The lead vehicle of the Ork column, if you could dignify either the contraption or the mob with those titles, rolls over the pressure sensor on the humans' side of the canyon. The bridge they're crossing promptly goes up in an explosion as the demolition charges on the supports detonate, taking most of the Orks with it and cutting off the rest. Over the vox, Shepard catches a few cheers, but lets it go. The defenders have had little enough to celebrate lately, and they don't deserve to have her snapping at them over vox discipline.

"Seen enough, Major?" The corporal, a remnant of another regiment, sounds tense, and she can't blame the man. If she gets pasted by a lucky shot, that leaves a second lieutenant in charge of the Guard forces for the entire planet.

"Not just yet," Shepard replies, eye to the scope of her rifle. If there's one thing she likes about the damned greenskins, it's their absolute idiocy, but even that only gets you so far, because they're also too stupid to die. As predicted, she gets her sights on one trying to claw its way up the twisted wreckage of the bridge still clinging to the canyon wall and puts a shot through its head. That plus the fall will probably kill it, and Shepard wriggles back from the edge of the rise. Undignified for a commanding officer, but so's getting shot because you poked your fool head up where someone could see it, not that Orks are smart enough to target officers selectively. "Right, let's go." She gets to her feet less gracefully than she'd like, and slings her rifle.

"Nice shot, ma'am," the corporal says, the undercurrent of a real compliment making the expected response livelier than it would usually be.

"Thank you, Corporal. When we get back to HQ you can tell everyone I'm actually good for something." Shepard manages not to snort at his surprised expression, and wonders just how insufferable his previous commanders had been. A lot of them do seem to make it a competitive sport. "Relax, soldier. I only set traps for Orks."

"...Yes, ma'am." The poor man settles for the safe answer, and Shepard decides to let him be as they board the Chimera that's no longer needed by the dead of yet a third depleted regiment.

As they start to rumble back to the relative safety of a position behind what passes for their lines, she stares at a dataslate to keep from having to talk to anyone, lost in unpleasant thought. Orkish tendency to walk into ambushes notwithstanding, Shepard's surprised the Guard has lasted this long. The "minor" Ork infestation they'd been deployed to handle had proved anything but, and the General was lucky to be dead, because having this fiasco on his record might well have gotten him shot after the court martial, anyway.

Having scraped together a unit that slightly resembles a regiment from the shattered pieces of the actual regiments that had landed originally, Shepard thinks they can hold out a little longer, but soon they'll have to scatter and go to ground. There aren't enough of her own regiment left for her to assign a recon-trained Guardsman to every squad, and she's been wrestling with her conscience for days over whether to simply vanish with her troopers when Guard lines inevitably break. They'd make a more effective guerrilla unit together than they would split up and babysitting other squads, and it's arguably the sounder strategic decision if they don't know when they'll be reinforced...but she'd be condemning every other Guardsman to grisly death, and that knowledge has kept her uncharacteristically indecisive. So, she's almost relieved when the Orks make the choice for her.

"They broke through!" comes a panicked shout over the vox. "They broke through! Get the Major! They're coming across the east plaza!" Not the least useful report she's ever gotten, Shepard supposes. It at least contains actionable intelligence.

Now that the worst has happened, she's glacially calm, and when she gets on the vox herself, squelching other chatter, her voice reflects it. "Shepard. Fall back. Regroup at the gun emplacements." It's an order none of them need to be convinced to follow, and a chorus of acknowledgements crackles across the vox. If she had any functioning artillery, she'd turn the plaza to rubble, but lacking that, she can choke the narrower approaches with Ork bodies as long as the autocannons last.

"Take us there," Shepard tells the driver, and the corporal stares at her in alarm.

"Ma'am, shouldn't we get you to HQ..." He trails off when he sees her expression. "...It's not going to matter, is it?"

"No. It's not," Shepard says, checking her bolt pistol unnecessarily. She's not especially faithful, and even if she were, she doubts she could bring herself to say "the Emperor protects" under the circumstances.

For a long moment, the corporal sits in silence, his hands visibly tightening on his lasgun, but then he surprises her. "It's been an honor serving with you, Major."

It's Shepard's turn to put more feeling into the stock response than anyone would expect. "The honor's mine, Corporal."