Effect of a Horse and a Dragon 15 (Patreon)

I am not a programmer, nor Japanese, ergo I don’t own.

This fic won the Ranma-only poll for September, which I hadn’t expected.  I thought Stallion would win, but my own votes were actually enough to get it to win despite Stallion getting the Carry-Over effect.  That doesn’t happen often LOL.

Hiryo did see the majority of the chapter, but I made a mistake there, and he will hopefully be getting the full chapter back to me soon. When he does, I will update this. Regardless, the chapter has been Grammarly-checked.

Chapter 15: A Horse Goes Stomping: Powering through

While he was still being carried by Ranma as if he were so much luggage, Garrus had stopped complaining about such things quickly. For one thing, even with his exoskeleton and body armor, the cold was starting to get a little annoying and being this close to a human who basically radiated heat like a heat pad was actually quite nice, despite yes still being carried like a parcel. For another, the three of them, himself, Ranma and Tali, had been attacked at least another forty minutes away from Peak 15 if they had been able to cover that terrain in the massive snow buggy they had been in originally. With said buggy was a burning piece of wreckage, the trek would’ve taken the better part of three to four hours at least.

At the moment, Garrus estimated that with the speed Ranma was keeping to they would be there in at most an hour and a half. Garrus was many things, but he wasn’t irrational. Thus, he’d stopped complaining about the… the uncouth nature of his own circumstances in comparison to Tali’s.

Now, as he estimated they were around halfway there, he began to look around, up and around, before wondering aloud if there would be another ambush attempt. As he spoke, Garrus looked up as best he could from his current vantage point toward Ranma’s faces and was amused to see Ranma doing the same.

“Huh. That’s interesting, you’re looking upwards as well, at the mountains and even into the air. Most humans I worked with before this didn’t do that unless reminded.”

“Not everyone is a master of aerial combat,” Ranma quipped, shifting his head forward and then looking left rather than simply turning his neck in that direction lest he push his face against Tali’s suit-covered thigh. Again. Twice was enough, thank you, and Ranma didn’t want to lose control of the heating technique he was currently using to keep Garrus and Tali pleasantly cool. Nearly causing the heat to go up so much that the snow melted beneath them once was enough. So embarrassing!

“Are you that good a pilot? Or is that your ego talking? With you, it’s hard to tell,” Garrus chuckled.

“Eh, I wasn’t talking about piloting, I meant physically. My whole martial arts style is based on taking the momentum of any enemy attack or even my own and using it to remain in the air, so of course I’m used to looking around and up at the same time for threats,” Ranma said, shrugging.

The shrug bounced Tali a little bit as she laughed quietly, seeing Garrus’s expression past Ranma’s head and body as the turian’s armored face shifted in his species equivalent of furrowing his brows. “Momentum doesn’t work like that. The person doing the striking or being struck can’t just manipulate the impact’s very small reverb, or whatever you would call it, to go in a specific direction. It makes absolutely no sense. And this is me saying it. I’ve seen you in action multiple times by this point and well understand most of what you can do is sheer spirits-cursed bullshit.”

“You should see him exercising occasionally. I swear, Ranma has this special relationship with gravity. It only affects him when he wants it to,” Tali said, finally letting loose the giggles she’d been keeping inside. “Just like with physics and who knows what other natural laws.”

As always, the sound of Tali’s laughter made Ranma smile. “Are you complaining? Is that the voice of someone who wants to start walking on their own~?” he teased.

“Oh, please! I’d need a hover machine to keep up with you,” Tali retorted.

“And don’t you forget it,” Ranma answered complacently, even picking up speed a little. This caused Tali to giggle again, as Garrus shook his head, bemused by how it seemed as if their weight just didn’t matter to Ranma, not even now, forty minutes into this run.

Garrus was quite correct; their combined weight didn’t matter at all to Ranma. In comparison to when he was ten years old and had to carry his father, who weighed at least half again as much as his current burden, along with a sofa and several large concrete blocks, the weight of his two companions was nothing.

In contrast, the necessary attention needed to keep his footing in this kind of environment was taking up a lot of Ranma’s mind even now as he bantered with the pair. The ground underneath them wasn’t just snow, be it fresh powder or hard-packed. It was a combination of all of those, had ice spears barely hidden under freshly fallen snow, and crevices that were covered over by ice too thin to take their weight for even a second. More than once, Ranma had heard the creaking beneath him and had needed to leap forward, only to then nearly lose his footing in hip-deep powder.

Ranma reckoned that it was like traveling over the North Pole on foot. Only without the supposed threat of polar bears to alleviate the concerns that his footing was causing him. Right now, the danger of actual physical violence would have been welcome in comparison to needing to be so aware of his surroundings, looking for clues which he barely understood to dangers he had never dealt with on such a scale before.

Even though a tremendous portion of his attention was on his footing, Ranma had other issues. One of them, which was becoming slightly more concerning as the day wore on, was that his eyes were starting to hurt a bit from the glare of the distant sun off the ice and snow all around him. That danger had honestly never occurred to him, and he wondered if Garrus’s uncovered eye – he had this weird monocle thing in one of them – was going to start hurting too.

Then, there was Tali’s presence on his shoulder. Feeling her rear like that was weird, admittedly, but it was still, well, feeling her rear. A rear that had, moreover, more than once made Ranma stare for a little too long for his own liking. At least she’s not commented on wanting to shift to a full piggyback or something. Having one thigh pressing into the side of my head is one thing. Having her thighs on both sides of my head, that’d be way worse.

Tali made this worse a moment later as she accidentally placed her hand on his head when Ranma leaped up and over what looked like a large patch of ice set between even larger patches of dense snow. Her three fingers tugged at his hair for a moment as she almost seemed to lose her balance going backward, but she righted herself, then did not remove her fingers right away, even as she apologized.

“Next time, a bit of warning would be nice, Ranma. Hmm… I can’t get enough of touching your hair. It’s been so long since I touched my own, and I actually think your hair was better than mine was at the time. I couldn’t let it grow more than a fuzz right up until I got my current suit, and now I can’t remember what it felt like.”

Quarians only began to grow hair during puberty. With life being what it was in the Migrant Fleet and how everyone had to live in suits, most had opted to be given patches that stopped them from doing so at all. Tali hadn’t, and since she had reached her full growth and been given her adult-style suit, she had a small area at the back of the neck underneath her hood installed to keep her hair in, something her Auntie Raan had teased her about at the time.

“Eh, I don’t know, er, I just wash it, I guess, mostly in female form, it’s a cultural thing,” Ranma answered with a shrug that caused Tali to bounce a little again, thinking about mentioning Japanese bathing practices, but deciding against it since it wasn’t like the quarians could take baths, or even showers. Ugh. I know those suits deal with sweat, smell, and keep them from getting dirty, obviously, but still. “Ya can touch it all ya want, just don’t pull out my pigtail.”

Seconds later, Ranma had cause to reflect that mistakes had been made, as he fought down yet another blush at the feeling of Tali’s fingers winding through his hair as much as they could. That felt altogether too good, something he hadn’t considered before. Eesh, not even Usagi or some of the sisters at the temple actually asked to run their fingers through my hair like this. Probably a good thing, really, wouldn’t’ve done me any good to let ‘em know they could nearly turn me to mush with this move.

“Why can’t I pull out the pigtail?” Tali asked quizzically.

“… You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you, although I will admit it’s probably a nice way to fill the time,” Ranma snickered. “I don’t suppose either of your races have mythologies about cursed items and stuff, do you?”

“Ranma, even if my race didn’t have those, I’ve seen your curse in action, and I’ve heard your reasoning behind it. I am willing to admit that there are more things out there in the galaxy than simple science can explain,” Garrus drawled, while Tali nodded in agreement. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt with your stories.”

When Tali agreed, Ranma snorted and began that particular tale. When the story finished, Garrus took his words back. “I was wrong. I don’t believe you. I suppose I can understand primitive people believing that eating the part of an animal or something would give them certain powers or abilities, but actually doing so, and to such a degree as to grow a bald man’s hair back in seconds? Also, what is a dragon anyway?”

“That would depend on who you ask. If you ask an Asian like me, you’ll get the answer that a dragon is a kind of extremely magical snake that floats and flies through the air, with a head that’s a mixture of deer, lion, and, duh, giant lizard.”

Ranma somewhat stumbled over how to explain Asian dragons before shrugging. “With the addition of tremendously large flowing whiskers, and balls under their feet that allow them to do magic. If you ask someone from Europe or America, though, they’ll tell you it’s a giant fire-breathing lizard with four legs, wings on its back, and a massive tail and neck on a fat dinosaur-like body. I’ve always thought that the Asian style looked a little more elegant. Oh, and both of them breath fire, but the Asian variety can also breath out other things and were once worshipped as gods. I don’t think that was a thing in Europe.”

“… I’m going to need to look both of those images up when we get back in contact with the intranet, aren’t I?” Garrus murmured. Without the booster that had been part of the structure of the giant snow buggy, the trio’s individual omni-tools lacked the power necessary to connect to the planetary network, let alone off-world. “Your ability to describe physical things with words leaves much to be desire. I know about dinosaurs and lizards, but deer and lion elude me.”

“So you would be able to describe to me some kind of mythological monster from your people’s mythology perfectly?” When Garrus didn’t answer, Ranma smirked. “Thought not. Regardless, whether or not you believe it or not, it has happened to me. If you pull that string out, my hair keeps growing longer and longer while I’m in my male body. And since I doubt now is the best time to show you, you’ll have to take my word for it. Unless you want to be enveloped in hairballs to keep warm?”

Tali hummed as if she was actually thinking about it, her fingers still working their way into Ranma’s hair, nearly causing his eyes to close in bliss, while Garrus shook his head quickly. “No, thank you. I’ve no idea how humans can touch that hair stuff. The one time I touched a human’s hair on a dare, it felt so weird I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be smothered in it.”

“…did the human at the time know you were doing a dare, or was that part of the dare in question?” Ranma asked, wondering how that had gone.

Garrus didn’t reply. Instead, he turned his eyes forward, his monocle instantly enlarging the image ahead of him. “I can see the lab. We’re getting close.”

Taking Garrus’s words at face value, he was the group sniper ever after all, Ranma slowed down and shifted their course to be closer to the valley’s side. Near those walls, there was a good deal of craggy, rocky bits sticking out of the snow, which would give them a bit more cover than simply running forward down the middle of the valley, which had been made ‘relatively smooth at some point in the not-too-distant past, with only the ongoing snowfall obscuring things. This territory slowed Ranma’s passage a little bit, but Ranma was content with that, thinking at this point that safety was paramount.

Moments later, the lab came into Ranma’s un-enhanced view as well, and he whistled.

The lab was built into the mountain and was one of the most high-tech buildings Ranma had yet seen. The entrance into Port Hanshan had simply been a gigantic hatch, the interior of the planetary capital city just a series of caverns, ones that had been heavily engineered, sure, but still nothing really out of the ordinary. Even the city on Mostromos and before that, Sijou, despite their decidedly alien architecture, had been just that, cities, even with their nonhuman architecture.

Whoever had built this lab had also built in some measure of beauty, but it was not like an asari’s version of beauty, where they would work with the local environment. Rather, it was standing out starkly against that environment that gave the lab some of its beauty.

The Lab was built into the mountains, true, but the main area seemed to be a jutting segment of metal. This was crafted almost to look like a certain weapon from the same game series Ranma had gotten his Halo armor concept from; it rose above the peaks to either side, a thing of strange angles and yellow lights that flowed up and down it. Possibly to be seen from the air above? Ranma wasn’t certain.

From this horn, white painted steel balconies jutted out, stabbing deep into the mountain. These balconies were further marked by red lines over what had to be windows, which glowed yellow from the light within. Each of those balconies was either dug in or jutting out from a different portion of the mountainside, with the ones at the edge of the lab melding into the rock in a asari-like manner that didn’t quite match the rest of its design, yet also fit.

Behind the main spire, there was an area that looked to simply be flattened metal, although from this angle, Ranma couldn’t tell any more than that. Still, he supposed aloud that it was probably some kind of landing pad. “I’d be stupid to make a place like this that could only be supplied one way. It’s almost a pity we couldn’t come in that way,” he muttered. “But I suppose we would’ve had to get the locals okay to land, and that’d probably mean we would’ve been walking into a trap.”

As he finished muttering, plumes of ice and snow began erupting around Ranma, causing Ranma to flinch. Faster than most would have been able to track, he ducked back into cover behind a rock sticking up out of the valley floor. There she dropped Garrus and placed Tali on the snowy ground.

“You don’t think we’re walking into a trap anyway?” Garrus quipped, ducking around and looking for the shooters. “At the very least. I can make out a few geth nearer the lab, normal Troopers I thinkKK--artillery incoming! Duck and cover!”

Ranma had barely a second to hear that before he was pushing Garrus and Tali out of the cover and then rolling backward away from it himself. This proved to be a most efficacious move, as that cover exploded a second later due to the same kind of large mass effect projectile that had destroyed their former ride.

Not that it meant they had gotten off scot-free. Tali found herself nearly buried in snow, but she still shouted over her suit’s speakers, “Really, just normal Troopers!?”

Garrus had slammed his back hard against another spike of stone-hard ice, which had been jutting upwards nearby. Twisting around, he hurled himself behind the ice pillar just in time to avoid several bullets coming his way. “Well, excuse me for not being able to see where artillery is firing from!”

Those bullets had given Tali, who had just pushed herself out of the snow, an idea of where the new shooters were coming from, and she shouted, pointing in that direction. “I can’t see the Colossi either, but over there, there’s got to be some Hunters there! Too far for me but…”

Pointed in the right direction, Garrus turned his sniper’s monocle toward that area and instantly began to pick out two shimmering sets of movement where there should have been none. In a snow field like this, where every few steps threw up small icicles, the chameleon cloaks of the infiltration-type geth didn’t work as well as such systems would in other environments.

A second later, his sniper rifle came up to his shoulder and fired, while Ranma pushed himself to his feet, glaring ahead of them. The valley narrowed almost from where they were currently under fire, to Peak 15, and far more of the debris had been removed from the valley’s floor nearer the lab than previously. Even along the edge of the valley, cover disappeared about 3 yards from Garrus’s current position, the forwardmost of the trio.

There was at least two football-field lengths between them and where the Troopers had spread out. They formed what Ranma recognized as a loose skirmish formation, separate enough that any attack would only hit one of them, enough that Ranma would need to jump several yards from one to the other. The geth that had just appeared out of nowhere also showed that there were Hunters around, and among the normal Troopers, there were a few taller units who had energy shields up.

With no chance of flanking, so little cover, and no way of retreating unless they wanted to try to get back to Port Hanshan somehow, Ranma charged forwards. ‘You two take ‘em out at range, I’ll draw their fire. Don’t get yourselves hurt!”

Like Ranma had hoped, his charge drew the Troopers’ fire on him, fire that didn’t come from just rifles, but from the still-too-distant-to-see geth Colossi. Within the span of the next thirty seconds, Ranma had to duck under a series of bullets, then leap upward and away as an artillery shell crashed down where he had been standing. It slammed into the ground behind Ranma, making him grateful the geth apparently didn’t go into explosive or shrapnel rounds. Although I suppose with the speed mass effect rounds go, explosive variants are mostly seen as overkill... let’s just hope that stays that way.

As he raced forward, several more artillery rounds crashed down, leaving gigantic craters where they hit. Alas, any chance of simply rushing forward faded as more Hunters and another, shorter, thinner form appeared, their camouflage fading as they fired. They began to take Ranma and his companions under fire from all around. This forced Ranma to dodge and duck, and weave through their fire, which slowed him down so much that he couldn’t cross any kind of distance.

Behind him, Tali made her way forward cautiously. While Ranma had carried her earlier, she had spent most of the time putting together a chameleon projector from parts from the Hunters. Activating it, she disappeared into the snow for short amounts of time as she shifted forward. She couldn’t run it for very long without the makeshift device overheating, not having enough nanotubes to create a better version, but it allowed her to cross some distance, pushing ahead of Garrus and pointing out her opposite numbers among the geth to the sniper as he fired downrange at any targets he could discern.

In this way, Garrus dealt with at least seven of the Hunters and three of the other camouflaged units before Ranma was able to close with the foremost group of Troopers. As he did, all of the geth in sight, around eighty of them, finally started to range on him. He began to take some hits but was able to shift his body so that his chest plate, the chest plate he had made back on Omega, took most of the bolts rather than his extremities. It was hard as hell to keep doing it from multiple angles, but Ranma thought it was worth it to not deal with the pain of getting hit by the larger rounds of the geth with the shields. The other rifles didn’t hit hard enough to bother him much, stinging like so many fast bees, but the heavier Troopers’ weapons did.

Thus, he was only able to take down two of the Troopers before the others began to fall back, the fire from the others too heavy to allow him to charge forward.  “Dammit, they’re not supposed to fall back, that’s not fair!” Fucking hell, I miss my suit! These geth are far too accurate for my liking. Ranma had taken dozens of hits, none of them really painful on their own, but still, in this amount, they hurt.  They can track me way better than any of the living enemies I’ve dealt with before this! Did they somehow get data back from the fight we had earlier?

“You’re the last person to talk about things being fair!” Tali shouted as she came out of stealth for a second. This time, she was close enough to engage some of the Hunters that had been trying to attack Ranma from behind. One of them exploded under a shot from her shotgun, before the other one tried to turn on her. Another’s shotgun blast removed its head, and then she was racing away as a few others began to shift their fire to her. “Keelah, but I’m not having fun here!”

Luckily, those few were the only ones that took their eyes off Ranma, but they were still able to force Tali into diving into one of the craters that had already been caused by the geth Colossi in the distance. “There’s got to be at least two colossi out there somewhere! I just tracked those shots to two different points.” One of them came so close that the back blast of the shell hitting the ground actually lifted Ranma up into the air. ‘If we can’t find them, they’ll just keep hurling artillery at us, and Garrus and I aren’t nearly as durable as you!”

“I’m open to suggestions! None of my techniques allow me to attack someone that I can’t even see from this far away!” Mind you, I could probably survive getting hit by one of their artillery shells; I can certainly survive the backblast, but that isn’t exactly dealing with the root of the problem, is it?

Despite Ranma’s annoyance at the distant Colossi, there was actually only so much that the artillery platforms could do at that distance. Better, the normal Troopers just didn’t have enough armor or shielding to deal with Ranma if he was able to close. Now he was able to close occasionally, while Garrus continued to move forward slowly, reaping a grievous toll on the defending Troopers from behind the others, and Tali shifted around the battlefield as best she could, doing what she could without drawing much attention to herself.

Eventually, her makeshift camouflage device flickered off with a static discharge, the thing overloading, and she was forced to pull back towards Garrus. By that point, however, she had added to her tiny arsenal by grabbing up a rifle from one of the geth. Shivering a little at how well the weapon fit against her shoulder and the grip in her three-fingered hand, she copied Garrus as she moved from place to place well behind where Ranma was. She shot any Trooper she could see, but kept on the move so that if they did turn their attention her way, she wouldn’t be where they thought she was. Garrus soon moved up with her, sticking close as they both shifted towards the front of the battle.

In this manner, Ranma eventually got within about two football stadiums' length away from the bottommost lab balcony or whatever it was. So close that he could actually see the entryway for the snow buggies. It was a gigantic hatch carved out of the rock underneath.

At that point, however, the battlefield changed. For the trio had come far enough into the kill zone that there was no way for them to escape.

At some unseen signal, the two Colossus stopped firing and instead shifted position to predetermined coordinates. There, without any set sign or signal of unease, the two colossi exploded, suiciding in order to create explosions high up in the mountains. Those explosions were followed by Rocket Troopers in turn set off a chain reaction set up ahead of time via deep-set explosives, each of them set up in a carefully calculated point for maximum impact. Those Rocket Troopers, after using all their rockets, retreated quickly, heading towards the lab via jump packs.

From high up in the mountains to either side of the valley, there was a sudden stirring. At first tons, then hundreds of tons, then thousands of tons of rock, ice and snow began to cascade down into the valley near Peak 15.

At first, there was no hint of all this movement, but soon, Ranma could hear something in the distance. He had already been glancing up into the mountains, confused by the fact that the artillery geth had stopped firing. Now, hearing something in the distance, his eyes widened at a sudden surmise. “Shit!”

Desperately, Ranma turned, racing towards his companions as high up in the mountains to either side of the valley, two avalanches built up still more speed and unstoppable fury. As it did, Ranma began to calculate distances, one eye up on the mountains above, tracking the movement he could now see there, only to start cursing. I can’t get back to the others and then turn around and get to the Lab. Maybe I can carry us back out?

The Geth Prime and Saren had been very meticulous. They had used the time after the ambush to plan out where to set up these explosions for the best effect. Accordingly, the two avalanches would completely bypass the laboratory. Instead, the avalanches would come straight down into the area of the valley right before it, aiming to completely bury the three attackers.

Garrus and Tali stood up from where they had been together at that point, crouching within one of the craters a Colossus’s round had created earlier in the battle, staring up at what would be their doom. “… we, we can’t get away from it, can we?” Tali asked, her voice small and worried, never having ever seen anything like what was coming their way, but instinctively knowing after the past few hours, it wasn’t good.

“I… I don’t think so, no,” Garrus murmured, wondering idly if he would have preferred the avalanches start further down the mountain. That way, he wouldn’t need to deal with this moment of very real dread. We’d just be dead.

There was no time to run; the avalanches were too wide, they were too deep into the kill zone that the geth had so neatly pulled them into. There was no way either of them would be able to survive what was coming. If they weren’t simply crushed by the weight of stone and snow coming down the mountains, they would suffocate.

But Ranma wasn’t about to just give up. “Toss your guns and stuff aside, then get on my back,” he yelled. As he reached the pair, he went to his knees in front of them, hoping to keep his hands free for other things. Once they clambered onto his back, clinging to one shoulder apiece, he raced towards one side of the valley. “Do you have any explosives!?”

His companions clung to Ranma, hoping the man had a plan, as Tali’s mind threatened to shut down. The idea of being buried alive was worse than going EVA and being left behind, a horror beyond anything that she had previously faced on her Pilgrimage, while Garrus simply knew he wouldn’t be able to survive what was coming, even with his armor and armored exoskeleton.

Still, he was at least able to think, and he quickly looked around, then grabbed Ranma’s head with both hands, twisting it to one side. “There! Two rocks over there have formed a small cave.  I used it earlier as a foxhole. If we can get between them, we might have a chance of not dying immediately! Although we might have to somehow enlarge the area for all three of us.” 

The two rocks in question jutted out from the bottom along the valley edge that Ranma was currently racing towards. Ranma instantly diverted his track in that direction, a plan beginning to form where before he had simply wanted to try and maybe use his aerial style to get above the avalanche.

But even Ranma knew he couldn’t get above the avalanche, as the edge of it was larger and taller than a tsunami. Maybe on his own and able to find a rock or something within that front to kick off of, he could’ve made it, but Ranma couldn’t see anything of the sort at the moment.  The whole front of the avalanche was just powdery snow.  So instead of going above, he was going to go under.

“Do either of you have explosives or something? A shaped charge?” Ranma asked again, having already thought of making his own cave earlier..

“I’ve got two grenades, but they’re not shaped charges,” Garrus replied, wondering what Ranma had in mind. “Oh, and we should grab up something to shield ourselves with, just in case.”

“Give them to me,” Tali stammered. “I can rework them quickly to—”

“You’ve got at most a minute!” Ranma said, diverting his course again at Garrus’s suggestion. Racing by, he grabbed up a geth Trooper, tearing off its limbs and continuing on, carrying the droid’s main body, tearing off the back armor with barely a grunt.  

Tali worked frantically on turning Garrus’s grenade into a shaped charge with one hand while Garrus helped to pull her tighter against Ranma with one arm. To say this was tough was underselling it immensely, but she finished.

In less than forty seconds, they reached the two canted boulders and the hollow between them, racing in between them, moving toward the wall of stone and ice ahead of them where the real mountainside began. “I’m done!”

“Throw the charge ahead of us!” Ranma ordered, hoping those stones would hold up under the weight about to hit them.  Aren’t like, triangles and stuff ridiculously hard to push down on and break? Or is that arches? Fucking hell, I can’t remember, and right now it doesn’t matter either, we’ll just have to trust to luck… fuck.

Not questioning, Tali did so. The Sticky grenade slapped into the wall of stone, sending all of its explosive power into the stone a second later.

As the explosion went off, Ranma held up the makeshift shields in front of him, shielding the pair from the explosion, which worked, although Ranma grimaced a little bit at shrapnel from the backblast peppered his legs. The shaped charge, though, had worked like so much TNT, blowing out a chunk of the mountain. With the rocks, this created a space big enough for all three of them to take cover within.

Ranma jumped into the now enlarged semi-cave-like structure, then twisted around, pressing his back into the back of the cave so that both Garrus and Tali were behind him. He then had barely a second to raise his makeshift shields before the snow, ice, and rock of the avalanche reached them with a cacophonous roar. All three of them shouted and shrieked as the ice and snow buried the cave, pressing in.

OOOOOOO

From the highest viewing port, Saren watched as the anomaly and his two companions disappeared under the snow, his glowing blue eyes narrowed. “They were doing something there. That wasn’t the frantic movement of someone who knew they were going to die. That was some kind of plan, however hasty it might be. You will need to get geth out there as soon as they are able to move over the new terrain to make certain the anomaly and the other two are dead.”

The Geth Prime standing beside him nodded, a move that it had learned from interacting with him, its voice the normal hundreds of voices jumbled together. “This unit estimates we will lose at least two more Troopers to such experimentation unless we wait eleven hours, twenty-five minutes. But the mission will be completed. I mention this only because we will be severely unguarded for a time. Of the Troopers used to bait the trap, we have lost all but four of the twenty-two Hunters. Zero of the four hoppers assigned to Peak 15 have been destroyed. Seventeen of the twenty-nine Troopers were destroyed in the battle and the avalanche. The Rocket Troopers were able to retreat, but we have used our on-site rocket ammunition. They will need to be outfitted with eezo-based weaponry.”

There was no condemnation in the Geth Prime’s voice, no censure. Indeed, there was no sign that he was speaking of thousands of living programs lost with those platforms. Indeed, there was nothing but cold calculation, and Saren had to fight back a shiver, one of mixed apprehension, and a smattering of wary approval.

Since the geth had begun to work with him, the turian Spectre had come to respect them in turn. They were perfect soldiers, perfectly willing to obey any order given, to work together far better than most military units he’d seen, regardless of race. Yet at the same time, that very selflessness, that very uncaring nature, constantly reminded him of his greater mission. What army can stop an enemy that doesn’t care if they live or die, only that whatever objective they are on succeeds? What society can survive an enemy such as that which has enough numbers to blot out whole galaxies?

That was what he was… not fighting for, not exactly. No, that was what he was trying to… not stop, but rather mitigate. Whatever he did, however he did it, life as a slave was better than no life, and not just his own, but that of every sentient being in the galaxy. Saren had to keep that foremost in his mind at all times.

“Good, we have seen what this anomaly can do, and it is better to be certain that it has died.” For a moment, Saren froze, wondering why he used that clinical term, before shaking his head and saying aloud, “Yes, it is better to make certain the human super soldier is dead,” he said, spitting out the word human as if it left a bad taste in his mouth, hatred coursing through him at the term, the flicker of blue in his eyes fading for a moment.

Saying that, he felt a little better. Humans, humans were a threat all on their own. These days, Saren had set aside his feelings towards them so as to concentrate on the greater threat, the need to prove to Sovereign that living beings could be useful enough to be let to live as slaves rather than simply exterminated. Still, he knew that humanity was a threat to the peace of the galaxy. It had been humans who had broken the peace with the Batarian Hegemony, forcing his own people to come in with them into a still-ongoing war. It had been humans who, despite floating Council law and losing the First Contact War, had been the reason for his father’s fall from grace in that war.

Since then, humanity had expanded more, become more powerful faster than any race before them, even the hated krogan. It was only because they had not expanded into any previously existing territory of other Council races that they had not been treated the same, and Saren knew it.

Unaware of the tangent Saren’s mind had gone down, the Geth Prime nodded and left the observation platform. As it went, Saren came back to the here and now, and he turned, heading deeper into the lab even as he pulled out a communicator and began to issue orders.

OOOOOOO

Garrus couldn’t see. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t feel anything but snow stone and Ranma’s back rubbing his shoulder against Tali’s.  He closed his eyes, feeling the snow pressing in on the top of his head where it had pushed in around Ranma, the bottoms of his feet, and the side of his arm.   I can’t see, I can’t move, I can’t move, no, stop, no can’t panic. 

Only the warmth coming from Ranma kept him from having a panic attack, and even then, it was a close-run thing. Only feeling Tali beginning to shiver and shake beside him gave Garrus the last bit of courage he needed to push through his own panic. No, remember, other people need you now.

With difficulty, Garrus grabbed onto Tali’s arm and tried to open his mouth to say something, only to be unable to even do that. The snow was pressing in so much around Ranma that he could feel the snow pushing in on his mandibles, almost like it would force its way down his throat, so he closed his mouth quickly.

Tali was hyperventilating, her heart thumping in her chest, her eyes wide, but unable to see anything beyond her helmet, not even what she was feeling to her side, not even to her front, nowhere beyond the environs of the inside of her suit. The only thing that wasn’t causing her issues right now was the close confines. But the lack of sound, the inability to move at all, the darkness, this was worse than some of the worst maintenance catastrophes that she had been caught up in while on board the Rayya.

However, her head was still protected by her vacuum suit. That gave her access to comms, and after she began to calm down, she activated her helmet speakers. “Ranma, I,” Tali paused, hating how scared and broken her voice sounded, squeezing Garrus’s hand back where he had grabbed onto her own with almost punishing force. “I hope you have a plan, because I sure don’t!”

When Ranma was able to reply, both of his companions started.. “A few plans, but first, I think we need some… some more applied heat. Can you, can you guys shift away from me? I’m not sure how this is going to go…”

Tali started because she could actually hear the strain he was under, which was very much not normal in her interactions with the human martial artist/super soldier/mystery. That is not good!  Garrus was simply surprised he could reply at all, although that was quite a minor mystery, solved by the fact that Ranma had used a geth’s back plate as a shield when he turned to face out away from the small hole that the shaped charge had dug into the mountainside.

The young quarian was the one to answer, and she kept her voice calm now, hoping to give Ranma some reassurance. Now that she was watching for it, she could feel the strain in his shoulders, the strain in Ranma’s voice. Yet somehow, just having him there made her feel calmer. “I’m sorry, Ranma, but I don’t think we can. Unless you can push forward a little? I’m kind of pressed in between… well, a rock and a hard place,” she joked.

The chuckle this won made Tali smile, and she inched her head forward, laying the bottom of her face mask’s respirator into his shoulder with some difficulty as she had to push her head through the packed snow, which was quite a strain on her neck. “But I trust you. You got us here; you made it so that we weren’t crushed immediately by whatever it was. You can get us out of this.”

While Tali had recognized the danger just as easily as the others, she literally didn’t have a word in her language for what had occurred. The concept of an avalanche was simply not one that still existed in quarian society for various reasons.

“Wish I could take all the credit, but it was Garrus who thought of using a geth chassis as a shield,” Ranma grunted, then Tali felt his muscles bunched, and then a shiver of something else through his form. What it was, she didn’t know, but the heat coming from Ranma rose for a second.

That was actually a sign of Ranma reaching inside himself and manipulating his ki to enhance his strength. It wasn’t something he had to do all that often consciously, as his body normally did that to a certain degree on its own, and had been doing so for so long that Ranma was naturally way stronger than anyone his weight or build could have been. He hadn’t needed to do so to toss around the krogan of the Blood Pack, for example. Now, though, with hundreds of tons of snow, ice and stone pressing in on him, trying to fill in all the spaces it could as the avalanche continued to settle above them, he needed all the help he could get.

With his ki fueling him, Ranma pushed, feeling the strain of the shield, almost as if it was about to start crumpling under the weight he was pushing. This forced him to push his ki not only through his own body but also into the shield to reinforce it. Thank goodness this thing is big enough to cover more than two-thirds of my body.

The back plate had been torn off one of the heavy troopers, whose name Ranma hadn’t heard yet, and they had stood at least a foot or more taller than him, with their bodies making up most of that difference.  The snow was still pushing in around his legs and head, though along with the sides, but the shield gave him something to work with.  And Ranma was an old hat at running his ki into metal like this.

Straining, he was able to push it a foot away from his body before he stopped, straining and not getting any further. As he did, Ranma began to feel a little short of breath, and his eyes widened. Crap! The snow and everything else is blocking out the oxygen, too!

Thankfully, Ranma wasn’t alone. He had Tali and Garrus, and Garrus had already thought of that when the snow began to press in between his mandibles. He was also a turian soldier who, prior to being deployed to Omega, had been on the batarian front. The batarians had never even heard of the Geneva Convention or the Citadel equivalent, and gas weapons were a frequent hazard when they pulled back from a prepared position. The pouches on his waist carried several things to deal with such things, including a small rebreather.

Once he had enough room, Garrus reached Ford around Ranma’s face, slamming a rebreather home onto his mouth, although admittedly, he missed the first time, smacking Ranma’s nose hard enough to make him twitch. “What the?” Ranma gasped as the mask settled somewhat into place. It was built for a turian’s face, so it didn’t stick to his face and the fitting wasn’t nearly airtight, but it did pump some air, which allowed Ranma to breath easier.

“Rebreather! It’s only got fifteen minutes of air in it, but humans need to take in a lot more oxygen than my people do. And you’re the one doing the straining right now,” Garrus said, keeping his sentences short and concise to conserve more air, thankful that he could even do that thanks to the foot of snow turned into oxygen while next to him, Tali did what she could to help. In this case, it meant clicking on a light fixture that was part of the top of her vacuum suit.

This was a little light set into one of the shoulders on her suit, and when it went on, Garrus really wished it hadn’t. Because what they could see now was basically Ranma’s back, the shield, and snow pressing in all around it. Slowly now, but inexorably.

But to Ranma, that was more than enough to help. Pulling one hand away from his shield, he held it to the side where the snow was pressing in around the shield most, and both Tali and Garrus saw a heat haze appear around his hand. “Need to boil some of the snow away, shift the rest to ice, create a wall…” He muttered, his voice barely discernible through the rebreather. “Gonna need to use my feet on some of it too. That’s gonna be hard, haven’t used my legs for ki at all…”

“Good thinking, boiling the ice away should give us some oxygen too,” Garrus encouraged him, before falling quiet as Tali nudged him into silence, his hands twitching nervously.

For several moments, the three of them were quiet, the other two watching Ranma work, basically creating an outer hatch-like area of ice around their cave’s entrance, if such a term could be used in the moment. Then, he slowly shifted the shield to one side, doing the same again and again. Soon, he had a construction in front of him that was almost solid ice. Doing so below his waist was harder, but this also created more oxygen. 

When it was done, all the snow below their waists that had pushed in was gone. Ranma still held the shield up, waiting, watching, one hand thrust forward into the wall of ice for a few seconds, sending more heat into the ice or rather beyond it, thickening the ice via melting the snow on the other side of the ice wall, exercising heat. Thankfully, he had played with using the heat-based techniques master Vulcan had taught him during wintertime before to make sculptures and so forth. This wasn’t too different, although the seriousness of the moment was, and the need to use the first layer of ice is a medium was making everything difficult.

However, eventually, Ranma felt the wall was thick enough to hold, and he breathed a sigh of relief, both in the fact that he’d done it, the fact that doing so had created enough oxygen for him to take away the mask for now, and, amusingly enough, that he was still male. If he had accidentally created enough water to trigger the change while also using his heat-based technique, well, the pain would’ve probably caused him to blackout. That bit of exercise had worn him down further than the battle beforehand. A battle, Ranma now knew, had been basically bait for the trap. “Someone in that lab is too damn smart!”

“Agreed,” Garrus said, while Tali simply blinked.

“Wait, this wasn’t an accident?”

Reveling in the fact that he now actually had some room to maneuver, Ranma turned to look at her, exchanging a glance with Garrus, the three of them visible to one another in the light coming from Tali’s suit. “No. That kind of avalanche, that well-executed? That was designed to trap Ranma,” Garrus stated bluntly. 

“Yeah. This reminds me of that ambush that bitch Vasir created for me and Herb. She knew she couldn’t take us on physically. Whatever was going on in the battle with those colossi, the Troopers, even their heavies, didn’t have enough firepower to put me down permanently, not without a lot more troops and distance to work with. They sacrificed themselves to bait the trap,” Ranma explained.

“Oh…” Putting away the term avalanche for a moment, Tali worked that through, then shook her head. “In that case, can I request that when next we go after some bad guys, we do so on a planet that doesn’t come included with a means of stopping you?”

“That would get my vote for sure,” Ranma snorted, while Garrus muttered something about being grateful that he was only on the team for this one trip. “I’m beginning to dislike fighting smart enemies. And… And I’m sorry that trailing after me led you two to this.”

Tali reached over and lightly smacked Ranma upside the head with two of her fingers. “That is the most stupid way of thinking I’ve ever heard. I’m here because I’m your friend Ranma, and because what we're doing is interesting. It’s not your fault that we’re stuck in here.”

“Yeah, but I still led you—" Another smack interrupted Ranma, and then he found one of Tali’s fingers waggling in his face. That somewhat amused him, showing that certain bits of body language carried over between species regardless of the shape of the hands doing it.

“Again, that’s stupid talk. It’s not like you could have foreseen the bosh’tet’s plan to collapse mountains on us or anything. And it’s only because of you and your skills that we’re still alive. So let’s start thinking about what to do from now on,” Tali demanded brusquely. “There’s no use worrying about shattered conduits. You can only get to repairing them.”

“I agree with Tali, and could we do so quickly? I am starting to feel quite claustrophobic in here,” Garrus quipped, keeping his mandibles from warbling with difficulty.

Ranma grunted at that, looking over to the ice for a second. He pressed his ear against it and could make out some kind of noise beyond, but not the creaking or cracking as if the ice was going to start giving way. Good, I was right about the thickness needed then.

“Well, we’re kind of safe where we are from the avalanche at least. It seems to be settling down out there now. I… could burst through, I think, use a Moko Takabisha to create a kind of tunnel. Although I don’t know if the technique would heat the snow enough to make a permanent one. I’ve never added heat to my long-range ki attacks. They’ve got some heat, but it’s mostly concussive force, so the snow and stuff might well just continually try to keep filling in the hole.”

“And even if you were able to make a hole up to the surface, I’d wager the geth would just start dropping artillery into it. You might be able to withstand that kind of thing, Ranma, but the two of us wouldn’t,” Garrus pointed out.

“Let’s take stock of what we’ve got. My suit is able to sustain me, obviously, so I don’t need to worry about air or anything.” Tali opened up her omni-tool, using a scanner on the air around them for a moment. “According to my omni-tool, there’s enough air where we are right now for the two of you for about fifteen minutes of hard exercise for both of you. For just Ranma, I’m not sure how that would equate, but probably more?”

A few other buttons on her omni-tool, Tali took a half-step forward, pushing past Ranma in a way that had Ranma blushing a little bit at the feel of first her thigh and then her suit-clad hip sliding against his. She stuck her omni-tool against the ice for a second, muttering about needing contact, and Ranma watched as what looked like a thin beam of some kind shot out from her omni-tool into the ice and beyond, deflecting through the ice and then even more through the snow beyond, but still visible for a few seconds before moving out of range of his ability to see through the two mediums.

After a few seconds, her omni-tool beeped again, and Tali frowned inside her helmet. “So… erm, good news, bad news. Most of the stuff my omni-tool is trying to get through to determine how deep we are is snow and ice. It didn’t run into any actual rocks beyond the lip of the cave.”

“Great.  Bad news?” Ranma grunted.

“The bad news is that we’re buried under nearly a mile of said substances…” Tali’s voice trailed off.

“Good grief! The calculations needed to make two avalanches that powerful which wouldn’t bury the bottom of the lab at the very least is crazy,” Garrus murmured.

“Have you forgotten what we're fighting?” Tali asked, a snarl in her voice, her earlier moment of weakness gone in a blast of anger. “If there is anything that the geth are good at, it’s calculating. All they need to do is bring in enough of their independent runtimes, and they’d be able to churn out an answer quickly enough.”

“Ugh…” Ranma grunted. “I doubt that the bottom of the lab got away free of the settling after the Avalanche, but more importantly, I’ve never even measured how far I can send a Moko Takabisha before it starts dissipating. I’d have to think it wouldn’t go more than thirty yards and even then, that’s in the air, not when it has to bulldoze through stuff.”

“Going up like that, it’ll take a while, and I would wager anything that whoever planned those avalanches would be ready and waiting with something else by the time we got to the surface, like I said before. Maybe another avalanche, depending on how much of the lab needs to be above ground,” Garrus agreed. “However, I think there’s another solution. Head straight for the lab. We were actually running towards it when we forted up here.”

“Forted up doesn’t seem to really describe what we did, but whatever,” Ranma muttered, shaking his head as he admitted. “I got all turned around though, kinda, heh, got tunnel vision. I’ve no idea in which direction the lab is. Tali, can you tell?”

Tali worked on her omni-tool for a few seconds, moving it this way and that, trying to send the sensor she’d used to figure out how much stuff was between them and the air to the side. After a second, she reluctantly stated that she couldn’t do it from this angle.

In reply, Ranma began to slowly crack a portion of the ice, setting aside segments of it, boiling it, and then shifting the wall of ice slightly, so that there was a bit of an angle to it, pushing out and away from the makeshift cave. It took a while, by the end of which Garrus and Ranma were very grateful that in so doing Ranma had made more oxygen for the pair, and Tali hurried forward, using her omni-tool again.

Meanwhile, Garrus was going a little manic. He had closed his eyes and was basically doing all he could to not curl into a frantic, rocking ball of uselessness. He had not been joking when he had mentioned that he was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic.

For her part, Tali was dealing with the enclosed space and the lack of other sources of light quite well now that her initial panic had passed. It wasn’t even quiet in here thanks to the activities, the slight hissing steam, and the creaking of the ice and snow Ranma was working with.

Eventually, she had the scanner at the proper angle, and a moment later, it beeped, quite a bit faster than it had the first time. “Oh wow! Garrus, you were right. We’re much closer to the lab than we are to the surface. This is reading only as two hundred yards.”

“We reacted too quickly to the avalanches. We nearly got out of the kill zone,” Garrus said, his eyes still closed, but his mandibles opening into a smile for the first time since they’d been buried. “That’s got to be easier to get to the lab, right?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know if I’ll have much left when we get there,” Ranma warned. “You’re talking about me making some kind of, of slow-moving ice tunnel? I’d have to continually renew it, burn through this ice wall facing that way, then basically start slowly moving forward, burning both a forward wall, destroying it as I go, and the tunnel’s ceiling and sides.”

“Actually, if everything settled down, then most of it will be packed snow anyway. I don’t think you need to worry so much about the sides,” Garrus disagreed, pushing through his claustrophobia to lessons he’d had in training in mountainous areas. “I’ve been a part of Mountain and winter training to know that ice can be packed pretty hard, and it can sustain a tremendous amount of weight.”

“Still, that’s a hard ask. But I suppose it’s the best plan we’ve got,” Ranma snorted. Any port in a storm or whatever. “Tali, keep monitoring our oxygen rate. And you both should probably think about some way to get into the lab when we reach it. If we come up against hard rock…”

“I’ve still got one grenade left on me. Tali, can you make it a shaped charge?” Garrus asked.

Tali got to work on that instantly, while Ranma began to crack still more of the wall that had heretofore been protecting them at an angle, then basically redoing it to a certain degree. Removing a segment of that ice showed that Garrus was correct. The snow beyond had packed in so much and so hard that it didn’t move much even after Ranma removed the ice.

This meant that digging out the tunnel was basically more digging through the snow than melting, something Ranma was very thankful for. He did have to stop a few more times to melt some of the snow that he’d removed into oxygen for himself and Garrus, but generally speaking, they were able to shift themselves forward slowly, with Tali’s omni-tool working overtime on both sensing for the oxygen and any sudden shifts in the snow.

It was slow going, but thanks to the density of the snow, the only real drain on Ranma’s ki was keeping them all warm, putting out enough heat from his body to act almost like a campfire. Occasionally, Garrus and Tali needed to move closer to him, the cold of the slowly growing tunnel getting to the pair, but they were still able to keep moving.

Through the snow ahead of them, Ranma began to see, thanks to Tali’s light, a shift in the color of the snow. As if something darker was beyond it. “We’re almost there. Tali, can you use your omni-tool to figure out if her approaching solid stone or a steel hatch?”

“It’s not my omni-tool, it’s a program on my omni-tool that’s letting me do this,” Tali said pedantically, more to get a snort out of Ranma than anything else, which she succeeded in. She again moved past him, accidentally pressing into his shoulder. An idle thought of what she would be feeling right now if the chest plate on her suit wasn’t covered by the new chest plate that Ranma had made for her back on Omega occurred to her just then, but she pushed that thought aside, knowing that even then, her suit had already had segments of armor plate built into it which would’ve stopped her from feeling much of anything.

Well, my suit generally speaking makes me not feel much of anything, but there are varying degrees to that, she thought, her thoughts going down a very normal, morose frame of mind for a second.

However, she kept most of her mind on what she was doing, and after a few seconds, had Ranma dig out areas to either side of the front of the tunnel they’d made. He had to stop for a moment to turn still more snow into oxygen, a process that Tali knew wasn’t nearly as one-to-one, so to speak, as Ranma and Garrus probably thought, but didn’t say that aloud. They were almost out, and there was no need to be too pessimistic.

Eventually, Tali’s tool found a lip that she recognized as a portion of the exterior hatch that the snow buggy they’d previously been traveling in would’ve entered the lab through in more peaceful times. It too had been buried under the snow and ice, as Garrus had said, along with at least a few stories of the laboratory itself, making Ranma remark that whoever had tried to kill the three of them had really wanted to be thorough about things.

To which the other two trapped with him simply gazed at him for a moment in the light of Tali’s light, a deadpan, “You don’t say?” coming from Garrus, while Tali simply shook her head, muttering under her breath, “What’s this ‘we’ thing? Last I checked, I didn’t need to have a mountain dropped on me to kill me.”

Ranma snorted at that, biting back his first reply of ‘give me a few years and that might change’ but he refrained for now. Eventually, his efforts to dig them forward had him scraping along what felt like metal. A few moments more work had opened the way forward for the tunnel to connect to the outer wall. “So, shaped charge, or should I try to melt our way in?”

“Considering all of the oxygen we have in here, and the fact that oxygen is a very flammable gas, I think the whole shaped charge idea is a last resort,” Tali drawled. “I didn’t object to it earlier because we were concerned about how tired you’d be, Ranma, or if we found only stone, but I have to assume that you’ve still got, erm, enough juice in your tank?”

She sounded apologetic as she said that, but also very firm. Even a shaped charge would create some fire and heat, and in an enclosed space like the tunnel, which was filled with their bodies and oxygen, that wasn’t something she wanted to test out.

Garrus agreed, having been running some calculations on that score on his own omni-tool. He was no longer feeling as claustrophobic as before. Being in tunnels didn’t equate to having been stuck in a slowly shrinking cave, after all, and he said now that any attempt to use the shaped charge would probably backfire. “I’m not saying we couldn’t survive it. We could hide behind another wall of ice that you’d create for us, Ranma, but we’ll probably also have to then start digging our way forward again when the resulting explosion brings down still more snow into the tunnel. And it would probably be tougher going at that point, as everything would have been disturbed.”

Ranma shrugged, then gestured them both backwards and away down the tunnel. “Well, then, ya two best get back and let me cook.”

Tali laughed at that. “Shouldn’t that be keep cooking?”

“Hush, you. Just get back.  This is gonna create more heat than either of you might want to deal with.”

Once they were a few yards away, Ranma set his hands against the metal, concentrating, bringing forth the same heating techniques he’d used dozens of times already in this effort, only heightening it to near the maximum he could. Tali and Garrus watched from where they were standing as a heat haze built up around Ranma’s entire body, then, a few moments later, the metal of the hatch began to change color, becoming red a few seconds later. That red shifted into white, then the wall began to melt and run away, with Ranma’s hands chasing upwards and around, continuing to pour heat into the metal until he had a hole entirely through it.

Once he had a hole large enough for the trio to enter, he backed away, canceling the technique with a sigh of relief. “Damn, I am so glad I got so used to using that technique for long periods when I was helping to build our ship over Mostromos. That would’ve been much harder otherwise.”

Admittedly, back then, I wasn’t using it to melt my way through the armor. I was simply using it to melt the pits of armor and the metals together while adding my ki into it.  This was a little bit harder, Ranma reflected, taking stock of his internal energy for a second. He estimated that he’d used at least half of his normal reserves doing that, but that was all right by him. They were through, and his knuckles were itching with the need to punch someone.

Specifically, the person behind that whole avalanche thing. Whoever that is is far too damn smart for me to want to let walk away, he reflected. I ain’t the type to go straight to the ‘obstacles are for killing’ type of thinking, but this one, yeah, I’m going to make an exception. Sorry, Benezia, if it's Saren, if he’s here, you ain’t gonna have a chance to question him.

“Ranma, move, you silly bosh’tet,” Tali laughed, a mixture of amusement and relief filling her as she pushed at his back, with Garrus also joining in.  “You’ve been giving off so much heat that the snow began to melt!”

Hissing at that, Ranma hopped through, getting out of the way of the other two who hopped up and over the still simmering bits of metal at the bottom of the whole he’d made.  Glancing over his shoulder as the other two whooped at being out of the tunnel of ice, Ranma realized that Tali was right. 

The sides, roof and even the floor of the tunnel he’d made had indeed melted. Luckily, the floor hadn’t melted all that much, but as he watched, the sides of the snow tunnel started to slough inwards, while the roof began to come down in chunks, accompanied by quite a bit of water.   

Well, that would’ve sucked.  I wonder if my heat haze would’ve been enough to heat the water enough so that I stayed a guy, or if it would’ve triggered the change, or been both… ugh…

Shaking that worry away, Ranma looked around the receiving area for the snow buggy, seeing no one present, with Tali already heading towards what looked like a control panel and Garrus shifting toward one entrance leading deeper into the installation, one hand up covering his eyes as they got used to the greater lighting in here.

After a second, Ranma realized why there wasn’t anyone waiting for them, as he had somewhat feared would be the case when he began that final effort.  After all, there was no way the enemy couldn’t detect such high heat underneath the snow. Yet according to his omni-tool’s chronometer, it had been good two and a half hours since the avalanche. If any geth or whoever else was in the lab had been out looking for them, they must’ve stopped back when Ranma was just using his heat haze to warm them up, thus missing the moment when they reached the hatch.

Seeing Garrus reach one of the doors leading deeper in, Ranma moved to the second of three doors, leaping up to the causeway in front of it, opening it and peering down the hallway beyond. The last door was labeled storage, which made Ranma and Garrus both discount it for the moment.

Garrus had already taken up a position at the other hatchway, rifle at the ready. Meanwhile, Tali snickered as her omni-tool lit up, going from a former yellow to green as Ranma glanced her way. 

That snicker was yet another sign of relief at their survival rather than any delight in her current activity, but Tali’s voice was remarkably upbeat as she spoke.  “I’m in, for a given value, anyway. I don’t know what all I’ll be able to do from here, but I can at least get us some maps and maybe some other information about this place.  Give me five minutes, and then we should be good.”

OOOOOOO

“Warning. Security cameras set within the land-based receiving area have detected movement. Placing it on the front screen for Ally Saren now.”

From where he was sitting in the command center of the lab, Saren looked up from where he had been going over plans to install some new exterior defenses, his glowing ice blue eyes narrowing. “What?” A moment later, those same eyes widened, as did many of the other people in the control center of the lab, turning away from their own work stations to stare. “They survived?!”

Despite his current shock, Saren had been worried about that ever since the first reports from the Troopers sent out onto the new terrain outside had reported that they would need to bring in specialized equipment to detect any heat sources through so much snow and ice. They could detect distances, and occasionally, they had reported some movement from below, but with no ability to detect a heat source, they had reported that as only supposition. An 80% chance of simply rocks and so forth settling down or being crushed under the weight of the snow and ice above them was the way the geth platforms had put it.

But with that human super soldier, a term that Saren was now using consciously rather than the term ‘anomaly’ Sovereign had labeled Ranma and his companion Herb with, Saren had not been so sanguine about his ploy having worked. Now, he was only hoping that surviving that had taken it out of the strange super soldier and his ability to throw around biotic-like energy attacks and other abilities.

Quickly, he began to outline a new plan, shouting out orders at the same time. “Lock down the lab. The observation room and control center are to be completely cut off, set their backup air supply. Every other door in the installation is to be opened and kept that way. We’ll need some specific gases added to the air circulation network. Further…”

All around him, technicians and scientists hastened to obey, while the geth crime settled down, responding promptly by sending messages along the interconnected network of geth programs. While the ambush had taken a significant portion of Saren’s available military power to both set up and activate, he was in no way without resources. In fact, I still have two ways to deal with this bastard and his two allies.

OOOOOOO

Garrus looked at the map that Tali had just sent to his and Ranma’s omni-tool, then raised his hand, almost ready to signal with a hand gesture that they should take the route forward from where he was guarding, before pausing, remembering he wasn’t really working with any other soldier here. Instead, he sent that message over his intercom, then moved forward, rifle out, scanning down the corridor ahead of him. “Odds of our entry being undetected?”

“I don’t think they would’ve detected my intrusion into the computer systems, but there are two security cameras here,” Tali said apologetically from where she still stood by the computer set into the wall of the loading area, her omni-tool jacked into its side. “They might have been able to see us before I started to spoof them. Worse, I can only spoof them for so long. I’m basically fighting, well, what I’d amount to a few hundred geth runtimes that are devoted to computer warfare. They can’t get into my omni-tool, but I’m having a lot of trouble doing anything to the local computer network myself. Sorry, guys.”

“What if you’re able to interact with one of their central computers rather than a simple console?” Garrus asked, while Ranma joined him. Garrus blinked as he then leapt up onto the roof of the tunnel right above Garrus, and then, Garrus’s eyes seemed to want to float away from the man. He couldn’t stop himself. Instead, after a second, he couldn’t really register Ranma’s presence at all. “And by the Primarchs, that is creepy! Is that another one of your tricks, Ranma?”

Ranma didn’t reply, but Tali did, hurrying up behind Garrus. She had done all she could from that simple console. “In answer to your questions in order, yes. If I can get to a central computer location, I could do a lot more damage. Simply physically ordering the computer to purge itself of all foreign programs for a few seconds before taking over would be simple and would wipe out any geth runtimes anywhere in the lab’s interconnected network. As to your second question about Ranma doing an invisibility act, yeah, he showed that technique off to me once. I also agree it’s creepy, it just doesn’t work like normal cloaking devices do.”

For a second, Ranma fought with the urge to break his technique if only to prank the two of them, but before he could give in to that urge, the corridor ahead of them filled with fire. Several Troopers had rounded a corner and immediately began to fire at them, although one of them fell to a precise shot from Garrus even as he fell back, grimacing and going to his knees, then his chest. Next to him, Tali yelped and threw herself forward, grimacing as a bullet still almost clipped her.

There was literally no cover in the corridor, which was one of many reasons why tunnel fighting like this was, regardless of your enemy, a horrible idea.

Two of the platforms pulled a security gun into position, but before they could begin to fire with its heavier caliber rounds, Ranma dropped down on top of them from above. His fists and legs fleshed out, destroying all five of the Troopers in less than so many seconds, but he had also noticed the problem the other two had. “Garrus, Tali, get up here. Pull apart these Troopers. You can use their back plates as shields going forward.”

“Good idea,” Garrus said, hurrying forward, while Tali frowned a little, then did the same.

While the two men took apart the Troopers, putting together a shield for Garrus, Tali reached down, not to create her own shield, but rather to pick up one of the regular Troopers’ guns, shivering again at the sensation of it.  Keelah, but I miss my own shotgun.

“Tali, are you okay?”

Blinking, Tali looked up into Ranma’s expression, causing her to blush a bit inside her helmet. “Er, physically, I’m fine, Ranma. It’s silly, but I, I don’t like how good geth weapons fit in my hand.” She reached down, pulling up the still intact hand of one of the platforms. She needed to make no further comparison to her own for a three-fingered hand. “Moments like this, it really hits home that I’m fighting the self-created bogeyman that had nearly wiped out my entire race, you know?”

Ranma didn’t know what to say to that, so instead he reached over, pulling Tali into a sideways hug, which she did not resist. She’d gotten used to how touchy Ranma could be early on in their friendship, and, frankly, greatly enjoyed it, even if she couldn’t get the full measure of it, what with her suit and all. “Sorry, I know that’s a big deal to you, and I know you still have issues with it. But think about it like this. In the fights with me, you’ve got a bit of your own back, haven’t you?”

“On a very, very small scale, sure,” Tali drawled, hesitantly wrapping one of her arms around Ranma’s waist, squeezing him back. Again, the lack of true tactile sensation, only the pressure around her arm, really, frustrated and angered the young quarian in equal measure, but Tali was so used to that after a lifetime spent in a suit that she was able to push through it, although no longer as easily as she once had. Nowadays, she was longing for sensation, a fact that she put down more and more to her companion.  

“But, um, thanks, that does make me feel better,” she said aloud, before moving away reluctantly, powering up her omni-tool again. “If we keep going, there’s going to be an intersection. The two side tunnels will lead to a second supply area on the right, and the maintenance entrance to one of the hydroponics gardens.  This installation has three of them.”

On a planet like this one, every lab needed to have a few hydroponic gardens, if only to add to their oxygen supply if nothing else. If a laboratory’s air supply rested solely on air brought in through tanks, any break in that supply chain would have catastrophic repercussions. And considering the weather and terrain on Noveria, assuming there wouldn’t be such breaks was a ridiculous idea.

“This particular hydroponics garden takes up the majority of this level, and two floors above to our right. To our left, after we go up a level, we’ll find another two gardens, taking up space up space on seven more floors combined.  After that, we’ll start running into various living quarters and an exercise room, with the levels spreading out immensely through the rock. The exercise room is almost as big as one of the gardens, but without a second story, funnily enough.  I suppose even high-grade scientists and so forth apparently know that they need some amount of exercise,” Tali stated.

Garrus and Ranma snorted at that and pushed forward as Tali continued to speak about the intersection, warning them that it had a security gun embedded in its roof. “Why, I don’t know, but from what I discovered, there are a lot of those things built into the laboratory from top to bottom. We’re going to have trouble with them, I’m sure, because several of them actually have their own shields.”

“What the heck is this lab set up to experiment with?” Garrus asked, frowning. “That kind of internal security is more in keeping with a military station, not a civilian laboratory.”

“We mentioned that this group might be experimenting on living subjects, didn’t we?” Ranma said, scowling angrily. “Remember, that was the original thing we told ya we were coming here to investigate before we even knew for sure that the geth or Saren was involved.”

Garrus grunted at that, and the two of them moved forward, with Tali taking cover behind them, using them basically as moving shields. This proved to be a very good idea, because not a few moments later, they came within sensor range of the gun. Garrus mentally noted that it had happened a little faster than it should have with a normal Council-grade security gun, but put that down to the geth programs heightening it for some reason.

The next few seconds were quite fraught as Ranma leaped up, bouncing off the walls of the tunnel with the ease of a particularly annoying bug, drawing fire from the geth platform, while Garrus fell to his chest, firing downrange. A shield glimmered around the gun, and several more Troopers appeared, coming out of hiding places, firing as they came back, but not staying where they were.

Instead, they retreated, splitting up along the two hallways that Tali had already mentioned led to what amounted to dead ends. This meant that when Ranma closed with the security gun, they continued to fire at him from the sides, hitting him several times in the arms, shoulders and the sides of his legs, causing him to grimace in pain even as his durability allowed him to keep moving. Such strikes didn’t really do any true damage, not unless Ranma stayed still and took it for a significant amount of time. Which Ranma was in no way willing to do.

Instead, he flowed up and around the security gun on the floor, his fists fleshing out at near Amaguriken speed to hammer into the shielding of the gun. He had barely touched down behind it when the guns shielding popped at last, and Garrus, who had been waiting for this moment, fired a shot straight through it. This left the two Troopers who had retreated to either side, and Ranma took still more shots from them even as he charged to the left, getting close to one of the Hunters. It tried to leap away, activating its cloning device at the same time, but Ranma was too fast, his hand lashing out to grab it by the leg. Whirling, he tossed it over the wreckage of the security gun to crash into its opposite number. Both of them went down, shattered by the impact.

Garrus passed the intersection by, his gun trained further down the way they’d need to go to get to the elevator that would take them up to the other levels of the laboratory. If, that is, they were stupid enough to use the actual lift rather than the stairwell that was set to one side of it.

“Of course, that’s like picking your poison,” Garrus said aloud. “The enemy can probably manipulate that elevator in various ways, which doesn’t say anything about the elevator tram itself being a kill zone. Similarly, a stairwell can be a very dangerous place. I’d really like some juggernaut armor right now,” he ended in a mumble.

Garrus was a sniper, a long-range killer, one who relied on fire and movement, not standing in one place and taking shots at his enemies. Thus, his armor reflected that personal choice. It was good, but nowhere near top grade, the kind that a krogan or close-range combatant would use simply because such armor would weigh him down. Up to this point, it had still served him well, but in the close confines of the laboratory? There was only so much that a turian exoskeleton and light armor could do against modern weaponry.

“Then I’ll go first like normal and draw their fire,” Ranma answered philosophically before turning away from Garrus to look up at the ceiling. “Tali?”

Tali had come up behind the other two slowly, basically shooting or otherwise sabotaging the cameras as they went. At the moment, knowing their exact location wasn’t all that difficult, but once they reached the floors with living quarters, it might come in handy if someone thought that they might be able to burn their way up to the next level using the same technique they’d entered the lab with. She had been about to actually suggest that very thing when Ranma’s call interrupted her thoughts. “Yes?”

Ranma gestured above his head to an air vent. Its slides had just opened, and he could hear some noise coming from within. A moment later, some kind of gas began to seep out, making Ranma grimace. “Fuck. Garrus, get that rebreather back on your face. They’re trying some kind of gas on us.”

Garrus hastily grabbed the reboot breather he had taken back from Ranma early on when they had begun to leave the tunnel behind. Luckily, it was a model that could actually take in air just as easily as it could store it, so it was now full and would give him at least thirty minutes of use. “Are you going to be all right?”

“No. I’m going to need to use my ki to keep cycling whatever this is out of my system. We’ll need ta speed up, see if we can get ahead of it. But first…” He looked over at Tali, gesturing up to the air vent again, even as it continued to spew out whatever gas had been added to the air circulation. “Do you think you can fit in there?”

This got a deadpan look from Tali, equal to the two that she had sent Garrus’s back in Port Hanshan. “I hate that it’s a good idea, and that I probably can. My claws will make noise, though, even covered by my suit,” she warned. Both her hands were covered like the rest of her, of course, and that included her fingers.  Similarly, the talons on her feet were covered by hard patches of plastic.

Ranma shrugged and pulled out several shirts from his ki space. He didn’t keep much in there ever since it had collapsed when he had been fighting Vasir’s gases, but he still kept a few changes of clothing in there. “In that case, we’ll just wrap them up.”

Despite the gas coming down on them, Tali actually giggled as Ranma wrapped her arms and feet in his own clothing. He then hoisted her up, causing her to laugh again, even as she went to work on doing the coverings on the air vent.

Hearing that sound made Ranma grin despite the fact that he now could feel his body using up his ki to keep the gas from affecting him. “You know, I’ve always liked the sound of your laughs. It makes me smile.” He said, before he could stop himself.

Tali blushed rosily behind her visor, grateful that the noise of the gas coming through the air circulation system meant that none of the other two could hear her suit reacting to our suddenly heightened temperature. “You, you, how can you spout out something like that!” Tali gasped.

“Eh, s, sorry,” Ranma muttered, blushing.

Nearby, Garrus really wished he could reach up and scratch at his mandibles in embarrassment at the moment, but considering they were covered by the gas mask, that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, he turned around, facing away from the two, and then shouted, “Children, this really isn’t the time. Let’s get a move on, please.”

“Er, right,” Tali higher into the air as the air vent great passed by his line of sight, smacking down into the ground a second later.

Ranma felt Tali scrambling, then pulling herself up into the vent and said, “Follow your map, try to find the command center and do what you can against the guns and whatever gas this is. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep up using my ki to fight it.”

The drain from that was actually a bit more than needing to keep Tali and Garrus warm in the ice tunnel, so it was a real concern. “And remember, shoot first, ask questions after.”

“Unlike you, I don’t actually espouse that way of thinking most of the time, but right now, I can’t argue with it,” Tali said, having already pulled herself upwards to the point where her upper body was in the air shaft. She then kicked off Ranma’s shoulders, pushing herself upwards, wishing that she could at least turn around to speak to Ranma face-to-face before they separated.  “I downloaded some of my hack-n’-crack programs to Garrus’s omni-tool.  You should be able to start spoofing their security cameras if you want.”

Not that the view that she gave Ranma as she disappeared into the tunnel was actually a bad one, regardless. Yep, semi-skintight clothing, and a rear that won’t quit. Bad combination for this martial artist, he thought wryly, looking away.  “You too, Tali.”

“The spirit of the homeworld be with you,” Tali replied, and began to make her way along the air vent.

Once Tali was on her way, Ranma joined Garrus, slapping him on the shoulder, then passing him by, racing down the corridor, rifle up again, searching for targets. Ranma followed, disappearing into the Umi-Sen-Ken again, soon passing his companion by as he clung to the roof.

OOOOOOO

“The gas alone won’t be enough, that’s why we need to try various mixtures, and keep the one I just ordered for last,” Saren snarled, his mandibles wide. “Keep our remaining geth falling back, we can’t be profligate with our strength.”

“But sir, that last mixture, it—”

“Did I stutter, technician?” Saren growled, glaring at the lab assistant at one of the consoles in the command room. “If I wanted your opinion, I would have given it to you in the first place. Obey.”

The man, a human whose eyes had only begun to show the blue of Sovereign’s touch as put there through a large chunk of the ancient dreadnaught Saren had brought along, nodded and turned to his controls. “I’m going to head out now.  Keep me apprised of the movements of the trio. Geth Prime, you’ll come with me. Unless we get very lucky, the gas we’re using throughout the lower levels won’t be enough to stop the human super soldier. If they win through, we’ll need to once more bait a trap.”

OOOOOOO

Just as Garrus had predicted, the stairwell became a dangerous choke point from the first. Two Hunters and a geth gunner (Ranma wasn’t certain what the ones with bigger guns were called, but it fit) stood at the top of the staircase, falling back as Ranma and Garrus entered, firing as they went. Ranma reacted quickly, pushing Garrus back out into the corridor. He took several of the mass effect rounds to his chest plate, while one rebounded off his cheek, breaking a few teeth and leaving a large bruise for a moment before his ki healing kicked in as Ranma followed Garrus out. Fucking hell, I need my real armor back. Getting hit in the face hurts. And I can’t dodge so well inside a stairwell like this.

The smaller caliber rounds of the Hunters and regular Troopers didn’t matter much to Ranma, but the larger caliber gun, which put Ranma, oddly, in mind of a SAW or squad assist (he thought) weapon, was a different matter. Things hit like strikes from Cologne or Happosai, a lot of power in a small hit zone. Worse, it reminds me of those larger units me and Tali ran into in the pirate den. Those things could actually hurt me. Gonna need to watch out for them in the future.

“Don’t suppose you have any more grenades?”

“Considering I said I only had two and gave them both to Tali to change them into shaped charges, no, I don’t,” Garrus grumbled, pushing himself off the ground where he’d been hurled a moment ago.

“Eh, it was worth a shot,” Ranma grunted, then looked around for a second. “Better question. You think you have a tool on you that we could take some of these wall panels out?”

“Another shield?” Garrus frowned, then used one of his talons as a screw. It wasn’t very good for his nails, but Garrus certainly didn’t care, and it was quick, which, given his limited air supply, was also good. Honestly, I would have hoped we would have left worrying about air back when we were digging through a Spirits-cursed avalanche, but it’s obvious Saren read Vasir’s report on how to deal with Ranma.

The thought was a somewhat bitter one for Garrus, but he faced it with grim determination. The geth presence alone on Noveria made this journey worth it on its own. But the change in tactics, the way the enemy commander had planned out first one, and now another means of bypassing Ranma’s insane physical abilities, was pointing toward it being someone like Saren. He’s always been known as a good tactician, one able and willing to think beyond the norm. Whoever it was who had planned the avalanche had certainly done that.

Soon, Garrus handed over the panel to Ranma, who nodded, and without another word, charged into the stairwell. Watching as Ranma charged up the stairs shield first, being hit by enough firepower to have literally taken Garrus to pieces, Garrus shook his head. “Better him than me.” 

The makeshift shield did its job, letting Ranma close with the retreating geth. Once he was close, Ranma lashed out with punches and kicks, launching the three Troopers there in every direction, the robots coming apart at even as they flew through the air from the force of Ranma’s punches.

As they ascended to another floor, Garrus took a brief moment to realize that whoever was filling this area with gas was doing so throughout the entire complex, before he pointed. “That way! We’ll at least find a hydroponics control station there. It’s got its own separate air ventilation system as part of the hydroponics system. Maybe there will be people there, maybe not, but…”

Ranma nodded and sprinted down the board that Garrus indicated, quickly coming to not one, not two, but three defensive guns, popping out of the floor and the walls alike. His eyes widening, Ranma ducked under his makeshift for a few moments, while Garrus fell back behind him, firing over the shield from well behind.

However, like the first gun they dealt with on the floor below, these three also had shields. Garrus’s bullets did nothing but cause the shield to appear like a scintillating ball of energy. Using the shield to protect himself as much as possible, Ranma charged forward, crashing into the first energy shield with his own metallic makeshift one. That shield eventually burst under his push, and Ranma’s hand flashed out, snakelike quick around the edge of the shield to grab at the gun barrel. Twisting, he sent it skidding sideways, blasting into one of the other guns on the wall, then he was passed.

Even as the shield on the second gun began to flicker and twitch under the fire of its fellow, Ranma had moved past, out of the angle of the guns. With a grunt, he ripped the one in the floor up out of its hinges, then used it as a blunt object against the other shields of the other two as Garrus pulled back, getting out of range when the guns began to track in his direction. He only returned when he heard two loud cramping noises.

Behind the guns was a hatch leading into the lab that Garrus had noticed on the map. He looked down at his gas mask for a moment, grimacing. Five minutes left. How Ranma was dealing with the various gases in the air, he didn’t know, but he also looked to be breathing a bit hard.

 “You think you can get this door open?” Ranma asked, gesturing. “If we go in my way, no amount of having their own air system is going to help us.”

The unseen connotation with those words that Ranma needed some help in that area made Garrus’s blood run cold a little. Regardless, he nodded and connected his omni-tool to the door’s exterior controls.

As he waited, Ranma slowed his breathing, his eyes closed as he concentrated on his inner ki. At the moment, it was down to just above where it had been when he fought the Shadow Broker, and that was not a good thing. Luckily, I’ve got some food on me, but still. I need to get out of this gas!

Ranma would get his wish as, a second later, Garrus’s omni-tool beeped. The door slid open, and Ranma charged in, getting hit by enemy fire almost instantly. There was only one geth in the room, but several of the scientists and lab technicians had apparently been given guns of their own. Ranma grunted as the mass effect rounds slammed into him, before hurling the makeshift shield, which he’d still been carrying, to slam into the geth Trooper like a very large, very heavy but dull boomerang. The Trooper, regardless of the dullness of the piece of metal, still came apart at the seams when it hit, spreading bits of debris and fluids everywhere.

Ducking to one side, Ranma forced Garrus to fling himself flat on his face behind him, but avoided most of the incoming fire. Sliding behind a nearby station of some kind, he lashed out at the technician who had been hiding there. The Salarian went flying, tumbling through the air in such a manner that he slammed into not one, but three of his fellows, as he went over their own protective barriers. “Ya missed me, ya missed me, now I get to punch ya!”

“That’s not how that phrase goes, are you high!?” Shouted the one human in the room, ducking and yelping as something fast went past his ear.

“I mean, we’re in the mountains, so yeah, technically,” Ranma joked, even as he flung himself sideways and between two more tech stations, reaching up quickly to grab two technicians who were scrambling in either direction. Even as the human ducked back into cover, his hasty move was followed by one of the bodies of his fellows coming up and over his apparent shelter, landing and squishing him to the ground.

The other went sideways, slamming into another technician, as Ranma said, “You see, Garrus, that’s how you deliver bad jokes, when it can stun your enemies.”

“I see, but… wait, you thought I was making bad jokes on purpose!?” Garrus shouted, rolling into cover as a few of the technicians turned their fire on him.

This proved to be the lesser of two evils. When the fire on his position slackened, Ranma then leapt up out of cover, bouncing off the ceiling before any of the untrained scientists could track him. Landing in between several others, he sent all of the techs or scientists in range flying, unconscious. Not as fast or as strong as he could’ve struck out, these weren’t geth, nor were they trained fighters, but definitely enough to put them down for a bit or hurl them away.

Behind Ranma, Garrus fired his gun twice from a prone position at the furthest two scientists, both of whom had senior tech assistant badges on them. As they fell and the fire began to die down, Ranma shifted around the room to finish off the other defenders while Garrus turned to one side, slamming the close button on the doorway. Several minutes later, his rebreather beeped, indicating that it was now taking in oxygen rather than giving him some from its supply, and he pulled it off quickly, glaring all around him. “I don’t particularly care what Saren or whoever is behind this told you all. Working with the geth is treason, even if a Spectre authorized it. As a member of the turian military, I can uphold Council law and execute each and every one of you. Don’t make me do so.”

Snorting at that, Ranma looked over at a few of the technicians. “Keep the air in here separate from the rest of the station, or you’ll probably all die regardless. As for me, I need a bite to eat.”

As the technicians and Garrus all stared, Ranma pulled out a series of breakfast bars, most of which he bought on Omega, and began to chow down. Looking up, Ranma saw the looks he was getting and scoffed. “What? You think everything I do doesn’t need fuel? Please,” he said between bites. “I need a lot of food to do what I do.”

He looked over at Garrus, cocking an eyebrow. “What do you think our next bet should be? It’ll take me like ten, fifteen minutes to turn food into ki, I should still be good to go in the gas out there. But what about you? I don’t think we’ll be lucky enough to just leapfrog from one lab to another with enough time for you to take on more air.”

And for me to let my key reserves build up again. That gas isn’t quite as nasty as whatever it was that Vasir hits me and Herb with, but even so… Ranma knew that it would be a while before his body developed what could amount to true immunity to whatever strange gases were being pumped into the laboratory, and also knew that continuing to use his key healing solve the issue would continually drain his resources.

“Let me think about it for a minute,” Garrus mused as he looked over at the various computers. “I also think we need to figure out what all these people were doing here.”

That proved to be a dead end. This lab, despite being a separate laboratory amidst Lab fifteen’s greater structure, wasn’t actually part of the ongoing project that Saren was therefore. Instead, it, and a few others like it, ran the hydroponics section just directly below it, which meant it was useless to both of them. Still, Garrus did find a few storage rooms for them to aim for.

Better, the two of them were not the only people attacking the lab at the moment…

OOOOOOO

I really don’t like being short most of the time, but I have to admit, Ranma was right. I can actually make my way around here pretty easily, Tali thought to herself as she crawled along the air vents, following her map. Heading from one floor to another had been exceedingly difficult, as it amounted to crawling up a slide, but it wasn’t anything that she hadn’t dealt with before while performing maintenance on the Rayya when she was younger. Quarian feet were really good at finding purchase on most surfaces, even metal. 

In fact, this whole experience brought back some good memories, although none of them match the feeling of Ranma holding her up by around her waist as she worked on the covering for the duct. Feeling his arms around her, his easy chuckle, feeling the warmth through the suit, how intriguing it all felt. And that damn smile of his! That smile should be illegal, especially mixed with those blue eyes of his! Tali mentally whined.

Tali had seen a lot of humans on Omega and even talked with John and some of his team members there. She’d seen humans here on Noveria. But none of them had the combination of those blue eyes of Ranma’s, so expressive, nor had they had his smile or… well… simple attractiveness in Tali’s eyes.

Stop it, you silly girl! You’ve got no guarantees that Ranma’s right and that you’ll be able to learn his ki tricks enough to take off your suit. You can’t place so much hope on such an uncertain future. No matter how nice it might feel.

She came to an intersection, then paused for a moment, thinking and looking down at her map. From here, she could ascend by going to the left several more stories to the control center. The control center was almost on the topmost floor of the laboratory, just two floors down from the shuttle landing area. Those two floors were also the most heavily guarded within the lab, with at least three automated security guns every ten yards, indicating that whoever had designed its security knew that the landing area could be a weakness.

Yet now Tali noticed that in the plans, the vents leading to the control center had internal security walls set into them.  But looking over the maps, Tali also now saw there seemed to be a secondary control center, a place where people could directly access the Lab’s mainframe. This one was labeled as an observation deck and oversaw one of the largest labs in the installation, labeled Main Cryogenic Research Division.

Why it was labeled that, Tali had no idea. There had been a limit to the information she could pull from the simple computer she’d found in the loading area. But if I can get into that, I will bet a spanner to a screw that I can do something to annoy the geth and their allies.  With that in mind, she turned to the right, before going up another floor, then across for quite a bit.

Around thirty minutes later by her chronometer, Tali was looking down into the Observation Room. This one did indeed have a large window dominating one wall, presumably to observe the lab beyond, with numerous small controls and a central command platform in the center of the room. Four technicians moved around the area, seemingly under the command of a Salarian, and Tali paused, listening to their discussion for a moment.

Apparently, they were still working on something that they had been ordered to by Saren, whose name was dropped enough times to make Tali certain that the Spectre was indeed involved with whatever was being done here, as Ranma and Tali had thought he might be when they had first found that recording of his discussing something with the geth. They are trying to unfreeze something, no, someone? But then, why do they call whoever it is an it? And even more confusing, it’s so old they’re worried about damaging it? That means whoever’s been frozen is at least nine hundred years old or more.

While it wasn’t habitually used in the modern galaxy save in emergencies, cryogenic technology was extremely well known, and most of the bugs and so forth had been worked out of it long since. Pulling something or someone out of deep freeze was a relatively understandable science, but the chances of doing so without causing brain damage went down the longer the subject had been frozen. This lot was being so cautious that it was very clear that whatever they were trying to unfreeze was extremely old. And what was that about a language barrier, and a specially programmed language chip? Weird…

Regardless, that didn’t matter at the moment. What did was getting down there and to the computers. Tali observed for a few seconds, then, with a sigh, she shook her head. Heh, I suppose sometimes Ranma’s got a point about the whole straightforward is often the best way.  

With a grunt of effort, Tali used the butt of her rifle to smash the grate out of her way before hurling herself out and into the observation room. Tali had no ability with aerial combat like Ranma did, and her fall out of the air vent wasn’t very graceful, especially since she’d had to go headfirst. But she rolled as she hit, grimacing a bit at the pain to her left shoulder and her neck, before she was up, the same rifle that she just used to open her way smacking into the side of the lead scientist, then shifting to fire on one of the others as he tried to reach for what was obviously an alarm.  That man, another salarian, fell with a hole through his neck.

Three others, all turians, rushed her, but she kicked out at one, catching him in the side and sending him flying. As Ranma had noted, quarian legs were really a good deal stronger than they looked.

Another tech she hadn’t seen before this pulled himself out from underneath one of the stations only to be met by the butt of her rifle, which slammed down into his forehead, even as her eyes widened in glee at what she saw on his belt and across his chest. Tubes of omni-gel!

“Thank you,” she said to the groaning man, before kicking him, knocking him all the way out. “I’ve been needing these.”

That finished off everyone in the observation room, and Tali hastily dropped the geth rifle she’d been using. Crouching down beside the man she’d just knocked out, Tali grabbed the various tubes of omni-gel, plugging them into her belt for now.  With them, Tali’s omni-tool would be able to create whatever tools she wanted for a while. Still better to use them in conjunction with some junk or broken parts, though.  Don’t worry, Chikki, you’re new version won’t be long now in coming.  

Feeling much better overall than she had for a while, Tali moved on towards the central computer. There, Tali began to let her fingers and omni-tool do the talking. Soon, she was battling it out with geth runtimes embedded into the operating system of the lab, but she was coming at them from a position of strength this time, having access to everything within the laboratory bar the defenses directly around the command center. All of those were hotwired to answer only to the command center itself. I can’t seem to order a purge of the whole OS, but I can still do a lot.

Ten minutes later, the gas on several of the floors began to shift. The air vents didn’t pump out anymore; instead, they began working to pull it back in, to deposit it elsewhere in the labs, specifically below where Ranma and Garrus were currently. It wasn’t a quick process, but she had full control of the environmental systems for the majority of the laboratory.

The geth runtimes had all pulled back and were now stopping her from taking control of anything in the three topmost levels of the laboratory, but none of them had her flair for programming.  Soon, she had set up a program of her own that would keep on poking at those areas of the system, keeping the geth runtimes within the operating system off balance, before turning to one of the other nearby stations.

Curiosity now drove Tali rather than fear for her friends. Ranma had proven the next best thing to unkillable by this point several times over, and what could matter more in the long run than helping him and Garrus have a slightly easier time of it were what Saren and the geth had joined up to do, which apparently revolved around whatever subject are was that was being unthawed in the lab that this observation room overlooked.

When she was able to pull up the data, Tali’s brows furrowed a little inside her helmet. “What the heck? What’s a Rachni? The name sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it. And it’s some kind of bug?  Weird to go to all this effort just for a bug.”

Fronting in confusion, Tali took a copy of the data on that system, then spent some time tying up her former opponents with their own clothing, something that Ranma had told her he’d done several times. He’d even demonstrated once for her while they had been awaiting Benezia’s arrival on the Shadow Broker’s ship. Once that was done, Tali picked up the rifle she’d been using and headed out the door, hoping to link up with her companions. Opening her coms at the same time, she linked into the local network, humming all the while.

OOOOOOO

While Tali had been working on the computer, Garrus and Ranma had pushed out from the first environmental lab and had ascended through the rest of the hydroponics segment of the complex, running into still more Troopers, heavies and Pyros. Thankfully, once Ranma’s shield was up, the Pyros were little threat to Garrus, and his long-range rifle put paid to them eventually.  Meanwhile, their fire did nothing to Ranma, not even burning his clothing.  Fire and heat were absolutely no threat to a man trained in Master Vulcan’s school of martial arts blacksmithing.

Garrus had found a storage area that had rebreathers and had grabbed a couple for himself and for Ranma two floors down.  But now, both noticed when the air vents began to work in reverse. “Tali did it!” Ranma exclaimed, even as he punched through a Hunter that had just tried to get the jump on him. He shook off his fist, sending the mangled remnants to the ground, as Garrus finished off a security gun in the distance.

Something had shorted out with this one, and its shield pattern activated, instead sending sparks everywhere. That had made Garrus remark that the security guns had apparently been added recently to the lab, as it was the fourth time that it had happened on their charge upwards. The Hunter ambush, on the other hand, was new, but Ranma doubted that the geth would try that trick again, given Ranma’s sheer reaction time.

“She did, and I’m very thankful for it. I’m down to the last two rebreathers. What about you?”

Ranma grimaced a little. “The last one for me, and it’s at about half full if I’m reading it right. Still, we should push on hard, so they don’t try to retake the command center from her.”

“I’m not actually in the command center, you two,” a voice buzzed in Garrus’s ear, and he held up her hand, gesturing to it. Ranma had lost his own communicator at some point, be it in the original fight or the mad dash to avoid the avalanche. “I just left an observation room that works as a secondary center. Sorry I couldn’t contact you before this, but steel and stone still block communications.  I’m piggybacking along the internal coms system.  I don’t think whoever is controlling everything has cottoned on to that yet, but we can talk now.  Oh, and you shouldn’t have to worry about any more security guns.  They’re all offline now.  It’s just the geth from now on.”

“Well, you and I can talk; Ranma doesn’t have a communicator right now. Sorry if my voice doesn’t bring you as much cheer as his,” Garrus quipped.

Ranma held up a paper two that had seemingly come out of nowhere, staring at Garrus, while Tali just seemed to sigh on the other end. “Have we mentioned you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are lately?”

Garrus sighed, remembering Ranma’s comment earlier that day. “Spirits damn it, I will try better,” he grumbled, before becoming professional again. “Can you tell us what we’re running into?”

Tali answered in the affirmative, and Garrus gestured Ranma in to listen, pulling out his headset and holding it between the two of them.

OOOOOOO

“DAMN IT ALL! Those blasted technicians in the control center should’ve known that the suit rat wasn’t somewhere behind the young turian and the human super soldier. She must’ve…” Saren thought about it for a moment, then groaned, tearing off his breath mask, his mandibles flexing into a turian equivalent of a snarl. “Of all the clichéd stupid--- Argh!  The suit rat went through the vents. Do you have any geth that are small enough to go in after her?”

“Negative. Further, there is an 87% probability that the Hated Creator is no longer within the offense but is moving through the corridors to link up with her companions. Logic dictates that we remain on the defensive here. If she is coming from the observation room, we are still between the Hated Creator and her companions,” the Geth Prime answered. “Further, my fellow geth have been able to stop her from complete takeover of the laboratory’s environmental systems. The two floors below us, and the final trap you have devised, are still intact.”

“Good. Still, detail two of your Hunters to hunt the quarian down. Keep the other Troopers and the remaining Pyros here,” Saren ordered, grim-faced. He’d refrained from ordering the Pyros forward for the most part in order to hold them here for this battle, instead using the Rocket Troopers as retooled heavy weapons troops.  “You’re right, they need to come through us to take the command center. It won’t be long now before they arrive.” Although perhaps I should prepare an escape just in case…

End Chapter

I wanted to push this through to the final confrontation, but several scenes dragged out a little too much, and I also wanted to finish the chapter with enough time to let Hiryo at least have a few days to look it over.  That… kind of worked, but not as well as it should have because of my idiot brain having a hiccup. Still, I am happy with this chapter and the ongoing interactions of the group of three. Until next time, folks.