Mass Effect What's In A Name

They had to hurry; time was always of the essence on missions like this. The consequences of being caught were something the closely-knit team hadn't spent much brainpower on for their other missions, so they simply again did what they always did: grit their teeth, cranked their amps to 11, and drove on. While the purity of it somewhat varied from squadmate to squadmate, they all had the same ice-cold carbonite at the center of their souls: Complete the mission, fuck the consequences.

Their best technician let out a quiet, nonverbal sound of professional pleasure as he cracked the lock on the footlocker they were clustered around. While clustered was still an appropriate adjective, the others were all dropped on one knee, facing out and away from the trunk, body posture tense. Their eyes scanned continually, keeping guard on their assigned doorway as their fingers absent-mindedly, instinctually curled around weapons they weren't currently holding. Their engineer reached slowly into the trunk and, with a gravitas belied by the datapad's simple outward appearance, lifted their primary objective out of its protected location.

He queued up squad comm's at the same time as he triggered the datapad's display, already sorting through the most recent, job-related messages until he can find what he's looking for: personal correspondences.

"All Blackjack elements, this is Blackjack Actual, fall in on me. It's harvest time, repeat, harvest time." The codewords in the second communication burst did their work as his squad reacted to the preordained signal, his three comrades pulling security straightening and moving to his side even as his far scout double-timed it back to his location. Once they had clustered around him, their military bearing and discipline cracked somewhat as they crowded the datapad with an enthusiasm that seemed distinctly at odd with their black-and-red, warpainted armor. There was a levity to the atmosphere suddenly, a burst of light-hearted excitement, as their engineer moved a grim-painted hand forwards to open the folder titled, strangely enough, 'Hope.'

The squad waits with baited breath as the gallery whirs to life before their eyes. The galleried images are too small to study in depth, so the engineer rapidly sorts them by date received, oldeset-to-newest, and tells the datapad to display all marked images in sequence, slideshow style, with the owner's responses to each image added appropriately. Their faces, bleached white and scarred from countless hours spent behind shielded helms, are a mixture of disappointment and confusion as the first received image rises to them.

It's a picture of a dead husk's head, its black and blue, cable-lined mouth hanging open at an awkward angle. In the dark sludge that functions as a husk's blood, a single word has been written jerkily across its forehead: 'Valek?' The period stabilizing the question mark is a diagonal, angry slash. The sender of the image is listed in the owner's contacts list, strangely enough, as 'HeartsPalpitate'.

Somewhat baffled, they flick to the next image, thinking that perhaps the owner's response to the husk image would clarify the issue. They had all seen the affect that these images had on their platoon leader, the way that the telltale Message Received chirp from her datapad sent her happily bounding off to privately check her messages. The platoon didn't do anything privately this deep into the Reaper war - their battles, their lovelives, their personal problems, it was always fair game to eachother. When your comrades are your soul, why deny a piece of yourself anything? They were family, blood and bone, heart and mind; there was nothing that stood between them. Nothing but this, whatever this was, here in these images that drove their platoon leader into almost euphoric happiness. The next image in the gallery seemed more her style.

The image displayed a hulking Reaper monstrosity code-named Brute, crashed over on its side, obviously dead. It was covered in a litany of smaller wounds, but the cause of its death was quite obvious as the squad gaped down at the picture of their platoon leader. The tiny, red-haired woman with the pixy cut hair was nestled, as if comfortably, into the creature's ripped open chest cavity. Its thick, armored ribs had been shattered by the impact of her biotic charge, and the gore spattered onto her grinning lips made her appear even more demonic than usual.

Gripped in her hands was a delicate cardboard sign which read, simply, 'Celvash?'.

The engineer's eyes lifted and scanned his comrades faces, noting the same puzzlement on their own as he knew was on his. The word didn't mean any more to them than it did to him. They moved on to the next image from HeartsPalpitate.

The third image in the gallery was a shot taken from some twenty feet off of the ground, a wide-lense shot that showed a single Krogan warrior and some thirty-fiveish mutiliated cannibals. The Krogan's armor had the telltale fetishes and markings of one of nature's greatest engines of pure, unbridled destruction: The Krogan Battlemaster. He was covered in the dark ichor of the Reaper's minions and his own, brightly-colored orange lifeblood. It seeped from several wounds that he did nothing to hide, instead going out of his way to seemingly flex those parts of his musculature as he performed a pose he had obviously picked up from his human counterparts: the Old Earth 'Lightning Bolt' pose, his Claymore still clutched in his right hand. Upon closer study, the assembled pieces of his victims behind him spelled out the word, 'Takarus?'.

Despite their training, despite their status as some of the Reaper War's most effective, most brutal special operation forces, the squad of human Vanguards just couldn't help it. They committed a mortal sin for someone in their occupation: they lost track of time. They moved through the gallery of images observing the correspondance between their platoon leader and HeartsPalapitate, their confusion never diminishing. The unashamedlly violent and gleefully murderous tones in the pictures, rather than abating, just continued to grow. As the time/date markings kept progressing closer and closer to the future, the stakes in each shot kept increasing. What was once a correspondance between husks, brutes, and cannibals, soon encapsulates a phantom, a banshee, and soon, multiple Atlases. One image from the platoon leader to the Krogan shows a squad of dead phantoms and actually has an arrow drawn to bright-red blood on one of their knives. Over the arrow, the words 'That's actually my blood right there. Finished the nova before she could get it into my spine! :D Kartac?' The last word and its question mark, like all of the other questions in all of the other pictures, means nothing to them. The last picture is from their leader to the battlemaster and it contains the word 'Rathma?' written in 105mm chaingun shells after the Siege of Elohae.

Eventually, the voice of their platoon leader rouses all of them from their study. Rather than being the anger-filled shout that they'd been worried about, it's quiet and soft. They know this voice, they hear it after the battles, and at night, when they cry. They've heard it when her hands were buried in their guts, holding their intestines in. They've heard it whispered in their ear when they were fireman carried out of an op that got all fucked up. They hear it in their sleep, in their dreams, telling them the most important thing of all: We're going to win. And you're going to make it happen, Blackjack.

"Sometime soon, he's going to win. He's closer to Shephard than I am, and I hear she is bringing Reapers, actual Reapers, down." She laughs quietly to herself as she moves deeper into the room, head slowly shaking. She sits down on a nearby bunk, her first squad still clustered around her own. She leans her naked back against the bare metal pole of the bunk-bed, hair almost black so soon after her shower, "I mean, how do you top that? We had that first joking fight about it, and neither one of us can let it go now. We both have too much pride to let the other one win the right to name our firstborn... and it seems like there's always a new challenge to topple the other's claim with. This love is ... hard."

These last sentences are said with a clandestine, bone-deep weariness that they all nevertheless recognize. All of them understand the feeling of wearing yourself so incredibly thin, burning your body and amps down to the wiring, just to be handed another op the next hour. They've all thought it before, said it before. They've just never heard her say it before. Even the air in the bay seems to have settled into a tomb-like stillness, as if the universe itself was observing this, the slow cracking of the strongest person any of them had ever known.

It's at this moment, this still moment of loss, when the forgotten datapad in the engineer's hand gives off its quiet, demanding chirp - 'Message Received from HeartsPalpitate.' The engineer stares down at the boring, unoffensive datapad as if it were an item he had never, in all his technologically masterful years, ever seen before. He looks to his platoon leader and she issues him a sad smile and an affirmative nod, granting her permission. He tilts the datapad at such an angle that they all may see and opens the file.

The image had to have been captured by a low-flying aircraft, to have caught such a broad, expansive view of the wasted London cityscape. There are no buildings above four or five stories tall that remain, the devastation putting a hard truth to the idea that too many could have survived this. Set against this hard desolation is the action that's been caught mid-scene:

Reapers. Dozens of them, scattered around the city ... in the process of limply, soullessly falling over. Far, far down below, a single Krogan battemaster is visible. His armor is in shreds, annihilated, destroyed, but he stands, arms caked to the shoulder in Reaper filth. He stands with his boots planted atop the metal corpse of one of the biggest Reapers, still-smoking artillery holes littering its hull. His back is arched, massive chest pointed to the sky, and on it a single word is written:

'Rathma.'


End file.
