Beta-read by Saberlin.
-J-
Shepard prowled about as best she could in the clunky, insulating suit of armor. It felt like wearing a rapid transit bus, but at least it meant she shouldn't pop any more of those weird biogel packs.
She staunched the inward shudder at the thought of the packs and what they represented quite easily. The reality confronting her was worse, far worse. She had expected, when she understood she was facing an abducted colony, something like Mindoir. She expected smoking ruins, damages, weapon marks all over the place, corpses, low-hanging fumes and clouds of smoke (though this last bit had more to do with the imagination than probability).
It was nothing like that, and her preconceived notions had her braced for all the wrong things. She expected flashbacks, little flickers of memory to shred into her mind like broken glass or fragments of shrapnel, for her own experiences to overlay themselves, to make her feel as if she was back there all over again.
It was nothing like Mindoir, nothing like any nightmare scene she could have conceived.
It was far worse.
The air hung cold, cold enough that the team's breaths froze on the air in little white puffs. The sky above was cloudy, though, and as she disembarked from the Kodiak it began to snow gently. "Should it be this cold?" she asked, more to break the oppressive silence than anything else. For all the sharp clarity of the air, the perception was that everything was frozen: that all the empty space before her was simply very clear glass, a solid, not a gas.
"Within normal parameters for this time of year," came Miranda's brisk answer.
Shepard nodded once to show she heard and moved forward, a sense of dread lodging in her stomach. She knew, now, that she would find no survivors. It was not like being on any ghost ship she had ever encountered; it was not like the Cerberus station where she first woke up. She knew with every ounce of instinct she possessed that there was not one human left. Not one wounded adult, not one terrified child.
She moved into the first prefab she came across, waving Miranda and Jacob to fan out.
The prefab looked like the set of a horror movie: a meal lay on a table ready to eat—but the food had gone bad. The heater was still running, the lights were all on. It was as if everyone had suddenly vanished, their corporeal forms turning to smoke on the air.
She'd expected a surge of feelings, of anger, of pain for others who suddenly had a share in some of the most miserable of her experiences…
…except that this was outside her experiences. There was no anger, there was no pain, just a sense of confusion and cold resolution.
Napkins had slid to the floor—which meant something had happened. No struggle, but certainly some manipulation of the humans who lived here. Why had no one fought back? Glancing to the door, she found shoes lined up in neat pairs—several pairs obviously belonged to young boys.
There were no signs of the typical last stand of adults protecting children.
It was unnatural. All of it, everything here, was unnatural in a way that made her teeth ache. Nothing was right, and for a moment Shepard had to wonder if she wasn't dead, or in a coma where all the strange events of the past few weeks were just…bad dreams.
But she knew better. Not even her jaded imagination could conceive the scene of a mass abduction that was so…sterile...yet so believable. Scenes of brutality she could imagine, even deal with, but this…
No blood spatter or structural damages, so obviously conventional (or unconventional) weapons were out. It lacked everything that, in her experience, defined what it was to be taken away by force.
How had the humans been immobilized? There should have been some resistance. Such things were hardwired into most members of most species. When threatened with death some humans might cave in, but some would fight, particularly if children were present.
Was it an inhalant, then?
Drugs in the water? No, those would take too long.
How? Not even a token attempt at defensive behaviors, or the table might have been knocked around, or the place settings would have been jarred past hastily set-down flatware.
She turned in a slow circle, looking for something, anything that might give her a clue as to what…
Shepard's breath caught, a loud sound in the silence, and she knelt to pick up the dark shadow, just out of the reach of the light in a doorframe. Here it was, the only evidence of fear. This would never have been cast away except in great joy or greater terror.
In this case it was terror. It gave her an idea of the direction from which the threat came: moving from the end of the prefab through which she came back to this spot.
She regarded the artifact in her hand—a hand suddenly shaky—as she rose. Jacob's heavy footsteps gave her a moment's warning, enough time to compose her expression into calm neutrality.
His eyes fell to the object in her hand and he suddenly looked as though someone had put him on the spot. He opened his mouth, but Shepard shook her head. "There's nothing to say about it. This whole thing is…unnatural. In the worst possible way."
"Looks like everyone just got up and left in the middle of dinner," Jacob noted to Miranda as she came in. His tone bore the same deep unease that pooled in Shepard's stomach.
Shepard said nothing but found the sleeping area that looked most likely to belong with the artifact in her hand. Leaning over, she laid the teddy bear—dropped by terrified hands—on the lower bunk, head cradled on the pillow, drooping quizzically to one side on a flimsy neck.
It seemed to ask 'where's my boy?'