Chapter 2

Part Six

Beacons… annnnddd

Mika and Jack finally arrived at the site of the beacon, three shuttles remained parked surrounding the beacon site. Gribal was nowhere to be found, yet next to the beacon stood a glowing biotic trooper.

The same as the biotic recruit before? Jack asked himself in his mind.

The trooper stood, back to him and Mika, and didn't offer anything to suggest she knew of their presence. Jack and Mika crouched down.

"What do we do, her barriers are off the charts," whispered Mika, arms folded across her chest piece.

Before Jack could offer an approach, a team of N7 recruits burst through into the clearing headed to one of the shuttles. When they noticed the trooper, they all began firing heavy quantities of rounds onto the troopers barriers. None made contact with the armor. In a motion almost too quick for Jack to see, the biotic trooper shot out an arm which released a biotic blast which completely picked up one of the members of the charging team. The trooper dismembered all four limbs and the man's head in an explosion which shook the earth under Jack and Mika's feet. His teammates, covered freshly in the blood of their comrade, stopped shooting as they looked down at their hands, brilliant red. Jack could feel the sudden shift in their attitude from that of extreme confidence to that of pure terror. The biotic trooper's shields were none the weaker for the amount of force she had thrown at the deceased recruit, and Jack knew this was not the same recruit as before. This was not a part of the mission, this was life or death.

"She isn't," Mika managed to gasp.

"She isn't here for the shuttle" Jack confirmed with Mika.

The trooper launched a shockwave at the other two. One of them managed to avoid the blast, but the other was ripped from the ground and flung into a tree. The crack of the recruits head hitting the dense wood followed by the limp landing suggested the worst case scenario. The force from the shockwave had taken the assassin's barriers down… a weakness, but the narrowest of ones.

"We have to get to the shuttle… I'll distract, you get it started!" Mika said, while watching the battle keep going between the last recruit and this force of biotic terror.

"What about Gribal?" he replied… there was no chance they were going to leave a teammate behind.

"We can find him in the shuttle, but you're the only pilot here… you need to get it started."

Jack placed his hand on Mika's shoulder.

"You better not die."

Mika smirked at him.

"I can see the pattern to her combat, piece of cake."

Jack hoped she was right. This was the only chance they had, and everything had to go 100% perfect.

The trooper finished off the last recruit with a biotic lift followed by a pistol round to straight through the recruit's heart.

"Armor piercing rounds…" Jack whispered.

He gulped.

As if hearing the saliva wash down his throat, the figure immediately turned to stare directly at his and Mika's location. The brush was not enough to hide them, and the trooper launched a shockwave directly at them. The Earth cracked, crumbled, and exploded towards them. He and Mika leapt out of the blast's effect range and Mika immediately charged at the trooper, duel omni-blades out on her wrists. Jack took the moments Mika had bought him and raced to the closest shuttle. Out of the corner of his eye he could make out the fierce battle going on between Mika and the biotic trooper. The two were solid acrobats with lethal efficiency. Each blow would have been fatally accurate, were it not for the superb parrying and dodging performances of both sides.

Jack reached the shuttle and burst into the cockpit. Activating all systems as fast as he could was possible, but the adrenaline flowing within his veins made it harder than ever. As the engines roared on, and all the diagnostics read green, elation washed over him. He ran back out of the shuttle. Mika and the trooper were still going at it, toe to toe was an understatement.

"Mika, we are green," he whispered over the comm channel, trying to not disturb her focus in the battle.

Mika nodded mid-way through blocking a ferocious roundhouse kick by the assailant. The trooper took advantage of her minor distraction and launched a biotic blast into her mid-section, Mika flew into the foliage and disappeared. The trooper thus turned to face Jack.

Sweat trickled down the back of Jack's neck as the trooper marched towards him, purple energy flowing around every inch of her armor.

"Time for a little hand to hand," Jack said to himself, his self-belief was present, but not particularly appropriate considering the fact Mika hadn't been able to leave a mark on the freak of nature glaring at him through a tinted visor. Jack made a silent prayer to himself and then exploded at the trooper. He was definitely not prepared for this physically superior force in hand to hand, but she didn't know that and he hoped to gain an advantage through sheer tenacity and force of will.

A biotic blast picked Jack up before he could reach his target, completely immobilizing him in that moment, his arms and legs splayed out.

"Jesus," he gasped as his body levitated with the trooper slowly walking towards him, arms extended to maintain the grasp on his armor. He steadily came to terms with his impending doom at the hands of this trooper.

The trooper, however, rather than finishing him then and there, stopped about two yards away from him, not speaking, simply holding him in the air.

"Liam says hello," the altered voice of the faceless spectre gruffly washed over him, it made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

"What the hell are you?" Jack asked, surprisingly calm given his predicament.

He felt a harsh tug on his shoulders, but his arms stayed in their sockets. He was being toyed with.

"You'll find out soon enough, there is always room for more slaves… especially ones with your talents…

Jack immediately felt an unconscious desire to spit at his captor. Before he knew it, the saliva had left his lips and landed about two feet from the trooper's boots.

"Typical," the trooper continued, chuckling.

"Just… whatever you're going to do, get it over with…. I'm sick… of this view!"

A hand reached forward from the mud at the troopers feet and with a canister of some sort. The canister impacted on the pitch black chest piece of the trooper's armor.

"What the," was all the trooper could utter before screams of agony echoed from the trooper's voice masker.

Jack fell hard, and at an incredibly awkward angle into the mud. A naked Gribal, caked in mud, rushed over and offered him a hand up.

"Quickly, we must get Mika and leave immediately."

The trooper was struggling on her knees with one of the notorious blobs from their mission briefing, which was digesting the armor of the biotic trooper with relative ease. The screams continued. Jack cleared his mind of the fall and rushed to where Mika had been flung. He found her lying unconscious, but still with a pulse. He picked her up and over his shoulder before bolting to the shuttles.

As they exited the foliage, Will's team appeared from one end of the brush, and the Batarian team from earlier also entered the shuttle clearing. They noticed the trooper with the blob on their chest, and the dead recruits before turning their gaze at Jack and the extremely naked Gribal with puzzlement.

"She's not one of us, she killed one of the other recruit teams. We need to get out of here before she gets free from that blob."

Both teams looked from the trooper to Jack and Gribal running to the shuttle a couple times before eventually accepting the situation and entering their own shuttles. Jack and Gribal made it onto their own shuttle where Jack placed Mika onto the row of seats against the wall of the shuttle.

"I will keep her alive, you just get us back to command," said Gribal, sitting down beside Mika with his omni-tool out and monitoring her vitals while simultaneously applying medigel to the most critical damage on her body.

All three shuttles lifted off and as Jack began the ascent, he noticed biotic bombs whipping past his shuttle. The trooper was not giving up on her prey. Doing his best to avoid the blasts surrounding his vulnerable craft, Jack spun, banked, and serpentined his way into the air. From the ground it probably looked a lot worse than he how felt performing the maneuvers. He let out a massive sigh of relief once he noted that blue of the atmosphere had turned into the darker hue of empty space as the shuttle entered into orbit.

"Safe for now!" he shouted back towards Gribal who looked up from Mika to Jack and nodded his approval.

The shuttle shot through space and Jack punched in the pre-entered coordinates of the new base of operations. With the auto-pilot enabled, he got up and came back to where Gribal was still huddled over Mika.

"What's the diagnosis, Doc?"

"Many fractures, no mortal wounds, but surgery will be needed to repair some of the more-worse injuries she sustained."

Gribal sat back and rubbed his chin for a moment.

"Without the armor absorbing the impact this might have been another story, but I believe Mika will make a full recovery."

Mika continued to rest unconscious for the entirety of the shuttle ride home, possibly as a result of the painkilling effect that the medi-gel was providing.

She deserved every second of rest after the day she had had.

His thoughts turned to what the masked trooper had said to him about Liam.

"Liam says hello…" echoed through his mind as he sat in the cockpit, hypnotized by the stars which swirled past him.

"Liam says…"

Jack closed his eyes, thinking of the horrors of the Hydra base, the indoctrinated colonists.

"Hello" Liam's voice whispered from behind him. Jack spun, but no one was there. The devices of the shuttle and the engines continued to create the ambient noises and nothing else made a sound. Mika slept silently, and Gribal sat staring across at the other side of the shuttle wall. Jack needed some rest of his own. His neck hairs continued to stand on end for the rest of the flight.

As they docked with the space station, Jack walked back into the rear of the shuttle and picked up Mika's calm, sleeping body in his two arms. Gribal kept his omni-tool trained on her vitals, which still read green. A medical team awaited them at the shuttle exit. Jack gently laid Mika down onto the medical gurney. The doctors nodded to Jack.

"She'll be in medical bay, room 4-E, when you want to visit."

"Thanks, doctor."

They made their way to the elevator as Jack and Gribal turned to face a grim looking Admiral Hackett and his ever-present team of heavily armed security. They both saluted. The admiral returned the salute.

"Glad to see you all made it back. I know what you went through on that planet wasn't in the intel we gave you, but in the circumstances your team did admirably. For that reason you get to skip the next step of the training we had scheduled for you, as Mika recovers. We have made quarters available to your team. The next training mission your team will partake in begins in two weeks."

"We'll be ready to go, sir."

"I know you will, dismissed gentlemen, see to your teammate, and maybe put some clothes on, Gribal. The alliance is doing their best to track where that monster fled to. If any information becomes available I'll be in touch."

At that, the Admiral and his posse also made their way to the elevator in the shuttle bay and disappeared into the depths of the large space station.

Jack began to exit out of his armor. Gribal, still naked and caked in mud made his way to the locker room to clean up.

"Gribal!" Jack shouted after him.

Gribal turned to him.

"Thanks, you saved us all today."

Gribal simply smiled, nodded, and continued to walk in his lanky, Salarian gate towards the locker room.

It was a close call that they had survived, but that's what it took sometimes in order to live to fight another day.