Meeting New People

Eden Prime 

Team 2b

Alex Mercer

Alex was actually enjoying this little hike across the colony. Sure, the geth had irreparbaly scarred its surface, and their attack would change the of colonial development for several years, but that wasn't his problem. He was more interested in the new challenge of fighting off the synthetic soldiers - which he couldn't consume at all - while keeping the unconscious Jenkins from getting killed, either by the geth or his own brutal style of combat. Cole had always seemed to smile when he successfully protected others, and Alex had to admit there was a certain satisfaction to it. 

He was currently carring Jenkins in his left arm, and he had his shield extended over his forearm, protecting the marine from rifle rounds. The geth's pulse weaponry stung a bit more than the bullets from normal small arms fire, but Alex wasn't concerned. On the offensive, the virus was using his whipfist, as it was the only power that he could use without exposing Jenkins' human frame to close-quarters mayhem. Alex was also using whipfist to keep the geth's freak-shows at bay. 

Dozens of human colonists had been lifted off the ground by thirty-foot spikes plunged through their chests, only to be brought back down as bio-mechanical husks. He hadn't considered them a threat until they began to discharge electricity. Alex managed to toss Jenkins out of the blast radius, but the shape-shifter couldn't escape before four thousand volts surged up and down his spine. Since it affected his whole body at once, electricity was not an attack Alex Mercer could easily tolerate. Luckily, the worst of the damage was a destoryed comm. link and a crack in Jenkins' helmet. Now, Alex was fighting smart, and killing everything with the whipfist. What sucked though was the fact that without a comm. link Alex couldn't warn Ryan about the husks he had encountered. Communication made all the difference in a combat zone, because if done right, everyone was on the same page. Ryan was still only aware of drones, and maybe he ahd considered full-fledged geth troopers, but now way would he know about the damn zombies the geth were making from the colonist.

The clicking and whirring of more geth told Alex he had his own problems for the moment.

Narrowly dodging a volley of rockets from the swarm of geth drones, Alex extended his whipfist to a nearby tree that looked like a large oak. Uprooting it with a small tug, he threw his wooden projectile at the drone cluster, taking out most of them. The two still floating didn't last long when Alex a hold of one and slammed it into the other. Then he took off running, lashing out with his whipfist at any husks that stood in his path. As much fun as it was playing combat babysitter, Alex needed to hand off Jenkins to the Master Chief and get back to the others soon.

Supernovas were supposed to travel in pairs on territories that didn't have spaceflight. Here they were going in four different directions on a territory that did. 

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Eden Prime 

Team 2a

Commander Jack "Rapture" Ryan

"Was that the last of the drones?" Lieutenant Alenko asked once the explosions had stopped. They had just killed their third wave of flying geth, and it was slowing their progress. 

"For now, but I guarantee we'll be seeing more soon enough," Ryan stated with an almost hopeful tone. He hadn't killed nearly enough machines to make up for the loss of a colony.

Ryan used his scout to look ahead, and noticed geth shooting at somebody other than them. He knew it wasn't Team 1, so it had to be survivors, and Ryan was eager to enlist their aid. Cancelling the scout, he pulled out his new shotgun, the Devlon Firestorm VII, and ran toward the shootout with Alenko trying to keep up. Anyone else would have been eating the splicer's dust, but Alenko was enhancing his speed with biotics. Ryan had to admit, the man was good. But the sight before him was much, much better. It was the lady with the gun from the transmission. This was going to be fun. 

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Eden Prime

2nd Frontier Division, Unit 212

Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams

She was exhausted, alone, outnumbered, outgunned, and out of her mind, but it would be a cold day in Hell before she became the second Williams soldier that lost a colony to aliens. A couple of drones landed hits on her shields, but they held up under the fire.

Turning around mid-sprint, Williams dropped to the ground to make herself a harder target. She whipped out her sidearm, a lousy Hahne-Kedar Kessler I, and blew both drones away with a few pulls of the trigger. She was getting to her feet when she witnessed something monstrous. 

The gth - at least she suspected they were geth - were hold a human over a large tripod, their synthetic strength keeping him in place. Suddenly, a massive spike burst out of the tripod, ripped through the man's chest, and carried him off the ground! Ashley thought she was going to hurl. Instead, she ran for cover behind the nearest rock outcropping, equipping her equally crappy Hahne-Kedar Lancer I assault rifle.

The geth were closing in, and Williams raised her gun, ready to give them hell, when the impossible happened. The geth began to seize up as lighting arced across their metal bodies. Ashley watched in awe as a man in an armored jacket with the insignia "N7" on it appeared out of thin air and used some kind of hook to clothesline one of the stunned geth. Man and machine hit the ground, but the man seamlessly transitioned his fall into a roll, returned to a standing position with a shotgun already leveled at the geth's flashlight. Ashley noticed two things as he blew the robot's head off. First, the other geth trooper was recovering from the strange burst of lightning. Second, her knight in leather armor's left hand was completely frozen, and there was steam coming from his plam where it gripped the underside of the shotgun.

The geth trooper about to open fire took priority, and she was about to tell the guy to duck, when the trooper's shields were overloaded, and the machine was biotically lifted by another man who was approaching, a lieutenant by the looks of the bars. As if the geth that planned on shooting him had never even been a threat, the jacket-man casually raised his left hand, which no longer was coated in ice, and without any sign of biotic power, launched the geth straight into the rock cliff behind the tripod spike, shattering it on impact.

Jacket-man turned to her with a lopsided grin on his face, and before Williams could formally salute and identify her name and rank, he simply said, "Are you free today? Saving the planet is only so much fun with an all-male team."

Williams remained speechless, and the lieutenant muttered something about conduct, but the man in front of her continued, "In all seriousness, I'm Commander Jack 'Rapture' Ryan, and that's Lietenant Kaidan Alenko. We're both with the Alliance, we're here for the Prothean beacon that the colonists had found, and if you'd like to get some payback, you're welcome to join the party."

That finally knocked Williams back to reality. Snapping a salute, she rattled off, "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212, and I'd be damn glad to help kill some geth. I also saw where the dig site is. Last time I checked, the beacon was still there."

Tapping his comm. the commander began to talk to some others. Without the frequency though, Ashley didn't know what was being said by anyone else on the line. "Team 1, 2b, and 3, we've found a local marine who... Mr. Nihlus, since you're not the one over here, I'll judge her combat skills for myself... Yes, MacGrath, Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams is a she... No I don't need a chaperone, and I resent the fact that everyone thinks I'm irresponsible enough to fraternize inn the middle of a damn warzone... OKay now that's... No comments from Mercer yet... Chief, get to Mercer now, cuz I'm pretty sure that oh-so-brilliant lunatic broke his comm. link... Well, Nihlus, it would be nice to know that he's keeping Jenkins safe, among other things... No don't worry; Chief Williams said she knew where the beacon was... No shit there's a lot of bodies... If there's a spaceport, then check it out already. Let me know what you find... Ryan out."

Turning back to her, Commander Ryan tossed her his shotgun. "You're weapons are crap, so you can borrow my boomstick for now." Then he pulled out a pair of Devlon Stinger pistols, cocky grin back on his face. "Let's move out."

She made a note to ask what the hell he was talking about later, but for now, she just nodded and fell into step behind Lieutenant Alenko. One thing had become clear though:

There were others fighting the geth here on the colony. Eden Prime just might survive this attack.

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Eden Prime

Team 3

Master Chief and Cortana

"I'm sorry Chief."

"Don't be."

"If I'm more careful, I should be able to-"

"No, Cortana. I don't want you trying to talk to these things again. It was too much for to handle. You can barely keep them hacked for ten seconds. Stick with doing that, and monitoring their activity, but do not try to tap into their minds."

"I- Alright, Chief. You win this one." Cortana had just finished giving in to the MAster Chief's argument when two more geth troopers began assaulting their position, and one of them had a rocket launcher. Cortana's instant response was to hack the rocket trooper, forcing it to blow both platforms to hell with a point-blank rocket. Inside the Chief's helmet, the AI woman smirked. Maybe she couldn't communicate with a synthetic species whose mind was the size of a galactic arm, but she could still make life hell for anyone who pointed a gun at her Spartan.

A shotgun wielding juggernaut, flanked by two shock troopers, came at the Chief with an efficiency expected from machines. The shock troopers meant to supress the soldier with gunfire, allowing the juggernaut to kill him at close range. Of course, they still had yet to understand that his armor was a lot stronger, and the shields were leagues above kinetic barriers. Rather than take cover, Chief ran straight for the juggernaut, narrowly dodging a carnage blast before simultaneously opening fire with his Kassa Breaker VII while using the rifle to life the giant machine over his head. The bullet riddled metallic corpse had barely hit the ground before Cheif had pulled out his Hahne-Kedar Kessler X and placed several bullets in the "eye" of each geth. They went down before his shields had hit seventy-five percent.

Chief was starting to wish that Covenant had gone down this easily when began to hear a horrific moaning noise. "Cortana, what... was... that?"

"Chief! On your six, you've got massive spikes in electricity. So unless Cole has six bastard sons, I'd back the hell away!"

The Spartan turned around and backpedaled at an absurd rate, watching cybernetic zombies fill the space he had been occupying with enough electricity to definitely cause some suit damage. Of course, they all died quickly enough, but as Chief went for the last one, his damn gun overheated. He was about to pull out his sidearm again, when a tentacle smacked into the zombie from the left, knocking it straight through the wall of a prefab house. 

Master Chief turned and saw Alex stride up to him with the unconscious Jenkins. The apex predator unceremoniously dumped the marine on the ground, looked around at the dozens of dead geth that the Chief had killed by himself, and nodded approvingly. Then, all business, he said, "Get this boy a casevac, I've got to catch up with the others. By the way, you probably know by now that my comm. is blown. Those damn husks have a lot of kick in their electric pulse. Cole's shockwave has more, but not by much. Be careful." With that, Alex jumped forty feet in the air, landed on the top of the nearby hill, and with a second massive leap, disappeared from sight.

Deploying a Drop Shield over the incapacitated Jenkins, Chief radioed the Normandy, drew his rifle, and prepared to hold this point until the corporal was in Dr. Chakwas' med-bay.

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 Eden Prime

Spaceport

Team 1

"Just give me a second and I can figure out who killed these three guys."

"Then tell Team 2 that they need to do it. I'm not wasting any more time." Nihlus was now fed up with Mr. MacGrath's need to inspect and even climb everything. His file said that he was into "urban exploration" to some extent, but that kind of lifestyle was supposed to be long extinct. Leave it to the humans to keep such a primitive activity alive.

Cole sighed in frustration. "Yeah, except Team 2 can't gain knowledge from the last thing to pass through a dead man's nervous system, can they? Alex eats living people and learns everything there is about them. I can catch glimpses of information from a corpse by sparking up the subject's brain for a few seconds. Works pretty well on the living too, but they have a tendency to resist."

Nihlus' mandibles twitched with minor admiration. Not even the asari could read a dead man's nervous system yet here was a human casually discussing his ability to do so on a whim. "Fine, but make it quick. I think we've  got company over on that landing."

The turian expected MacGrath to give tell him what he was "sensing" on that landing, but he received only silence. Nilhus turned to see MacGrath holding an outstretched hand across the human body's skull, just a few millimeters away from actually touching it. Just as the Spectre was about to comment on the ritualistic display, MacGrath's eyes snapped open, lighting began to billow from his arms, and he glared daggers at Nihlus. "These three were killed by a turian, Mr. Nihlus. Care to explain?" 

Nihlus stood there in shock. There was no record of any turian living on the colony. What was MacGrath talking about? "MacGrath, calm down, and tell me what you-" a gunshot on the landing interrupted him. He turned to MacGrath, "Let's talk about this once we've taken care of whatever is up on that platform, okay?"

MacGrath didn't answer, instead free-running over a large assortment of boxes, leaving Nihlus behind. The Spectre sighed and moved to catch up. When he rounded the corner and found MacGrath with the shooter, the sight before him was beyond strange. Nihlus lowered his gun and and flared his manidbles in confusion. "Saren?"

Cole barely even heard Nihlus call out to this piece of shit turian murderer, but he was glad he had a name to work with while using the bird's fringe as a damn lightning rod. His hands were dripping sparks all over the place as he looked at Saren standing casually over a human's fresh corpse. He was the turian that Cole had seen kill those other three, and he just killed this one too. Cole wanted answers, and he wanted them now.

Without a care in the world, Saren turned to Nihlus, ignoring MacGrath as if he were garbage, and addressed his fellow turian Spectre. Nihlus was quick to ask what he was doing here, and Saren's response was a simple one. Putting a comforting arm on his turian compatriot's shoulder, Saren said, "The Council thought you could use some help on this one."

Nihlus seemed to accept that answer, and Cole barely contained his fury, turning on Saren, Cole began what would be a two-part destruction of the killer's argument.

"Saren, was it? Why the hell did you kill the humans? That doesn't do us a lot of "help" now does it?" Cole tempered the rage in his voice with the knowledge that he was about to ruin this guy's day. He could fool Nihlus, but a radar pulse showed that the turian bastard was an enemy.

Saren acknowledged Cole for the first time, the disgust evident even on his alien features. "These... humans were part of the reason that the geth attacked. They were smugglers, and their activities invited that" he pointed to the massice squid-shaped ship in the background, "here to the colony, along with the geth. I apologize, but your colonists seem to have brought this on themselves."

Nihlus nodded, "a fitting end to criminals then."

Cole rolled his eyes at Nihlus' naïveté. Now for the second part. "Okay, then how about this? How in the fuck did the Council think to send help when there wasn't even going to be any action? We haven't established contact with anyone, and no word of this attack has reached beyond this system. That leaves two options. Either the Council knew that geth would attack our colony, and chose to withhold that information from Mr. Nihlus." He knew that would get both turians' attention, and hopefully it would wake Nihlus up to the horrible truth. "Or you are completely and utterly full. Of. Shit. Guess which one I think is more likely, you bastard?"  

Nihlus turned around to face Saren, having found a great amount of logic in MacGrath's words, and he came face-to-face with Saren's pistol. The barrel was already inside the envelope of his kinetic barriers. Spirits forgive him...

Bang!

Cole was expecting many things to possibly happen next, but seeing Saren pull a gun on Nihlus and shoot him that damn fast had not been one of them. Feeling like diplomacy was over, Cole launched a megawatt hammer - practically a rocket of lightning - at the maniac. He was surprised yet again when the turian effortlessly fired a massive biotic blast that collided with his rocket in midair.

ZAAAP!

The explosion knocked Cole off of his feet. When the dust cleared, Saren was gone, and in his place was a small army of geth. Cole was less afraid of them than he was about his new discovery: 

Saren wasn't just a major enemy. He was a Supernova-class opponent that Shepard must have gone through hell trying to take down. Cole raised his polarity wall in one hand and primed a shock grenade in the other. This was going to be a long day.

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Hey guys its shadow here summer vacation is coming up and when that comes. I won't be updating because I use my schools computer to type this up and at my house we don't have one. So I'll try to get one more out before school year ends if not im sorry. 

And I'm so happy that you guys are liking my story but even if it's not mine to begin with. I just want people to see this story as it is good.  So again im so happy you guys like this story.

Shadow out~