“No time!” Arvex’s voice, never quiet, now practically buried him in its intensity. “Get back to the hatch, go, go!”
Na’to flailed as the krogan slammed him feet-first onto the deckplates. For a moment, he forgot that he’d switched the magnetization of his boots off to work within the delicate interior of the power conduit. When the hand in his suit let go, Na’to felt his feet lift again. “Emergency,” he said, then louder, “Emergency!”
“Rock-dumb salarian, turn your boots on!” That hand grabbed his faceplate this time, spun him around and slammed him back to the plate. Arvex waited until Na’to’s boots sealed to the deck. Once assured Na’to wouldn’t go careening off into space, he pushed him toward the other krogan—Wratch, he thought dumbly.
“Nacho, don’t just stare!” Reg’s voice, slack tight at the gear securing him to the station.
A spray of bullets erupted just behind him.
His brain, deeply invested in fuses and synaptic power cores and the unfortunate mess of wires he’d corrected along the way, struggled to catch up. At least until the first bit of debris clipped his shoulder.
It didn’t hurt. Not really. It was too small for that. Na’to flapped a hand at it, forcing his magnetized boots to unlatch and make for the airlock. It spun away, a rotating disc of something or other. Out of my field, he thought. He didn’t do structural.
“Na’to,” Andria warned, her voice high and even younger in consequence. “Focus!”
He shook his head, pulling his attention back to the deck he walked across.
And to the virtual landmine of debris ahead.
Some small. Some medium.
Some very, very large.
All of it caught in ephemeral tendrils of black and orange and yellow and—
“It moved!” he exclaimed, so fascinated by the concept for a moment that he stopped trying to run.
Behind him, a loud clang jerked his attention back to the hatch. Nakmor Arvex knelt over it, grunting with effort as he secured the bolts back into place. Overhead, debris spun and gathered, whipped into frenzy. Whether it was the energy fringe turning large debris into smaller, the collisions of each as they magnified, or the bullets peppered by the krogan as they attempted to target debris out of their path, it only served to make it worse.
Action and reaction.
Calculating the rate of motion plus the additional force caused by the krogan’s efforts at firepower control, eyeballing the distance to the airlock—
None of it mattered.
“Oh, shit,” Andria whispered. “Ohshitohshit—”
“Get your slimy carcass inside,” roared Arvex.
Na’to tried. Panting, struggling to coordinate his slim build and the heavy magnetized grip of the boots, he struggled to take strides that would eat up the hull. Get him closer to the airlock. To safety.
Behind him, Arvex swore—or yelled or encouraged. Na’to couldn’t be sure; it was all krogan to him.
What he did know is that at the rate of force between the remains of a spinning rover and his own feeble momentum, he wouldn’t make it in time.
The comms filled with too many voices, yelling and shouting, pleading and encouraging.
Na’to looked up, saw nothing but somehow just knew. He jerked to the side, forcing his boots to unlatch. It threw him sideways, a floating kind of dodge, but it also pulled him free of the station hull.
Just as molten red furrows scored through the plate.
“Out,” Wratch bellowed on comms. “Seal the warehouse!”
“But Na’to—”
“I got him,” Reg said tightly.
Na’to’s safety went taut. He flailed, caught in a free-float that sent him careening into a large portion of a broken wing, jarring every bone in his body and ones he’d feel later, too. Black flashes turned to white behind his eyes, and as he clung to the bit of metal, he managed, “Here! Pull!”
“Don’t pull,” Arvex shouted, but too late.
Reg yanked on the cord. Na’to’s fingers ached around the rim of the torn wing, and the air jerked out of his chest with the force of it, but he felt himself move.
Felt the whole thing move with him.
“No,” he muttered. Then, forcing the membranes over his eyes open, yelled it louder. “No, no! Let go—!”
Krogan curses filled the line as Na’to stared, horrified, at the surface of the station. From this vantage, the horizon spread wider, farther than any of them could see from the hull itself. The void of space, black and blue and red and white and every beautiful color stretched out in unfathomable eternity.
Captured, it seemed, as if in a perfect sphere of tangled nebula.
“Let go,” Arvex ordered.
Numbly, Na’to obeyed. His hands spasmed, the sheared metal fragment peeled away as his whole body jerked to the side.
“Out, out!”
“Reg!”
Na’to couldn’t see what was happening inside the warehouse. Couldn’t place the edge of the hull or the deck he’d stood on. He spun, out of control, in a slow circle.
But the trajectory of the wing, that hadn’t changed.
“Brace for impact,” Arvex roared on the line.
Him? Heh. Na’to couldn’t. Not out here. He watched helplessly as the disaster unfurled in unstoppable, achingly slow motion. The slack around his waist unfurled. The sound of his own breath in his helmet thundered.
And down below, mere meters from the likely impact of debris to hull, Arvex had both hands wrapped in Na’to’s secure cord, feet braced and locked, every breath a growled echo of Na’to’s own.
The salarian splayed his hands. “Let go,” he said, calmer than he thought he’d be. His brain ran thousands of kilometers a second, no, a nanosecond. He knew what this looked like. What it’d end with.
That wing was going to do more damage than the already struggling structure could handle. The Scourge would tear through the rest. Somehow, miraculously, Na’to hadn’t floated right into the thicket rising like a terrifying black sun just past the warehouse hull breach—but no, he thought.
Not miraculously.
A krogan.
And it would kill them both.
“Let go,” he said again, louder. He wrapped the cord around his wrist, pulled. But his might was nothing compared to an angry krogan.
“Na’to,” Andria cried.
“The hell I will,” roared Arvex, yanking back with all his strength. “I said I’d keep your boots on deck and Nakmor keep our word.”
With nothing to brace against, no support, he had no way of stopping the thick-headed reptile-spawn from playing this through. Heroism, he reflected as everything drifted into one inexorable outcome. The heroism of krogan, of salarian. Of those who struggled to rebuild what was already lost.
The first sparks shot golden arcs across the hull as the giant mass of debris collided with the station. The secure rope Arvex wrapped around his arm grew thicker, the stars and sparks reflected in his tempered faceplate.
Na’to smiled. “Andria… Reg… Seal the outer antechamber. The hull will buckle at approximately fourteen points.”
“Damn it, no!”
Arvex hissed a long, hard sound as the hull cracked under his feet. Bent and rolled like metal shouldn’t. The nest of harmless-looking threads rose in Na’to’s field of vision. Tendrils brushed debris, sheared it through. Cast even more to scatter, to pepper the station.
He watched it come closer. “Krogan, unless you wish to join me, let go.”
Far too late. Far too little. The hull snapped back against the collision force and threw the krogan hard off the plating, breaking the magnetic seal holding him on. His shout was buried in the sudden chatter on comm lines, the rush of too much breath. Gasping. Yelling.