Jason Hough - Mass Effect - Nexus Uprising

Morda.

Fuck . This wasn’t going to end well, and Sloane—without thinking, acting on her first instinct—had sided with the enemy.

Nakmor Morda stood at the center of this fresh line of combatants, coming in from the breach they’d made in the barricade. If she recognized Sloane Kelly, or cared, she made no sign.

It wasn’t just Morda, either. Her elite soldiers had been woken, too, and surged in beside her. Morda flicked her arm toward the battle and her guard surged into the fray without a second thought. Didn’t matter who was involved, or why. The game was afoot.

“Nakmor Morda!” Sloane shouted over the fray.

The clan leader glanced in her direction.

“Stop this now! There’s no reason to—”

But Morda only shook her head. “You’re on the wrong side of the barricade, Kelly!”

“There is no right side,” Sloane growled, and did not move.

Morda glared at her and there came the strange sort of quiet that can occasionally fall over a crowded place. Despite all the combat, the chatter of gunfire and the roar of the krogan flood, a silence stretched, if only for a second. And nothing was said. Morda’s eyes did the talking; they said, Time to choose, Sloane. With us, or with them .

Sloane Kelly could feel the eyes of the rebels on her. Some of them, anyway. And half the krogan force, too. Waiting, if only for that fraction of a second, to know her decision.

She shook her head at Morda and raised her weapon.

The leader of the Nakmor clan grinned.

All at once the cacophony of violence folded back in and with it the chaos. Hundreds of combatants on both sides, all killing or dying.

“Fall back!” someone shouted. Calix, maybe. The cry was quickly taken up by the other rebels, though, and Sloane would never know who’d given the original order. Someone who didn’t know the krogan, that’s for sure.

She danced backward, shooting, never turning to flee. That would only further incite them into a truly cataclysmic bloodlust. But her effort made no difference. The rest of the rebels had broken and run. If she didn’t do the same she’d be out here all alone, in no-man’s-land, against several hundred of them. They’d tear her limb from limb, and she knew it.

So Sloane ran, soon overtaking some of the slower of Calix’s rabble. The wave of krogan hit the stragglers from behind. She heard the screams, the crunching of bones, and the orgasmic howls of delight only meters behind her. A symphony of violence.

Vaulting a long shelving unit, she rolled over the top just a split second before a krogan slammed into the thing and sent it smashing into her back. She rolled to get out from under it, and the krogan loomed over her, fists raised.

An incendiary round took it in the head. Blood and gore splattered across her face. She turned to one side and tried to blink it away as the body above her shuddered, twisted, and finally came apart under the explosive hail of gunfire.

All across the vast room the rebels shifted to this new plan. Whatever concerns had kept them from it before, they were no longer relevant. Explosive rounds washed over the krogan front line. That entire side of the room became one long, roiling, thunderously loud wall of death and destruction. Krogan and rebel alike were consumed in shockwaves and diced by the sprays of shrapnel.

The tactic worked, at least. It kept the enemy back.

Keeping low, Sloane staggered back to the rebel line and heaved herself over a blood-smeared crate. No one batted an eye at this. She was one of them now. They might not be able to say how they knew that, or when it had happened, but they knew. Morda had demanded she choose. The side of rebels fighting for the right to be equals? To make their own choices?

Or the side of the machinations that unleashed a krogan clan on its own people.

Fine. She fucking well chose.

In the temporary reprieve Sloane cast about for a weapon. She’d lost the rifle at some point, and the knife. She thought of all those dead behind her, and the weapons they’d dropped. The krogan hadn’t come armed—not all of them, at least. Perhaps because there hadn’t been the supply, or the time, or maybe just because they wanted a challenge. She wondered if Tann knew what he’d ordered here, and whether Addison had been party to it. Kesh would never have agreed to this, though it would be just like Tann to go around her. Straight to the clan leader, waking her from her slumber and telling her just enough to get the desired result.

Salarian or not, it had worked.

There was a shoulder against hers. Calix. Their eyes met.

“Why’d you give me the knife?” she asked.

“To see what you’d do.” He forced a smile on to his face. “Enlightening how we act when we have no time to think, isn’t it? I guessed right, Sloane. I thought you might—”

A sharp report thundered across the barricades. Calix’s brains left his body in a small gray eruption to the left. His eyes went unnaturally wide. He dropped to his knees and slumped against her.

Sloane turned, dumbstruck. The krogan were coming again. A wave of them, bearing down on the exhausted rebel line. But they did not carry rifles. She saw others, then, at the smashed barricade where it had all begun. Newcomers in uniforms like hers. One of them was lowering a sniper rifle from her shoulder, having seen Sloane in her sight, the target she would have shot next after Calix. One of her officers. Their eyes met, for an instant, and then the woman was gone, rushing back to report what she’d seen.

Sloane is with them , she’d say. Gone over. Or maybe she’s been working against us all along .

As the enraged horde of krogan fell upon the rebels Sloane sank to her knees. She turned Calix over and looked into his clever eyes one last time. It was all she could take. The last straw.

This wasn’t what she came here for.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

“What do we do?” someone asked.

After a second Sloane realized that the question had been directed at her. She glanced up and saw the brute, Reg. The one who’d savagely bound her wrists, the one whose “approval rating” of her had been rock bottom, according to Calix.

“What?” she asked, numbly.

“What do we do?” he repeated. He was asking her. Just like that. With Calix gone, this rabble was leaderless, and they knew it.

“We die,” Sloane said, simply. “They won’t stop until we’re all dead.”

The brute offered her a hand. “Then we die fighting,” he said.

Sloane took his hand. A rifle was thrust toward her. She looked at it as if it was a foreign thing, despite the fact she could take it apart and reassemble it while blindfolded. She took it.

“Some other time,” Sloane said. “Let’s die on our terms. For now I say we retreat, deeper into the Nexus. Go underground.”

He puffed up. A wall of a person. “I’m willing to die here.”

“Are you willing to let your cause die here, as well?”

That gave him pause.

“What about family?” she demanded. “Friends? What about making a fucking choice that matters ?”

Reg looked up. His eyes closed. Then, with a grunt, he nodded. “Emory’d never forgive me if I lost my head here.”

The battle closed in around them. Sloane clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. Then let’s make this one matter, okay? For Calix.”

A single, grudging nod.

“Retreat!” Sloane shouted, and she was off, moving away from Morda, deeper into the idle machines of the assembly floor. She repeated the call over and over, and Reg did the same. They joined up with a group of rebels near the back, armed with longer-range rifles, led by someone named Nnebron. He took aim at Sloane as she rushed up, but Reg stepped between.