The first Geth platform moved with the mechanical precision of a clock hand reaching midnight.
It didn't charge. Didn't fire. It stepped forward, photoreceptor locked on Webb's position, and raised one three-fingered hand in a gesture that might have been communication or might have been targeting. With Geth, the distinction was academic.
He fired.
The round took the platform in the chest. Its barrier — a personal kinetic shield, standard Geth issue — flared white and held. The platform staggered back half a step, processed the impact, and continued forward.
Second shot. Third. The barrier shattered on the fourth round, and the fifth punched through the platform's torso. White synthetic fluid sprayed the corridor wall. The platform dropped, limbs folding with mechanical neatness, photoreceptor dimming from red to black.
Five left. Plus the two new arrivals Tali had detected, somewhere deeper in the station.
"Downloading!" Tali's voice was tight but controlled. Her omni-tool projected streams of data — communication logs, navigation files, encryption protocols — pulling them from the server banks with the focused urgency of a surgeon extracting shrapnel. "Two minutes forty."
The remaining five platforms didn't attack. They moved. Repositioning with a coordinated fluidity that spoke to networked intelligence — each platform adjusting its vector based on the others' positions, creating a contracting semicircle around the data core's entrance.
"They're not trying to kill us. They're trying to cut off our escape route. Box us in, then overwhelm."
"They're flanking. Two moving left, three right. They'll close the corridor behind us in about thirty seconds."
"Can you hold?"
He checked his MP. Seventy-eight points. The barrier emitter — the same emergency construction he'd used on the Distant Fortune and in the siege — would buy time. But time was exactly what Tali needed.
[EMERGENCY CONSTRUCTION: BARRIER EMITTER — PORTABLE]
[COST: 50 MP]
[EFFECT: DIRECTIONAL KINETIC BARRIER — BLOCKS CORRIDOR. DURATION: 5 MINUTES OR UNTIL OVERWHELMED]
[MP REMAINING: 28]
He pressed his palm against the corridor floor at the data core's entrance. Heat bloomed. The barrier assembled — a two-meter kinetic wall spanning the corridor, shimmering blue-white as its emitters calibrated.
The two left-flanking platforms reached the barrier three seconds after it deployed. Their weapons — pulse rifles, integrated into their forearms — fired into the kinetic field. Blue flashes. Energy dissipating. The barrier held.
Tali's head turned at the construction sound. Through the faceplate, her luminous eyes were wide.
"What was—"
"Portable barrier. Don't ask. Keep downloading."
"That appeared from—"
"Tali. Download."
She turned back to the terminal. Her fingers moved faster. The omni-tool's display showed the download counter climbing — sixty-two percent, sixty-eight, seventy-four.
The three right-flanking platforms had found another route. A maintenance conduit, running parallel to the main corridor, connecting to the data core through a floor panel that Webb hadn't noticed because it was covered in a decade of dust.
The panel burst upward. A Geth platform rose through the gap, pulse rifle already firing.
The first shot hit him in the left arm. The barrier he'd just built wasn't between him and the maintenance conduit — it faced the corridor, not the floor. The round punched through his jacket sleeve and grazed the bicep — not deep, but the pain was electric, radiating from elbow to shoulder in a wave that made his vision white at the edges.
He pivoted. Fired from the hip. The round went wide — the platform was already moving, synthetic reflexes faster than organic reaction time. It advanced, firing, each shot calculated to suppress rather than kill. Herding him away from Tali.
Tali didn't run. She drew her shotgun one-handed, kept the omni-tool connected to the terminal with the other, and fired.
The Katana's blast at four meters was devastating. The Geth platform's barrier absorbed the first pellet spread. The second spread hit exposed joints where the barrier's coverage was weakest. The third — fired as she stepped forward, closing the distance to two meters — hit the photoreceptor directly.
The platform collapsed. Tali racked the slide, ejected the spent thermal clip, and returned to the terminal. The download counter hit eighty-three percent.
"Two more in the maintenance conduit," Webb said, peering into the floor gap. Dark. Movement. Red light flickering in the depths.
He dropped a thermal grenade — Webb's standard kit, magnetic adhesive, three-second fuse — into the conduit. The detonation was muffled by the tight space but the heat bloom was visible as an orange glow through the deck plates. One platform's silhouette collapsed. The other retreated.
The corridor barrier was failing. The two left-flanking platforms had been joined by a third — summoned from somewhere deeper in the station, one of the new arrivals. Three Geth platforms, concentrating fire on a barrier designed for five minutes of protection, and four minutes had already passed.
"Ninety percent." Tali's voice, strained but steady. "Ninety-three. Ninety-five—"
The barrier cracked. A kinetic round punched through the weakened emitter field and sparked off the server bank two feet from Tali's head. She flinched — the first involuntary movement he'd seen from her — but didn't stop.
"Ninety-seven percent. That's — I need to abort. The barrier—"
"Abort. Now."
She ripped the omni-tool connection from the terminal. Data transfer halted at ninety-seven percent — three percent lost to the mathematics of survival. She grabbed his uninjured arm and pulled.
"Maintenance ducts. There's a secondary route to the docking bay — I mapped it on the way in."
They ran. Not through the corridor — the barrier's final collapse released three Geth platforms into the data core. Through a service hatch in the data core's rear wall, into a duct system originally designed for cable routing. Tight. Dark. The kind of space where a human had to crouch and a quarian could move at speed.
Tali moved ahead of him, her omni-tool projecting a dim orange path through the ducts. Behind them, Geth platforms attempted to follow — too large for the cable ducts, their metallic bodies scraping against the walls, forced to reroute through standard corridors.
"Junction ahead. Left goes to docking. Right goes to the comm array."
"Left."
They burst through the junction hatch into a secondary corridor. Docking bay three was fifty meters ahead — the airlock where Tali's shuttle waited. Between them and the airlock: one Geth platform. Standing in the corridor's center. Photoreceptor locked on the junction hatch. Waiting.
"They predicted this route. Networked intelligence. They knew we'd go for the ship."
Tali's omni-tool flared. An overload program — electricity arcing from the tool's projection system into the Geth platform's shields. The barrier collapsed in a shower of blue sparks. Webb fired three times. The first two hit the platform's chest. The third hit the photoreceptor.
It dropped. They ran.
The airlock cycled. The shuttle's engine was already warming — Tali had set an automated startup sequence before they'd left. She threw herself into the pilot's seat, released the magnetic clamp, and punched the throttle before Webb had finished closing the cargo hold's inner door.
The shuttle ripped away from Theta-7. Behind them, the station's lights were fully active now — every platform powered, every system online, the Geth's collective intelligence processing the organic intrusion and filing it in whatever served as a memory for synthetic minds.
Two pulse rifle shots followed them — long range, already outside effective engagement distance. One clipped the shuttle's port stabilizer. A vibration ran through the hull, sharp and metallic, then faded as Tali adjusted trim.
"FTL in thirty seconds. Hold on."
He held on. The cargo hold was even more cramped with his rifle jammed against the ceiling and his injured arm pressed against the bulkhead. Blood had soaked through his jacket sleeve — the graze was bleeding freely now, adrenaline no longer masking the damage.
Stars stretched. Blue shift. FTL engaged.
They sat in the shuttle as it hurtled through compressed space. Tali's hands were on the controls, but the flight was automated now — a straight line back to Haven's Point, four hours of travel with nothing to do but breathe and bleed and process.
Her hands were shaking. The fine tremor of adrenaline crash, visible even through the suit's gloves. She reached for a suit seal on her left arm — a minor breach, caught by a stray fragment during the fight — and her fingers couldn't grip the repair tool.
He reached over. Took the tool. Found the breach — a hairline crack in the environmental seal, small enough that her suit's internal systems had compensated but large enough that exposure to the station's contaminated atmosphere was a risk.
He sealed it. The repair tool clicked, the sealant bonded, and the suit's integrity indicator switched from amber to green.
"Thank you." Her voice was quiet. The combat focus had drained, leaving something rawer underneath.
"You're welcome."
They sat in the tiny cockpit. Stars blurred outside. His arm bled into a makeshift bandage he'd torn from the cargo hold's emergency kit. The data on her omni-tool — ninety-seven percent of the Geth core — pulsed gently, waiting to be read.
"Webb."
"Yeah."
"That barrier. The one you built in the corridor."
"Portable equipment. Standard—"
"It appeared from nothing. I was watching. Your hand touched the floor and it assembled from the deck plating. No components. No fabrication time. Nothing to nothing in three seconds."
The shuttle hummed. His arm throbbed.
"That's not 'Terminus salvage.' That's not 'rush-assembled prefabs.' That's something I've never seen, and I've seen a lot."
"I know."
"Are you going to explain it?"
"Not yet."
A pause. Her luminous eyes through the faceplate, bright and sharp and carrying the weight of a question that was also a test.
"Alright." She turned back to the controls. "Not yet."
The shuttle flew on. Four hours to Haven's Point. Four hours with ninety-seven percent of a Geth data core and a question that would need answering sooner than he wanted.
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