Author note: This one is quite a bit longer, and, as the title may imply, some important things happen. However, this chapter involves something that many people will not find pleasant. Torture. I wrote in gory detail, such that I personally think that a mere 'M' rating is insufficient, and if you aren't a sick fuck like me I recommend that you think carefully before deciding to read it. I have inserted a break either side of the offending section, so that you can go straight past it if you find that sort of thing too much.

You have been warned.

As ever, I appreciate feedback.

Revelations

The saving grace of the situation was that the enemy was unarmed; although in their numbers, it was difficult enough to deal with the dozen that were trying to claw at the two humans at any one time.

"What if they're contagious?" O'Reilly yelled as he managed to find room to mow down six foes with his assault rifle.

"Try not to get any blood on you." Shepard suggested, as he blew a chunk out of a test subject's skull, before severing the spinal cord of another with a well placed knife thrust. "Other than that, we can't really do much, so there's no point worrying. However," he said as he restrained an attacking foe, "If you look, there are indications that this is the result of surgery, and therefore probably not contagious. Nevertheless, don't get any blood on you if you can help it."

Easier said than done. Shepard was already in mourning for his trenchcoat, aware that in all probability it would not escape unscathed.

The two marines hacked their way through the inmates, making it to the end of the corridor, rounding the corner, and finding themselves faced with...

A locked door.

"I'll hack it. Keep them off me." Shepard decided, activating his Omni tool and breaking into the wireless network that he had expected to be present, this being a lab, after all.

Meanwhile, the Irishman had gone back around the corner, in order to give himself time to deal with the test subjects; if he shot at them only once they'd turned the corner, he'd quickly be swarmed under. Particularly since it seemed that the enemy were slightly harder to kill than they'd expected; half of the enemies they'd dealt with during their progression down the detention corridor were attempting to get back up again, and approaching him whether they could manage it or not. Clearly, only outright kill shots would do.

O'Reilly began spraying his assault rifle on fully automatic fire, in order to stall them and buy himself time to bring them down more permanently, bringing up his single shot pistol for the finishing rounds. Even as it was, the twisted, warped creatures continued to approach in unnerving numbers, and the Irishman prioritised the enemies that were sufficiently intact to be a serious threat; the ones that could run were the ones that he focussed on.

This meant that as the upright ones managed to get almost within striking distance of him, he failed to notice the wretched batarian test subject dragging itself towards him, it's legs non-functional, but otherwise still perfectly capable of doing damage...

O'Reilly almost collapsed from sheer shock when he felt a sharp stabbing, ripping pain in his left leg, glanced down, and saw that one of those things had bitten him, was tearing at his leg. The marine retched, thankful that his last meal had been quite some time ago, so that his stomach was empty, yanked his leg out of the disgusting creature's grasp, and opened fire on it with both of his guns, practically shredding it, but failing to stop when it was dead.

He screamed hysterically as he fired, oblivious of the presence of the other test subjects as they swarmed him, until they blocked his line of sight from the target of his retribution.

At that point, he realised his peril-

And felt a foreign hand yank him back off of his feet, simultaneously confiscating his rifle, buying himself some breathing space with a brutal kick to the creature immediately in front of him, his combat boot actually caving the creature's chest in, and sending it back at the feet of its fellow monstrosities, giving him time to bring the gun he held to bear and unleashing merciless bursts into the skull of every creature that he could see, until only those that could do little more than crawl remained.

Hastily, Shepard treated the foul mess that the creature had made of the vulnerable section of O'Reilly's calf with medigel, before dragging the man to his feet and shoving him around the corner ahead of him, so that the Corporal could turn to bring the rifle to bear again and act as a rearguard. They retreated through the door that Shepard had hacked, then the infiltrator instructed it to close against their pursuers, ensuring their safety for the time being.

They advanced to find themselves faced with the main lab area, complete with microscopes, data terminals... and large numbers of clearly upset batarian scientists, all of them apparently armed, and reinforced with somewhat better equipped security forces. The Two took cover behind work benches, and returned fire.

Some of the scientists appeared to be preparing to evacuate, Shepard noted. Under the cover of fire from the security personnel, they were taking samples of their work, and appeared to be wiping the drives of the data terminals... and deploying explosives...

"O'Reilly; our time frame for a possible victory just shrank. They're deploying erasers." An 'eraser' does exactly what it sounds like; it erases. In a military context, this tends to involve large amounts of strategically placed high explosive. O'Reilly swore, and rose up out of cover to unleash a barrage of fire at the scientists, forcing them into cover, but really doing little more than slowing them down.

However, this provided Shepard with an opportunity. The Irishman's actions resulted in him becoming the target of choice for the batarians trying to provide cover for the cleanup squad. As a result, Shepard had a clear route out of cover to gain access to the scientists, which he promptly took, vaulting the workbench and immediately opening fire to keep those that would delay him out of the way. He got in amongst the scientists, shot one at point blank range, and dealt another a crippling blow to the neck, before seizing the one that had been collecting the samples and the copies of the data on the terminals, spinning him around, and using his valuable torso as a human shield. To help get his point across, he put a gun to the alien's head.

"Stand down." He instructed. After a moment, the batarians complied.

"Drop your weapons; slide them over to my comrade." They hesitated, he shot one of them before returning the gun to his shield's head; they obeyed.

"Thanks. Now, I'm afraid I only really need one captive to question, so, O'Reilly, if you wouldn't mind..."

The Irishman opened fire; batarians howled with rage, dived for cover, ran for their weapons. In any case, within seconds, the only remaining living batarian was Shepard's hostage.

"Well, now that we're alone... let's have those collectables that you seemed to think were so valuable." Shepard suggested. The batarian snorted.

"Why should I? I'm loyal to the Hegemony, human."

"And if you comply, you can continue to be loyal to the Hegemony, whereas if you do not, I shall simply have to remove said items of interest from your corpse. It doesn't actually make that much of a difference to me, but I would have thought that to you it might make some difference..."

The batarian put the samples and the data storage unit in a holdall that O'Reilly slung over a shoulder.

"Thank you kindly, good sir. Now, perhaps you would be obliging enough to enlighten us as to what you and yours were doing here."

"Yes, and tell us where our comrades are." The Irishman butted in, glaring at both of them. Shepard's fingers started to itch for his Karpov.

"You'll have to kill me before I tell you anything-and my knowledge is one thing you can't extract from my corpse." The batarian answered defiantly.

"Would you care to place a wager on that?" Shepard enquired ominously, an anticipatory gleam in his eyes. He didn't enjoy torture as such; he wasn't a sadist, but it made for a puzzle like no other... and the batarian's stoicism was aggravating.

He drew his stiletto, twirled it expertly, flipping it round and round with small movements of his fingers, as others might fidget with a pen. The movement of the matt black carbon was hypnotic.

Shepard considered his solution to the puzzle of how to get his captive to provide the necessary information as quickly as possible without pushing him too far. He recalled that, like humans, batarians have two kidneys, and that around them are a large number of nerve endings. He also recalled that batarians are significantly less prone to shock than humans.

Without any further ado, he placed his blade exactly over the spot of flesh that he intended to puncture, and, ever so gradually, eased the sharp blade in, slowly notching up the agony for the alien by twisting the blade. The scientist groaned, teeth gritted, as his blood flowed out around the puncture, but managed to grit out

"You'll have to do better than that..."

Shepard ripped the blade from the wound, opening it further, and allowing the blood to gush forth in a torrent; he had ruptured a key artery. He drew his pistol, and, worried; the Irishman stepped forward, before the psychopath pulled the trigger rapidly into one of the corpses, until his weapon overheated. He placed it over the batarian's wound, and vented the weapon by partially disassembling it, and cauterised the alien's wound, being careful to inflict as much superficial damage as he could through the action. The scientist screamed once, then, his voice carrying an oddly shrill note for a batarian, he grunted out "No-no-won't tell you-"

Shepard was impressed by his foe's resistance, making the puzzle more interesting, if more inconvenient. Subtlety was all well and good, but when time was an issue, perhaps he needed to be a little more... obvious. Privately, he wished for a little music, but doubted that O'Reilly would approve of the tribute to the 'old masters' of the art.

"Four eyes... they're the trademark of your race, really, aren't they? Do you really need all of them?" Shepard enquired in a conversational tone, as he almost absently cleaned his knife. "What quirk of evolution led to them becoming dominant in your species? What advantage do they confer over those of us with only one pair of eyes? And, perhaps most importantly at present, just how sensitive are they, hmm?" He poised his knife over the first eye, the smaller upper left eye, deciding on gradually building up to the main pair.

The batarian squirmed, flinching, trying to turn his head away, to shut his eyes, struggling compulsively to get away from the slowly approaching blade.

"O'Reilly, would you mind holding his head still?" Shepard asked, in a somewhat cavalier tone of voice.

Uneasily, the marine complied. He was a closet xenophobe, especially when it came to batarians, Shepard decided, but it didn't seem to switch his sense of morality off entirely. Inconvenient; this would serve to turn him against his superior still further, despite the obvious necessity of his actions.

The batarian was practically delirious with fear as the blade resumed its belaboured approach towards his eye, gradually growing larger and larger in his vision, consuming his world until that was all that seemed to remain; the hand and the terrifying blade it wielded. The knife slid in, the batarian started to scream and hyperventilate simultaneously as the blade displaced the soft optical matter that was practically a viscous liquid, and it oozed out around the blade to run down the captive's face and collect in the socket of his lower left eye. Shepard stopped when he reached the back of the socket, resisted the strange temptation to 'tickle' the retinal nerves with the point of his blade, and, as gradually as he had inserted it, removed the blade.

When he did, the batarian gasped and sobbed, shaking violently as the blood and gore slowly traced a viscous path down his face.

"This would be an appropriate moment to stop this." Shepard stated quietly, put in a peculiar, pensive mood by the process. "You've performed admirably lasting this long, most wouldn't. Allow me to ease the pain." The batarian didn't respond. Shepard sighed, raised the knife, and began to repeat the process on the other eye of the upper pair. The blade approached again, was a mere millimetre for the eye, actually touched it-

The batarian screamed out one word, his voice filled with pain, despair and anguish. "STOP!"

Shepard immediately complied, and gave the alien a mild anaesthetic to keep him coherent. He wasn't worried about the batarian regaining his resolve. Torture was as much psychological warfare as anything, and taking something as fundamental as a sentient's eye whilst they watched was a memory that would persuade them as effectively as the process itself.

"Thank you. First things first, what was the purpose of your experiments here?"

"To-to find applications for the new technologies the Hegemony has discovered on archaeological sites." The batarian said hoarsely.

"Sites related to the Protheans?"

"No; from a civilisation at least a billion years old, and far more advanced than all other known civilisations, including the Protheans. One of the technologies discovered gave the possibility of circumventing 'free will' in a far more efficient, cheap and reliable manner than a neural control chip. That became the focus of our experiments here. Other technologies, perhaps even more powerful, have been uncovered, but-"

"Yes?"

"They're so advanced as to be almost entirely incomprehensible, even to our race's greatest scientific minds. And-"

"And?"

"Despite the potential for advancement, we have had to be cautious. The data is in the records, but the technology... has had an effect on those performing the experiments as well as those participating."

"Where did these technologies come from? Specifically?"

"Most-all- were found on board the Leviathan."

"The Leviathan?"

"A ship, the likes of which have never been seen elsewhere in the galaxy. It was taken by one of our dreadnoughts from the Dis system."

"And have you developed any other technologies to operational status the way you did the neural control technology?"

"No. We haven't had time-you damned humans interfered too soon. But don't worry. We still have the Leviathan; you cannot stop our ascension, and your subsequent destruction."

"We'll see. And what of the earlier squad that attacked these labs?"

"We unleashed the test subjects on them. Once you destroyed the comms tower, they were out of control briefly before the signal reached us again from Command. They went berserk, and killed all but one of them. We have him in the interrogation sub-block. He's been there quite a while now..."

The anaesthetic was wearing off, the batarian's breathing was deepening, and Shepard now had the information he required from the scientist.

"Thank you for your eventual cooperation." He shot the batarian in the head, a quick death, if not technically clean.

"Let's get Kyle and then raze this place." Shepard said to O'Reilly. Together, they left the room and went to find their Commanding Officer.