Chapter 89. The Intangible is Indomitable
3. April 2417 AD, Mirage of Halegeuse, Hangar
"Alright, this isn't what I was expecting when you said stealth shuttle," Haugen observed while standing in front of the roughly forty-meter long vessel, dark-blue vessel. Despite the fact that this was apparently a stealth craft, the flat, triangular-shaped craft seemed rather conspicuous to him. "Figured it'd be more nimble," he added.
"Trust me. You won't find anything nimbler in the entire fleet," the salarian pilot replied before patting the exterior of the dropship. From what he'd been told, this was apparently an advanced STG transport equipped with the best stealth technology the Union was going to produce in the next fifty years. And while it made perfect sense that a craft like this would belong to STG of all organizations, he still had a hard time linking the huge dropship to the words 'stealth' and 'undetectable'. You could stack five Kodiaks in a line and the line still wouldn't go from tail to tip of the salarian dropship. The closest human transport ship he could think off to compare it to was the Fringe-War-Era Condor, a large air lifter that had been built to carry squads of Paladins, infantry fighting vehicles or an entire company worth of infantry.
"They told you we're just dropping with five people, right?"
"They did. But don't let the size fool you, most of its space for tech and weapons. Five people are already going to be a tight fit. Not counting the crew, the maximum capacity on this is thing is one geared-up infiltration team," the pilot said. "That's ten operatives," he elaborated quickly, before Haugen could ask. "Even then it won't be a pleasant ride. Whoever designed these ships decided that the best place to put the heat sinks is in between the crew and the pilots. And since we'll be flying with the highest level of countermeasures, those will get heated up pretty quickly," he placed and arm against the ship and leaned into it. "Oh and please. Mind the ramp when you leave. It takes a little getting used to, to step on something you can't see but if you just go in a straight line, it can't technically go wrong."
He looked at the ship again.
"Wait. You got full optical camo?"
"Obviously," the salarian replied as if it was the most common thing in the world. "What else did you think I meant when I said completely undetectable?"
"That it worked like any other normal stealth ships. You're fine as long as no one looks at you but when the actually spot you, there's nothing you can do," Haugen admitted. That was how all the other stealth vessels he knew about functioned. They were shielded against all forms of detection, except visual one, because the effectiveness of optical camo tech scaled poorly the bigger and faster something got.
"Two hundred years ago, maybe," the salarian laughed with a shrug. "When I said undetectable, I meant undetectable. If I fire up the cloak, you won't know that it's there unless I land on your foot."
"Damn," he muttered.
"Impressive, I know," the pilot replied before reaching for something in the bag he was carrying. It was a small, equally dark-blue tube that appeared to be made of the same material as the transport ship. He handed it to Haugen.
"What's this?"
"It's a signaler for when you need us to come and pick you up before the actual rendezvous time. Just hit the button on the top and enter our callsign and we'll be right there. STG-MV One-O-Three," the pilot explained while Haugen pushed the small device into one of the sealed pockets of his hardsuits combat rigging and noted down the code, just in case. "But remember that we'll be venting our heatsinks in the asteroid belt until thirty minutes prior to your scheduled pick-up. So we might take a couple minutes more than planned if you call us early. Also, I'd appreciate a genuine heads-up if I'm flying into a combat-zone. We do have enough weapons onboard to make a corvette blush, but that doesn't mean that we're as tough as one. A couple of good hits and none of us are flying anywhere anymore."
Haugen nodded his understanding and pulled on his helmet. When his HUD was done assembling itself, he gave the salarian another nod, indicating that he was now ready to depart. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that," he waved his hand towards the four other people standing by the ship, his team and Doctor T'Soni.
They boarded the craft, which really wasn't as spacious as it appeared from the outside, and then began the annoying process of waiting to be dropped off. Personally, he had never liked being on spaceships. It's why he'd joined the army, not the marines. But as things were, there wasn't another way to get onto Jasintho. So he'd deal with it. When his team was settled in, he let the pilot know. They felt an ever so slight lift-off, far less than on any human shuttle, and a hologram indicating their progress appeared in between the two rows of seats. Right now it depicted three things, the Mirage, the shuttle they were in and an increasingly larger moon in orbit around a gas giant; Jasintho. Compared to most other batarian colonies, the earth-like planet was a surprisingly rural and decentralized world focused on two things, mining and farming. Despite its favorable climate, it lacked any major population centers outside of a colonial capital far away from their actual destination. That fact had played a major role in the selection of Jasintho as the sight of their reconnaissance mission. Whereas other spire planets had their spires located within densely populated and heavily guarded areas, Jasintho had several of spires that simply dotted the countryside like lonely powerlines. They were easily accessible and, more importantly, less likely to be heavily guarded.
Whereas other squad leaders might use this little ride to go over the plan again, Haugen didn't feel the need to do so. His team knew their roles and he'd keep an eye on the asari. If they all did their jobs properly, they'd be in and out in three hours without firing a single shot. Just drop in, hike to the spire, take the readings and leave again. He knew better than to jinx them by saying that it sounded simple enough, but it kind of did as long as one ignored the threat of running into a run away elemet of the planetary garrison or some other unforeseen consequence like the one Mav had worried about prior to their drop. He threw a look at Doctor T'Soni and the inactive camo tarp wrapped around her shoulders. He rested his case, he could neither confirm nor deny what Mav had said about her past workings with Reaper tech. And while he understood that it didn't work like this, T'Soni didn't exactly radiate treason, if that made any sense. So as long as she did what he told her, the ASOC captain had a feeling they'd be fine.
And if he was wrong, well, as one quick glance at Mav confirmed, there'd be eyes on her for the entire op.
"Salarian's sure don't like leg space, do they?" one of his men, Miller, complained while shifting in his seat. "I'd take a Kodiak over this any day," he added before moving his legs in a way that audibly annoyed the soldier seated opposite to him, Hofmann.
"You'd rather ride into a batarian colony on Kodiak than a state-of-the-art salarian stealth ship?" Hofmann repeated while Haugen monitored their progress on the hologram. They were moving fast. Very fast.
"Affirmative."
"Seriously?"
"Yep."
"Sometimes you really are a fucking idiot, Miller, you know that, right? Wanna ring the doorbell too while we're at it?"
"Sure. Why not? Let's make a hundred Kodiaks out of it and turn this whole thing into an invasion. I know that'd be my dream scenario for this op," Miller said with a shrug. "God knows we'd have more us for that planet than the batarians anyways."
"And that right there is why you're not in charge," Hofmann replied before looking at Haugen just as the shuttle shook ever so slightly. That probably meant that they were already breaking through the atmosphere of Jasintho. As another glance at the hologram confirmed, that was true. "Promise you never recommend him for a promotion?"
"I didn't plan on recommending any of you until I get out. If I do, you'll run away to lead your own teams and I'll have to train a new Phantom all over again. And on the list of things not happening in my career, that's pretty far up," Haugen shrugged jokingly before wondering why the hologram suddenly got blurry. Before he could ask, a voice from the intercom offered a quick explanation.
"Attention ground team, delivering first scan of your operational zone. Be advised, there have been changes to the mission perimeters," a salarian, who wasn't the pilot from earlier, stated while the hologram reassembled itself to show what appeared to be a small town built around a large, winding pillar situated inside a river valley surrounded by large fields of corn on all sides. "The Spire has identified. As expected, there appears to be a large slave camp surrounding it. Up to now we are not detecting any signs of defense emplacements. However the scale of urbanization in the operation zone is much higher than expected," just as the salarian finished his sentence, various buildings showed up. Whereas the slave camp formed a ring around the spire, there was a second ring around the camp and the spire. It consisted of large factory halls, worker barracks and streets overlooked by thin needle-like towers.
"This wasn't part of the recon package," Haugen said as his eyes narrowed. "Are you sure this is the right place?"
"Yes. The coordinates are an exact match. This is the objective," the salarian pilot injected. "We can enter a holding pattern if you wish to consult with your superiors, but we don't recommend it. The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that someone's going to notice us. Decide quickly."
He looked at the asari.
"How close do you need to be to the spire to get what you need?"
"The closer, the better," she replied.
"Not the answer I was hoping for," he said honestly, prompting T'Soni to sigh.
"Since we are searching for signals believed to be emitted all the way to dark-space, I could get what we need as soon as we're on the ground," she shifted in her seat. "But if we really want to find a way to stop these signals, then we'll need to understand how these spires function and take detailed readings of their surroundings. To that end," she began.
"We need to bring you to the limit of the safe distance."
"I'm afraid so, yes. A lot of the things I'm looking for might not be noticeable from anywhere but up close."
He looked at the map. Their safe distance was five hundred meters from the spire.
Contrary to their plan, that distance wouldn't put them just outside of the slave camp, but rather in between the town and the camp. If things went south, they'd effectively be trapped between a rock and a hard place. While there was a river they could use to sneak to a quarry by the slave camp, there was no way to tell if that river wasn't being used by the quarry itself and although he could see what appeared to be a mountainous region to the north of the spire that would provide ideal cover, he wasn't ready to bet his team's lives on the fact that T'Soni could climb it up again fast if they had to. Therefore the only really safe approach was through the fields that surrounded their mission area. And since fields tended to move when you went through them, that wasn't ideal either.
"Captain, I understand that this isn't what you planned for, but this might be our best chance to understand the spires. We have yet to identify a more accessible world than Jasintho," the asari added as he considered the map and the pilot repeated his request. "If we abort now, there's no telling if another window is going to open before the Reapers arrive."
He let out a breath.
"I'm aware of that, Doctor." He'd still be able to call it off when they had taken a look at the terrain on the ground. Doing so any earlier would be a waste of this opportunity. T'Soni was right. This might be the best and only shot they'd get. And given that not just humanity's fate depended on the success of their task force, quitting here was hardly an option. He looked at his team and his second in command Hofmann threw him a single nod. Mav and Miller followed swiftly. Then it was settled.
"We're here now. Let's do this."
"Understood. Initiating our final approach to the drop zone. You might want to hold onto something, this one's going to be faster than usual."
Before he could ask why, Haugen started to feel something that was remarkably close to a moderately fast Kodiak dive. Then again, given the much more advanced inertia dampeners, whatever the salarian was doing was likely a lot worse than the worst human pilots could put their ships through. He pressed his shoulders against the back of his seat and waited for the chance to finally get on with this op, because as far as he was concerned, every minute he spent on a batarian planet was one minute too long.
Forty Minutes Later, 2158 CE, Hegemony Fringe Space, Jasintho
They'd been hiking through Jasintho's midday sun for about thirty minutes now and although Liara's armor was climate regulated, she was starting to feel the surprisingly rapid pace that the humans were going at. While it technically wasn't running, she'd been told running movements would render their cloaking ineffective, it was a brisk march across uneven and difficult terrain that most others would've considered running. She considered herself to be in rather good shape for an asari, a side effect of climbing through uncomfortable dig sites and obliging with her mother's requests to always practice her biotics, still, she had to admit one thing. Working with a purely human unit going at a human pace was more straining than she remembered working with the Normandy's crew. So either this team was pushing her harder than Shepard's crew, or she'd grown soft in the last two years.
She wanted to wipe the sweat of her brow, but her helmet and the necessity of keeping her arms under the cloak were stopping her from doing so. She also wanted to drink something, but since the water tanks in her armor would have to last her the whole mission and there was no telling how long that might drag on now that they were adapting to the new situation, she also stopped herself from indulging her thirst. In all honesty, she was rather uncomfortable right now, but as one glance at the black-purplish spire in the distance confirmed, it'd all be worth it soon enough, even if it didn't seem like it right now.
"Hold," the human officer instructed quietly and instantly, Liara froze in place and did what she saw their invisible shapes do on her HUD. Take a knee in the field they were in right now and face into the direction of the tall spire. At first she was expecting this to be another instance of having to dodge a farming vehicle, they'd had to do so twice already, but when she didn't hear any engine sounds, she realized that something else was holding their advances. After the realization, the captain quickly delivered an explanation.
"Alright. Unless I completely messed up our heading, something's really fucking wrong here," he stated, making Liara's heart jump a beat. That didn't sound good. "Hofmann, get me a ranging on the spire, Miller, toss up a drone and take a look at our surroundings, Mav, you're on perimeter. Take a walk and find out if there's anything close to us. Fifty meters," he ordered. When he was done, Liara spoke up.
"I am sorry to interrupt, but what's going on?" she questioned
On her HUD, she could see the ASOC leader turn to her and in the real world, his invisible movements made the crop field he was kneeling in move ever so slightly.
"The city's missing," he replied briskly before moving his hand to his HUD.
"What do you mean?" Liara asked perplexed. How could a city be missing?
"We should be seeing the settlement by now. But it's not here. That's what I mean when I say that something's really fucking wrong here," he turned his invisible head to where one of the soldiers had stood up. "Hofmann, what's the ranging on the spire?"
"Six-Zero-Five. We should definitely be seeing buildings by now," the soldier replied.
"Miller, you see anything on the drone? Signs of camo maybe?"
"Negative. I got the slave camp and the needles. But that's it. No signs of camouflaged buildings and definitely nothing close to what the STG bird showed us."
"Mav?"
"Nothing but crops in our vicinity, Sir."
"Understood. Breaking radio silence now," he informed his team. "Mirage, this is Phantom-Lead. Do you copy?"
For a few seconds, there was no reply. Then a salarian voice spoke up.
"Phantom-Lead, this is Mirage. Why are you breaking radio silence?"
"Mirage, we've run into an anomaly. I need you to run a scan of my position."
"You know we can't do that. Mission protocols require the Mirage to stay inactive until the destruction of the spire."
Unbeknownst to the salarian speaker, Captain Haugen shook his head.
"I'm well aware of that, but if you hear me out, I'm sure you'll catch on," he sighed. "You were briefed on the shift in our operational perimeters?"
"Affirmative. You identified more structures than initially believed. How does this relate to the requested scan and breach of protocol?"
"They're not here, Mirage. I'm seeing the slave camp and the spire but there's no sign of the city we saw. So either your bird screwed up big time or we've got an unknown cloaking technology at work that we can't detect ourselves," instantly Liara's mind went back to the needle-like structures the STG scan had revealed. Could they be the cause of this? Initially she had worried that they were similar to the structures the geth had deployed on Eden Prime and elsewhere, 'Dragon's Teeth', the humans had called them. They were the devices that turned people into husks. But maybe it was just a structural similarity? Maybe these needles were something else? While she was thinking about that, the salarian replied.
"Copy your last, Phantom-Lead. We're working the problem. Hold."
"Roger, holding" the human officer said before turning to Liara again. "You ever seen anything like this when you were hunting Reapers with Anderson or Shepard? Some kind of advanced camo system maybe?"
"No. The Reapers have never used any kind of cloaking technology," she replied from her memory before thinking back to Saren's attack on Therum and the battle reports she'd read from Eden Prime back when she'd still been on the Normandy. "The only optical camouflage we ever faced was with the geth."
"And they've got nothing that could cloak an entire city?" he asked next.
"No, definitely not," Liara replied with a confident nod. Then she looked at the spire. "Have we considered that your assessment is right and that there really isn't a city? If we set aside the cloaking explanation, it's equally reasonable to assume that the spire's signals might have interfered with the STG scanner in a way that falsified the results. It may even be intentionally. There is a possibility that the spire and the needles project false signals to make it seem like the settlement is much larger than it really is. As a deterrence so to speak."
"Deterrence against what?"
Good question.
She already had an answer though.
Or at least she was coming up with one right now.
"Curious intruders. Batarian space is large and the Hegemony never could defend all of it at the same time, even before going to war with you in the Verge," she reasoned. It was true, despite what they wanted people to believe, no place in the galaxy had as much problems with pirates and rebels as batarian space. And ever since the combined human-turian counter-attack during the Blitz had broken the External Force's spear tip into two dull pieces, the military of the Hegemony wasn't what it used to be. "If these spires are as crucial as we believe them to be and the batarian leadership is as indoctrinated as we fear, it makes sense that they would try to protect them the best they could," it's what she'd do if she was working with ancient, enigmatic intelligence that systematically wiped out organic life in a cyclical pattern. "And if the best protection can't be achieved through traditional means like soldiers or guns, then deception might be a preferable option. Especially so if the Reapers lend a hand. Just because we didn't observe them use technology like this up to now, doesn't mean that they don't have access to it. If anything, the absence of our observation of reapertech-based stealth technology might even be a hint to how advanced it really is."
"The intangible is indomitable," Haugen muttered. "Never thought of it like that but I guess that's another way to use that to your advantage."
"Sorry, what?"
"The intangible is indomitable," he repeated. "It's ASOC's battle cry if you will. For us it means that our cloaking and tactics to give us the fighting edge. But I guess if you put a different spin on the phrase, it could also mean using something that isn't there to your own advantage."
Before he could say anything else, the salarian ship reported back in.
"Phantom-Lead, this is Mirage. How copy?"
"Reading you Mirage."
"Our scans still indicate the presence of structures on the surface. However an in-depth scan of the spire and the needle-like structures has detected a set of anomalies. We're detecting strong magnetic disruptions, energy bursts, hints of radioactivity and electric discharges and low-frequency soundwaves that are being emitted in a recognizable pattern."
"Understood. Can you tell if it's coming from the spire itself?" She understood what he was doing. If the Mirage could take the readings, they'd have no more reason to be here. Sadly however, she could've given the officer the same answer he was about to receive.
"Negative Phantom-Lead. Too much anomalous interference on our end to tell what is coming from where. Whatever is responsible for the signals is projecting them specifically into space to counteract long-range scans. If you still want the spire readings, you'll have to do it from the ground. But be advised that we recommend that you abort immediately. The readings we are seeing could indicate that you are about to enter a high-risk zone," that was of course referring to indoctrination.
"Roger that, Mirage. Wait one," Captain Haugen replied. "What can you do from here, Doc?"
She looked at the spire and adjusted the weight of the backpack that was carrying her measurement equipment.
"Some superficial scans and maybe a differentiation between what readings are coming from the needles and what's the spire's doing."
He paused for a second and adjusted himself so that he was now behind another one of his teammates.
"That'll have to do. Diamond formation, Phantom-Squad. If you see as much as a blade of grass twitching, you call it. Miller, keep up the drone while you're at it. I'll keep an eye on your sector," then he spun his head to her a final time. "Get to work doctor. I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to," he pressed down on his radio again. "Mirage, we're finishing the job from here. Phantom-Lead out."
So Liara did.
She assembled her equipment, pointed the parts that needed to be pointed at the spire and began to take every reading she could possibly think off. Truthfully, she probably could've stayed here for days, but given the situation, she was ready to prioritize. First she checked off what the salarians had detected, then she moved on to different categories. Wavelengths of light, atmospheric composition, she was even considering a soil sample one of the ASOC soldiers spoke up.
"Hey. Any of you guys just felt that?" he asked carefully before bringing up his weapon so that his scope pointed at the spire.
"What, Mav?" Captain Haugen instructed.
"Something in the air. Like it's about to thunder, Sir. And I'm talking seriously thunder."
The team leader paused for a second, not sure what to make of it.
"Hofmann?"
"I feel it too, Captain. Mav's right, it feels like a thunderstorm's about to roll over us," his second in command replied.
"Miller?"
"Yeah, boss."
"Doctor?" the officer said while Liara was already shifting her equipment to scan for a spike in electricity, pressure and ozone. While she couldn't claim to have the same intuitive sense of an inbound thunderstorm as the humans appeared to collectivly have it, she did have science to make up for that missing biological feature. While those scans were running, she glanced to the spire and the sky. Although the dominating sight of the blood-red gas giant that Jasintho orbited made it kind of hard to tell, there was something jumping through the sky around the spire, something she'd seen before with recordings of Sovereign; red lighting. It was subtle, but as soon as she saw it, she was certain that it was there. And that couldn't be good.
If she needed anymore convincing, a loud thunder cracked through the sky shortly after her realization. With it, an unnatural cold ran across her skin and a strange sense of fear settled in the back of her spine. She looked at her equipment and started to pack quickly, not caring that her cloak had slipped off by now or that she was moving way faster than she'd been advised to do.
"Everything alright, Doctor?"
"We need to go," she said quickly.
"You already have what you need?" the captain replied.
"Not everything. But we need to leave right now."
To his credit, the soldier didn't question her statement and simply pulled out the beacon he'd been given. "Take a breath and tell me what's going on," he asked while activating the device.
"Red lighting," was all the reply she could muster.
Surprisingly enough, the officer made the connection immediately.
"Shit. Like with Sovereign?"
"Yes, I think so," she replied, able to hear her panic in her own voice. Then she dropped a piece of equipment and noticed how badly her hand was shaking. What in Athame's name was going on with her? Before she could begin to think about that question, thunder cracked through the sky and a yellow glow shot out of the tip of the spire like a ray of corrupted light. Then, the red lighting intensified. It forked through the sky and spread into every direction above them. With it, the sense of fear spiked.
"Heads up! We've got contacts! At least thirty batarians, four hundred meters and closing in on us!" the soldier with the drone shouted before Captain Haugen pulled the hood over Liara's head again and began to push her into the direction they'd come from, away from her equipment. Instinctually she made an effort to stop and reach for it but the ASOC officer wasn't about to let her do that.
"Don't even think about it. We are leaving!" he instructed. "Miller, are we made?"
"With the way they're running for our position? Definitely," the soldier replied while they dashed through the field. "I got riflemen and some really freaky looking batarians coming our way. There's at least twenty of 'em."
"Freaky looking?" he asked while Liara picked up her pace to keep up with the soldiers. Despite their earlier insistence on moving slowly, they had instantly picked up the pace and now appeared as visible disruptions in the field.
"Glowing blue, Sir."
"Alright. Recall the drone, Miller. Mav, toss out the proximity charges. Five meter spacing. They should buy us some time," the captain muttered before pressing a button on the beacon he'd been given. "MV One-O-Three, be advised, you are coming in for a hot pick up. Riflemen and by the looks of it, reaper-fied batarians."
"Phantom-Squad, this is Mirage interrupting your transmission. Did you say reaper-fied batarians?" a salarian voice asked.
"That I did, Mirage. Good that you're listening in. I was about to request that you bomb this entire place to kingdom come. Make it danger close and burn everything that's south of my squad. How copy?" Captain Haugen stated before slowing his pace and once more falling in step with Liara, who was now really having a rather hard time with matching the pace of a human spec-ops squad in full retreat. While they were running and organizing their retreat at the same time, she felt like she was in a sprint of her life and could focus on nothing but the way in front of her, the fear in her and the yellow light ray behind her. Incidentally, it was that fear and the increased difficulties with breathing that were stopping her from voicing her thoughts that they were about to kill the entirety of the slave camp.
"Affirmative Phantom-Squad. Friendly-Fire prevention calculations finished," the salarian stated right as the first proximity charges exploded behind them. "Sending precision payload onto the spire now. Brace for impact. Impact in three, two-"
"Wait!" she shouted, just as she managed to form the cohesive thought of the kind of collateral damage they were about to cause in her head.
Too late.
"One."
An impossibly loud crack rang through the sky and suddenly Liara felt herself flying forward alongside the human officer. Before she could dust herself of however, she was already being lifted to her feet and led up a small, stony hill.
"Good effect, Mirage!" Haugen reported while Liara dared to glance behind her.
"Affirmative, Phantom-Lead. Switching positions and going radio silent. Mirage out."
The once black and purple tower was now hidden by a dust cloud easily twice its height and the slaves were presumably all vaporized. But their pursuers? Well. Although she'd just been lifted from the ground, she was suddenly being thrown down again.
"Contact! One hundred meters! Engage, engage, engage!"
"Jesus, what the hell is that glowing thing?" one soldier, she wasn't sure which one, shouted, before all four opened up with rifles and a machinegun. Judging by the impacts into the hill and stones, someone was shooting back as well. She was about to reach for the pistol that had come with Arterius' equipment but then decided that her biotics were much more useful. She was about to rise, so much in fact that the outer layer of her barriers were already peaking out from her cover, when an invisible shape somewhere to her left her pressed her down again. It was just in time to avoid the strange projectile that had embedded itself in the stone above her and, in the process of doing so, had gone straight through both her kinetic and biotic barrier.
How that was even possible?
She truly didn't have the hint of an idea.
"You wanna lose your head? Stay down!" the voice of who she believed to be the soldier called 'Mav' shouted while her attention focused on the projectile that had nearly taken her head off. Contrary to what was common with most guns, this projectile wasn't a sand-grainzed sized piece of tungsten. It was a black crystal the size of her finger. Instinctively, she pulled it out of the rock and stuck it into her backpack for later. A second later or so, there was an angry grunt to her left and then a silhouette that was quickly made visible by the leakage of crimson blood dropped down next to her.
"Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Mav cursed with pain in his voice while Liara froze at the sight, unsure of what to do. The logical part of her was screaming to administer first aid but the majority of her brain could only register the hellish snarling and shouting of whatever the ASOC team was fighting. The background noise was like something taken straight out of an old asari play about demons and while she'd fought geth, rachni and krogan before, this time she couldn't seem to escape the paralysing fear.
"Mav's hit!" a member of Phantom Team shouted. "Doc! You gotta help him," she wanted to but all she could register was the red lighting in the sky, the fading yellow light and the snarls and growls of the batarians that were attacking them. Why? This wasn't the first time she'd been in a fight for her life. What was wrong with her?
And what in Athame's name was that damned ringing in her ears?
"Doc! He needs medigel!" the soldier called again. "Fuck! Hofmann, get in there, the asari's all frozen and not doing shit!"
"Miller! Frag everything underneath me! Kill those fucking things!" Captain Haugen ordered over the squad intercom before Liara realized that the soldier by her side was now receiving first aid from a soldier to her right that she hadn't even registered before, despite a positional HUD overlay showing him. If she wasn't so preoccupied with the feeling in her spine, she might've realized how impressive it was that the human team could keep track of where everyone was under these circumstances. But as things were, she could only focus on what could best be described as sheer terror, something that the humans were either ignoring or not feeling at all and the hellish noises.
"Frag out!"
For a second everything but the ringing in her ears turned quiet since the soldiers stopped shooting to take cover. In that moment, she could hear something else, something that was coming from down below. It was a deep, distinctively batarian voice with a very unbatarian undertone.
"Your interference will not be tolerated," a voice gurgled. "You will not break the cy-" then there was an explosion and ever so slowly, one of the outlined shapes on her HUD rose.
"Is it dead now?" Haugen wondered out loud.
In response, a burst of gunfire was fired.
"Yeah. I think so," Miller replied.
"Hofmann, how's Mav?"
"Still kicking, Sir. But the bastard nicked me in the shoulder, no way I can use the MG now," the injured soldier in question and not Hofmann replied.
"Good. Miller, switch with him," Haugen ordered before Liara saw him peak up from behind the rock. "Alright. Anyone want to explain what the hell that is? Looks like some kind of lab."
"Kind of looks intentional, doesn't it?" Miller replied. "Maybe a super soldier program gone haywire? Wouldn't be the first time the Hegemony cut up their own people to make them better fighters."
"Why the fuck would a super soldier have two heads or look this fucked up?"
"No idea, boss. Terror? Certainly worked on some of us," he muttered and Liara knew exactly that he meant her. She was still fearful but the continued remarks about whatever they were fighting and her pride finally made Liara ignore the ringing and the fear enough to rise and look for herself. As soon as she did, she regretted it. She felt sick at the sight.
The 'batarian' in question was roughly the size of a krogan, had two fused heads, tan, bloated skin a gun for an arm and black-reddish armor plates welded to his contorted, blue-glowing body. While it couldn't look more different from the human variant, the eyes and remnants of a slave collar around its remaining wrist betrayed its origin.
"It's a batarian husk," Liara muttered before looking to where the damaged spire was peaking out of the dust cloud. The yellow light it emitted seemed to dim and the ringing in her ears was slowly dying down. But before she could make the connection, she once more remembered the slave workers who'd presumably perished in the indiscriminate orbital strike the human officer had called in just now.
"You killed them," she muttered just as a piece of the damaged spire broke off and fell to the ground in the distance. "Goddess. You killed them all!"
The human seemed perplexed, he looked at the corpses in front of them and then back to her.
"They were trying to kill us, so damn right I did," he said before Liara noticed that in addition to the batarian husks, which there were five of, there were also several dead regular Internal Forces soldiers. In the short firefight, the team had apparently killed an opponent four times the size of their own unit. How they'd done that? She had no idea since she'd been hunkered down, but it didn't matter to her now either. "What else was I supposed to do? Ask them nicely to stop trying to shoot us?"
"I'm talking about the slaves," she explained. "You and the salarians just bombed them! There had to be hundreds of captives in that camp and we didn't even try to save them!"
Shepard never would've done something like this. Neither would've Anderson or Saren. She saw his slightly dirty silhouette shift in front of her. Then he did something she wouldn't have expected anyone int his situation to do.
He shrugged.
"They were all goners anyways, being that close to the spire and whatnot" he stated. "Besides, if they all looked like those guys down there, I think we just did them a solid one. It doesn't get much closer to a mercy kill than-"
Whatever explanation he was about to deliver stopped when he lifted his rifle and let out a burst at something down the hill that was barking, snarling and closing in fast.
"Contact! Varren!" he shouted just as Liara turned her head to see several of the creatures leave the tall crop field. And while they might have resembled varren more than the batarian husk resembled a batarian, there was still no doubt about the fact that these creatures had also been altered by the Reapers. They large black eyes now shone blue and the claws on their feet and teeth in their mouth had been replaced by the same material that the claws of human husks were made of. Furthermore the comb on their heads and skin on their backs was now replaced by a sheet of flexible metal.
When a pair of the creatures jumped to the foot of the hill and suddenly launched themselves at them, a wave of biotic energy shot out of Liara's hands. The purple ripple sent them and the rest of the pack flying back into the field. And while she might've incapacitated one or two of them, a glance at the movement in the field told her that their enemies were growing in numbers faster than they could deal with. She was about to speak up about it but clearly the ASOC team realized the same think.
"Hofmann, get Mav to his feet! Miller, lay it down into the field, anything that moves, dies! Doctor, you keep doing what you just did! We are falling back to the top of the hill!" he ordered before letting out a burst of rifle fire that struck one of the jumping varren mid-air. Then they began to move up the hill. "MV, what's your ETA?" he asked in between climbing and firing.
"Fifteen minutes," the salarian pilot replied just as Liara shoved another wave of the creatures back.
"We don't have that long!" Haugen retorted before helping her to reach the top of the hill as well. From up here she could see that there was even more movement in the field. And to make matters even worse, it seemed like there weren't just varren coming for them. Although most of the crops was being pushed by something moving low to the ground and out of sight, a worrying number of staggering batarian figures was now starting to make their way towards them from the direction of the spire. Judging by the burns on their skin, they were probably survivors of the blast and from their movements alone she could tell that the captain had been right about their state.
Those weren't regular batarians anymore.
"More freaks coming right up, boss!" one of the team members shouted before lying onto the ground on top of the and firing off a light machinegun, which unlike the mass accelerators she and the rest of the human team were carrying seemed to be similar in making to the hybrid power weaponry the rest of the HSA military used. He sent bursts downrange at the staggering batarians and hit several of them. However instead of seeking cover, Liara got the distinctive impression that the fire they were taking was only spurring them on to change their staggering into sprinting and for every one that fell down, another seemed to pop up in the field.
"I can see that, Miller!" Haugen replied while the asari archeologist sent three more of the huskified varren flying back into the field. Whatever she'd done had been enough to turn off her camo tarp in the process so she was now completely visible.
"Then you know what I'm about to suggest!"
"Not happening!"
"Sir, we need to get this information off-world. I'll hold them for as long as I can and you fade into the woods!" at the last second, Liara tossed another varren aside. This one had gotten closer than the others because the captain, who'd covered her left had been distracted by the first batarian husks reaching the foot of the hill. Unlike the larger specimen with the fused head, these ones were closer to their human counterparts. The only difference was that their chests were covered in black-red armor that seemed to be very effective at keeping them alive until the ASOC unit switched to headshots. "It's the only way!"
"It's not! You're not dying on my watch, Miller! Finally get that into your fucking head!"
"We're going to get overrun, Sir! Let me do this!"
"Miller, there's a time and place for self-sacrifice, this ain't it!"
"Sir!-"
Whatever the human had been about to say was overshadowed by a loud but indistinctive shout from right behind them that was followed by a pair of explosions at the foot of the hill that they weren't responsible for. Even before the dust could settle, she saw a batarian jump up next to her and look at her. His skin was dark-brown and covered in black stripes and underneath the armored vest that he'd strapped on, he was wearing clothes she'd associated with a farming job.
"Follow me if you want to live!" he called before removing another grenade from his vest and lobbing at the foot of the hill. The explosion tore apart the husks, varren and batarians alike and then he pointed somewhere. Liara followed his finger and spotted a hidden tunnel entrance dug into the other side of the hill and she made exactly one step into the direction before the invisible hand of Captain Haugen grabbed her by the wrist. The action made her focus on the HUD outlining once more and only then did she realise that instead of pointing his weapon down where the husks were regrouping, he was now leveling its muzzle at the torso of the batarian farmer, who'd taken a knee next to the narrow entrance.
"What do you think you're doing?"
She slipped her hand out of his grip and took another step towards the tunnel.
"I'm saving our lives!" she responded before looking at the clearly anxious and confused batarian. Like her, he probably didn't understand what was stopping the humans from taking this way out.
"They're the enemy!"
"Unless you've got another way out of here, this is the best chance we'll get!"
Then, without waiting for a reply, she jumped into the tunnel hole. Only as she slowed her fall on her way down did she realise that there would've been a ladder.
Meanwhile, 3. April 2417 AD, Jasintho
He looked at T'Soni jump into the hole and was dumbstruck by the stupidity of the action.
Had she seriously just done that?
Damnit.
So much for following everything he said.
"Phantom-Squad, tunnel, now!" Haugen ordered. Hofmann and Mav complied instantly but Haugen had to kick the still firing Miller against the leg to tell him that they were leaving. At first the soldier made no indication of getting up, but when Haugen grabbed him by his combat rigging and lifted him to a kneeling position, he listened. "You too, Sergeant!" he shouted, making Miller finally register the order. The soldier followed the rest of the team down the hole and then, when it was just him, the batarian and a whole bunch of husks, so did Haugen. He slid down a latter and heard a heavy door being closed above his head.
When his feet touched the ground, he suddenly found himself standing in what looked like a bunker with teal walls and was faced with a crowd of batarians holding a mixture of old shotguns, outdated pistols and pointy farming equipment. With a few exceptions, most of them looked rather young. They were locked in a standoff with three of the four people he was with and only T'Soni seemed to be entirely unconcerned by the fact that they were now just as trapped as on that hill. And as if her initiative hadn't gotten them into enough trouble already, she'd also chosen to position herself right in his line of fire. He heard feet set down on the ground behind him and instantly turned around to their saviour, a brown batarian with a now empty grenade vest. With the intentions of the batarian unclear, Haugen only knew that he couldn't keep him in the middle of his formation. So he grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him in front him so he'd act as a living shield and then rested his rifle on his captive's shoulders. That was also when he noticed that the 'bunker' he not only held sever makeshift sleeping areas, but was covered in the remains of some kind of the same alien grain they'd stalked through earlier, meaning that it was actually a granary and no a bunker.
"Hey. Easy!" the batarian called.
"Tell your people to drop the weapons," he demanded from his batarian hostage.
"Captain-" T'Soni began before making a step towards one of the farmers. To Haugen the batarians looked fearful, but he wouldn't take any chances, especially not in the spot they were in right now.
"Let me handle this and change your position. You're in our line of fire," he cut her off. While he realized that it sounded like a threat, he meant it as a warning. If this turned into a firefight right now, there wasn't a thing in the universe he could do to save the asari. She really was in the worst possible position. "Weapons. Now."
"Pillars! I save your sorry hides from the cultists and this is how you repay me?" he screamed at T'Soni.
Cultists? Was he talking about the husks?
"I'm not going to ask again."
The batarian pulled in an audible breath.
"Captain!" he ignored the asari's protest.
"Don't make me count, batarian!"
"Fine! Fine!" he looked at one of the few older batarians in the front of the crowd. "Lower your damned weapons before this maniac shoots us all, would you?"
"I told you this would happen, Ketho!" the farmer he was looking at said disapprovingly before a series of old weapons and farming tools were dropped to the floor with audible metal clatters. Satisfied with his disarming of the farmers, he let go of the batarian and shoved him towards the crowd a bit more forcefully then intended. He clearly wasn't going to keep his balance but before he could plant his ugly face on the ground, T'Soni caught him from stumbling. Probably for the better given how some of these guys were looking.
"I apologize for the behavior of my companions. Thank you for saving us."
"At least the asari's got manners," another voice of the crowd replied. This one sounded younger as well.
"And the guts to show herself so we know who we're talking to!" a third, equally young batarian added before pointing into the direction Haugen's squad. Although they were covered in dirt, or blood in Mav's case, it seemed like the batarian farmers still weren't able to determine who they were just yet. "Can't say the same for her mercs, though."
"Boss, maybe we should decloak to deescalate," Hofmann suggested.
"Negative. Stay cloaked," Haugen said, denying the request because as far as he was concerned, this could devolve into a fight at any time. Then he looked at the asari. "Doctor T'Soni," he began, prompting her to turn towards him. "They think you're our leader. You do the talking now. Try and figure out who the hell these people are and what they're doing here."
"I will. But please, show yourselves," the asari responded.
"Doctor, I don't think that's a good idea. If this turns into a shootout, we'll need every advantage we can-"
Now it was the asari's turn to cut him off.
"Batarians place a lot of value into face-to-face conversations. Please, decloak Captain," the asari stated before turning to the group and addressing them over her helmet's speakers. "Besides, if they wanted to attack us, they would've done so already."
That drew a nod from one of the few older batarian farmers. Haugen considered those words for a moment and then obliged. With their backs to the wall, they were compromised already anyways.
"MV, be advised, we're in an underground silo right now. Enter a holding pattern over our coordinates until I can tell you how this ends."
"Understood Phantom-Lead. Entering holding pattern."
"Decloak, Phantom," he ordered before he materialized in the room. Needless to say, he'd expected a lot of initial reactions from the batarians. Hate, disdain, violence, curses, all had been top runners in the past when it came to humans. But fear? Fear hadn't been one of them. As soon as he appeared, some of them cowered behind the taller ones in front and the general mood quickly seemed to sour. Additionally to that reaction, he also hadn't expected them to be surprised by the fact that he was human. Then again, from their point of view, it probably would've made more sense for T'Soni to have batarian company since she was in batarian space. Either way, the panicked crying and aggression followed swiftly.
"They're humans!" one exclaimed the obvious.
"I knew it! It's an HSA invasion! They're the ones behind this madness!" the older one who had already doubted Ketho earlier shouted. "We should've let them get mauled by the cultists," he added.
There was that word again; cultists. So that was how the batarians were explaining all this to themselves. They thought this was some kind of cult. Incidentally, that explanation wasn't far off from what they had initially believed Reaper indoctrination to be. A cult-like following of alien artifacts.
"Pillars, they'll kill us all!" a younger one cried.
"Not if we get them first!" another young one reasoned. Haugen gripped his rifle tighter as he saw one pick up his weapon again in response to that statement.
"Throw them out, let the cultists have them!" one began.
"Yes! Throw them out!" another repeated.
"Throw them out! Throw them out!" the chants started. Haugen braced himself for the seemingly inevitable fight. But then the batarian who'd saved them just now roared at the top of his voice.
"Shut up everyone!" he shouted before walking in front of the group and grabbing the chief aggregator by the collar of his working clothes. "My silo, my weapons, my rules! I decide who stays! No one else! Now drop the damn weapons!" Surprisingly enough that actually quieted the group down. Considering how agitated they'd been seconds before, it really surprised Haugen just how readily the batarians fell back in line. Then again, most of the group were adolescents from a caste-based slaver society. If the older Ketho was of better standing than the others, he likely commanded the kind of respect that'd shut up an angry crowd.
The brown batarian turned towards T'Soni and then pointed at another door attached to the silo.
"For the sake of keeping things peaceful, I suggest we talk in private."
"Very well," T'Soni replied.
"Why the hell is that guy helping us?" Miller muttered while Ketho opened the door to reveal a smaller silo that appeared to be his own sleeping room. He definitely was a caste or two higher than the others.
"Probably figures that we're his ticket off Jasintho," Mav suggested before pressing the palm of his hand against the spot where the medigel had stopped most of the bleeding. "We had to get here somehow, no?"
"Yeah that might be it," Haugen replied. "Hofmann, keep an eye on the door. He's not locking it, you got me?"
"Yes, Sir."
After Ketho had gestured for T'Soni to sit and allowed Hofmann to keep the door open, Haugen and the rest of the squad watched the batarian plop down on a hanging mat and look at the ceiling. Then he let out a long-drawn sight.
"Very well. Let's start with the obvious. What are an asari and her four human serfs doing on Jasintho?" he asked before turning to look at T'Soni.
"Did that fucker seriously just call us serfs?" Miller growled.
"Zip it," Haugen ordered in return.
"We're here on a mission of utmost importance," T'Soni replied. As instructed by Haugen, she was acting as their leader right now.
"I assume that mission has something to do with your destruction of the spire and your fighting of the cultists?" Ketho went on before folding his hands on his chest and looking at T'Soni in expectation.
"Yes," she said briefly. "We came here to gather information on the spire and destroy it."
"Well you did succeed in at least one of those objectives. But given your earlier retreat, I somehow doubt that you found everything you were looking for," Ketho muttered. "I'll be honest with you, asari, I don't like your kind. I really, really don't. Neither do I like humans," he said before tilting his head to the right and snorting at Haugen. "I do however understand that you may be our only way of off Jasintho."
"Called it," Mav muttered over the intercom.
"Therefore I'd like to bargain. I'll tell you all I know about the spires and you'll take me, the other farmers and our farmhands with you when you leave. How does that sound?"
So that's what the guys from the silo were, they were his coworkers and employees. It explained why they were rowdier than slaves but still listened to his commands.
T'Soni glanced back at Haugen.
"Sounds good," Haugen said over the squad intercom, deliberately neglecting the fact that the salarian craft they'd used to circumvent the automated air defenses definitely wouldn't fit half the batarians in the silo. Then again, there were more than one of those ships aboard the Mirage. So that wouldn't be the decisive factor. What would really matter was if the salarians were ready to bring a bunch of batarians on board. That wasn't his call but he could already guess how that answer was going to turn out.
"That sounds like a very fair trade," T'Soni replied before leaning against the back of her wooden chair, an action that made it creak uncomfortably. When Ketho stayed silent for a few more moments, she folded her hands together. "Well?" she asked in expectation.
"Oh. You thought I'd tell it to you now before you actually got me off of Jasintho?" he replied before smirking in a way that showed his needle-like teeth. "You aren't a businesswomen, are you, asari?"
Haugen was about to step in when T'Soni showed a deceptive side he didn't think she'd have. She got up from her chair, folded her arms and shrugged her head.
"Very well then, in that case we'll be leaving now. Enjoy the cultists' company," the stated before walking towards he door. "Captain," she added in a clear suggestion for him to play along.
"You heard the lady, let's pack it up," he instructed audibly to Ketho. Then he muted his exterior speakers. "Play along," he added.
They got about two steps to the door before Ketho shot up from his hanging mat.
"Wait!" he shouted. "Fine. I'll tell you now."
T'Soni stopped in place. As did Phantom Squad. Then the asari turned around and sat down again.
"Start from the beginning, please," she said cheerfully. And so Ketho did.
Over the course of ten minutes he explained how this spire had been constructed about a year ago after the others on the planet had been finished and how the slaves from the construction camp and the settlers from surrounding towns had quickly started to change and began the worship of a 'cult'. While he couldn't actually tell them what the cult was about, he'd only heard rumors from its existence in the colonial capital of Jasintho and other planets in the Hegemony, he could say that it had altered those affected. Then he went into detail about how he, his two neighbor farmers and his farmhands, who weren't slaves because his social standing didn't allow him to keep slaves for manual labor, had decided that whatever was going on in the other farms wasn't for them. When a squad of Internal Forces soldiers from the capital had shown up to 'show them the truth about the spire' three weeks ago, they'd gone into hiding into the underground granary network of Ketho's land. From there on out, he began to describe a rather horrific encounter during a nightly supply run that Haugen could clearly attribute to a run-in with one of the husks they'd killed and explained that he and his farmhands, them more than him, were running out of water and food and would soon be forced to abandon their hiding place. Then he insisted that he'd held up his end of the bargain and demanded that T'Soni organize their extraction. She was about to turn towards Haugen and tell him to handle that matter when one of the older farmers busted in through the half-way closed door with a shotgun in hand.
"Ketho, they found us!" he called before realizing that Haugen's pistol was now pointed against the side of his skull in response to the sudden entrance. In the deadly silence that followed, the ASOC captain could hear the sound of power tools working against metal. He immediately decided that that was the noise of the batarians above them trying to break into the silo through the hatch they'd used, lowered his pistol and walked over to T'Soni and Ketho. He grabbed the batarian's hanging mat so that he was forced to look at him and then stared directly at the farmer through his darkened visor.
"Is there another way out of here?"
"Get your serf in line, asari or I wi-" instead of finishing the threat, he shrieked when Haugen reached down and pulled the batarian by his collar. He was done being called serf or playing his game so he laid the cards out on the table as clearly as he could.
"I'm the one in charge and if you want to get out of here without getting mauled by a bunch of batarian, you're going to start working with me. Do I make myself clear?"
The batarian visibly swallowed.
"The silos are connected and they go all the way to the Geka River. We can get out there."
"That's the river by the spire?"
"Yes."
He radioed the STG vessel.
"MV, this is Phantom-Lead. Adjust your heading for the river you identified earlier and follow my signal," he looked at the batarian again. "How long does it take to get there?"
"Ten minutes maybe."
He pressed down on the radio again and ignored the panicked shouting outside and the increasingly loud power tool noises.
"ETA is ten minutes. Expect a hot extraction. How copy?"
"Understood Phantom-Lead. Rerouting for hot exfil. MV out."
With that out of the way, he pulled Ketho from his hanging mat and shoved him through the door, only to come face to face with the assembled, terrified farmhands. In expectation of a breach they'd grabbed their weapons again and in stark contrast to before, they actually didn't seem all that terrified of him and the rest of Phantom anymore.
While it was obviously possible that Ketho had bullshitted them and that he was about to bring a whole bunch of indoctrinated batarians back to the Mirage, their story made them being indoctrinated monsters far less likely than the circumstances of the slaves. And while he might've hated batarians with a passion, he wasn't entirely ready to just leave them to get mauled to death by varren.
"How many people do you have?" Ketho hesitated. "Think, we don't have time," he reinforced.
"Fifteen, sixteen," the batarian counted before he started to mumble. "Twenty-one. With you guys, that's twenty-six," there was another bang on the hatch and a large piece of metal came falling down the ladder, revealing daylight and growling noises.
Not good.
"Understood. Head for the river exit and don't look back. We'll bring up the rear," he grabbed onto Hofmann with a hand and then maneuvered Miller next to him. "Mav, you're leading us. Hofmann, you've got the doctor. Miller, you and me are covering the back," he ordered next. He aimed his rifle down at the ladder and spotted a shadow climbing down. "Mirage, this is Phantom-Lead I need shuttles for twenty-one batarian civilians," he spoke into his radio. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then the voice of the Mirage's captain replied.
"Negative, Phantom-Lead. We're only extracting you. You are not cleared to bring along batarian civilians. I repeat. Do not bring along the batarian civilians. There will be no shuttles for them." It was a good thing his radio and helmet were muted to the outside. That way only T'Soni turned to look at him.
"They'll die if we leave them here," she stated, rightfully so.
He considered his words for a few seconds but before he could decide how he could word things differently, one of the larger batarian husks with the arm-guns slid down the leader and snarled at them. In response both him and Miller started to shoot. Additionally T'Soni flung some kind of biotic field at the creature. The screaming of the farmhands followed suitly. Although he wasn't sure what exactly had made this husk different form the one that they had to frag, maybe it was the lack of armor plating, it went down just in time for them to squeeze through the door and into the next silo. As soon as the had passed, one of the farm workers close the hatch just as three of the smaller batarian husks climbed down the ladder face-first like insects and started to rush towards them with their ugly, mangled faces locked in a constant scream of pain.
"This should buy us a minute," the young batarian stated before falling in line behind the ASOC team and T'Soni. Not needing to be told any more than that, Haugen pressed down on his talk button again. The salarian captain didn't seem like an absolute monster, just a pragmatist. Hence, he only really needed to sell the idea of rescuing the batarians to him in a way that spoke to that pragmatism.
"Mirage, these people hold valuable information about the spires and the situation in the Hegemony ever since they went up first. They've been living with these things for months. Bringing them with us could be crucial to the success of the task force."
Again there was another moment of silence, more banging on a door and another silo being sealed behind them.
"Phantom-Lead, the only ships that can clear the automated orbital defense systems are the STG transports of the Mirage and there are only two of those. One is currently awaiting your arrival and even counting the other one, we do not have the capacity to airlift out twenty-six people. Even if I let the other ship start, we can't evacuate everyone at once."
He looked at the door that was being closed and Hofmann practically spoke his mind.
"How many silos are there?" he asked one the batarian who was closing them.
"About twenty more," he replied as he shut another one.
"If the doors hold as long as the hatch, they should buy us enough time to get out everyone, right boss? Let's have the shuttles fly out the farmhands first while we set up in the final silo and then we leave with Ketho and the farmers during round two," the senior NCO suggested over the otherwise muted squad intercom.
"Yes. That will work," T'Soni injected with an enthusiasm that had been absent up to now. "With my biotics and the close quarters of the silos, we'll definitely be able to hold our ground until the salarians rescued everyone!"
"You ready to bet your life on that?" Miller muttered as they climbed through another door just before a dampened explosion echoed off somewhere behind them. That sounded just like a breaching charge to Haugen and if that was the case, they might not have as much time as Hofmann believed.
Miller clearly picked up on that.
"Captain, you know I'm always down for a good fight, but do we really wanna risk our asses and our mission for a bunch of batarian nobodies? If we mess up the timing on this one, those husks are gonna mince us before the salarians get back here and I don't know about you, but I'd rather stay in one piece today."
"They're not nobodies! They're people just like you and me. Goddess, most of them are practically children! They deserve to be saved!" T'Soni suddenly injected. This time the enthusiasm in her voice gave way to something akin to anger. "Besides, weren't you eager to die for the mission a couple of minutes ago?" she added, referring to the events on the hill. Had she known anything about Sergeant Miller, she wouldn't even have tried that. But as things were, she didn't know the first thing about the soldier or his relationship with the batarians. To say he 'hated' them would put things softly and if not for his order to escort them, the junior NCO wouldn't have thought about rescuing them in his worst nightmare, even if they were adolescents.
"People, Doc? They're batarians. Before you catch me risking my life for any of those assholes, hell's gonna freeze over. Fuck, if they hadn't dropped their guns when they did, I would've mowed the fuckers down right from the get-go-"
That was his cue.
"Cut it out, Miller," he instructed sharply before stepping through another door and hearing another explosion. This one sounded closer than the last one. They were catching up. "Mirage, send the ship. We'll worry about the seating issue when we're at the evac site."
"Understood, Phantom-Lead, sending the other stealth transport now."
Their way through the connected silos continued for about another five minutes with the explosions slowly catching up to them until Ketho informed them that this was it and that they'd reached their exit. Haugen left the rearguard to Miller and Mav, who was now free of his duty of leading them while they walked backwards, and went to the front of the crowd to find the final door still closed and Ketho standing on a ladder just in front of it. On his way to the front, he gestured for T'Soni to stay back, just in case there was a breach.
"MV, are you there yet?"
"Acknowledged, Phantom-Lead. Both vessels are ready to land at your discretion," he nodded towards Ketho and the batarian pulled the hatch open. The rays of light hit Haugen in the face and in the split second it took his visor to dim to reduce the blinding, Ketho and the farmers in front were already climbed up, as were some of the farmhands. He followed, but right as he was climbing up the ladder and placing his hands on the final step so that he could leave the silo, the happy smirk on Ketho's face vanished and was replaced by pure terror.
Shit.
In one second, he realized the fatal flaw of his escape plan. But before he could curse himself for it, time seemed to slow to a crawl. First there was an explosion below them. He'd later learn that its fiery consumption of the room and the remaining occupants within was only stopped by Doctor T'Soni, who somehow not only managed to block the blast but also redirect it from the way it had come, yet still ruptured the eardrums of every remaining farmhand within the room.
Next, in the same moment as he spotted the pack of varren and pair of hulking batarian husks that were the source of Ketho's terror, he was already being jumped at by one of the huskified creatures. In a move very reminiscent of his first encounter with these beasts, the weight and force of the impact sent Haugen flying but still gave him enough wiggle room to stab the beast in the neck. It was then that he noticed that the creature was still wearing the same control collar as the regular varren that the batarian military liked to employ.
At the same time, gunfire from the machinegun Miller was carrying erupted from within the silo and more farmhands were climbing up the ladder in an effort to escape from whatever he was shooting, only to freeze in the same manner as Ketho and the others. A second later, the remaining varren launched at them and although they were armed, the adolescent batarians and the couple of older farmers didn't stand a chance in hell against what was about to happen. While Haugen lifted the creature off himself, braced his Valkyrie against his shoulder and started shooting until his heatsink had to be exchanged, his lone gun was far from enough to save any of them. Screams echoed through the riverbed they were standing in and blood and guts were thrown around while he jumped to his feet and fought off another one of the varren that had decided to take on him instead of the easier prey. He popped a thermal clip and jumped out of the path of one of the varren before firing another burst into a second one. But before he could finish it off, he was forced to dodge a third and a fourth attack. As he nearly avoided stumbling , Haugen realized that he wasn't going to keep this up very long.
"Cloak and get up there!" he heard someone shout over the squad intercom. It was Hofmann's voice. A few seconds later, his HUD showed an invisible ASOC operative with a machinegun marked as 'Phantom 1-4' emerge from the hole. Miller oriented himself for exactly half a second, threw his remaining fragmentation grenade in the general direction of the hulking monstrosities and then discharged Mav's machinegun at the mauling varren pack until his ammunition was depleted entirety. While some of the farmhands and even one of the farmers had still been alive when he'd opened up, nothing in the area they were being attacked in survived Miller's onslaught. Although it had just been ten seconds of carnage, the sight was enough to make some of the worst scenes he'd experienced during the Blitz seem tame in comparison. Where thirteen farmhands, two farmers and Ketho had just expected rescue a moment ago, there remained nothing but riddled and mangled corpses of varren and batarians. He watched the younger sergeant climb to his feet again, exchange the saddle-drum magazine of the machinegun and stare at his doing for a second. Then he fired off another burst into a still twitching varren, hitting both the creature and the deceased Ketho it was lying on.
When the dust cleared and nothing moved, he took a knee by the silo entrance and watched the remaining farmhands climb out with horrified looks on their faces. Although some struggled, he only helped the injured Mav up. Then, after T'Soni and Hofmann left the silo as its final occupants, he wordlessly turned towards the killing field.
Haugen didn't say anything. Neither did Hofmann or Mav. The ASOC team simply secured a perimeter and waited. Doctor T'Soni took one glance at the sight, her deactivated camo tarp was now covered in ash and varren blood, and exclaimed her horror at the sight. Then she quickly moved on to the surviving farmhands, who were either deadly silent or crying in terror right until they could board the two salarian stealth ships. Once inside, the outright crying of the five that had joined them had turned into quiet, horrified sobs. It was only when the doors of the STG vessel closed that T'Soni spoke up over the squad intercom and addressed the elephant in the room.
She looked at Miller.
"You didn't even try to save them. You did exactly what you said you would. You mowed them down as soon as you got the chance."
The ASOC soldier looked back at her.
Contrary to what Haugen had expected, the sergeant reacted calmly.
"They were dead anyways. Same as the poor sods around the spire," the operative replied before looking away again.
"You wouldn't say that if they were human, or turian, or salarian, or asari!" she accused in response.
Miller only offered her a shrug.
"Yes, I would. You ever seen a varren mauling? You don't walk away from that unless you're wearing something like this" he cracked his knuckles against the armor on his thighs and looked at the floor. "If you really got a bleeding heart for batarians, you should be thanking me right now. I spared them from getting eaten alive. That's more mercy than the batarians ever offered to the humans their varren tore to shreds during the Blitz."
"Those were innocent people you just killed. Goddess, most of them were children! How can you say something like that?"
This once more drew Miller's glance.
"Because we're at war and deaths like those a part of it. If you can't handle seeing brutal shit, I suggest you stay in your lab the next time around," then he shifted in his seat as if he was about to take a nap, still, he raised his voice ever so slightly. "Besides, they'd probably still be alive if your little panic attack on the field hadn't gotten us compromised. You certainly are the reason Mav's shoulder's messed up right now."
"Hey. Don't drag me into this, Miller," Mav stated cautiously.
"Yeah. Whatever," the younger soldier muttered. "I got another theory for you, Doc. I heard you like those. So here it goes. Maybe that thing you grabbed instead of trying to help Mav after he got shot saving your sorry ass also made them track us through the silos? Ever thought of that with that big brain of yours? Or do humans risking their lives to save your ass rank lower on the compassion scale than some fucking batarian farmers?" T'Soni was silent. "Yeah. Go figure. Maybe think about that for a bit instead of playing the fucking moral preacher all the fucking time."
Wait. She'd done what? Haugen shook his head. He'd solve the team conflict first. Miller might have had a point. Her panicked insistence on leaving, which Haugen still could only moderately explain to himself, had been the start of everything going haywire. But point or not, the sergeant was definitely stepping over a line now.
"Alright, Miller, you're about to go way out of line. Shut up."
"Roger that, Sir."
Now onto the next item on his list.
"What's he talking about? What did you grab?"
The asari picked up her backpack, rustled around in it and retrieved a black crystal shard that Haugen couldn't identify but was immediately weary off.
"What do you have there, Doc?" he asked cautiously. They weren't supposed to bring anything with them.
"An ammunition splinter. It was what the larger husks were firing at us on the hill. It was a spur of the moment decision, I figured it couldn't do any harm," she nearly stuttered in her explanation and let the piece fall back in her pack. Then she buried her helmet in her armored gauntlets. "Did they somehow track this? Was this my fault?"
"Whatever you picked up there, Doc, it definitely isn't the reason they made our entrance. That's all on me," Haugen sighed before coming back to his realization from just before the varren-husk had launched itself at him. "The husks on top were tracking the progress of their buddies underground. All they had to do was wait for us to emerge somewhere in the area," he threw his head back against his seat and looked at the napping operative to his left. If not for his screw up, he never would've had to do what he did. Therefore, the responsibility for what had happened was entirely on him. "So if you want to blame anyone for what happened to the batarians, don't look at Miller or yourself. Look at me."
He certainly could handle a couple more dead batarians on his conscience.
Codex: Hegemony Space
Stretching from the edge of the galaxy at the Alpha-Relay all the way to the Skyllian Verge and the Northern Terminus, Hegemony Space is, on paper, one of the largest portions of the galaxy governed by any single spacefaring species. Although sparse in inhabited planets and not nearly as densely populated as the likes of salarian, asari or turian space, the sovereign territory of the Batarian Hegemony consists of nearly as many systems as the territories of the 'big three' of Council Space and, due to breaches in Council Law, remains one of the few rapidly growing territories of this day and age. Similarly to the unchecked human expansion into the Attican Traverse prior to its membership with the Council, the lack of checks and balances on colonial rights assure that the Batarian Hegemony has been chipping away at the Terminus for decades, slowly but steadily subsuming formerly independent worlds into its empire.
While this does present the Hegemony with large territories to develop and harness, a factor that attributes to the many batarian-owned companies in fields of raw resource acquisition and food production, this expansion, combined with their past refusal of turian assistance and current exclusion from the Council, has also pushed the batarian military to the limits of its capabilities.
While the Internal and External Forces were capable of patrolling the most important pieces of their space and keeping a tight lock on Hegemony borders prior to the Skyllian Blitz, the crippling defeat batarian forces suffered at the hands of the unified Council militaries in the wake of their attack on human space have left the Hegemony's navy in a position where it can no longer afford to patrol large swaths of its territory. As a direct result, piracy and separatism in the Hegemony's outer territories have reportedly skyrocketed and only the core systems around Khar'shan remain as secure and locked down as before.
A/N:
So. After nearly three weeks of radio silence (and the breach of the magic 1100 and 1200 mark, nice job there) I herby deliver... a chapter-sized action scene. Ding ding!
While I realise that there are those among you who favor SV's non-action chapters, there really wasn't a way for me to do this chapter without it having a lot of action.
The end result of that is this:
A chapter where the good guys gun down a bunch of batarian teenagers getting eaten by reaper varren!
YAY!
... okay , no , on second thought, that's not something to cheer for.
Either way, this chapter actually has a number of pretty important details on it and acts as a sort of 'Loyalty Mission' for Liara (meaning that it's the segment of ME2 that's specifically about her character development, even if half the chapter isn't from her pov)... but most of them (including the bits and pieces that are actually for Captain Haugen (who still is the renegade background, in case anyone forgot that. I wouldn't blame you, he really has been getting the short stick when it comes to apperances compared to Shepard and Morneau) won't be relevant until we hit ME3.
So yeaaaaaaah.
Just bear with me when I tell you that I didn't describe how a bunch of vacation-jobbing batarian teens getting shot by an HSA command for the hell of it. We'll come around to it making sense outside of seeming like a stupid shock effect.
Other than that... Nothing to talk about because this is once more a "one-mission, one-chapter" chapter.
Next up, we'll be moving on to some spy action with Morneau, which will be... different and a (tad) more light-hearted. (at least comperativly. No gunned down batarian teenagers in the next chapter, that's a pinky promise)
Until then, I can only say that I hope you keep up you reviewing habits and that I hope you enjoyed this (entirely original) addition to Mass Effect 2's plot. It won't be the last.
For the record we're at 710 reviews, 1108 favorites and 1201 follows. (I don't know why, but for me the 1100/1200 marks are kind of a big deal. So yeah, thanks for that!)
See you around next time.