04-01-2010, 07:16 AM
The ground underneath trembled, as if it were charged with a high-grade electrical current. There was a faint, far off sound, rising and falling in a steady, pulsing rhythm, that almost sounded as if something were breathing out in the darkness. Far above and to the sides, walls slipped past, fleshy and indistinct, shrouded in shadows, their gleaming surfaces only briefly illuminated by the glow the hexagonal platform Belle stood on gave off as it sank deeper into the ... wherever she was.
But the first thing Belle noticed, before anything else, was the smell. When she was younger, Belle had occasionally come across the carcasses of slaughtered animals, and the stench around her reminded her of them - of sun-baked flesh left to rot. Of decay. And yet, somehow alive as well, filled with a musky scent that was hard to define and laced with the tang of terrified sweat.
She wasn't alone. Two others were with her: Juno, the weirdo she had run into at the carnival, and someone else that she didn't know, a green-skinned, fish-like man with large black eyes, a long overcoat over an exotic suit of armor, and a cigarette dangling from his human-looking lips.
Belle and Juno were dressed strangely, too, and in a way that was far too form fitting for Belle's comfort. Plates of an exotic, plastic-like compound had been grafted onto a thick, lycra-like body sheathe. The plates seemed as if they had been made to conform to their bodies, and Belle's made it very difficult to deny the changes that had been forced onto her body.
"Belle," Juno called over the passing rush of wind. He waited for her attention, then gestured in the direction of the walls.
Belle looked. On closer inspection, she saw the massive series of tubes that lined the sides. There were dozens, maybe even hundreds, in too many sizes to categorize. They almost looked like - and here Belle wrinkled her nose - veins. They stretched out ahead of them, leading deeper into the tunnel. "All of them seem to be leading somewhere," Belle mused aloud. "I wonder what they're doing?"
"I can answer that for you, Hibiki," someone spoke into Belle's ear.
Belle jumped and spun around, but there was nobody there. "Who-?" she started to say, then noticed the weight on one of her ears. Another comm?
"I am EDI," the voice continued, definitely coming from the device snugged around Belle's ear. It sounded feminine, but was just as clearly synthetic. "I can monitor your progress on the mission and give you information."
"Handy," Belle muttered, reaching up to play her hand along the comm device. It was bulkier than the one Wess had used in the previous round, but she would take it. She lowered her hand. "Alright." She gestured towards the tubes. "What can you tell us about them? The tubes."
"The tubes are feeding into some kind of super-structure. It is emitting both organic and non-organic signatures."
The tunnel began to widen as EDI spoke. A ring of lights marked the terminus of the passage just before it opened up into a significantly larger chamber. The decking under Belle's feet seemed to thrum more powerfully the nearer and nearer they got.
"Hibiki, if my calculations are correct," EDI continued as their platform reached the end of the tunnel, "the super-structure ... is a Reaper."
"What's a Reap-?" Belle started to ask, but the question was answered immediately as she looked up. Light spilled into the chamber from another tunnel far above, sending out a wan, diffuse white light that silhouetted the enormous form that hung before them, suspended by a network of fat tubes similar to the ones they had already seen. These tubes, however, ended in syringe-like appendages with clear sides. A filthy orange ooze swirled within each.
"Is... Is it ...?" Juno started to say, then shook his head and took a step back.
Belle could understand the hesitation. Though it was only half-complete, the skeletal construct looked disturbingly human. It had a skull, shoulders, ribcage, arms, and the beginnings of what looked liked a spine that dangled down from the rest.
"Your goal is to destroy it ... by any means necessary," EDI said.
"Great," Belle said sarcastically. "Sounds fun. Who built this thing, anyway?"
"The Collectors."
"The who?"
"The Collectors," EDI repeated with infinite mechanical patience. "The Collectors were created by the Reapers to be workers. Reapers are sentient machines, composed of both organic and inorganic matter. What you are seeing is likely the Reaper method of reproduction."
"'Reproduction'?" Belle echoed.
"Affirmative. By my scans, the Reaper is only 20% complete. In human terms, it is in the fetal stage."
"What's that mean?"
"'Fetal.' Derived from fetus, the young of a viviparous mammal that has not left the womb." EDI paused. "A baby not yet born, if it makes it easier, Hibiki."
"Bullshit," Belle snapped, feeling her skin crawl. "Babies come from the stork. Not a womb."
"Commander Hibiki, given your gender, I would hope that you would be aware of the functions of your own body."
"I'm not a girl!" Belle bellowed, her voice echoing off the walls and making both Juno and her other companion jump. "Wait a second," she said suddenly. "You want us to kill a baby?!"
"A Reaper is not a 'baby' in the traditional sense. Where many species' young begin life at an early stage of development, a Reaper, even partially constructed, could be assumed to possess a fully developed intellect and base of knowledge. The Reapers are designed to be killing machines, Commander Hibiki; I would not advise showing mercy."
Belle bit her lip, brows furrowed. The others were looking at her expectantly. "I ... I guess it's not real, anyway," Belle admitted, though she wasn't sure if she really meant what she was saying. "How do we destroy it?"
"My analysis of the super-structure has revealed several weak points. A direct attack on the feeding lines leaning into the Reaper should be enough to dislodge it from its housing and bring it down."
"So we go up and hit it?" Belle asked, frowning.
"I would advise the use of your mass-accelerator weapons."
Belle looked around, then belatedly noticed the slight extra weight on her back. She reached behind and her fingers brushed cool metal. She pulled, and the object came loose from its magnetic holster with a brief snap, then expanded in her hand with an electric whir. There was a grip, a shoulder-stock, and a rather obvious barreled at the other end.
A gun.
"I really don't like these things," Belle grumbled. She took a moment to figure out how best to hold the weapon, then propped it against the inside of her right shoulder. Aiming up at one of the ooze-filled cylinders, she bit her lip, narrowed her eye, and prepared to fire. Her finger tightened on the trigger... But she didn't pull.
"What the fuck is wrong?" the fishman Zaeed demanded. "Shoot the damn thing."
Belle shook her head to clear it, but EDI's words refused to be thrown out. Fetal. Fetus. Baby. She gritted her teeth. It's not real, she told herself sternly. Just shoot! Shoot it!
Belle squinted at her target and lined up her shot again. But before she could fire, a loud rattling filled the room. Her finger eased on the trigger and she blinked as a section of the connecting tubes seemed to extend, several sheets of metal moving in concert to cover the exposed syringes.
"We've got company," Juno informed her.
From within the darkness of a branching tunnel, another hexagonal platform had floated into view. Lazily floating across the distance between them, the esoteric transportation abruptly spun and meshed one of its flat edges perfectly against a matching edge on their own platform. They seemed to lock together, and from beyond a stunted series of roughly chest-high walls, three creatures emerged.
Belle took a reflexive half step back. She wanted to call them people, but it was difficult to get past how they looked: tall, gangly humanoids, insectoid in appearance with a dark, puss-yellow hue. Their widely-domed heads swept back to a point, and would almost look like a backwards guitar-pick from above. They had four eyes, two on each side of their 'faces' and snugged just below the dome, which glowed a bright, featureless yellow.
They also had weapons, and were beginning to train them in Belle's direction when Juno grabbed her wrist and yanked her down. Half a second later the top of their cover sputtered and screeched as a dozen mass-accelerated grains of sand sheared thin section of metal off the top. "Goddamn it," Belle muttered as she pressed her back up against the cover and risked a peek over the top. "What the crap are those things?!"
"The Collectors," EDI spoke before Juno could. "You must defeat them to make the feeder tubes vulnerable again."
"Defeat em'." Belle ducked her head as a pellet whizzed over the barrier. It was so close that she could feel the heat as it burned the air. "Okay."
Without bothering to wait for further advice, Belle shoved the barrel of her rifle over the top of the wall, pointed vaguely in the direction of the fire, and squeezed the trigger. Her gun jumped under her hand, and despite its light weight, it was almost torn from her one-handed grip. There was a sharp scream of pain...
The world around her suddenly seemed to dull and slow down. Sounds, once clear, became indistinct, as if she were hearing them from under five feet of water, and her body went from responsive to sluggish in the blink of an eye. There was a ringing in her ears, low but sharp, and then:
"You will know pain, Belle."
It was unlike anything Belle had ever heard; less like a single voice than a chorus, each tone deep, gutteral, and laced with the promise of nightmares and brimstone. It seemed to come from all around her, then faded, and the world came back into focus.
Someone was tapping her on the arm. Belle looked up to find Juno looking at her, his face filled with concern. "I'm fine," she lied, pushing herself straight and peeking over the top of their cover. How long, she wondered, had she been out?
Apparently not too long. One of the aliens was lying on its back on the other platform, twitching violently as it disintegrated into a hail of polygons. Another was making its way from cover to cover, nearing them, and the third ...
Belle frowned. Well, the third was just standing in the open, as if daring someone to shoot. Its arms at its sides, its face tilted up to the ceiling. It shuddered violently, and was abruptly ripped off the ground by an invisible hand.
The ringing in her ears was starting again. She leveled her gun and fired at the hovering bug/alien/thing, but her rounds pinged harmlessly off a shell of energy. Belle had a vague memory of Kaden wielding a similar technique, though much more primitive. Strange, though, that he couldn't remember precisely when she had seen it. For some reason, she had the impression that she had been very angry at the time...
The floating Collector's eyes shined briefly brighter. Then, in a cacophonous explosion, its body erupted with light. Cracks ripped themselves open in its flesh, luminescence pouring out, glowing like magma. The air around the creature shivered as it slowly lowered to the ground. Its feet took its weight, and it did not fall down.
Its eyes turned on Belle, and the ringing in her ears doubled. She clapped her hand over the one that was exposed, but the sound seemed to be coming from inside. "Agh...!"
"This hurts you..."
The ringing grew louder. Belle's eyes watered. She felt as if her head were about to burst, her breath short in her throat, eyes rolling back in their sockets...
A shot rang out across the battlefield. The glowing Collector's head snapped to the side and it stumbled.
The ringing stopped. Belle looked up, confused, and saw the smoking end of Zaeed's long-barreled rifle extending from over a piece of nearby cover. "Keep fighting," the fish-man ordered. "Don't let him have a chance to use his biotics. Whatever you do, don't give in!"
But the first thing Belle noticed, before anything else, was the smell. When she was younger, Belle had occasionally come across the carcasses of slaughtered animals, and the stench around her reminded her of them - of sun-baked flesh left to rot. Of decay. And yet, somehow alive as well, filled with a musky scent that was hard to define and laced with the tang of terrified sweat.
She wasn't alone. Two others were with her: Juno, the weirdo she had run into at the carnival, and someone else that she didn't know, a green-skinned, fish-like man with large black eyes, a long overcoat over an exotic suit of armor, and a cigarette dangling from his human-looking lips.
Belle and Juno were dressed strangely, too, and in a way that was far too form fitting for Belle's comfort. Plates of an exotic, plastic-like compound had been grafted onto a thick, lycra-like body sheathe. The plates seemed as if they had been made to conform to their bodies, and Belle's made it very difficult to deny the changes that had been forced onto her body.
"Belle," Juno called over the passing rush of wind. He waited for her attention, then gestured in the direction of the walls.
Belle looked. On closer inspection, she saw the massive series of tubes that lined the sides. There were dozens, maybe even hundreds, in too many sizes to categorize. They almost looked like - and here Belle wrinkled her nose - veins. They stretched out ahead of them, leading deeper into the tunnel. "All of them seem to be leading somewhere," Belle mused aloud. "I wonder what they're doing?"
"I can answer that for you, Hibiki," someone spoke into Belle's ear.
Belle jumped and spun around, but there was nobody there. "Who-?" she started to say, then noticed the weight on one of her ears. Another comm?
"I am EDI," the voice continued, definitely coming from the device snugged around Belle's ear. It sounded feminine, but was just as clearly synthetic. "I can monitor your progress on the mission and give you information."
"Handy," Belle muttered, reaching up to play her hand along the comm device. It was bulkier than the one Wess had used in the previous round, but she would take it. She lowered her hand. "Alright." She gestured towards the tubes. "What can you tell us about them? The tubes."
"The tubes are feeding into some kind of super-structure. It is emitting both organic and non-organic signatures."
The tunnel began to widen as EDI spoke. A ring of lights marked the terminus of the passage just before it opened up into a significantly larger chamber. The decking under Belle's feet seemed to thrum more powerfully the nearer and nearer they got.
"Hibiki, if my calculations are correct," EDI continued as their platform reached the end of the tunnel, "the super-structure ... is a Reaper."
"What's a Reap-?" Belle started to ask, but the question was answered immediately as she looked up. Light spilled into the chamber from another tunnel far above, sending out a wan, diffuse white light that silhouetted the enormous form that hung before them, suspended by a network of fat tubes similar to the ones they had already seen. These tubes, however, ended in syringe-like appendages with clear sides. A filthy orange ooze swirled within each.
"Is... Is it ...?" Juno started to say, then shook his head and took a step back.
Belle could understand the hesitation. Though it was only half-complete, the skeletal construct looked disturbingly human. It had a skull, shoulders, ribcage, arms, and the beginnings of what looked liked a spine that dangled down from the rest.
"Your goal is to destroy it ... by any means necessary," EDI said.
"Great," Belle said sarcastically. "Sounds fun. Who built this thing, anyway?"
"The Collectors."
"The who?"
"The Collectors," EDI repeated with infinite mechanical patience. "The Collectors were created by the Reapers to be workers. Reapers are sentient machines, composed of both organic and inorganic matter. What you are seeing is likely the Reaper method of reproduction."
"'Reproduction'?" Belle echoed.
"Affirmative. By my scans, the Reaper is only 20% complete. In human terms, it is in the fetal stage."
"What's that mean?"
"'Fetal.' Derived from fetus, the young of a viviparous mammal that has not left the womb." EDI paused. "A baby not yet born, if it makes it easier, Hibiki."
"Bullshit," Belle snapped, feeling her skin crawl. "Babies come from the stork. Not a womb."
"Commander Hibiki, given your gender, I would hope that you would be aware of the functions of your own body."
"I'm not a girl!" Belle bellowed, her voice echoing off the walls and making both Juno and her other companion jump. "Wait a second," she said suddenly. "You want us to kill a baby?!"
"A Reaper is not a 'baby' in the traditional sense. Where many species' young begin life at an early stage of development, a Reaper, even partially constructed, could be assumed to possess a fully developed intellect and base of knowledge. The Reapers are designed to be killing machines, Commander Hibiki; I would not advise showing mercy."
Belle bit her lip, brows furrowed. The others were looking at her expectantly. "I ... I guess it's not real, anyway," Belle admitted, though she wasn't sure if she really meant what she was saying. "How do we destroy it?"
"My analysis of the super-structure has revealed several weak points. A direct attack on the feeding lines leaning into the Reaper should be enough to dislodge it from its housing and bring it down."
"So we go up and hit it?" Belle asked, frowning.
"I would advise the use of your mass-accelerator weapons."
Belle looked around, then belatedly noticed the slight extra weight on her back. She reached behind and her fingers brushed cool metal. She pulled, and the object came loose from its magnetic holster with a brief snap, then expanded in her hand with an electric whir. There was a grip, a shoulder-stock, and a rather obvious barreled at the other end.
A gun.
"I really don't like these things," Belle grumbled. She took a moment to figure out how best to hold the weapon, then propped it against the inside of her right shoulder. Aiming up at one of the ooze-filled cylinders, she bit her lip, narrowed her eye, and prepared to fire. Her finger tightened on the trigger... But she didn't pull.
"What the fuck is wrong?" the fishman Zaeed demanded. "Shoot the damn thing."
Belle shook her head to clear it, but EDI's words refused to be thrown out. Fetal. Fetus. Baby. She gritted her teeth. It's not real, she told herself sternly. Just shoot! Shoot it!
Belle squinted at her target and lined up her shot again. But before she could fire, a loud rattling filled the room. Her finger eased on the trigger and she blinked as a section of the connecting tubes seemed to extend, several sheets of metal moving in concert to cover the exposed syringes.
"We've got company," Juno informed her.
From within the darkness of a branching tunnel, another hexagonal platform had floated into view. Lazily floating across the distance between them, the esoteric transportation abruptly spun and meshed one of its flat edges perfectly against a matching edge on their own platform. They seemed to lock together, and from beyond a stunted series of roughly chest-high walls, three creatures emerged.
Belle took a reflexive half step back. She wanted to call them people, but it was difficult to get past how they looked: tall, gangly humanoids, insectoid in appearance with a dark, puss-yellow hue. Their widely-domed heads swept back to a point, and would almost look like a backwards guitar-pick from above. They had four eyes, two on each side of their 'faces' and snugged just below the dome, which glowed a bright, featureless yellow.
They also had weapons, and were beginning to train them in Belle's direction when Juno grabbed her wrist and yanked her down. Half a second later the top of their cover sputtered and screeched as a dozen mass-accelerated grains of sand sheared thin section of metal off the top. "Goddamn it," Belle muttered as she pressed her back up against the cover and risked a peek over the top. "What the crap are those things?!"
"The Collectors," EDI spoke before Juno could. "You must defeat them to make the feeder tubes vulnerable again."
"Defeat em'." Belle ducked her head as a pellet whizzed over the barrier. It was so close that she could feel the heat as it burned the air. "Okay."
Without bothering to wait for further advice, Belle shoved the barrel of her rifle over the top of the wall, pointed vaguely in the direction of the fire, and squeezed the trigger. Her gun jumped under her hand, and despite its light weight, it was almost torn from her one-handed grip. There was a sharp scream of pain...
The world around her suddenly seemed to dull and slow down. Sounds, once clear, became indistinct, as if she were hearing them from under five feet of water, and her body went from responsive to sluggish in the blink of an eye. There was a ringing in her ears, low but sharp, and then:
"You will know pain, Belle."
It was unlike anything Belle had ever heard; less like a single voice than a chorus, each tone deep, gutteral, and laced with the promise of nightmares and brimstone. It seemed to come from all around her, then faded, and the world came back into focus.
Someone was tapping her on the arm. Belle looked up to find Juno looking at her, his face filled with concern. "I'm fine," she lied, pushing herself straight and peeking over the top of their cover. How long, she wondered, had she been out?
Apparently not too long. One of the aliens was lying on its back on the other platform, twitching violently as it disintegrated into a hail of polygons. Another was making its way from cover to cover, nearing them, and the third ...
Belle frowned. Well, the third was just standing in the open, as if daring someone to shoot. Its arms at its sides, its face tilted up to the ceiling. It shuddered violently, and was abruptly ripped off the ground by an invisible hand.
The ringing in her ears was starting again. She leveled her gun and fired at the hovering bug/alien/thing, but her rounds pinged harmlessly off a shell of energy. Belle had a vague memory of Kaden wielding a similar technique, though much more primitive. Strange, though, that he couldn't remember precisely when she had seen it. For some reason, she had the impression that she had been very angry at the time...
The floating Collector's eyes shined briefly brighter. Then, in a cacophonous explosion, its body erupted with light. Cracks ripped themselves open in its flesh, luminescence pouring out, glowing like magma. The air around the creature shivered as it slowly lowered to the ground. Its feet took its weight, and it did not fall down.
Its eyes turned on Belle, and the ringing in her ears doubled. She clapped her hand over the one that was exposed, but the sound seemed to be coming from inside. "Agh...!"
"This hurts you..."
The ringing grew louder. Belle's eyes watered. She felt as if her head were about to burst, her breath short in her throat, eyes rolling back in their sockets...
A shot rang out across the battlefield. The glowing Collector's head snapped to the side and it stumbled.
The ringing stopped. Belle looked up, confused, and saw the smoking end of Zaeed's long-barreled rifle extending from over a piece of nearby cover. "Keep fighting," the fish-man ordered. "Don't let him have a chance to use his biotics. Whatever you do, don't give in!"
![[Image: Bellesig6-1.jpg]](http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff137/catseye543/Bellesig6-1.jpg)