Deep Space: An Epic Sci-Fi Romance

by Joan Jett

  “What happened to the site?”

  “The whole thing reset as soon as you disengaged from it. Everything looked fine when we left.” He reached into a pocket and held out a small object, the Prothean cylinder Sha’ira had given me. “We recovered this.”

  “Good. Someday I want to go back there and study the site in more detail. There’s no limit to what it might teach us.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw your people, primitive humans, as they were while the Protheans were watching them.” I shook my head. “It would take a long time to explain. I don’t think it’s relevant to our mission in any case.”

  “You’ll have to tell me more when we have the time. For now, you need to rest up and be ready. The data module we recovered from Eletania gave us a breakthrough. We know where Saren and Sovereign were about a week ago, while the Fifth Fleet prepared to attack the geth.”

  “Where?”

  “Feros.”

  Chapter 30 : Breaking the Siege

  9 May 2183, Zhu’s Hope/Feros

  “Feros Control, this is SSV Normandy, asking for a vector and a berth, over.”

  No response from the ground, as Normandy continued to approach the coordinates we had for the Feros spaceport. I could see Joker glancing up at Shepard, then back to his control panel.

  “Feros Control, this is SSV Normandy, asking for a vector and a berth, over.”

  I looked out one of the viewports, and saw possibly the strangest habitable planet we had yet visited.

  Feros had an atmosphere composed of a hospitable mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. Unfortunately the atmospheric pressure at surface level, far below the world-girdling cloud cover, rose to over five times the habitable standard. Anyone unlucky enough to find themselves on the surface without protective gear would expire of oxygen narcosis in minutes.

  On the other hand, during their Third Age the Protheans had come to Feros and built enormous skyscrapers and arcologies, soaring several kilometers into the sky, creating space in which millions of their people could safely live. The Prothean extinction had destroyed most of these structures, but dozens remained more or less intact.

  The Feros colony consisted of a few hundred humans, clinging to the upper floors of three adjacent Prothean buildings. ExoGeni Corporation scientists made up most of the population, there to study the unusual life-forms existing in and below the cloud layer. Reading between the lines, I could guess that the results so far had been disappointing. No profitable breakthroughs had appeared in the news, nothing to justify the expense of supporting a colony in such a strange and remote place.

  “Feros Control, this is SSV Normandy, asking for a vector and a berth, over.”

  Suddenly we heard a burst of static from the radio, and a male human voice. “. . . Zhu’s Hope . . . under siege . . . synthetics . . . come quickly.”

  I frowned. “The geth are still attacking the colony?”

  “Joker, there’s no sign of Sovereign?” demanded Shepard.

  “None at all,” Joker stated. “Best guess is that Saren has already come and gone.”

  “Then why are the geth still here and attacking? Simply to eliminate the human population?”

  “Got me, Commander.”

  “The other question that comes to my mind,” I interrupted, “is why Saren would be interested in this planet at all? What objective would an attack here help him attain?”

  “No idea. It is a Prothean world. Maybe he was looking for a clue to the location of the Conduit.”

  “We’re speculating for lack of data,” I said, dissatisfied.

  “You’re right.” Shepard turned away from the sight of Feros looming ahead. “Kaidan, I want the full Marine detachment armed and ready, up here in ten minutes. Get Garrus, Wrex, and Tali up here too. Assume a hot landing zone. As soon as Normandy has a berth, we’re going to storm ashore and secure a beachhead.”

  “Aye-aye,” said Kaidan, turning to rush for the staging deck.

  “I had better go arm myself as well,” I murmured.

  “Liara . . .”

  “Don’t say it, Shepard. My place is with you.”

  “Not in the front lines. Not in an assault situation,” he said. It was an order.

  “Aye-aye,” I said, echoing Kaidan.

  I ran.

  As it happened, we met no geth in the makeshift docking bay when Normandy arrived. Shepard, Ashley, and Petty Officer Bayard led the assault, at first meeting no resistance. That gave us time to position ourselves and be ready for any counterattack.

  Tali and I had just emerged from the airlock, the last to deploy, when the geth arrived in force. A rolling series of explosions gave us our first warning, as a barrage of rockets slammed into the cover used by Shepard’s front line. Fortunately the geth had no line of sight on the Normandy’s airlock, else they would have targeted the ship at its weakest point. As it was, Tali and I had to scramble from cover to cover to reach a position where we could aid in the defense. Behind us, the airlock closed and the ship’s kinetic barriers went up.

  We eventually settled behind a stack of crates labeled EXOGENI – BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS – SEALED. From that position we could peek out and see the geth up ahead, fiercely engaged with Shepard and his leading squad of Marines. Garrus had somehow clambered up onto the stack, making a tiny sniper’s nest for himself at the top.

  “Better keep your heads down,” he advised us. “The geth have a sniper somewhere back there, and it’s very talented.”

  I looked out, and immediately saw a laser targeting me. I ducked back at once. “I see what you mean.”

  “We can’t support Shepard if we can’t see the battlefield,” complained Tali.

  Garrus only made a one-handed gesture, demanding patience. Suddenly he turned his sniper rifle a few degrees to the left and fired. “Scratch one! Ladies, your wish is my command.”

  We went to work.

  Tali used her new techniques for hacking the geth friend-or-foe protocols, turning them against one another and sowing chaos in their lines. I couldn’t coordinate biotic combinations with Kaidan or Wrex, but that didn’t prevent me from warping any geth whose shields came down. From his perch Garrus aimed and fired, aimed and fired, striking from above like some ancient predator-deity.

  “Get ready to push through!” shouted Shepard over the radios. “By the numbers, even numbers first. Charge!”

  Shepard had an even number, of course. He led half of his Marines forward through the declining geth fire, seizing ten meters of the deck before diving behind new cover. Then he and his partners laid down their own fire as the odd numbers ran forward, led by Kaidan. A few moments longer, and Shepard and his team moved forward again, almost reaching the geth line. Then the odd numbers again.

  Wrex apparently had an odd number. A krogan roar echoed off the distant roof of the docking bay. He rushed forward, passing Kaidan and the other human Marines. Two shotgun blasts and a vicious krogan body-check knocked down one of the bright red “juggernaut” platforms. Then Kaidan’s people were right in the midst of the geth, the enemy line was dissolving in confusion, and Shepard’s team came charging in just behind. Within moments, no geth at all existed in that space.

  We convened at the far side of the docking bay and took stock.

  “Casualties?” asked Shepard.

  “A lot of minor wounds, but Chase and Fredericks are the

  only ones seriously hurt,” reported Kaidan.

  Shepard looked around, assessing our strength. “Bayard, get Chase and Fredericks back to the Normandy for medical. You, Müller, and Dubyansky will secure the docking bay. The rest of us are going to push forward to the Zhu’s Hope settlement on the other side of this structure.”

  A chorus of aye-ayes, a rush of organized activity. Within five minutes, Shepard led our squad forward.

  We moved through corridors and climbed stairs, following signs placed by the human colonists. I looked around as we advanced. The ancient structure had
decayed badly, all bare stone and metal beams, with no sign of Prothean artifacts or technology. Even so, I stood in awe of the engineering skill that had built this edifice to last for so many empty millennia.

  We encountered geth here and there along our path. Some were bipedal, ordinary troopers, stragglers from the battle in the docking bay. Others were the odd wall-clinging, leaping platforms that lurked in stairwells and struck from ambush. None of these posed any serious threat to our group. Shepard, Ashley, and Garrus led the way, usually disposing of the geth before any of the rest of us had to take a hand.

  Finally we emerged into the Zhu’s Hope colony.

  The Prothean architects had placed a broad terrace on the side of the building, perhaps fifty meters wide and thirty deep. In Prothean times it might have been enclosed, but now it was open to the sky. The human colonists had erected pre-fab shelters on the terrace for housing and work space. A small freighter starship, the Borealis, rested in a plaza at the center of the colony.

  As we moved out onto the terrace, we saw teams of colonists working frantically to repair electrical and water systems, moving concrete blocks to shore up defenses, or standing guard with a mismatched array of civilian and military-grade weapons. Few of them took any notice of us, which struck me as very strange. Even if the colonists were in the last extremity of desperation, surely the arrival of a heavily armed squad of strangers, including four non-humans, would attract some attention?

  Apparently not. Shepard had to deliberately accost one of the colonists before anyone would take notice. She looked us over, and then directed us to the colony’s leader, a man named Fai Dan, at the far end of the terrace.

  We passed the Borealis on our way to meet Fai Dan. I examined the freighter closely as we went by: a hulk, obviously badly damaged, unable to provide power or help the colonists evacuate. It occurred to me to wonder what the ship was doing on the terrace instead of in the spaceport facility. Perhaps it had been caught and damaged in the initial geth attack, forced to land where it now rested.

  Fai Dan turned out a short, slight human male, with dark skin and craggy features. When we arrived, we found him deeply engaged in conversation with another human, this one a rather attractive female in black body armor with an ExoGeni logo on the breast.

  “Fai Dan? I’m Commander Shepard of the SSV Normandy. We came in response to your hail.”

  “A little late, aren’t you?” said the female human accusingly.

  “Arcelia. These people have come to help.” Fai Dan turned to us. “I’m glad you’re here, Commander. The geth have been pressing us very hard.”

  “Do you have any idea why the geth are attacking you?”

  “No, Commander. They arrived a few days ago and have been laying siege to us ever since. We’ve lost contact with the main body of the colony over at the ExoGeni building . . .”

  A roaring noise from above us. A geth dropship appeared, approaching the upper levels of the building, behind and above the terrace. Suddenly we heard the warbling sound of geth beyond the edge of the terrace, distant but threatening.

  “The geth are in the tower!” said the woman named Arcelia, unslinging her weapon and rushing to a nearby barricade.

  “I need militia reinforcements over here!” shouted Fai Dan. “Protect the heart of the colony!”

  “We can do better than that,” Shepard decided. “Normandy, follow me.”

  With Shepard and Ashley in the lead, we rushed past the colonists’ barricade, passing under a wide archway and back into the corridors and tunnels of the Prothean structure.

  We soon encountered geth in twos and threes, filtering down through the tunnels to find the human colony.

  Shepard barely slowed down. He had upgraded his shields, and switched from his usual sniper rifle to a high-powered shotgun for close-in work. He simply charged any geth he saw, hammering them flat with blasts from the shotgun, sometimes lashing out in a vicious close-quarters attack with his combat knife. Then he moved on, supremely assured that the rest of us would finish destroying any geth still active in his wake. With Ashley and Wrex right behind him, he had every reason to be confident. For long minutes, not a single geth survived for Kaidan, Garrus, Tali, or me to deal with. All we had to do was run to keep up with our vanguard of warriors.

  Finally we approached the highest floors of the building. Shepard slowed and ordered us to gather together.

  “I think one more landing and we’ll be adjacent to the space where they’re dropping in and consolidating.” He took a deep breath, releasing the adrenaline high that had carried him through the past ten minutes. “No more of those run-and-gun tactics.”

  “Good,” rumbled Wrex. “I nearly had a heart attack at least three times, watching you fight like that.”

  “I was just employing krogan strategy,” said Shepard, grinning.

  “And we appreciate the emulation, but you’re not built for it.”

  “It worked.” Shepard became serious. “Best guess is that the geth have a beachhead just above us and about twenty meters ahead. They will have gotten word from the platforms we destroyed on our way up here. We can expect massed weapons fire, possibly rocket attacks and assault drones.”

  Tali held up her omni-tool and nodded. “I can confirm that, Shepard. There’s lots of EM radiation just ahead, on the bands geth use for inter-platform communication.”

  “Okay, here’s where we go back to the usual playbook. Our objective is to give them such a bloody nose that they think twice before attacking Zhu’s Hope again. We move up to the edge of their occupied space, find cover, and wear them down. Make sure your cover is solid and remember the third dimension. That dropship may still be up there.”

  We moved forward cautiously. The end of our corridor opened up onto a long curved gallery. At one time the gallery must have been closed off, an interior space. At some point the roof had collapsed, strewing the floor with massive stone chunks and exposing the entire gallery to the sky. There hovered the geth dropship, still placing platforms in the gallery when we arrived.

  We found plenty of cover at the entrance to the gallery. We deployed and got to work.

  Suddenly the geth had a turn at suffering a siege. Pent up in the gallery, with no obvious alternative exits, they had no choice but to face us and fight. They lay down heavy weapons fire with the occasional rocket, but our cover was strong enough. For a moment I worried about a set of three assault drones, which flew through the air and tried to fire down behind our cover. Then Wrex took positive pleasure in knocking the drones out of the air with his shotgun.

  One by one the geth went down, usually to Shepard or Garrus as they applied their sniper rifles to devastating effect. Tali, Kaidan, and I used our practiced techniques to knock out several platforms as well.

  The last few geth took to cover, pulling back into the gallery. Shepard, Ashley, and Wrex moved forward in pursuit, always watching to make sure the dropship had no way to fire upon them.

  Something bothered me about this development.

  The geth are suddenly behaving more intelligently, I realized. And that means . . .

  I reacted just a moment too late. I heard a sound behind us and whirled, in time to see an enormous white Prime platform emerge from the corridor from which we had entered the gallery. How it had gotten around us, I had no idea. Perhaps it was a straggler from the battle for the docking bay.

  In any case, as soon as it appeared it opened fire. Kaidan and I dove to opposite sides, frantically seeking cover.

  Tali had been concentrating on an overload charge for a geth at the other end of the gallery. She reacted to the new threat just a moment too slowly. She spun and fell under the Prime’s fire.

  “Shepard, there’s a Prime behind us!” shouted Kaidan. He and I moved to either side, trying to catch the enormous geth in crossfire.

  Of course, even a perfectly executed crossfire isn’t of much effect when the two of you are using nothing but military-grade pistols. The Prime seemed not to ev
en notice.

  It turned toward Kaidan . . . and then rocked as two heavy rounds struck it on the head and upper torso. Sniper rifle fire, from Shepard and Garrus. Its shields flared but stayed up, barely.

  Tali lay small and quiet on the floor, but I had learned a few tricks from her over the past few weeks. I tapped furiously at my omni-tool, and triggered an overload charge at the Prime. Already battered by our fire, its shields finally went down.

  Kaidan saw the opportunity and applied a massive telekinetic lift. The Prime rose helplessly into the air, drifting up toward the gap in the gallery’s ceiling. The others began to concentrate their fire on it as it drifted.

  “Get down!” I shouted through the general channel, and threw a biotic warp.

  Wham!

  The detonation threw Kaidan and me to the floor, but then we heard nothing but an echoing silence.

  I looked up in time to see the geth dropship rise higher into the atmosphere, turning to fly to the northwest. I thought for a moment, and realized the ExoGeni headquarters complex was in another Prothean tower in that direction.

  Kaidan rushed over to Tali, checking her vital signs and applying first aid. “She’s alive, but unconscious and hurt bad.”

  “Is her suit breached?” I asked.

  “Definitely.”

  “That’s bad. Quarians have terrible immune systems. Exposed to the open air, there’s no telling what kind of risk she might have for infection.”

  “The geth are gone, and we’re safe for the moment,” said Shepard as he approached us. “Let’s make a stretcher and evac Tali back to the Normandy.”

  I shot him a worried look, and switched to his private channel. “Three casualties already, Shepard, and Tali is in serious danger. This planet is a death-trap, and Saren doesn’t even seem to be here.”

  “He was here. We need to find out why.” Shepard gave me a determined stare. “I think I need to have a talk with Fai Dan.”