Drew Karpyshyn: Ascension

For example, she realized that there should have been more people around. She had hazy, incomplete memories of crowds moving in and among the cubicles. She could recall the buzz of chatter; it had circled around her head like a swarm of angry bees. Now, however, the cubicles were empty. Everything was still and silent.

Again, she knew this was wrong. She just couldn't quite figure out why.

Kahlee said hide in Seeto's room, she thought, as she reached out and pulled the curtain aside. The room didn't look as she remembered it. The sleeping mat had been moved half a foot to the side of where it had originally been placed, and someone had turned the cooking stove ninety degrees since the last time she was here.

Gillian knew that people moved things around sometimes. But she didn't like it. Things should always be put back in the same place.

I don't like it here, I want to go back to the shuttle.

She let the curtain fall from her hand and turned away from the cubicle. Walking with slow, uncertain steps she began to make her way back through the crisscrossing aisles toward the stairs leading to the deck below, taking a long, meandering route far different from the one that had brought her here originally.

Kahlee fell back up the stairs, knowing all hell would break loose when Cerberus followed them and the fight spilled over into the cubicle grids. Even with all the civilians cleared out, the battle would become a run-and-gun skirmish up and down the crisscrossing aisles, giving Cerberus and their superior weaponry an even greater advantage.

While several of Mai's people took up positions around the corners of cubicles near the staircase, aiming their weapons at the door Cerberus would have to come through, Kahlee made her way straight to Seeto's room to grab Gillian.

By the time she got there, she could already hear steady bursts of gunfire being thrown back and forth. She knew she didn't have long; as easy as it had been for Cerberus to break through the quarian defenses on the lower deck, it would be even harder to hold position up here. There were simply too many options; the quarians would have no hope of pinning an enemy down when they could simply double back to one of the other aisles and come at them from the opposite side.

She pulled the orange curtain back, only to discover an empty room staring back at her.

Gillian was still wandering up and down the halls when the loud noises her mind had refused to identify earlier began to ring out even louder. She saw a quarian run across the far end of the aisle she was standing in, and the gun in his hand forced her to recognize the sounds as gunfire.

/ don't want to be here, her mind screamed at her. Go back to the ship.

Gillian intended to do just that. She could hear the gunfire all around her now, sporadic bursts coming from in front, behind, and off to either side. But her overwrought mind simply blocked it out and she continued to make her way toward the stairs.

She took a left turn and came face-to-face with a man and a woman. She could tell right away they weren't quarian — they had no environmental suits.

They were wearing helmets, but the visors only covered the first three quarters of their faces, and they had big, bulky vests that hid their chests, shoulders, and arms. Each was carrying a gun, and when they saw her they raised their weapons up and pointed them in her direction.

Gillian simply continued to walk toward them, as if oblivious of their presence.

"Hold fire!" the woman shouted, lowering her gun as the girl approached. "It's her! Grayson's daughter!"

The man lowered his weapon and rushed forward, reaching out to grab her. Without even thinking about it, Gillian made a fist and snapped her hand out, just like Hendel had taught her. The man hurtled away from her, slamming his back against the edge of one of the cubicle walls. There was a sharp crack and he bent in a funny way.

"Holy mother—" the woman gasped, but Gillian cut her words off. Moving on pure instinct, she reached out with an open hand, palm upward, and flicked her wrist. The woman launched up to the ceiling, smashing against it so hard her helmet cracked. She dropped down at Gillian's feet, her eyes rolling back into her head and blood trickling from her nose, mouth, and ears. Her leg twitched once, her boot kicking against the side of a nearby cubicle, then went still.

The girl simply stepped over her and continued on her way. She reached the staircase without running into anyone else, then went down to the lower deck.

She could still hear the gunfire from up above, but it was quieter down here. Feeling a little better, she began to hum a tuneless song as she headed toward the shuttle.

Kahlee was in a near panic as she raced up and down the aisles, desperately searching for Gillian. Fortunately, her training allowed her to keep her wits together just enough not to do anything stupid, and instead of dashing blindly around corners, she would poke her head out at each intersection, taking a quick peek for enemy combatants.

All around her she could hear the sounds of fighting, but she didn't encounter any Cerberus troops until she came across two dead soldiers lying in the middle of one of the aisles. For an instant she thought she'd found proof that Hendel had survived being thrown twenty feet through the air: it was obvious the soldiers had been killed by a biotic attack. Then another thought occurred to her.

Gillian.

Since coming to the Idenna Hendel had worked closely with the girl, teaching her to develop and control her biotic abilities. But despite the remarkable improvement in her condition over the past few weeks, she was still an emotionally fragile, easily disturbed little girl. Something had set her off in the cafeteria back at the Academy, unleashing a storm of biotic powers. Now Kahlee had clear evidence that the storm had been unleashed yet again.

She's scared, Kahlee thought to herself. Confused. She's going to want to go somewhere she feels safe. An instant later she had it.

She's heading back to the shuttle.

Leaving the two dead soldiers where they lay, Kahlee continued to work her way carefully through the aisles back toward the stairs.

Golo was thoroughly enjoying the battle against his former people. While he hadn't been a crew member of the Idenna, he had no trouble imagining the quarians he gunned down as being the ones who had banished him from the Usela, his old ship.

Heavily armed and armored, he had already notched six kills during the battle — two on the trading deck and four more hunting through the cubicles up above. Given the superior weaponry Cerberus had provided him, it wasn't even a fair fight.. which was exactly how Golo liked it. In fact, he was enjoying himself so much that he nearly lost track of the time.

It was only when the timer in his helmet began beeping softly that he realized they had only ten minutes left. They hadn't found the girl yet, but that didn't really matter to him. It was time to head back to Grayson's shuttle and get off the Idenna.

He knew the rest of the team would keep fighting and searching for Gillian for another five minutes before pulling back, but he didn't like cutting it that close.

With a sigh of regret he abandoned his hunt among the cubicle maze, and made his way quickly and cautiously back toward the stairs leading to the deck below.

Inside the passenger cabin of the nameless shuttle that had been stolen from him on Omega, Grayson paced anxiously. Checking his watch, he realized they were down to just under ten minutes.

"You and you," he said, pointing at two of the three soldiers left behind to help him secure the shuttle. "Get out there and find the controls to release the docking clamps."