01.21.01 - Becky's First Leadership Mission
A Blood Pack dropship is silently roaring through the void of space, a paradox made real by the vacuum swallowing every sound. Its engines emit a glimmering blue thruster flame, scorching away rock and stone where its exhaust strikes, yet no noise accompanies this destruction. From the belly of this mechanical beast, Krogans alongside Rebecca leap into the abyss, floating the half-mile distance to their target—an Eezo extraction site nestled on an isolated asteroid.
This asteroid, a mere fifteen miles on each side, tumbles aimlessly through space. According to briefings that were more guesswork than fact, this floating rock was once part of a planet that had ventured too close to a sun, only to witness its fiery supernova a million years ago. Its surface is annoyingly flat, an expansive barren of muted grays under the starlight. Even from this distance, the site's purpose is unmistakable. Rebecca can see the makeshift structure of metal and polymer, a four-story edifice rising awkwardly from the asteroid's surface. It's flanked by a formation of guards, their figures small but discernible, clustered outside and hunkered behind makeshift barricades of rock and metal that reach chest high. The scene is a stark outpost of civilization slapped onto an uncaring slab of cosmic debris, standing defiant against the emptiness of space.
As the dropship continues its silent assault, the surrounding cosmos sprawls endlessly in all directions, stars twinkling like distant beacons guiding the way through the dark. The void feels both claustrophobic and infinitely vast, a frontier not just of space, but of survival and conflict.
"Vorcha are gonna be torn up by that." Krat points a finger as his radio crackles with connection to the internal comms of the Krogan and human team. The line of his pointing leads to a machine gun emplacement with a glimmering hardlight shield in front of it, letting the barrel and sights slip out, but otherwise nothing else. "So are we."
Beside it are another eight Batarians, all wearing various stripes of armour from merc bands no one's ever heard of because the Batarian government made them yesterday to have disposable assets for whatever purposes they wanted. Rifles in hand that glimmer a cherenkov blue, the colour of mass accelerators ready for siege. They hug cover, likely seeing the group as they are seen.
"Alright, well I either did this stupidest fucking thing in existence, or the smartest." Rebecca said to Krat. Over her comms, she clicked a button and, in the radio, barked, "Send in Twitchy."
A bright red streak flew over head. A hideously rusted pile of junk and bolts that had been patched together over a week from junkyard parts twirled and spun in the void. The engines, de-synchronized and glowing different shades of purple, would at times randomly cut out. The barest glimmer of a barrier showed as occasionally it hit a rock or dust. The mass accelerator on the bottom glowed, but swung dangerously the dying pneumatics making large hissing whines and groans as it aimed. Behind the flying salvage piece, was a small trail of rust and screws and other detritus that were seeming to peel off the ship.
The thing shouldn't have been capable of being controlled in flight. The very idea of it flew in the face of aeronautics, astronomy, physics, and plain common sense, but the vorcha had never practiced much science. Twitchy—belovedly dubbed for reasons that soon became apparent—seemed either oblivious or indifferent to his vessel's glaring dangers. As he juggled dozens of holo controls, the ship's path was a series of jerky arcs and trails, yet miraculously, it flew straight.
The machine gun opened fire immediately on the ship, sending an actinic spray of glimmering blue slugs along its course. The tracers followed the complicated maneuveours but seemed to always be a step behind the wild and utterly insane twists and turns. Rebecca couldn't help but giggle as she watched the scene unfold. She pictured the Batarians' frustration, realizing they were stuck firing their high-tech guns at what was essentially a flying junk heap with an oversized cannon. Meanwhile, swarms of jetpack-equipped Vorcha charged towards the front, adding to the chaos.
It's rather like a tide of flesh, thrusters rumbling silently as the Vorcha rush forwards at wholly unsafe speeds, some of them forgetting to decelerate and missing the Batarians, stumbling off and slamming into the building with painful crunches. Others are cut down by actually disciplined rifle fire by Batarians with real training.
Rebecca shakes Vrat, "It's working. It's working." She says, as she pulls up the omnitool. Giggling silently. A heads up display shows her the Vorcha who are reading dead. Many at the feet or on the building. She flicked a timer on the dead vorcha front line, watching as small bits of shrapnel exploded into the Batarians. Craters showing as parts of the building, and the enemy were obliterated by over-loaded mass effect thrusters.
Glowing, superheated orange omni-claws sprout from the savage combatants. Meanwhile, Twitchy cackles silently into the void. His unwieldy craft sputters and chokes, haphazardly firing thirty-millimeter slugs. The cannon wreaks havoc on the enemy's cover and randomly destroys equipment—though it scarcely manages to hit any actual combatants. He's trying.
"Probably should get going, the insides gonna be a mess." Krat grumbles, starting to run in wide strides, bouncing with the zero gee interestingly. The rest of the Krogans follow with the same stride.
"The insides is my favorite part!" Her eyes are glimmering as she breaks into a zero gee sprint. Instead of just walking she crouches, firing herself forward with as much strength as possible, like a bullet. She doesn't bother with gravitation, instead aiming herself at an angle so she can fire off another large pulse of her own energy, muscles straining as the asteroid rushes beneath her. Running seemed pointless when flight was on the table. Eventually she reached the side of the building, impacting it and holding on with cybernetic limbs and a clang, something with just enough give to let her not have to aim and focus solely on strength.
She looked behind and saw the krogans in the distance behind her. "Remember, most kills gets a bonus." Then flings herself towards the front line screaming past the vorcha. A surprised Batarian is slammed by a now nearly seven foot tall missile that consists of blades and manic bloodlust, tackled to the ground and pushed into a struggle. A cybernetic whirr leads to his arm coming off and a sudden vacuum ripping out blood that freezes and crystallizes oddly in the black.
Her assault rifle opens fire as combat instincts kick in. She falls to one knee and achieves a stable firing position while spewing sustained bursts that ignite kinetic barriers. The Batarians, fall back, hounded by Vorcha to the doorway.
Expensive comm relays were too delicate to trust to a vorcha, but tremendously useful for more intelligent combatants. They feed targeting telemetry to a distant rock, about fifty metres tall nearly four miles away. Anti-material rifle rounds punches down barriers and sends a spray of instant-freeze brain and bone out into the void. Vorcha fall upon more, and walls of munitions arrive from Krogans to kill the last of the front line, everyone arguing loudly as too whose kill that was.
As Rebecca and her team breach the entryway of the Eezo extraction facility, the atmosphere shifts palpably. They leave behind the vast emptiness of space for the claustrophobic confines of the facility. The corridors are narrow and oppressive, lined with cold, utilitarian metal that seems to absorb both light and sound. Pipes and conduits snake along the ceiling, pulsing with the lifeblood of the facility—power and Eezo-laden fluids. The air is thick with the acrid scent of lubricants, metallic tang of blood, and the faint, sharp scent of ionized particles left hanging after each shot fired.
The layout is a labyrinth designed more for function than ease of navigation. Sharp corners lead to long, straight stretches that offer little cover, making each step forward a calculated risk. Overhead lights flicker sporadically, casting erratic shadows that distort the perception of depth, adding an eerie, disorienting quality to the already tense advance. Every few meters, the walls are punctuated with heavy blast doors, sealed shut or left gaping open, leading to offshoots that could either be shortcuts or deadly detours.
Rebecca falls upon another Batarian, finding him strong enough to rip her gun out of her hands with a grimace of effort, but not sufficiently strong to stop her from gripping tightly at his hands and tearing off his arms. A steady pulse of blood pools beneath him while medigel is desperately injected to stop the traumatic bleed.
The building is well designed, and the Batarians are able fighters, locking down corridors with heavy fire and trying to control movement with locked doors, but when faced with cybernetic and Krogan strength, they can't. Rebecca is at the lead, grinning widely as the noise of screaming, gunshots and violence finally returns in a building with atmosphere. Vorcha are slaughtered at a great rate by automatics and tight quarters, but they're meant to be expendable, and their detonating engine packs when life signs stop mean they still can break positions given death.
Pulling a pistol, she puts a half-dozen rounds from the Striker into his neck, near-detaching the head before grabbing and throwing the thing at the first fighter to turn a corner. The detached skull cracks the next fighter in the helmet and stumbles him into the column that was following behind, giving both Krat, who has been directing the lower level battle, and her time to pull rifles up and flick to automatic, filling the hallway with ferrous slugs and scarlet arcs that paint in their own, random patterns of death.
"Be careful, Eezo's unstable!" Krat roars into the comms, slamming a Batarian into a wall and dispensing a shotgun blast from a second weapon into his gut, nearly bisecting him with the horrible damage done to his spine and connective tissue, offal and bone spilling out in a tide as the room everyone's here for reveals itself.
Vorcha go in first, tripping the wire and letting autocannon turrets bark their thunk, thunk, thunk of heavy calibre shells, tearing them to grizzly explosive chunks as Krat and Rebecca take cover around the entrace, a ten foot tall, ten foot wide cargo door into a storage centre for the mine. Other Krogan throw suppressive fire, but mostly take cover themselves as VI's do not care for suppression.
"What's the plan!?" Krat asks, staring at Rebecca while the turrets start digging in through the walls, APHE rounds threatening to make cover a thing of the past with every passing, terrifying second of heart-pounding adrenaline and blood. As she thinks, a smooth, Turian voice gets on comms, "Stop worrying so much and just give me....one....single....second."
Three shots pass through walls, the heavy slugs he's loaded into the sniper after tinkering with it for hours making the reinforced graphene more or less butter as the turrets fritz and sizzle, a thirty grain round ripping through their internals at hypersonic velocity and tearing out a spray of electronics, oil and hydraulic fluid.
"See, trust your sniper ladies and gentlemen." Camlos sounds very cocky and self-assured right now as the remaining Batarians are rushed by Krogans hungry for blood, shotguns, rifles and hands making mincemeat of them, limbs and heads flying free while a particularly angry Krogan, having been shot within an inch of his quad, sees fit to bite out a Batarian's eyes before killing them.
Leaving naught but the cherenkov blue magnetized containers of Eezo, creeks of blood flowing through the halls, and maybe a dozen Vorcha from the fifty Rebecca brought here.
"Oh, well if no-one has any objections, I'll just be taking these," Rebecca said to the room of corpses, "Hmm? No? You're so shy! Thank you."
She holds out her knife and slices off the lead Batarian's hand, identifying his markings from a photo. He screams, apparently only playing dead, and she returns the scream with a sharp stomp of the boot exploding the gushing melon that was once his skull. The hand is placed on a scanner, which pings open, and the crates begin to levitate on small thrusters, released from their clamps for transfer.
"Alright Krat," She yells as she begins to move the first container, "Get the boys, and lets get this shit out of here." Rebecca rarely gave the Krogan direct orders, instead just letting Krat handle it. None of them had gotten more spicy than her second could handle. At least not yet. The comms sparked at the signal of the Dropships coming down. The overwhelmed Batarians having lost any anti-air capabilities, and most of them now dead, or fleeing from the vorcha swarm.
Under her gaze, and a tight paranoia watching the horizon, she oversaw the first crate getting placed into a dropship, and double, then triple checked the pilot was precisely who they were supposed to be. As the crates were loaded, she examined the crates for trackers, extra loads, possible explosives. She made sure that she helped push each one closer to the door, to see if any of them were lighter than the others.
The long stretch of quiet as combat ends, but the mission continues. A constant repetitive hiss of oxygenation being the only background noise until, finally, after shipping the Krogan, the Vorcha, every crate, and whatever loot could be gathered, Rebecca and Krat got into the dropship themselves, and rode the fusion fire into the void-sky, coming alongside a freighter with civilian ID, but Blood Pack markings and docking inside a flight bay.
This asteroid, a mere fifteen miles on each side, tumbles aimlessly through space. According to briefings that were more guesswork than fact, this floating rock was once part of a planet that had ventured too close to a sun, only to witness its fiery supernova a million years ago. Its surface is annoyingly flat, an expansive barren of muted grays under the starlight. Even from this distance, the site's purpose is unmistakable. Rebecca can see the makeshift structure of metal and polymer, a four-story edifice rising awkwardly from the asteroid's surface. It's flanked by a formation of guards, their figures small but discernible, clustered outside and hunkered behind makeshift barricades of rock and metal that reach chest high. The scene is a stark outpost of civilization slapped onto an uncaring slab of cosmic debris, standing defiant against the emptiness of space.
As the dropship continues its silent assault, the surrounding cosmos sprawls endlessly in all directions, stars twinkling like distant beacons guiding the way through the dark. The void feels both claustrophobic and infinitely vast, a frontier not just of space, but of survival and conflict.
"Vorcha are gonna be torn up by that." Krat points a finger as his radio crackles with connection to the internal comms of the Krogan and human team. The line of his pointing leads to a machine gun emplacement with a glimmering hardlight shield in front of it, letting the barrel and sights slip out, but otherwise nothing else. "So are we."
Beside it are another eight Batarians, all wearing various stripes of armour from merc bands no one's ever heard of because the Batarian government made them yesterday to have disposable assets for whatever purposes they wanted. Rifles in hand that glimmer a cherenkov blue, the colour of mass accelerators ready for siege. They hug cover, likely seeing the group as they are seen.
"Alright, well I either did this stupidest fucking thing in existence, or the smartest." Rebecca said to Krat. Over her comms, she clicked a button and, in the radio, barked, "Send in Twitchy."
A bright red streak flew over head. A hideously rusted pile of junk and bolts that had been patched together over a week from junkyard parts twirled and spun in the void. The engines, de-synchronized and glowing different shades of purple, would at times randomly cut out. The barest glimmer of a barrier showed as occasionally it hit a rock or dust. The mass accelerator on the bottom glowed, but swung dangerously the dying pneumatics making large hissing whines and groans as it aimed. Behind the flying salvage piece, was a small trail of rust and screws and other detritus that were seeming to peel off the ship.
The thing shouldn't have been capable of being controlled in flight. The very idea of it flew in the face of aeronautics, astronomy, physics, and plain common sense, but the vorcha had never practiced much science. Twitchy—belovedly dubbed for reasons that soon became apparent—seemed either oblivious or indifferent to his vessel's glaring dangers. As he juggled dozens of holo controls, the ship's path was a series of jerky arcs and trails, yet miraculously, it flew straight.
The machine gun opened fire immediately on the ship, sending an actinic spray of glimmering blue slugs along its course. The tracers followed the complicated maneuveours but seemed to always be a step behind the wild and utterly insane twists and turns. Rebecca couldn't help but giggle as she watched the scene unfold. She pictured the Batarians' frustration, realizing they were stuck firing their high-tech guns at what was essentially a flying junk heap with an oversized cannon. Meanwhile, swarms of jetpack-equipped Vorcha charged towards the front, adding to the chaos.
It's rather like a tide of flesh, thrusters rumbling silently as the Vorcha rush forwards at wholly unsafe speeds, some of them forgetting to decelerate and missing the Batarians, stumbling off and slamming into the building with painful crunches. Others are cut down by actually disciplined rifle fire by Batarians with real training.
Rebecca shakes Vrat, "It's working. It's working." She says, as she pulls up the omnitool. Giggling silently. A heads up display shows her the Vorcha who are reading dead. Many at the feet or on the building. She flicked a timer on the dead vorcha front line, watching as small bits of shrapnel exploded into the Batarians. Craters showing as parts of the building, and the enemy were obliterated by over-loaded mass effect thrusters.
Glowing, superheated orange omni-claws sprout from the savage combatants. Meanwhile, Twitchy cackles silently into the void. His unwieldy craft sputters and chokes, haphazardly firing thirty-millimeter slugs. The cannon wreaks havoc on the enemy's cover and randomly destroys equipment—though it scarcely manages to hit any actual combatants. He's trying.
"Probably should get going, the insides gonna be a mess." Krat grumbles, starting to run in wide strides, bouncing with the zero gee interestingly. The rest of the Krogans follow with the same stride.
"The insides is my favorite part!" Her eyes are glimmering as she breaks into a zero gee sprint. Instead of just walking she crouches, firing herself forward with as much strength as possible, like a bullet. She doesn't bother with gravitation, instead aiming herself at an angle so she can fire off another large pulse of her own energy, muscles straining as the asteroid rushes beneath her. Running seemed pointless when flight was on the table. Eventually she reached the side of the building, impacting it and holding on with cybernetic limbs and a clang, something with just enough give to let her not have to aim and focus solely on strength.
She looked behind and saw the krogans in the distance behind her. "Remember, most kills gets a bonus." Then flings herself towards the front line screaming past the vorcha. A surprised Batarian is slammed by a now nearly seven foot tall missile that consists of blades and manic bloodlust, tackled to the ground and pushed into a struggle. A cybernetic whirr leads to his arm coming off and a sudden vacuum ripping out blood that freezes and crystallizes oddly in the black.
Her assault rifle opens fire as combat instincts kick in. She falls to one knee and achieves a stable firing position while spewing sustained bursts that ignite kinetic barriers. The Batarians, fall back, hounded by Vorcha to the doorway.
Expensive comm relays were too delicate to trust to a vorcha, but tremendously useful for more intelligent combatants. They feed targeting telemetry to a distant rock, about fifty metres tall nearly four miles away. Anti-material rifle rounds punches down barriers and sends a spray of instant-freeze brain and bone out into the void. Vorcha fall upon more, and walls of munitions arrive from Krogans to kill the last of the front line, everyone arguing loudly as too whose kill that was.
As Rebecca and her team breach the entryway of the Eezo extraction facility, the atmosphere shifts palpably. They leave behind the vast emptiness of space for the claustrophobic confines of the facility. The corridors are narrow and oppressive, lined with cold, utilitarian metal that seems to absorb both light and sound. Pipes and conduits snake along the ceiling, pulsing with the lifeblood of the facility—power and Eezo-laden fluids. The air is thick with the acrid scent of lubricants, metallic tang of blood, and the faint, sharp scent of ionized particles left hanging after each shot fired.
The layout is a labyrinth designed more for function than ease of navigation. Sharp corners lead to long, straight stretches that offer little cover, making each step forward a calculated risk. Overhead lights flicker sporadically, casting erratic shadows that distort the perception of depth, adding an eerie, disorienting quality to the already tense advance. Every few meters, the walls are punctuated with heavy blast doors, sealed shut or left gaping open, leading to offshoots that could either be shortcuts or deadly detours.
Rebecca falls upon another Batarian, finding him strong enough to rip her gun out of her hands with a grimace of effort, but not sufficiently strong to stop her from gripping tightly at his hands and tearing off his arms. A steady pulse of blood pools beneath him while medigel is desperately injected to stop the traumatic bleed.
The building is well designed, and the Batarians are able fighters, locking down corridors with heavy fire and trying to control movement with locked doors, but when faced with cybernetic and Krogan strength, they can't. Rebecca is at the lead, grinning widely as the noise of screaming, gunshots and violence finally returns in a building with atmosphere. Vorcha are slaughtered at a great rate by automatics and tight quarters, but they're meant to be expendable, and their detonating engine packs when life signs stop mean they still can break positions given death.
Pulling a pistol, she puts a half-dozen rounds from the Striker into his neck, near-detaching the head before grabbing and throwing the thing at the first fighter to turn a corner. The detached skull cracks the next fighter in the helmet and stumbles him into the column that was following behind, giving both Krat, who has been directing the lower level battle, and her time to pull rifles up and flick to automatic, filling the hallway with ferrous slugs and scarlet arcs that paint in their own, random patterns of death.
"Be careful, Eezo's unstable!" Krat roars into the comms, slamming a Batarian into a wall and dispensing a shotgun blast from a second weapon into his gut, nearly bisecting him with the horrible damage done to his spine and connective tissue, offal and bone spilling out in a tide as the room everyone's here for reveals itself.
Vorcha go in first, tripping the wire and letting autocannon turrets bark their thunk, thunk, thunk of heavy calibre shells, tearing them to grizzly explosive chunks as Krat and Rebecca take cover around the entrace, a ten foot tall, ten foot wide cargo door into a storage centre for the mine. Other Krogan throw suppressive fire, but mostly take cover themselves as VI's do not care for suppression.
"What's the plan!?" Krat asks, staring at Rebecca while the turrets start digging in through the walls, APHE rounds threatening to make cover a thing of the past with every passing, terrifying second of heart-pounding adrenaline and blood. As she thinks, a smooth, Turian voice gets on comms, "Stop worrying so much and just give me....one....single....second."
Three shots pass through walls, the heavy slugs he's loaded into the sniper after tinkering with it for hours making the reinforced graphene more or less butter as the turrets fritz and sizzle, a thirty grain round ripping through their internals at hypersonic velocity and tearing out a spray of electronics, oil and hydraulic fluid.
"See, trust your sniper ladies and gentlemen." Camlos sounds very cocky and self-assured right now as the remaining Batarians are rushed by Krogans hungry for blood, shotguns, rifles and hands making mincemeat of them, limbs and heads flying free while a particularly angry Krogan, having been shot within an inch of his quad, sees fit to bite out a Batarian's eyes before killing them.
Leaving naught but the cherenkov blue magnetized containers of Eezo, creeks of blood flowing through the halls, and maybe a dozen Vorcha from the fifty Rebecca brought here.
"Oh, well if no-one has any objections, I'll just be taking these," Rebecca said to the room of corpses, "Hmm? No? You're so shy! Thank you."
She holds out her knife and slices off the lead Batarian's hand, identifying his markings from a photo. He screams, apparently only playing dead, and she returns the scream with a sharp stomp of the boot exploding the gushing melon that was once his skull. The hand is placed on a scanner, which pings open, and the crates begin to levitate on small thrusters, released from their clamps for transfer.
"Alright Krat," She yells as she begins to move the first container, "Get the boys, and lets get this shit out of here." Rebecca rarely gave the Krogan direct orders, instead just letting Krat handle it. None of them had gotten more spicy than her second could handle. At least not yet. The comms sparked at the signal of the Dropships coming down. The overwhelmed Batarians having lost any anti-air capabilities, and most of them now dead, or fleeing from the vorcha swarm.
Under her gaze, and a tight paranoia watching the horizon, she oversaw the first crate getting placed into a dropship, and double, then triple checked the pilot was precisely who they were supposed to be. As the crates were loaded, she examined the crates for trackers, extra loads, possible explosives. She made sure that she helped push each one closer to the door, to see if any of them were lighter than the others.
The long stretch of quiet as combat ends, but the mission continues. A constant repetitive hiss of oxygenation being the only background noise until, finally, after shipping the Krogan, the Vorcha, every crate, and whatever loot could be gathered, Rebecca and Krat got into the dropship themselves, and rode the fusion fire into the void-sky, coming alongside a freighter with civilian ID, but Blood Pack markings and docking inside a flight bay.
