Touchdown.

Ardan quickly made his way to the armoury where he had spent much of the previous night after the disastrous forced mealtime doing equipment inventory and checks. Aside from his own gear, Ardan had the requested weapons and equipment lined up for those who chose to store their gear in the armoury, each having been quickly inspected and moving parts lubricated while checking to make sure the eezo charges were optimal and the heat sinks kicked on to cool the weapon down between shots. It didn’t matter overly much if you still had a barely sheered munitions block if the weapon didn’t have enough power to actually operate. The tiny sand-grain sized projectiles that were fired from a firearm at a fraction of the speed of life relied entirely on velocity to do the damage they inflicted, and it was the reason that mass effect principle firearms development had ended up with an arsenal of guns that could shoot literally thousands of rounds between reloading. 

It lead to its own form of technical complications that gunpowder age civilizations didn’t have to deal with; if your power core wasn’t calibrated properly or the parts that helped channel the energy to sheer the metal blocks to produce shots were misaligned or damaged lead to jams or projectiles that didn’t get up to speed to inflict the damage they needed to; you could still kill something soft without armour, shielding, or barriers, but the last thing anyone wanted staring down a charging krogan was their gun only firing at thousands of meters per second and the krogan being reminded of one of the hellish sandstorms back on Tuchanka. It would be nostalgic up to and including the part where he broke your spine. Ardan, sensibly, took pains to ensure that never happened.

It didn’t take long to gear up; he’d already been in his armour when they arrived in Illium’s system and it was simply a matter of putting on his helmet and checking the visor and its link to his weapons. While the ship didn’t have a firing range, it did have a relatively safe plate of 10 centimeters of titanium you could aim your weapon at in case your weapon had a negligent discharge and one didn’t want a shot going through several meters of important life support equipment. The Predator and Falcon both had their crosshairs show up in his HUD, as well as their heat gauges and fire mode displays, and the M-100 showed its ammunition gauge and the ballistic arc for that weapon. Final checks for life support, air filtration, shielding, and so on were conducted and the turian carried on, giving Mr. Wheezy the stuffed Volus a pat on the head on the way out the door.

Soon enough, he was standing side by side with the rest of the crew as Kolya stood on a crate, prompting Ardan to smirk behind his polarized visor as the commander reminded him of a great number of turian war vids where the fearless leader rallies and inspires what’s left of their regiment before they charge into what’s almost certainly certain death. He’d heard asari and salarians bemoan how stupid and depressing it all was, with a good chunk of those vids ending with a small handful, if any, of survivors out of dozens but they simply didn’t understand how a turian thinks; what’s the sacrifice of a regiment compared to an entire city, an entire [I]planet[/I]? There was no such thing as “acceptable losses”; you simply kept going until you completed your objective or you died trying.  

Of course, those vids often came up with some flimsy narrative of why the enemy position wasn’t blasted to bits with hours’ worth of fighter strikes or artillery or orbital bombardment until the enemy didn’t have a position left to defend, but the stories were about individual courage and sacrifice against impossible odds and overcoming them. Looking around the room for a moment, he mused it might be worthwhile trimming the fat. Brushing the macabre thought away with a shake of the head, he honed in on the briefing. With the plan outlined and the mission parameters established without much in the way of complicated specifics, Ardan was pleased. Clear and concise orders were what you needed to lead a mission; he’d seen far too many commanders try to micromanage soldiers down to their rate of fire and how to clear out a damned room that it led to the actually important shit being forgotten or misunderstood. 

Kolya wasn’t disappointing so far. As far as humans went, he certainly wasn’t bad and had an air of humility to him that was at odds with the rest of his species’ sense of suffocating arrogance and entitlement. It did him credit.

Moving out and beginning the rappel, Ardan took up position behind the group, his weapon trained the way they came to protect the ascent.  Kolya approached, placing a hand on his shoulder.


“I want you to be the last man, make sure they all get up, soldier.” Kolya ordered.

“Copy that.” Ardan affirmed, checking the IFF tags of the other squad members and checked over their ascension gear for the climb; they’d be doing it by hand, but it would keep them from falling if their grips slipped, which wasn’t unheard of with modern shielded armour; generally the shields were weak around the palms and soles of the feet so someone could grab onto weapons and walk without skating around, but enough remained it could remain a concern. Kolya and the first batch went up first, then the next, and the next. Finally, as that last man, Ardan did one last scan for detection or threats, and then hooked himself up to begin the long and arduous climb.

By the time he reached the top, the rest of the team was already through the gates and examining one of the bodies. From the looks of things, a maintenance worker. The poor bastard was a human who probably escaped out into the galaxy for job opportunities away from a crowded homeworld and to experience alien culture first hand like some kind of tourist and he discovered that the Terminus Systems were a dangerous, thankless place no matter how pristine and advanced somewhere like Illium looked. He learned the hard way what lawless space meant.

The next bit of instruction from Kolya was something Ardan didn’t agree with on principle, and normally he’d let orders slide, but he felt it important to speak up. “Not [I]too[/I] bunched up. You don’t want to give one lucky bastard a chance to kill three or four of you  with one grenade or burst from his rifle. I’ll be at the rear.” He said, M3 in hand, taking up position at the end of the column walking backwards. He grabbed onto the belt of the person behind him to guide him with one hand and kept his sidearm facing rearward, ensuring no one flanked the team.