I blinked blearily. Wygan had killed the Guardian, and through blurry eyes I saw Will step forward, the Grey engulfing him. In a moment that seemed to stretch slowly forward, I saw his human form dissolve, becoming part of the weave of the Grey. Even as I closed my eyes, a giant clawed hand reached out, grabbed me, and hurled me into darkness.
The noise woke me first, crackling fire and the far-off sounds of a science fiction gun firing. Followed by a shuddering boom close enough I could feel it. I cracked my eyes open, and started to raise my head, only to encounter something hard an inch or two up. Groaning, I turned, shuffling my arms around. A door slid open by my left arm, and a gloved hand reached in to brush mine. "Quiet," the man said, "they are close. Can you move?"
I took stock of myself. Aside from a headache, I had recovered from whatever Wygan had done to me. I started to reach for the Grey, and immediately retreated. Wherever I was had so many layers of Grey it felt like I was staring down the wall of the Grand Canyon. "What's going on?" I whispered, wriggling out from under the shelf in the closet.
"Not sure. Evidence suggests AI has taken control of station. Remote controlling Keepers, experimenting on residents." I didn't completely catch the last part, as I was staring at my rescuer. I didn't know what he was, though the skin and the bizarre horns reminded me of a lizard I'd seen in a pet store. "Why are you staring? Problem with Salarians?"
I ran a hand over my face, considering my options. He was either an alien, or there were far weirder creatures out there than vampires and poltergeists and Native American spirits that turned into canoes. "Honestly, I've never seen one before. How did I get into that closet?"
His eyebrows, or some close not-actual-hair equivalent rose. "Not sure. Found you here, heard you breathing. Are you armed?" As he asked the question, each hand pulled a gun from holsters at the small of his back. "Have a spare. Old, but usable. Have been hiding for four days now, was hoping to find food."
Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled back my jacket. Sure enough, my own gun was missing, so I took the offered one with a nod of thanks. No ammo spot on it, just a little temperature indicator right below the holographic sights. "Where am I? When am I? What's hunting us?"
"We are in Tayseri ward, specifically a residence building near the Museum of Galactic History." At my blank look, he continued. "On board Citadel Station."
Adjusting the strap carefully, I stuck the pistol into my holster. "Yesterday, I was in Seattle, on Earth, and we didn't even have a working space program. Then I woke up in a closet on a space station a million years old." Even as I said it, part of my brain was trying to figure out where I came up with that number. His eyebrow-things went up again.
Turning around, he peeked through a window, and I took the opportunity to look outside as well. We were fairly high up in some kind of apartment building, and outside was a star and cloud vista, broken only by some other portion of the station we were on. Fires were burning in several places I could see, and I recognized the smell of blood on the air. As I watched, he floated one hand above his wrist, and a glowing hologram of orange light sprang up from his wristband. "Humanity has been in space for over a century. Your story sounds highly unlikely." Satisfied with whatever his glowy device told him, he turned it off. "Still, hostile AI takeover also highly unlikely."
He rose to his feet, and I followed him. "We should keep moving. Being detected is … bad." I trailed him to the door, and when he took out his gun, I did as well. "Can discuss your insight to the age of the station later." He moved to type a code into a panel next to the door, which was positively teeming in Grey. A smoky insubstantial hand hit the symbols a fraction of a second before my alien friend did. I shook it off, just in time to see a cyborg monster on the other side of the opening door.
My gun was up in a moment, time literally slowing down around me as I instinctively pulled on the Grey. The cyborg looked like a humanoid spider-person turned into a Star Trek Borg extra, one of the eyes pulled out and replaced with a laser pointer, a whole arm replaced with a giant cannon of some kind. As it moved in slow motion, I pulled my gun hand up, sighted down the holographic sight, and pulled the trigger.
The kick was less than I expected, so rather than going up from center body mass, the next couple of shots went down, stitching marks down its chest and abdomen, the last one punching through one leg. As it seized up, electricity arcing up and down the cyborg's body, time returned to normal for me. Just in time for my companion to stagger back, green blood pouring out from a jagged hole across one side of his chest. I dropped my gun trying to help him, but he was dead before I lowered his body to the floor.
Strange as it seemed to me, his last act had been to raise his hand and activate his glowing arm-thing. Looking at it more closely, I figured it was a language selection, as I recognized English from the list. Hesitantly, I touched the light, feeling a tingly resistance in my finger, and the display changed. I reluctantly unstrapped it from his arm, and carrying it, moved through the building. There was an elevator, or at least a shaft, crashed somewhere far below, and I turned to the emergency ladder to descend. I thought, or hoped, anyway, that any cyborgs coming to investigate their buddy's deactivation would be taking the stairs.
Three floors down, I stopped, and carefully squeezed out onto the floor. Another hallway with several doors greeted me, and all of the security systems had shadowy Grey images of their past owners. I almost moved to activate one, then changed my mind, dropping to the ground and crawling underneath one bent and jammed door. I didn't know how the cyborg found us, but it was possible that the … Salarian, wasn't it, had tipped them off by locking the door in the first place.
The apartment inside was a charred mess, thick with the smell of burned plastic and something that reminded me of burnt tinfoil. I found that pretty quickly when I found the former inhabitant, another alien species with mandibles and half-melted metallic skin. I quietly knocked the ashes off a metal chair, then set about adjusting the straps for the glowing tool until I could strap it to my arm.
Just as I was about to try searching for a tutorial on the thing, it popped up an alert. Communication on band 29. Respond? I hesitated for a moment, then tapped to listen. It was a single squelch, the kind of communication you saw military squads using in the movies. "What the hell," I whispered to myself, and with a couple of quick taps, tried sending back. Nothing happened, so either my doohickey wasn't powerful enough to send back, or they were looking for some other answer.
Giving up on it for the moment, I crawled back out into the hallway, brushing soot off my jeans. The hall was a simple square with three apartments on each side, the elevator on one side and the stairs on the opposite. Hoping that any reinforcements would have already gone by, I waited for a moment by the open doorway, then stepped inside, pistol at the ready.
Only inside the stairwell could I hear the quiet tapping of feet, and I looked over the railing down the open center. Coming up the stairs were a half dozen cyborgs, all of them belonging to humanoid species. As I leveled the pistol again, I could feel time slowing down around me again. Not quite as powerful as the ability to manipulate the fabric of magic, but some part of me thought it was a whole lot cooler.
Every one of the cyborgs, as I looked closer, had a cluster of glowing strands of Grey spurting out from just above where their hip-bone was. And I thought that was where one of my shots into the one upstairs had hit, so on a hunch, I targeted the blue tentacle-head woman in the lead and gut shot her with my pistol. Sure enough, she promptly seized up, electricity arcing across her body. The others walked right over her, and behind them were a dozen giant bugs.
My time-slowing was already slipping away from me, so I started pulling the trigger madly, blowing holes in my pursuers as I stumbled up the stairs. The temperature gauge rapidly boosted until it maxed out, locking the trigger, so I stopped trying to shoot the last two cyborgs and just ran for it. Five floors later, I hit the top, still hearing them below me, and maxed out the heat sink one more time.
With just the bugs behind me, I slammed the door open, which in retrospect was a mistake. I must have ignored some safety protocol, because the sudden rush of air escaping into a vacuum yanked me out the door before it slammed closed behind me. Instinctively clawing at my throat, I virtually threw myself down into the layered past, hunting for one where I wasn't above the atmosphere line.
My feet thudded heavily into a floor a foot below the roof, and I blinked frozen tears out of my eyes. The ghost of some giant snake-person slithered past me, talking with an ape-dog in a language I almost felt I could recognize. My new Grey powers were working well enough, letting me see and interact with this memory of time even as I walked through the ghostly image of the present, following these two aliens over to the next building. I identified the door inside on the other roof, having to step partly into the snake-person to reach it, then lay on the floor to get myself inside the stairwell of the other building.
Bracing myself, I reached back to the present, sliding out of the layered past and falling five feet to the floor. The top of the stairs was filled with old smoke, and I stifled my coughing to breathe through my shirt sleeve as best I could. Two floors down, the smoke had vanished, and I stepped out into an almost identical apartment building. I picked a room at random, and moved through it to find windows that overlooked the street. The sound of a fire came through the wall to one side, and I resolved not to linger.
Crashed vehicles and collapsed buildings made a maze of the streets below, and only a football field away was the edge, looking off into space beyond. I could make out two other arms of the station curving up and away, dotted with fires of their own. The Grey was unusually thick in here, and I slid just far enough in to view.
The recent past, no more than a week, and the green bugs were breaking into the apartment. Several aliens, one of the tentacle heads and her daughter, plus a Salarian, cowering behind the couch. The bugs force the door open, and the Salarian raises his tool, firing a blast of fire through it and roasting the first bug through the door. Tentacle-lady forms a ball of glowing blue light in one hand, freezing another one in place. The other ten simply climb over their brethren, and the couch, striking down the inhabitants with cattle prods or something like it. Once paralyzed, they strap them together, forming a chain and cart the bodies away.
The buzz of my own glowy tool shook me out of it, enough that I talked back instead of just sending another squawk. As we held our conversation, I looked down at the street, some eight stories below. I could see a couple more cyborgs entering my building, but if I moved too far from the window, the communication cut off. It was odd, since I could hear the background noises going out on my own communication, but this Adam's signals were almost professional voice recordings.
We were almost done with our conversation when the first cyborg showed up, and I shot it in the kidney while talking. After we decided when to next talk, I ran past the body, shooting two more in the hallway, and on a whim, punched the elevator button. To my surprise, the door opened with a musical chime a moment later. I half-stepped inside, shooting one more cyborg, then tapped the third floor button before ducking back out and into a different apartment.
I hadn't expected the decoy to work, but it turned out flawlessly. The one left on my floor promptly turned around, heading back downstairs. Keeping quiet, I followed along behind it, and we made it to the fifth floor before it halted. Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the past.
Not too far in the past, a mere hundred thousand years, this floor was an open garden that spanned the width of the station arm. I ran across the grass, passing half-visible aliens and heading for the edge. Even as I ran, the Grey suddenly extended far past the station, filling the whole sky with inky black threads that raised the hair on my neck. I skidded to a stop, ignoring the present completely, as hundred of giant ships shaped like squids blurred into reality, the past-aliens suddenly panicking as these ships, some of them a full mile long, swarmed in.
Closing my eyes, I fought the Grey. It wanted me more solidly in that time, and I kept myself in between, each hand holding a different strand of time. When I opened my eyes again, it was almost worst than being blind, as dozens of different time spans tried to layer themselves into my vision. I backed off slowly, sliding closer to the present until I could see the building around me. The map on my tool had mentioned a concert hall, and I had stumbled into it.
From what I could see from the balcony seats, it was deserted, so I released my hold of the Grey and settled down onto a seat to catch my breath. I started muttering to myself, never a good sign, but useful to take stock of my situation. "Okay. I'm trapped on a several million year old space station. The only people I've seen are dead lab experiments or fellow displacees. I have no idea of how to stop what's happening, or where there might still be safe zones." Way to give myself a pep talk.
Pulling back up the map, I fiddled around, looking for other places to try. One caught my eye – Citadel Security Academy. On Bachjret Ward, near the ring of the Presidium, if I was reading the map right. It sounded like a police station, so if anywhere was likely to be holding the cyborgs at bay, that was probably it.
Of course, I had to cross ten kilometers on this ward, then go around a good chunk of the Presidium ring to get there. But it sounded better than any of the smaller C-Sec offices listed. With a destination ready, I rose back to my feet, and headed out.