Chapter 2: The Beacon
Shepard led the way to the cargo train, she’d been briefed that they were picking up the beacon from platform 2 and Nihlus had died on platform 3. Finding the train was a simple matter of following the signs. Securing it was going to be a bit harder.
The train ran along a ravine, about 12 feet down from the level ground they’d been fighting on. Unfortunately, the admin building which overlooked the train had no obvious entrances, and butted up directly against the drop off, so there was no chance of flanking it from high ground on the same side as platform 3. On the other side, the midges showed a concrete bracket to anchor the train line, and which provided very little cover.
Which meant that they’d need to clear the train the hard way. Each train car had three pairs of brackets on them, solid chunks of metal dug directly into the material of the car, to keep cargo containers from shifting as the train moved. Seemingly every row of these braces had another pair of geth behind it, and they’d had the chance to dig in behind deployable shields, leaving the marines stuck between the rock of trying to shoot through them and the hard place of restricting fire to opportunistic shots as geth moved between cover.
Shepard indicated the maintenance ladder at the rear of the train. “Okay, after we clear the back car, take that ladder up to the anchoring line Alenko. Williams and I will cover you. Williams, you better in hand-to-hand or at range?”
“Just tell me what you need me to do, ma’am. I can…”
“Can the ego.” Shepard snapped. “I need to know what you can do, not what you’re willing to try to prove. You flex now and end up in the wrong place, we all end up dead and the mission ends up a failure. Now, range or close up work?”
Shepard saw the marine kicking herself. She knew she was occasionally too sharp with her subordinates when she was mad. She made a mental note to make things up to her later.
“I was one of the top-rated marksmen in my unit, ma’am.” She had, in fact, been in fierce competition for the top spot with a man who had been a good friend, and who was now dead.
“Fine.” She handed Williams her DMR and drew her pistol and knife. “You give us covering fire. Alenko, cover is sparse up there, so I’ll be taking point. I push them out of cover, you and Williams take them out. Then you consolidate our gains and give me biotic support for the next push”
From the high ground, sweeping the geth off the rear of the train was straightforward enough. Shepard and Williams pressed up, taking cover behind the cargo braces.
Williams went prone behind the lefthand row of braces, leaving her the maximally convenient line of fire while leaving her minimally exposed to geth return fire. She and Shepard began laying down cover fire while Alenko pulled himself up the ladder. Jane sent the midge swarm which had formerly been Nihlus’ to establish a perimeter around the maintenance area, in case the geth decided to contest their hold on it, and left her own swarm to make sure no geth came up behind them. This operation would be dicy enough as it was. If the geth successfully flanked them... She and Williams would be dead, and the mission would fail, though Alenko might get away, if he was lucky.
Shepard traded a nod with Alenko and they began to advance. Williams suppressed the geth while Shepard vaulted the braces, or occasionally risked ducking through the aisle.
Shepard hurtled another row of braces, Alenko staying behind and staying low.
Three rows of braces separated her from the front rank of geth. “Flip.” She said aloud.
“Heads.” Flere said, routing the word through Jane’s omni-tool. She vaulted the brace. The geth were focusing fire on her now, her shields had been knocked down more than she’d liked.
“Flip.”
“Heads.”
She vaulted another brace. More fire. More whining from her suit systems telling her she’d been a few stray kilojoules away from ending up like Jenkins.
“Flip.”
“Tails.”
She ducked through the aisle. Only one more row of no man’s land.
“Flip.”
“Tails.”
She went low, keeping her head down until she’d passed the last empty row. She started feeling impacts against her armor, but she was among the geth now. She knew better than to try to match them for muscle, even joint locks in her own powered armor wouldn’t work against their synthetic strength. So she didn’t go for anything fancy.
She plunged her knife into the chest of one of the geth, ducking under it as it’s flashlight eye died so it fell across her shoulders, giving her cover from the two on the other side of the aisle. A few pistol shots to the knees and hips of the other on her side, and it fell. She dispatched it with another shot, then she, with help from her armor’s own synthetic muscles, threw the mostly-shredded geth she’d been using as cover at the two on the other side of the aisle. Her follow-up pistol shots took one out, and Alenko got a biotic grip on a second, pulling it into the air where Williams could dispatch it easily.
So far, so simple. But the next step wouldn’t be quite as pleasant. Instead of another row of braces, there was a car connector. Tactically, that meant a wide open area for the geth to turn her into finely ground meat between her and the next piece of hard cover.
Well, the only way out, as they say, was through.
“Alenko, get me some grenades to cover this advance.” She ordered, sheathing her knife and palming a pair of grenades from her own belt as she did so.
She showed him 3 fingers from her pistol hand.
He nodded.
Two fingers.
“Flip.”
“Heads.”
One finger.
She thumbed the detonator on her first grenade and threw. Alenko did likewise.
She fired blindly as she vaulted the brace and sprinted across the open space. Her shields overloaded. She felt a series of hammerblows across her chestplate. A lance of pain shot through her left thigh. Instead of testing the leg, she half-rolled-half-sprawled against the brace on the other side of no man’s land, rolling her second grenade in amongst the geth in cover across the aisle from where she’d landed. There was a satisfying thump, and the gunfire peppering across her shins died.
She could hear more geth less than a foot away from her head, though. One of them tried to lean over the brace to deliver a coup de grace, but Williams put a shot through it’s flashlight instead. Shepard gave the marine an “okay” gesture, signaling both her appreciation and that she was okay. She pushed medi-gel through her armor systems, then tried putting as much weight on the leg as she could without exposing herself to fire. The leg seemed to hold. No bone trauma, just a flesh wound, the sort of thing medi-gel could almost completely fix almost instantly. She stood and shot the remaining geth on her side, before sinking back below the brace.
Fortunately, the geth tried to stem their losses. The next few rows of geth broke cover and charged. However, this put them at exactly the disadvantage the marines had been facing a moment before. Shepard leaned out from behind cover and opened fire. Williams and Alenko did likewise. The gunfire and biotics would have taken an appalling toll on the advancing geth, but they could have taken the rate of attrition, and likely overwhelmed the marines by sheer weight of firepower and numbers.
Flere had something to say on the matter, though. Routing their cyberwarfare suite through Shepard’s omni-tool, they let out a few… interesting signals. Using known exploits in geth software, the Vaastan tactical support drone injected the seed code for a spur of one of their own emulated human brains into the geth code base. In the following nanoseconds, it blossomed into a cut-down version of one of Flere’s own personalities, complete with their own creativity, talent for mischief, and utter lack of moral scruples. It turned out that the exploit which had let them into the geth networked consciousness was in a folder which was a relatively trivial privilege escalation away from their IFF systems.
The back rank of geth opened fire wildly, tearing away the shields and chewing into the relatively light rear armor of the rest of the unit. By the time the network’s counterhacking programs isolated the spur of Flere, the assault was broken. Polishing off the rear rank of geth was barely an inconvenience. Pushing through the cars the geth assault had left empty was also fairly simple.
Shepard waited for Williams and Kaidan to reposition closer to the new front, then “Flip.”
“Tails.”
Shepard went low across no man’s land and… “fuck me running.”
A geth easily half again the height of the others had stood up from behind the braces she was advancing on. It fired what seemed to be a rocket launcher at Kaidan, then charged her, it’s free hand glowing with a disruptor field. Trusting Alenko to get clear but not taking her eye off the enemy, she stepped back and drew her knife. They fenced for a moment, neither committing to an attack, knowing that a blow from either’s weapon would end the fight. Time was on Shepard’s side, but the geth had much less self-preservation instinct. It charged, trying to bully her into a corner where it could force her to commit.
“Trap card.” Shepard ordered, forgetting to subvocalize as she ducked swings from the geth.
The midges abandoned their perimeter and swarmed the remaining geth, who were suppressing Alenko and Williams, nestling as deep into their armor as they could or, perching on the emitters for the geth deployable shields, then detonating their battery packs. The explosions left fist-sized holes where the midges had once been, leaving many of the geth incapacitated, and the rest exposed to Williams’ fire. Alenko took advantage of the opening to push far enough forward that the close-combat geth fell within the range of his biotics. Just as it managed to box Shepard in and made a killing lunge, it was surrounded by a blue aura. It’s lunge went wide and it almost peacefully floated off away from the train, where Alenko dropped it several hundred feet down the ravine.
When Shepard was sure all her extremities were still intact, that the remaining geth were dead, and that Alenko had hopped down onto the train, she hit the controls. As the train set off, she slumped against the control console. “Well, that was fun. Williams, Alenko, you doing alright?”
The marines confirmed that they were uninjured and, after a few seconds sitting down to recover her breath, Shepard got back to her feet. She reholstered her pistol and took back her DMR. Sighting down the tracks, she started taking potshots at the geth welcoming committee.
Clearing the arrivals platform proved trivial next to taking the train. But the train was set below the main platform, so they’d need to push up through geth resistance to make it to where the beacon should be. And to make things even more exciting…
“Williams, you have an EOD cert?” Shepard asked as they looked down at the steadily-beeping bundle of grey tubes, wiring, and electronics.
“No, ma’am.” She replied.
“Well, then. Let’s see what I remember.”
A glance at the internals of the demolition charge showed that it was a hastily-repurposed civilian explosive. Which was good, a civilian explosive would fail-safe. A military one would fail-deadly. So the EOD training was pretty much overkill for these. Defusing them was basically a matter of grabbing a fistful of wires and pulling until the detonator timer stopped beeping. Evidently the geth hadn’t planned on live resistors. Jane chuckled to herself at the electrical engineering pun.
In a stroke of luck, the ramp itself was largely clear. Shepard approved of the rhythm they’d developed as a squad, with her rifle cutting down enemy specialists, drones, and other high-threat units, Alenko pushing forward to flank their positions, and Williams cleaning up what Alenko flushed out. She was always a little jumpy when she was operating without midge support, but the few remaining geth provided little resistance. The rest of the bombs were equally easily disarmed.
The three marines had to clear the platform the old fashioned way, which was intensely annoying, but they’d soon eliminated the remaining geth and corpse things, and moved in to secure the beacon.
“Was it supposed to be glowing like that?” Shepard asked.
Flere and Williams spoke at once, one of the downsides of the drone covercy.
“I can confirm that the beacon was not ‘glowing’ in the pictures or reports from the briefing. Williams confirms that it was not doing so when it was first excavated.” Flere caught her up when Williams stopped talking.
Shepard stepped away from the squad to call in their extraction as the marines curiously approached the beacon. When she was finished with the call, she waved Williams over, intending to ask her how she’d feel about being reassigned to the Normandy, now that the 212 was combat ineffective. Before the words could leave her mouth, a brilliant flash of green came from the beacon. It seemed to be dragging Alenko towards itself, like he was caught in some kind of biotic field. Without thinking, she rushed in, grabbing him by the waist. She locked her suit’s mag boots to the platform and half-pushed-half-threw Alenko clear of the beacon.
Which just left her, deep in it's pseudo-gravity well with no way to climb out. She cautiously disconnected one boot, trying to take a step back, but another pulse of green light brought a surge of pull with it, ripping her still-magnetized boot away from the deck and pulling her towards the beacon.
Laughing as millions died
Falling
Death
Ruin
Falling
Falling
Hope torn away
Infants slaughtered
Teeth
Falling
Civilizations set ablaze
Fangs
Claws
Blood
Falling
The vast stone of war
Burning
Falling
Falling
Falling
fall...
Nice. Good chapter, mate.