by Joan Jett
* * *
26 April 2183, Maji Surface
None of us were inclined to take any chances. Normandy landed its entire Marine detachment along with the Mako. The AFV rolled ahead under Ashley’s command, moving up a long mountain slope, taking out rocket turrets and concentrations of geth troopers. The rest of us followed on foot, searching for and destroying survivors under the blood-red light of Vamshi B.
This time we found the geth unprepared for our attack. We easily broke them up into small fireteam-sized units, clumsy and slow compared to the coordinated assault we had seen on Rayingri. The Marines took gleeful pleasure in flanking the geth, flushing them out of cover and hammering them into scrap. Kaidan, Tali, and I stayed close to the center of the formation, using our combined tactics to cover the Marines, ensuring the geth had no chance to recover. A long series of craters, born of high-explosive grenades and biotic warp detonations, marked our slow progress up the mountainside.
An armature-class unit waited at the top of the mountain, guarding an array of communications and data-storage gear that stood exposed to the stark light of the stars. Powerful as it was, it had no cover and could only fire in one direction at a time. Once all the smaller geth went down, we could fan out around the armature, keeping under cover, wearing its shields down from a distance. Finally Ashley brought the Mako out of cover and finished it off with a blast from the main gun.
For Normandy it stood as a great victory, especially after Tali tapped into the geth data core and recovered all manner of useful intelligence. Everyone celebrated as we returned to the extraction point.
Everyone but me. I spent the three hours of the battle wrecking geth, as coldly and efficiently as I could. I said nothing to anyone except in response to an order or a direct question. Even when we finished, I felt nothing but icy anger. I began to understand how Shepard felt about batarians. If I could have thrown a switch and destroyed every geth in existence, I might have been tempted to do it.
The blood didn’t thaw in my veins until I returned to the Normandy and was told Shepard had regained consciousness. I flew up to the medical bay without bothering to remove my armor or sidearm. There he lay, propped up into a half-seated position on his bed, sipping water through a straw while Dr. Chakwas used her instruments to examine him.
He glanced at me with his sky-blue eyes and smiled. And suddenly the universe seemed right again.
Chapter 27 : Ranging for Revenge
3 May 2183, Grissom System Space
Normandy dropped out of FTL, the massive blue bulk of Notanban off to one side, its large moon Solcrum looming just ahead. I watched the sky on a video feed, replacing the Mako’s exterior view.
“No significant drift,” came Joker’s voice from the bridge. “ETA just under five minutes.”
“Passive sensors confirm what we got from the geth archive on Maji,” said Shepard, also reporting from the bridge. “The main geth fleet is in orbit around the gas giant, but there’s some kind of coordinating signal being broadcast from this facility on Solcrum. Take that out and the Fifth Fleet has a clear shot.”
“Roger that, Commander. Don’t worry, we’ll get the job done,” said Kaidan from the weapons console.
“See to it, Kaidan. Hell, do a good enough job, I’ll give you Normandy and retire to the beach to drink Mai-Tais in peace and quiet.”
“That won’t work, sir. Give me Normandy and I’ll be in charge of approving your retirement papers.”
“Oh.” Silence for a moment. “Well, I’m sure I can think of something.”
Solcrum grew before us at a tremendous rate. Suddenly it no longer seemed a distant pearl in space. Instead it became a massive globe, looming gray and pockmarked in our path. A landscape with a frighteningly close horizon. Mountains reaching up to swat us out of the sky.
The Mako deployed. Ashley slammed the thrusters into full as we plummeted toward the surface. We still landed very rough, as she tried to minimize our time exposed to geth sensors.
“There are active sensors up ahead, but I don’t think we were detected,” I reported from the EWS console. “Joker’s piloting was extraordinary as usual. The geometry of our landing had us under the horizon from the geth facility the entire time.”
“Good,” said Kaidan with satisfaction. “Take us in, Ash.”
Ashley seemed to be a slightly better driver than Shepard. Of course, local conditions may have helped. Various ices made up most of the moon’s bulk, but the primary star’s heat had boiled away almost all the volatiles within a few kilometers of the surface, leaving behind a smooth surface of silicate rock.
Something about the active sensor traces bothered me. I ran a filtering algorithm to parse out different components of the signal. “Kaidan, I think there are armature-class units on the surface up ahead.”
“How many?”
“Hard to determine. Two at least.”
Kaidan called up a topographical map of the terrain in front of us. After a few moments, he glanced up at the exterior view and then turned to Ashley. “Turn left, fifteen degrees. Take us in where the crater rim forms that little peak. Stop right behind it.”
“Aye-aye,” she answered, turning as directed.
When we stopped, less than a kilometer from the geth facility, Kaidan turned to me. “We’re still not detected?”
“Not as far as I can tell. I think I can make a more definite report. There are two armatures down inside the crater, and several smaller geth platforms.”
“All right. Ash, Liara, and I will stay with the Mako. Garrus, Tali, Wrex, I want you all to get out here and move quietly up to the rim of the crater wall. Take up positions with sniper rifles. We’re going to move out into the crater at high speed and attract the attention of those armatures. As soon as we engage, start hitting them from behind, but be careful. Don’t expose yourselves to unnecessary risk.”
Kaidan waited for our friends to take up positions, Garrus waving down to us from his selected spot just out of sight from the geth facility. Then he nodded to Ashley.
The Mako roared into action, rounding the small peak and flying over the crater wall, the wheels leaving the surface for a few moments as we came into view.
I immediately saw the effect of weapons fire on our kinetic barriers. Several troopers attacked us with pulse rifles, two large bipedal geth fired rockets, and the armatures began to power up their plasma cannons. Ashley kept us moving at top speed, circling just inside the crater’s rim, jinking from time to time to dodge rocket or plasma strikes.
Kaidan traversed the turret, following one of the armatures and hitting it repeatedly with both the main gun and the coaxial cannon.
I saw the moment when our friends popped up over the rim wall and began taking shots at the geth from behind. They concentrated on the smaller geth platforms, hoping to knock them out quickly and leave the armatures without support. I had difficulty seeing how effective they were, but I did see one trooper, than another, suddenly twist and fall in the moon’s light gravity.
“Kaidan, one of the armatures is turning toward the snipers!” I tapped at my console to indicate which one.
“Ash, hard right.”
The turret traversed, both weapons hammering away as intensely as Kaidan could manage.
The armature suddenly wobbled, its shields down, and then it collapsed.
Wham! The Mako heeled over to the right, and my eyes widened as I saw the kinetic barriers simply collapse. The remaining armature must have scored a direct hit with its plasma cannon. I opened a console I rarely had occasion to use, and began to work on damage control.
“Liara?”
“The list is too long, Kaidan. Extensive damage.”
“The drive train is still working, the gun is still firing,” said Ashley.
“Point taken. Ash, whip us around the far side of the facility from that other armature, then do a hard hundred-eighty-degree turn and double back. We’ll see if we can surprise it.”
The Mako maneuvered
violently, twice, and the enemy’s fire slackened. I used a few moments of quiet to improvise madly on the damage-control board. We heard a loud hiss and the lights flickered, as fire extinguishers activated in the electrical compartment.
“Damn. That armature is shrewd,” observed Kaidan.
“Big geth are smarter, LT. It was worth a try.”
The turret swiveled, making a loud grinding noise along the way, and the main gun fired once, then twice. The lights flickered again, hard, as Kaidan barely dodged another plasma bolt.
Suddenly the armature seemed to become confused, shaking in place and ceasing to track our movements. I was puzzled at first, but then I saw a bulky figure standing on the crater rim, silhouetted against the blue glow of Notanban.
“The armature’s shields are out!” I shouted. “Wrex hit it with a biotic pull and it’s lost control. Take it down!”
Kaidan pounced on his weapons console, and the main gun crashed again. The armature took a direct hit and flew into pieces.
“All targets down,” I announced.
“That was a little too close,” muttered Kaidan.
The snipers climbed down the crater wall. Well, at least Garrus and Tali climbed. Wrex simply jumped down, giving us the unusual sight of a krogan flying gracefully through space for long moments, kicking up a great plume of dust when he landed. Meanwhile Kaidan and I worked with the Mako’s automatic repair systems. Before long we had all the critical systems up and running again, especially including the kinetic barriers. We would limp to our extraction point, but at least we could fight again if we had to.
All of us convened at the entrance to the geth habitat. I found it strange to see such a thing here, as geth usually didn’t worry about raw vacuum. Still, the surface of Solcrum suffered great extremes of heat and radiation, and I suspected that even the geth would want shelter for sensitive equipment. We saw no airlock, only a simple hatch in the habitat’s side, big enough for one of the armatures to enter or leave. Tali hacked the lock and we moved inside.
The geth opened fire the moment we appeared, a whole squad of troopers and several larger bipedal platforms. Worse, we had no cover to speak of, nothing but a few pieces of machinery spaced around the outside of the central well. Our numbers was the only thing that saved us. The geth failed to focus their fire, and after the first second or two we spread out to both sides, moving as fast as we could to avoid presenting a concentrated target.
Seeing little chance to take cover, Ashley, Garrus, and Wrex simply attacked the geth. The krogan in particular went into a roaring charge, as irresistible as an avalanche. His shields went down, he took hits to his armor, but nothing slowed him, and the geth he attacked simply crumpled when he struck. Ashley and Garrus showed less power but more grace, almost dancing their way across the open floor, turning so that no weak spots on their shields had time to give way.
Meanwhile the rest of us tried a new trick. Tali’s shields were already as tough as steel, and mine were not much weaker. I put up a barrier, and Kaidan stood close at hand so my biotic protection covered all three of us. Thus armored, with the geth distracted by our more aggressive partners, we could apply our usual tactics from out in the open. Tali’s overload charges knocked out geth shields, Kaidan’s biotics sent unprotected geth flying through the air, and then my own warp fields lanced out to turn them into so much scrap metal.
“Just a moment,” said Tali after a few targets went down and the pressure began to decline. “I want to try something.”
Kaidan and I waited while the quarian did something elaborate with her omni-tool. Suddenly one of the geth troopers hesitated, turned . . . and began firing on its own partners.
“Hah!” she gloated. “I thought I could get into their friend-or-foe algorithms.”
“Nice going,” said Kaidan. “Now do it again.”
Before long, complete confusion ruled among the geth and we could seize the advantage. One last challenge remained: a very large bipedal platform with blood-red coloring and very tough shields and armor. It fired on Garrus, taking down his shields and almost breaking through his armor, but then Wrex charged in on its flank and knocked it to the ground. Ashley applied a shotgun at point-blank range, and then all was quiet.
Kaidan took charge. “Tali, Liara, find the transmitters so we can plant the demo charges. Ash, Garrus, Wrex, police up the place and look for anything else that might be of use. Make it snappy. They may already have reinforcements on the way.”
Tali and I soon found the source of the control signal we needed to disable. While Kaidan and Ashley placed demo charges, Tali continued to scan through the geth equipment. I noticed when she suddenly stopped, tapping furiously at her omni-tool.
“Keelah,” she breathed.
I moved over to her. “What is it, Tali?”
“It’s an archive,” she said. “Not just military or technological information, but cultural data. This must be a backup for all the geth runtimes currently in the fleet out in space.”
“Do geth have culture?”
“Apparently they do. Look at this.”
She called up an image with accompanying audio track: a beautiful bipedal creature standing on a stage, looking a little like an asari, a little like a human, a little like a turian, but not entirely like any of those. She (it was definitely a she) sang a melody of heart-stopping purity and sadness, followed by silence.
“What is that?” I wondered.
“A quarian,” she said softly. “From the time before the geth rebellion, while we still lived on Rannoch without any need for environment suits. I recognize the song. Shala’Raan, a friend of my family, she used to sing it to me when I was small.”
“Why would the geth keep it?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “This isn’t like anything I would have expected from the geth. If there’s more here . . .”
“Kaidan!” I called.
He turned toward us. “What’s up, Liara?”
“Tali has found something.”
The quarian explained quickly. “This is information critical to the Migrant Fleet, Kaidan. We’ve been searching for insight into the geth for centuries. What their culture is like if they have any, what their motives are, how they might have evolved since they drove us into exile. If I could download some of this . . .”
Kaidan frowned. “Tali, we may not have time.”
“Please, Kaidan. This could make an enormous difference for my people.”
“All right. Get to work downloading all you can. But if I call, you have to come right away.”
“Thank you!” She hurried to begin work.
“Alenko to Normandy,” Kaidan called. “What’s the situation? Do we have a little more time?”
“Not much,” came Shepard’s voice from the ship. “That facility must have gotten an alarm out. We see several geth ships peeling off from the main body and heading this way. ETA about ten minutes.”
“Time until the Fifth Fleet arrives?”
“About the same. You don’t want to be on the ground when all that comes down.”
“Understood. We’ll be ready.” Kaidan turned. “Five minutes, Tali, and then we have to blow this place and run.”
“I can download a lot of data in five minutes,” said the quarian.
Her word was good. Within five minutes she had filled her omni-tool with data, all properly scanned for geth malware and compressed as tightly as it would go. She had also filled mine, Kaidan’s, Garrus’s, and half of Ashley’s before Kaidan ruled that we simply had no more time.
We ran for the entrance. The moment the hatch closed behind us, Kaidan triggered the explosives. We didn’t hear anything, but felt the sharp concussion of the explosion as a shockwave passing through the ground.
All of us piled into the Mako. Ashley powered up the engine, engaged the drive train . . . and nothing happened.
“Liara?”
I called up the damage-control interface. “Unclear. Some of the diagnostic se
nsors in the undercarriage aren’t responding.”
“Spirits,” cursed Garrus. He jumped to the hatch and flung himself back outside, Tali following right behind him.
I tried not to think about them working on the drive train while the power plant was still engaged.
“Would it help if I got out and pushed?” inquired Wrex.
“Liara, what do you get on circuits 23-Alpha through 23-Epsilon?” Garrus demanded.
I touched controls. “Nothing at all. Completely dark.”
“Okay, that eliminates a bunch of possibilities. Tali . . .”
“On it,” said the quarian. “Come on, you little bosh’tet.”
Suddenly my panel lit up, whole banks of diagnostic sensors reporting for the first time. “There! Circuits 23-Alpha through 23-Gamma are red, but the rest are showing green.”
“Easy fix,” said Tali.
We waited for ten seconds, then twenty, and then my panel turned green across the board.
“Done!” shouted Garrus. “Get ready, Ash!”
“Too late,” said Kaidan calmly.
I glanced at the external view. “Oh, Goddess.”
Three geth ships rose over the horizon, moments away from dropping enough combat platforms to overwhelm us.
The hatch slammed behind Garrus and Tali. “Go!”
“Roger that,” said Ashley, flinging the Mako into forward motion.
The dropships soared up into the sky, almost reaching the zenith . . . and then one exploded in a blaze of plasma.
“Get ‘em, Shepard!” shouted Ashley in triumph.
Normandy soared across the sky, firing its main guns at another dropship. The attack instantly smashed through the geth ship’s kinetic barriers and sent it raining down in fragments on the surface of Solcrum. The third dropship veered off and fled frantically for the horizon.
“You’re clear,” said Shepard’s voice over the radio. “You cut that a little close, Kaidan.”
“Just giving you the opportunity to be big damn heroes, Normandy.”