Massive Disaster 5-30B (Patreon)

“Coil four still lagging the sync window—”“I see it, I see, already compensating.” Even under Tali’s deft and skilled hands, the reactor was still sluggish to start.

Zedd couldn’t fault it for that. Not that it knew enough to act against it, but if his internals were crawling with oversized space bugs — of the murderous variety — unseen since the days of the Roman Empire, he wouldn’t be all that eager to wake up either.

“Priming sequence holding.” Tali’Zorah had the startup sequence spread across three haptic panels, orange glow bright and steady as her hands prepped the injection staging. 

“Helium-3 feed pressure climbing…”“I see that as well, Zedd.”“Well, you shouldn’t be looking. That’s my job.” His job — self-assigned of course, unofficial and absolutely necessary — was to stand at her shoulder, his eyes on the load numbers so the quarian could keep hers on the task at hand. The engineer didn’t answer him back, simply grunting as she focused back on the reactor booting up in stages, the whole board a Christmas tree of amber struggling to achieve a state of solid green. It hadn’t actually taken them that long at all to find the primary reactor, with or without the assistance of the flickering VI. Corporate paranoia dictated that the most volatile piece of machinery in the place needed a manual override. All they had to do was follow the thickest of the power cables through the dark. Please don’t blow up. I’d rather not end up atomized this far from home.

The floor hummed all at once as all of Peak 15 took a breath, the massive eezo core housed in the chamber right below them spinning up in full force. Deck plating shook under his dark blue soles, strips of halogen above their heads burning to life through once-dark corridors; racing away from the reactor level in every direction, merciless and sodium-bright.

“Good work, Tee.” “Thank you.”Emergency signage flicked on from dead gray to a proper green and, one by one, emergency bulkheads retracted their deadbolts with heavy slides, the arteries of the mountain finally unlocking. On the console beside them all, Mira’s hologram was the last to come to life properly, the digital ghost recompiling piecemeal as static dropped out of her in sheets.Sections locked in properly, the once-buffering face now resolving into something properly whole, steady and almost pretty for the first time. “Primary power restored.” Crystalline audio sounded off through local speakers, the voice as clean as the VI now looked with no crackle to be found. “Network functionality at thirty-four percent. Tram network reconnecting.”“Look at us.” Zedd patted the quarian on the back. “Fixing corporate infrastructure for free. We should invoice somebody.”“W-will they pay?” For some reason, Tali actually seemed interested in the idea.“Doubt it.” Wrex rumbled from the gathered set of six non-technical crewmembers, the krogan’s arms folded. “Might even sue you for touching their property.”

Tali’s shoulders slumped as Zedd looked over at Wrex, unable to deny that possibility but also not a fan of it either. “See, that’s the kind of energy we don’t nee—”

Zedd’s words died in his throat, all else disappearing from his thoughts as well as his blue lenses flared red. The map projected on his HUD blared a warning all over, every containment alert suddenly announcing a threat.Nothing sequential or even a failure cascade he could track or manage, this was sudden and all-at-once, sector after sector flipping into the worst case scenario. Oh, fuck no.“Warning.” As if to make thing’s worse, Mira’s voice changed as the VI spoke again, all that administrative politeness draining to nowhere and replaced with something that spoke with actual priorities. “Magnetic containment failure detected in sectors three, five, eight, and thirteen.”

“Failure?” John Shepard looked the way Zedd felt, horror flooding the commander’s face.

Zedd’s right hand went to work, what few security logs he could get access to ripped open with little care or fanfare. “...fuckin’ power surge.”“What about the power surge, Zedd?” Tali’s question almost went unheard and it took the quarian almost screaming it at him — a three-fingered hand gripping him arm — to bring him back down to earth. “What about the power surge?”“...booting the primary reactor manually and without ‘official’ authorization did a hard reset on the locks.” Zedd bit back a sigh. “It only lasted for three seconds but that’s still three seconds without power to the magnetic lock systems before they got a reboot. Am I right, Mira?”“You are correct, custodial staff.”

“I thought you said seventy-eight percent!” The man’s sister nearly punched the wall beside her in a rage. “Not ninety-fucking-nine!”Zedd wasn’t sure how to tell Shepard that he was pretty sure Binary Helix had left this as an intentional possibility. If a quarantine was taking place anyway and somebody wanted to get access to systems without authorization, what better way to get rid of them than to let the monsters they were trying to get info on out at them, right?

Right.As if to add injurty to injury, a second row of sectors — layered sub-basement areas — went red under the first, Zedd’s eye beginning to twitch behind his glasses as he watched them flood his field of vision. “Oh, there’s that cascade I was hoping for. So great!”“De-!” Ashley made a noise that was neither tough nor soldier-like. “Define cascade!”

Somewhere below their feet, a heavy door lost pressure — the deep pneumatic sigh audible through the floor as several tons of composite decided its job was done. Then another.

…fuck.Then a third.It didn’t stop there, more and more stuttering open in overlapping sighs as Zedd’s ears struggled to keep track of each one — six, eight… twelve.

Twelve doors gave up one after another, all through the structure, above and below, and at their sides. Doors Zedd knew without a doubt were important for several reasons, their maintained wellbeing being a major one of those. The starvation protocol needed the doors. The doors needed the containment fields. The fields needed the mag-lock systems.

His eyes twitched again. We turned the locks back on properly. We turned everything back the fuck on. 

Unfortunately, that came with everything also turning the fuck off first, emergency power giving up right before the reactor came to life. "Tali—!"“Already on it, Zedd!” Her omnitool bloomed to life, the most expensive thing the quarian owned shining bright with military-standard shine as it projected a live sensor feed of Peak Fifteen’s internals. "I have movement."

Plenty of movement.Shapes poured through maintenance tunnels just fast enough for frame rates to keep up, a flood of green appearing more as a single whole smearing across the camera panels with far too many legs. "How many?" Jane Shepard had gone still, legs almost frozen in place even as she racked her shotgun. “How many rachni, Mira?”The Virtual Intelligence was silent for a moment, numbers actually scrolling across her orange body in a digital reverse rain. "Confirmed organisms: one hundred eighty-seven."Shepard let out a breath, but the integer had already jumped higher on Zedd’s lenses before the woman’s shoulders could properly slump in relief. “Correction: two hundred sixty-two.”

Both Shepards shared the exact same face — pure rage arguing with simple shock — and it only deepened as a wall of red error code flooded the right side of Mira’s body with another burst of static. “Additional Correction: unable to establish reliable population estimate.”

Jane Shepard’s ranting was less words and more rage at this point, Zedd closing his eyes as his hand went for his pistol. The second his fingers met the grip and he pulled Full Stop free from inside his coat, Zedd opened his eyes with a sigh. “Love that. Love an uncertain amount of extinct murder bugs.”“You wanted the lights on.” Eyes narrowed, he turned to look at Wrex — the offending krogan just standing there with his mess of a weapon aimed at wherever the noise of skittering was closest. “The lights were a group decisi-”A ventilation shaft caved inward, no warning past a half-second of buckling metal as the grille and a solid meter of duct came apart in a shriek. Something rode the wreckage down in a hail of debris and a single rachni in toxic green plummeted to the floor. The creature hit the ground hard enough for something to crack, whether it was the floor itself or the building material that landed with it — Zedd really wasn’t in the place to tell.The part of his mind that would have handled that sort of filing was too busy processing the oversized tangle of segmented legs and armored carapace that was a rachni.The thing shrieked, fluid dripping from it as its spiked legs found immediate purchase on the plated floor below it.Ashley Williams didn’t give it a chance to do anything else.The M-8 Avenger barked, the wrapon unleashing a three-round burst of shards mass accelerated to high-velocities for proper cavitation. Those shards chipped pieces off the thing’s carapace, green flecks of chitin flying but the rachni was already on the move and the bulk of the ammo barely even grazed the thing as it skittered away.Multiple feet meant multiplied speed and the rachni used it to its advantage, crossing a good distance by the time Ashley was set to re-aim. The bug closed in on her position, screeching again as bubbling fluid formed in its mandibles.Unfortunately, it ddin’t account for Udnot Wrex.Or his Scimitar.The shotgun blast caught the rachni in and through the open mouth, the thing’s upper-body no longer in existence as anything more than green mist and flecks of similarly-colored paint.The rachni’s body made it two more steps on simple momentum before biology and physics demanded it fold, everyone simply staring at the collapsed corpse a dozen feet from Jane Shepard’s boots."Hostile organisms converging on this location." Mira’s hologram flickered in again, a map projected and updated with contact markers to show what they knew was coming.

And just like that, the vents started screaming.

Sound traveled through the facility far ahead of the swarm itself, metal buckling somewhere far but undeniably getting closer and closer. Claws and chitin scraped ductwork in numbers that failed at being recognized as individual long ago. No. Zedd knew this was a swarm in every sense of the word, a texture pattern of overlapping clicks vibrating down through the wall panels as they themselves buzzed.

Jane Shepard stared up from the lone rachni corpse and aimed her attention at the ruined ceiling vent, green eyes twitching in a way Zedd found vaguely familiar. “That…” Teeth grit so tight that Zedd was surprised she could manage a single word, the Spectre forced out an entire sentence. “That does not sound like one nest.”Liara’s head swivelled all around, unsure where to look that wouldn’t have the sound press down on her. “I-it certainly does not sound like one.”

"Accurate." Mira didn't hesitate, glowing head tilted a fraction toward the asari. "There are eleven active nests."

"Eleven?" The Spectre among them found a new pitch, her normally low voice as high as Tali’s for all of three syllables.

"Eleven confirmed.” Mira offered again. “Sensor coverage of the lower geothermal levels remains incomplete."

"So eleven is the floor.” They were staring at a floor with an unconfirmed ceiling and the potential for this to go sideways in the worst way. “Fantastic. Great facility. Five stars." “Review noted.”Zedd didn’t even bother to twitch at that, well aware something was off with this VI. Growing back through the paint again. He clicked his tongue, deciding to bookmark it as something to address later. Even now. Even mid-crisis.

"Mira." John Shepard stepped forward, Avenger raised to his shoulder as the man barked orders in a perfect mimicry of his sister. "Rift Station. Now."

The VI projected it for all to see, the facility in cutaway a large chunk of what had been black now flagged completely with ever-growing dots of red. One path threading through all the mess with an operational blue glow, it threaded across the entire map — the only functioning route connecting their current position to the laboratories of Rift Station. Zedd could think of three reasons why that was a terrible idea.“That is where most of them are.” Talie stepped closer to the holo, three-fingered hand pointing right at the thickest concentration of red markers on the entire map. “The heat signatures are completely overlapping."

“Correct!”“But we’ll die.”

That was clearly none of the VI’s problem. "Route remains operational.”

"Technically." Zedd gripped his weapon tighter. “Assuming your definition of operational includes making our way into a mantodean meat grinder.”

"Route remains operational.”

"Technically operational is still operational." John stepped forward, the man clearly deciding to make the best of what little plan they had before their options became all of zero. "Load out. We're not waiting for the number to grow."

As usual, Jane took the forward position with Wrex, Liara beside Tali in the center with the quarian’s link to Mira still bright and orange on her omnitool. Ashley and John set their rifle lanes overlapping, geometry set in interlocking fields, while Kai rested one hand on the grip of his katana and contributed his standard word count.Which was nothing.

Not eager to be left out, Zedd reached into the deap pockets of his duster, digits brushing the cold compact chassis of his drones. The VIP hovered to life immediately, the other fourteen forming their own swarm as they rose around him with a rising hum. Eight repulsor frames spread into their lattice overhead, each one ready to damage. 

John Shepard nodded out at all of them. “Only way out is through.”

So, they went through.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Mira rode Tali’s omnitool the whole way — a husky accented voice in the quarian’s wrist opening emergency doors junctions ahead of them and making sure to seal the ones behind, while doing her best to mark breached vents in amber on their HUDs before the corridor brought them into view. Even with a distinct inability to name the specific ‘unauthorized biological threat’, Mira still knew enough to keep them from getting caught up in them.“Vent access, left, nine meters. Pressure loss ahead. Rerouting.” The VI also made sure to give the other kind of warning, the one Zedd had learned to love the most despite how maddening it was: contact markers on the sensor net vanishing to nothing as bug signatures dropped clean off cameras that still worked.He wasn’t sure why or how, but he didn’t like what that meant for the rachni’s intelligence. More specifically, what that meant for them and their chances at making it out of this. No way in hell I’m dying to a bug.

Her information came incomplete, though; a vent flagged after they'd already passed under it or a door reportedly sealed that stood open and scarred in their path. Zedd couldn’t help but keep a running tally of the misses but he was still aware that without the VI’s help, they'd be moving blind through a building whose walls were full of teeth.

Unfortunately, even with all the help, the first wave hit before they made it all the way through the first sub-basement.

Maintenance openings all down the machinery hall gave up at once, the rachni spilling through in a wave of insectoid death. Green chitin rolled over green chitin, workers crawling across one another's backs to get through the gaps faster, bodies pouring onto the deck and moving as quick as bugs that size could.Behind them, in slower formation, came — fuck me! — came the bigger ones. Easily six times larger and armored, these weren’t green at all. More dark gray and brown with armor plates layered thick over bodies that pulsed withvisible sacs of fluid swelling and shifting, it was almost enough to make you ignore the clawed tentacles waving above the mass of the oversized things.

Uncertain amount. The Full Stop was already up and level in his hand. Start subtracting.

One of the big rachnis reared up mid-stride, throat sacs contracting, and spat.

A glob of green crossed the hall in a flat arc, and John's field snapped up to meet it — a Wonderwall blooming into the space between the acid and Ashley's firing lane.

The impact should have ended there, considering that’s what the wall was for.

Instead the acid spread. It hit the barrier and sheeted across it, clinging to the biotic barrier and  down the field's curvature in rivulets before it properly hit the floor and began to smoke."Note: Biotic barriers are effective but kinetic barriers will likely fail at providing complete protection." Mira’s report came velvet calm. 

"OF COURSE!" Jane didn't have a single decibel of anything approaching calm, shotgun already braced as she held it high. "WHY WOULD THEY?"

The rachni charged.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Oh-Ma-Stars-And-Garters (300 FP)Encounters a live specimen of a previously-believed extinct species.

ROLL: One Hit Wonder (400 FP) [Generic Video Game Developer] {Quality Efficiency}:For whatever reason, you have the ability to make some of the best games possible, using your skills to the fullest of their potential. Whatever game you make, and so long as you put in some effort, it will have a quality to it that makes it enjoyable for just about anyone to play, and if it gets big enough in the media and market it could easily be known as one of the best games of the year, and possibly even of all time. And despite the name, this isn't limited to a one-time thing. As a bonus, this is one of several capstone boosters that will boost any 600cp perks you have purchased to even further heights. Check the notes section below for details.Forge Points: 300