Kima Siege
From FABT
|
Previous: |
|||||||||||||||||
 Archangel dodges a rocket from a freelancer only to move back in and return fire.
| |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Date: |
1-11 August 2185 CE (1 week and 4 days) | ||||||||||||||||
|
Location: |
|||||||||||||||||
|
Outcome: |
Pyrrhic Kima Alliance victory
| ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
- "I finally pissed off the three most powerful merc bands on Omega so much they decided to team up against me. My manager in C-Sec would be impressed."
- — Archangel discussing his situation with Commander Shepard during the siege in 2185 CE.
The Kima Siege, also known as the Battle of the Suri-Kara Hotel, was the final climactic battle of Archangel's war against crime fought by the lone Archangel, later joined by the Normandy Squad, against the combined coalition forces of the Kima Alliance. Following the discovery of his hideout and the subsequent slaughter of his entire team as a result of the betrayal of his second-in-command, Lantar Sidonis, Archangel was left trapped in his old headquarters, facing a combined army of the three most powerful PMCs in the galaxy: the Blue Suns, Eclipse and Blood Pack. While this coalition, calling themselves the Kima Alliance, were then-unaware of a series of tunnels below the hotel that Archangel's squad had used to discreetly enter and leave the base, believing the bridge linking the hotel to the skyscraper opposite to it was the only way in and out, Archangel was aware of this but chose to remain behind anyway, consumed by the guilt of losing his entire team and wanting to avenge their deaths by making the PMC victory as bloody and costly as possible. Archangel himself was spared from his team's massacre as a result of Weyrloc Garm negotiating with Krefin Tarak to lure Archangel away with a fake lead so that he could return in time to see the last of his squad die, hoping to break his spirit. This stopped the Kima Alliance from securing a quick and easy victory as Tarak had hoped, as Archangel did not break as Garm had hoped and instead chose to fight on, and buying Archangel time to prepare for the final assault of the PMCs. At this point Archangel's war against crime was effectively over: his squad was wiped out, his hideout compromised, Archangel himself boxed in and it was only a matter of time before he was dead: there was no hope to continue his mission to free Omega of its crime-riddled underworld, and Archangel only fought on in order to kill as many mercenaries as possible before he was inevitably overwhelmed. This marked the beginning of the Kima Siege, with Archangel choosing a balcony that overlooked the bridge he knew the PMCs would attack across and preparing his defensive position.
On the opposite side of the bridge to the Suri-Kara Hotel was an abandoned shopping plaza, filled with empty buildings and a long, winding street. One courtyard was cleared to use as a landing pad, with Tarak's gunship, the A-61 Mantis gunship Blue Scimitar, parked there. The Blue Suns, Eclipse and Blood Pack forces, numbering almost 7,000 in total, were assembled on the building, with the Blood Pack poised to go in first in order to use their numbers and stopping power to soak up much of the damage while the Eclipse provided tech support and Tarak's men came in last, with limited air support in the form of Tarak in his Blue Scimitar. The plan was a staggered advance across the bridge, suppressing the opposite side with rockets, biotics and machine gun fire, advancing until they reached the opposite side, at which time it was predicted Archangel would be finished, having lost his only chokepoint. Archangel had predicted this plan however and planned accordingly to counter it as best he could, bringing up the team's secret ammo reserves that the PMCs had missed in their raid, consisting of rocket launchers, machine guns, mines, incendiary weapons, a harpoon gun, and a portable shield generator to use for cover. Placing his helmet on a pedestal and recording himself shouting taunts across the bridge and plugging it into a loudspeaker, he used a cloak to sneak down to the bridge to put down some of his mines, including one of his shield generators and a flashbang detonator on a stick rigged to a remote detonator, before discreetly pulling back, all while the PMCs believed he hadn't moved positioned due to his helmet and the loudspeaker. Once he was ready, he contacted the PMCs over the comms, promising to kill Tarak, Garm and Jaroth before he died, hoping to goad them into attacking as soon as possible: he then contacted his estranged father to make amends with him. Within minutes, the attack commenced, consisting of the first line of Blood Pack moving in a staggered advance, the Eclipse following suit. Archangel picked apart the krogan first, kneecapping them before switching focus to the Eclipse engineers to harass their tech support capabilities. Archangel's sniping skills remained unparalleled, each shot killing or crippling a target, and as dozens of dead mercs littered the bridge. As time went on, Archangel used his numerous traps, a flashbang detonator blinding numerous mercenaries as they tried to cross, making them easy targets. As Blood Pack krogan crossed to the other side, mines detonated, killing dozens of krogan warriors. When the Eclipse tried to bring up their biotics and commandos across, Archangel remotely activated the shield generator he set up, using it to not only block their shots temporarily, but box them in as he hired three, top down missiles into the air, directing them directly into the middle of the group that had clustered up, resulting in maximum casualties. Their first assault blunted, the PMCs regrouped and attacked again, only to be met with more of the same, with the Eclipse bringing in mechs, only for them to be torn apart by concentrated rocket barrages. Once the second assault had failed, Tarak became fed up and committed his own men to a third assault, piloting his gunship into the fray in the hopes of killing Archangel with a shower of missiles and machine gun fire from above. This third assault proved just as costly as the first two however, especially when Archangel, using the last of his mines to tie up the main PMC assault temporarily, quickly and methodically switched positions, waited for Tarak to expose his gunship as he searched for the vigilante, then activated his cloak while he fired three, clean shots at the gunship, using disruptor rounds as he hit it at the weakest points of its kinetic barrier, able to rupture the fuel tank, then the primary heat dispensation system (causing his main gun to overheat and lock up when he tried to fire it), then one more through its left wing thruster, Tarak was just able to survive long enough to regain control of his gunship and returned to the landing pad, just barely managing to get it there in time before its engines gave out completely and it crashed, but this put the gunship out of action entirely, eliminating any hope of using air support to brute force their way across the bridge. Returning to the PMCs, Archangel continued to inflict heavy casualties until Tarak finally called off the assault, pulling back his remaining troops: by the end of the assault Archangel had carried the day, with over 1,200 mercenaries lying dead on the bridge.
Realizing that Archangel was too entrenched to be brute-forced, Tarak ordered his forces to bunker down and ready themselves for a lengthy siege, hoping to starve Archangel out. He ordered their position to be fortified, with a large barricade set up on their side of bridge to allow them safe passage across the building, done so after Archangel had taken pot shots across the bridge, managing to kill several Blood Pack vorcha who weren't paying attention. Despite Tarak wanting to commit to a siege, Garm was having none of it, and Tarak was forced to allow further assaults over time, ones that failed each time, only resulting in further casualties: by the end of the first week of the siege, Tarak finally put a stop to the attacks, stating that if Garm's aim was to give Archangel a free victory, all he needed to do was to keep charging across that bridge: Garm conceded after that, but made it clear he was losing faith in Tarak's leadership, and demanded a plan soon or he'd pull out of the alliance. Setting up his command center in an abandoned store front close to the main barricade, Tarak spent days coming up with a plan, becoming convinced alternative paths into the hotel had to exist, and needed to find them in order to eliminate the possibility of further suicidal attacks across the bridge. Tarak's scouts finally discovered the tunnels Archangel's squad had used to enter the base, and knew that accessing them was the key to victory: however, he could not just send troops up there, otherwise the assault might fail and Archangel would find a way to permanently seal them off, removing any hope they had of finishing him off in a swift attack and thus losing Garm's support. As such, an assault would require enough manpower to pull it off, and Tarak was unwilling to waste anymore of his men due to the losses he had suffered so far, and thus devised his plan to recruit legions of freelancers from Omega's dense population to make up the difference. They would be the cannon fodder to soak up Archangel's bullets, keeping his best troops in reserve for when Archangel was exhausted or out of ammunition. Garm was displeased with freelancers "stealing all the glory", but Jaroth and Tarak were more than content to allow raw rookies to be slaughtered by Archangel in the droves if it meant their best troops were unscathed. In time, dozens of freelancers added to the bodies collected on the bridge, and the mounds of dead soon became so momentous that the Eclipse had to send out mechs to clear them out, as they were beginning to impede line-of-sight and acted as makeshift barricades that Archangel was using to his advantage to slow any advances cross the bridge to a crawl, making targets sitting ducks as they tried to maneuver around the piles of corpses and the wet, slippery blood that formed pools across it. Tarak was convinced, with time, that throwing enough freelancers at the problem would eventually wear out Archangel or exhaust his ammunition stores enough to make an assault bloodless on their end. But as was per usual, Garm's impatience proved their undoing, and he once again threatened Tarak with breaking off his alliance, this time with Jaroth backing him up as he too grew impatient with the progress of the siege. Forced to compromise, Tarak drew up a new plan: recruiting more freelancers and speeding up repairs on his gunship, the plan was to use the freelancers in a diversionary assault across the bridge to soak up as much ammunition as possible while carrying demolition charges in the hope of getting Archangel to prioritize and hyper-focus on the bridge attack. Meanwhile, Garm would personally lead his Blood Pack through the tunnels they discovered, attacking the hideout from below, synchronizing their assault with a second wave of Eclipse forces moving across the bridge, personally led by Jaroth and bolstered by every mech they had left, followed shortly by Blue Suns troops led by Jentha Renmark breaching from the sides of the building, with Tarak in his gunship to provide air support. The assault was one final hail mary, but one Tarak was convinced would succeed, attacking from every possible angle so as to overwhelm Archangel's ability to handle every single attack at once. One of them would slip through, and one would land the killing blow. The attack was scheduled for 11 August, exactly two weeks after the siege began, and Tarak was known to have been tense and anxious on that day, paranoid there was some factor he hadn't considered and cursing Garm and Jaroth for their impatience.
As it would turn out, Tarak's paranoia was justified. Unbeknownst to both sides, the Normandy Squad under Commander Shepard had come to Omega looking to recruit Archangel for a mission against the Collectors and having infiltrated the operation, masquerading as freelancers, in order to get close to him. While Jaroth noted how peculiar it was to find such well equipped and heavily armoured freelancers when compared to the others (some of which didn't bring armor at all), most did not care, as most of the freelancers were expected to be dead before the day was over. Free of suspicion, the Normandy Squad was free to collect intelligence and sabotage the operation from within: the Eclipse's mechs were hacked, their central control hub reprogrammed to view Eclipse as hostile once activated; one of Tarak's mechanics and field lieutenants, Sergeant Ghalle Cathka, who was repairing Tarak's gunship, was killed and his body thrown off the skyscraper, followed by Tarak's gunship being sabotaged, the heat dispersion system once again compromised and causing the gun to lock up when fired; Shepard and his squadmates asked seemingly innate questions about the operation, gathering intelligence necessary to plan for the PMC attack, and even a sympathetic Jentha Renmark, taking pity on what she saw as freelancers being led to slaughter, was more than willing to tell Shepard about the whole plan, giving him advice on how to survive. When the diversionary attack commenced, the Normandy Squad showed their true colors and turned on the freelancers, killing them all and rushing across the bridge. Recognizing potential friendlies, Archangel let them cross and met them on the other side, at which point Shepard informed Archangel, who he now recognized as former friend and ally Garrus Vakarian, about Tarak's entire plan. Archangel, now with fresh reinforcements, held back the Eclipse assault, inflicting heavy casualties in addition to their own mechs turning on them, with Jaroth killed in the process. They then turned and dealt with Garm's Blood Pack, wiping out Garm's entire force and killing the warlord himself. The last was Tarak's attack, with Renmark leading the assault as planned, but met with heavy resistance. The Blue Suns assault was massacred but Tarak, using his missiles, was able to hit and severely injure Archangel, incapacitating him. Despite this, the Normandy Squad was able to destroy the gunship and kill Tarak, and all order and cohesion in the PMC forces collapsed. Abandoning their positions across the bridge, the Kima Alliance splintered and fractured, each PMC gathering their equipment and leaving in haste, although each one believed Archangel was dead, as the turian subsequently disappeared after the siege and was never heard from again, allowing the PMCs to paint it as a pyrrhic victory.
Regardless of how the siege had ended, both sides had achieved their objectives to some degree. While Archangel's war against crime was over and his perceived death was seen as a victory by the PMCs, the cost suffered to achieve such a victory had been crippling, with thousands of troops lost, all three merc bosses dead, and enormous resources and material wasted. Leadership for the PMC's Omega chapters never fully recovered from the siege, managing to establish new leaders (while Renmark survived the siege, she would leave Omega and ultimately become second-in-command to the CEO of the company), only to be followed a few months later by a Cerberus invasion of the station that finished them off for good. Archangel, while believed to be dead, had survived his injuries and joined the Normandy Squad, albeit no longer operating under the name of Archangel and no large-scale public connection was made between him and his alias, and as such most believed Archangel had died during the assault.