Massive Disaster 5-30C (Patreon)

“Left gantry!” Anything close to standard combat doctrine died under the first minute, long before the first wave of green screechers were chewed through, and Zedd watched it all crash and burn as everything… crashed and burned.Fuck! Fuck! Acid splattered not too far from where his foot was, the green goop already eating at the metal with smoke rising from the floor. Fuuuuuu- Full Stop fired out, the weapon already configured for full-auto and bursting with blue from the muzzle. 

It was a given that doctrine came with certain assumptions. It had to, considering the entire galaxy seemed to function around the same combat loop — with the sole exception of biotics, of course.Even geth stuck to those few standards.Symmetrical warfare was a big one, of course — mass-accelerated shardfire traded against other targets. Predictable geometry was another; established fire lanes, expected cover, and the simple concept of flanking and out-flanking. You expected the enemy to shoot back, which meant cover mattered, and a kinetic barrier between you and the problem was worth the power draw in the first place.

Barriers were shardfire rated, defending against mass-effect weaponry their main purpose and one they’d managed to do rather well for the literal thousands of years the Citadel had known combat. 

“Liara!” Zedd’s scream almost tore his throat on its way out. “You said their numbers were reasonable!”Not an impossibility, given that the weapon profile was small, velocity high, and the physics honest. It was a respectable piece of technology that handled what it was built for.“Comp-!” The doctor’s response vanished under a scream, a split-second wall of blue saving her face from acid spit flying at speed. “I said, comprehensible!” What they were not built for was to catch a claw moving at near whip-speed, a mandible with leverage, or a sheet of corrosive spit that was too slow and too liquid to be defended against.

“Ten meters!” John Shepard continued barking orders, the Commander darting back with a kick to a rachni. “Move! Move! Move!”

Zedd didn’t need to have a conversation with the man to realize Shepard had realized the failure of all that doctrine, especially as they all watched the airborne rachni explode mid-flight — a puddle of green acid raining down on the backline.“Why are they balloons?” The scream left him as he fired his weapon again, each of the smaller green ones popping with each shot. “Why the hell are they acid balloons?”No one bothered answering Zedd’s question, too busy fighting for their own life and maintaining what little firing position they had left. Unfortunately, each firing position had a shelf life, and the shelf life was however long it took the swarm to climb said shelf, come up through the floor grating beneath it, or simply dissolve the cover and barrel right through.The bugs are eating the map. Several of his Little V’s lanced out into the breach, every ball-drone a weapon on their own buying space and ground for him as he kept firing his single gun. They’re eating the fucking map. How do you hold ground against something that didn’t respect ground?

“Jane!” Shepard’s order sounded out over the shrieking, his gun punching clean through another line of green rachni. “Clear it!”“Mark!” Jane cleared it.The Vanguard detonated forward, a blur of fury wrapped tight in a field of dark energy. She hit the frontline of the swarm with all the force of a Charge, a living catastrophe folding the first row of workers into plating. Mottled green chitin cracked in a rippling sheet as over a dozen of the things went from charging to flat, another burst of blue behind Jane before the wave even finished traveling.

Liara appeared behind the retreating Spectre with her arms out. With barely more than a grunt to announce itself, dense Singularity bloomed over the approaching rachni; a dark little star twinkling bright and pulsing with power. Under the force of the biotic attack, the walls gave up their climbers, small green rachni ripped off mid-scuttle as they went screeching into a crushed and spinning knot of legs and fractured shells.

“Light them up!” John opened fire, M-8 on full-auto as it unleashed a stream.Williams didn’t wait for the order to leave the Commander’s lips, her own Avenger opening up into the heart of the knot, incendiary ammo sparking orange against the green. Wrex’s Scimitar joined in a bare second later, the battlemaster laughing nearly as loud as the weapon. Tali’s own shotgun barked a half-beat after that, a third stream of incendiary shards converging on the mass as it burst into flames.Burning bodies exploded at once, insects cooking like popcorn as they flew from the collapsed Singularity with trails of boiling green acid and the smell of roast rachni left behind.“Wrex!”Jane Shepard’s shout went heard and ignored as eight hundred pounds of krogan (not counting body armor) rushed forward into the central choke point with a laugh on his lips, Urdnot Wrex making it clear that he didn’t care for combat doctrine, either. 

Zedd wasn’t surprised at that.Not in the slightest, considering he built the krogan a weapon designed explicitly to spit in the face of all that.And that weapon was firmly on display now.Shotgun holstered, the Pride was hefted high in Wrex’s grip; polished red plating still as shiny as the day Zedd had presented it to the battlemaster. With a single swing, the kinetic warhammer boomed out with a wave of force, a line of workers not even close enough to touch him turned functionally inside out all at once.

Green paste was left behind where an entire group of living organisms once were, space bugs aside, and all Wrex did was laugh louder as he kept swinging.Even as one of the bigger rachni hit him, the ancient mercenary still found the humor in it. A tackle from a nearly five-foot tall armored bug built like a horse carried the both of them clean through a safety railing and all Wrex did was laugh as he caught the thing by the mandibles on the way down.One hand.That’s all the krogan needed to force its head backward and even further back, mouthparts straining against a grip that had probably crushed more skulls than years humanity had known the written word.And then the Pride came up underneath the rachni’s jaw, tip kissing the plating beneath its throat to make the argument nobody survives.“Now this!” Wrex shoved the corpse off himself, already diving back into the swarm with the warhammer aglow and swinging. “This is war!”Zedd had to force himself to pull his attention away from the krogan showing off the single job krogan got uplifted for — “Die!” — and proving exactly why the Citadel had gotten a rather good deal. “Kill me or die!”Okay, that’s a bit much. 

“Closing secondary bulkheads behind us!” The form of Tali’Zorah rushed past him, the quarian moving between access points along the chamber’s edge as she managed to one-hand a shotgun. The thing spat fire as her omnitool blazed alongside it, ending lives while conducting the building. “Mira! Maintenance passages! Twelve through sixteen, s-seal them! Seal them now!”

“Warning.” That synthetic velvet managed that calm even as they fought for their lives, the VI’s voice echoing through the hellscape that was this space. “Passage fourteen contains authorized personnel. Classification: Custodial workers.”“That’s us!” Tali ducked low, a spray of acid flying overhead as Ashley fired back at the oversized dark rachni that attempted to flank the engineer. “That’s us!”“Clarification accepted.” 

Doors slammed down in sequence somewhere beyond the walls, Zedd unable to miss the sounds of them landing one after another as heavy pneumatic seals sounded off like punctuation. The timing couldn’t have been better, one massive door slamming shut at the far end of the hall, seals engaged just a second before a new wave of workers reached the threshold.“Good job, Tee!” 

“T-thank you, Zedd!”There was nothing else to say but that, the plan designed to give them breathing space and force a bottleneck. All we gotta deal with is the rest of them in here and the ones small enough to fit through the vents.Unfortunately, the vents surged harder.A heavier wave of green poured from previously untouched vents, rachni rushing forward with reinforcements as their claws scored against the steel on their way down.“OH COME ON!” Weapon up, Zedd fired with everyone else — eye twitching quicker than he could shoot.

Tali didn’t bother aiming her weapon, the woman sliding behind a power junction box. Omni-tool flashing, the personal device pinged for a moment before Tali did something genuinely ruide to it.

Emitters along the eastern wall overloaded all at once, a fence of crackling current springing up across the breach and sending an entire wave of rachni into convulsions before they burst into streams of green gas. 

 So did the second wave.

The third wave lost half their number in the process, but it was the fourth that put a cold finger on the back of Zedd’s neck as he watched them climb the smoking pile of the first three-and-a-half of their number.

That… That’s a ramp. His finger hitched, weapon running hot in his grip. “Guys, they’re learning!”“How?!” Ashley was mid-vent when her mouth fell open. “They’re bugs!”“Williams, they’re smart bugs.” Supposedly extinct monsters brought back to life out of scientific curiosity, larger population than expected, and adapting as they go. I’m living Space Jurassic Park. Annoyed as he was, Zedd’s eye eased up on the twitch as Kai Leng covered his front. The man’s high-frequency katana cut clean arcs of blurring death, his bodyguard threading his way through the swarm and turning aside acid spray with just a blade. “Everyone knows this!”“Oh, it’s my fault for not caring about some dead aliens from a thousand years ago?”“I dropped out of middle school!” Leng flipped over his head, Zedd venting the Full Stop in a haze of blue smoke as rachni screamed around him. “What’s your excuse?A dark line never holding position, never even wanting it, Kai Leng had stopped pretending the fight had lanes at all as the HF blade went through leg joints and plating and the wettest places on the largest rachni. Even as rachni spat at him, he was already gone before acid even finished crossing the sub-basement — feet carrying him up the side of a column, four running steps horizontally along a surface not made for it, and then off it; blade dropping clean through the top of an oversized rachni skull with all his weight behind it.Three years and I still can't call the footwork. The mods were all Zedd, the specs were all him too. Everything else… Somehow, Kai Leng was just built like that.

Zedd’s own contribution to the chaos was less elegant. Easily as effective, of course, but much much louder. A splayed hand and a thrust palm send his Lil Vs driving through the densest clusters of space bugs with all the force of battering rams. No bigger than billiard balls, each one screamed across the chamber at speeds that made them threats to anything that wasn’t layered in both body armor and kinetic barriers.Blue-white kinetic sheaths flared on each impact, chitin cracked and mandibles mangled under eight drones. With seven more held in reserve, just those alone were enough to thread between friendlies. A single pointed finger and a half-turned wrist guided the swarm every few seconds, gun in his other hand handling whatever threatened the geometry.Unfortunately, the rachni were very good at being threats.One drone screamed a warning into his HUD, telemetry going from green to screaming as a swarm of green swallowed it in a stack of weight on weight. Little icon in his lenses blinking its version of last words, Zedd shook his head.“Not today!”He clenched his fist tight.The pile of green flared white-blue as the buried drone dumped the remainder of its sheath charge outward, an unbuffered pulse of force scattering every stored joule. Broken rachni scattered across the floor in a scattered ring of green parts, rachni thrown into walls and each other.Out of the crater, his Lil V rose wobbling; #8 returning to his pocket with a scorched casing and stuttering repulsors. Good boy."Reactor output at sixty percent." Mira announced the progression as if it was somehow relevant, another wave dropping from the ceiling as ductwork gave up its passengers.Jane’s biotic Throw met half of them before they even landed, Mira sounding off again with a calm and placid: “Seventy-two percent.”

Glass burst apart, one of the large rachni tearing through a room window amid a small reinforcement of the greens. With a shriek, it rushed right for them.Commander Shepard threw a hand upward, face pulled tight with strain. Biotics caught the oversized insect in the air in a localized field of dark energy, the rachni shrieking and clawing for freedom  through warped gravity. “Zedd!”He was already on it, a Lil V turned sideways and lined along his pointed finger. With a pull of his thumb, he sent the drone off.It crossed the chamber as a blue-white streak, the rachni struck clean through the carapace as its thorax went concave. One more icon in Zedd’s lens went to static as he let the drone go with a sigh. Note to self: attempt higher shield ratings."Primary reactor restored.” Every route on the map turned green. “Rift Station tram access available." “You heard her!” Commander Shepard gave the order with one hand raised. “Move, move, move, people!”Zedd picked up the pace, eyes on the blue glow of his omni as he aimed at something he’d been thinking over for the last half-hour. In no time at all, he opened up another channel, one just below the shared systems link.→ target: mainframe_root_architecture

→ isolate: Mira_personality_matrix, heuristic_algorithms, memory_lattice

→ execute: aggressive_copy

→ destination: local_storage_partition_omega

Corporate assets were meant to be acquired and he liked this one’s tenacity. It might have been a basic administrative VI at one point, but it had clearly grown after who-knew-how-many wipes to the system.

By the time John repeated the withdrawal order, the transfer hit one hundred percent and Zedd closed the channel with a smile. “...you’re gonna be useful.”

"Rift Station tram ready.” Mira announced one more time as they hit the platform, the aerodynamic sleek tram car waiting patiently for them. “Warning: quarantine conditions remain active at destination."

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Clever Girl (100 FP)Survive an encounter with a live specimen of a previously-believed extinct species.

FAIL: -Skill Plus (800 FP) [Eclipse Phase] {Knowledge Mundane}:Forge Points: 400