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Garrus’s sniper rifle overheated for the fourth time in as many minutes. He swore and ducked further into cover, but the sickly green rachni swarmed his position in moments without the rifle fire as deterrent.
“Fall back!” Kaidan shouted, wading through his own wave of glowing bodies.
“Negative!” Shepard shouted. Her shotgun sounded in a regular rhythm that Garrus knew was just barely below the overheat tolerance of the weapon, but the rachni swarmed her faster than her weapon could fire. “Nowhere to fall back to!”
“We can’t keep up with them, Commander!” Garrus called. His shields took a hit from an exploding rachni and dwindled quickly under the bite of their acid. His stomach revolted against the combined smell of the singed electronics and green fluids.
“Augh!” Shepard cried as another exploded on her boots. They sizzled with the acid, shields flickering weakly. Her shotgun fired, another fell, but three more swarmed her before her gun had recovered. In frustration, she struck out with her booted foot, sweeping two of the bugs away from her in one motion and stomping down on the third. It crushed with a horrific squelch, but the acid puddled harmlessly on the floor instead of coating everything around it.
Shepard grinned even as she readied another shot from her shotgun.
“Switch off your sniper!” Shepard called. “Gotta deal with these close-quarters style.”
“‘Close quarters’ and ‘filled with acid’ should not go together,” Garrus grumbled. With reluctance, he racked his sniper and pulled out his AR.
“C’mon, Garrus, it’s good for you!” Shepard called. She was practically dancing to the beat of her shotgun, leaping from rachni to rachni between shotgun blasts, a slightly feral grin on her face.
“I’m with Garrus,” Kaidan said. He pushed his pistol to its overheat limits, but a mistimed shot had him reluctantly following Shepard’s example. “Hand-to-hand was never meant for bugs.” He squashed a glowing rachni on the last word for emphasis.
“It’s either my way or soak in acid,” Shepard said, grinning all the harder at her squad mates’ squeamishness. Garrus knew then he’d never hear the end of this.
“Fine,” he said, spraying shots across a wave of rachni and following it up with a vicious stomp. “We’ll do this your way.”
~
Shepard stalked out of the bunker and onto the stark surface of Agebinium, Kaidan and Garrus barely keeping pace despite her injury.
“When I find Haliat...” Shepard fumed. Her voice was almost as frigid as the atmosphere.
Someday, I’m going to have to convince Shepard to land us somewhere nice for a change...
“We’ll find him, Commander - hey, where’s the Mako?” Kaidan asked, bringing all three of them to an abrupt halt. Sure enough, the Mako was not parked where they had left it when they disembarked to clear the bunker.
Shepard’s silence could not have been louder.
Garrus pulled up his omni tool to scan for any kind of signal nearby. Its scanner was nothing to the Mako’s, but it hadn’t taken them more than a minute to disarm the bomb and escape the bunker - Haliat couldn’t possibly have gotten far...
“Over there,” Garrus said, striding to the ridge behind the bunker. He crouched to peer over the ridge to the plain below, waving Shepard and Kaidan to keep their heads out of sight. “Haliat, his goons - and your tank.”
Shepard grumbled something unintelligible to Garrus’s translator, but he caught Kaidan’s quickly hidden grin. A chance piece of the bunker ceiling had fallen on her shoulder when Haliat had sealed them in - it had been a glancing blow, thankfully, but an injured Shepard was a grumpy Shepard and a grumpy Shepard was creative with the insults. Kaidan had triaged her shoulder, deemed it “good enough for now, if she laid off the shotgun”, and applied a dose of medigel.
Garrus kept his own face impassive as Shepard turned to him.
“Can you make out how many of them there are, and if they’ve done anything to the Mako?” she asked.
Garrus held his scope up and swept first over the Mako, then over the pirates surrounding it.
“About a dozen, and the Mako looks just like you left it,” he said. That dent on the left side door panel was there before, right?
“That’s too many for us to take out without approaching cover, commander,” Kaidan said. He shaded his eyes and peered down the ridge from a crouch.
“Is there any other approach we could take?” Shepard asked. “Circle around to the north, maybe?”
“That’s even worse,” Garrus replied, sweeping his scope in the direction she indicated. “This ridge is the closest thing to terrain near to their position. They probably picked that spot on purpose.”
“I am not losing my tank to a bunch of pirates,” Shepard spat. She winced as she crouched beside Kaidan, putting one hand on her injured shoulder.
Never thought I’d be playing rescue to the damn tank...
“There’s another option,” Garrus said. Shepard looked up at him with one eyebrow raised. Garrus’s heart rate sped up. He calmed it down with an effort and years of sniper training, forcing himself to look down his scope again at his targets. “If we set up a cross fire to confuse them, I can pick them off. They don’t have a lot of cover down there, either - not nearly enough to hide from me from this vantage point.”
“You sure?” Kaidan asked. “We’re awfully far away for sniping. I don’t think I could hit the Mako from here, let alone one of the pirates.”
“You two don’t need to hit anything,” Garrus said over top of Shepard’s cry of “do not hit the Mako”. “Just keep ‘em confused about which direction the real shots are coming from.” Garrus tried to keep the smug out of his voice, but Shepard’s sideways glance told him he hadn’t really succeeded.
“Okay, big guy,” she said. She unracked her seldom-used sniper rifle and gestured for Kaidan to do the same. “We’ll do it your way this time.”
~
“If you want your friends to live, I suggest you step aside.”
Shepard exchanged a meaningful glance with Kaidan from their respective covers.
“…have it your way, Balak. For now.”
Shepard and Kaidan took off in opposite directions for two of the demolition charges. Garrus, already in position at the third, finished disabling his before Shepard was done speaking and stepped into the cover of one of the trees scattered around the atrium. He waited until Balak and his men had set their path, heading for one of the side doors.
“Got it!” cried Kaidan.
Balak’s first guard reached the door, wrenching it open and darting through.
“Almost!” Shepard cried back, tapping furiously at the charge’s control panel.
Balak and his remaining guards hesitated, waiting for the all-clear.
“Done!” Shepard yelled.
Garrus fired.
Balak dropped.
Shepard and Kaidan mopped up his stunned guards quickly, with a little help from Garrus when one managed to make a break for it. It was over in moments.
After, once the hostages had been freed and assured of their safety, Garrus sauntered over to where Shepard stood alone. Kaidan was rendering minor medical assistance, and Shepard had just finished calling in the Normandy for a pickup.
“So…chalk that one up to my way,” Garrus said smugly.
“Fat chance, Vakarian,” Shepard said, snorting. “You’d never have had that shot lined up if I hadn’t been in their faces.”
Garrus shook his head, smiling.
“Call it our way, then?” he said. Shepard considered him for a moment before nodding.
“Our way.”