Ozz Medrilo —

I awoke with a jolt, suddenly wide-eyed and alert. There were chemicals in my blood stream, enough to make me quiver with unused energy, as my heart and lungs increased to uncomfortable levels. I sat up swiftly, and regretted it - the room began to spin around me and I nearly fainted. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and after a matter of seconds, I was back to normal.

There was a turian in front of me, holding a datapad. A nurse, I assumed. She wore an expression of consternation and uncertainty as she searched my face intently.

"Mister Medrilo? Are you alright?"

"Perfectly," I replied, wiggling my fingers, which still felt a bit of stiffness. "So we've arrived, then? I thought six hundred years would feel like a longer sleep, to be honest, but it's like I was instantaneously translated from waking moment to waking moment. Delightful!"
"Yes, we're here," she replied, "but things are in a bad state. We woke you up because we need you help."

Just as my pulse was finally returning to an acceptable resting rate, the implications of her words send my heart sprinting again, as my mind began running through disaster scenarios. Had we struck a foreign object en route to our destination? Did we experience a power outage? Encounter hostile native forces? Did we experience navigational failure and arrive in the wrong star cluster? I considered these, and dozens more in rapid succession, before my mouth caught up enough to ask a question.

"What kind of trouble? Why me? What do you need me to do?"

"Spirits, where do I start? Here's the short version. We hit an energy cloud that damaged the station… the senior leadership died in the event, and a salarian named Jarun Tann is the acting director. The arks haven't shown up, and the security team tried to mutiny, so the he exiled them. And when that group left, they took the technician who was supposed to work on life support systems, and they're crashing, and we need you to fix them as soon as possible."

"Terrific." I said with a sigh. I could feel a headache brewing. "What sort of life support system? How long do I have? Interior or exterior? What tools are available? What-"

"Let me… just take you to it," she interrupted. "I'm just a med assistant. Can you walk? Do you need water?"

"Hand me a bottle. I'll drink it on the way. Let's go. You said it was urgent, right?"

"Right. Yes. Just follow me."

The under-informed assistant led me down a series of brightly-lit corridors and onto a tram. After a short ride, she took me to a row of apartments where the senior leadership team and staff lived. Once we were close, I didn't need her to show me where the problem was - I could smell the smoke even before I saw it seeping out of a wall panel in little white billows.

"What's up there?" I asked, pointing at the telltale panel.

"I'm not sure," she said, "but the apartments aren't getting the right amount of oxygen. We had to reroute air from hydropinics, but it takes too much energy, and now we're close to losing the plants. It's… a mess."

"Bring me a ladder, and whatever repair tools you have handy," I instructed, running causality scenarios in my mind. "I'll find the problem."

She returned after an agonizingly protracted time, pushing a wheeled cart with a haphazardly-assembled conglomeration of actual tools, and things that apparently looked 'techy' to a medical assistant. I dismissed her, and set out to diagnose the problem, removing the panel to thin out the smoke, and following the trail that remained through the access duct. It was a tight, hot, and odorous passage, requiring me to crawl at a frustratingly snaillike pace, but at the end was the obvious problem. Faulty wiring caused the oxygen scrubbers to overheat. It was a simple fix, and I set out at once to repair the system.

After working in relative silence for several minutes, I heard the shuffling of feet below me, and the whoosh of a sliding door airlocking. Curious, I paused to listen more closely.

"We shouldn't be in here," one voice said. A human female. "Everyone's on edge right now. It looks bad."

"It is bad," the response came, a human male.

"Spit it out, then! What's so important it can't wait?"

"It's the krogan. They're irate - threatening to leave."

"Leave? Why?"

"They got the impression, somehow, that Tann was going to give them a seat on the leadership panel."

"Why the hell would they get that idea?"

"You've got me…."

"Don't you lie to me, Spender," the woman said aggressively. "What did you say to them?"

"Nothing! I swear! Just that we needed their help to get rid of Sloane and the mutineers, and we'd scratch their backs if they scratched ours. Now, they're demanding a say in the affairs of the whole station, and their own colony…"

"Colony? Are they insane?"

There was silence for a moment, before the woman continued. "You're telling me they just concocted this idea, all on their own?"

"We're talking about krogan, Foster. They're not the sharpest knives in the drawer."

The woman sighed, and muttered something I couldn't make out. "Remind me never to put you in a diplomatic position again. Tann will never give them a seat on the panel, and I'm sure as hell not going to give them a damned colony. I'll… go and speak with their leaders and see if I can talk them into staying. In the meantime, keep your damned mouth shut on this. I don't want word getting out. The last thing we need is another panic."

"Of course," the male voice replied. There were more footsteps, and the whoosh of the door. I had hardly begun processing the information when the male voice spoke up again. The door had only opened and closed once. He was alone.

"Hey, it's me. Addison knows," he began, apparently speaking to someone over a headset or similar communication device.

"…well, because I told her," the voice said after a pause. "She was gonna find out eventually. Need to control the perception on every end, or it won't just be my ass that gets spaced."

Oh my - this is juicy! I harkened back to my STG days - collect evidence. Always evidence. Data is paramount. I quickly summoned a sound-recording application on my omni-tool, and continued listening.

"…she won't…" the voice said. "She thinks I'm stupid, but loyal. You're safe. Trust me… …well, you don't really have another choice, do you? … … The krogan are furious. Gotta love those short tempers. I played them like a fiddle. They feel like Tann pulled the rug out from under them… … oh, they already blame him. This is gonna blow up in his face. They're leaving, count on it… … oh, that's, that's genius! You think you can pull that off in time? That would take care of the biggest threat in one fell swoop… … What do you need from me? I can still pull some strings… … but, I can- … … fine, fine. Whatever. Just remember who got you here… … okay, fine. Bye… … assholes. Try to cut me out, huh? We'll see who's 'no longer necessary to the larger mission.'"

The door whooshed again, and there was silence. The implications of my overheard conversation were dire and urgent. Possibly even more so than the need for oxygen scrubbers. I didn't feel like crawling all the way through the torturous ductwork again, though, so I quickly finished the repairs to the wiring, and once I ensured the scrubbers were functioning at an acceptable capacity again, I went straight to the operations deck to share my findings.

It took fifteen minutes of pestering, fast-talking and threatening to push my way into the colonial affairs office, but I arrived at last, and went straight to the director - Foster Addison.

"Miss Addison - I need to speak with you. It's very urgent," I said.

"Who are you, and who let you in here?" She replied curtly.

"Ozz Medrilo, I'm… a mechanic."

She sighed sharply, with a hand on her hip. "Well, what is it, then? In case you haven't noticed, I'm a little busy."

"I have reason to believe one of your subordinates has been working to intentionally undermine both you and Director Tann."

"I can't imagine what you're talking about," she said, glaring at me fiercely and motioning with her head. I followed her to the far corner of the room, where she continued in hushed tones, to avoid being overheard by the other workers nearby. "What do you know. Spill it!"

"I… overheard a conversation that a 'Spender' had with an unknown associate, where he seemed to imply that he was intentionally stirring up dissension between the krogan leadership and director Tann."

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "And you heard this how?"

I suddenly realized I had failed to account for a rather troublesome flaw in my plan.

"I… uh… well, overheard it, as I was doing repairs… in the apartments near hydroponics."

The light hit the sand, and she inhaled sharply. "You little bastard. You were eavesdropping on me!"

"Not… intentionally. But what I heard-"

"Is what? The confessions of a dolt who screwed up his job? I said nothing wrong, and neither did Spender. You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't have time for this."

"Just wait - wait! I have proof."

Dammit, Ozz! Why did you say that? Why? Oh, mouth, why do you keep betraying me!

Addison's annoyance turned to seething, marginally-restrained rage. "Proof of what? A mechanic trying to concoct a conspiracy theory? You heard nothing," she hissed. "You understand me? Do you understand what a razor-thin peace we're hanging onto here? No, you don't, so let me spell it out for you. If I can't talk the krogan down, we'll have a worse mutiny on our hands than Sloan's. And when those krogan come looking for salarian blood, you think they'll stop with Tann? Huh? You think they won't string your entrails from this deck like Christmas garland? No, you heard nothing. You breathe a word of this, and you and I will both be dead. I suggest you crawl back into whatever hole you came out of, and take your 'proof' with you."

I was shaking so violently on the staircase down to the tram that I fell, tumbling the last dozen steps and landing with a thud on the cold, hard boarding platform. Anger was overshadowed by fear in my brain. If Addison didn't come for me, the krogan likely would.

I was growing more paranoid by the moment, as I rode the tram back to the docking bay. All my STG counter-espionage training turned on me, feasting on my fears, and painting assassins in every shadow. I wandered for hours down hallways and staircases, becoming disastrously lost, until I finally gave up, slouching into a corner. I sat on the floor, resting my head against the wall, and was about to fall asleep, when I heard a pair of footsteps approaching. I jumped to my feet, and started to run, but someone else came from a side hallway, catching me from behind with some kind of taser. After a moment of excruciating pain, I went numb, unable to do anything but watch in horror as a group of masked men circled around me. They picked me up, carrying me down a series of dark hallways, until at last, we reached the cryo bay.

"Nap time, Squidward," one of them said, as they placed me back into a pod.

"Wait - gotta get the omni-tool first," another one said. Still numb, I heard a shuffling sound, then footsteps walking away, and finally, the soft hiss of air pressurization, as the pod lid lowered over me. I tried to hold my breath - tried to fight the chemicals inducing sleep, but it was useless. In a matter of seconds, I was drifting off.

And then in an instant, I was awake again, gasping for breath, and staring at another Turian. I rotated my wrist, where my omni-tool should've been. Nothing.

A cover-up. So, I was onto something. But who's to blame? Addison? Spender? This unnamed contact he was working with? It doesn't matter - whatever they're up to, it's not worth dying over. I wonder what day it is? What year it is? Maybe this turian knows…

"Ozz Medrilo," she said, reading from a chart in her hand. "Says here you're former STG?"

I cleared my throat, coughing through the mucus that had settled there over some indeterminate span of time. "Former," I emphasized.

"Close enough. Tiran Kandros needs to speak to you."