Shep ran to the window, peering into the distance with his modified eyes. With a clearly audible surrounding click, the lenses in his eyes changed, zooming in on the image, simultaneously processing it with his neural networks, adding stabilization. His pupils forcibly dilated, letting even more light into his retinas.
The polymer in the operative's brain instantly deciphered the image captured by his eyes, finding and marking everyone who had even a semblance of a weapon, sending the image to the general network, easing the work of the Red Army soldiers.
He saw everything. Every potential enemy was immediately calculated, outlined with a cold target designation contour, and turned into a tactical unit that only needed to be neutralized. In his perception, the urban landscape turned into a sterile threat diagram, where the fates of individual sentient beings meant no more than pixels on a display.
"Mercenaries. And fanatics. Many," he said curtly, rushing to the elevator. Even for him, the height was fatal to jump from.
Miranda, already waiting for him in the cabin, judging by her slightly unfocused gaze, was communicating with someone through mental images, and judging by the grimaces on her face, it was Joker, who was supposed to be on watch on the bridge right now. As soon as the lieutenant colonel crossed the cabin threshold, she pressed the sensor. Garrus, whose leg the elevator doors almost crushed, dived into the closing door.
"I'm with you," the turian stated directly and unequivocally, looking at the humans with a slight challenge.
"Will you make it in time?" Shep asked slyly, starting to get openly annoyed that every time he hoped for a quiet routine, shooting started, and it was good if ship cannons didn't start firing on the surface.
"Why should I run when I have a pistol?" the SBC member asked reasonably. "Moreover, I underwent basic modifications during my service. I won't fall too far behind..."
He said the last part looking at Miranda, who didn't look like an operative of an elite special unit in the uniform of a CERBERUS investigator. The girl stared at him, putting on an indifferent mask, as if examining the turian on a prosector's table in a morgue. These two disliked each other from the first moments of their forced acquaintance.
"Maybe I should shoot him?" the thought flashed through Shep's mind, his eye twitching slightly. He had just remembered the legionaries' dislike, albeit former ones, for their own agency.
"...especially on a flyer," the Citadel resident finished his remark, clearly enjoying the humans' reaction. What could be done, the Hierarchy had tried hard in terms of propaganda so that the citizens of the USSR would evoke only negative emotions in Palaven's children, even if there were those who didn't believe the tall tales.
"Do I imagine it, or are you mocking us right now?" asked the operative, who was starting to like this turian. There was something brazen about him, inherent only to a Soviet citizen.
"You only imagine it," Garrus replied coldly, like all representatives of his race, to the human.
"He also thinks that we scorned their friendship at the time, although that's far from the case. It's their fault. The Hierarchy went down the wrong path. Military honor is not equal to conscience, and vice versa. The medieval knights of Earth are an example of this," this is roughly how the turian's image in knightly armor, sent to Shep by Miranda, could be deciphered. She, as always, had extracted the essence, instantly dissecting the sentient being into complexes and phobias, like an investigator.
"That's why it's sad, but who are we to pull them back from the edge of the abyss? The Geth scouts only helped to emphasize the points, so that the lesson would be the most illustrative," the man replied with regret. Shep respected those, the former turians, not what they were becoming.
Garrus just snorted, perfectly understanding who the humans were gossiping about. Although he couldn't hear their mental conversation, he could understand its content from the glance thrown at his back. The SBC employee was too professional not to feel that gaze.
The Hierarchy native did not humiliate himself with a caustic reply, considering it a damage to his own dignity to answer something he did not know for sure. He was a warrior, not an Asari songbird, to sing like a canary and flutter his eyes.
Instead, Garrus silently opened the flyer's door, taking the pilot's seat himself. Without waiting for his passengers to buckle up, he took the machine into the air, heading towards the flashes of gunfire. The turian did not allow himself more, understanding the necessity of cooperation. The human operative's power could significantly change even the worst situations in a firefight.
Meanwhile, the situation was no longer calm. Other SBC flyers appeared in the air, bringing all available personnel to the combat zone. Below, rumbling with tracks or silently tearing across the Citadel level deck, Soviet tanks, armed with anything but water cannons, advanced from the embassy side.
"No matter how this ends today, we'll have to wait for a punitive raid on Omega. The Queen of Pirates has gone too far, if she's still alive, disregarding all agreements. So much the worse for her..." Shep thought, feeling no pity, and even more so, feeling a burning triumph somewhere deep in his soul. For the operative, mercenaries or pirates only became good when they started dancing the dance of the dead in the noose, after the sentence was read...
"Attention! Prisoner has broken through the cordon!" came the "Collective" notification. The man immediately leaned over the front seat, trying to cover as large an area as possible with his gaze. Miranda did the same, opening the flying machine's window.
Hundreds of USSR citizens on the station followed their example. It took two seconds to find the fugitive.
"To the right!" the operative barked, pointing the direction with his hand to the turian, and seeing that he was reacting too slowly, he twisted and kicked his hand on the control lever. The flyer lurched, but turned in the desired direction.
The transport, carrying Lebedev towards the private hangars, weaved through the passenger traffic of the air route, sliding between other vehicles, using their hulls for cover, preventing attacks from the ground.
"Closer and smoother!" Shep said, summoning a knife from his spatial backpack and immediately sticking it into the roof of the service flyer. The turian, who was about to utter a few choice words, just parted his mandibles, snapped his jaw shut with a click, nodding, leaving his own language unspoken, but not forgetting the human's stunt.
Miranda tried to reach the air vehicle with telekinesis, but it swerved, and the girl had to take cover in the cabin because their transport brushed against a cargo truck, sparking from the hull and scraping off paint, under the roar of the Krogan driver. If not for her reaction, the girl's face would have been scraped to the bone.
The lieutenant colonel finished cutting through the roof, knocking out the pseudo-hatch with a telekinetic impulse. Jumping into the middle of the cabin, catching his foot on the front seat, Shep summoned his sniper rifle, aiming at the anti-grav grid of the criminal's vehicle.
The first shot sparked from the bumper of the Soviet-made flyer. The pilot, seeing the sniper, didn't wait for him to aim and went off trajectory, swerving sideways and down, leading the vehicle into a spin.
The rifle clicked, reloading, ejecting a smoking casing that rolled into the cabin with a light clink. Shep, regaining his balance on the swaying deck, just cynically snorted, watching the diving target. This was to be expected; no one would obediently sit and wait for the next bullet.
Garrus, not being the best pilot, repeated his maneuver, once again sliding along the hull, but this time with a public multi-passenger bus flyer, under the croaking cries of Salarian tourists. Moreover, seeing an opportunity, he knocked out the side window on his driver's side, drew his pistol, and fired on the fly, also knocking sparks from the bumper.
Shep pressed the trigger again, this time hitting the intended engine, wrecking it, but not disabling it. Soviet technology could survive worse.
Clicking out the empty casing, the lieutenant colonel fired again, this time successfully severing the anti-grav power cable.
The vehicle nosedived, which the turian took advantage of, firing several bullets from his pistol at the driver. After that, the criminal's flyer went into a dive.
Smashing a kiosk, it plowed through the street surface, ending its journey in the window of a hardware store.
Debris from the kiosk and a cloud of dust slowly settled on the mangled flyer hull. Flashes of short circuit and the hiss of damaged hydraulics were visible from the wrecked display window. For a moment, silence reigned, broken only by the growing wail of sirens and the muffled cries of eyewitnesses.
Making a circle, turning around, the SBC employee landed the service transport nearby.
Without bothering, Shep jumped through the hatch he had cut himself, instantly finding himself in the store, encountering a most curious scene.
"You're late," the disgraced academician grumbled calmly, holding a mixer drill with both hands, its bit in his nose. "Unpleasant, but there will be plan B..."
With these words, he pressed the activation button, splattering a good dozen square meters of the sales floor with his brains, which had been turned into a smoothie when his skull couldn't withstand such abuse.
"Spirits, I've seen a lot," Garrus commented, wiping the scientist's brains off his uniform. "But this... You humans are crazy..."
"Am I the only one who didn't feel his death?" Miranda asked rhetorically, not seeing a black ripple from the academician's demise in the "collective."
"If I'm thinking correctly," Shep intercepted the turian's hand, asking the investigator for an evidence bag with his gaze. "Then his betrayal looks much more terrifying..."
"That's impossible," Miranda immediately understood what her comrade meant. "Even if he could fool us, even he couldn't hack the radiation sensors. One is fine, but there are thousands of them!"
"Just don't tell me you believe your propaganda nonsense. There are no Reapers," the turian said decisively.
"And where is the pilot?" Miranda asked, pointing to the empty driver's seat...
The Ghost fired a single shot. A blue flash illuminated his dead face. A small plasma spheroid instantly burned through the Asari's skull, cauterizing the brain, and the rest was done by the steam from the evaporating tissues, turning the unfortunate woman's back of the head into a horrific flower of death. The moans of the wounded immediately ceased.
The dead man's hand shifted slightly lower. The plasma pistol fired again, leaving a crater with bone fragments in the maiden's heart. The fallen hero, after the recent fiasco, became overly cautious in everything. He personally visited the Citadel excavations on Terum, slaughtering the entire expedition along with heretical geth, comparing each body to the list. This was the last blue-skinned one...
There, in the echoing silence of the ancient ruins, there was no smell of gunpowder or burning. Only the acrid dust of ages and the sweet, nauseating stench of burnt flesh. The air shimmered with residual thermal energy from the shots, and in this unnatural light, his lifeless features seemed even more alienated, like a mask of petrified flesh. He felt neither triumph nor regret, only cold satisfaction that another variable in the equation of destruction had been reduced to zero.
Turning, he calmly departed. Emerging onto the surface, the Ghost routinely pressed the detonator button, blowing up the just-cleared site. Without even looking back at the explosion that thundered behind him, he boarded his ship, accompanied by geth, to head to the next point on his route.
The Sovereign, who had observed everything, merely noted another completed step in the preparations for the Harvest, feeling absolutely nothing. The ancient machine was merely fulfilling its mission. The equation of life had to be solved. Organics would again accept the inevitable, and the cycle would repeat.
This was the greatest irony of existence: the striving for survival, this sacred principle for organics, was the very engine that wound the spring of their own destruction with relentless precision. Their technological marvels, their great empires, their very genetic essence—all of it was merely fuel for the great equation he was called to solve.
It will be again, again and again, until all the stars in the universe burn out and fade. Knowing organic primitives, the Reaper would not be surprised if even after that they would cling to their pathetic existence. Only a few can accept the inevitable with dignity, abandoning the senseless struggle and saving resources for a new cycle.
Omega was burning. The USSR fleet did not stand on ceremony, immediately beginning artillery preparation, freezing at the far approaches to the ancient asteroid like a pack of hungry predators, waiting for the prey to bleed enough and weaken.
Individual shots from the defenders, chaotic and desperate, dissolved without a trace in the fiery storm that the raiders and firing points unleashed upon them. Bright flashes of explosions, like death throes, momentarily illuminated the debris, which had already begun to swarm into the icy void. This was the first harbinger of the inevitable transformation of the once mighty pirate haven into a lifeless graveyard of ships.
Pirate and mercenary ships tried to resist. If before they had a semblance of protection based on agreements between the pirate queen, then now their flimsy ship shields could not withstand the power of the heavy ships' main guns. Left alive only because several fleets were needed to catch all the scum in this corner of space, the station in the asteroid was now slowly turning into ruins.
The Union was not going to forgive the warriors of fortune, since they decided to take money from its enemies. Punitive forces will know no mercy. They celebrated the retribution of justice with a gun salute, striking down, but not firing directly at residential areas. Soldiers of the Red Army are not soulless butchers!
Soon, assault units will land on the battered station, beginning the cleanup. Thanks to the Geth's agent network and information, simultaneously transmitted by pilgrims, every resident of Omega had their own dossier, which meticulously detailed how much, where, and for what they were convicted or acquitted.
No doubt the USSR will be accused of cruelty, but that will be later, when this place becomes a communist outpost. It's time to stop playing without rules. The end of the Cycle was approaching, and the galaxy would have to take up arms, preparing to defend its right to life, but for this it was necessary to convince the public of the threat to themselves, because despite all the efforts of the voice of reason, no one still believed the stories about the Reapers. Well, the USSR will force the galaxy to arm itself differently, and the pirates came in handy for its war machine very timely...