autocannon fire, automated fire control protocols reacting faster than even his brain can process. The guard with the grenade launcher is suddenly rendered headless, Garrus reaping a deadly toll with disciplined bursts of his battle rifle even as his barriers spark under fire. Zaeed does not share his cold discipline, choosing instead to turn a tightly spaced group into screaming torches with an incendiary grenade. He is the leader of this team, but he gives orders only sparingly. He knows how well they fight as individuals, but not as a team save Garrus. They do not disappoint. Cover is demolished by eight hundred kilogrammes of charging Krogan at his command, sending armoured figures flying. His newly regenerated barriers sparking under the concentrated assault, Shepard continued to push forward, returning fire a hundred fold with autocannon and grenade launcher alike. There was no order to take cover, no opportunity for leapfrog manoeuvres that would protect them from incoming fire at as they advance. It is suicidal, and he knows it. But he pushes on anyway.
And then it is over, save for the spasms of the dying or the moans of the mutilated. The control room is just ahead, sealed behind sturdy looking blast doors.
There was no need for an order or gesture. Shepard shared a look with Garrus and the turian slung his rifle, loping ahead to the door while the others sought cover in preparation. He remains in the open. There isn't any cover large enough to shelter his bulk anyway. Seconds later, the door is gone, blasted open by the cutting charges they had brought with them, and the firefight has begun anew.
Grunt does not lead this charge, he does, the moment far too crucial to entrust to the headstrong krogan. The room is dark, devoid of internal lighting save for a starfield of muzzle flashes. It gives him pause for an instant. Is the darkness a tactic or scorched earth at work? An instant, and then he pushes it aside as irrelevant. Ultraviolet lamps turn shadows to light, and the darkness doesn't inconvenience him the slightest. Sixteen people of various species. Less than half of them are armed and armoured. The remainder are dressed in civil garb with only two pistols between them. The bridge crew, and thus of less immediate importance. Autocannon twinkling in the darkness, he sets a deliberate course through the control room, taking him to right into the heaviest resistance. The defenders oblige his ploy, pouring the majority of their fire into his rapidly depleting barriers at full auto, a wasteful tactic except only as a last ditch defence such as they are facing now. His own attacks are far more tightly restricted, the missile and grenade launcher dormant in the firestorm. Only the autocannon speaks with short, precise bursts to avoid unnecessary damage to the control room itself.
The rest of the team pour in behind him, barely noticed against the rampaging machine that is his form. His team enjoy the advantage, rifles seeking out the easy target of muzzle flashes. Brilliant sparks of blue white light join the red glare of weapons fire, kinetic barriers being struck and overwhelmed. Fully half their defenders fall in the first three seconds, but their defence only grows more desperate. His own barriers collapse in a corona of dispersing dark energy, the armour registering multiple impacts in the space of a second. A warning alert goes off in his head, a round has penetrated somewhere vital, and fire controls in his right arm becomes unresponsive. He recognizes the damage, but ignores it. There is no pain, and the close quarters preclude the use of it's concealed missile launcher. Automatic damage control systems engage, shutting off power to the damaged regions while secondary feeds are brought online. It takes only a moment to rectify, but the defenders are already capitalizing on it, increasing the intensity of their attacks.
Another warning alert sounds off, this time a leg actuator has been damaged, locking in mid step. Automated omni-gel packs flush their contents, molten smart plastics forming over damaged components to make critical repairs. But it is not fast enough. A tinge of worry enters his consciousness as his body overbalances, but no, not now. He has experienced this before. He will not, cannot fall here. Internal gyros whine as they struggle to retain his balance, failing a moment later as his body tilts uncontrollably forward. Defensive fire shifts direction, thinking him neutralized and seeking out the rest of the team. A mistake he capitalizes on. The arm with the missile launcher slams into the ground, halting his fall his other arm reacquires it's targets. The autocannon belches flame and death, taking a guard in the shoulder. The impact makes his body spin, rifle trigger held in a death grip as it spits rounds into his fellow guards. Only a few rounds connect, insufficient to even penetrate their barriers, but it serves as a distraction. Roaring a challenge, Grunt bounds over their barricade and lands close enough to the guards to use his powerful limbs. The remaining two hold enough presence of mind to stumble back, bringing rifles to bear. The krogan is faster, wrapping his hands around both their necks before they can twitch.
The loud crack of shattering cartilage signifies the end of their continued resistance.
The warning tone of a energy spike alerts him, the heat flare of a weapon going live. Without shifting his sensor pod, the autocannon, still glowing hot from it's firing, swerves to face the new threat. Target acquisition systems paint a crosshair on the edge of his awareness. Pistols clatter to the floor before he can fire, and a voice rings out in desperate terror.
"Don't shoot! We surrender!"
The bridge crew, a part of his mind registers as his sensor pod swivels to confirm. Most are huddled in one corner of the command centre, trying to make themselves smaller targets. A bare handful, some of them having discarded their weapons, are standing on their feet, hands in the air as they repeat their plea. It is what stops him from ending their lives.
Grunt, still in the throes of battle lust, is not so easily placated. He begins to call out a halt to the krogan, he knows what will follow if not stopped, but something prevents him from doing so at the last moment. They are agents of treachery, prepared to sell him to the highest bidder. What mercy do they deserve? It seems wrong. It is wrong. The order goes unsaid.
**********
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. He was going to die in this terribly dismal place and there didn't seem to be anything he could do about it. Schmidt had placed his hands in the air the moment the shooting had stopped, belatedly realizing that such sudden movement might have gotten him mistaken as hostile and killed. Of course some of the bridge crew had tried pulling their guns, against his better judgement, but the mech had convinced them otherwise with that great big gun in it's arm. Shouting their surrender was a brilliant thing to do at the time, and the machine hadn't shot them full of holes yet. It's krogan companion however, didn't seem to share it's hesitation.
He'd met krogan face to face before, usually the bored mercenary Insight or their clients hired to pad security for business out in the more lawless regions. He also knew what they were capable of, at least intellectually, even if some of the things seemed exceedingly exaggerated. They were security providers, sporting a variety of weapons, naturally muscle bound and trouble prone when bored.They really didn't bear much thinking on when you had the fascinating architecture of advanced artificial intelligences to study and develop. To him, they were just a well armed part of the background, not to be annoyed if you could help it, but ignored otherwise. All of this went through his mind in the time it took for him to process what he was looking at. And that was a very short time indeed. There was something about watching nearly a tonne of rampaging krogan bearing down on you that sped one's mind up and brought it down from abstract algorithm to the here and now. The here being trapped in a room with an angry krogan and the now being just about the length of his life expectancy.
In hindsight, it would probably have been wiser to curl in a ball and hide in a corner until the end came, but Schmidt's brain was taking a tangentially different route. It might even have worked. In another time and place.
He waved his ID badge like a shield and screamed at the top of his lungs. "Don't kill me! I'm not one of them! Ohgodohgodohgod, please don't kill me!"
For his troubles, he got a backhanded swipe to the midsection that sent the badge flying and smacked him hard against the bulkheads, wheezing for breathe. The analytical part of his mind celebrated the fact that he was alive enough to register the part that he was alive enough to feel the pain as he tried to suck in a breathe that would not come. The rest of him writhed in pain and tried not to asphyxiate on the floor while his would be killer stumped closer with that ludicrously big gun. He tried begging again, but all his air deprived lungs would produce was as mewling squeak that he barely even heard. One tiny tiny voice in his head wished that he hadn't skipped that firearms training course after all. Getting instantly blown to bits was a lot more attractive than watching death coming on deliberately slow steps. Another tiny voice wondered why his pants had gotten very warm and wet.
"HOLD GRUNT"
The alien ground to a halt at the commanding voice, close enough to touch and glowering at him from behind its helmet. The important part however, was that it had stopped. Still- grunt? A title? He didn't think krogans in general liked being called exhalations. It took all three heartbeats for his mind to register the really important part. He was alive, the krogan wasn't advancing. Saved! Huzzah! Whoever commanded the krogan had prevented his unduly expiration, even if it did still hurt a great deal. Whoever that was, he could kiss their feet, metaphorically of course, and if he was still capable of breathing. Oh dear. Fortuitously, his lungs decided to work again before panic set in, and he breathed in that sweet, coppery air with all the gratitude of the nearly asphyxiated. Three breathes later, and he felt well enough to try craning his head. Who had given the command anyway, and why did he sound so well... mechanical for lack of a better word? Well, the difficulty in focusing his vision meant that he was rather looking about without much success, but his mind was rather busily filling in the gaps. Ah yes, the artificial intelligence within the assault platform. That seemed to be the logical suspect.
The artificial intelligence that was stumping towards him by the sounds of mechanical limbs.
He suddenly remembered waving that badge. The one that identified him as an agent of Synthetic Insights. It had only been for a second before he had been knocked down. But artificial intelligences didn't miss details, did they? No no, of course they didn't, they had perfect recall. And it wouldn't take a magnitude VI to put two and two together. And- and those were very menacing looking light patterns glowing from inside the sensor pod.
"YOU ARE NOT OF THE SUNS"
The voice was the same mechanical one that had halted the krogan, and up close, the harsh electronic tones sounded both very threatening and more a statement than a question. It knew, he realized with a sinking sensation. It knew what, if not who, he was. It must have already drawn the correct conclusions as to how it's plans had gone wrong and who was to blame. But he wasn't dead, so maybe it hadn't caught sight of the now missing badge. The tiny possibility of that being true kindled a great deal of self preservative hope that he wouldn't be facing a gruesome death any time soon. The first impulse was to deny everything, claim that he was really one of the Blue Suns. Of course that wouldn't work, he'd already said he wasn't one of them. Think think think. Claim to be a visitor, yes, maybe that would work. A visitor, a client of course, just here to see about getting a miscreant to vengeful hands. If no one contradicted the story, it was perfectly believable-
"YOU BELONG TO SYNTHETIC INSIGHTS"
-unless it already knew the truth.
Until five seconds ago, Schmidt had thought nothing more frightening than the approaching visage of a rampaging krogan with carnage on its mind. Now he was being forced to rapidly revise that estimate as premature in the light of new evidence. Said evidence being the expressionless sensor lights(eyes?) of a war machine that topped him by more than a head and looming over him with it's multi ton bulk. Strangely, that it was bristling with all manner of weapons pointed at him was far less frightening than the utterly blank look it was giving him. His mind was doing a very good job of filling in the blanks with all sorts of mannerisms and visual cues, admittedly human ones, that were promising a great deal of unpleasant and very drawn out gruesome fates for him.
Fortunately, his mind was also thinking up of new excuses to keep his skin intact.
"Uhm. Well. I. Well yes, I am an Insights agent. Strictly here as visitor of sorts, temporarily of course ah ha ha, really. And well, uh-" oh curse his traitorous chattering teeth, why couldn't his mouth keep up with his brain? He was saved from the embarrassment of continued excuses, and potential death, by a turian speaking.
"I think we can go over his story later Shepard, looks like we have bigger problems." Schmidt stared blankly at the blue armoured turian that had spoken for a moment before realizing that it was the one that had come in with the machine. When combined with the fact that he was currently interfacing with the disabled command consoles with his omni-tool, Schmidt rather felt that he knew what those "bigger problems" were. Unfortunately, they also translated to bigger problems for him too.
"This command centre's dead, there's some residual current on some of the circuits, but nothing we can use. Looks like someone blew the power feeds just before we got here, probably a lockdown protocol. I'd bet quite a lot on the warden having a secondary command system somewhere, probably using a hardline connection if he wants to keep out any wireless intrusion attempts." In the dim light, he could make out the turian shaking his head. "I could track down the split, but it'd take a lot of time that we don't have."
A human might have redirected some of his attention towards the turian as he spelled out Schmidt's doom, but the machine's sensor pod never wavered from his face. To his vast relief, the intelligence withdrew from him and turned it's weapons on the rest of the bridge crew who had huddled into one corner of the room.
"YOU WILL PROVIDE SOLUTIONS"
It emphasized the words by opening the weapon sheathes, the exhaust ports hissing menacingly with escaping steam. Schmidt took a look at the machine, at the rest of his squad and came to a very logical conclusion. Even if the crew were cooperative, they were not likely to be kept around alive for much longer. That meant it would not be prudent for him to stay, oh no no no. Fingers crawled on the ground as he tried to make himself very small and moving towards the door. He risked a look behind him. No ones attention wasn't focused on him, which was good. He turned his head back to find a pair of armoured boots right in front of him, swallowing in the process. That was bad. The barrel of a rifle found it's way under his chin, forcing him upwards to look at the glowing eye ports of a helmeted human. He was also very distinctly not wearing the colours of a Blue Suns guard. It was now very, very bad.
"And where do you bleeding think you're going?"
"Do your worst you bucket of bolts. You're getting nothing out of us."
Schmidt gaped in shock. That wasn't him, right? He wasn't ready to take a rifle butt or bullet to the face yet. No no, his mouth was still closed, he hadn't said a thing after all. It was belatedly that he realized the speaker had originated from further back in the room, where the rest of the bridge crew had been. Whatever other thoughts he was having ended rather abruptly there when the terrifying roar of that machine's weapon filled the room again. It ended a heartbeat later, and a very long one at that because it was still racing in his chest when the deafening stutter came to a halt. Ragged screaming immediately filled the absence, and he spun his head to a scene of horror. One of the technicians hadn't been just shot, his arm had been torn off at the shoulder, blood spurting fitfully from the wound as he trashed on the ground. Another of the prisoners tried to reach out for him, but the machine had him stumbling back with a gesture of it's weapon arms. It took a step towards the screaming man and... oh no, it wasn't going to- it was! Schmidt screwed his eyes shut, not wanting to see what came next.
"HE HAS CEASED TO BE USEFUL" the machine rumbled, it's mechanical voice amplified well over the fading screams of the wounded. There was a whine of limb motivators, and the moans were replaced with a hoarse gurgle, punctuated by the meaty sounds of flesh uselessly striking metal. The sounds seemed to stretch forever before terminating in a bubbling shriek and an ear splitting crack. "WHO ELSE WILL BE UNPRODUCTIVE"
Images flashed through Schmidts head, his adrenaline fuelled imagination making each one more horrible than the last. This wasn't how an artificial intelligence was supposed to behave! They didn't threaten or intimidate, they were clinically logical in everything they did! How much of human mannerisms had it absorbed? And why was it the worse examples of humanity? He wasn't just going to die here. He was going to wish he did, and a great deal sooner. It didn't take a genius of his calibre to know what would follow, and he wanted to avoid that very much. Being dead didn't frighten him that much, but it was the process that he very much wanted to avoid, especially now! The means of his immediate survival was obvious. But in the greatest of ironies, he'd gone and put the very thing that could save him out of the artificial intelligence's reach. Everything he'd advised the warden on had been specifically to prevent exactly what it was trying to do. Oh god, the machine was starting to go through the rest of the crew.
He had to think, there had to be something he could bargain with. His position with Insights? Useless! No, it had to be something with the ship. He'd gone over all the schematics, every weak point there was. No, this was the wrong way. What did it want? A hard link control of the ship? No, that couldn't be it, that wasn't why it was here. Something temporary? The answer hit him then. The jamming systems, of course! It had a ship already, and it had subordinates elsewhere inside. It would want to coordinate things wouldn't it? Yes, that had to be it. But... how was he going to disable that?
Another horrified shriek echoed in the room, sending his thoughts scattering all over the place. The turian was saying something, but he wasn't paying attention. No-no-no-no, not like this, he needed a bit more time, a hint, something, anything! He needed to offer a way to shut it down, maybe the power- of course, the power systems!
"I! I have a way!" he tried to shout, but it mostly came out as a desperate squeak. It caught the machine's attention, and it turned back to him, the tips of it's limbs gleaming with a wet slickness that made him gag just thinking about it. He tried standing up, but a hand from behind landed on his shoulder, immobilizing him. A grizzled voice spoke into his ear.
"No funny moves unless you want a third nostril."
"ELABORATE"
"Uhm, well, it's the reactor controls," he manage to get out before squeaking, the machine's sensor pod looming threateningly close to him, "there's a secondary override system in case there's ever a containment failure. It will vent the entirety of Engineering to vacuum and kill the reaction. There's emergency power backups, but they're designed for the the bare minimum of life support systems. The override is on an independent command circuit so it should still work... don'tkillmeplease!"
"You can't do that!" One of the bridge crew yelled from the back of the command room. "Without the engines we have no station keeping. Purgatory would lose orbit and drop into an uncontrolled re-entry! We'd break up in less than an hour!"
The weapon arm swung back in their direction with a hiss, instantly silencing the objector. But it didn't fire. Schmidt took that as a hopeful sign until that sensor pod whirled on him, illumination lamps glowing red like the demons his grandmother used to tell him about.
"SHOW ME AND YOU MAY SURVIVE"
Schmidt tried saying something, only to find his tongue gummed up. He nodded vigorously instead, shakily getting to his feet as the restraining arm withdrew. The prospect of survival, no matter how slim, was better than what would befall him if he did nothing. What the machine did next however, confused him. He did not recognize the harsh, electronic tones at first, but when it did, he nearly froze. It was chuckling.
"THEN PURGATORY WILL BURN"
**********
The Citadel was once a shining beacon of galactic civilization, it's technology and artistry unmatched. Now it is a burned out hulk, ruined beyond even the skill of it's now extinct Keeper population to repair. Some say it was an ancient race, enacting revenge for reasons long forgotten. Others say it was the hubris of those who inhabited it's hallowed halls. There are as many stories as there are tellers that explain it's fate.Cpl_Facehugger said:
They are wrong.
The fall of the Citadel, and the banishment of it's races was not the act of gods or ancient beings, but the act of one man. One man who had sacrificed everything for the good of all. And with that sacrifice, scarred and wounded, he returned to those he had worked so hard for, victory hard earned.
They denied his very identity.
I am so using this.Jace911 said:
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
I CANNOT wait to read this.
Well, since this has been languishing for so long, and since Noxturna asked, I'll post up a snippet of the next bit of Iron Rebirth.
And now, neither does she.
The guard in her grasp manages one scream before it trails off into a wet squelch, the crumpled remains more like the food paste from her last meal than human. Discarding the leaking corpse with a wave of her hand, head buzzing with the tight grasp of the implant in her skull, she goes to work on his partner with a snarl. The blue white flare of biotics outlines her frame, and the armoured Turian comes apart like wet tissue paper. Purple blood splatters her face and chest, dripping down her tats and draping over her body like a sweater made of warm stinking guts. But that warmth is nothing compared to the rush, the roaring bonfire in her stomach as she rips the scumsucker's head off. The charnel smell's just something she's just that good at ignoring. The human she didn't give a flying fuck, just another dumb idiot too stupid to live. But the Turian was one of the ones Kurill tended to sic on her if she broke his toys. She had rules about that kind of thing.
Rule one. Always get even. Always.
The black, bulge eyed expression she gets kindles the warmest thing she's felt in what seems like a lifetime before it pops like a scaly grape. She can just imagine squishing Kurill's face now.
She sees the motion from the corner of her eye, tell tale signs of hostility that set off a hiss of a hate from her lips. Number three, another rule to follow. Always get them first before they can get you. Blue light swirls and a barrier is up before she even registers the muzzle flash of the remaining guard's rifle. A hail of bullets streak across the measly fifty feet in an eyeblink before flashing to a cold stop inches from her face and chest. A bloodless curl makes its way up her lips. This one's broken. Kurill wanted her alive after all. Screaming all her rage, she lets the spider in her head claw at her brain, little steaming icicles of ghostly pain stabbing into the hindquarters of her consciousness. A light show envelops her, draining into her fist as she charges across the intervening space in wide bounds. A burst of biotic power, and she clips him on the head, blowing off the helmet to reveal a grizzled face behind it. The sap drops his rifle to clutch at his chest, jerking free a silvery knife. It's not one of the fat K-bars soldiers sometimes carry, but a long thin thing, with a cutting edge like a scalpel.
And suddenly she's a little girl again, back in the lab, in the surgical ward with the doctor.
The doctor doesn't introduce himself to her, not like the others. He doesn't have a name, just the title, 'doctor', the cold room with the bright lights, the shackling straps that hold her tight, and the knife. The cutting edge of a knife pressing, slicing, making tiny little incisions in her skull, peeling away skin, cutting through bone. She's conscious through it all, her nerves dead, but never asleep, every sensation there for her to feel in terrifying horror as it probes deeper and deeper. She tries to scream, but her gagged mouth refuses to budge, tries to struggle, to get away from the man with the knife, but the restraints bite down tight and prevent her even from shivering. And then there's the pinch at the base of her skull, clamping down on exposed flesh and bone, the burrowing thing she learns to call the Spider, digging into her mind like an unwelcome predator. It jostles her consciousness, an alien thing intruding on her awareness like a fat mouth breather sitting in your personal space. It's all of a second of an acquaintance, and she hates it, fears it with every fibre of her being.
But the Spider is power, sweet delicious nectar that floods every pore in her body, the tingling warmth of her superiority over every other thing. Blue fire she had struggled to ignite in bygone days comes like a snap, roaring with all the hate and pain she can stuff into it. She's faster, stronger, harder than everyone else who's ever wronged her, than every fucker in the universe. The guard's gone, but the doctor is still there. She doesn't see the blue and white armour he's wearing, the ashen face twisting into a snarl of defiance. She doesn't even register the hand going for the grenade pinned to his chest. All she sees is the doctor and the knife, ready to make that cut.
But she's not a helpless little girl anymore, begging in futility for the pain to stop. Never again. Never beg like a weakling. She takes.
The knife doesn't even come close to touching her. There's no form, no grace, just raw instinct and bloodlust as she twists away from the first thrust and ducks the second slash. And then she ends it with her fist slamming into armoured carapace like a bulk lifter, polymer and ceramic inlays crumpling like a wet paper bag. There's all a microsecond of a choked cry before physics comes back with a vengeance, splattering the doctor against the far wall with all the force of a mass accelerator round. She spends all of a heartbeat blinking as she finally recognizes the cracked armour plate he has on.
Not the doctor, the sadistic bastard's dead like every other fucker in Teltin. Just another ex-guard in Purgatory. Teeth gleam from beneath her sadistic grin. Bad memories or not, it's just one less obstacle to her freedom.
The annoying wail of klaxons pick up in pitch as something blows up behind her with a roar of flames, another stab at her ass end of a home for the past fuck knows how many years. Automated doors slam shut as fire suppressant systems activate, filling the room with a cold puffy white clouds. The hallway exit itself is sealed, hidden behind a double layered blast door of reinforced steel. She snarls with the energy of the scornfully defiant. Did they really think that would work?
The Spider skitters across the web of her consciousness, stabbing little icicles of venom and pain as it obeys her command. A good pain that encases her fist in a rioting halo of blue. But before she can tear down the offending barrier, the crackle of a radio catches her attention. She doesn't ignore it, not right away. She's pissed, but not stupid. It's from the helmet of the cretin she just pulped, squawking with a voice she knows so well.
"Block D-1 is in lockdown. Squads Theta and Gamma, move in to secure Jack. Non lethal force only. Find and capture her!"
She sneers. Non lethal force? What a bunch of weak kneed pussies. The only way anyone was going to get her now was with a fucking huge bomb. Not that she'd count on that working either. When she was through with Kurill, he'd be lucky if all that was left was a stain on the wall. But maybe not today, she can wait. Right now, the only thing that matters is getting out. Somebody had woken her up, left the Spider to run riot, and she didn't believe in accidents. That meant somebody was looking for her, busted her out of cryo, but she didn't give a damn as to who or why. Maybe it's Cerberus, maybe not. Didn't matter anyway. Anyone coming for her was a scumsucker out to kill or use her, too bad for them. She isn't going to be around when the place burns. She directs her sneer back at the blast door, thick bolts of reinforced steel alloys that would take a rocket head on and keep on standing. The Spider leaps.
Doors? Fuck doors.
**********
Chapter 10: Parole
The cell blocks of Purgatory, most of the ship in fact, was a cold place. Built more like a space station than a ship, it had a lot of wide open spaces for heat to diffuse through, and with her slow burning engines, stacked up with miserly application of life support meant that keeping things warm was more of a problem than keeping cool like in most ships. Making matters worse were the lack of heating elements in the cells, not like the warm inner hallways where the guards went on their time off. Some places you could take a piss and watch it freeze before you were done. It was the kind of thing that put a permanent chill in your bones, made you slow. Not that the Warden cared about that kind of shit.Chapter 10: Parole
And now, neither does she.
The guard in her grasp manages one scream before it trails off into a wet squelch, the crumpled remains more like the food paste from her last meal than human. Discarding the leaking corpse with a wave of her hand, head buzzing with the tight grasp of the implant in her skull, she goes to work on his partner with a snarl. The blue white flare of biotics outlines her frame, and the armoured Turian comes apart like wet tissue paper. Purple blood splatters her face and chest, dripping down her tats and draping over her body like a sweater made of warm stinking guts. But that warmth is nothing compared to the rush, the roaring bonfire in her stomach as she rips the scumsucker's head off. The charnel smell's just something she's just that good at ignoring. The human she didn't give a flying fuck, just another dumb idiot too stupid to live. But the Turian was one of the ones Kurill tended to sic on her if she broke his toys. She had rules about that kind of thing.
Rule one. Always get even. Always.
The black, bulge eyed expression she gets kindles the warmest thing she's felt in what seems like a lifetime before it pops like a scaly grape. She can just imagine squishing Kurill's face now.
She sees the motion from the corner of her eye, tell tale signs of hostility that set off a hiss of a hate from her lips. Number three, another rule to follow. Always get them first before they can get you. Blue light swirls and a barrier is up before she even registers the muzzle flash of the remaining guard's rifle. A hail of bullets streak across the measly fifty feet in an eyeblink before flashing to a cold stop inches from her face and chest. A bloodless curl makes its way up her lips. This one's broken. Kurill wanted her alive after all. Screaming all her rage, she lets the spider in her head claw at her brain, little steaming icicles of ghostly pain stabbing into the hindquarters of her consciousness. A light show envelops her, draining into her fist as she charges across the intervening space in wide bounds. A burst of biotic power, and she clips him on the head, blowing off the helmet to reveal a grizzled face behind it. The sap drops his rifle to clutch at his chest, jerking free a silvery knife. It's not one of the fat K-bars soldiers sometimes carry, but a long thin thing, with a cutting edge like a scalpel.
And suddenly she's a little girl again, back in the lab, in the surgical ward with the doctor.
The doctor doesn't introduce himself to her, not like the others. He doesn't have a name, just the title, 'doctor', the cold room with the bright lights, the shackling straps that hold her tight, and the knife. The cutting edge of a knife pressing, slicing, making tiny little incisions in her skull, peeling away skin, cutting through bone. She's conscious through it all, her nerves dead, but never asleep, every sensation there for her to feel in terrifying horror as it probes deeper and deeper. She tries to scream, but her gagged mouth refuses to budge, tries to struggle, to get away from the man with the knife, but the restraints bite down tight and prevent her even from shivering. And then there's the pinch at the base of her skull, clamping down on exposed flesh and bone, the burrowing thing she learns to call the Spider, digging into her mind like an unwelcome predator. It jostles her consciousness, an alien thing intruding on her awareness like a fat mouth breather sitting in your personal space. It's all of a second of an acquaintance, and she hates it, fears it with every fibre of her being.
But the Spider is power, sweet delicious nectar that floods every pore in her body, the tingling warmth of her superiority over every other thing. Blue fire she had struggled to ignite in bygone days comes like a snap, roaring with all the hate and pain she can stuff into it. She's faster, stronger, harder than everyone else who's ever wronged her, than every fucker in the universe. The guard's gone, but the doctor is still there. She doesn't see the blue and white armour he's wearing, the ashen face twisting into a snarl of defiance. She doesn't even register the hand going for the grenade pinned to his chest. All she sees is the doctor and the knife, ready to make that cut.
But she's not a helpless little girl anymore, begging in futility for the pain to stop. Never again. Never beg like a weakling. She takes.
The knife doesn't even come close to touching her. There's no form, no grace, just raw instinct and bloodlust as she twists away from the first thrust and ducks the second slash. And then she ends it with her fist slamming into armoured carapace like a bulk lifter, polymer and ceramic inlays crumpling like a wet paper bag. There's all a microsecond of a choked cry before physics comes back with a vengeance, splattering the doctor against the far wall with all the force of a mass accelerator round. She spends all of a heartbeat blinking as she finally recognizes the cracked armour plate he has on.
Not the doctor, the sadistic bastard's dead like every other fucker in Teltin. Just another ex-guard in Purgatory. Teeth gleam from beneath her sadistic grin. Bad memories or not, it's just one less obstacle to her freedom.
The annoying wail of klaxons pick up in pitch as something blows up behind her with a roar of flames, another stab at her ass end of a home for the past fuck knows how many years. Automated doors slam shut as fire suppressant systems activate, filling the room with a cold puffy white clouds. The hallway exit itself is sealed, hidden behind a double layered blast door of reinforced steel. She snarls with the energy of the scornfully defiant. Did they really think that would work?
The Spider skitters across the web of her consciousness, stabbing little icicles of venom and pain as it obeys her command. A good pain that encases her fist in a rioting halo of blue. But before she can tear down the offending barrier, the crackle of a radio catches her attention. She doesn't ignore it, not right away. She's pissed, but not stupid. It's from the helmet of the cretin she just pulped, squawking with a voice she knows so well.
"Block D-1 is in lockdown. Squads Theta and Gamma, move in to secure Jack. Non lethal force only. Find and capture her!"
She sneers. Non lethal force? What a bunch of weak kneed pussies. The only way anyone was going to get her now was with a fucking huge bomb. Not that she'd count on that working either. When she was through with Kurill, he'd be lucky if all that was left was a stain on the wall. But maybe not today, she can wait. Right now, the only thing that matters is getting out. Somebody had woken her up, left the Spider to run riot, and she didn't believe in accidents. That meant somebody was looking for her, busted her out of cryo, but she didn't give a damn as to who or why. Maybe it's Cerberus, maybe not. Didn't matter anyway. Anyone coming for her was a scumsucker out to kill or use her, too bad for them. She isn't going to be around when the place burns. She directs her sneer back at the blast door, thick bolts of reinforced steel alloys that would take a rocket head on and keep on standing. The Spider leaps.
Doors? Fuck doors.
**********
Shepard doesn't so much sleep as have a rest state when he disconnects from the external sensors. It isn't exactly real sleep, but it's the best analogue he's got.
The proper question though is, would he dream of electric sheep.
The proper question though is, would he dream of electric sheep.
*Shepard7 has logged in*vIsitor said:
ShepardN7: Yo.
ShepardN7: Great, my first time back on WoW in years and everybody is off. Ah well, back to my mage.
[An Hour later]
ShepardN7: They #$$%# nerfed it! Those bastards!
This took much, much, much longer than I thought it would to complete, but here I am, and it's done at long last. I present to you, Iron Rebirth, chapter 10.
And now, neither does she.
The guard in her grasp manages one scream before it trails off into a wet squelch, the crumpled remains more like the food paste from her last meal than human. Discarding the leaking corpse with a wave of her hand, head buzzing with the tight grasp of the implant in her skull, she goes to work on his partner with a snarl. The blue white flare of biotics outlines her frame, and the armoured Turian comes apart like wet tissue paper. Dark blue blood splatters her face and chest, dripping down her tats and draping over her body like a sweater made of warm stinking guts. But that warmth is nothing compared to the rush, the roaring bonfire in her stomach as she rips the scumsucker's head off. The charnel smell's just something she's just that good at ignoring. The human she didn't give a flying fuck, just another dumb idiot too stupid to live. But the Turian was one of the ones Kurill tended to sic on her if she broke his toys. She had rules about that kind of thing.
Rule one. Always get even. Always.
The black, bulge eyed expression she gets kindles the warmest thing she's felt in what seems like a lifetime before it pops like a scaly grape. She can just imagine squishing Kurill's face now.
She sees the motion from the corner of her eye, tell tale signs of hostility that set off a hiss of a hate from her lips. Number three, another rule to follow. Always get them first before they can get you. Blue light swirls and a barrier is up before she even registers the muzzle flash of the remaining guard's rifle. A hail of bullets streak across the measly fifty feet in an eyeblink before flashing to a cold stop inches from her face and chest. A bloodless curl makes its way up her lips. This one's broken. Kurill wanted her alive after all. Screaming all her rage, she lets the Spider in her head claw at her brain, little steaming icicles of ghostly pain stabbing into the hindquarters of her consciousness. A light show envelops her, draining into her fist as she charges across the intervening space in wide bounds. A burst of biotic power, and she clips him on the head, blowing off the helmet to reveal a grizzled face behind it. The sap drops his rifle to clutch at his chest, jerking free a silvery knife. It's not one of the fat K-bars soldiers sometimes carry, but a long thin thing, with a cutting edge like a scalpel.
And suddenly she's a little girl again, back in the lab, in the surgical ward with the doctor.
The doctor doesn't introduce himself to her, not like the others. He doesn't have a name, just the title, 'doctor', the cold room with the bright lights, the shackling straps that hold her tight, and the knife. The cutting edge of a knife pressing, slicing, making tiny little incisions in her skull, peeling away skin, cutting through bone. She's conscious through it all, her nerves dead, but never asleep, every sensation there for her to feel in terrifying horror as it probes deeper and deeper. She tries to scream, but her gagged mouth refuses to budge, tries to struggle, to get away from the man with the knife, but the restraints bite down tight and prevent her even from shivering. And then there's the pinch at the base of her skull, clamping down on exposed flesh and bone, the burrowing thing she learns to call the Spider, digging into her mind like an unwelcome predator. It jostles her consciousness, an alien thing intruding on her awareness like a fat mouth breather sitting in your personal space. It's all of a second of an acquaintance, and she hates it, fears it with every fibre of her being.
But the Spider is power, sweet delicious nectar that floods every pore in her body, the tingling warmth of her superiority over every other thing. Blue fire she had struggled to ignite in bygone days comes like a snap, roaring with all the hate and pain she can stuff into it. She's faster, stronger, harder than everyone else who's ever wronged her, than every fucker in the universe. The guard's gone, but the doctor is still there. She doesn't see the blue and white armour he's wearing, the ashen face twisting into a snarl of defiance. She doesn't even register the hand going for the grenade pinned to his chest. All she sees is the doctor and the knife, ready to make that cut.
But she's not a helpless little girl anymore, begging in futility for the pain to stop. Never again. Never beg like a weakling. She takes.
The knife doesn't even come close to touching her. There's no form, no grace, just raw instinct and bloodlust as she twists away from the first thrust and ducks the second slash. And then she ends it with her fist slamming into armoured carapace like a bulk lifter, polymer and ceramic inlays crumpling like a wet paper bag. There's all a microsecond of a choked cry before physics comes back with a vengeance, splattering the doctor against the far wall with all the force of a mass accelerator round. She spends all of a heartbeat blinking as she finally recognizes the cracked armour plate he has on.
Not the doctor, the sadistic bastard's dead like every other fucker in Teltin. Just another ex-guard in Purgatory. Teeth gleam from beneath her sadistic grin. Bad memories or not, it's just one less obstacle to her freedom.
The annoying wail of klaxons pick up in pitch as something blows up behind her with a roar of flames, another stab at her ass end of a home for the past fuck knows how many years. Automated doors slam shut as fire suppressant systems activate, filling the room with a cold puffy white clouds. The hallway exit itself is sealed, hidden behind a double layered blast door of reinforced steel. She snarls with the energy of the scornfully defiant. Did they really think that would work?
The Spider skitters across the web of her consciousness, stabbing little icicles of venom and pain as it obeys her command. A good pain that encases her fist in a rioting halo of blue. But before she can tear down the offending barrier, the crackle of a radio catches her attention. She doesn't ignore it, not right away. She's pissed, but not stupid. It's from the helmet of the cretin she just pulped, squawking with a voice she knows so well.
"Block D-1 is in lockdown. Squads Theta and Gamma, move in to secure Jack. Non lethal force only. Find and capture her!"
She sneers. Non lethal force? What a bunch of weak kneed pussies. The only way anyone was going to get her now was with a fucking huge bomb. Not that she'd count on that working either. When she was through with Kurill, he'd be lucky if all that was left was a stain on the wall. But maybe not today, she can wait. Right now, the only thing that matters is getting out. Somebody had woken her up, left the Spider to run riot, and she didn't believe in accidents. That meant somebody was looking for her, busted her out of cryo, but she didn't give a damn as to who or why. Maybe it's Cerberus, maybe not. Didn't matter anyway. Anyone coming for her was a scumsucker out to kill or use her, too bad for them. She isn't going to be around when the place burns. She directs her sneer back at the blast door, thick bolts of reinforced steel alloys that would take a rocket head on and keep on standing. The Spider leaps.
Doors? Fuck doors.
"We've got sector C-2, but we're pinned down and cannot hold! Requesting reinforcements!"
Kurill was a lot of things, most of them generally unflattering, and quite a few contradictory depending on who you asked. A Blue Suns commander, Warden over the inmate populace of Purgatory, cold blooded Turian mercenary turned extortionist, and public service provider were among the few labels he had acquired over the years he'd gone into the business of wetwork for hire. That was just baggage, bits of debris that people tended to heap on old hands like him once they'd gotten around. But to himself, he was always, and would always be, a simple businessman, if one willing to get his hands a little dirtier than most. When some corporate wanted guns for hire to quash an upstart competitor, there he was, no questions asked. When a government needed a place to get rid of dangerous criminals, he was a happy supplier of that place, for the right price of course. Businessmen did not get by on charity cases after all.
"Damnit, where are our reinforcements? We need backup now!"
And like all successful businessmen, he knew how to gauge the risks and profit of any venture. Synthetic Insights had promised a kingly sum for the intact capture of the prototype AI chassis, much more than what Cerberus had offered for Jack's release. For that kind of money, risking his reputation as a 'fair' dealer with his clients was well worth the trade off. And so long as he had Jack, who remained securely locked behind the most heavily reinforced cryogenic systems known to Citadel Space, Cerberus would have to forgive him anything. It had been, in his original estimation, a no-lose situation. However, the machine was rapidly proving to be a bigger drain on his resources than he had initially estimated. He had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and resources gathering all the information on the war machine's performance, crafting his plans around countering them. That had been accurate. But with the rest of its compatriots, his intelligence was less so. He'd expected professionals, Cerberus had no dead weight in its numbers as far as he knew. The Turian and Krogan were a surprise to find among the human supremacist organization. Unfamiliar faces to him, but they were operating like an elite assault unit who'd spent a lifetime training together. And seeing Zaeed's face working among them was a shock.
"It's that damned mech! Get down, GET DO-"
The legendary mercenary had shot to infamy when he'd brought down the Verrikan from the inside with just a handful of men, earning the reputation for someone who got the job done no matter how insane, but often at the cost of most of his squad. Strangely, none of the Cerberus operatives had died yet, which made his losses all the more frustrating. This could have been explained away by the fact that Zaeed was not in command, the synthetic intelligence was; which led to its own set of problems. From the video feeds, he watched it direct the troops under its command with the kind of fluid but brutal efficiency that bore little in common with the grinding and implacable onslaught of Geth tactics, bearing more than a passing resemblance to human ones instead. No wasted motions, near instant comprehension of orders and responses. The hero of the Citadel may have been dead and gone, but Cerberus had apparently not slacked in trying to replicate his tactical proficiency. He had already lost five times the men originally projected as sufficient to overwhelm the boarding team, and they had yet to neutralize the Cerberus liaison and her bodyguard, not to mention loss of the command centre. Kurill felt put out about that; he'd trained his men to repel that kind of heavy assault and it rankled his professional pride that they were being brushed aside so easily despite the advantages of territory, numbers and firepower on their side. Compared to the way things were rapidly deteriorating into however, it was a minor case of scale itch.
"Damnit, there's too many of the prisoners! We can't hold them back! We-"
Losing power had cost him much of shipboard security and his prisoner stock before the secondary fuel cells could come online. Even then, they only had the barest minimum of power available, just enough to run life support, lights and the doors. The engineering bay had reported entire power arrays slagged from overheat; sabotage they had claimed, before they'd been overrun by the prisoners. He'd taken drastic measures then, voiding several blocks including Engineering, hundreds of thousands of credits of valuable scum sent blowing out into hard vacuum, as an example of what would happen if they continued. It hadn't worked. They were too desperate to be held back by threats, counting on him not willing to sacrifice them all with heavy handed use of decompression since it would gut his lucrative business. Five minutes ago, they would have been even right. To an extent.
"Gamma team here. We've spotted Jack, request permission to use lethal force."
He flicked a mandible, activating his suits communication system for a micro burst transmission.
"Denied."
"She's tearing us apart! We're getting slaugh-"
Mandibles clacked in frustration as the transmission cut out with a burst of static. With the same amount of dispassionate ease, he tasked another assault group from his command omni-tool on an intercept vector. The corpse of Jack would be useless to him, but alive, she was worth so much more. With just her in custody, he could lose Purgatory and still recoup his losses. If he could not capture the machine Insights wanted, then at least he would still have Jack. The remaining Arc projector-equipped troops had been retasked with the role of hunting the escapee down and bringing her in one way or another, but he had his private doubts about their chances. What few command systems still responding to his tactical net were reporting over thirteen hull breaches, all of them caused within five minutes of Jack's unauthorized release from cryogenic suspension. The only silver lining in the whole matter was that Cerberus had yet to make contact with her, the reports on former indicating that they were in pursuit, but unable to catch up before running into another clutch of guards.
"Hey asswipe."
It wasn't an encrypted broadcast, but in clear, and on a wide band send. Someone wanted everyone to hear this. Kuril did not demand the identity of the person on the tactical net, nor did he berate them for insubordination. The automatic response had been strangled in the creche at the first syllable. That the IFF system tagged the unit responding as already killed in action had nothing to do with it. He knew that voice. Not unexpected.
"Jack."
A part of him wanted to strangle the destructive ball of hate, but like all the other unprofitable impulses he had in the past, he pushed it down and kept his voice civil, if condescending.
"I'm coming for you, you Drell fucking piece of Vorcha shit, and when I'm done, there's not going to be even a smear."
"How generous." A pack of prisoners rounded the corner and spotted him, howling with fury as they pounded forward with a variety of improvised or stolen weapons in their hands. Kurill unhurriedly put his weapon to his shoulder, letting his upgraded kinetic barriers absorb the occasional hit that connected without flinching, and pulled the trigger. His return fire was much more effective. The entire exercise took less than a second to clear and by then he had formulated his response to the biotic while he strode past the corpses. "But I have a better offer, seeing how you have nowhere to go. Return to your cell block, and I'll let you keep one leg. And maybe an arm if I'm in a good mood."
He preferred to avoid maiming his stock when he could, such things tended to lower their value as incentives for governments to pay for their imprisonment. But sometimes a stronger example than just beatings needed to be made, to keep the inmates properly docile. The response was a snarl of scorn and hate, peppered with some colourful language that made his mandibles twitch in amusement at her imagination. An intense ball of hate stronger than any Krogan grudge and biotics powerful enough to tear through bulkheads made Jack a very powerful enemy to have. He didn't wait for the litany to die down before he interrupted her.
"Or perhaps I'll just let you be reunited with certain quarters who want to see you again very badly."
There was a stream of inventive invectives before the channel died in a squeal of static.
He motioned for his guards to pick up the pace. Jack was angry, and she was desperate now that she knew what he did. Desperation drove most sentients into a very limited series of objectives, and for all her bluster, he knew the kind of creature she was. What she would seek first and foremost had already been well accounted for. He cycled through the available channels, hovering over a one time encryption key he'd never planned on using but kept all the same. Only a handful of his most trusted men had the necessary decryption protocols, the rest would have to find their own way. He activated the key, and spoke only two words.
"Do it."
Today, Purgatory burned.
He found it difficult not to find dark amusement in that particular knowledge as he stepped over the remnants of a blue armoured corpse, the cadaver having been torn apart not by firearms, but the fists and feet of desperate prisoners. For all the promises of the priests and preachers of an afterlife of one flavour or another, his meeting with the reaper had not introduced him to any incarnation of the sort. Death had lacked a place of torments and judgment that the religious spoke of, but life had given him one. That it was quickly turning into a classical depiction of hell, with fire and death in its halls... it brought a tendril of amusement to his jaded mind. Cerberus's Frankenstein project might have robbed him of a body, but it had given him a fresh viewpoint for the symbolically ironic.
Not that he had anything to do with the ongoing destruction of the space borne prison. Well, not entirely. The effects of his plan had plunged the station into the temporary darkness of total power failure, and though backups did exist to combat such an event, they were not as well protected from external intrusion as the primary systems had been. It had only been emergency reporting systems and such, but they were a vulnerability all the same. EDI had seized control of most of the command systems the moment they were reactivated, circumventing firewalls and transferring administrator privileges in the brief window of time they were exposed. Establishing communications with Miranda's team once the jamming system had been disabled was easily accomplished, but there had been complications. Though only the most direct threats, the automated sentry guns and security mechs, had been disabled, it had not taken very long for the prisoners to realize a never-to-be-repeated opportunity and broken confinement en-masse. They were unarmed and unarmoured, going against a security contingent of heavily armed guards with only their superior numbers to assail the mercenaries fortifications. The conclusion was a foregone one.
It did not take very long before the first hull breach was reported, with the loss of all hands in that sector.
All for the sake of a rampaging biotic.
As if the thought conjures her presence, the interior rings with the shriek of steel being tormented beyond all tolerance, shearing apart as some part of the ship in the distance is rent asunder by an unstoppable force. He knows it is the bulkhead giving way, a violent remodelling of the interior to produce new doors where once there was solid steel. The towering rage of a sociopath imprisoned but now free, bending local reality for the sole purpose of destruction. He knows all of this, because they have already borne witness to the destruction left in her wake. His squad, already used to the ear splitting sounds of destruction, do not falter, the Turian only pausing in his advance to share an inscrutable look from behind the opaque visor of his helmet. He couldn't see what was behind the mask, couldn't catch the twist to his mandibles or raised eyeplate, but neither was required to decipher the unspoken question.
Was what you did that back there, all of that, really necessary?
He didn't answer, at least not right away, other than to wave his arm in a forward gesture. Fresh gunfire crackled as doors opened to spill forth a platoons worth of blue suns, assault rifles chattering. His squad went to cover, questions forgotten as Garrus dives behind the ruins of a collapsed cell transfer crane. Too large to take advantage of the chest height obstructions, Shepard waded forward, autocannon in his arm snarling a reply. Marching in lockstep with him was Okeer's legacy, swaddled in thick armour and the even thicker hide of his race, shotgun at the ready. Blue armoured forms staggered as they were stitched with a storm of metal, flinging them to the ground in boneless heaps. He fought on, but the question niggled at his mind.
It was redundant to ask. Necessity guided his actions, defined the man that he was. He always weighed the scales, made the choices that provided the best results for all concerned. If horror and cruelty was the only way in the time they had, then he would do so. They had made their decisions, so had he. Releasing Jack from cryo stasis while the situation was fluid was a gamble, but he had two very good reasons for taking the risk. They required a distraction to keep the forces separated, and it would be an effective test of her capabilities. If she survived, it would prove she had the power and mettle they needed for the task ahead. He loathed to use people that way, but the logic behind it was necessary. Even with the dossiers, Jack was an unknown and volatile equation, testing her now would gauge her effectiveness later. But doubts still lingered, and not only at the calculative reasons.
They were both agents of the law, Garrus in C-Sec and him as an Alliance marine. Former in both cases, but the oaths they had taken did not end with their service. The blue suns were mercenaries, their calling was money, not the law, not the governments they hailed from, and certainly not justice. But they had guarded a prisoner, no doubts as to her crimes there, one they were helping escape from well deserved incarceration. Her biotic potential was off the scale, both in the reports he had read and the evidence that lay strewn about the collapsing ship. He had seen the remains of the YMIR assault platforms, crumpled like clay men within a prizefighter's fist. Miranda and Jacob, the only two biotics in his crew, could not even begin to compare. Their need was great, nothing could be held back in the fight against the Reapers. The best of the best, every bullet, ship, and resource available to be marshaled to fight the coming tide of extinction, no matter its origins.
Subject Zero was a diminutive package of unparallelled biotic fury who could throw over thirty thousand Newtons worth of force, four times greater than the next best human on record, more than enough to crumple steel bars like empty soda cans. No matter their reservations, that kind of power was an asset they could use. A power that they desperately needed to fight the Reaper's Collector pawns. But the thoughts are an unwanted distraction, even if they are not affecting his combat performance; they are committed, and there is no place for doubts here. The crackle of his tactical communications net reminds him of that.
"You know, this makes no sense Shepard."
"WHAT" The reply is cursory, his attention focused on the nimble guard who avoided the first fusillade and is now making a getaway. He does not take his second step before a rifle cracks with lethal finality, blood erupting from his chest as his body pitches into the ground before lying still. From the corner of his vision, Shepard caught the suggestion of a shrug from the grizzled Turian as he ducked back behind the shelter of an upright steel plate. With the momentary respite, he rapped the construction with his free hand.
"This. Pop up barriers in the middle of a nice wide and open kill zone like this? It's like they want to make things easy for us."
Shepard would have smirked at the sardonic tone if he still had lips, his earlier introspection forgotten. Garrus always did have a knack for understating things. The plates had been a bit of a surprise when they had first encountered them in the prison wings, thick slabs of armoured steel seamlessly flush against the deck, snapping to position via powerful magnetic clamps at just the right height to shelter a roughly human sized person if they ducked. Since they were controlled by the security system, he could see the logic behind evenly spaced shelters you could deploy on command. Except with communications restored, security was EDI's plaything, the artificial intelligence subverting the automated shelters for their benefit and denying it to their enemies. He didn't know how well they would have stood up to conventional omni-tool hacks, but given how woefully prepared they were for heavy electronic warfare attacks, he decided that Garrus had a point after all.
"NOT THAT THEY NEED TO" He punctuated his observation with a burst of cannon fire, the stream of projectiles flaring against the barriers of a guard and knocking him down behind a fallen girder.
"Well if it's too easy for you commander, I'm sure we'll find something suitably challenging for you soon enough," Piped in another voice on the tactical net, the ID tag telling him what he already knows from the arch, slightly annoyed voice. So much for the unofficial small truce with the Cerberus liaison. Miranda had been rather peeved to learn how the insertion attempt had almost gone bad, much less being ordered back to the Normandy with Jacob, though she kept her disapproval reined in. Neither one had worn environmentally sealed armour to avoid tipping off their hand early, while most of their contingency plans required them. "Seeing how those arc projectors they're using don't seem to be up to your standards, perhaps riding out the impending re-entry would be more to your tastes."
Mostly reined in.
Garrus chuckled, unhooking a flashbang from his harness, "Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Shepard's the one for crazy rides. Word of advice; never let him drive. Especially if it's a Mako."
For once, he was glad at his machine body's inability to reproduce contextual sounds outside of human grammar or he would have groaned as yet another voice added his two credits.
"You mean the Mako IFV?" the grizzled voice of Zaeed queried, a hint of curiosity in his voice as he stepped past a ventilated corpse, pausing only long enough to give it a swift kick. "Never been in one, but damned bloody tough things I remember. Take a hell of a beating and they just keep on going. Hear they have shitty suspension though, half the time they get called vomit comets because it was bloody bouncing all over the place."
"NOT THAT BAD," he refuted a little defensively, ignoring the chuckles of the ex-vigilante and turning his attention and grenade launcher to where the guard had fallen. Thermal sensors illuminated the hidden form, pencil-thin beams of coherent light feeding distance calculations into the micro-warhead as the weapon on his shoulder barked. The roar of its incendiaries detonating over the barrier is joined by the tormented cry of a newly-ignited human torch.
"Not that bad? Come on Shepard, you were a complete maniac behind the wheel." The Turian accompanied his rebuttal with a backhand toss of the flashbang towards the last gaggle of guards. "Calling it a vomit comet was an understatement when you drove. How many Alliance Marines can claim to have made it cartwheel off a sheer drop, bounce off a cliff face, only to land on that pirate crawler? I swear the thing would have fallen apart after only one mission with you."
Shepard refrained from answering immediately as his optics dimmed to compensate for the sudden eruption of light and sound, feeling a bit offended. Yes, he had pushed the armoured fighting vehicle hard, and the ride was sometimes uncomfortable between dodging anti-tank fire and navigating harsh terrain, but they'd all come through, more or less intact despite the incredible odds stacked against them. The complaints, he felt, were somewhat unjustified. "EVERYONE SURVIVED."
"Not that survival was much of a blessing if it meant another drop like that. Why do you think I was always running maintenance on it?" The sardonic reply was punctuated by a short staccato beat of Garrus's battle rifle. At the end of the hall, a guard threw down his ruined shotgun with a curse, darting for the holstered pistol at his side. Another triple beat, and the mercenary fell with a spray of arterial blood. "Besides, remember the Geth colossus? The one you ran over?"
The mercenary actually paused in mid-fire, retaining the presence of mind to duck behind cover before shooting an incredulous look at Shepard. "Wait. A Geth colossus? Bloody huge walking tank? You're bleeding pulling my leg."
Powering through a deployable barrier with his bulk, Shepard slew the idle thought of sending a warning shot at Garrus as he continued to elaborate.
"A lucky hit had taken out the main gun, so instead of pulling back to fix it, he charges straight ahead. Fishtailed into it right as it was turning around to hit us, knocked out half its support legs." Garrus rose to his feet, snapping off another accurate burst of fire before dashing forward. Several steps later, he slid behind a piece of debris, nonchalantly continuing as if he wasn't being shot at. "The platform went down hard at that point, clipped the Mako with its backside. One thing about that vehicle, the suspension really likes to bounce. It sent us flipping across the landscape. Longest ten seconds of my life. By the time we came to a stop, I was ready to call it quits."
He chuckled as Shepard scoured the remaining strongpoints with a withering storm of steel. "Only sheer luck we ended up on our wheels rather than upside down. But just as the synthetic starts to get up again, Shepard guns the engine and drives up its back like a ramp before parking right on top of it. Between the Geth's flailing and Shepard lighting off the thrusters on its head, we're getting tossed around inside like a bunch of marbles. And would you believe it, he's laughing all the while."
"YOU DID NOT COMPLAIN THEN." Were they not in the middle of a firefight, and had he better control over the amount of strength put in his motor controls, Shepard would probably have given into the impulse to chastise Garrus with a smack across the back of the head for bringing up the incident. Instead, he vented his frustrations by lighting off another missile from his arm launcher, blasting apart the last of the holdouts while Grunt charged into their midst. Yes, it had happened the way Garrus described, but it had made sense at the time!
"I think we were more concerned about checking to see if we were still alive after that stunt, commander." He interjected above the bark of his rifle.
"You talk too much Turian." Grunt's disapproving rumble carried above the crack of armour plate as he drove his fist into the chest of the last guard. The blow sent him slamming against the bulkheads with enough force to leave a dent, his chest plate crumpled inwards. "Your warlord brings you to glorious victory in battle and you complain of discomfort? Weak."
"Oh, you haven't experienced his driving yet." There was the tiniest pause where Shepard could visualize the twitch of mandibles behind a helmet, the Turian equivalent of a grin. "It would be... instructive."
Slewing his sensor pod towards the ex-vigilante, Shepard fixed him with the hardest stare he could muster with its optics. It was conceding the point, but he was a man without a body dammit. He was entitled to preserving at least a shred of his dignity. "DO YOU WANT ME TO PILOT THE GUNSHIP ON THE NEXT DROP"
It was petty, but the way the Turian's head snapped towards him in shock was very satisfying. "Isn't that against Citadel and Systems Alliance law, commander? I think they classified it as cruel and unusual punishment."
He regretted not being able to grin, settling for shifting his arm servos in the analogue of a shrug. "NOT IN THE MILITARY ANY MORE. THIS IS A CERBERUS OPERATION. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS LIKE."
"Commander, as amusing as it is to hear of your past exploits, might I remind you that we are short on time as it is," Miranda's voice on the tactical net carried no small amount of irritation as she interrupted Garrus's response, "Purgatory's orbit is rapidly decaying and Subject Zero is still a-." Her words were suddenly cut off by the toneless and unhurried voice of EDI.
"Shepard, I am detecting the simultaneous launch of Purgatory's escape pods. Sensor contacts indicate that they comprise the entirety of Purgatory's complement."
A few curses flitted through the communications net, the guttural oath from Zaeed losing itself in the Grunt's growl of frustration at the 'cowards', but Shepard only asked one question of the synthetic intelligence.
"LIFE SIGNS"
Purgatoy's primary thrusters were down, its reactor cores scrammed and would stay that way for days with only the on board resources at hand. The secondary fuel cells had been slagged, forced to overload by a pulsed override command even as they warmed up. Not all of them, enough just to leave life support and the barest of functions running. For a little while longer. Anyone in the Engineering bays would know from their data readouts and the red hot pools of chemical sludge that were their secondaries. Cold-starting the main reactors was impossible. Caught in Olokun's gravity well, its hours-long death spiral had already begun, and would terminate in the crushing grasp of the gas giant. Abandoning ship was the only sensible thing to do, about the only option left if you intended to live to see the next day. At least, the only option he wanted the inhabitants of Purgatory to believe with EDI's more subtle manipulations of the control systems.
Frankenstein's creation he might be, but Shepard was not yet a complete monster.
But coordinated mass launches like this were an unexpected variable, there was no practical sense to delaying the pods until everyone was filled. Assuming they were filled. EDI's answer came a moment later, confirming his suspicions.
"None. They are empty."
Shepard had never been one for profanity, no matter how bad things had gotten. Profanity was an emotional outlet, but pointless for resolving problems. It did not lessen the urge to blister the air with Kurill's name, like now. He accelerated, moving down the trail of destruction that Jack had left behind. It had to be a part of the Warden's plan, that meant they didn't have-
A detonation rocked the entire ship, the superstructure groaning in protest as the prison bucked and heaved. Internal gyros whined as they struggled to keep his balance in the sudden upheaval, his team scrabbling to stay upright even as the floor panels buckled beneath them. Screaming filled the air, but not from those who had accompanied him. Wall-mounted isolation modules high above were knocked loose by the detonation, tearing free into gravity's grasp. Prisoners still trapped inside shrieked as their prisons smashed themselves into pulp on the unyielding floor, or were cracked open to unforgiving vacuum while fires bloomed from shattered life support pipes, plumes of igniting oxygen scorching the walls.
But the all-consuming explosion he expected never came.
"STATUS" he demanded the moment the aftershocks subsided, receiving a number of affirmative check ins on the tactical net. And one jibe.
"Hey commander, was that your idea? Because, you totally got the sequence wrong you know? When you blow up the ship, you're supposed to be in the escape pods, and not inside getting blown to bits. That's how it's done in the action holos."
If he had eyes, he would have rolled them at Joker. "NOT MY IDEA JOKER" He had a pretty good idea who's idea it was, though the knowledge was not very comforting. He had miscalculated. From the amount of opposition that had been thrown up to intercept his group, he was expecting that the Warden would have tried to force a confrontation, possibly harbouring the hopes that he could still capture him. He should have expected the possibility it was a feint. He hadn't expected this.
"Uh yeah. That probably makes sense. You're crazy, but not that crazy. Might want to hurry it up a bit then. The Purgatory's port fuel storage tanks just went up all at once, nearly tore her in half. Thermal's showing a lot of heat signatures going on inside too, looks like fire containment's on the fritz. The way things are going, starboard tanks might go up any minute too. If that happens, it's really going to bring down the resale value."
Another lesser explosion rocked the ship, underscoring Joker's words as the perfectly calm voice of the Purgatory's shipboard VI announced the loss of life support in several decks.
"Definitely not the kind of thing you want to see up close."
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck the Warden. The bastard was crazier than she'd given him credit for. Purgatory was getting blown to shit. That was good. About time it got what was coming. Except there weren't any escape pods, and that was fucking kick to the cunt. It was the same fucking thing with every pod she'd come across, all launched, none left, and the fucking ship about two steps from finishing the job of blowing itself to bits. She was damned sure she'd gotten to the pods ahead of the guards and rest of the prisoners a few times, but those were gone too. She wanted to grin despite her rage. The sadistic bastard had finally decided to take her seriously, blowing up the ship and her with it.
There had to be a way out. She fucking refused to give up like this. Rule three. Someone always fucked up, kill him before he can unfuck himself. Jack wasn't stupid, she knew her freedom had been somebody doing rule three. The guards were too well trained to fuck up like that, so that meant somebody else, probably those 'concerned quarters' the Warden had let slip. That meant they had come looking for her, probably set her loose. Didn't matter whether it was an accident or on purpose, but that meant they were probably fucking up the Warden's shit, and more importantly, they had a ship.
Jack didn't buy into that 'enemy of my enemy' crap. Looking out for yourself was the rule. Everyone else has an angle, looking to screw you over. They had a ship, likely a shuttle in the only hanger bay on this rustbucket, and that meant she had a ticket out.
She just had to make sure she killed them all first.
She walked down the hallway, tapping the walls periodically until things squared with the mental map in her head. She'd seen the interior of the hanger once, when they'd brought her in. Like every other place she'd come across, she'd kept all the important details in that corner of her mind labelled 'escape routes and weak points'. And right now, she needed a weak point right where she could kick the bastard in his scaly balls. She stopped walking at a junction, just another featureless corridor of panelled walls and floors, at least, that was how it would look like to anybody else. To her, it was perfect. The floor fell away as she fed the Spider all her hate and rage, the other presence in her mind encasing her body with solid blue fire. With an ear splitting howl, she hurled herself at the wall, punching through screeching bulkheads like a freight train through wet waste paper.
The bulkhead tore open in an explosive shower of deadly debris as she rammed through them, a particularly large chunk flattening some schmuck in blue before he could even turn. But there were a lot more figures in blue with guns, and a few of them had already started shooting. Jack didn't waste a second, pulling at some of the debris with a flick of her mind and sending the rest of it scattering into the hanger bay. Two heartbeats later, and a chunk of steel the size of an aircar slammed into the closest bunch of guards like a freight train. The rest scattered and dove for cover as the rest of the former wall hurtled their way. It wasn't much, but it was enough for her to land on the crane without taking a shot up the ass. She didn't pause to admire her handiwork, only stupid idiots did that, but scuttled along the crane's loading arm, pausing only to grab a loose fuel tank and slam it into a cluster of guards who tried their luck with potshots over their makeshift cover. Their screams as the tank broke and ignited sent up a warm feeling in her belly.
"You feeling that, you bastards?"
She jumped, tearing down the crane behind her in a shower of sparks. The container in its grasp broke free, the improvised missile crushing a gaggle of guards with an almighty crash as it came down on their heads. She landed a moment later on the twisted pile of scrap and rolled with the impact, bouncing to her feet before the rest could correct their aim. She spent all of a heartbeat swivelling her head left and right, looking for the scaly shit who ran this miserable hell hole and finding nothing. She scowled at that. The Warden was somewhere around here, too many of his goons to be anything else. Well, she had the answer for that.
"Come out you asswipe!" the ex-convict howled as she tore through another cluster of guards, bowling them over with a blast of dark energy and smearing a few across the floor like crushed fruit for good measure. Assault rifles chattered and shotguns roared, storms of flechettes halting just inches from her face as the Spider hissed and webbed them. She sent them back, with exploding canisters for interest. One of them had a rocket launcher, she blinked at that, giving him points for having the balls to use it inside a ship. And then she took his balls away with a well aimed throw of torn piping. The improvised spear punched through his kinetic barriers and pinned him to the wall where he flopped like a dying fish. His screams were music to her ears.
There were at least thirty more moving bodies in blue with guns. She had no armour and no weapons. But she didn't need either. The Spider was a weapon, the Spider was loose, and so was all the cargo in the hanger, this was her playground now. Flechettes and grenades were met with the Spider's web, never touching her. She flailed with her power in broad sweeping strokes, slamming armoured figures into unyielding walls with resounding crunches. A gesture with her forefinger, and a head popped clean off the neck it was attached to. A wordless snarl, and a man was torn from limb to limb. But they weren't him.
"Come out and fucking die already!"
A sudden burst of fire caught her attention, a hail of flechettes sparking off the floor just in front of her.
"So nice to see that you're punctual, Jack."
That was when she saw him emerging from an opened cargo container, that smug flare to his mandibles making her blood boil. Turians all looked the same to her, but she made it a point to memorize that distinctive face paint, and that oily bastard voice. How convenient that he had gone without a helmet so she could find him easily. Even better, he was standing next to a shuttle with its engines primed and ready for takeoff. She grabbed a loading crate and tossed it at him, but the bastard was faster than she had accounted for, ducking under the missile before snapping off a few rounds. They slammed into her barriers harder than the other times she had been shot at. The Spider chittered under the strain of holding it up, exacting its toll with a pulsing migraine.
"Be a good prisoner and be so kind as to drop on the floor." He responded laconically between bursts of fire. "I'd prefer to have you undamaged... permanently that is."
She howled and lunged forward, biotically kicking off a shattered support for better acceleration. That was when the Warden tapped a button beside his rifle, and the underslung barrel barked.
Two disc-like objects whizzed towards her, slamming into the shield of dark energy she had drawn up at the last instant. One moment was all it took for her to recognize them, and she raised her hands protectively. That was when the world went white, and all thought became impossible except for an infuriated, 'Fuck, my eyes!'
But she didn't go down, and didn't stop, clinging on with all the stubbornness she could muster with her fury. She didn't need her eyes to use the Spider. She didn't even need them to navigate, she remembered where everything was well enough. Then the pain hit her. It felt like kissing a live wire, every muscle in her body jerked and spasmed as she danced to the electric tune. Her mouth opened to howl in fury, but all that came out was a strangled cry of pain and frustration. Every part of her body didn't want to respond to her rage no matter how she forced it.
Blinded, deafened, immobile. Helpless for the Warden to scoop up. Vulnerable.
Jack managed to scream at that thought, biting down on that pain and riding it like a brutal lover. She'd faced worse than this, she'd lived worse than this, she wouldn't give up like a fucking pansy. By sheer force of will, she clamped down on the Spider, squeezing it to do as she willed. The swirling pulse of biotic power filled her, not to strike out, but encasing her limbs with a suit of dark energy. Nerveless fingers that refused to clench surrendered to the constricting aura of light, limbs bending to her will. She was going to make them pay, every single fu-
Another live wire struck her chest and she screamed at the pain, the swirling corona of energies around her fist trebling as spasms racked her body. The Spider chittered, nearly squirming out of her grasp as her control over her biotics faltered. But she held on, howling as she strangled the Spider into submission. Dark energy flared and pulsed, sending everything not nailed down flying. Guards yelled with panic, music to her ears that encouraged her to press on. She got shocked again for her resistance, twice in rapid succession, nearly dropping her to her knees as her body writhed under the assault. The Spider slipped it's leash, skittering away into the darkness for one horrible second before she wrestled it back. But her hold was tenuous, nearly failing from the overwhelming pain. Rifles chattered, and her barriers flickered, barely stopping the bullets while the Spider screamed in agony.
But she clamped down on the torment, hanging on by sheer fury alone. The pain was nothing, nothing compared to the torture Cerberus had put her through. She would survive. And she was going to make them pay.
Every single fucking one.
That had been the optimistic plan. So of course it went wrong.
Between Jack's rapid exit before they could link up, the mass launch of empty escape pods and the, likely deliberate, detonation of the fuel tanks now threatening the entire ship, that plan, not to mention Plans B through D were now obsolete, E had insufficient preparation time to make it work, and F was little more than making it up on the fly with a few educated guesses. The good news was, they knew where Jack would most likely be heading with all other avenues of escape cut off. The bad news was, the Warden would be waiting there with whatever remained of his troops, heavy weapons and prepared ambush positions. And given her pace, there was no way they could link up with the convict before she ran headlong into the ambush.
She would last a while, he had no doubt about that given what he had seen in her passing. But biotics had limits, and the Warden had captured her before. Even if she destroyed the ambush before they arrived, she'd likely escape on whatever means Kurill had stashed away and they would lose their last opportunity. Haste had become the only priority, they had to find Jack before it was too late, even if it meant making a direct assault into enemy fire.
To be fair, he had been expecting weapons fire to greet him the moment he breached the hanger bay doors. Getting struck by a screaming mechanical missile was not among the things he had been accounting for.
It happened in an instant. The hanger doors had been sealed shut, the controls locked out. So they had been blasted open with breaching charges, his team pushing through the instant the doors came apart. He was the first through the breach, trusting to his shields and armour to absorb the expected attack. And then the projectile was there, howling scrap code as it blew past the smoke and headed for his head.
Automated threat detection routines registered the threat in under a microsecond, and kinetic barriers flared to life at the speed of light. The white and black form of an armoured FENRIR mech struck the barrier, coronas of dark energy flashed and rippled dangerously for an instant as conflicting shield systems tried to cancel each other out. A lightweight human form LOKI type security mech would have been instantly bowled over at the sudden impact even had it been shielded. But a YMIR assault class mech was a stable platform, more than a ton of armour, servos and power systems supported by thick sturdy legs. Against the thrown two hundred kilo mass of the doglike mech, it would barely have stumbled. With it's kinetic barriers, even one as battered as his, it would have been a negligible nuisance. But he was no creation of silicon and quartz, no coolly calculating machine intelligence. Despite everything that had been suppressed or stripped out, he was still at the core, human, and reacted as only an organic could.
Shepard flinched, over a ton of heavily armoured machine falling back a step as the doglike machine crumpled against his barriers and exploded.
The detonation was the final push, his kinetic barriers collapsing in the face of flensing shrapnel. They rattled off his body, thick armour plate proof against the improvised missile. But his sensor pod was less well protected. A spear of twisted metal the length of a human arm punched through the protective glass, smashing the camera feeds. The hanger bay disappeared behind a storm of white static before blacking out entirely. Threat alerts blared in his consciousness of incoming fire even as the world vanished. His shields sparked and sizzled as they tried to initialize while a barrage of fire hammered into his armour, system warnings droning of imminent catastrophic breaches. Despite being in the middle of battle, he couldn't help but hold just one grimly amused thought. At least he wasn't beheaded this time. But with the initiative lost, blinded and caught in the open, he should have died there and then.
If he had been alone.
"Fire in the hole!"
From behind his sheltering bulk, Garrus's under rifle attachment thumped, a dark projectile arcing high into the hanger before it erupted as a newborn star. Incoming fire slacked off and pained cries rang out from all around as his tactical net, unhindered by the loss of the sensor pod, fed him Grunt and Zaeed's positions. The mercenary and the Krogan swept out into the bay, their weapons thundering as they immediately began cutting down the most obvious threats. A moment later, sight returned, emergency protocols building a composite image from the cameras embedded into the helmets of his team, layering the data over uploaded plans and hijacked security footage to feed directly into his brain. The feed was distorted, disorientating from the odd way the angles appeared, but it was enough. He raised his arms, a veritable arsenal spitting death at blue armoured forms as he tried to pinpoint their objective.
She was there, out in the open and impossible to miss. A hurricane of metal and debris surrounded her with a cloud of whirling death as she flung parts of it at anything her sights fell on. He felt as moment of relief at the sight. Not captured, still an effective, her combat potential confirmed as worth all the trouble they were going through to get her.
"OBJECTIVE LOCATED. PATTERN ALPHA."
Alpha was as simple tactical manoeuvre. Stay in pairs, move fast, and keep enemy positions suppressed while rear elements neutralized them with heavy weapons. As the most obvious target, his job was to draw enemy attention and the Blue Suns went along with his plans amiably.
Enemy fire that had slacked a moment ago returned in full force, slamming into his newly-reinitialized shields with a desperate tempo. He pivoted to the side and accelerated, moving towards a pile of shattered cargo containers for shelter while his arm-mounted autocannon roared in defiance. The stuttering roar overshadowed the chatter of assault rifles, forcing blue armoured figures to dive behind cover as he swept withering fire at their positions. Return fire sparked off his armour whenever the stream of shots passed them by, the mercenaries jumping out when they were in the clear. Minor damage alerts began intruding on his awareness as the fire picked up, more defenders focusing their efforts on him. Taking advantage of the lack of attention, Garrus's rifle barked twice in quick succession, each shot punching through the helmet of a less than cautious mercenary while Zaeed vaulted over the cover of a sheltering Sun. The shotgun in his hand bucked, silencing the surprised cry as the veteran brutally smashed in the head of another guard with its butt. A moment's hesitation gripped the enemy forces as they split off their fire, long enough for a nest of guards to promptly disappear in a ball of flame when Shepard's missile struck.
Attention immediately fell back on him.
Through it all, he kept advancing, dividing his attention between Jack and the Suns. The former was still paying attention solely to the mercenaries, using her biotics to smash them with gravity and thrown containers. The latter were slowly falling back, unable to hold their positions between the two forces, but where was the Warden? He had to be somewhere- his attention suddenly swerved back to the convict. The motion was slight compared to the chaos of battle, so much so that he would have missed it had he been slightly less attentive. Jack had raised her arm. And it was pointed at him.
There was no time to think, only to react. The shoulder-mounted grenade launcher swivelled into position just as a wave of dark energy manifested around the convict. Fast as he was, she was faster. The blue aura flared and lanced out like an arrow. Deck plates warped and burst apart as the wave engulfed them, forming a line of destruction straight for him. The grenade launcher barked trice in rapid succession. Arming safeties overridden, contact fused high explosive rounds met the edge of the wavefront. Thin skinned metal housings twisted and broke, setting off their payloads. Concussive force and pulses of dark energy warred in a roiling cloud of blue tinged fire, the blast rocking Shepard back on his heels with a whine of abused actuators.
A heartbeat later, the convict burst through the cloud of flame, trailing an aura of biotic energy and murder in her eyes as she raised a corona engulfed fist. The same fist he had seen her drive through solid steel moments earlier.
"JACK-"
He never finished his words as the convict came in swinging. Training kicked in, and he evaded, sidestepping her biotic lunge with a quick shift of his body weight. The right arm swung, jabbing at her exposed flanks with the tips of his gun sheathes, but the convict reacted faster. An elbow jammed into the exposed muzzle of the rocket launcher in his arm, tearing apart the hardened alloys with a sudden flare of biotics and shower of sparks. Power to the limb immediately failed as emergency cutoffs engaged. She pivoted, sweeping a leg out that would have, should have, smashed itself uselessly against his armoured legs. Seeing the flare of biotics, he turned with her kick before it could connect, the limb whistling against the air too close for comfort.
"WE ARE-"
"Fuck you!"
The blue pulse of biotics around her frame gave him only a split second warning. Actuators whined in protest, compacting his frame even as the pulse caught him. Gravity inverted, gained momentum and sent his multi ton bulk flying. He slammed against the bulkheads with a deafening shriek of crumpling hullplate. Motive power to his internal gyro failed, the system locking down his legs as it underwent an emergency reboot. So much for making contact, was the wry thought that flitted in his awareness between the cascade of error reports. Jack advanced, screaming as the flare of biotically created barriers stopped incoming fire from so much as scratching her. Time to do it the old-fashioned way then.
"EDI-"
The convict lunged, her fist glowing with blue fire as she aimed it right at his chest. Time seemed to slow down.
"SHUT-"
Internal sensors, those not already destroyed in his mangled head, painted the distance. Close.
"OFF-"
Too close. Half a meter to go. On his tactical display, Garrus's icon flickered with movement, the Turian rapidly approaching his position to assist. But the conclusion was obvious. He would never make it. Her fist began to come down where it would terminate against his chest. It would go through, punch into his brain casing. There wasn't enough time.
"HER-"
The fist crossed another twenty centimetres. He'd die.
But not today.
Power hissed from his microfusion core, dumping nearly it's entire output into the single remaining functional limb. Actuators screamed as his left arm lanced out. Purple blue barriers caught the leading edge of his gun sheathes, friction searing off the paint with a bright pop of short lived flame. But the arm was simply too massive, too mass heavy, to be stopped. With a flare of collapsing barriers, his arm punched through, catching the convict straight in the solar plexus.
"Hrk!"
Pliant flesh met with unyielding steel, momentum carrying the convict forward even as her torso refused to follow. The blue flare of biotics flickered and went out as her eyes bulged, limbs and arms going askew as her body was brought to an immediate halt. Phlegm and digestive acids splashed against his chassis as she reflexively gagged.
Time resumed its normal pace.
"-IMPLANTS. SHUT HER DOWN"
With a snap shut motion of his gun sheathes, he clamped down on either side of the convict's torso, pinning her in place. She reacted immediately, pain becoming a snarl of hate, the fading aura of flashing anew as she aimed a kick trailing blue fire at his chest-
"Of course Shepard. Disabling Subject Zero's implants"
-only for the biotic aura to vanish with a pop, the convicts foot crunching against his armoured glacis plate with the audible crack of snapping bones. Jack hissed in pain, drawing back her bloody boot as she struggled to break out of his grip. Flashes of blue fire surrounded the convict, arm mounted actuators groaning as they were subjected to forces they were never meant to withstand. But the flare of biotics was intermittent, her control insufficient without the implant to break free. It didn't stop her from filling the air with curses and aiming ineffectual kicks, struggling to break free.
"OBJECTIVE SECURED" He reported, forcing the convict to the ground as his gyroscopic systems completed their reboot sequence with a faint whine of leg actuators unlocking.
"Jesus Christ Shepard," Zaeed swore over the chatter of his assault rifle "You cut things bloody close don't you?"
"IT IS NOT OV-" Before he could finish the word, a warning flashed on his tactical net.
ALERT. MICROFUSION SPIKE DETECTED
Shepard swore.
"GET DOWN"
A large shipping container exploded, streams of fire lancing out from the roiling cloud of smoke. Zaeed cussed as his cover was promptly turned into confetti, the mercenary barely keeping ahead of the trail of destruction. Another blinking line turned a stripped out shuttle into a ball of fire, sending Grunt sprawling to the floor as it exploded. Garrus ducked, barely avoiding losing his head as a third line of fire clipped the top of the wrecked crane he was hiding behind. Still holding Jack on the ground, Shepard brought his grenade launcher online, aiming a blind volley into the debris cloud. Flashes of light and sound thundered as the grenades vanished into the cloud.
A whipcrack of supersonically displaced air punctuated the grenade launcher's violent destruction in a shower of sparks and fragments, electrical feedback shocking his consciousness as the bulkhead behind him cratered from the impact of a hypervelocity large calibre round.
The dust cloud boiling away, rising on pair of ducted fans, a predatory shape lifted off from the wreckage of the crane, twin linked gun turrets on either side of its forward blade tracking the members of his team who stayed behind cover. Mounted on top of the lean, tan and beige vehicle was a heavy mass accelerator cannon, it's still-smoking aperture pointed directly at Shepard. Three superficial scorch patterns marked its armour where his grenades had struck, apparently to no effect. With the faint hiss of ozone, the air around the vehicle became a shimmering haze, indicating the presence of a high yield kinetic barrier. In the sudden silence, the message was clear. They were out-gunned, and out-armoured, one wrong movement was all it would take. And then it's speakers activated, amplifying a familiar and smug voice of the assault vehicle's pilot.
"Ah, the elusive AI Shepard, we meet at last. So good of you to take down Jack for me."
But a moment later, he calmed down. This was Shepard, of course he'd have a plan, no matter how crazy sounding it was. Anyone who fought Geth armatures and colossus's on foot with nothing but an assault rifle and a bandoleer of disc grenades was chock full of crazy, but coming out of the fight as the last man standing made it the winning brand of insanity. Facing a tank was Tuesday for Shepard's bad guy crotch-punching galaxy tour.
"You've caused me a lot of trouble for a machine, but since you took down Jack for me I'm willing to let it pass," the Warden's voice carried across the communication net. "Surrender, and we can end this with a minimum of fuss."
"H'yeah, right." The helmsman snorted at the obvious lie, but kept his eyes glued to his tactical display. He was getting a lot of feeds not just from the Normandy's sensors, but the ground team too. Fingers flashed across the haptic interface display as he brought the Normandy around, sidling up to close to Purgatory. Whatever plan the commander had up his sleeve, Joker put good odds on Purgatory exploding at the last minute as part of the package. Or maybe a shambling horde of swamp zombies. Ok, that might be a little bit on the ridiculous side, but after what happened on that colony, he wasn't going to discount that. Either way, Shepard and the rest of crotch punch squad was going to need a ticket out fast as soon as they got the chance...
"NO REASON TO TRUST YOU"
Joker blinked, sliding an eye to the ground team data feed. Nope, no one shooting yet. Ok, that was... yeah, that was new. Normally a dozen rounds would have been exchanged by now.
"C'mon commander, what the heck are you doing? Hurry up and kick his ass before you get that one way ticket to- huh..." one of the communication terminals had just lit up with Shepards authentication key. Instead of an audio feed though, a short burst of raw data was being streamed through. Joker's eyes flicked through them, rapidly putting together the numbers into a coherent picture. Telemetry, timing, squad locations, route calculations... fire lanes?! His jaw dropped.
"Oh no. No no no. This has got to be a joke." He protested to no one in particular. A finger hovered over the transmit button, but the commander had already shut off the channel. "That's the plan you want to use? Really?"
A holographic blue globe popped out of the terminal next to him. "It would appear to be so Mr. Moreau. I have confirmed the telemetry and authentication codes. It is accurate."
Joker turned a jaundiced eye at the overgrown golf ball. "Then it's got to be a joke. This isn't just crazy, this whole thing it's," he waved his hands in frustration, guiding the ship on foot pedals and manoeuvring thrusters alone, "just plain suicide. This is the kind of thing that gets you in the record books for dumbest stunts ever."
"I disagree Mr. Moreau," The golf ball's scanning light flickered. "Calculations indicate the chances of success of this method to be approximately 0.0001 percent with the loss of all deployed squad members. It is an acceptable risk."
Joker felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.
"That was a joke."
The pilot opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and finally closed it with a click as he glared at the glowing ball. "You totally need to work on your comedy, because-" He stopped, staring disbelievingly at the communication terminal where Shepard had sent a single text message.
"ON MARK"
"Crap." Fingers flashed across the controls as he fired the retro thrusters, coasting the Normandy to a stop at the optimal position for what was going to probably be the most insane stunt Shepard had ever pulled. "He's serious."
The next message that came through totally didn't fill him with confidence either. It only had three simple words.
"DO NOT MISS"
T+ 0.00 seconds
On the transmission of a single encrypted burst, many things happened all at the same time. From behind his fragile cover, Garrus dropped his rifle, throwing himself prone as the Turian curled into a ball with his hands covering his head. Inside the ruined husk of a cargo container, Zaeed mimicked the ex-vigilante, bracing himself against the walls of his shelter. There was no hesitation nor confused pause to the warning. Every part of the team had been told what to expect in such a contingency well in advance. Shepard followed suit, folding in on himself, hunkering down and reducing his target profile with the high pitched whine of actuators. The convict in his grasp recognized his actions for what they were almost immediately, curling herself up into a ball in a flash of movement. But the most significant part, the one that best guaranteed their survival, was not in their movements, but rather, their suits.
Constructing kinetic barriers was always a balancing act between performance and endurance, the limited space of modern combat suits dictating the demands of modern infantry design. An active barrier could be made to last for weeks on end with the limited reserves stored in a suits power banks, but be unable to protect from little more than the least of small arms fire. Those built to take tremendous punishment before failing could weigh the same as their lesser cousins despite larger Eezo cores, but only last hours, if not minutes before their power levels were completely drained. Better protection invariably meant larger, and bulkier, power reserves. Myriad combat suits had been built and designed around this paradigm for centuries, becoming the de facto standard of infantry protection.
It was an often overlooked truth that it was not just the size of the eezo core that dictated protective capacity, but the power that flowed through the system. But brute forcing the system with raw power was inefficient and crude, a method widely ignored in favour of more efficient solutions by designers everywhere.
Shepard had learned that particular factor a lifetime ago, and today, he used it.
T+ 0.53 seconds
In a single moment, power cells and capacitors were flash drained, the very safety systems that were designed to prevent such a discharge stripped out long before they had entered Purgatory. Communication channels winked out and power assist motors froze from lack of power, tactical displays going blank as non-critical systems were starved of energy. Weeks of power reserves were poured in their entirety through electrical channels. Suit temperatures instantly spiked as resistance converted wasted energy to heat, but the rest flowed through into the system. Supernova-forged elements within their ceramic and polymer prisons flared with actinic light, bathing the members of the strike team with vivid blue fire.
In the same instant, a mere dozen kilometres away and hidden in the depths of space, a crippled helmsman swore under his breath, and pulled a trigger.
T+ 0.68 seconds
Aboard the Normandy, flickers of dark energy coiled along accelerator arrays, buoying an ellipsoid shape in a sphere of twisted space where mass had no meaning. Banks of capacitors discharged their load through high capacity conduits, feeding systems with an instantaneous burst of life. The hardened projectile remained motionless for only a fraction of a second, and then the accelerators hummed with power. Invisible magnetic fields caressed the loaded shot, imparting it with kinetic energy as the fields pulsed in rapid sequence, flinging the projectile like a thunderbolt across the blackness. Only a fraction of the frigate's full power was expended on the shot, not even measuring a hundredth of the muzzle velocity from a dreadnought's fearsome armament.
It still crossed the distance to Purgatory in less than a second.
T+ 1.35 seconds
Starship grade kinetic barriers that should have stopped the errant projectile, that would have laughed at the understrength velocity of mere tens of kilometres per second, failed to manifest. With Purgatory's main reactors off-line and her backup systems teetering on the edge of depletion just from keeping life support, not a spare joule could be spent on external shields. And even had the barrier generators been provided power without end, the artificial intelligence aboard the Normandy dominated every aspect of the prison ships control infrastructure. No protective aura of twisted gravity appeared, leaving the shell to strike with it's full fury unimpeded.
T+ 1.36 seconds
He saw the flash of light and electrical discharge, the light warping around the hovertanks cannon in a display of mass accelerator technology at work. A single moment of threat warnings as the hostile fire indicators lit up in that haze of heightened battle senses. One moment, a frozen slice of time for the awareness to thread through of what was going to happen.
T+ 1.37 seconds
At full power, five kilogrammes of hardened superheated tungsten should have converted to energy on impact, becoming a rapidly expanding plasma cloud consuming armour and flesh with equal ferocity. At its reduced velocity, the shell retained its armour penetrating capabilities, meeting space rated hull metal and punching through, boring through the alloy which offered all the resistance of foam. Metal parted in its path, melting down to white hot temperatures in a split second, coating the harbinger of death with a sheathe of metallic plasma. In less than a microsecond, the shell speared through the inner hull, boring down on its target in surrounded by a hail of incandescent shards. Blue suited forms in the open were transfixed by the glowing missiles, their protective barriers shattering in the same instant that they died.
Amongst Shepard's team, overloaded shields blazed with azure fire, white hot chunks of shrapnel that powered through their cover disintegrating against the barriers in a pyrotechnic display. Warning tones flashed into Shepard's consciousness as electrical systems burned out, the power coursing through the wiring far greater than they had ever been designed to channel. Temperature warnings spiked as waste electricity became heat, the soaring heat becoming triggering emergency venting of his stored coolant to keep from being cooked alive. A particularly large spike of molten steel speared his barriers, the impact nearly knocking him over. But the barriers held.
Amidst the carnage the main body of the projectile continued its flight, striking at the tank like a bolt of lightning. Onboard threat systems reacted with the speed of light, kinetic barriers flaring into existence as a shield against the fury of a warship. Light scintillated, blinding all eyes as unstoppable force met unmovable object, fighting against each other. Only for a single moment.
Then the barriers failed.
It happened before anyone could register the events. Shepard's only warning was the sudden flash of light as the shell punched through the top armour of the combat vehicle. The projectile speared the hovertank, melting through components, body armour and flesh with impartial impunity to explode out through the bottom and penetrate the deck floor beneath. Capacitors in mid discharge were breached, releasing their stored energy in a single catastrophic detonation. The shot in its arrays went wild, striking the shattered hanger entranceway with a whipcrack of buckling steel. The tank bucked and careened, detonations from the ground launching it into the air. A moment later, internal explosions racked the ruined tank, a powerful blast sending its turret flying off into the air as its engines simply cut out, the burning hulk smashing to the ground with a floor rattling crash. The charred turret came down a moment later, trailing fire and debris as it collapsed on the wreck of its parent body.
T+ 2.97 seconds
Very slowly, Shepard felt his body respond once more to his commands, myriad warning alerts slowly flicking away as repair systems began recovery operations. Capacitors that had been drained earlier feebly drew power from the still active microfusion core, the burned out electrical pathways preventing immediate reactivation of all non-essential systems as the onboard VI prioritized available resources. Motor functions came back first, the abused motive systems groaning in protest as they came back to life. Like an old man, the machine body he inhabited creaked upright, hissing smoke rising from exposed joints where coolant fluid had been flushed through in an attempt to keep from overheating.
Short ranged communications and secondary sensors came back next, painting a composite picture of the surroundings from the suit feeds of his team. His attention immediately went to the immediate surroundings, searching for any remaining threats.
The hanger bay was a scene of total destruction, the deck plating holed in hundreds of places where supersonic shrapnel of various sizes had embedded themselves. Shuttles and loading cranes were perforated so badly that none of them would ever work again. A few of the latter were on fire, leaking pools of burning fuel that consumed the wrecked shuttle craft. No piece of machinery larger than the smallest aircar was left untouched, some of them bearing punctures where finger sized bits of spalling had punched right through while others were little more than twisted ruins of blackened metal. Looking upwards where the shell had punched through, Shepard caught sight of the blue tinged aura of a barrier, the emergency system deploying a low strength shield to keep the atmosphere within the ship. Beyond it's translucent haze was the dark red haze of the local gas giant, it's swirling storm clouds visible even at this distance.
Of the Blue Suns who guarded the place, none of their suit power signatures showed up on his sensors. Bodies were strewn about, blasted apart by shrapnel and pressure wave when the shell had landed. Most were scorched black, twisted corpses lying where they had been speared by burning bits of metal. Without exception, those had been torn apart, body armour and the softer bodies within ripped open or torn off by the hail of death that had killed them. Others had their limbs bent at unnatural angles, the Suns tossed at fatal speeds against unyielding bulkheads when the explosions had ripped apart their positions. There were no survivors as far as he could see.
The hovertank the Warden had been using... was a burned out wreck, its armoured chassis torn apart and nearly split in two from the jagged tear running through its chassis. It's turret was lying upside down on the ground, it's main weapon shattered while flames merrily crackled from inside the turret ring. Shepard felt a brief spike of vicious glee at the sight. He doubted the Warden ever saw it coming.
"-pard, can you hear me?"
Joker's voice came through the communications net as power was finally restored to the long range telemetry feeds, the worried face of the bearded navigator appearing in a small window inside his consciousness.
"SHEPARD COPIES. AREA SECURE." He paused as the muffled groans of his ground team began to filter through the communication net. He hesitated a moment, calling up the life sign monitors from each suit they wore. All of them were elevated, but nothing within the immediate red line. "GROUND TEAM ALIVE."
"Speak for yourself, you overgrown tin can," Zaeed spat out between curses, digging himself out from under some rubble that had fallen on him earlier. "I've been through some real shit, but that was bloody insane." The mercenary gave himself an experimental pat on the chest once he was out. "Hell, I'm not even sure I'm still alive."
"ALIVE ENOUGH TO COMPLAIN" came Shepard's deadpan reply, getting a short bark of laughter from the grizzled mercenary.
Further down the hanger, Grunt rose to his feet, casually brushing away metallic debris from his heavy frame with a sweep of his hand. "Warlord," the Krogan began, turning his keen eyes towards the commander, "that, was a glorious end to your enemies."
'Well, no surprise there.' The unspoken thought ran through Shepard's brain as he turned his attention to the ex-prisoner still in his grip. A moment of worry spiked through him as he caught sight of the convict lying limp between the gun sheathes, her eyes open but unfocused. Barriers or not, the shockwave could be devastating to anyone outside of fully sealed armour. But his worry evaporated when she twitched sporadically, her eyes slowly coming back into focus. She would need to be checked out by Chakwas, but going by the available evidence, the mission was a success. He turned his attention to the final member of his team.
"AND WHAT ABOUT YOU"
"Well, complaints eh?" Garrus's flanged voice carried an amused tone. The Turian had risen from behind the thick slabs of spare hull plate he had been hiding behind, resting an arm on them as he leaned forward. "Then I certainly would like to put one in, Commander."
He paused, letting the silence drift for a second or two before continuing. If he could have smiled, Shepard would have. It didn't take a genius to guess what the Turian was getting at.
"When I said to never let you drive? I'm going to add never letting you call in fire support to that list."
**********
Chapter 10: Parole
The cell blocks of Purgatory, most of the ship in fact, was a cold place. Built more like a space station than a ship, it had a lot of wide open spaces for heat to diffuse through, and with her slow burning engines, stacked up with miserly application of life support meant that keeping things warm was more of a problem than keeping cool like in most ships. Making matters worse were the lack of heating elements in the cells, not like the warm inner hallways where the guards went on their time off. Some places you could take a piss and watch it freeze before you were done. It was the kind of thing that put a permanent chill in your bones, made you slow. Not that the Warden cared about that kind of shit.Chapter 10: Parole
And now, neither does she.
The guard in her grasp manages one scream before it trails off into a wet squelch, the crumpled remains more like the food paste from her last meal than human. Discarding the leaking corpse with a wave of her hand, head buzzing with the tight grasp of the implant in her skull, she goes to work on his partner with a snarl. The blue white flare of biotics outlines her frame, and the armoured Turian comes apart like wet tissue paper. Dark blue blood splatters her face and chest, dripping down her tats and draping over her body like a sweater made of warm stinking guts. But that warmth is nothing compared to the rush, the roaring bonfire in her stomach as she rips the scumsucker's head off. The charnel smell's just something she's just that good at ignoring. The human she didn't give a flying fuck, just another dumb idiot too stupid to live. But the Turian was one of the ones Kurill tended to sic on her if she broke his toys. She had rules about that kind of thing.
Rule one. Always get even. Always.
The black, bulge eyed expression she gets kindles the warmest thing she's felt in what seems like a lifetime before it pops like a scaly grape. She can just imagine squishing Kurill's face now.
She sees the motion from the corner of her eye, tell tale signs of hostility that set off a hiss of a hate from her lips. Number three, another rule to follow. Always get them first before they can get you. Blue light swirls and a barrier is up before she even registers the muzzle flash of the remaining guard's rifle. A hail of bullets streak across the measly fifty feet in an eyeblink before flashing to a cold stop inches from her face and chest. A bloodless curl makes its way up her lips. This one's broken. Kurill wanted her alive after all. Screaming all her rage, she lets the Spider in her head claw at her brain, little steaming icicles of ghostly pain stabbing into the hindquarters of her consciousness. A light show envelops her, draining into her fist as she charges across the intervening space in wide bounds. A burst of biotic power, and she clips him on the head, blowing off the helmet to reveal a grizzled face behind it. The sap drops his rifle to clutch at his chest, jerking free a silvery knife. It's not one of the fat K-bars soldiers sometimes carry, but a long thin thing, with a cutting edge like a scalpel.
And suddenly she's a little girl again, back in the lab, in the surgical ward with the doctor.
The doctor doesn't introduce himself to her, not like the others. He doesn't have a name, just the title, 'doctor', the cold room with the bright lights, the shackling straps that hold her tight, and the knife. The cutting edge of a knife pressing, slicing, making tiny little incisions in her skull, peeling away skin, cutting through bone. She's conscious through it all, her nerves dead, but never asleep, every sensation there for her to feel in terrifying horror as it probes deeper and deeper. She tries to scream, but her gagged mouth refuses to budge, tries to struggle, to get away from the man with the knife, but the restraints bite down tight and prevent her even from shivering. And then there's the pinch at the base of her skull, clamping down on exposed flesh and bone, the burrowing thing she learns to call the Spider, digging into her mind like an unwelcome predator. It jostles her consciousness, an alien thing intruding on her awareness like a fat mouth breather sitting in your personal space. It's all of a second of an acquaintance, and she hates it, fears it with every fibre of her being.
But the Spider is power, sweet delicious nectar that floods every pore in her body, the tingling warmth of her superiority over every other thing. Blue fire she had struggled to ignite in bygone days comes like a snap, roaring with all the hate and pain she can stuff into it. She's faster, stronger, harder than everyone else who's ever wronged her, than every fucker in the universe. The guard's gone, but the doctor is still there. She doesn't see the blue and white armour he's wearing, the ashen face twisting into a snarl of defiance. She doesn't even register the hand going for the grenade pinned to his chest. All she sees is the doctor and the knife, ready to make that cut.
But she's not a helpless little girl anymore, begging in futility for the pain to stop. Never again. Never beg like a weakling. She takes.
The knife doesn't even come close to touching her. There's no form, no grace, just raw instinct and bloodlust as she twists away from the first thrust and ducks the second slash. And then she ends it with her fist slamming into armoured carapace like a bulk lifter, polymer and ceramic inlays crumpling like a wet paper bag. There's all a microsecond of a choked cry before physics comes back with a vengeance, splattering the doctor against the far wall with all the force of a mass accelerator round. She spends all of a heartbeat blinking as she finally recognizes the cracked armour plate he has on.
Not the doctor, the sadistic bastard's dead like every other fucker in Teltin. Just another ex-guard in Purgatory. Teeth gleam from beneath her sadistic grin. Bad memories or not, it's just one less obstacle to her freedom.
The annoying wail of klaxons pick up in pitch as something blows up behind her with a roar of flames, another stab at her ass end of a home for the past fuck knows how many years. Automated doors slam shut as fire suppressant systems activate, filling the room with a cold puffy white clouds. The hallway exit itself is sealed, hidden behind a double layered blast door of reinforced steel. She snarls with the energy of the scornfully defiant. Did they really think that would work?
The Spider skitters across the web of her consciousness, stabbing little icicles of venom and pain as it obeys her command. A good pain that encases her fist in a rioting halo of blue. But before she can tear down the offending barrier, the crackle of a radio catches her attention. She doesn't ignore it, not right away. She's pissed, but not stupid. It's from the helmet of the cretin she just pulped, squawking with a voice she knows so well.
"Block D-1 is in lockdown. Squads Theta and Gamma, move in to secure Jack. Non lethal force only. Find and capture her!"
She sneers. Non lethal force? What a bunch of weak kneed pussies. The only way anyone was going to get her now was with a fucking huge bomb. Not that she'd count on that working either. When she was through with Kurill, he'd be lucky if all that was left was a stain on the wall. But maybe not today, she can wait. Right now, the only thing that matters is getting out. Somebody had woken her up, left the Spider to run riot, and she didn't believe in accidents. That meant somebody was looking for her, busted her out of cryo, but she didn't give a damn as to who or why. Maybe it's Cerberus, maybe not. Didn't matter anyway. Anyone coming for her was a scumsucker out to kill or use her, too bad for them. She isn't going to be around when the place burns. She directs her sneer back at the blast door, thick bolts of reinforced steel alloys that would take a rocket head on and keep on standing. The Spider leaps.
Doors? Fuck doors.
**********
The hallways echoed with the chatter of firearms, the roar of flames raging despite the feeble efforts of automated fire suppression systems, the banshee shriek of twisting metal and screams of rage and pain as the battle for the prison continued. Through this all, the armoured Turian walked on unhurriedly, the squad support weapon in his claws dwarfing the assault rifles in his flanking guards. Speed was important, but rushing now would only cost them situational awareness when things were starting to come apart."We've got sector C-2, but we're pinned down and cannot hold! Requesting reinforcements!"
Kurill was a lot of things, most of them generally unflattering, and quite a few contradictory depending on who you asked. A Blue Suns commander, Warden over the inmate populace of Purgatory, cold blooded Turian mercenary turned extortionist, and public service provider were among the few labels he had acquired over the years he'd gone into the business of wetwork for hire. That was just baggage, bits of debris that people tended to heap on old hands like him once they'd gotten around. But to himself, he was always, and would always be, a simple businessman, if one willing to get his hands a little dirtier than most. When some corporate wanted guns for hire to quash an upstart competitor, there he was, no questions asked. When a government needed a place to get rid of dangerous criminals, he was a happy supplier of that place, for the right price of course. Businessmen did not get by on charity cases after all.
"Damnit, where are our reinforcements? We need backup now!"
And like all successful businessmen, he knew how to gauge the risks and profit of any venture. Synthetic Insights had promised a kingly sum for the intact capture of the prototype AI chassis, much more than what Cerberus had offered for Jack's release. For that kind of money, risking his reputation as a 'fair' dealer with his clients was well worth the trade off. And so long as he had Jack, who remained securely locked behind the most heavily reinforced cryogenic systems known to Citadel Space, Cerberus would have to forgive him anything. It had been, in his original estimation, a no-lose situation. However, the machine was rapidly proving to be a bigger drain on his resources than he had initially estimated. He had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and resources gathering all the information on the war machine's performance, crafting his plans around countering them. That had been accurate. But with the rest of its compatriots, his intelligence was less so. He'd expected professionals, Cerberus had no dead weight in its numbers as far as he knew. The Turian and Krogan were a surprise to find among the human supremacist organization. Unfamiliar faces to him, but they were operating like an elite assault unit who'd spent a lifetime training together. And seeing Zaeed's face working among them was a shock.
"It's that damned mech! Get down, GET DO-"
The legendary mercenary had shot to infamy when he'd brought down the Verrikan from the inside with just a handful of men, earning the reputation for someone who got the job done no matter how insane, but often at the cost of most of his squad. Strangely, none of the Cerberus operatives had died yet, which made his losses all the more frustrating. This could have been explained away by the fact that Zaeed was not in command, the synthetic intelligence was; which led to its own set of problems. From the video feeds, he watched it direct the troops under its command with the kind of fluid but brutal efficiency that bore little in common with the grinding and implacable onslaught of Geth tactics, bearing more than a passing resemblance to human ones instead. No wasted motions, near instant comprehension of orders and responses. The hero of the Citadel may have been dead and gone, but Cerberus had apparently not slacked in trying to replicate his tactical proficiency. He had already lost five times the men originally projected as sufficient to overwhelm the boarding team, and they had yet to neutralize the Cerberus liaison and her bodyguard, not to mention loss of the command centre. Kurill felt put out about that; he'd trained his men to repel that kind of heavy assault and it rankled his professional pride that they were being brushed aside so easily despite the advantages of territory, numbers and firepower on their side. Compared to the way things were rapidly deteriorating into however, it was a minor case of scale itch.
"Damnit, there's too many of the prisoners! We can't hold them back! We-"
Losing power had cost him much of shipboard security and his prisoner stock before the secondary fuel cells could come online. Even then, they only had the barest minimum of power available, just enough to run life support, lights and the doors. The engineering bay had reported entire power arrays slagged from overheat; sabotage they had claimed, before they'd been overrun by the prisoners. He'd taken drastic measures then, voiding several blocks including Engineering, hundreds of thousands of credits of valuable scum sent blowing out into hard vacuum, as an example of what would happen if they continued. It hadn't worked. They were too desperate to be held back by threats, counting on him not willing to sacrifice them all with heavy handed use of decompression since it would gut his lucrative business. Five minutes ago, they would have been even right. To an extent.
"Gamma team here. We've spotted Jack, request permission to use lethal force."
He flicked a mandible, activating his suits communication system for a micro burst transmission.
"Denied."
"She's tearing us apart! We're getting slaugh-"
Mandibles clacked in frustration as the transmission cut out with a burst of static. With the same amount of dispassionate ease, he tasked another assault group from his command omni-tool on an intercept vector. The corpse of Jack would be useless to him, but alive, she was worth so much more. With just her in custody, he could lose Purgatory and still recoup his losses. If he could not capture the machine Insights wanted, then at least he would still have Jack. The remaining Arc projector-equipped troops had been retasked with the role of hunting the escapee down and bringing her in one way or another, but he had his private doubts about their chances. What few command systems still responding to his tactical net were reporting over thirteen hull breaches, all of them caused within five minutes of Jack's unauthorized release from cryogenic suspension. The only silver lining in the whole matter was that Cerberus had yet to make contact with her, the reports on former indicating that they were in pursuit, but unable to catch up before running into another clutch of guards.
"Hey asswipe."
It wasn't an encrypted broadcast, but in clear, and on a wide band send. Someone wanted everyone to hear this. Kuril did not demand the identity of the person on the tactical net, nor did he berate them for insubordination. The automatic response had been strangled in the creche at the first syllable. That the IFF system tagged the unit responding as already killed in action had nothing to do with it. He knew that voice. Not unexpected.
"Jack."
A part of him wanted to strangle the destructive ball of hate, but like all the other unprofitable impulses he had in the past, he pushed it down and kept his voice civil, if condescending.
"I'm coming for you, you Drell fucking piece of Vorcha shit, and when I'm done, there's not going to be even a smear."
"How generous." A pack of prisoners rounded the corner and spotted him, howling with fury as they pounded forward with a variety of improvised or stolen weapons in their hands. Kurill unhurriedly put his weapon to his shoulder, letting his upgraded kinetic barriers absorb the occasional hit that connected without flinching, and pulled the trigger. His return fire was much more effective. The entire exercise took less than a second to clear and by then he had formulated his response to the biotic while he strode past the corpses. "But I have a better offer, seeing how you have nowhere to go. Return to your cell block, and I'll let you keep one leg. And maybe an arm if I'm in a good mood."
He preferred to avoid maiming his stock when he could, such things tended to lower their value as incentives for governments to pay for their imprisonment. But sometimes a stronger example than just beatings needed to be made, to keep the inmates properly docile. The response was a snarl of scorn and hate, peppered with some colourful language that made his mandibles twitch in amusement at her imagination. An intense ball of hate stronger than any Krogan grudge and biotics powerful enough to tear through bulkheads made Jack a very powerful enemy to have. He didn't wait for the litany to die down before he interrupted her.
"Or perhaps I'll just let you be reunited with certain quarters who want to see you again very badly."
There was a stream of inventive invectives before the channel died in a squeal of static.
He motioned for his guards to pick up the pace. Jack was angry, and she was desperate now that she knew what he did. Desperation drove most sentients into a very limited series of objectives, and for all her bluster, he knew the kind of creature she was. What she would seek first and foremost had already been well accounted for. He cycled through the available channels, hovering over a one time encryption key he'd never planned on using but kept all the same. Only a handful of his most trusted men had the necessary decryption protocols, the rest would have to find their own way. He activated the key, and spoke only two words.
"Do it."
**********
Chaos surrounded Shepard, the familiar lack of order descending into anarchic violence in an cacophonous display of smoke, fire, screams and full automatic fire. It was starting to seem that no matter where he went, it would always be the same. Death and destruction slavishly followed in his footsteps, leaving nothing behind but ruin. Noveria, Eden Prime, Omega, even the vaunted safety of the Citadel. The scenery changed, but never the outcome.Today, Purgatory burned.
He found it difficult not to find dark amusement in that particular knowledge as he stepped over the remnants of a blue armoured corpse, the cadaver having been torn apart not by firearms, but the fists and feet of desperate prisoners. For all the promises of the priests and preachers of an afterlife of one flavour or another, his meeting with the reaper had not introduced him to any incarnation of the sort. Death had lacked a place of torments and judgment that the religious spoke of, but life had given him one. That it was quickly turning into a classical depiction of hell, with fire and death in its halls... it brought a tendril of amusement to his jaded mind. Cerberus's Frankenstein project might have robbed him of a body, but it had given him a fresh viewpoint for the symbolically ironic.
Not that he had anything to do with the ongoing destruction of the space borne prison. Well, not entirely. The effects of his plan had plunged the station into the temporary darkness of total power failure, and though backups did exist to combat such an event, they were not as well protected from external intrusion as the primary systems had been. It had only been emergency reporting systems and such, but they were a vulnerability all the same. EDI had seized control of most of the command systems the moment they were reactivated, circumventing firewalls and transferring administrator privileges in the brief window of time they were exposed. Establishing communications with Miranda's team once the jamming system had been disabled was easily accomplished, but there had been complications. Though only the most direct threats, the automated sentry guns and security mechs, had been disabled, it had not taken very long for the prisoners to realize a never-to-be-repeated opportunity and broken confinement en-masse. They were unarmed and unarmoured, going against a security contingent of heavily armed guards with only their superior numbers to assail the mercenaries fortifications. The conclusion was a foregone one.
It did not take very long before the first hull breach was reported, with the loss of all hands in that sector.
All for the sake of a rampaging biotic.
As if the thought conjures her presence, the interior rings with the shriek of steel being tormented beyond all tolerance, shearing apart as some part of the ship in the distance is rent asunder by an unstoppable force. He knows it is the bulkhead giving way, a violent remodelling of the interior to produce new doors where once there was solid steel. The towering rage of a sociopath imprisoned but now free, bending local reality for the sole purpose of destruction. He knows all of this, because they have already borne witness to the destruction left in her wake. His squad, already used to the ear splitting sounds of destruction, do not falter, the Turian only pausing in his advance to share an inscrutable look from behind the opaque visor of his helmet. He couldn't see what was behind the mask, couldn't catch the twist to his mandibles or raised eyeplate, but neither was required to decipher the unspoken question.
Was what you did that back there, all of that, really necessary?
He didn't answer, at least not right away, other than to wave his arm in a forward gesture. Fresh gunfire crackled as doors opened to spill forth a platoons worth of blue suns, assault rifles chattering. His squad went to cover, questions forgotten as Garrus dives behind the ruins of a collapsed cell transfer crane. Too large to take advantage of the chest height obstructions, Shepard waded forward, autocannon in his arm snarling a reply. Marching in lockstep with him was Okeer's legacy, swaddled in thick armour and the even thicker hide of his race, shotgun at the ready. Blue armoured forms staggered as they were stitched with a storm of metal, flinging them to the ground in boneless heaps. He fought on, but the question niggled at his mind.
It was redundant to ask. Necessity guided his actions, defined the man that he was. He always weighed the scales, made the choices that provided the best results for all concerned. If horror and cruelty was the only way in the time they had, then he would do so. They had made their decisions, so had he. Releasing Jack from cryo stasis while the situation was fluid was a gamble, but he had two very good reasons for taking the risk. They required a distraction to keep the forces separated, and it would be an effective test of her capabilities. If she survived, it would prove she had the power and mettle they needed for the task ahead. He loathed to use people that way, but the logic behind it was necessary. Even with the dossiers, Jack was an unknown and volatile equation, testing her now would gauge her effectiveness later. But doubts still lingered, and not only at the calculative reasons.
They were both agents of the law, Garrus in C-Sec and him as an Alliance marine. Former in both cases, but the oaths they had taken did not end with their service. The blue suns were mercenaries, their calling was money, not the law, not the governments they hailed from, and certainly not justice. But they had guarded a prisoner, no doubts as to her crimes there, one they were helping escape from well deserved incarceration. Her biotic potential was off the scale, both in the reports he had read and the evidence that lay strewn about the collapsing ship. He had seen the remains of the YMIR assault platforms, crumpled like clay men within a prizefighter's fist. Miranda and Jacob, the only two biotics in his crew, could not even begin to compare. Their need was great, nothing could be held back in the fight against the Reapers. The best of the best, every bullet, ship, and resource available to be marshaled to fight the coming tide of extinction, no matter its origins.
Subject Zero was a diminutive package of unparallelled biotic fury who could throw over thirty thousand Newtons worth of force, four times greater than the next best human on record, more than enough to crumple steel bars like empty soda cans. No matter their reservations, that kind of power was an asset they could use. A power that they desperately needed to fight the Reaper's Collector pawns. But the thoughts are an unwanted distraction, even if they are not affecting his combat performance; they are committed, and there is no place for doubts here. The crackle of his tactical communications net reminds him of that.
"You know, this makes no sense Shepard."
"WHAT" The reply is cursory, his attention focused on the nimble guard who avoided the first fusillade and is now making a getaway. He does not take his second step before a rifle cracks with lethal finality, blood erupting from his chest as his body pitches into the ground before lying still. From the corner of his vision, Shepard caught the suggestion of a shrug from the grizzled Turian as he ducked back behind the shelter of an upright steel plate. With the momentary respite, he rapped the construction with his free hand.
"This. Pop up barriers in the middle of a nice wide and open kill zone like this? It's like they want to make things easy for us."
Shepard would have smirked at the sardonic tone if he still had lips, his earlier introspection forgotten. Garrus always did have a knack for understating things. The plates had been a bit of a surprise when they had first encountered them in the prison wings, thick slabs of armoured steel seamlessly flush against the deck, snapping to position via powerful magnetic clamps at just the right height to shelter a roughly human sized person if they ducked. Since they were controlled by the security system, he could see the logic behind evenly spaced shelters you could deploy on command. Except with communications restored, security was EDI's plaything, the artificial intelligence subverting the automated shelters for their benefit and denying it to their enemies. He didn't know how well they would have stood up to conventional omni-tool hacks, but given how woefully prepared they were for heavy electronic warfare attacks, he decided that Garrus had a point after all.
"NOT THAT THEY NEED TO" He punctuated his observation with a burst of cannon fire, the stream of projectiles flaring against the barriers of a guard and knocking him down behind a fallen girder.
"Well if it's too easy for you commander, I'm sure we'll find something suitably challenging for you soon enough," Piped in another voice on the tactical net, the ID tag telling him what he already knows from the arch, slightly annoyed voice. So much for the unofficial small truce with the Cerberus liaison. Miranda had been rather peeved to learn how the insertion attempt had almost gone bad, much less being ordered back to the Normandy with Jacob, though she kept her disapproval reined in. Neither one had worn environmentally sealed armour to avoid tipping off their hand early, while most of their contingency plans required them. "Seeing how those arc projectors they're using don't seem to be up to your standards, perhaps riding out the impending re-entry would be more to your tastes."
Mostly reined in.
Garrus chuckled, unhooking a flashbang from his harness, "Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Shepard's the one for crazy rides. Word of advice; never let him drive. Especially if it's a Mako."
For once, he was glad at his machine body's inability to reproduce contextual sounds outside of human grammar or he would have groaned as yet another voice added his two credits.
"You mean the Mako IFV?" the grizzled voice of Zaeed queried, a hint of curiosity in his voice as he stepped past a ventilated corpse, pausing only long enough to give it a swift kick. "Never been in one, but damned bloody tough things I remember. Take a hell of a beating and they just keep on going. Hear they have shitty suspension though, half the time they get called vomit comets because it was bloody bouncing all over the place."
"NOT THAT BAD," he refuted a little defensively, ignoring the chuckles of the ex-vigilante and turning his attention and grenade launcher to where the guard had fallen. Thermal sensors illuminated the hidden form, pencil-thin beams of coherent light feeding distance calculations into the micro-warhead as the weapon on his shoulder barked. The roar of its incendiaries detonating over the barrier is joined by the tormented cry of a newly-ignited human torch.
"Not that bad? Come on Shepard, you were a complete maniac behind the wheel." The Turian accompanied his rebuttal with a backhand toss of the flashbang towards the last gaggle of guards. "Calling it a vomit comet was an understatement when you drove. How many Alliance Marines can claim to have made it cartwheel off a sheer drop, bounce off a cliff face, only to land on that pirate crawler? I swear the thing would have fallen apart after only one mission with you."
Shepard refrained from answering immediately as his optics dimmed to compensate for the sudden eruption of light and sound, feeling a bit offended. Yes, he had pushed the armoured fighting vehicle hard, and the ride was sometimes uncomfortable between dodging anti-tank fire and navigating harsh terrain, but they'd all come through, more or less intact despite the incredible odds stacked against them. The complaints, he felt, were somewhat unjustified. "EVERYONE SURVIVED."
"Not that survival was much of a blessing if it meant another drop like that. Why do you think I was always running maintenance on it?" The sardonic reply was punctuated by a short staccato beat of Garrus's battle rifle. At the end of the hall, a guard threw down his ruined shotgun with a curse, darting for the holstered pistol at his side. Another triple beat, and the mercenary fell with a spray of arterial blood. "Besides, remember the Geth colossus? The one you ran over?"
The mercenary actually paused in mid-fire, retaining the presence of mind to duck behind cover before shooting an incredulous look at Shepard. "Wait. A Geth colossus? Bloody huge walking tank? You're bleeding pulling my leg."
Powering through a deployable barrier with his bulk, Shepard slew the idle thought of sending a warning shot at Garrus as he continued to elaborate.
"A lucky hit had taken out the main gun, so instead of pulling back to fix it, he charges straight ahead. Fishtailed into it right as it was turning around to hit us, knocked out half its support legs." Garrus rose to his feet, snapping off another accurate burst of fire before dashing forward. Several steps later, he slid behind a piece of debris, nonchalantly continuing as if he wasn't being shot at. "The platform went down hard at that point, clipped the Mako with its backside. One thing about that vehicle, the suspension really likes to bounce. It sent us flipping across the landscape. Longest ten seconds of my life. By the time we came to a stop, I was ready to call it quits."
He chuckled as Shepard scoured the remaining strongpoints with a withering storm of steel. "Only sheer luck we ended up on our wheels rather than upside down. But just as the synthetic starts to get up again, Shepard guns the engine and drives up its back like a ramp before parking right on top of it. Between the Geth's flailing and Shepard lighting off the thrusters on its head, we're getting tossed around inside like a bunch of marbles. And would you believe it, he's laughing all the while."
"YOU DID NOT COMPLAIN THEN." Were they not in the middle of a firefight, and had he better control over the amount of strength put in his motor controls, Shepard would probably have given into the impulse to chastise Garrus with a smack across the back of the head for bringing up the incident. Instead, he vented his frustrations by lighting off another missile from his arm launcher, blasting apart the last of the holdouts while Grunt charged into their midst. Yes, it had happened the way Garrus described, but it had made sense at the time!
"I think we were more concerned about checking to see if we were still alive after that stunt, commander." He interjected above the bark of his rifle.
"You talk too much Turian." Grunt's disapproving rumble carried above the crack of armour plate as he drove his fist into the chest of the last guard. The blow sent him slamming against the bulkheads with enough force to leave a dent, his chest plate crumpled inwards. "Your warlord brings you to glorious victory in battle and you complain of discomfort? Weak."
"Oh, you haven't experienced his driving yet." There was the tiniest pause where Shepard could visualize the twitch of mandibles behind a helmet, the Turian equivalent of a grin. "It would be... instructive."
Slewing his sensor pod towards the ex-vigilante, Shepard fixed him with the hardest stare he could muster with its optics. It was conceding the point, but he was a man without a body dammit. He was entitled to preserving at least a shred of his dignity. "DO YOU WANT ME TO PILOT THE GUNSHIP ON THE NEXT DROP"
It was petty, but the way the Turian's head snapped towards him in shock was very satisfying. "Isn't that against Citadel and Systems Alliance law, commander? I think they classified it as cruel and unusual punishment."
He regretted not being able to grin, settling for shifting his arm servos in the analogue of a shrug. "NOT IN THE MILITARY ANY MORE. THIS IS A CERBERUS OPERATION. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS LIKE."
"Commander, as amusing as it is to hear of your past exploits, might I remind you that we are short on time as it is," Miranda's voice on the tactical net carried no small amount of irritation as she interrupted Garrus's response, "Purgatory's orbit is rapidly decaying and Subject Zero is still a-." Her words were suddenly cut off by the toneless and unhurried voice of EDI.
"Shepard, I am detecting the simultaneous launch of Purgatory's escape pods. Sensor contacts indicate that they comprise the entirety of Purgatory's complement."
A few curses flitted through the communications net, the guttural oath from Zaeed losing itself in the Grunt's growl of frustration at the 'cowards', but Shepard only asked one question of the synthetic intelligence.
"LIFE SIGNS"
Purgatoy's primary thrusters were down, its reactor cores scrammed and would stay that way for days with only the on board resources at hand. The secondary fuel cells had been slagged, forced to overload by a pulsed override command even as they warmed up. Not all of them, enough just to leave life support and the barest of functions running. For a little while longer. Anyone in the Engineering bays would know from their data readouts and the red hot pools of chemical sludge that were their secondaries. Cold-starting the main reactors was impossible. Caught in Olokun's gravity well, its hours-long death spiral had already begun, and would terminate in the crushing grasp of the gas giant. Abandoning ship was the only sensible thing to do, about the only option left if you intended to live to see the next day. At least, the only option he wanted the inhabitants of Purgatory to believe with EDI's more subtle manipulations of the control systems.
Frankenstein's creation he might be, but Shepard was not yet a complete monster.
But coordinated mass launches like this were an unexpected variable, there was no practical sense to delaying the pods until everyone was filled. Assuming they were filled. EDI's answer came a moment later, confirming his suspicions.
"None. They are empty."
Shepard had never been one for profanity, no matter how bad things had gotten. Profanity was an emotional outlet, but pointless for resolving problems. It did not lessen the urge to blister the air with Kurill's name, like now. He accelerated, moving down the trail of destruction that Jack had left behind. It had to be a part of the Warden's plan, that meant they didn't have-
A detonation rocked the entire ship, the superstructure groaning in protest as the prison bucked and heaved. Internal gyros whined as they struggled to keep his balance in the sudden upheaval, his team scrabbling to stay upright even as the floor panels buckled beneath them. Screaming filled the air, but not from those who had accompanied him. Wall-mounted isolation modules high above were knocked loose by the detonation, tearing free into gravity's grasp. Prisoners still trapped inside shrieked as their prisons smashed themselves into pulp on the unyielding floor, or were cracked open to unforgiving vacuum while fires bloomed from shattered life support pipes, plumes of igniting oxygen scorching the walls.
But the all-consuming explosion he expected never came.
"STATUS" he demanded the moment the aftershocks subsided, receiving a number of affirmative check ins on the tactical net. And one jibe.
"Hey commander, was that your idea? Because, you totally got the sequence wrong you know? When you blow up the ship, you're supposed to be in the escape pods, and not inside getting blown to bits. That's how it's done in the action holos."
If he had eyes, he would have rolled them at Joker. "NOT MY IDEA JOKER" He had a pretty good idea who's idea it was, though the knowledge was not very comforting. He had miscalculated. From the amount of opposition that had been thrown up to intercept his group, he was expecting that the Warden would have tried to force a confrontation, possibly harbouring the hopes that he could still capture him. He should have expected the possibility it was a feint. He hadn't expected this.
"Uh yeah. That probably makes sense. You're crazy, but not that crazy. Might want to hurry it up a bit then. The Purgatory's port fuel storage tanks just went up all at once, nearly tore her in half. Thermal's showing a lot of heat signatures going on inside too, looks like fire containment's on the fritz. The way things are going, starboard tanks might go up any minute too. If that happens, it's really going to bring down the resale value."
Another lesser explosion rocked the ship, underscoring Joker's words as the perfectly calm voice of the Purgatory's shipboard VI announced the loss of life support in several decks.
"Definitely not the kind of thing you want to see up close."
**********
Bulkheads and blast doors were no obstacle to her, ripped from their mountings or just powered through with all the fury of the Spider scuttling in her brain. Prisoners and guards alike she blew apart or crushed with equal contempt, never stopping, never slowing, but getting no closer to her goal. Another explosion tore through the prison ship, a blast of fire consuming some screaming guards before she brought a containment module down on their annoying heads like the hammer of Jack. Thumping down the hallway, she rounded on the alcove leading to the escape pods, giving no more attention to the prisoners beating on its sealed door than she would a buzzing insect. And like insects, she swatted them aside, stumping past their broken bodies to check the pod launch controls. She spent all two seconds looking at the readout before screaming in frustration.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck the Warden. The bastard was crazier than she'd given him credit for. Purgatory was getting blown to shit. That was good. About time it got what was coming. Except there weren't any escape pods, and that was fucking kick to the cunt. It was the same fucking thing with every pod she'd come across, all launched, none left, and the fucking ship about two steps from finishing the job of blowing itself to bits. She was damned sure she'd gotten to the pods ahead of the guards and rest of the prisoners a few times, but those were gone too. She wanted to grin despite her rage. The sadistic bastard had finally decided to take her seriously, blowing up the ship and her with it.
There had to be a way out. She fucking refused to give up like this. Rule three. Someone always fucked up, kill him before he can unfuck himself. Jack wasn't stupid, she knew her freedom had been somebody doing rule three. The guards were too well trained to fuck up like that, so that meant somebody else, probably those 'concerned quarters' the Warden had let slip. That meant they had come looking for her, probably set her loose. Didn't matter whether it was an accident or on purpose, but that meant they were probably fucking up the Warden's shit, and more importantly, they had a ship.
Jack didn't buy into that 'enemy of my enemy' crap. Looking out for yourself was the rule. Everyone else has an angle, looking to screw you over. They had a ship, likely a shuttle in the only hanger bay on this rustbucket, and that meant she had a ticket out.
She just had to make sure she killed them all first.
**********
Jack felt, rather than saw or heard the ambush ahead of her. It was impossible to miss because it was that fucking obvious. The hanger bay doors were sealed, and she bet there were a mess of guards on the other side with heavy weapons, waiting to screw her in the ass the moment she came through. The Warden was a crazy bastard, but she wasn't dumb enough to think that he was a stupid one. If the sack of shit hadn't made his getaway by now, he would be waiting there to try and snatch her, a ton of his best guards with shock sticks, rifles and everything in between. She smiled a feral grin at that, all teeth, malice and the promise of sweet, sweet revenge. Well fuck him sideways with a Krogan power fist too.She walked down the hallway, tapping the walls periodically until things squared with the mental map in her head. She'd seen the interior of the hanger once, when they'd brought her in. Like every other place she'd come across, she'd kept all the important details in that corner of her mind labelled 'escape routes and weak points'. And right now, she needed a weak point right where she could kick the bastard in his scaly balls. She stopped walking at a junction, just another featureless corridor of panelled walls and floors, at least, that was how it would look like to anybody else. To her, it was perfect. The floor fell away as she fed the Spider all her hate and rage, the other presence in her mind encasing her body with solid blue fire. With an ear splitting howl, she hurled herself at the wall, punching through screeching bulkheads like a freight train through wet waste paper.
The bulkhead tore open in an explosive shower of deadly debris as she rammed through them, a particularly large chunk flattening some schmuck in blue before he could even turn. But there were a lot more figures in blue with guns, and a few of them had already started shooting. Jack didn't waste a second, pulling at some of the debris with a flick of her mind and sending the rest of it scattering into the hanger bay. Two heartbeats later, and a chunk of steel the size of an aircar slammed into the closest bunch of guards like a freight train. The rest scattered and dove for cover as the rest of the former wall hurtled their way. It wasn't much, but it was enough for her to land on the crane without taking a shot up the ass. She didn't pause to admire her handiwork, only stupid idiots did that, but scuttled along the crane's loading arm, pausing only to grab a loose fuel tank and slam it into a cluster of guards who tried their luck with potshots over their makeshift cover. Their screams as the tank broke and ignited sent up a warm feeling in her belly.
"You feeling that, you bastards?"
She jumped, tearing down the crane behind her in a shower of sparks. The container in its grasp broke free, the improvised missile crushing a gaggle of guards with an almighty crash as it came down on their heads. She landed a moment later on the twisted pile of scrap and rolled with the impact, bouncing to her feet before the rest could correct their aim. She spent all of a heartbeat swivelling her head left and right, looking for the scaly shit who ran this miserable hell hole and finding nothing. She scowled at that. The Warden was somewhere around here, too many of his goons to be anything else. Well, she had the answer for that.
"Come out you asswipe!" the ex-convict howled as she tore through another cluster of guards, bowling them over with a blast of dark energy and smearing a few across the floor like crushed fruit for good measure. Assault rifles chattered and shotguns roared, storms of flechettes halting just inches from her face as the Spider hissed and webbed them. She sent them back, with exploding canisters for interest. One of them had a rocket launcher, she blinked at that, giving him points for having the balls to use it inside a ship. And then she took his balls away with a well aimed throw of torn piping. The improvised spear punched through his kinetic barriers and pinned him to the wall where he flopped like a dying fish. His screams were music to her ears.
There were at least thirty more moving bodies in blue with guns. She had no armour and no weapons. But she didn't need either. The Spider was a weapon, the Spider was loose, and so was all the cargo in the hanger, this was her playground now. Flechettes and grenades were met with the Spider's web, never touching her. She flailed with her power in broad sweeping strokes, slamming armoured figures into unyielding walls with resounding crunches. A gesture with her forefinger, and a head popped clean off the neck it was attached to. A wordless snarl, and a man was torn from limb to limb. But they weren't him.
"Come out and fucking die already!"
A sudden burst of fire caught her attention, a hail of flechettes sparking off the floor just in front of her.
"So nice to see that you're punctual, Jack."
That was when she saw him emerging from an opened cargo container, that smug flare to his mandibles making her blood boil. Turians all looked the same to her, but she made it a point to memorize that distinctive face paint, and that oily bastard voice. How convenient that he had gone without a helmet so she could find him easily. Even better, he was standing next to a shuttle with its engines primed and ready for takeoff. She grabbed a loading crate and tossed it at him, but the bastard was faster than she had accounted for, ducking under the missile before snapping off a few rounds. They slammed into her barriers harder than the other times she had been shot at. The Spider chittered under the strain of holding it up, exacting its toll with a pulsing migraine.
"Be a good prisoner and be so kind as to drop on the floor." He responded laconically between bursts of fire. "I'd prefer to have you undamaged... permanently that is."
She howled and lunged forward, biotically kicking off a shattered support for better acceleration. That was when the Warden tapped a button beside his rifle, and the underslung barrel barked.
Two disc-like objects whizzed towards her, slamming into the shield of dark energy she had drawn up at the last instant. One moment was all it took for her to recognize them, and she raised her hands protectively. That was when the world went white, and all thought became impossible except for an infuriated, 'Fuck, my eyes!'
But she didn't go down, and didn't stop, clinging on with all the stubbornness she could muster with her fury. She didn't need her eyes to use the Spider. She didn't even need them to navigate, she remembered where everything was well enough. Then the pain hit her. It felt like kissing a live wire, every muscle in her body jerked and spasmed as she danced to the electric tune. Her mouth opened to howl in fury, but all that came out was a strangled cry of pain and frustration. Every part of her body didn't want to respond to her rage no matter how she forced it.
Blinded, deafened, immobile. Helpless for the Warden to scoop up. Vulnerable.
Jack managed to scream at that thought, biting down on that pain and riding it like a brutal lover. She'd faced worse than this, she'd lived worse than this, she wouldn't give up like a fucking pansy. By sheer force of will, she clamped down on the Spider, squeezing it to do as she willed. The swirling pulse of biotic power filled her, not to strike out, but encasing her limbs with a suit of dark energy. Nerveless fingers that refused to clench surrendered to the constricting aura of light, limbs bending to her will. She was going to make them pay, every single fu-
Another live wire struck her chest and she screamed at the pain, the swirling corona of energies around her fist trebling as spasms racked her body. The Spider chittered, nearly squirming out of her grasp as her control over her biotics faltered. But she held on, howling as she strangled the Spider into submission. Dark energy flared and pulsed, sending everything not nailed down flying. Guards yelled with panic, music to her ears that encouraged her to press on. She got shocked again for her resistance, twice in rapid succession, nearly dropping her to her knees as her body writhed under the assault. The Spider slipped it's leash, skittering away into the darkness for one horrible second before she wrestled it back. But her hold was tenuous, nearly failing from the overwhelming pain. Rifles chattered, and her barriers flickered, barely stopping the bullets while the Spider screamed in agony.
But she clamped down on the torment, hanging on by sheer fury alone. The pain was nothing, nothing compared to the torture Cerberus had put her through. She would survive. And she was going to make them pay.
Every single fucking one.
**********
Things go wrong. Plans run into unexpected circumstances, invalidating previously held assumptions and viable courses. To the cynical minded, nothing is more natural, no situation more normal, than everything ending all fouled up. In that same mindset, nothing is more unnatural than a plan working to perfection the first time, a flawless operation without hitch, last second improvisation or just plain luck to stave off disaster. As a corollary, the more complex a plan you make, the greater the probability that not only will something go wrong, that it will do so in a big way. With that in mind, Shepard had gone with simple objectives and crafted his strategy accordingly. The original goals, should the Warden prove hostile, had been to take control of the ship's systems, find Jack, release her from cyro-stasis, give her the twenty second run down under fire, reactivate her implants and fight their way to the extraction point through the pre-plotted route while Joker fended off Purgatory's defenses and its fighter escort long enough to launch a recovery craft.That had been the optimistic plan. So of course it went wrong.
Between Jack's rapid exit before they could link up, the mass launch of empty escape pods and the, likely deliberate, detonation of the fuel tanks now threatening the entire ship, that plan, not to mention Plans B through D were now obsolete, E had insufficient preparation time to make it work, and F was little more than making it up on the fly with a few educated guesses. The good news was, they knew where Jack would most likely be heading with all other avenues of escape cut off. The bad news was, the Warden would be waiting there with whatever remained of his troops, heavy weapons and prepared ambush positions. And given her pace, there was no way they could link up with the convict before she ran headlong into the ambush.
She would last a while, he had no doubt about that given what he had seen in her passing. But biotics had limits, and the Warden had captured her before. Even if she destroyed the ambush before they arrived, she'd likely escape on whatever means Kurill had stashed away and they would lose their last opportunity. Haste had become the only priority, they had to find Jack before it was too late, even if it meant making a direct assault into enemy fire.
To be fair, he had been expecting weapons fire to greet him the moment he breached the hanger bay doors. Getting struck by a screaming mechanical missile was not among the things he had been accounting for.
It happened in an instant. The hanger doors had been sealed shut, the controls locked out. So they had been blasted open with breaching charges, his team pushing through the instant the doors came apart. He was the first through the breach, trusting to his shields and armour to absorb the expected attack. And then the projectile was there, howling scrap code as it blew past the smoke and headed for his head.
Automated threat detection routines registered the threat in under a microsecond, and kinetic barriers flared to life at the speed of light. The white and black form of an armoured FENRIR mech struck the barrier, coronas of dark energy flashed and rippled dangerously for an instant as conflicting shield systems tried to cancel each other out. A lightweight human form LOKI type security mech would have been instantly bowled over at the sudden impact even had it been shielded. But a YMIR assault class mech was a stable platform, more than a ton of armour, servos and power systems supported by thick sturdy legs. Against the thrown two hundred kilo mass of the doglike mech, it would barely have stumbled. With it's kinetic barriers, even one as battered as his, it would have been a negligible nuisance. But he was no creation of silicon and quartz, no coolly calculating machine intelligence. Despite everything that had been suppressed or stripped out, he was still at the core, human, and reacted as only an organic could.
Shepard flinched, over a ton of heavily armoured machine falling back a step as the doglike machine crumpled against his barriers and exploded.
The detonation was the final push, his kinetic barriers collapsing in the face of flensing shrapnel. They rattled off his body, thick armour plate proof against the improvised missile. But his sensor pod was less well protected. A spear of twisted metal the length of a human arm punched through the protective glass, smashing the camera feeds. The hanger bay disappeared behind a storm of white static before blacking out entirely. Threat alerts blared in his consciousness of incoming fire even as the world vanished. His shields sparked and sizzled as they tried to initialize while a barrage of fire hammered into his armour, system warnings droning of imminent catastrophic breaches. Despite being in the middle of battle, he couldn't help but hold just one grimly amused thought. At least he wasn't beheaded this time. But with the initiative lost, blinded and caught in the open, he should have died there and then.
If he had been alone.
"Fire in the hole!"
From behind his sheltering bulk, Garrus's under rifle attachment thumped, a dark projectile arcing high into the hanger before it erupted as a newborn star. Incoming fire slacked off and pained cries rang out from all around as his tactical net, unhindered by the loss of the sensor pod, fed him Grunt and Zaeed's positions. The mercenary and the Krogan swept out into the bay, their weapons thundering as they immediately began cutting down the most obvious threats. A moment later, sight returned, emergency protocols building a composite image from the cameras embedded into the helmets of his team, layering the data over uploaded plans and hijacked security footage to feed directly into his brain. The feed was distorted, disorientating from the odd way the angles appeared, but it was enough. He raised his arms, a veritable arsenal spitting death at blue armoured forms as he tried to pinpoint their objective.
She was there, out in the open and impossible to miss. A hurricane of metal and debris surrounded her with a cloud of whirling death as she flung parts of it at anything her sights fell on. He felt as moment of relief at the sight. Not captured, still an effective, her combat potential confirmed as worth all the trouble they were going through to get her.
"OBJECTIVE LOCATED. PATTERN ALPHA."
Alpha was as simple tactical manoeuvre. Stay in pairs, move fast, and keep enemy positions suppressed while rear elements neutralized them with heavy weapons. As the most obvious target, his job was to draw enemy attention and the Blue Suns went along with his plans amiably.
Enemy fire that had slacked a moment ago returned in full force, slamming into his newly-reinitialized shields with a desperate tempo. He pivoted to the side and accelerated, moving towards a pile of shattered cargo containers for shelter while his arm-mounted autocannon roared in defiance. The stuttering roar overshadowed the chatter of assault rifles, forcing blue armoured figures to dive behind cover as he swept withering fire at their positions. Return fire sparked off his armour whenever the stream of shots passed them by, the mercenaries jumping out when they were in the clear. Minor damage alerts began intruding on his awareness as the fire picked up, more defenders focusing their efforts on him. Taking advantage of the lack of attention, Garrus's rifle barked twice in quick succession, each shot punching through the helmet of a less than cautious mercenary while Zaeed vaulted over the cover of a sheltering Sun. The shotgun in his hand bucked, silencing the surprised cry as the veteran brutally smashed in the head of another guard with its butt. A moment's hesitation gripped the enemy forces as they split off their fire, long enough for a nest of guards to promptly disappear in a ball of flame when Shepard's missile struck.
Attention immediately fell back on him.
Through it all, he kept advancing, dividing his attention between Jack and the Suns. The former was still paying attention solely to the mercenaries, using her biotics to smash them with gravity and thrown containers. The latter were slowly falling back, unable to hold their positions between the two forces, but where was the Warden? He had to be somewhere- his attention suddenly swerved back to the convict. The motion was slight compared to the chaos of battle, so much so that he would have missed it had he been slightly less attentive. Jack had raised her arm. And it was pointed at him.
There was no time to think, only to react. The shoulder-mounted grenade launcher swivelled into position just as a wave of dark energy manifested around the convict. Fast as he was, she was faster. The blue aura flared and lanced out like an arrow. Deck plates warped and burst apart as the wave engulfed them, forming a line of destruction straight for him. The grenade launcher barked trice in rapid succession. Arming safeties overridden, contact fused high explosive rounds met the edge of the wavefront. Thin skinned metal housings twisted and broke, setting off their payloads. Concussive force and pulses of dark energy warred in a roiling cloud of blue tinged fire, the blast rocking Shepard back on his heels with a whine of abused actuators.
A heartbeat later, the convict burst through the cloud of flame, trailing an aura of biotic energy and murder in her eyes as she raised a corona engulfed fist. The same fist he had seen her drive through solid steel moments earlier.
"JACK-"
He never finished his words as the convict came in swinging. Training kicked in, and he evaded, sidestepping her biotic lunge with a quick shift of his body weight. The right arm swung, jabbing at her exposed flanks with the tips of his gun sheathes, but the convict reacted faster. An elbow jammed into the exposed muzzle of the rocket launcher in his arm, tearing apart the hardened alloys with a sudden flare of biotics and shower of sparks. Power to the limb immediately failed as emergency cutoffs engaged. She pivoted, sweeping a leg out that would have, should have, smashed itself uselessly against his armoured legs. Seeing the flare of biotics, he turned with her kick before it could connect, the limb whistling against the air too close for comfort.
"WE ARE-"
"Fuck you!"
The blue pulse of biotics around her frame gave him only a split second warning. Actuators whined in protest, compacting his frame even as the pulse caught him. Gravity inverted, gained momentum and sent his multi ton bulk flying. He slammed against the bulkheads with a deafening shriek of crumpling hullplate. Motive power to his internal gyro failed, the system locking down his legs as it underwent an emergency reboot. So much for making contact, was the wry thought that flitted in his awareness between the cascade of error reports. Jack advanced, screaming as the flare of biotically created barriers stopped incoming fire from so much as scratching her. Time to do it the old-fashioned way then.
"EDI-"
The convict lunged, her fist glowing with blue fire as she aimed it right at his chest. Time seemed to slow down.
"SHUT-"
Internal sensors, those not already destroyed in his mangled head, painted the distance. Close.
"OFF-"
Too close. Half a meter to go. On his tactical display, Garrus's icon flickered with movement, the Turian rapidly approaching his position to assist. But the conclusion was obvious. He would never make it. Her fist began to come down where it would terminate against his chest. It would go through, punch into his brain casing. There wasn't enough time.
"HER-"
The fist crossed another twenty centimetres. He'd die.
But not today.
Power hissed from his microfusion core, dumping nearly it's entire output into the single remaining functional limb. Actuators screamed as his left arm lanced out. Purple blue barriers caught the leading edge of his gun sheathes, friction searing off the paint with a bright pop of short lived flame. But the arm was simply too massive, too mass heavy, to be stopped. With a flare of collapsing barriers, his arm punched through, catching the convict straight in the solar plexus.
"Hrk!"
Pliant flesh met with unyielding steel, momentum carrying the convict forward even as her torso refused to follow. The blue flare of biotics flickered and went out as her eyes bulged, limbs and arms going askew as her body was brought to an immediate halt. Phlegm and digestive acids splashed against his chassis as she reflexively gagged.
Time resumed its normal pace.
"-IMPLANTS. SHUT HER DOWN"
With a snap shut motion of his gun sheathes, he clamped down on either side of the convict's torso, pinning her in place. She reacted immediately, pain becoming a snarl of hate, the fading aura of flashing anew as she aimed a kick trailing blue fire at his chest-
"Of course Shepard. Disabling Subject Zero's implants"
-only for the biotic aura to vanish with a pop, the convicts foot crunching against his armoured glacis plate with the audible crack of snapping bones. Jack hissed in pain, drawing back her bloody boot as she struggled to break out of his grip. Flashes of blue fire surrounded the convict, arm mounted actuators groaning as they were subjected to forces they were never meant to withstand. But the flare of biotics was intermittent, her control insufficient without the implant to break free. It didn't stop her from filling the air with curses and aiming ineffectual kicks, struggling to break free.
"OBJECTIVE SECURED" He reported, forcing the convict to the ground as his gyroscopic systems completed their reboot sequence with a faint whine of leg actuators unlocking.
"Jesus Christ Shepard," Zaeed swore over the chatter of his assault rifle "You cut things bloody close don't you?"
"IT IS NOT OV-" Before he could finish the word, a warning flashed on his tactical net.
ALERT. MICROFUSION SPIKE DETECTED
Shepard swore.
"GET DOWN"
A large shipping container exploded, streams of fire lancing out from the roiling cloud of smoke. Zaeed cussed as his cover was promptly turned into confetti, the mercenary barely keeping ahead of the trail of destruction. Another blinking line turned a stripped out shuttle into a ball of fire, sending Grunt sprawling to the floor as it exploded. Garrus ducked, barely avoiding losing his head as a third line of fire clipped the top of the wrecked crane he was hiding behind. Still holding Jack on the ground, Shepard brought his grenade launcher online, aiming a blind volley into the debris cloud. Flashes of light and sound thundered as the grenades vanished into the cloud.
A whipcrack of supersonically displaced air punctuated the grenade launcher's violent destruction in a shower of sparks and fragments, electrical feedback shocking his consciousness as the bulkhead behind him cratered from the impact of a hypervelocity large calibre round.
The dust cloud boiling away, rising on pair of ducted fans, a predatory shape lifted off from the wreckage of the crane, twin linked gun turrets on either side of its forward blade tracking the members of his team who stayed behind cover. Mounted on top of the lean, tan and beige vehicle was a heavy mass accelerator cannon, it's still-smoking aperture pointed directly at Shepard. Three superficial scorch patterns marked its armour where his grenades had struck, apparently to no effect. With the faint hiss of ozone, the air around the vehicle became a shimmering haze, indicating the presence of a high yield kinetic barrier. In the sudden silence, the message was clear. They were out-gunned, and out-armoured, one wrong movement was all it would take. And then it's speakers activated, amplifying a familiar and smug voice of the assault vehicle's pilot.
"Ah, the elusive AI Shepard, we meet at last. So good of you to take down Jack for me."
**********
"Holy freaking shit!" Joker swore, bolting upright from his helmsman chair, the tactical feed telling him everything he didn't want to know about what was going on groundside. Creed Land Dynamics weapons platform blah blah, bah, he didn't want to know that! He knew the Blue Suns were one of the best kitted out mercenary outfits there were, but how the hell had the Warden gotten a hovertank of all things? The damn thing had come practically out of nowhere, scans had completely missed it until the fusion core startup. He shelved that thought under "not very important" and focused on the important bits. Like how the heck Shepard was going to get out of this one outside of a body bag... forklift, whatever.But a moment later, he calmed down. This was Shepard, of course he'd have a plan, no matter how crazy sounding it was. Anyone who fought Geth armatures and colossus's on foot with nothing but an assault rifle and a bandoleer of disc grenades was chock full of crazy, but coming out of the fight as the last man standing made it the winning brand of insanity. Facing a tank was Tuesday for Shepard's bad guy crotch-punching galaxy tour.
"You've caused me a lot of trouble for a machine, but since you took down Jack for me I'm willing to let it pass," the Warden's voice carried across the communication net. "Surrender, and we can end this with a minimum of fuss."
"H'yeah, right." The helmsman snorted at the obvious lie, but kept his eyes glued to his tactical display. He was getting a lot of feeds not just from the Normandy's sensors, but the ground team too. Fingers flashed across the haptic interface display as he brought the Normandy around, sidling up to close to Purgatory. Whatever plan the commander had up his sleeve, Joker put good odds on Purgatory exploding at the last minute as part of the package. Or maybe a shambling horde of swamp zombies. Ok, that might be a little bit on the ridiculous side, but after what happened on that colony, he wasn't going to discount that. Either way, Shepard and the rest of crotch punch squad was going to need a ticket out fast as soon as they got the chance...
"NO REASON TO TRUST YOU"
Joker blinked, sliding an eye to the ground team data feed. Nope, no one shooting yet. Ok, that was... yeah, that was new. Normally a dozen rounds would have been exchanged by now.
"C'mon commander, what the heck are you doing? Hurry up and kick his ass before you get that one way ticket to- huh..." one of the communication terminals had just lit up with Shepards authentication key. Instead of an audio feed though, a short burst of raw data was being streamed through. Joker's eyes flicked through them, rapidly putting together the numbers into a coherent picture. Telemetry, timing, squad locations, route calculations... fire lanes?! His jaw dropped.
"Oh no. No no no. This has got to be a joke." He protested to no one in particular. A finger hovered over the transmit button, but the commander had already shut off the channel. "That's the plan you want to use? Really?"
A holographic blue globe popped out of the terminal next to him. "It would appear to be so Mr. Moreau. I have confirmed the telemetry and authentication codes. It is accurate."
Joker turned a jaundiced eye at the overgrown golf ball. "Then it's got to be a joke. This isn't just crazy, this whole thing it's," he waved his hands in frustration, guiding the ship on foot pedals and manoeuvring thrusters alone, "just plain suicide. This is the kind of thing that gets you in the record books for dumbest stunts ever."
"I disagree Mr. Moreau," The golf ball's scanning light flickered. "Calculations indicate the chances of success of this method to be approximately 0.0001 percent with the loss of all deployed squad members. It is an acceptable risk."
Joker felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his head.
"That was a joke."
The pilot opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and finally closed it with a click as he glared at the glowing ball. "You totally need to work on your comedy, because-" He stopped, staring disbelievingly at the communication terminal where Shepard had sent a single text message.
"ON MARK"
"Crap." Fingers flashed across the controls as he fired the retro thrusters, coasting the Normandy to a stop at the optimal position for what was going to probably be the most insane stunt Shepard had ever pulled. "He's serious."
The next message that came through totally didn't fill him with confidence either. It only had three simple words.
"DO NOT MISS"
**********
"MARK"T+ 0.00 seconds
On the transmission of a single encrypted burst, many things happened all at the same time. From behind his fragile cover, Garrus dropped his rifle, throwing himself prone as the Turian curled into a ball with his hands covering his head. Inside the ruined husk of a cargo container, Zaeed mimicked the ex-vigilante, bracing himself against the walls of his shelter. There was no hesitation nor confused pause to the warning. Every part of the team had been told what to expect in such a contingency well in advance. Shepard followed suit, folding in on himself, hunkering down and reducing his target profile with the high pitched whine of actuators. The convict in his grasp recognized his actions for what they were almost immediately, curling herself up into a ball in a flash of movement. But the most significant part, the one that best guaranteed their survival, was not in their movements, but rather, their suits.
Constructing kinetic barriers was always a balancing act between performance and endurance, the limited space of modern combat suits dictating the demands of modern infantry design. An active barrier could be made to last for weeks on end with the limited reserves stored in a suits power banks, but be unable to protect from little more than the least of small arms fire. Those built to take tremendous punishment before failing could weigh the same as their lesser cousins despite larger Eezo cores, but only last hours, if not minutes before their power levels were completely drained. Better protection invariably meant larger, and bulkier, power reserves. Myriad combat suits had been built and designed around this paradigm for centuries, becoming the de facto standard of infantry protection.
It was an often overlooked truth that it was not just the size of the eezo core that dictated protective capacity, but the power that flowed through the system. But brute forcing the system with raw power was inefficient and crude, a method widely ignored in favour of more efficient solutions by designers everywhere.
Shepard had learned that particular factor a lifetime ago, and today, he used it.
T+ 0.53 seconds
In a single moment, power cells and capacitors were flash drained, the very safety systems that were designed to prevent such a discharge stripped out long before they had entered Purgatory. Communication channels winked out and power assist motors froze from lack of power, tactical displays going blank as non-critical systems were starved of energy. Weeks of power reserves were poured in their entirety through electrical channels. Suit temperatures instantly spiked as resistance converted wasted energy to heat, but the rest flowed through into the system. Supernova-forged elements within their ceramic and polymer prisons flared with actinic light, bathing the members of the strike team with vivid blue fire.
In the same instant, a mere dozen kilometres away and hidden in the depths of space, a crippled helmsman swore under his breath, and pulled a trigger.
T+ 0.68 seconds
Aboard the Normandy, flickers of dark energy coiled along accelerator arrays, buoying an ellipsoid shape in a sphere of twisted space where mass had no meaning. Banks of capacitors discharged their load through high capacity conduits, feeding systems with an instantaneous burst of life. The hardened projectile remained motionless for only a fraction of a second, and then the accelerators hummed with power. Invisible magnetic fields caressed the loaded shot, imparting it with kinetic energy as the fields pulsed in rapid sequence, flinging the projectile like a thunderbolt across the blackness. Only a fraction of the frigate's full power was expended on the shot, not even measuring a hundredth of the muzzle velocity from a dreadnought's fearsome armament.
It still crossed the distance to Purgatory in less than a second.
T+ 1.35 seconds
Starship grade kinetic barriers that should have stopped the errant projectile, that would have laughed at the understrength velocity of mere tens of kilometres per second, failed to manifest. With Purgatory's main reactors off-line and her backup systems teetering on the edge of depletion just from keeping life support, not a spare joule could be spent on external shields. And even had the barrier generators been provided power without end, the artificial intelligence aboard the Normandy dominated every aspect of the prison ships control infrastructure. No protective aura of twisted gravity appeared, leaving the shell to strike with it's full fury unimpeded.
T+ 1.36 seconds
He saw the flash of light and electrical discharge, the light warping around the hovertanks cannon in a display of mass accelerator technology at work. A single moment of threat warnings as the hostile fire indicators lit up in that haze of heightened battle senses. One moment, a frozen slice of time for the awareness to thread through of what was going to happen.
T+ 1.37 seconds
At full power, five kilogrammes of hardened superheated tungsten should have converted to energy on impact, becoming a rapidly expanding plasma cloud consuming armour and flesh with equal ferocity. At its reduced velocity, the shell retained its armour penetrating capabilities, meeting space rated hull metal and punching through, boring through the alloy which offered all the resistance of foam. Metal parted in its path, melting down to white hot temperatures in a split second, coating the harbinger of death with a sheathe of metallic plasma. In less than a microsecond, the shell speared through the inner hull, boring down on its target in surrounded by a hail of incandescent shards. Blue suited forms in the open were transfixed by the glowing missiles, their protective barriers shattering in the same instant that they died.
Amongst Shepard's team, overloaded shields blazed with azure fire, white hot chunks of shrapnel that powered through their cover disintegrating against the barriers in a pyrotechnic display. Warning tones flashed into Shepard's consciousness as electrical systems burned out, the power coursing through the wiring far greater than they had ever been designed to channel. Temperature warnings spiked as waste electricity became heat, the soaring heat becoming triggering emergency venting of his stored coolant to keep from being cooked alive. A particularly large spike of molten steel speared his barriers, the impact nearly knocking him over. But the barriers held.
Amidst the carnage the main body of the projectile continued its flight, striking at the tank like a bolt of lightning. Onboard threat systems reacted with the speed of light, kinetic barriers flaring into existence as a shield against the fury of a warship. Light scintillated, blinding all eyes as unstoppable force met unmovable object, fighting against each other. Only for a single moment.
Then the barriers failed.
It happened before anyone could register the events. Shepard's only warning was the sudden flash of light as the shell punched through the top armour of the combat vehicle. The projectile speared the hovertank, melting through components, body armour and flesh with impartial impunity to explode out through the bottom and penetrate the deck floor beneath. Capacitors in mid discharge were breached, releasing their stored energy in a single catastrophic detonation. The shot in its arrays went wild, striking the shattered hanger entranceway with a whipcrack of buckling steel. The tank bucked and careened, detonations from the ground launching it into the air. A moment later, internal explosions racked the ruined tank, a powerful blast sending its turret flying off into the air as its engines simply cut out, the burning hulk smashing to the ground with a floor rattling crash. The charred turret came down a moment later, trailing fire and debris as it collapsed on the wreck of its parent body.
T+ 2.97 seconds
**********
'Come on, move'Very slowly, Shepard felt his body respond once more to his commands, myriad warning alerts slowly flicking away as repair systems began recovery operations. Capacitors that had been drained earlier feebly drew power from the still active microfusion core, the burned out electrical pathways preventing immediate reactivation of all non-essential systems as the onboard VI prioritized available resources. Motor functions came back first, the abused motive systems groaning in protest as they came back to life. Like an old man, the machine body he inhabited creaked upright, hissing smoke rising from exposed joints where coolant fluid had been flushed through in an attempt to keep from overheating.
Short ranged communications and secondary sensors came back next, painting a composite picture of the surroundings from the suit feeds of his team. His attention immediately went to the immediate surroundings, searching for any remaining threats.
The hanger bay was a scene of total destruction, the deck plating holed in hundreds of places where supersonic shrapnel of various sizes had embedded themselves. Shuttles and loading cranes were perforated so badly that none of them would ever work again. A few of the latter were on fire, leaking pools of burning fuel that consumed the wrecked shuttle craft. No piece of machinery larger than the smallest aircar was left untouched, some of them bearing punctures where finger sized bits of spalling had punched right through while others were little more than twisted ruins of blackened metal. Looking upwards where the shell had punched through, Shepard caught sight of the blue tinged aura of a barrier, the emergency system deploying a low strength shield to keep the atmosphere within the ship. Beyond it's translucent haze was the dark red haze of the local gas giant, it's swirling storm clouds visible even at this distance.
Of the Blue Suns who guarded the place, none of their suit power signatures showed up on his sensors. Bodies were strewn about, blasted apart by shrapnel and pressure wave when the shell had landed. Most were scorched black, twisted corpses lying where they had been speared by burning bits of metal. Without exception, those had been torn apart, body armour and the softer bodies within ripped open or torn off by the hail of death that had killed them. Others had their limbs bent at unnatural angles, the Suns tossed at fatal speeds against unyielding bulkheads when the explosions had ripped apart their positions. There were no survivors as far as he could see.
The hovertank the Warden had been using... was a burned out wreck, its armoured chassis torn apart and nearly split in two from the jagged tear running through its chassis. It's turret was lying upside down on the ground, it's main weapon shattered while flames merrily crackled from inside the turret ring. Shepard felt a brief spike of vicious glee at the sight. He doubted the Warden ever saw it coming.
"-pard, can you hear me?"
Joker's voice came through the communications net as power was finally restored to the long range telemetry feeds, the worried face of the bearded navigator appearing in a small window inside his consciousness.
"SHEPARD COPIES. AREA SECURE." He paused as the muffled groans of his ground team began to filter through the communication net. He hesitated a moment, calling up the life sign monitors from each suit they wore. All of them were elevated, but nothing within the immediate red line. "GROUND TEAM ALIVE."
"Speak for yourself, you overgrown tin can," Zaeed spat out between curses, digging himself out from under some rubble that had fallen on him earlier. "I've been through some real shit, but that was bloody insane." The mercenary gave himself an experimental pat on the chest once he was out. "Hell, I'm not even sure I'm still alive."
"ALIVE ENOUGH TO COMPLAIN" came Shepard's deadpan reply, getting a short bark of laughter from the grizzled mercenary.
Further down the hanger, Grunt rose to his feet, casually brushing away metallic debris from his heavy frame with a sweep of his hand. "Warlord," the Krogan began, turning his keen eyes towards the commander, "that, was a glorious end to your enemies."
'Well, no surprise there.' The unspoken thought ran through Shepard's brain as he turned his attention to the ex-prisoner still in his grip. A moment of worry spiked through him as he caught sight of the convict lying limp between the gun sheathes, her eyes open but unfocused. Barriers or not, the shockwave could be devastating to anyone outside of fully sealed armour. But his worry evaporated when she twitched sporadically, her eyes slowly coming back into focus. She would need to be checked out by Chakwas, but going by the available evidence, the mission was a success. He turned his attention to the final member of his team.
"AND WHAT ABOUT YOU"
"Well, complaints eh?" Garrus's flanged voice carried an amused tone. The Turian had risen from behind the thick slabs of spare hull plate he had been hiding behind, resting an arm on them as he leaned forward. "Then I certainly would like to put one in, Commander."
He paused, letting the silence drift for a second or two before continuing. If he could have smiled, Shepard would have. It didn't take a genius to guess what the Turian was getting at.
"When I said to never let you drive? I'm going to add never letting you call in fire support to that list."
**********
