The shuttles hit the mining flats like iron rain.
Twelve of them, burning through Haven's Point's thin atmosphere in staggered descent patterns, their retro-thrusters scorching the grey-brown earth as they slammed down across a two-kilometer front. Ramps dropped before the dust settled. Bodies poured out — batarians in dark armor, vorcha in mismatched plating, the occasional turian moving with military discipline among the chaos.
From the comm tower, Garrus's Mantis spoke its language.
Crack. A batarian squad leader folded sideways, mid-stride, three steps off the ramp. Crack. A vorcha with a rocket launcher disintegrated at the shoulder. Crack. A turian trying to establish a command post behind a shuttle's landing strut jerked and fell.
Six kills in nine seconds. The landing zone became a kill zone, and for eight precious seconds, the assault stalled.
"First wave deploying. Count: eighty-plus hostiles. Mixed batarian-vorcha with turian officers. Formation is batarian standard — heavy front, light flanks, reserves at the shuttles."
Webb processed the data from the operations center. The territorial overlay painted each hostile as a red icon, each militia position as blue, each guard post as a green diamond. The eastern approach was a tapestry of overlapping fire zones — Guard Posts Gamma and Delta covering the primary corridors, militia squads at prepared positions behind emergency barriers, the GARDIAN battery tracking airborne threats from the western rooftop.
"Guard posts, weapons free. Eastern engagement zone."
Gamma and Delta opened up simultaneously. Mass accelerator rounds hammered into the mining sector's corridors — the same corridors the first assault team had used, the same terrain the second team had been briefed on. But the guard posts hadn't been here two weeks ago. The barriers hadn't existed. The firing positions had been empty ground.
The assault force hit the kill corridors and died in them.
Not all of them. Not enough of them. The front ranks crumpled — barriers flashing, armor cracking, bodies tumbling into the dust. But the ranks behind adapted with the brutal efficiency of experienced fighters. They scattered into the abandoned infrastructure, using ore processors and collapsed roofing as cover, pushing through side corridors the guard posts couldn't cover, probing for gaps in the defensive line.
"Eastern militia, contact at grid seven-four. Three targets in the processing spur."
"Copy — engaging!"
The militia fought. Garrus's training held — they fired from cover, communicated positions, fell back when flanked and reformed at secondary lines. They weren't soldiers. They didn't need to be. They were two-thousand-credit-a-month miners defending the only home they had, and they fought with the desperation of people who knew what surrender meant.
Hanson — the mine supervisor, the beer gut, the borrowed rifle — led his squad with a voice that could have commanded a regiment. His people held the eastern flank's weakest point, a gap between Gamma's firing arc and the residential district's outer wall, and they held it by putting rounds downrange with a volume that compensated for accuracy.
The assault stalled at the chokepoints. Forty minutes of sustained combat reduced to a grinding attrition at the defensive perimeter's strongest points. Red icons blinked out on the overlay. Blue icons... some of them blinked out too.
"Militia casualties: seven dead, twelve wounded. Eastern line holding."
Seven. Seven names that would be on a list by morning. Seven people who'd been eating protein paste in the militia mess three days ago.
Then the western approach erupted.
"Contact west! Two shuttles — landed behind the industrial sector. They came in under the bombardment noise!"
The second wave. Not behind the main assault — behind the entire colony. A smaller force, maybe twenty fighters, but better equipped. Heavy weapons. Breaching charges. They'd used the cruiser's probing shots as acoustic cover to mask their shuttle engines, slipping past the GARDIAN battery's engagement zone by flying low through the mining sector's terrain shadows.
"Smart. Razor's not stupid. He sent the main wave to fix our attention east while the real assault comes from behind."
"Garrus, western—"
"Already moving. But I can't cover both approaches from one position."
The western breach team hit the industrial sector's back wall with breaching charges that blew a three-meter hole through prefab construction never designed to stop explosives. They poured through, into the corridors between the water recycler and the atmospheric processor — the colony's vital organs.
"Militia reserve, deploy to industrial sector. Western breach."
The reserve — thirty militia, his last uncommitted force — moved. They weren't fast enough. The breach team was already inside, pushing through maintenance corridors toward the colony's center. Toward the operations center. Toward the bunker where two thousand civilians sheltered.
Webb grabbed the rifle from the weapons rack by the operations center door. Webb's body knew rifles — Alliance training imprinted at the cellular level, muscle memory that didn't care who was driving. He chambered a round and ran.
The industrial sector's corridors were tight. Low ceiling, pipes overhead, emergency lighting painting everything in red. He could hear the breach team ahead — boots on metal, the clatter of weapons against armor, shouted orders in batarian that his translator processed half a second too slow.
He came around a corner and found them.
Three batarians. Point team. Fifteen meters away. The lead one saw him at the same moment he saw them.
Time didn't slow. That was a lie stories told. Time stayed exactly the same speed, and everything happened inside it with a density that crushed thought into instinct.
He fired. The rifle kicked. The round took the lead batarian in the upper chest — barriers already down, apparently expended during the breach. The batarian staggered, didn't fall, raised his weapon.
The second batarian fired first. Rounds sparked off the pipe junction beside Webb's head. Metal fragments bit into his cheek. He flinched sideways, fired again — missed — fired a third time. The lead batarian dropped.
The second one charged. Not shooting — a blade, batarian combat knife, lunging through the tight corridor with the commitment of someone who'd decided close quarters favored him.
Webb's rifle came up as a barrier. The knife skidded along the barrel, deflecting past his face close enough to feel the displaced air. His elbow drove into the batarian's jaw — four eyes wide, shocked by the impact — and the batarian stumbled back.
The third one lined up a shot.
Garrus's round came through the corridor window. The turian had repositioned to the industrial sector's external catwalks — a shot through a maintenance window at sixty meters, threading the gap between pipes. The third batarian's head snapped sideways and he collapsed.
The second recovered. The knife came back. Webb blocked with the rifle again — the blade scored a line across the receiver — and fired from the hip. Point blank. The round punched through the batarian's abdomen and the corridor wall behind him.
The batarian looked down at the wound. Up at Webb. His four eyes carried something that might have been surprise. He fell.
Webb stood in the corridor. Three bodies. The smell of blood and discharged thermal clips and the acrid stink of a pierced coolant pipe hissing somewhere behind him.
His hands shook. Not the fine tremor from the guard post construction — a deep, bone-level vibration that made the rifle rattle in his grip. He'd killed someone. Not through a turret, not through a system-built defense. His finger on the trigger, his round in the chest, his enemy dead on the floor.
"Marcus Webb was a soldier. He'd killed before. But I haven't."
The militia reserve arrived behind him. Thirty people flooding the corridor, securing the breach, pushing the remaining infiltrators back. The western assault broke against prepared positions and desperate defenders, the breach team caught between militia from behind and Garrus's rifle from outside.
Four hours.
The siege's first ground battle lasted four hours. From the initial shuttle landings to the last sporadic gunfire in the mining sector's eastern corridors, four hours of sustained combat that felt like four years.
---
[Haven's Point — Operations Center, 2130]
The casualty list glowed on the terminal.
Twenty-three dead. Thirty-one wounded. The names were real — people he'd eaten with, trained with, passed in corridors. Ito, the young mineral surveyor who'd asked if they were going to win, was in the medical bay with shrapnel in his leg. Hanson was alive, but three members of his squad weren't.
The enemy count was better. Forty-seven dead, eighteen routed into the mining wastelands with no transport and no support, fifteen captured. Razor's first ground assault had cost him eighty fighters against a colony that shouldn't have survived the first salvo.
[TERRITORY UPDATE: HAVEN'S POINT]
[DEFENSE EVENT: GROUND ASSAULT REPELLED — COSTLY VICTORY]
[LOYALTY: 58 → 64 (+6 DEFENSE BONUS)]
[MILITIA: 140 → 117 EFFECTIVE (23 KIA, 31 WIA)]
[ENEMY LOSSES: 47 KIA, 18 ROUTED, 15 CAPTURED]
[NP EARNED: +75 (MAJOR DEFENSE — SETTLEMENT)]
Seventy-five points. The system rewarded survival with resources for the next fight. Cold arithmetic applied to warm bodies.
He sat against a cargo container behind the operations center. The colony was dark — power diverted to shields and medical, everything else running on minimum. Stars overhead, different from the ones he'd known in another life on another world. Blood on his hands. Not his. The batarian's. The one he'd shot point-blank in a corridor that smelled like fear and coolant.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking. He tried to reload the rifle — dropped the thermal clip twice. Gave up. Set the rifle across his knees and pressed his palms against his thighs until the trembling became manageable.
Garrus found him there. The turian sat beside him without a word. Mantis across his own knees. The silence between them was the kind that existed after shared violence — too heavy for words, too raw for platitudes.
"First time," Garrus said after a while. Not a question.
"That obvious?"
"The shaking gives it away. C-Sec Academy teaches you to expect it. Doesn't help, but at least you know it's normal."
"Does it stop?"
"The shaking? After a few hours. The rest of it?" Garrus's mandibles shifted. "You learn to carry it."
The colony breathed around them. Medical lights glowing in the clinic. Quiet voices in the bunker as civilians processed the reality that the fighting had stopped but the fleet was still overhead. The water recyclers humming — the filtration unit he'd built in a storage closet a month ago, still working, still keeping people alive.
A scout report came through his omni-tool.
RAZOR'S FLAGSHIP — MODIFIED CRUISER "CRIMSON MAW" — REPOSITIONING TO LOW ORBIT. SHUTTLE BAY ACTIVE.
He showed it to Garrus.
"He's coming down personally," the turian said.
"His first wave failed. His scouts failed. His infiltration team failed. He's angry enough to handle it himself."
"Angry commanders make mistakes."
"Angry batarian warlords with two hundred troops in reserve make expensive mistakes. For both sides."
Garrus looked at the sky. The Crimson Maw was visible now — a dark shape occluding stars as it descended into low orbit, close enough that its running lights were individual points rather than a blur.
"We can't survive another assault like that," Garrus said. "Not with a hundred and seventeen militia."
"I know."
"So what's the plan?"
He stared at the blood drying on his hands. The plan. There was always supposed to be a plan. The system gave him buildings and territory and threat assessments, but it didn't give him the ability to conjure two hundred soldiers or a fleet to match Razor's.
But it had given him information. And information, applied correctly, could be worth more than guns.
"I need to talk to the prisoners again."
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