The following is a Mass Effect fanfic that I have been working on recently. Naturally, I have no ownership of any of the Mass Effect things within this story, and bomb-pumped gamma ray lasers were first proposed by Edward Teller.
If any terms are giving you difficulty, most can be defined at the Mass Effect Wiki. If the term isn't there, it is likelier to be at the Project Rho: Atomic Rockets website.
NOTE: There is a metric fucktonne of spoilers for Mass Effect in here. If you haven't played the game but want to, reading this is DISCOURAGED AS HELL.
“This isn't going to work.” Tali declared as we finished mounting the bomb's core behind the lasing rod that would focus the explosion into the beam.
“What do you mean?” I half-grunted as I wrestled it into its final place and made sure the lasing rod was sitting proper. Once that was set, I began putting the last bits of armor plating in place. Despite the cool air, I was sweating from exertion and coffee. She sealed everything I had put in place only moments after my arms had moved away. It was a beautiful rhythm, one that I was loathe to have interrupted with talk before it was finished.
“Well,” Tali said, sealing up the final exterior shell piece to the mounting frame, “we don't have a targeting system for beam weaponry. No one uses lasers, due to the problems with energy generation and light lag. Not to mention, this time, we have an actual bomb pumping the laser, which is going to shake it into oblivion. I don't think it is going to work. What if we use it, and it's turned around to shoot at us?”
I finished up putting the last bit of frame in place, and held it while she attached it to the point. The lasing rod and bomb were finally in place, and the old rockets and thrusters were already where they needed to be. Removing my hands from the structure, I yawned and said, “At short-range, it can be aimed by a cheap VI with a camera. The bomb is laser-started, so there's no shake. The only real problem we have is, well, what are we going to shoot it at?”
“Saren's ship.” Tali said quickly as she mirrored my relaxed position. The final assembly had passed, and it was time to sleep.
I stopped my yawn with a laugh. As I leaned up against the wall I made a gesture with my hand, saying, “That would just piss them off, wouldn't it?”
She crawled around the probe casing toward me. Her body's motion and wriggling would have been seductive had I not been dead tired at the time. As she crawled, she pointed out something that should have been obvious, “One laser isn't going to win a war, Shepard. It's also strictly an orbital weapon; we won't be able to kill Saren from orbit with it; the gamma ray laser would just get absorbed by the atmosphere.”
I held an arm out toward her and ran it up from the elbow closest to me up to her shoulder. As she closed in, I raised the other, to pull her into a light embrace. My arms were burning as they relaxed from the strange exertions of construction, so I didn't want to pull her too close. She returned the hug as she shifted her body next to mine.
“So, if Sovereign somehow gets into the upper atmosphere, we kick the probe out and tell it to attack while we get away?” I asked, holding her close. Her armor smelled like the engineering section and had the synthetic odor of omni-gel. It wasn't the best smell in the world, but every combat engineer smells home when around the scent of omni-gel. Especially combat engineers born on starships.
She only nodded in response as we held each other there, leaning on the wall for a few minutes. We were falling asleep together there, in that terrible position. I remember almost getting to sleep when we shifted and she ended up on top of me, resting her helmeted head on top of mine.
The hard plastic wasn't uncomfortable to have pressed up against my face, likely because she wasn't trying to push it down on my nose. My breath fogged up the outer layer each time I exhaled but the cndensation didn't hold on to the smooth surface for long. Our breathing fell into a rhythm, and I couldn't help but focus on it before drifting again into sleep. I was exhausted, and nothing in the world could move me from that place on the floor.
* * *
I was regretting it when we got to Virmire. My whole body ached from the unfamiliar positions, and something on her had been digging into me the entire night. I had been far too tired to wake up or move, and I was suffering the consequences, even though it had been a day in the past.
Normally, I would have had a great time driving the Mako along a fun, winding road, sliding it into geth emplacements and cheering loudly. Instead, every time I pulled a hard stop or a tight turn, I felt the soreness from the night before hitting me right in my back. For the most part, I was able to ignore it.
Still, the whole mission was terrible. We were grounded due to the enemy's anti-air defense network, and I got into a fight with Wrex which almost came to blows. I managed to convince him to reconsider his arguments, but ultimately, I was dissatisfied with the arguments I gave as well; the krogan need a cure for the genophage. At least there's hope that it can be found someday without having to deal with the questionable shit Saren was putting them through.
I can't even say I didn't try to salvage the stuff. I didn't have any OSDs with me, and some loose shots shredded the research station's computers. Husks were all over the place inside, and this only served to make the day worse; anyone who has fought them knows that they are territble creatures, but knowing that they are likely a result of Reaper indoctrination only serves to infuriate me more.
We had to kill some salarians as well. I wanted to release them from their prisons, but once they were out, they attacked me. They were too far gone. Saren and Sovereign had destroyed their minds. They were once allies, but they could only help by illustrating what could happen to someone under Sovereign's control for too long. The telling problem is that I couldn't bring myself to experience sadness as a result of this. I was already in a bad mood for having to send Alenko to assist the salarians; it was our best hope, but I felt like I was sending someone to die.
The day didn't start looking better even at the end; we had to leave Alenko there,. I'm still not comfortable talking about it. Had I gone to him, the nuclear device would have been in jeopardy, as I trusted Saren to know enough to disarm a nuclear device at least as quickly as I could. Ultimately, I stayed with Ashley as we all left the planet. Sovereign was coming, and we had to get out fast.
So we ran like mad into the ship. The nuke was going to go off, and we barely made it off of the planet in time. At first, I had thought it managed to catch Saren, but my luck hadn't been good that day. His base was destroyed, Alenko was dead. We were in a low orbit, getting ready to aim ourselves at the nearby mass relay on the next swing-around when it happened.
Rising up from the atmosphere below, the giant ship, Sovereign, rose through the atmosphere like a rocket, chasing us. My heart sank as I heard the news. I made my way into the elevator and took it up to the mid-deck. As the door opened, Tali was standing there, helping suited crewmen get a gurney carrying the nuke probe to the cargo hold. As I exited, she placed a hand on my arm and said, “Go the comm room. Joker has everything set up already. I'll be there in a moment.”
I stepped out of the elevator as they entered it and the door closed. In that moment, I couldn't even bring myself to nod in acknowledgement. She didn't wait to see that I had heard her, however. She was gone in an instant.
I walked up the stairs to the CIC, deliberately avoiding getting a good look where Alenko would stand between missions. If I had seen that, I wouldn't have had a chance to make it up to the FTL comm room. I wasn't in any shape to be introspective. Launching the device wasn't something I wanted to do, it was meant to be a time when I could feel good, not an impotent act of vengeance.
Still, I made it to the comm room. Once inside, I pulled my helmet off and threw it into a chair hard enough for it to bounce away and onto the floor behind me. I wanted to shout, to scream and explode with rage. Saren had taken a good man from me. Even though we had destroyed hundreds of Saren's followers, they weren't worth Alenko's life.
Sovereign loomed menacingly behind the ship, approaching with its giant ship-tendrils dangling frrom its giant cephalapod-like main ship structure. It was moving quickly, catching up to us as we tried to hug the planet more to make our orbit quicker, so that we could accelerate to FTL and get ourselves out of trouble. It was going to take too long, however; Sovereign could accelerate much faster than Normandy. It would be upon us shortly. Joker was moving the ship as much as he could to make sure they wouldn't get a clean shot when they finally tried to take us down. The massive beast fired a few shots at us, trying to bracket us with fire. They were massive slugs, tens of kilograms at the least. At the speed they flew past our ship, they would have killed us all.
As a particularly close shot passed by, I noticed a small dot on the viewscreen. As I focused the image, it was my, our probe. My heart would have soared had it not been weighed down by the mission that had just ended. I didn't expect much of it; the tiny thing was nothing compared to Sovereign. Like a tiny tugboat to the unknowable beast, it squared up its aim and stood in the inky blackness as the two closed their distance.
As the probe held for a second in the void, I felt comforting arms wrap around me from behind. Tali was there, holding me around my waist gently and looking over my shoulder at the screen. We watched for a moment as the probe sat between our ship and Sovereign, everything appearing frozen in time for a second as it whipped back toward the massive ship. I shifted a bit to pull her up next to me.
We stood there, together, cheek to helmet as the probe fell far too close to Sovereign. For a moment, I felt a lurch in my stomach that told me it would end up a wasted effort, like my attempt at saving Alenko, the salarians with him, or the krogan. As my confidence waned further, the probe collided with Sovereign's kinetic shield. The blast was asymmetric at best, and seemed muted by the shield. It was nothing more than a tiny spark on the massive dreadnought.
“Accelerating to the mass relay, in five.” Joker said over the comms. As he spoke, however, I noticed something strange. Sovereign had stopped gaining. It held an equal velocity with us, and had stopped coming closer.
As Joker counted down, I froze the screen and squinted. Using the electronic zoom, I focused just above where the bomb had detonated. A clear, black scorch mark in a perfect diagonal all the way across its body until it terminated just before reaching the edge. I laughed and pointed at it with a hand I slowly moved from Tali's side. Incredulous, I asked, “Did... did we do that?”
As I switched the screen back to real-time, we saw that Sovereign had started decelerating. It withdrew down toward the planet, sinking into the atmosphere. I could feel it focusing, trying to grab at my mind to instill it with the terror it had used to turn Saren into a willing slave. We were out of the range of its indoctrination, so all it could do was flail in anger as I held Tali close. Shortly after, we hit FTL speeds, screaming away from the planet toward the mass relay.
I turned to look to Tali, planting a kiss on her visor as I laughed again, saying, “We did it. We gave it a black eye!”
Tali's laugh echoed my own, but hers held a nervous timbre half-hidden inside of it. I stopped gawking at the now re-frozen image on the screen and turned my attention back to her. We stood there for a time, holding each other. I made sure to keep my head next to hers, as staring into her visor still felt a bit strange. Still, I focused on the moment, rather than letting my thoughts slide to the worse things that had happened in the day; with any luck, I would be able to address those later.
“What's the matter?” I asked, my voice quiet as the enthusiasm and pride gave way to the thoughts of the terrible day that had led up to this, “You sound like something is bothering you.”
“I am a bit nervous, that is all. I was worried that the probe would not detonate.” Tali spoke quietly, and added after a moment, “And just as afraid that it would detonate.”
I pulled away from the embrace slowly, keeping my hands on her hips as I asked, confused, “Why? It worked, and if it didn't...” I trailed off for a moment, thinking before I said, “Okay, Joker would have been able to get us out of there either way. Still, why the fear?”
“You never learned much more about quarian relationships beyond what Garrus told you at first, did you, Shepard?” She asked looking up to me. She was barely keeping herself from laughing. While shaking her head, she moved her hands to my shoulders.
As she did, I leaned my head to the left on one of them, trapping it and saying, “No... should I have?”
She laughed again and ran her other hand over my hair and replied, “Probably. Normally we would stay together after this, considering that we were able to make practical a device that was so absurdly complex and seemingly useless and unlikely.”
Mock-pouting, I joked, “Does that mean you won't stay with me forever?”
On this, she fell silent.
Reaching up with my right hand from her waist, I patted her on the visor, making sure to scuff up the front a bit. As I did so, I said quietly, “Don't worry about that sort of thing now, Tali.” Removing my hand and placing it back where it was before, I continued, “We can just take things slowly, and see where it goes, right?”
“I suppose you are right.” She answered quietly, “My people still need the information we collected back in the Armstrong cluster.”
Leaning in a bit and raising my head from her hand, I said, “Then we can deliver it together, when we are done with Saren. Just to make sure it gets there.”
“If you are sure that we should.” Tali responded, “I do not think it would be a great idea.” She adjusted where her hands were and began leading me out of the FTL comm room. Everyone who was down on the planet would have to write out reports to add to mine. I was running late on mine.
“Is it a bad idea?” I asked as we walked down the stairs that led to the mess deck, “Is your father going to attempt to get into a fist-fight with me?”
“Nothing as silly as that, though I don't doubt he would be a challenge even for you.” She teased me as we approached my room, “I just don't want to go home so soon.”
Taking one of her hands in mine as we reached the door, I turned to her and asked, “So you'll stay with me?”
She led me into the room, intially not deigning to answer the question. As the door closed behind us, she took my other hand into hers and looked to me. Leaning forward, she pressed her visor against my forehead, a gesture which I returned. She spoke so quietly that I felt I had to strain to hear, despite the clarity of her words, “For the time being, Shepard. Let's enjoy what we have.”
Hope you enjoyed it. It was only 10316 words.
Novelist Bunnies: Do you write in order? 
