Never Fade Away: Rite Of Passage (ch. 58) (Patreon)

This was going to be one hell of a test drive, I thought to myself as the Turian fleet began to move. Portions of the fleet that I'm guessing didn't have an army on them began to converge on my location. There were a thousand ships, and even if a hundred of them remained behind, that was still nine hundred to deal with. The leader of the fleet was the dreadnought under the command of Tacitus.

I was cautious. I had stacked the deck as much as I could in my favor -- the Swordfish was as close to as indestructible as I could make it. It was fast. It had strong shields, stronger armor, and even stronger weapons. But, I imagine that Tacitus was prepared for this. He was prepared for me to take the fight to his fleet, he would be prepared for my tech, even if he had no idea what tech I might unveil against his fleet.

I couldn't say that I knew Admiral Tacitus well, but he struck me as a no-nonsense kind of guy. All Turians did, from what I saw. He tried to talk me out of the battle, but when that failed, I couldn't see him being unprepared for what came next. So, he had something up his sleeve, and given that he had unveiled Adam Smasher of all people, I was wary of what exactly he had up his sleeves.

“No time like the present to find out,” Johnny said as I did a quick systems check. Everything was green. Pivoting, I turned to face the fleet that was moving swiftly. A hologram projection marked out their formation in empty space -- layers of lines, almost like a grid. The dreadnought at the forefront, followed by cruisers, and frigates while fighters began to spill out to fill the spaces in between.

“I don't like this,” I said out loud, as much to myself as to Johnny. “Feels like I'm doing what he wants me to do.” I couldn't shake that feeling. My grip tightened on the armrests to my seat as my lips thinned. I wasn't afraid to fight. Odds were, even if they did have something up their sleeves specifically to counter me, I was pretty confident that I could deal with it. I've done it before.

“He wanted you to take the deal,” Johnny pointed out as the fleet, now in formation, surged forward. “And even if we are… the only other option is that we leave the fleet alone while it shits all over Earth.” He added, and I couldn't argue with either point.

“I guess we'll find out,” I agreed, the GN Drive humming with power as I began to move forward to meet the Turian fleet. Space… space was big. A whole lot of nothing in every direction. High above Earth’s atmosphere, there was an incredible amount of distance between us, but it closed all too quickly. My sensors picked up that the Swordfish had been locked on and, not a second later, the battle began in earnest as the Turians let loose an opening salvo.

The space between us became filled with specs of light as their guns fired off tens of thousands of shots, each one marked with a thin trail of biotic energy. I pressed on despite the incoming wall of gunfire, trusting my double layered shields. I didn't have to wait long for them to be put to the test as the shots struck them, pounding away with enough force that my ship nearly bucked under the sudden reverse momentum. Missiles streamed out behind the gunfire, streaking towards me as the Swordfish endured the assault.

I wasn't content to simply take the blows. The stream of gunfire, missiles exploding in anticipation of where I would be as much as they were at where I was -- all of it provided a screen of cover as the Swordfish's main gun hummed with life. The energy consumption spiked up, but within acceptable amounts as I held the charge for a long three seconds.

At the end of those three seconds, a blood red beam erupted from the main gun. The Swordfish only managed to stay in place by pushing the thrusters into high gear, the GN Particles reducing the ship’s weight to nothing -- all to endure the recoil from the main gun. In an instant, the blood red beam from the onboard GBM, crossed the distance, striking the first cruiser on one end of the formation before pivoting so that the blood red beam curved to strike a line through the fleet.

Their shields tried to hold out, but they were like glass before a hammer -- they shattered before the beam washed over the ships themselves. It was a tighter, more compact beam than what I had fired up at the carrier that was in the atmosphere, but it was no less damaging. The beam cut through the ships, bisecting them, some striking at the reactor or the munitions because they exploded in short order. It was only a dozen ships out of nearly a thousand, but it was a good start to the battle.

The formation disrupted, ships taking evasive maneuvers to dodge out of the way of another attack. The rest because they realized that their neat formation opened themselves up to another attack like that. In a moment, the formation lost its cohesion -- purposeful chaos, if I had to describe it. Still, it was what I was looking for as I kept the Swordfish going full speed ahead, diving into the heart of their formation where I was greeted by their fighters, which were just half the size of the Swordfish.

Point defense became active as lasers shot down missiles from all angles while the armor plating of my ship shifted back to reveal silos of its own missile. They were small, no bigger than a foot long, but they packed quite a punch when they streamed out continuously, striking at the ships around me. They were packed with GN Particles, filling space with orange light, which in turn, acted as a screen and disrupted communications.

As soon as the missiles were fired out, the onboard fabricator replaced the spent missiles and readied the new ones for loading. The process was seamless as the fabricators were hooked up to metric tons of materials, the entire process autonomous, so I just needed to point and shoot. The fighters exploded as the missiles made contact, their own weapons scrambled by the GN Particles, and I turned my attention to the nearest ship. The main gun bucked, a short blast from the GBM, but it still packed enough of a punch to tear right through the ship.

It wasn't destroyed, but having a hole punched through it certainly couldn't help things.

The battle raged all around me -- hundreds, thousands, of fighters swarming me like insects while the fleet itself circled like vultures, trying to pick me off. “I'm not seeing anything special from them,” Johnny remarked as the Swordfish sailed forward, breaking away from the swarm, the main gun ready for another shot. Banking, my scans indicated heat emissions, marking where the mass drive likely was. It, or the command center, I decided, firing off a shot that disabled a cruiser. A well placed shot at the mass drive or the command center was what I needed to pick them off.

“Neither do I,” I replied and I… something weird was happening. I was completely surrounded, under fire from all sides, but I was feeling confident. And Admiral Tacitus should have known that this much wouldn't be enough to take me out. I couldn't deal with all of them easily, but… “They want to delay me,” I decided, my OS picking out targets as I loaded up a special batch of missiles.

The delay could be for a number of things. There was the whole invasion that was currently ongoing, which seemed a solid bet, but there had to be something else that they were trying to get done in a small window. Because, as far as I could tell, Admiral Tacitus was trading lives for time.

The special missiles picked their targets before streaking out on a continuous flow as I flew at high speeds. The missiles shot off towards their targets and, as they did, they broke off into smaller missiles. The Turian point defense did its job for most of them, but they were small and fast. Only one of them needed to make contact to deliver a world of hurt.

And make contact they did. The singularity missiles slowed down just enough to bypass the kinetic barriers to slam into a dozen Turian ships, making a bright light flash when they struck before everything was pulled into the singularity. It lasted only for a moment, but it was enough to take bites out of the ships, rendering them dead in the water.

I was still heavily outnumbered, but as much as the Turians were trying, they just couldn't handle me. The Swordfish was too fast, the shields were too strong, the armor too thick, and my weapons tuned to slip by their defenses. The verdict of the battle was already clear, but the Turians kept fighting, so I kept killing them. Another dozen ships were disabled, then another one destroyed by the GBM. Countless fighters tried to take me down, some even trying to kamikaze me, only to shatter on the bubbleshield.

Some managed to slip by the shields, managing to strike at my ship, but the shots were so slow, they had no hopes of getting through a hundred feet of thick armor shrunken down to a few inches in width. It didn't stop them from trying, but it did stop them from succeeding and they were slaughtered. It was just grinding them away, whittling at their numbers. The fighters were the first to thin out and retreat simply because they were being slaughtered, which left me free reign to start targeting the fleet itself.

I kept waiting for that other shoe to drop even as I laid waste to the fleet. Missiles streaked through empty space, striking at the ships that did their best to shoot them down. To the Turian’s credit, there were fighters that crashed into the missiles for a premature detonation. It just didn't stop the balance of power from shifting in my favor as the fleet was chipped away, going from near a thousand, to half a thousand, to a quarter.

As I fought, I looked for the other shoe on Earth. Humanity had been thoroughly unprepared for Adam Smasher, but they were prepared for the possibility of the bubble shields being disabled or circumvented. Fierce battles were being waged across the planet, the Turian army launching simultaneous invasions, concentrating on a few key locations. But I didn't find the shoe there. Things weren't looking great on Earth, but they were holding. So long as things didn't break in the next couple of hours, I knew I could turn the situation around.

It was then that I realized I was looking in the wrong direction.

At first, my thoughts went to reinforcements. Turian info security was pretty air tight -- I knew they were part of a council, only because Admiral Tacitus told me so. The info about where they were located, where the mass relays were, and more importantly, what their numbers were… that was all a great big blank. We had captured Turians, but if they said anything of note, then I hadn't heard it. The thought of reinforcements, another fleet, prompted me to scan transmissions. There were plenty that I found within the battlefield.

Beyond it, I only found one. A continuous stream of data that was beam cast straight to the mass relay. An ongoing call?

“So that's what your game is,” I realized. I could see that the data was going somewhere, and I could guess what it was. Information. A video about me. I wasn't oblivious to the optics -- I was thrashing their fleet, and the only thing that stopped me from doing it before was lack of interest.

Admiral Tacitus was scaring his bosses into action.

“I can feel my ears burning. How about we go see what they're saying?” Johnny prompted as the ship shifted its position. I left the dreadnought be, certain that when the other shoe dropped, it would be the hint that gave it away. The dreadnought fired upon me, as did the remainder of the fleet, only to taper off when they realized I was heading straight for the dreadnought. My systems did a deep scan of it -- the dreadnought was equipped to block scans, and while it prevented me from creating an accurate map, I still got enough to guesstimate where I wanted to go.

The dreadnought seemed to realize my plan, as it began to bank to the side as my ship slipped through the kinetic barrier. For all the good that it did. Loading up another type of missiles, I fired them off, striking the thick armor that vanished in a singularity. Only for the pressure to be maintained with a bubbleshield that let me slip right through it into, what I'm guessing, had been the command deck to the dreadnought. My missiles took a chunk out of it.

The cockpit to the Swordfish slid open and I jumped out of it, landing lightly on the deck to see that the command center was pretty sparsely populated. It could have been because of the singularity missile… but when I saw Admiral Tacitus rising to his feet, I knew that couldn't be right. “Heard you were talking shit,” I remarked to him, knowing that he could understand me.

He seemed dignified, if I had to describe him a word. Painted face plates, armor that was half a robe, and he was armed with a simple pistol. He didn't draw it as his gaze narrowed at me. “I underestimated your boldness,” he voiced, sounding like he regretted it. Or, at least, that's what it sounded like to my translator. The omnitool had a translator on it that we were able to rip the data from, so it should be accurate. “But you helped prove my point,” he said before three shaky and glitching holograms appeared behind him.

“Do you now understand what we face, Councilors?” He asked them, and my gaze flickered to the holograms. One was a Turian. The other looked vaguely human, except with head tentacles. The other… seemed amphibian with large black eyes and a lack of a nose. “A single ship. A single man crushed our fleet.” Admiral Tacitus continued, holding my gaze.

“... A point well made, Admiral,” the vaguely human looking alone said, her voice glitching out. “It was a mistake on our part. However, perhaps now is the time to speak terms?” She said, looking at me.

“Little late for that,” I replied, a finger tapping at the GBM. “And I already said no to whatever you had to offer.”

“Then why are you here?” The blue humanish alien questioned, her tone even. I suppose a great deal of distance between us lessened her fear considerably.

“I just wanted to catch a look at the people that decided to invade my planet,” I admitted with a shrug of my shoulders, finding myself unimpressed even if my curiosity was satisfied. “Because… as far as I can tell, Admiral Tacitus here decided to prove a fucking point by T-ing me up to wiping out most of your fleet. Then those armies down there. Then Smasher. Again,” I continued, finding myself… I wasn’t even sure. The word disappointed came to mind, but that implied I had expectations in the first place.

Admiral Tacitus didn’t deny the accusation and that was… that was cold. Maybe Turians were built different from humans, maybe it was all volunteers, but to make that decision was some of the coldest shit I had ever heard. My gaze flickered to the other Turian councilor, who wore robes that seemed to be over some kind of armor and if he was upset then he hid it well.

“We need not be enemies-” I cut off the blue alien with a hand and thinning lips.

“No, I think we do,” I corrected. “You allied with Arasaka. The megacorporation responsible for cutting me up like a lab rat, who killed hundreds of my friends, and has murdered thousands of other kids during the span of your little arrangement.” They didn’t react. They didn’t react in the kind of way that told me that they were tightly controlling their reactions to not give anything away, so I had no idea if they knew that or not. “So, it stands to reason that if the enemy of my enemy is my friend… the friend of my enemy is also my enemy.”

I knew what it was now. I shook my head, “I thought you’d be different. You aren’t human, but it seems humanity doesn’t have a monopoly on being fucking awful.” That was… well, the Turians launched a full scale invasion without so much as a ‘how do you do?’ so it wasn’t exactly a shock to find out. Still, there had been some part of me that held out hope. That beyond Earth, across the stars, there was some grand utopia out there that we just had to find.

“I won’t deny what you’ve done here isn't impressive, but you are vastly overestimating your victory,” the Turian councilor spoke up and I noticed the same unyielding iron in his voice. “This was a portion of a fleet. One that we expected to deal with your species, which was a vast underestimation on our behalf, which led to… unfortunate alliances.” He continued, and I took that as a sign that he wasn’t as onboard with Arasaka as the others.

“But it is one of many. With this, the threat of you, and your species, has been conveyed. We shall bring the full force of the Council’s might on you and your planet,” he continued and I hummed, my finger tapping on the GBM in thought. “It would be in both of our interests that hostilities end, and in your species interest that they end in our favor.” The attitude was grating, but I did agree with the sentiment more than I was willing to admit. I saw all the signs -- humanity was racing straight off the cliff of no return.

“I’m hardly an ambassador of earth,” I pointed out, but it was the frog alien that responded.

“No, but you are humanity’s armsdealer. Without you, I expect far less resistance,” he noted, his tone clinical. It reminded me of the doctors in the Orphanage and I immediately decided that I didn’t like him.

This was disappointing. Bitterly disappointing. I had hoped that it was something like… incomparable differences between our species. A physical difference like what we called blue was green to them. A tangible, real difference that could explain away everything up to this point. That wasn’t the case. Not at all. The opposite, really.

The aliens were just like humans. They just came in different shapes.

“Hm,” I hummed, taking out the GBM and looking at it thoughtfully. “You know, I thought killing a megacorporation would be easy. Kill the top ranks, kill middle management, and cut such a bloody swath that everyone would run screaming. Then I just had to do that again, and again, and again until Earth was rid of them entirely. But it wouldn’t really change anything, would it? It’s a people problem. And you, unfortunately, are people. Ordinary people. The same people that sold out their souls for power, influence, and money.”

There was a shift in the room now that they saw the negotiation wasn’t really a negotiation. “You’re threatening me with an army and a fleet that you know that I’ll kill. Hell, maybe you’ll get me, but I can promise you that I’ll get a lot more of you. But you probably won’t because in the time your fleet will get here, I’ll cook something up that you won’t be ready for. And I’ll kill whoever you send my way.” My lips thinned, my eyes narrowed and I shook my head.

“That’s insane. Absolutely fuckin’ bonkers. And I’m crazy too because… I’d do it. I’d kill them all. A whole lot of people whose only mistake was the misfortune of being pointed in my way. Pointed… by you three,” I said, my gaze meeting all of theirs. Uncertainty. Wariness. “I’m trying to do things a little differently. I want to think I’m a little wiser, learning from my mistakes. So… I’m not going to be making peace.”

There was a small beat of silence before I broke it.

“I’m declaring war on you three. Not the council races or whatever you call yourselves. Just you three for having the fucking gall to sit in your ivory towers while you send people to their deaths at my hands. See you soon,” I said, raising my GBM and pulling the trigger before the back half of the ship opened up as a blood red beam tore through it. The bubble shield expanded, eclipsing the two of us and I looked to Admiral Tacitus.

He met my gaze evenly. “I won’t surrender,” he answered my unspoken question as I turned to head back to the Swordfish. “I gave my men the order to die. I won’t shirk my duty,” he continued and that was respectable, I suppose. Certainly better than what I saw from those three.

“Suit yourself,” I said, jumping into the cockpit, and I met his gaze, watching me. He didn’t even draw his gun when my back was turned. I had one final question, “Was it worth it?” I asked him, not even sure if I wanted to know.

Admiral Tacitus seemed to know what I meant. “They hamstrung this war for the sake of optics and bureaucracy. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. When the Smasher Units revealed themselves, I knew that we could not win. Yet, we fought as duty demands and duty demanded our lives.”

Yeah. I didn’t want to know.

“Same shit, different flavor. An alien or a corpo, both bowing to their overlords, justifying the means for the sake of their bottom line,” Johnny summarized my thoughts as the cockpit closed and I was repressurized with a hiss of air. “The sap didn’t even think of backing off. Retreating to die another day. He’d rather throw lives away for the sake of making the pile bigger so it’d be someone else's problem.”

“Not for long,” I replied, the bubbleshield shrunk down as I left the command center, leaving the Admiral to die without much in the way of remorse.

“I think it’s about time we went on the offensive.”