“Son of a bitch!”
Darkness was not his friend and neither was momentum; something launching itself out of a dark corner of the freighter the second he entered it.
It was sprawling limbs and wet rot the moment it crashed right into his chest. His heels ground two long lines across the already-stained deck plating before Zedd could bring his mass to bear and anchor himself against whatever had just struck him.
His own hands were up before his brain caught the current track, both barely managing to catch the snapping jaws that lunged for his face.
It was no asari, that much was certain.
For one, it was shaped like a man.
For another, it had no eyes.
Not even the black pits of the mutated biotics; everything above what would be the nose was a flat expanse of chalky skin. And everything below, just a cavernous maw lined with jagged protrusions that looked less like teeth and more like splintered wood.
Hands wrapped around its throat, all Zedd could manage to do was keep its snapping jaws away from his face, especially when every bit of feedback his brain could parse right now was telling him that whatever he was holding was far from normal meat.
Its skin was no different than decaying bark; fleshy, rigid, and pulsing with wet heat under his fingers as it thrashed against his grip, clawed hands raking uselessly against his Mantle’s kinesis barriers.
“Get the fuck off me!” He ignored the Full Stop, hips pivoting with a grunt hissing from between clenched teeth. In a single reversal, Zedd threw the creature back against the bulkhead to the right. The impact was enough to dent the interior wall, the ship groaning with the hit.
Yet, despite that, it didn’t go limp.
Zedd wasn’t sure it was even stunned.If it was, then it didn’t last for long, the thing tearing its mouth open with a sound of sticks crunching underfoot. A shriek left that gaping hole of a mouth — a high click that rattled his eardrums, the thing snapping its head forward.
Something flew free.
Hot, viscous, and fluorescently green; it shot across the hall in a thick stream, Zedd barely ducking the sludge with wide eyes.
Barely.
Most of it flew past and overhead but a glob of that sludge managed to land on Zedd, right below the collarbone. The Mantle didn't flare, kinesis systems and environmental barriers seeming not to register the weight or force as it splattered against the heavy fabric of his overcoat.
The hiss was loud in his ears before he even felt the heat, smoke pluming thick as the chemical began eating straight through the proprietary synth-weave — a smoking hole just an inch from his sternum. "...my coat."
Irritation vanished and unadulterated annoyance flooded the gap it left behind.
His fingers let go of its throat and Zedd went for the creature’s head instead. Ten digits grabbed at the monster by the sides of its deformed bark-plated head and, with eyes closed, he pulled for all he was worth.
Technique was forgotten.
Skill was tossed aside.
He just went for instinct and anger and tugged.
It took a split-second of effort for cartilage to pop, fibrous tissue snapping like wet celery. A final aborted shriek was all it had left, the noise drowned out with the creature’s spine giving way with a crunch loud enough to echo off freighter plating.
And just like that, Zedd tore the monster’s head completely off its shoulders.
A torso slumped against the bulkhead, something like sap dripping from its gaping neck across the deck. Biting back a sigh, Zedd tossed the severed head over his shoulder — the wet thud it made behind him none of his business.
His head twisted back toward the open door, the plaza just outside the freighter still packed with enemies. The infected colonists were swarming at the gap in the hull, faces pressed against the torn metal, but that was where they seemed to stop. No further than the exterior did a single one of them move, mouths open with bodies piled against the threshold like an invisible wall was keeping them out.
Weirdos. Either way, he didn’t care.
No, that wasn’t true; he was happy about that for at least one reason.
Enough of this. His right wrist flicked out and his custom omni unfolding in a blinding flare of blue hard-light over his wrist. He didn’t even bother looking at the interface, left thumb swiping over the haptics with muscle memory to guide him. It took just two seconds to override the auto-mode on the Full Stop and jack the KEP output back to his preferred standard. We’re done with riot control.
Non-lethal was officially off the table.
"Inside! " John’s voice echoed into the cramped staging area just ahead of him, Zedd’s head snapping up at the sound of flying shardfire. “Push the gap!”
He rushed through the next area in the freighter, barreling past a jagged tear in one wall and vaulting over a pile of twisted metal to find —
“Armor’s thick!”A disaster.
Emergency lighting strobed in harsh bleeding reds the darker into the ship he went, water dripping from ruptured pipes just overhead and turning the ground into a slick hazard. Thick air, no less humid than any jungle, had the place smelling almost like a compost bin left out in the sun.
He didn’t doubt that was on purpose.
“These things don’t even fucking have armor!”Jane Shepard slammed herself to the deck, the Spectre sliding to a knee with her shotgun leveled across the room like the action hero she saw herself as. Both Kaidan and Garrus flanked her, the two squeezed tight against groaning bulkheads; biotic and sniper aiming fire at the bark-skinned corpses and mutated asari rushing their position.“Don’t think they really care, Lieutenant!” Ashley stood in front of Tali, both women backed into a shadowed alcove. The quarian stumbled back with anti-Thorian grenades clutched tight in her two fists; head twisting from side to side as if unsure where to throw them.
"What the hell are these things?" Ashley’s rifle almost drowned her out, the bark-skinned screechers not deterred by the impact of the shards — each one taking shot after shot without slowing down much at all. “Shardfire isn’t doing shit!”
"I don't know.” The words left him in a grunt as Zedd raised two glowing fingers, already tired of this mission in every way. “I don’t care.”
A Deadbolt caught another wood monster in the face, bark exploding like shrapnel the instant before it dropped. “But ExoGeni owes me five cred-stacks for the tailoring!"Jane ducked a pale claw, the Spectre not missing the chance to jam the barrel of her Katana directly into the chest of the offending bark-zombie and pulling the trigger. The blast echoed like a bomb in the tight space, but — even with a crater blown messy through its torso, the gaping hole dripping pale green sap — it just stumbled and shrieked back at Jane. A crack from the Mantis had its head vanish mid-shriek, the monster slumping before it could lunge again. “Seriously, what are these things?” The rifle already bucked against the turian’s shoulder with another heavy shard tearing down the hall; a crack echoed back at them, the turian’s shot finding a naked biotic target before it could use those glowing clawed hands. “Asari were bad enough!”
“Th-those aren’t asari!” Liara’s shout didn’t exactly land on deaf ears but nobody seemed to have an answer for the doctor either way. Regardless, her acolyte pistol kept firing out — doing all standard shardfire could against the advancing monsters. “These wretches are not!”“Wretches!” Jane barked out alongside her shotgun, her twin brother throwing out a barrier to deflect whatever biotic attack one of those Wretches sent her way. “That works, sure!”
“ExoGeni logs had a name for the things!”“Did they now?” Zedd racked the slide on his handcannon with a yell forward, royal blue coils along the barrel finally shifting to a bright blue-white; full-yield finally settling in. “Don’t hold back now, Commander. We got nothing better to do than listen!”“Uh-huh.” Commander Shepard dropped to a knee, a sustained burst from his Avenger doing a great job of gardening as it managed to trim some chipped wood off an advancing freak. “They called these things Creepers! Thorian Creepers! Plan was to use them for docile labor! Hear they even managed to grow more and ship them off-world for research!”
“Great! Just fucking great!” ExoGeni needed to die as soon as possible, but that was a problem for another day. Fighting off worse words, Zedd stepped up to John Shepard, pistol leveled. “More great names and great ideas from the smartest company in the entire fucking galaxy. I’ll send marketing a fruit basket!”“Really?”Brown eyes snapped over to Garrus, the turian staring back at him. “No, not really. Do these translators not catch sarcasm?”
The emergency lighting flickered harder, long strobing shadows streaming down the blood-lit hallway with more targets peeling out of side-vents and access hatches; a mix of the mutated Wretches and the eyeless Creepers.
"Kill them! Nothing non-lethal in here!" Zedd didn’t bother waiting on Jane to repeat her order. His gun thumped hard in his hand, the kickback familiar and overgeared as kinetic force tore out from it in a single blue slug of directed energy.
"Push up! Push up!!" John’s order came from behind a quickly-thrown barrier, his rifle quickly making mulch of one of the Wretches. “We can’t afford to be boxed in!”Blue kinetic slugs blasted out one-by-one, each shot ripping at least a limb from one of the chalky wood-monsters as Zedd made his way forward. “I don’t think this is about what we can afford, Commander!”“And I thought you were rich, Victors!”“...your sister’s funnier.”
Before Jane or John could agree or argue with that, a Creeper launched itself into the air high as it could go in the hallway, the monster screeching out as it spat a glob of green acid down on the squad. Its head became wood chips an instant later as the barrel of Garrus’ rifle hissed smoke but the sludge landed anyway.
Kaidan let out a shout as the green mess bypassed both shielding and barriers — kinetic and biotic — to splatter against the Sentinel’s shoulder plate in a hiss of bubbling ceramic. "Shields don't stop the spit!" “Yeah!” Zedd grunted out as his weapon barked again. “I know!”"No offense, but what the hell are these things made of?!" Ashley stepped out from behind a doorframe, trigger on her Avenger held down. Even with that, all she managed to do was suppress an advancing Creeper.
"Doesn't add up.” That is, until Garrus finally took its head off with the Mantis. "Like shooting a tree."
"Then chop them down!" The Spectre snarled the words as she ducked a spray of acid. Without wasting a breath, she grabbed a Creeper by its extended arm and physically hurled it into the path of the turian’s sniper.
"And here’s me without my hatchet." Garrus bit back, weapon cracking out again. "Victors, drop the one on the ceiling!"
Another Creeper attempting to sneak Liara from the flank found itself without a head, and really most of its shoulders too; the rest of it collapsing from above.
"Head in the game, doc!” Zedd fired again, dropping another Wretch trying to skitter along the ceiling pipes. Another meatgrinder they’d found themselves in and, somehow with roughly the same amount of room to maneuver as the outside; pinned between rusted bulkheads instead of a flood of bodies.
“I…” Liara was pressed flat against the rear bulkhead, hands shaking so badly it was a miracle she hadn’t dropped her pistol. The asari’s eyes were still on the bodies of the green clones littering the floor nearest her, breath coming in ragged gasps. “I…”"They were dead before we walked in!" Jane didn't even turn her head, a Creeper greeted with a point-blank shotgun to the head. "Don't freeze up on me now, Doctor!"
"I have the—the gas is primed!" Tali’s shout rang out over comms, the quarian’s arms up as she held the grenades high.
"Use it then!" Kaidan’s hand thrust out in front of him, a lunging Creeper frozen mid-leap with its body encased in a shimmering blue mass effect field. The biotic groaned before quickly doubling back out of the way of another, the pistol in his hand already up and aimed. "Use it, Tali!"
"Using it!" A small canister flew down the hall.
A sharp pop announced its detonation, the spherical canister opening up with a vapor just as yellow as it had been the first few times Tali had used it in the plaza outside. “It’s working!” The only difference was that without open space, the gas had nowhere to go, Creepers and Wretches both caught in the gas. The monstrous attackers caught in the cloud immediately dropped, convulsing against the ground as the fleshy bark on their bodies blistered and melted against the gas.
Zedd’s eyes twitched as he kept shooting with both hands; a tight pulsing ache blooming behind his forehead with each Deadbolt he let fly from his left hand and each Creeper that fell. He blinked hard at the dryness in his eyes, static clinging to his peripheral as he kept pushing forward. Not the time.
The pistol dropped for a fraction of a second, left hand trembling slightly. Wake…
Zedd’s grip tightened around as he snapped the gun back up to fire out another blue slug. Wake up. He couldn’t afford to be drowsy no matter how much he was draining his psions. Wake the fuck up!
"Clear!" Shepard’s voice echoed down the corridor as the last Creeper dropped under his and Ashley’s Avengers, legs severed by a concentrated burst of assault rifle fire. It crawled forward on its hands for two feet before Williams stepped up to do the honors, driving the heel of her boot directly through its skull.
Silence fell back on their shoulders, the emptiness of the freighter broken only by the ragged breathing from the squad and the steady drip-drip of condensation from the ceiling pipes. Even through the filter in his Mantle, smell was still present — albeit dulled — and one thing was obvious. Smells like a greenhouse fire in here.Ashley let her rifle drop to her side, the weapon clearly steaming as it cooled; hands jittery, she joined Liara in staring at the pile of shattered green bodies. Kaidan was back-to-back with Garrus, both leaning against the wall but only one of them with his eyes shut tight.
Even Jane looked entirely drained, the Spectre leaning on her shotgun as she stared down the dark throat of the freighter yawning ahead of them.
“Everyone okay?” Even as the question left him and nobody answered back, Zedd realized he didn’t really care for the answer. Everyone was alive and that’s all that really mattered for right now.
With a sigh, he tapped his omni-tool, pulling up the telemetry the drones had sent his way before the ambush. A single swipe of his hand pushed the data packets directly to the squad’s internal HUDs and omni-tools and he knew without having to check that a glowing blue pathway lit up on their screens as they snapped their heads up.
Just like his own, they all traced a descending route through the bowels of the crashed freighter.
"Path's clear down to the maintenance tunnels.”
He stepped over the headless corpse of the last Creeper he’d killed, Zedd walking down the hall to the edge of the darkness. A hand reached out and pulled aside a tarp, the thing falling to the floor as he found himself staring down into the gaping mouth of the access shaft leading deep into the bedrock.
If it smelled bad up here, it smelled worse down there.
"Jarheads first." Zedd gestured vaguely toward the black hole with his gun. "I'll go last."