Outside an eruption of gunfire. Hundreds of voices shouting to take cover, to return fire, to flee. The very definition of a disorganized rabble.
Biotic force shook the walls.
“No, no!” Sloane shouted. She’d been so close. A solution could have been found. No one else needed to die.
She slipped and cut her own arm, ignored the pain and kept sawing at the stupid little nylon strap. She sawed and sawed. Damn the little thing was tough. Sloane roared in frustrated anger and a growing pain as she slid the blade back and forth across the strap.
A tiny sound, barely audible with all the thunder pouring in through the doorway, signaled success. The strap fell away. Sloane came to her feet at a dead run, pushed out the door. Blood from the cut flowed into her palm. With each step she squeezed her hands into fists and then let them open. It hurt like hell, but the pain meant sensation returning and she welcomed it. It focused her thoughts.
In the space outside she skidded to a stop. Sloane had seen a lot of combat in her days. She’d put an end to brawls, started even more. She’d defended a research station until no one remained but herself when the dropship took her from the roof. She’d seen massacres, and been party to some of them. Those were doors in her mind she didn’t open anymore.
She’d never seen anything like this.
Calix’s rebels were entrenched, well-armed, and they had idealism on their side. They had numbers, they had ammo, and they’d already crossed that Rubicon known as violence.
They had a powerful desire to win.
But they weren’t krogan. The krogan didn’t have idealism. Didn’t need it.
They had joy. The joy of combat.
The assembly plant had exploded into the ugliest, meanest, largest brawl Sloane Kelly had ever seen.
“Tann, you shit, what have you unleashed?” she whispered. Not really a question, for the answer was painfully obvious.
The krogan had powered in like a battering ram, and they hadn’t come to talk. Some of Calix’s rebels lay strewn around the barricade they’d erected, and not all of them were whole.
Sloane’s brain kicked into tactical mode. The big picture was out of control, but here, in front of her…
A krogan warrior kicked a severed arm across the floor, then rushed into the shuddering barrel of an assault rifle. One meaty fist knocked the weapon aside, while the other took the asari rebel on the chin and sent her sprawling backward to slam against a dormant machine.
The krogan stepped forward again, ready to crush her under his massive foot. Sloane rushed in with her knife—her crappy little utility knife—and drove it into the eye of the krogan before she’d even realized what she’d done.
This only made him angry.
She knew better than to stop, to apologize, to plead for calm. The situation had gone well beyond that point. There would be no jogging up to them and appealing to reason. No, this was a battle now, and the krogan had the taste of sport in their mouths. Soon they would reach a state of blood rage. If that happened the massacre would be ruthless and utterly complete.
She watched herself, as if from a distance, as that punched-aside-rifle found its way into her hands and swiveled around to bark its magnificent bark at the krogan she’d wounded. The hulking worker, mad with rage, walked in even as the bullets tore through him.
Finally he fell at Sloane’s feet, and behind him she saw the faces of a dozen more. The one in the middle caught her eye. Their leader.
Not Kesh.
A moment of disbelief settled like the blood that seeped into the crevices of the floor.
“Morda,” Sloane whispered.
Tann had woken Morda. It had to have been him. Kesh would have known better, would have come here and tried to salvage the situation herself.
Morda.
Fuck. This wasn’t going to end well, and Sloane—without thinking, acting on her first instinct—had sided with the enemy.
Nakmor Morda stood at the center of this fresh line of combatants, coming in from the breach they’d made in the barricade. If she recognized Sloane Kelly, or cared, she made no sign.
It wasn’t just Morda, either. Her elite soldiers had been woken, too, and surged in beside her. Morda flicked her arm toward the battle and her guard surged into the fray without a second thought. Didn’t matter who was involved, or why. The game was afoot.
“Nakmor Morda!” Sloane shouted over the fray.
The clan leader glanced in her direction.
“Stop this now! There’s no reason to—”
But Morda only shook her head. “You’re on the wrong side of the barricade, Kelly!”
“There is no right side,” Sloane growled, and did not move.
Morda glared at her and there came the strange sort of quiet that can occasionally fall over a crowded place. Despite all the combat, the chatter of gunfire and the roar of the krogan flood, a silence stretched, if only for a second. And nothing was said. Morda’s eyes did the talking; they said, Time to choose, Sloane. With us, or with them.
Sloane Kelly could feel the eyes of the rebels on her. Some of them, anyway. And half the krogan force, too. Waiting, if only for that fraction of a second, to know her decision.
She shook her head at Morda and raised her weapon.
The leader of the Nakmor clan grinned.
All at once the cacophony of violence folded back in and with it the chaos. Hundreds of combatants on both sides, all killing or dying.
“Fall back!” someone shouted. Calix, maybe. The cry was quickly taken up by the other rebels, though, and Sloane would never know who’d given the original order. Someone who didn’t know the krogan, that’s for sure.
She danced backward, shooting, never turning to flee. That would only further incite them into a truly cataclysmic bloodlust. But her effort made no difference. The rest of the rebels had broken and run. If she didn’t do the same she’d be out here all alone, in no-man’s-land, against several hundred of them. They’d tear her limb from limb, and she knew it.
So Sloane ran, soon overtaking some of the slower of Calix’s rabble. The wave of krogan hit the stragglers from behind. She heard the screams, the crunching of bones, and the orgasmic howls of delight only meters behind her. A symphony of violence.
Vaulting a long shelving unit, she rolled over the top just a split second before a krogan slammed into the thing and sent it smashing into her back. She rolled to get out from under it, and the krogan loomed over her, fists raised.
An incendiary round took it in the head. Blood and gore splattered across her face. She turned to one side and tried to blink it away as the body above her shuddered, twisted, and finally came apart under the explosive hail of gunfire.
All across the vast room the rebels shifted to this new plan. Whatever concerns had kept them from it before, they were no longer relevant. Explosive rounds washed over the krogan front line. That entire side of the room became one long, roiling, thunderously loud wall of death and destruction. Krogan and rebel alike were consumed in shockwaves and diced by the sprays of shrapnel.
The tactic worked, at least. It kept the enemy back.
Keeping low, Sloane staggered back to the rebel line and heaved herself over a blood-smeared crate. No one batted an eye at this. She was one of them now. They might not be able to say how they knew that, or when it had happened, but they knew. Morda had demanded she choose. The side of rebels fighting for the right to be equals? To make their own choices?
Or the side of the machinations that unleashed a krogan clan on its own people.