So, I am aware that at least one other story has been written with the same general idea, however, do note that any similarities are purely coincidental. In addition, I am not the lawful owner of Mass Effect or any of that related "stuff"; I'm sure you get my point, so I won't write an essay in legalese here. These disclaimers apply to all the chapters in this story.
Also, as this diverges from the "canon" timeline at the end of Mass Effect 2, it mostly ignores the stuff found in Mass Effect 3 – there may be similarities, but it will not be something which I will put focus into following. Besides it was kind of crappy in some parts.
Chapter 1: Disaster
Her ammo was running low, Shepard noticed, as she punched her second-to-last heat clip into her assault rifle. Her SMG had already been emptied, and she knew that her Carnifex Hand-Cannon wouldn't last her very long. To her left, Thane rose from cover and put a Collector out of its misery, sniping it cleanly through the skull, and Shepard herself soon proceeded to do the same, unloading her clip on a pair of Husks unfortunate enough to stand in her line of fire. As she went back down, jamming her last clip into the gun, Jacob provided cover fire with his own pistol, whilst Jack mostly looked annoyed that she couldn't join in on the killing, preoccupied as she was with upholding the biotic field around them.
"Assuming control of this form." rang out across the chamber, one of the Collectors in the back now starting to glow with a brilliant, golden-yellow sheen. Their morale strengthened by the possessed drone, the Collectors pressed the attack, multiple streams of fire, and a pair of energy beams, flying above the Humans' (and one Drell's) heads as well as smattering into their cover.
Before anyone else could react, Shepard's omni-tool was out, and her pet combat drone fizzled into existence in the midst of her enemies' ranks, giving her ample opportunity to rise out of cover and unload her last clip on the distracted enemies. Half a second later, Thane's sniper once more rang out, eliminating yet another Husk, and Jacob's pistol got a chance to complain about the lack of a usable heat clip before the drone finally got blasted out of existence, ending their brief sanction as they pulled back into cover.
Seconds later, a Husk rounded the corner of their cover, found itself floating in the air as Jacob's biotics did their job, and was terminated by his point-blank shotgun blast a moment later. Of course, by that point three more had taken its place, and they were in no way dissuaded by Jack's comment of "where the fuck did you come from?" as they shambled in uncomfortably close.
Shepard's omnitool's incinerate function, which was a homing, incendiary half-missile-half-grenade manufactured and launched by her omni-tool, met the first one head on, taking it down together with another of Jacob's shotgun blasts. The second met its fate by a few Carnifex rounds and Thane's warp-biotics, whilst the third one struck down on Jacob, his shotgun being smashed beyond use as it became the only thing between the Husk and its target. Before any other permanent damage could be done, though, Thane's sniper rifle removed the issue, draining its last clip in the process.
"We are the harbinger of your destruction." the possessed Collector spoke, advancing along with its companions, leaving the other squad with precious little time to figure out what to do.
The first thing they did was check how many enemies were left. Sneaking another peek, Shepard could soon conclude that the remains consisted of three Husks and four Collectors, one of the latter being the possessed one. Run that against their remaining ammunition, being a fully loaded SMG without spare clips in Thane's possession, and a half-full Carnifex pistol with an extra clip, carried by Shepard, their ammo was going to run out before their enemies did. They shared what they could, Shepard giving her extra clip to Jacob so that the guy would at least not be completely unarmed, but the end result would still be woefully inadequate.
Then again, they did have one more weapon, which Shepard now pulled out. It was a portable mini-nuke launcher which they'd only constructed in the first place because Grunt had caught whiff of the project and refused to relinquish the idea of carrying around an actual nuke, even a small one, as a personal weapon. She stared at it, wearing a forlorn expression, knowing that they had to use it if they wanted to survive, yet still wanting to save it in case they encountered something nastier later on – it only had one shot, after all.
Ultimately, there was no alternative. "Cover me" she said, and the three rose in tandem. She aimed, and pulled the trigger.
The following seconds felt like the longest in her life as her weapon charged up. Shot after shot impacted her shields, then downed said shields completely, followed by taking a bullet in her right shoulder and another in her left leg right below the hip.
Finally it finished charging, Shepard's shout of "duck!" barely cutting ahead of the weapon's firing. Thane was down on the ground before she could even blink, she herself followed within a moment, and Jacob hit the ground right after her.
For a moment, it was completely silent. Then there was light, followed closely by the shockwave, knocking the nearby swarms away for a moment. A rumble sounded as a wave of heat washed over their position, and then it went dead quiet.
A moment passed in silence, and then another one. There was not a sound. Gradually, they popped out of cover, and Shepard found herself starting to sweat as the formerly cool air now felt unpleasantly hot.
The site was empty, and now equipped with a nice, black scorch mark, as well as the remains of a mushroom cloud formerly a few meters high. The charred remains of the three Husks lay a few meters away, and of the Collectors there was not even a trace to be seen.
"Hell yeah!" Jack cheered, emerging from her cover position, and Shepard had the feeling that if the half-naked biotic hadn't been busy with the field, she would have flipped the bird at the Collectors' last position.
Then, suddenly, bullets were showering the air around them. The culprit: a lone Collector drone, standing rather far back, seemingly having escaped the blast.
The team fanned out, moving to their nearest cover, and opened fire upon the survivor. Shepard brought her pistol to bear, firing a shot, before she heard a pained outcry from behind her, followed by the barrier flickering out of existence. She turned her head and saw Jack clutching the empty stump where her right hand had been, staring at it in disbelief whilst trying to stem the tide of blood gushing forth.
The swarms approached, and Jane felt a sting in her midsection. She reacted on instinct, her right hand grabbing the cause and throwing it away, until it froze mid-throw, together with the rest of her. There she stood, covered in a stasis field with her right arm extended outward halfway into a throwing motion, still clutching the insect which was trying futilely to escape her iron grasp.
"Oh shi-" was all Jack managed to get out before she too was stung by the insects and covered in a stasis field which, as it turns out, also stemmed the blood flow from her hand's former position.
It was at this point that the other two noticed what was happening. In the corner of Shepard's eye, Thane's and Jacob's biotics both flared, summoning up a new biotic shield to keep the swarms at bay.
"Assuming direct control." the voice spoke, though as she was currently stuck looking in Jack's direction, Shepard could only guess as to where its source was. A ball of yellow, biotic-like energy streaked past her as gunfire erupted. More followed, and after a few seconds, an explosion shook the ground nearby. Jacob's voice could be heard, drifting into the communications channel.
"Shepard? Shit! Samara, do you read? We've lost Shepard and Jack to the swarms; there are enemies closing in on our position." It was at this point that Shepard spotted a formerly unseen Husk, climbing up from the side of the walkway a bit behind them. "We need support, quickly. What's your position?", Jacob continued, as Shepard helplessly watched the Husk climb up, unseen by her friends. She brought out every single bit of strength she could muster, but despite this, she couldn't even blink, much less provide any sort of warning.
The response was nothing more than unintelligible gibberish as the swarms made a mess of their transmissions, and before another attempt could be made, the lone Husk rushed forth, charging straight towards its targets. Unprepared, Jacob never even saw its strike coming before the Husk slammed its entire body weight into the back of his skull, sending him collapsing to the ground without a sound, leaving Thane the option of either dropping the already unstable biotic field to fight back, and thus be overwhelmed by the swarms, or maintain it and be helplessly cut down by his enemies.
Of course, being who he was, he didn't just lay down and die; he tried to do both, bringing up his leg in a kick to the Husk's midsection whilst his arms stubbornly kept the field up. Unfortunately, this left him completely open to the attacking Collector, whose biotic bolts soon met the Drell himself. He fell to the ground, his back smoking as the biotic field fell, and from there it did not take long for the swarms to do their job.
They had failed, and what was worse, it was not limited to the rest of their squad, but every single, living being that the Collectors would now attack unhindered. Despite her perilous situation and highly dubious chance of survival, Shepard felt more disappointment in herself than actual fear.
…well, unless the Collectors didn't have another ship to replace that one that the Normandy blew apart, that is, in which case they probably wouldn't do much of that for the next few months; ships that size could take a while to rebuild, and the Collectors did not quite seem to have the greatest shipyards in existence.
Footsteps resounded as a pair of golden-shining feet walked into view, their owner illuminating Shepard's face with a weak sheen. The buzzing of wings increased its already notable presence within the chamber as several additional drones flew down to take their landing, surrounding the immobile squad. Their possessed leader then spoke, dishing out several orders to the lesser Collectors.
"Prepare these two for ascension" it said, gesturing to Jack and where Shepard assumed Jacob to be. "Dispose of the non-human", it continued, turning to face Shepard herself, looking her straight in the eyes as it spoke the last part of its sentence: "I will deal with this one personally."
The being turned and grabbed Shepard's hands; she involuntarily went completely limp when the possessed Collector subsequently started to drag her away, its enhanced strength allowing it to do what there would normally be required two of the once-Protheans for. The last she saw of her three friends as she was dragged –not very carefully– away from them, was Jack and Jacob being unceremoniously dragged away in a different direction, Thane being thrown off the edge of the walkway into the abyss below.
Then, they were gone, and she was left alone with her thoughts and the steady thump, thump of her heartbeat. Second after second, she slowly came to be moved further and further away from her friends.
Once they reached an exit to the swarm room, the communications jamming gradually eased away, allowing her communicator to pick up the remaining team's transmissions once more. Samara's voice drifted through her earpiece quite loudly, trying to drown out the noise of gunfire, explosions and all the other sounds of war emanating from the message's background.
"Shepard, we are at the door. We are waiting on you now" her voice, sounding calm as usual, spoke through the com-link. Of course, Shepard was completely unable to respond in any way whatsoever; right now, she could do nothing more than listen.
The corridor she was now in twisted, and her last glimpse of the swarm-room vanished behind your average corner; it was soon followed by a second turn, and then a third, before Samara's voice once more met her ears.
"Shepard, our enemies are increasing in number; we are growing hard-pressed to hold them back. It is advisable that you hurry." – another wave of disappointment washed over her, knowing that she had probably doomed every single one of her squad-mates, her friends, to death. She had of course known that this could happen. From the moment when they went through the Omega-4, they had mentally prepared themselves for death, but that did not make it any less painful. Thane was already gone, Jack, Jacob and she herself would most likely follow, and things did not seem bright for the rest of them, either. At least she could take comfort in that Garrus had successfully gotten the rest of the crew back to the Normandy, so they always had that.
When a transmission next met her ears, the voice drifting through was Legion's, not Samara's, and Shepard almost immediately felt that something else must have gone wrong.
"Shepard-Commander. Samara-Justicar and Goto-Thief have registered as casualties." …and there it came. Two more dead. Damn it! "Multiple hostiles inbound. Probability of mission success at 2.36%, rounded up. Commencing emergency retreat. We are… sorry, Shepard-Commander" the unique Geth finished. Then, the transmission ended, officially marking their attack as a complete failure. Of course, she knew she was, to put it bluntly, screwed – there would be no point for even more people to futilely die for her, and sending a second squad through the swarm-chamber would leave too few to reliably make it through the other path. The mission was over; all she could hope for was for the others to come back with new strength in a few months and blow the entire station to oblivion without her help.
Slowly, memories started to drift unbidden to her mind. From her youngest days together with her parents in the fleet, the Skyllian Blitz, Eden Prime, Saren and Sovereign (or Nazara, as Legion had said that its name was), Ilum and the attack on the Citadel, her death, Cerberus' resurrection effort, flying around in the Normandy SR-2 building a team, Horizon, the dead Reaper, the Collectors' surprise attack, a mad dash to catch the culprits before they could finish off the captives, all through the attack on the very station she was now an immobile captive in; her life passed right through. Was this how it would all end? Dragged through the mostly empty chambers of a space station in the core of the galaxy, by a remote-controlled Collector, until she suffered the same fate as the captured colonists? "Commander Jane Shepard. Savior of the Citadel. Two-times dead at the hands of the Collectors" - would that be what would be written in the books of history? Quite frankly, she didn't envy her chances.
…Then again, it would probably say "killed by Geth"; that's what everyone thought, after all.
She was in an elevator now and, as it turns out, the Collectors' elevators were no swifter than those on the Citadel, which were humorously known as 'the very definition of slowness'. Well, at least it would prolong her life, so she wouldn't complain. It also gave the next communications burst plenty of time to resound through her earpiece.
"Shepard-Commander. Zaeed-Mercenary has been rendered irrevocably inoperable. We are retreating rapidly; rendezvous at Nor-ndy-applicable" – static began to drift in, interfering in the message. "We re-ste, Sh-a-", and then it was nothing more than unintelligible buzzing, the signal completely lost.
The elevator's doors slid open behind her, and Shepard was dragged out, soon noticing Collector after Collector lining the path; she had a feeling that she must be getting closer to… wherever she was involuntarily going.
True enough, the dragging soon subsided, and she was lifted up into a standing position. Subsequently, the hands of the golden Collector sent her reeling into what, though looking remarkably different from the inside, she had no doubt was one of those pods which the majority of her crew had, until recently, been trapped within and almost becoming base cellular goop in – for the first time in a long while, she felt a streak of pure, complete fear shoot through her entire being; it caught her completely by surprise, but for the first time in years, she was truly afraid, not for others, but for herself. There had always been something she could do, but now…
Before she could get anywhere with that train of thought, the pod's suspension ability kicked in, and her mind fell to unconsciousness faster than she could blink. (Not that she actually could blink right now, but the point stands – it was really fast).
It would be a long time, and several seconds of the most intense pain in her life, before she would wake again.
Well… there that ended. I really don't have much to say at the bottom author's note, as I believe I've said enough up top. As per usual, though, any sort of feedback or review is welcome and much appreciated.