Looking back, I can scarcely believe how much work I've had to do this past month, and then the chapter decided it had to grow beyond what I planned, which is as always an issue with me. But I conquered it! Eventually...
Once again, credit goes to
LogicalPremise for their wok on giving some manner of scientific explanation for biotic powers and what they should be able to do, even if the mechanics aren't the same here (though their effects largely are, at least for now).
Finally, credit goes to
koobismo for their great comic Marauder Shields. I borrowed one character and their explanation for Cerberus' backstory, because it at least manages to
somewhat explain how a terrorist group you'd spent three games crushing was able to take on the Systems Alliance
and take over the
Citadel within the span of a few weeks. During a galactic extinction war. Somehow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Times of Old in a Distant Place (2)
"-. .-"
It felt like something stopped for a moment that lasted a whole… something in his chest that-
"MEDIC!"
"Man down! Man down, MAN DOWN!"
The yells penetrated the throbbing haze in his temples and the man experienced a moment of confusion over being passed over entirely by mister… the soldiers that had just-
Doctor Garrett Bryson jumped to his feet so fast that his vision whitened into black spots from how quickly the blood rushed out of his head, but by some miracle he managed to avoid losing consciousness again.
"VIP is down!"
"I'm not seeing any breathing! He needs emergency treatment stat!"
Instead he tumbled over cracked floor tiles towards the nearby wall where the emergency first aid station was.
"God Almighty, there's no skin left on him!"
"Come on..!" he gasped as he tried and failed to pull the lid off. "I – unh – need help! It's melted shut!"
"Here!" private Shay hauled him out of the way and smashed the thing open with the butt of his rifle. "That's done it! What do you need first, Doc!?" The man started to pull cases and envelopes out of the container.
"Medi-gel, medi-gel can – here it is!" Bryson snatched the dispenser and rushed off to kneel over Nicholas. "The rebreather, I need it over here right now, then the rest of the medi-gel and get me the defibrillator!" Bryson adjusted the nozzle function and hastened to spray medi-gel over every bit of the boy he could reach, which was literally all of him facing up. His clothes were… his skin and even muscle and bone had been
flash-fried. "Scans…" his omnitool lit up and beeped too loudly in the hot, smoke-filled air –
don't choke don't choke your patient needs you – and by
hell, the fact that scans actually worked on the boy now had better not mean he was dead and gone. "Muscle tension inconsistent, pulse entirely gone, sparse neuroactivity in secondary nervous system, primary nervous system neuroactivity erratic and
fading, heartbeat has almost completely stopped so
where the hell is that defibrillator!?"
"Here, doctor!"
Bryson snatched it from Lee's hands and deployed it without pause, thanking humanity's penchant for efficiency that it only needed three centiseconds to charge instead of 10 seconds like they used-
Electricity
blasted out of the capacitors with the sound of a thousand birds among the echoes of thunder and he fell backwards with his hands shocked and burning on the inside. Bryson barely caught a glimpse of shimmering lines of blue light criss-crossing all over Nicholas' mutilated body before he was hitting the ground back-first for the second time that day.
This time when he came to, it was to the sensation of a racing heart amid what felt like the remnants of sticking his fingers into a power socket. Barely registering the armoured arms helping him sit up, the man dazedly looked at his hands. His hands that felt like someone had scrubbed them raw with sandpaper inside-out and looked like their skin had been scratched by angry cats. They shook.
He was a doctor and his hands
shook.
Shit!
Words flew around him over voice and radio and between the soldiers and whoever else but that didn't matter. "CPR!" he gasped as he did his best to master himself. "Someone start on CPR now!"
"On it!" Anderson threw a handcuffed Derek to the ground next to the Gunnery Chief and rushed to Nicholas' side while private Shay applied the rebreather to his mouth.
But Bryson didn't watch to make sure their technique was any good. There wasn't time. There wasn't enough
time. Clenching his fists and ignoring whatever other people were saying to him he rifled through the rest of the first aid supplies, blessing mankind's penchant for redundancy when he found what he was half-expecting not to be there despite Sirta having decided on the content of the SA's alliance first aid kits themselves.
"Patient missing his right arm from above the elbow, left hand gone from below the wrist, first two toes gone from right foot, lids and cornea of right eye completely cauterised, patient suffering from third to sixth degree burns upon 75% of remaining body, terminal shock incurred, patient suffering from sudden cardiac arrest," the man recited damage after damage in an effort to master himself. "Defibrillation has failed, patient remains clinically dead upon unexpected bioelectrical interference, cardiopulmonary resuscitation being administered to no visible effect, further adherence to standard first aid procedures untenable in light of violent reaction to defibrillator, now defunct," Bryson barely recognised his own voice as he left aside the intravenous dispenser for something decidedly more archaic. "Remaining option: intracardiac injection." The man pressed a hand on the boy's chest, forced his grip to steady despite the crawling
ache in his hands, then drove a syringe topped by a long spinal needle right in the fourth intercostal space between Nicholas' ribs.
The horror around him was almost thick enough to physically touch as he injected a dose of epinephrine straight into Nicholas' heart. In other circumstances the man would have scoffed at them, but not then. Not when a 10-year-old boy was burned badly enough to be unrecognizable, and not when he had a steel needle stuck in his ventricular chamber.
Not when the procedure he was using had been considered obsolete since the dawn of the 21st century, but nothing else had worked, he had neither the time nor tools for endotracheal or intraosseous delivery and he couldn't hope that intravenous injections would work any better when the boy was missing most of the limbs needed for that, and if he was doing an intracardiac injection and Nicholas
wasn't responding even now-
The boy lurched under his hand and drew in a feeble, rattling breath before falling still once again.
But this time he breathed.
The boy was breathing.
Not well at all, but at least – Bryson snatched the rebreather from Shay's hand to apply a proper rhythm to it and… – yes, it seemed to be settling into something more approaching an agonised wheezing than the excruciating last rattle he'd heard just a minute before.
That was when a sniper round caught Captain Steven Hackett right in the head.
The flash of a shield belt that Nicholas had emotionally blackmailed Bryson into wearing painted the world in off-colours, which was the only reason he realized he'd
also been shot. Then the suddenly toppling man found himself tackled to the ground and forcefully rolled into cover by David Anderson.
"SNIPER!" cried Jill Dah as she rolled into cover below the windowsill.
"Hostiles attacking from beyond sensor range!"
"Man down!"
"Captain's been hit!"
"I'm
fine," Hackett gasped from behind the other support column as his kinetic barrier reengaged around him and he tried to get his bearings, handgun appearing in his hand from somewhere though the man didn't seem to see it. He still stared at the charred form of the ten year old in the middle of the sudden hotzone. "I… Get me- I want-…" thoughts and feelings flashed over the man's face too fast for Bryson to register fully, and then he didn't have time because they were being
shot at again. "Anderson! You're the best field operative we have. You have command!"
"Roger that, sir! Everyone, switch to secure frequency and sound off!"
"Dah, sounding off!"
"Shay here, providing medical assistance!"
"Lee here, dazed but getting better!"
"O'Reilly here, deploying forcefield!"
As the rest of the marine detachment called in one by one, the doctor dimly pondered that all else being equal, Murphy Law
did indicate this as more or less the best moment when the downside was revealed. The downside to how rapidly the smoke had cleared from the building due to the pressure differential caused by the giant explosion that Nicholas had tossed out the window and which had eaten a large chunk of the air outside. Karin also seemed to have joined them at some point during the past few minutes while he was otherwise preoccupied, and was cowering behind the column across from him since before even Hackett was.
Gunshots sounded around him again amidst yells of outrage and barked commands and acknowledgments from half a dozen different soldiers as a gunfight sparked in earnest.
The man looked from his shaking hands to Karin Chakwas, then between her and the boy who was still motionless in the middle of the Sirta Foundation receiving hall, protected only by some forcefield emplacement that specialist O'Reilly had produced out of nowhere sometime over the last 5 seconds.
Did the Alliance even have those? No, not important.
His goal was clear, his mind was calm and his breath no less steady than during the worst of the brain surgeries he ever had to undertake.
But his hands shook still.
"Doctor."
Karin snapped her head to stare at him, eyes wide with horror, terror and a million other things.
Two and a million that didn't matter.
Dr. Garret Bryson nodded in Nicholas' direction. "You have your patient."
The young woman gaped and looked between him and the child in unvarnished horror.
But she saw his hands – red, scraped and trembling – gulped, grit her teeth, glared out into the direction of whatever or whoever was attacking them and took a deep, fortifying breath.
Then Karin Chakwas broke out of cover, threw herself behind O'Reilly's forcefield as quickly as she could, took in at a glance the supplies strewn about the ground, and got to work.
"Marine Shay! Hand me the red-capped brown bottle, now! Doctor, I'm going to need assistance!"
BANG!
What a strange reversal of their usual roles, Bryson thought numbly as he crawled behind O'Reilly's shield as well.
"What the- the needle warped! It won't touch the skin! How… what… Marine, give me the burn salves. Doctor, ready some gauze! Quickly!"
Crack!
"More hostiles at five o'clock!"
As he followed Karin's orders and helped her bandage almost the entirety of Nicholas' body, Bryson barely had time to wonder why they were being attacked, let alone by whom.
"Salve applied, gauze in place, bandages… in place. There's nothing else I can do for him here."
"I see one heavy! Sir, they're going to try and blow through the bulletproof glass!"
He supposed it was good that the gunmen were not on the same side as the windows that had just shattered then.
"Captain Hackett! If you could-"
BANG-CRACK!
"Target trajectories analysed! They're aiming for the Captain!
What? The surprise penetrated the haze behind his ringing temples. Not here for Nicholas then?
"We need to get him down to the hospital ward!"
"Captain Hackett, I'd appreciate it if you-"
BANG-crack-crack-crack!
"My shield seems to be better than most of yours but you have command, Anderson!"
"Then you're protection detail! Cover the retreat of the medical party and then see the rest of the civilians to safety! That's an order!"
"Roger that!"
As Captain Steven Hackett brought up the rear in the scramble, time just seemed to almost entirely disappear into that one, endless breath when Bryson had to pick up and carry Nicholas out of danger with his own two arms.
Gods, he was so
light.
"Missile!"
BOOM!
The sound of duraglass shattering reached them down the hallway and all the way to the elevator.
"Gina!" Karin shouted into her omnitool as soon as they were out of the line of fire and broke into a sprint. "Patient in critical condition incoming! I want an intensive care unit up and running by the time we get down there!"
"What!? What's happening up there!? Where's Doctor Bryson, is he alright!"
"GINA!" Bryson shouted over her despite himself. "The doctor just gave you your orders!"
"R-right!" Indistinct noises over the radio were followed by rapid footsteps, beeping and rustle of fabrics.
"Equipment booting, sir-MA'AM!"
"We need to get the other children to safety as well!" Hackett said. "I'll go and work with the Vales. We'll sort out where to put them later but we can't leave them on this level!"
"Go, I'll have someone prepare a room for them," Bryson told him as they reached the lift. "Bring them to sublevel 02."
"More host-… wait, are those friendlies this time?"
"Do we suddenly have terrorist randomly helping us!? Alright, who forgot to check the temperature in hell?"
What was that last part? He could have sworn he'd just-
"ICU ready, ma'am!" Gina said via radio just as the elevator doors opened
.
"Transmitting details now," Karin answered. "Individual is human, male, age 10, suffering from first to sixth-degree burns, freshly resuscitated, in need of life support after terminal shock to the system due to exothermic explosive device detonating at point-blank range-"
As Karin described the situation much as he'd done earlier, Bryson distantly wondered if subjective time was really something he should know so well. Feeling like it took three days to get past three minutes of emergency treatment and two
more minutes of emergency hoverbed and elevator transport was… it was a new one.
"I also want some of whatever drugs we have that can be absorbed through the skin!" Karin added. "Prioritise anything that could be useful during shock-refractory VF, but get me a full inventory!"
They'll also need to boot up the flash-cloning vats and to harvest or outright synthesise stem cells,
lots of them, but Bryson supposed that was a bit outside the scope of emergency life support.
"And someone attend to Doctor Bryson since he was caught in the blast as well."
What? Ill-advised! "I don't-"
"Doctor's orders, Doctor," Karin steamrolled him as they sprinted towards the ICU along two of his other assistants that met them at the elevator. "Your hands are a national resource that I
won't see permanently crippled and I'm sure Shepard would agree!"
Shepard would agree? The boy so lacking in sense that he jumped in front of a bomb!? Caring about his opinion should be the
last thing on their minds, but arguing would be a time sink and distraction of possibly terminal degree to the boy in question, so instead all Bryson said was "I'll be in the adjoining medlab overseeing the stem cell treatment."
"Thank you, Doctor. Eric, Susan, attend to him!"
"Yes ma'am! We're right behind you, doctor!"
The next ten minutes were tense but came with good news for once. There would be no need of skin grafts for him, for one thing, and for another his hands' shaking had subsided almost entirely. The even better news was that a quick electroneurography showed no abnormal neural activity in his radial nerves, and a subsequent electromyography revealed that any erratic electrical activity in his hand muscles had faded almost completely.
The doctor had to take a moment to process the wave of relief at the confirmation that he would not lose use of them.
The biotics had done something then, something which had since run its course. Warp effect induced by defibrillator shock interacting with the surplus of eezo in the boy's body? Bryson mentally raised the priority level of reading through the exact mechanics of biotic powers. They'd actually been top of the list before this… this terrorist attack on Sirta Foundation but now they had a different emergency on their hands. One that demanded that he start on that stem cell culturing and bioprinting, preferably before his surroundings turned entirely as red as his sight already was at the edges.
… wait a second.
The world shifted sideways, the petri dish on the table next to him slid away as if yanked by a string and shattered on the floor as gravity changed its vector, taking his sense of balance and folding it on itself as everything else rattled or outright fell around him, spilling from the shelves and glass cases lining the lab walls. The jolt of pain from his hip striking the side of the table barely registered but he still yelped alongside his assistants as the colours of his surroundings distorted, light spectrum bending abberantly from clinical grey-white to a decidedly more cardinal shade. In the end he managed not to fall only because of the desperate grab he made for the machine in front of him, the grip he managed by blind luck. Blind but not really. Red hues turned orange and blue and violet and back as his eyes flew every which way while he staggered in place as if buffeted by a storm that battered him with no wind at all.
Just as abruptly, the vertigo faded.
But the red stayed and the pull remained.
For a moment Doctor Garret Bryson merely stood there gaping, feeling like he was falling sideways while his mind struggled to understand what had happened.
Then, because he lacked any better ideas, the man slowly turned in place and looked from one end of the room to the other as he made a full 360-degree turn,
The background tint flowed from red to orange, then yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and then back. All the colours of the rainbow as well as many others, some he had words for, some he didn't, some he doubted he'd ever seen before, some coming and going so quickly and looking so uncanny that he wasn't sure he saw them at all.
His turn left him looking at the wall separating his lab from the intensive care unit. The direction in which the world was reddest.
The man blanched.
Gravitic distortion.
Redshift.
Redshift that flowed into blueshift and back depending on where he turned his face.
Doppler Effect? No, the
opposite. Was… was
light going slower!?
"Gravity," Doctor Bryson breathed in shock. "Karin!" the man shouted into his omnitool as he broke for the door leading out into the rest of the suddenly rainbow-colored world, so light wasn't
all slower! "Karin, come in!" His exit from the room came with a swirl of background colour that almost dazed him – not just slower but
faster light on some vectors – but his fumble with the door switch helped him centre himself. "Karin, what's happening in there!?" The signal was garbled and his holographic displays flickered as he charged down the hall while the second, intruding gravitational pull literally tugged him forward.
He almost slammed into the ICU door because of the havoc everything was inflicting on his sense of balance and depth perception but he managed to brace himself, barely. He just as barely set aside the lack of discernible difference between the red light on the lock and the metal around it as he input his senior override code, so red the whole world was by that point. Sounds of distress and running reached him from behind and the adjoining corridor but he couldn't spare the focus for whoever it was.
Then, finally, red light switched to a washed out yellow – it should have been green – and Doctor Garret Bryson stumbled into the intensive care unit to find a shocked Gina backed into a corner, the floor covered with tools in disarray, Karin Chakwas leaning away from the operating table with an arm in front of her face as if trying to ward the literal storm blasting and pulling at everything, and Nicholas Alexander Shepard right in the middle of it as it seemed he was bound to always be. An unconscious, crippled, burned mummy of a child at the core of a dust cloud floating in and out of a light-shattering haze as the sheet, mattress and even the medical tools and
metal table under him slowly disintegrated to dust before the man's very eyes, powdered metals and synthetic grain pooling around him, mounting, fusing…
Sprouting into what looked sinisterly like
nerves that flared and flowed intermittently with light more blue and green than red, only they weren't connected to anything and… they looked like… but the biotic flares somehow surged from him and poured out of and over his extremities…
Metal dust, light and gravity came together as he mutely watched the spectacle, concentrating into a translucent, mercurial haze that shimmered as it gave entirely new meaning to the notion of phantom limb syndrome.
"Wh-what's going on here?" Captain Hackett breathed from the doorway behind him.
Gina and Karin started at his voice and the latter even jerked away from the table. Her hair rustled as it tried to fly towards the centre of the pull.
Unfortunately, Bryson was shocked beyond the ability to put thought to words so he didn't have an answer for Hackett or anyone else. The doctor instead fumbled with his omnitool controls and scrolled through the Biotics Encyclopaedia that the boy had provided him earlier. He tabbed past the large collection of Asari biotics articles, market Nicholas's studies of Dark Matter and Dark Energy to read later, skimmed through the opening intro of his treatise on Pan-Dimensional Biophysics, entirely passed over the file on Nutritional Considerations, then finally stopped when he found the file titled "Compilation of Biotics: Mechanics, Powers, Side-Effects and Baryonic-Non-Baryonic Interactions."
Biotics is the ability of some life forms to manipulate energy and force by using Element Zero accumulations in various body tissues (usually but not necessarily part of the nervous system). At their most basic this means using the natural electrical currents running through the nerves to generate and shape dark energy, thus producing barriers and direct kinetic effects.
Beyond these bare basics are invoked effects, where conscious control begins to be exerted over the universe's non-baryonic contamination, colloquially referred to as the Mass Effect. Almost all known Biotic Powers fall under this category, including warp fields, biotic explosions and other indirect applications. Mostly this is done by using the nervous system to emit a pulsar field which shapes the Mass Effect.
There is a level beyond this, where the Mass Effect is used to directly manipulate energy and the fundamental force of the Universe, namely Gravity. Singularity is the only widely known effect of this type, but more specific or complex effects are possible, some known but kept secret by various factions such as Ardat-Yakshi Mental Domination or the Reave ability of Justicar Asari.
As those very universal forces steadily dug cracks into the operating table, Bryson grit his teeth in harried frustration. As heavy as the implication was that a 10-year-old boy somehow knew Asari state secrets, this wasn't the information he wanted! Damn those terrorists, not only did they bomb his workplace but they didn't even have the courtesy to wait until he at least knew enough of the vernacular to know what to look for in an emergency!
Not knowing what else to do, the man quickly skimmed through the power descriptions in the hopes that one of them would help him start figure out what the hell was happening. The basic ones might not read like anything fancy, but…
Pull, throw, shockwave, slam, create mass effect tunnel for an instant charge, create barrier to deflect attacks and powers, form barrier to block or outright absorb powers – was this… no, this went eons beyond that – create gravitic tethers to bring vehicles to a stop or pull aircraft out of the sky – wait, what? – cause stasis by locking the energy states and motions of all particles, shear nuclear forces to break things and people to pieces, use angled mass effects to flay anything or anyone in sight – Bryson felt a chill down his spine – subsume localised gravity to pulverise or crush people to paste or fine powder – who came up with these horrors? – tug molecular bonds apart to reduce attacking armies to a smear over time –
sweet heavens! – curve the air into a lens to magnify sight or melt distant targets, create a field of gravitic lensing to render user invisible and defend from kinetic assault, lock energy states to render one transparent and invulnerable –
this was what Nicholas used on the wall but
what was he doing now!? – warp matter apart and churn plasma to cause things and people to catch fire, pull ambient heat energy to set things and people on fire, hurl plasma orbs, shoot plasma bullets, launch plasma lances capable of blasting through heavy ship plate armour, grind the nervous system to cause agony and lethal damage.
Dammit, this wasn't helpful! And these were just gravitic and molecular control. If they did all this, what was Dimensional control like?
Disrupt mass-energy ratios to detonate living beings into smoking red splatter – Gods… gods above… – strip ions from the air to tear apart the atmosphere and ruin all electrical charge, use widespread warp fields in conjunction with the above to bring down bolts of lightning from the sky, shut down nervous systems by distorting subatomic bonds to discharge excess energy states from neurons, send biotic shockwaves into targets via a shifting target mass tunnels to detonate them from the inside…
His stomach twisted, and this time it wasn't all owed to the abnormal secondary vector of gravity. This… this was horrifying and he still had high order energy manipulation to go through.
Channel any form of energy or force he could imagine to turn aside explosions and send plasma and shock hurling backwards -
this was what Nicholas had done but his
injuries! – disrupt molecular bonds and churn matter to plasma to detonate a biotic Flare of devastating power, deploy high order Flares to disrupt biotics, chain multiple Flares together with unstable mass effect links to create a biotic detonation across a whole mile, annihilate energy states to fray apart surrounding matter thereby causing massive damage all around while rendering one's self impossible to safely attack in turn.
Derange molecule energy states and bind them and variance levels together to pull surrounding matter inwards and create degenerate matter known as neutronium.
Doctor Garret Bryson stared blankly at his omnitool display, went back and re-read the last two lines, blinked several times to make sure he wasn't actually hallucinating, then he re-read them again and still couldn't bring himself to believe what he was seeing.
"Doctor?" Bryson jumped at Karin's terse call. "Did you find anything? Because I'll take anything right now!"
The man could only shake his head and mutely scroll down from the science-breaking claims he'd just been exposed to. He skimmed the next section as quickly as he could and only stopped when he reached the heading called "Dark Energy, Gravity and You." And not because of the heading itself which he only belatedly registered, but the unusual comment attached to it, the only one in the whole document.
Dark Energy controls Gravity + Gravity changes the speed of light + (wormholes = folded space = junctures between gravity wells) -> world becomes rainbows.
Wormhole = Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Event horizon = rainbow. Bridge + rainbow = rainbow bridge.
Wormhole.
Rainbow Bridge.
Bifröst.
Research Norse Mythology.
Doctor Garret Bryson stared blankly at the words. The only reason he moved on was because it had almost become a reflex by then. And because he knew that if he allowed that emerging train of thought any room to sprout, he was lost.
The "Pan-Dimensional Interactions" section suddenly welcomed him, but somehow he just didn't have it in him to care that he should feel foolish over the realization that all the reading he'd just done had been a waste of not just credulity but time.
Time he
didn't have.
"E—e-even-"
Bryson's gaze snapped towards the deathly boy.
"Th-though I w-walk…" Nicholas's hand twitched. His left hand. His
missing hand. "Through th-the valley …" His missing hand made of gravity and powdered metal strings held fast by bevies of air. "Of the shadow o-of death." It rippled like the haze from a torch flame. "I shall brook no evil and stand fearless and numb… For nothing in death will compare to the final memory of a faceful of
BOMB!"
Bryson yelped back as the operating table
shattered under the clawed blow of Nicholas' spectral hand.
"A FUCKING
BOMB!"
"Oh crap we're all gonna die!"
"Shay, this is not the time!"
Before Bryson could wonder about Hackett's radio regaining function or why it was on speaker all of a sudden, the world flashed out of view, and for one instant Bryson saw with stunning clarity the silhouette of some older, grimmer man superimposed over the tortured child, a man-shaped kaleidoscope of luminosity sitting at the centre of two blended four-sided pyramids of light.
But it passed so fast that he couldn't be sure he'd really seen it, and he wasn't given more time to dwell on it than he'd had for anything else since the bombing topside. Not even the foul language despite…
"Goddamit, I've had it!" roared the infant mummy as he floated in the middle of that maelstrom of matter-devouring indignation. "I barely have time to feel glad I didn't overindulge in my faith in the collective wisdom of mankind, and then I get
bombed in the face with the realization that I failed to properly appreciate how it does not preclude monumental acts of
self-absorbed stupidity!"
"Oh Our Lord Father, Though Who Art in the Heavens-"
"Shay, I swear to God-!"
"A bunch of terrorists just managed to piss off Baby Jesus, so with all due respect, sir, we're fucked!"
"Mech coming up on your three!"
"I see it!"
The air
inflated vibrantly half-way between Bryson and where Shepard now sat on the one part of the operating table still upright, giving Bryson a prismatic glimpse of the Sirta Foundation crèche before the boy's bag came flying out.
Gina shrieked.
"Oh give it a rest!" the boy snapped at her as he caught it with the construct of unattached metal skeleton, air pressure and force that now substituted for his missing arm. "It's like you've never heard of a wormhole before!"
On the one hand his reaction meant he wasn't about to splatter them all over the walls without even realizing they were there.
On the other hand, Gina fainted.
Shepard made an aborted move to pinch his flash-fried, bandaged nose. Whether he stopped because his burned skin would hurt or the mass effect substituting for his hand would rip his own face off, Bryson couldn't possibly say. "Oh for crying out loud!" Shepard growled. "I don't have time for this!"
The chevrons Bryson had believed were toys flew out of the wormhole and by science, it was an actual
wormhole, he was staring at the holy grail of civilisations one or more technological singularities above mankind's current development level and he couldn't afford to pay attention to it – and there it went, winked out like a soap bubble. Literally like one, almost.
Somehow, Bryson still managed to find his voice. "Nicholas-"
"I don't have time for you either!"
Bryson gaped at the rudeness. Where did it even come from? Nicholas was such a sweet boy!
"Nnnh-gh." The whimper broke into a growl as the brainwave interface flew out of the hovering backpack and locked around the boy's bandaged head. "Gah, ah… Note to self, print new skin... a-and new h-hands, arms,
shit, new toes too!?" He hissed, swaying from the pain as a spare omnitool flew from the bag to his lap. "There… there go my next two weeks." Orange pseudo-hardlight screens flickered into being in front of him that showed the battle topside from… from several different angles that
weren't Sirta's external security cameras.
"Do you have time for emergency care then?" Karin asked while the older man was still processing the shock.
"No."
"Dammit, Nicholas!" Bryson finally snapped. "You have sixth-degree burns!"
"I know what happened, Bryson. I was there."
Science save him from smart-mouthed martyrs!
But before Bryson or anyone else could say anything, the boy brought a holographic microphone-amplifier to his throat that made his voice come out as an adult's tenor. "Attention all mobilised members of the Cerberus Private Organisation. This is the Chief Strategic Operations Overseer Odin, calling in to politely inquire as to
what the hell you morons think you are doing!?"
Hackett's live audio feed suddenly returned a noticeable drop in gunfire.
Then more of the same.
"Perhaps I haven't been sufficiently clear," Shepard growled in the ensuing quiet. "To whoever's leading whichever Cerberus squads are firing up the place outside. This is Callsign Odin, Password: Pithos, demanding your name, rank and serial number!"
For a moment there was no response, giving Bryson enough time to wonder why Nicholas expected a terrorist group to organise itself like the military.
Then…
"… Whoever this is-"
"You!" Shepard snapped. "You'd better
not be who I think you are! Or do I have to go out and take care of whatever identity theft this is now as well!"
"Sir, I don't recognize your-"
"ADAM SOLHEIM!" Shepard roared loud enough to make Bryson flinch. "Give me your name, rank and serial number before I call up Cronos so The Man himself can watch as I go up there and
blow your knees out myself!"
Gravity was wild and the light ran amok in a world of red, but somehow it felt like the world stood still, for a moment.
Only a moment.
"… Name: Solheim Adam; Rank: Sergeant Major, Cerberus Marines, Alpha Squad; Serial Number: CRBGT-0114-9328."
"Better," Shepard said coldly. "Though that begs the question: what the hell are
you doing on Arcturus!? You were to be on standby while preparations for Operation 'Night of Cleansing' were still ongoing!
Report."
"Sir!" the man answered as gunshots resumed over the radio even more viciously than before, if that was possible.
"Operation 'Night of Cleansing' had to be expedited upon top notification that the unsanctioned operation 'Golden Apple' had been prematurely launched by known subversive elements within the organisation. Unfortunately, we did not deploy in time to entirely avert enemy action, nor did we expect the dissenters to escalate from mere theft to assassination and bombing public edifices. I regret to report that at least this part of the mission is FUBARED. Requesting radio silence on your end so that I can focus on my squad."
"Denied! Your failure resulted in a bomb exploding in my face and the near success of the enemy's prime objective! The only way your operation is going anywhere is under better leadership! Anderson! You have command."
""WHAT!?""
"No protests!" Shepard barked to both men as if a 10-year-old co-opting two opposing military forces on the basis of 'because I say so' was not the most absurd thing that could possibly happen. "Lieutenant Commander David Edward Anderson will be assuming command of the engagement effective immediately!"
"Sir-"
"Adam Solheim! I am not here to treat, I am here to
distrain! You have your orders, soldier, or I can make good on my earlier threat! Five seconds to comply."
5.
4.
3 –
"Acknowledged," the man – Adam Solheim – tersely sent over the line.
"Sending IFF and synching frequencies now."
"…Receiving IFF and synching frequencies," Anderson echoed a second later, tone stiff and flat and far too lacking in perceivable shock to be genuine.
"Requesting radio silence on your end, Operative Odin, so me and mine can focus on winning this engagement."
"Granted! Good luck, Commander." The voice connection cut off just a moment before Nicholas broke into wheezing coughs that nevertheless didn't prevent him from fumbling with a small port on his omnitool. "Cough – Shit – cough! Ugh! God, I try so hard to see the best in people, but Cerberus makes it so damn hard! They always ruin everything! Well I've had it with them! If karma won't hit them, I will! Oh Nikola, you're lucky to not have lived to see all this you bastard!"
Somehow setting aside the question of who Nikola was, Bryson made to approach but was brought to a halt by the sideways lurch his stomach made and the nauseating way in which colours shimmered at the edges of his vision. The same thing happened to Karin as well.
The same could not, however, be said of Captain Steven Hackett. "So," the man grimly spoke as he slowly walked around Bryson for what qualified as a clear view of the boy in the red haze that was now their world. The boy who'd just barely managed to suppress his convulsions to meet the man's eyes upfront. "Should I still call you Shepard, or is it Operative Odin now?"
"I made that up."
Bryson gaped.
"Excuse me!?" Hackett balked, speaking as much for him as for everyone listening in. "You just ordered around the leader of the armed forces of a terrorist organisation on the strength of your codename alone, and your only explanation is
you made that up!?"
"I suppose that if things had been different it would not have been
impossible that I would have been recruited by Cerberus and eventually risen through the ranks enough to assume a postings of such high profile, in which case I well might have assumed the codename Odin and-"
"Don't try to distract me! Are you saying you bluffed your way through that entire conversation!? How do you expect me to believe that could ever happen?"
"The same way a poor little orphaned boy recently believed he could experience a normal holiday for New Year's! Instead of asking for something more realistic for Christmas. Like a dragon. Or galactic peace." The boy finally connected whatever it was to his omnitool. "The same way people used to stare at goats thinking they could set them on fire if they did it long enough. The same way a comic book brand managed to persuade millions of people that will is the strongest emotion even though will is not an emotion at all! Hope, fear, anger, love are emotions, and the amount and combination of them that you put behind the pursuit of a goal is what translates into
drive."
"Enemy cohesion wavering!"
"Correction! They're going nuts!"
The gunfight outside suddenly grew frantic and there were snatches of nearly panicked expletives from whatever NCO was leading the enemy forces. It was blatant even over the low-volume background feed that Nicholas had relegated the outside surveillance to.
The world's colors shook as the boy started jabbing violently at his holoscreens and code seemed to fly over all five of them, downloaded into his wrist device straight from his mind. "The idea, the goal appears in the mind, but then you have to
care about it or whatever else lets you push up and on. Like when that poor excuse of a scientist tried to vivisect me because he
desired the mother of all breakthroughs. Like when the Batarians showed up on Pragia so the kids defaulted to doing what worked best for them in their short lives – doing as I said – because they were
afraid. Like Anderson is loyal, proud and
believes in the Systems Alliance so much that he pushes to excel in his military service even though it's ruined his marriage beyond repair." The gunfire on the low-volume feed from outside suddenly stalled for an instant. "And then there's me and what I'm doing right now, which is running exclusively on
spite. Pure, seething, gangrenous
spite, because I just got
bombed in the face and lost two and some limbs to the power-hungry self-delusion of Walton. Fucking. Simmons
. and I WILL SEE HIM DISGRACED!"
Before Bryson could work his way through even half of Nicholas' rambling diatribe, Hackett gaped and sputtered. "Wh- Walton Simmons! What does the leader of the Terra Firma party have to do with this!?"
Days like this Bryson wondered if God existed but perhaps shut himself in Heaven because he was afraid to see what his creation turned into. But wait! That name! "Walton Simmons?" Bryson breathed. Did Shepard just imply-? "Leader of the Terra Firma party and member of the Systems Alliance Security Council? That Walton Simmons?"
"Who else could I be talking about?"
"But that man's a patriot!" Hackett protested. "I met him at a social event, and he even has an adorable daughter named Inez whom he dotes on all the time! That man could never be a terrorist!"
"Which matters not at all because Cerberus is technically
not a terrorist organization-"
"Shepard!" David Anderson suddenly cut into their conversation even as he kept shooting, confirming that he was listening in through a secondary feed despite Nicholas having left the combat frequency earlier
. "Enough with the tangents! If you know what the hell is happening here, just tell us already!"
"Pearl Harbor, Anderson!"
"What does naval strategy have to do with anything!?"
"Not the warfare aspect, the politics!"
There was a stilted silence on the other end of the line before Anderson replied.
"President Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbour was going to be bombed but let it happen in order to galvanise the US into dropping its non-interference policy."
"Exactly."
"Hold on just a damned minute!" Hackett snapped. "Are you implying all this right now is an inside job?"
"After Teltin and all the assassinations and the eezo ship core accidents you really-"
"I said enough with the tangents, Shepard!" Anderson cut him off again.
"You're angry and hurt and unfocused and I get it, but if you have enough presence of mind to reject emergency treatment, backtalk and accuse the shoe-in for next Systems Alliance Prime Minister of treason, then you can get ahold of yourself enough to make actual sense! So start making sense!"
Nicholas snarled and made as if to palm his face before stopping short of touching it with his matter-destabilizing ghost limbs. He clenched his see-through hands instead and the rapid code generation on his screens slowed, staggered and then halted entirely.
"Shepard." Gravity briefly reset and the room flared lambent blue as Nicholas lost control of his biotics for an instant.
"I want my explanation!"
"My apologies," the boy told Anderson as he resumed whatever he was doing to… make light go slower. His manner shifted to something flat and stilted in speech. "Spite is not the most coherent catalyst for optimal decision-making or achieving meaningful conversation. Which is why I've been trying to burn it all now on fulfilling contingencies and decisions I made previously, instead of later when I'll have to start making new decisions again. Stand by while I… let me mentally readjust."
The awkwardness of the next few moments was colored only by the mounting stress on Hackett's face as the man tried and failed to establish some connection or other via comms. The Captain put his efforts on hold and shifted his full attention to Nicholas the moment everyone else did, however.
"So. Cerberus." Nicholas began in a tone that made the doctor wonder what emotion he was trying to focus on this time, if the boy really was capable of compartmentalizing them as he claimed. Which he doubted but couldn't entirely dismiss when the code on the screens started to write itself again, if not quite as quickly as before. "As the name suggests, the organization is actually a fusion of three different entities. These three 'heads' of the 'guard of the underworld' are an independent Systems Alliance Black Ops unit, an underground research group known only as the Human Project, and a loose coalition of pro-human political groups united under the banner of what is publicly known as the Homefront Coalition. Cerberus is
not a mere terrorist organization. It's a private army united in its goal to protect mankind and advance human interest."
"That's a different tune from everything else you said about them so far, Shepard, and I'm not seeing Pearl Harbor!"
"That's because Cerberus is united behind a single goal,
not the best way to achieve it! Political tensions started to arise within the group almost since its founding. Several radical cells, especially those reporting to Walton Simmons, believe the Systems Alliance are selling out to the Citadel Council, endangering the future of mankind and forfeiting its rightful place as the dominant species in the galaxy. It's why Simmons made sure General Williams was drummed out of the military for choosing lives over pride during the First Contact War, and why Ivor Johnstagg tried to assassinate the Volus ambassador on the Citadel last year. It wasn't schizophrenia no matter what anyone says, that was a grudge job by Simmons' faction and just the latest instance of the Illusive Man's authority being questioned."
"Are you telling me I'm fighting Cerberus alongside
Cerberus and you just got blown up because of a grudge match between two manifest destiny nutjobs?"
"No! This escalation of conflict is happening because Walton Simmons intends to push Cerberus into an open conflict with the Systems Alliance."
"You mean Cerberus doesn't want conflict with the alliance?" Hackett broke into the conversation. "Or what did you call him, The Illusive man?"
"No. This may change in the future once the stuff The Illusive Man got exposed to on Palaven finishes subverting his mind, but right now he's well-intentioned."
"What does that even..." Silence over the line, then…
"Operation 'Golden Apple.'"
"Operation 'Golden Apple' was to be the first of several moves to bring Cerberus into the public consciousness and provoke open conflict in the hopes of riding the discontent from the First Contact War and achieve a full Coup d'Etat. But in the tradition of all opening moves, it would have been small-scale. It would have been theft, not bombing of public edifices and shootings in the Thousand Stories streets! And it wasn't supposed to happen until at least two months from now."
Where was Nicholas even
getting all this information?
"So if this so-called 'Illusive Man' decided to escalate to this extent, it's all but guaranteed that Golden Apple set off prematurely and with objectives vastly different than mere theft."
"There is nothing 'mere' about stealing
antimatter, especially from the one cruiser that happens to not only be the flagship of mankind's foremost colonization pioneers, but also a military vessel class leader in its own right, so I
fervently hope you're wrong Anderson. But I suppose we're about to find out one way or another."
The pages upon pages of code suddenly halted, compiled and shut down, only to come together as Shepard's custom hyper-secure videocomm program which launched several new holoscreens. They were all blank video feeds that blurred and flickered due to either problematic transmission or the unnatural gravitic and electromagnetic interference, or both.
The first cleared within moments to show an aerial view of the SSV Geneva's docking berth, blurred not with EM glitches but with
smoke.
Doctor Garett Bryson gasped in horror.
It was in ruins.
Small fires all over the place, warped metal ruins covered in slag and scattered bodies of alliance soldiers, civilians and armed aggressors alike. And throughout the chaos, Cerberus fought Cerberus just as much as they shot at the dock and ship's own personnel, or what was left of it still alive.
For Captain Steven Hackett, that was the last straw. "What the bloody hell!?" The man gasped. "That's my ship! The terrorist cell is-Cerberus is-STOP BLOWING HOLES IN MY SHIP!"
Unfortunately, the other screens then connected to whatever the boy had tapped into in
spite of what Bryson now realized had been Hackett's failed attempts to hail his ship just a few minutes earlier.
Three more different hovercam feeds joined the first, showing scenes of ship-board fires, warped and punctured walls, mass accelerator rounds flying up and down chrome hallways, and a last-ditch defense action at the door to the SSV Geneva's engineering bay.
"Anderson," Bryson heard Nicholas say as the Geneva's skeleton crew on screen suddenly became one person smaller. "We have a problem."
.
