Chapter 12: Known Unknowns

Author's Note: This week was even worse. I didn't have time to proofread this chapter, sorry. Please let me know if you spot any typos or other errors and I'll fix it when I get back. I'm taking the rest of October off to recover. Updates will resume in November.

Ash glanced around the table, everyone but the Old Man had a drink, crucially they had the right drinks, as with the exception of her and Kohrvan, anyone mixing up drinks was going to end up in the hospital, or the morgue. Though Shalira was levo, like Humans and Batarians, not dextro, like Quarians, Viper's alcohol contained various additives that bonded with alcohol in their stomachs and melted other sapients' stomachs. Without those additives, even a beer's worth of alcohol would give a Viper alcohol poisoning. The potential death if you grabbed the wrong glass gave getting drunk that little frisson of excitement that made it just a bit more fun.

Shalira fortunately wasn't eating, as that was a disturbing sight for everyone, but the rest of them were snacking on bar food. Chora's Den wasn't a very nice place, but that suited their mood and no one was dumb enough to bother five Combine soldiers drinking together and obviously in a bad mood.

Well, one person had been that dumb and that drunk, but after Maale's pull had turned him into a floating, puking missile, no one else had tried to bother them. It had made it a little tricky to get service, but that was easily resolved with cash and angry glares (which had also respectively attracted, then repelled one of the dancers).

"This is bullshit," Kohrvan said, after a lengthy discussion of the quality of the bar's snacks and how they compared to other snacks in other bars.

"Just because you don't understand how good raw meat can be with the appropriate lubricants—" Shalira began.

"Not what I mean," Kohrvan interrupted the Viper before she could resume waxing poetically about the pleasures of eating all your food for a day in a single, distended and disturbing, bite. "The Council grabbed up Liara and the Combine grabbed up Shepard. Everyone who saw—" Ash kicked her under the table and the Batarian swallowed her words and rephrased, "that stuff is in custody. And they just kick us loose, after relieving us of our responsibility for the Zorah heir? Seriously? That makes sense to you?"

"It's SOP for Sentinel Squads to stand down when the protectee is within another secure perimeter. Prevents conflicts of loyalty and gives the squad some downtime. If you're worried, just check with Geth," Ash said levelly.

"You can call me paranoid if you want, but it sure as dirt isn't SOP for a Sentinel Corps lieutenant commander get dragged off in cuffs."

"You're paranoid," Ash began, intending to argue it was SOP when someone else had been in your head.

"It's SOP for Shepard, anytime Wrex or his boys get near, or any other time Service Security gets a hair up their butt," the Old Man said, voice echoing slightly as he watched over the drinking officers with the benevolent calm of a family patriarch. He made it about halfway through his explanation of the younger man's family history before Kohrvan exploded out of her seat, literally pounding the table, prompting stares and an explosion of smaller snacks.

"I fucking knew it! I told you, it's just like the bullshit I have to deal with all the time! 'Everyone knows Batarians don't have the patience for defense, why don't you go join the Vanguard Corps?' Fucking racist mother-fuckers!"

"Their concernsss about Sssshepard are based on bloodline, not racccce," Shalira countered, swaying slightly, though her increasing incapacity was more audible than visible as her esses elongated when she was drunk. She focused somewhat, "Besides, it makes sense to me. Family loyalty isn't an easy thing to let go of."

"That's bull—" Kohrvan began, repeating herself, only to be cut off by beeping coming from five omni-tools at once as the Geth broke in. That alarm produced instant silence from everyone at the table.

"Members of Sentinel Squad 0193, C-Sec has issued an alert to bring Commander Shepard into custody. They do not have a location on him. We do. He entered Service Corridor 337-Alpha approximately 13 minutes ago. All security is down in the service corridors of that ward, but we are transmitting the most efficient route from that entrance to the Service Security central station."

The squad was rising and moving, though both Ash and the Old Man checked to confirm that the Geth had informed the rest of the Combine about the problem, as they didn't want to be trying to solve it, half-drunk, unarmored, unarmed and alone.

XXXXX

"Patroller, I owe you an apology. You were correct, this situation is indeed literally FUBAR," Garrus Vakarian said to the C-Sec officer who'd escorted him to the extremely tense crime scene.

The massive Asari Spectre facing down Donnel Udina, the Combine ambassador, there in person, surrounded by his personal guards, was a highlight. More worrisome were the half-potted Sentinel squad drifting into the C-Sec guards' personal space so they'd be able to 'borrow' C-Sec weapons if this went as bad as it was looking like it might. The squad of Asari commandos, escorting a Turian psionic, sent by Matriarch Benezia to keep her daughter from being mind probed by bringing back the Human to undergo it in her place were just irritants and the C-Sec guards were mostly under his command (except for Psi-Investigator and her team). The heavily armed and armored squad from Lawson Industries, escorting their CEO who were actually standing over the pair of Humans who'd started all this nonsense were the immediate problem, as they'd bulled their way past the first responders and refused to give way.

Codex: C-Sec Psionic Team, Unlocked.

At that point, the corpses and shattered surroundings were just window dressing. The two Humans at the center of this nightmarish scene were on the ground, one's hands wrapped around the other's throat and head.

"Yes, sir," the patroller agreed with a smirk which made clear how glad she was that solving this situation wasn't her responsibility.

Garrus took a deep breath and stepped forward. "All right, everyone, we," he waved at himself, the Spectre, C-Sec officers and Asari commandos," want to bring Commander Shepard to the Council's investigators, alive and with his mind intact. You," he pointed at the Combine ambassador and the Setninel squad," want to take him to your own security," the Sentinels twitched in a way which suggested that might not be true, "alive and intact. You," he turned to the Lawson Industries folks, "I don't know what you want, but I assume it includes him alive and intact, or else you'd have killed him before the rest of us got here. So, since we all agree that he needs to be fixed, all the psionics are going to go over there and fix him, while the rest of us get out of the way and let the crime scene techs see if there's any evidence at all left here, now that we've all marched through here. When that's done, we'll figure out what to do with him. If anyone has a problem with that, I really don't care, because I've got three platoons of Special Response Division officers with brand new guns outside who really want a chance to see what they can do."

A moment of silence greeted that. Garrus continued even more menacingly. "Of course, if any one of us didn't want the commander's mind to come out of this intact, well, delaying us all like this would be a good way to do it. But none of you want that, right?" his implicit, and unsubtle accusation landed as it began to occur to folks that, if he really believed it, then he might really mean it when he said he'd unleash the goons of the Special Response Division on them.

There was a certain amount of awkward shuffling and 'don't you know who I am'-ing, but everyone was moving in the right direction, so he ignored it. He intended to be the last person out of the room, but the CEO of Lawson Industries tried to remain behind, even as her guards trickled out.

"You too, ma'am," he said sharply.

"I'll stay with the other psionics, thank you," she replied without bothering to look at him. In fact, he noticed, she hadn't bothered to take her eyes off the frozen pair for the entire time he'd been in the area.

A quick glance at the Psi-Investigator got him a brief nod confirming she really was a psionic and Garrus retreated out of the corridor to clear the way for the crime scene techs, who skewed heavily Salarian and were already muttering bitterly to one another about clod-footed biglings who stomped all over everything without any concern for proper preservation of evidence. Garrus chose not to hear any of that, as people who started (or even participated in) arguments with the crime scene team tended to discover that the technicians could construct truly elaborate and diabolical practical jokes. And you weren't allowed to just shoot them in response. Especially since they didn't leave any evidence behind that they'd been involved. Only the Network Division nerds were more dreaded when it came to pranking and that was only because they controlled the Citadel's sewer system.

They shuffled out of the corridor, though each group left a soldier on the other side of the door to linger and glare at the psionics.

XXXXX

Most of the other psionics were giving Tali odd looks. Maybe they knew her, or maybe they just could feel she was a lot stronger than they were, but it was the usual nonsense. She didn't particularly want to be in command, but no one else was stepping up. Miranda was still staring at Shepard, the Turian psionic Benezia had dispatched was extremely nervous and outclassed, the Salarian Psi-Investigator was silently examining the scene and the Sentinel Corps psionic Udina had brought along was staring at Tali.

"Anyone know what he's doing?" she asked.

"We've caught a psionic attack in process," the Psi-Investigator said, watching the crime scene techs work. "Looks like a smash and grab." There were dozens of forms of psionic crimes, but the smash and grab was relatively basic, smashing the victim's mind to pieces, then grabbing the information sought out of the wreckage. It was occasionally the first step in reforming the victim's mind into something else, as a smashed mind was quite…pliant. Only extraordinary willpower, military training and the massive amounts of adrenaline that were still pumping through Shepard's system had kept his mind as intact as it was.

Codex: Psionic Crimes, Unlocked.

Shit. "Anyone have any experience with that?" Miranda asked.

"I've done some clean-up work afterwards, but I have no idea how to interfere with one that's happening," Tali said.

"No one does," the Psi-Investigator stated with a calm certainty. "We'll have to wait for him to finish, then do what we can to fix the victim."

"Unacceptable," Miranda said, before Tali could speak.

"We've had some success fixing folks up afterwards, but I don't think anyone's tried what you're talking about. The only case I know where anyone even tried the psionic caught a bullet and his victim kicked it too," the Psi-Investigator pointed out, without ceasing to hover over the crime scene techs as they worked.

"We're doing this. Who's in?" Tali said.

Benezia's and Udina's psionics looked at each other and came to an agreement that they'd ambush the assailant when he tried to retreat to his own mind and make sure they got a full copy of whatever he'd pried loose from Shepard's mind. Whatever visions the beacon had shown him where what they were after, Shepard's mind was, at best, a secondary matter.

Miranda attempted to argue that they needed the Sentinel Corp's psionic to get them through the traps in Shepard's mind, but apparently whoever the asshole attacking Shepard was, he knew how to rip those defenses apart and hadn't left anything but wisps of unpleasant thought behind in their place.

The Psi-Investigator made it clear that he was going to stay out of everyone's mind and instead observe what was going on, in the interest of helping future victims and scientific curiosity.

"I'll chase the asshole out and stabilize Shepard's mind. You get him to focus and reform his self," Tali said.

"I think you should—"

"I don't, Miri," Tali interrupted her, for the first time in the other woman's experience.

A muscle jumped in Miranda's jaw. "All right. Let's do this," She stepped forward and put a hand on Shepard's forehead, while Tali took one of the Sentinel's hands. And they began.

XXXXX

Joker's seat in the corner let him keep an eye on doors, windows and everyone else in the shitty bar on Ward 49. It was full of Humans, with the ridiculous planet Earth flag of one or another of the Human supremacist factions. He could never keep track of all of them, partly because there were quite a few of them, partly because they were almost completely inconsequential and mostly because as a Flight Officer for X-Com, he didn't have to know shit about them.

The bar was the rendezvous point his contact had chosen and he was in the right position, with the right drink and both sleeves on his shirt rolled up. So his contact should be able to find him without needing to resort to anything as unreliable as a holo. Personally, he preferred using a holo, but that was probably just because he was a Flight Officer, not Intelligence and failed to properly appreciate spycraft.

The lithe woman who approached him was definitively not his contact. He'd never seen an X-Com officer covered in tattoos, or wearing approximately half of a standard issue crewman's jumpsuit. The lower half, to be precise, though the remnants of a leather jacket kept her from violating decency laws, so long as she was very careful in her movements. Black hair jutted upwards in an impressive Mohawk and to complete the image of sheer toughness, she casually decked the first drunken idiot to take her half-dressed state as an invitation.

When she sat down across from him and propositioned him, he was surprised. Not just at the offer, though that wasn't something that happened every day, but mostly because it contained the series of code words he'd been told to keep an ear out for. He'd been wrong. She definitively was his contact. He would not have thought it was possible to work the words 'vociferous,' 'elemental,' and 'revivify' into a sexual proposition, but he'd have been wrong.

He accepted the proposition with a joke (as he had to live up to his nom de guerre) and rose, preparing to follow her out of the bar to wherever they could actually talk. It was something of a surprise when she chose to drag him by the hand into the backroom of the bar, elbowing aside a bartender who tried to get in her way and glaring down the bouncer with a flicker of biotic energy racing along her skin, raising goosebumps where it came in contact with his skin.

The heavy door slid shut and active noise cancellation activated, blocking out all noise from outside the room. After she made an actual pass at him which he delicately declined, she slid the data-storage device into his pocket, stole his belt and shoved him out the door with an insulting comment about his performance.

Blushing despite himself, Joker made his retreat back to the Pillowtalk, docked separately from the Ghost under a temporary id as the CMV Alpha, a courier ship. That almost fit the profile of the small vessel and with the guns retracted everyone was pretending that it wasn't an X-Com hunter-killer.

The data chip slid into the reader in PT's bridge, and demanded a passcode, which his contact had not given him. A quick quantum entanglement communicator call to HQ later and he had the password, which unlocked the data on the storage device.

He didn't notice that because it also shut down his ship, unlocking the airlock and let his contact make her way inside with the use of heavy biotics and a magnetic manipulator to handle the physical locks without cutting, or breaking them. It still took her several minutes to make her way to the bridge, where Joker was desperately attempting to get the Pillowtalk to work, or at least wake up the Geth who lived inside her computer systems.

"Relax, Joker, everything will turn back on in twenty minutes, and all the Geth will know is that they were temporarily deactivated at the order of the Commander," the contact said, standing in the entryway to the bridge startling the X-Com officer out from under the console he'd been working under (though not without him barking his head off the edge in a painful, but not debilitating manner).

Joker was a bit grumpy about that and even grumpier about her presence and yet more grumpy still that he still hadn't managed to reclaim his pistol from wherever PT had hidden it. He didn't manage to hit completely furious until a wave of her hand lifted him off the ground and she pressed some device against his skull, easily batting aside his defensive movements. It beeped and pressed tight on his head, then pulled away, beeping in a more positive manner.

"Congratulations! You aren't a slave of the Hegemony." the woman said, pulling the device from his head and letting him fall to the ground.

"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? AND WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO PT?"

Joker's contact was glad she'd shut the door behind her. "We need to have a little talk about things the Geth isn't cleared to know. Most of what you need is on that disc and will be revealed, but," a hand set down active noise cancellation and a broad-spectrum bug detector, "but there's some bits it's not cleared for."

Joker managed not to ask how he knew this wasn't a trap. QEC's couldn't be intercepted and he'd gotten the codes for the single use, quantum-encrypted chip from the Commander's office. The codes to shut down PT had to have come from there as well.

"Speak," he commanded, voice low.

"Ooooh, so commanding and growly."

Joker's glare contained less amusement than usual.

"All right, no time to waste. Following the worst military disaster in Combine history, X-Com had a little bit of a problem. The sudden appearance of the Hegemony superdreadnought took everyone by surprise, but everyone wasn't in charge of external intelligence and security, we were. And we'd missed it completely."

"Yes, thank you, I studied that cluster-fuck in flight school. Not that there's a maneuver which solves the 'oh my god a superdreadnought we didn't know existed has dropped out behind your fleet which was maneuvering to cut off the Hegemony from the Kite's Nest Relay."

"Yes, yes, bad news all around, Combine fleet trapped—"

"No they weren't FUCKING trapped. It could have run easily, except that command chose casualties over retreat. With full support from the X-Com advisors on-site," Joker snapped.

"You can keep delaying, but if we get to the part where your Geth wakes up without me telling you what I need to tell you, I'll just put it back under."

Joker settled somewhat at that threat and the sheer pointlessness of further delay.

"Fine. And this all has what to do with your scary brain-beeper?"

"That I'll explain when your Geth is up. The point here is that the battle was a disaster. The newly appointed Commander assigned nine senior Field Commanders the task of figuring out what the fuck happened. Where the superdreadnought had come from, why they hadn't known about it and what exactly its capabilities were."

"So what?"

"So, they spent the next twenty years of the Commander's tenure doing nasty shit to try to find answers."

"What sort of nasty shit?"

"Okay, so you know that the Battle of the Relay was supposed to be X-Com's crowning moment. Our allies amongst the slaves and lower caste Hegemony sailors had sabotaged the fleet's GARDIAN systems. Their main batteries still worked, but we had a whole fleet of boarding craft prepared. We were going to capture their entire fleet and use it, crewed by former slaves to capture the Kite's Nest."

"Yes, yes, the Batarians liberate themselves, we're just helpful allies. Except it didn't work and we used up that entire fleet launching a ridiculous suicidal assault on the superdreadnought to no real effect except a couple of ships plowing straight into it."

"Except, no. We got several hundred soldiers onboard, they managed to sabotage some portions of the ship. Shame we hadn't brought along any nukes, or we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. The key point here is that most of the folks who got on and all the psionics, went nuts and started killing each other. We got five soldiers off before the ship got away and they were very nuts. Vivisecting them was how the team figure out the little doodad I used on you a moment ago, to look for that unique form of mind control."

"Not nice, but I don't know that I'd call it nasty shit. They were volunteers and under alien mind control," Joker argued, not terribly surprised that some bits of the history he'd been taught were bullshit, though since this change made X-Com appear less incompetent and was coming from an X-Com partisan, he wasn't entirely sure he believed it.

"Yeah, well, they noticed that the damage done to the minds of the soldiers wasn't like what you see when a psionic controls your mind. Which isn't real surprising, given how hard it is for a psionic to control another psionic, yet all our boys and girls got mind controlled. Instead it was more like domination."

Joker just blinked at her. "If you pull out a riding crop, I'm telling HR."

"Funny. It's an ability which was only seen in Ardat-Yakshi."

"Which are?"

"Which were Asari who suffered from a genetic illness. They were almost all cured after first contact and a few, large, purchases of Meld. Major early propaganda success for the Combine."

"Okay, well, if they were mostly all cured, then there were some survivors working with or enslaved by the Hegemony. So what?"

"Well, first, dominate isn't magic, you need close proximity, which they certainly didn't have for almost thirty shuttles, breaching from different areas. Second, it's only sorta close to the effects of domination and thirdly, there were never that many Ardat-Yakshi and they weren't trustworthy allies, or safe slaves. Anyway, the point here is that this team went looking for Ardat-Yakshi, but didn't find any. Hardly a surprise as any who are left have been hiding for eighty years."

"And here I thought we were in a hurry. Is there any chance of you coming to a point anytime soon?"

"So, it occurred to them, anything which can be done by Meld, can be undone by Meld and there's a big ol' market full of Asari slaves in the Terminus…"

"Aw. Shit," Joker picked up her thread and decided he didn't actually want her to finish her story.

"Nasty shit," she agreed.

"Okay, fine. What's all this got to do with me?"

"So this team, investigating the superdreadnought you just saw, goes on happily for twenty years being murderous assholes and recruiting other murderous assholes to their band of murderous fucking assholes. Then the Commander kicks it, right in the middle of the Sarai scandal."

The revelation that X-Com had provided a safe harbor for slavers in exchange for information on Geth positions in the Terminus had been extraordinarily damaging to the organization, especially coming immediately after claims from the Council that X-Com had been providing Meld, money and information to the Krogan. Joker nodded as he actually remembered that from his own childhood, barely.

"X-Com went through several interim Commanders, then the current Commander was finally appointed, from outside X-Com altogether. So, without any information, or experience, it takes for-fucking-ever to get a handle on the job. Finally, a member of this team comes to visit, eight years in, when things are finally, sort of, under control and say 'hey here's this huge secret program inside your secret organization and we've been doing nasty shit for decades, aren't we awesome?' And the Commander says, 'no, stop it,' and they say, 'but Commander, look at all this progress we've made,' and the Commander say, 'that's nice, now stop it,' and they say, 'but consider the danger,' and the Commander says, 'we can address that without doing this nasty shit,' and they say, 'no we can't,' and the Commander says—"

"Yes, we can?" Joker suggested.

"Right, so it goes on like that for a while. Finally the Commander gives a flat out order, 'stop it, your task force is decommissioned,' to which they said 'no.'"

Joker jumped ahead about five steps. "So we've got a rogue X-Com unit, probably with ties still inside the organization, probably on its way to question me and the others, but don't worry, because the tattooed lady is here to protect me?"

"Oh, fuck no."

"Thank—you're about to say you aren't here to protect me, aren't you?" Joker asked.

"Stepped on my punch line there."

"Well, shit."

"Nasty shit," she agreed.

"Fine. So you're here, alone, to hunt other X-Com agents. Okay, fine, whatever. What do you need from me, since I expect this data file has orders for me to assist you however I can."

"It does. Nothing much, I'll just hang around until they show up."

"Then defeat an entire X-Com unit on your own?"

She smiled, "I doubt it will be an entire unit, but yes."

"Fine. Okay. Whatever. One last question."

"Yes?"

"What's your name?"

"Jack."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously, Joker."

"All right then. One more last question. What's next?"

"Explain all of this except the murderous assholes bit to your Geth and then get back to work, of course."

"Of course."

XXXXX

A psionic sees one of two things in the mind of another, memory or metaphor. The memories belong to the mind of the host, while the metaphor belongs to the mind of the psionic. Tali's metaphor was always a starship. She might have been more skilled if her metaphor had been more organic, but that wasn't how her mind worked. The pieces of that shattered ship floated in an endless black void. She could see how she might pull them back together, but knew that for the trap it was, that would be reshaping Shepard's mind to fit her perceptions of him, nothing more or less. Instead she held every shattered, broken piece of the ship in place and traced the man who was attempting to pull them further apart, with approximately as much success as a child attempting to pull a toy from the grip of a full grown Viper (this image brought to you by her time spent being babysat by Commander Issar-Volum, leader of her father's bodyguards). A flicker of a thought was enough to shove the weaker psionic out of Shepard's mind. It was good that was all it took, because it turned out that holding every fragment of a man's mind in place against entropy, fear and his own will was a lot harder than she'd expected.

Miranda's metaphor was somewhat more organic, but not that much, as Shepard's mind appeared to her as a massive shattered glass statue of the soldier in single giant room of a museum. It was relatively easy to find the center of Shepard's remaining will, as it centered the most intact portion of the glass. She could hear his mind focusing on a single mantra and the reminder of who he was.

"I am a soldier of the Combine. I am the sentinel who never sleeps. I am the shield which never breaks. While I live, the Combine will not fall. While I live, the Treaty will not be broken. While I live, those I protect are safe from all harm. I am a Sentinel."

The Sentinel Corps creed was not a particularly pretty piece of prose, but it was one Shepard could repeat in his sleep, in fact he had done so, during training and occasionally since. The sentinel was standing in a glass ball of his memories, the strongest ones, which would come to him regardless of how little he wanted them to. Embarrassment, lust, pain, pride, fear, betrayal and loss. She could see flashes of them all surrounding them, including herself a few times.

"John," she whispered.

He turned, saw her and remembered. She remembered through him.

Blood on the walls, the ceiling, the floor, both of them and everyone else in the area. The look on Miri's face, disgust as she saw what he'd done in his rage, in his loss of control. No. That was wrong. It wasn't disgust she'd been feeling, it was surprise. She'd been trained by the best and hadn't known it was possible to do that with biotics. Shame. It hit her with the force of a throw to the chest and she forced herself not to correct him.

Her own hand extended, smile on her beautiful face as she pointed out that his assignment was over and no anti-fraternization regulations prevented them from doing…anything at all. All he had to do was say yes. She shuddered. I want her. The lust she felt was an echo of her own remembered emotion, but she couldn't let them leak together, that would be a horrible violation of his mind and will.

The throw impacted his shoulder at full force, not the quarter-strength usually used while sparing and he felt the pop and agony of the joint sliding free of the socket. Eyes flicked up to see Miranda standing over him in her workout clothes, the metal of her cybernetics plainly visible on her bare midriff. "Shouldn't underestimate me just cause I'm a crip," she smirked and the blue glow around her hands swung towards his unprotected head. Pain. But he dodged that, threw me into a wall and then explained he was just tired from having night watch, nothing else. I apologized for jumping to conclusions and put his shoulder back in. All true, but that was not this memory, this was a memory of being hurt by someone he trusted because she didn't trust him.

Her glare at her father was fire and fury. She stripped him of his control, his allies, his wealth with nothing more than the force of her personality. And the platoon of Vanguard Corps troops at my back. There was no hesitation at all as she did the hard, necessary thing to fix the harm her father had done. There was plenty of hesitation. She'd been fucking terrified of the man all her—Pride. Unearned, he didn't have anything to do with her actions—untrue—but he was still proud. That she could revel in, even as a part of her shriveled at how badly he'd misread her. But it wasn't something she could fix.

The shot hit her square in the chest. She went down. FEAR. She shook as pride was swept away. He was over her, looking down, fear had not yet turned to fury and would not. There wasn't any blood. It was just an EMP, short out the cybernetics-reveal my weakness-slow them down, but she didn't look scared, or hurt, just pissed. And alive. The relief at that was a lake of cold water on burning skin.

"I see why you like her, Johnnie, what Human boy doesn't grow up wanting a remote control Barbie? You don't mind lending me her remote some night, do you?" Commander Liva'Ran's voice was lascivious and pointed as she sought to provoke a reaction from him. RAGE. He kept his face still. RAGE. He rose. Gunnery Sergeant Ravel rose as well to get between the two officers, but he slipped past the larger man and let his voice drop to a level that was just barely audible. "Do you think the Combine would pay for implants like hers for you if there were to be a terrible accident and you took a warp to the base of your spine? Or would you decline rather than be turned into a…what was the phrase? Remote-controlled Barbie?" She met his eyes and smiled. "Relax, I was just testing you. It's good to see you have some fire in you after all, Johnnie." RAGE. But he didn't react when she walked into the room, a moment later she remembered that moment, she'd actually thought Liva was flirting with him in that moment. Now she knew how badly she'd misinterpreted that. She couldn't think of a time words had provoked such a strong reaction in herself. More memories came, faster and faster, only fragments touching her.

She collapsed, convulsing, mind trapped in an artificial moment of agony. Though, he remembered, the agony had not been artificial, but he had experienced it for only a moment, to permit the trap to be created. She was stuck in it. He should have felt pity, but he didn't. She'd tried to pry inside his mind, violate it, for her own curiosity, which he would have slaked if she'd just asked the question, but she didn't. She couldn't trust him, or anyone. The betrayal stung worse than the minor pain of ejecting her mind from his. Speak for yourself. That fucking hurt.

He'd said no and saw she wouldn't ask again. He'd offended her pride, probably convinced her he cared about the implants, or the genetic mods, or that he hadn't really forgiven her for her stupid insecure bullshit. That wasn't it at all. But he'd lost her, forever in that one word and all the stammered explanations afterwards couldn't make that right. It wasn't that big a fucking deal, I made the offer, you said no, that was the end of it. Loss. It brought tears to her eyes, but she controlled herself, forced herself away from the memories, the exhausting, exhilarating history of the year they'd worked together, told from a perspective she'd never truly seen and looked at the man behind it all.

He was exhausted and fraying around the edges, like a running watercolor. She tried to reach him and suddenly found herself trapped in a glass bubble of his memories of her, shunted aside and away as his mind clawed out trying to pull its fragmented self into some sort of order. The damage he would do to himself trying to fix his own mind would be almost as bad as that his assailant had done trying to destroy it. Tali wouldn't let him do that, but he was wasting energy on that while she was trapped in a bubble which she didn't dare shatter for fear of making him forget her altogether.

He wasn't thinking, merely reacting and only his most powerful memories remained with him, under his control. Maybe she could build from that, she could see how the pieces should fit together, how they should come together into a single whole. She could make him strong again, whole again.

No. She could make a strong, whole thing out of the pieces of him. Only he could make himself whole again. She knew that. If nothing else, her father had taught her that.

She focused her will and slid through the glass as if she was vibrating at precisely the right frequency. It was his mind, but her metaphor and she was the psionic. She slid closer and evaded the instinctive ambush this time.

"I'm going to try something Tali, let him move the stuff around, one at a time, all right?"

"Understood."

"John, focus on me. Remember how we met?"

The memory flashed by so fast she couldn't get more than a blurred impression of irritation at needing to work with a corporate suit, even a pretty one. "Then what?" she asked.

More memories flashed past, quick as thought, then they were flowing together into a single unified story. They met, fought, learned to work together, won and went their separate ways. A cohesive tale, if told only from a single limited viewpoint.

"But how did you become the man I met?" she asked. Those memories moved too fast for her to see at all and he formed not the massive glass statue of a man as she'd thought, but was a glass sculpture all along the walls of the museum, a band of shimmering glass circling round and round, narrower and narrower as it approached the floor and the past, telling the tale of his life, his ancestors, all the things which had shaped him. "And what did you do after you left?"

The glass sculpture rose, growing wider and wider as it approached the present, then stopped with the smoothness of polished glass at this moment, when she came for him, pulled away his tormentor and saved him, just as he'd saved her, once upon a time.

The glass wasn't real, it was just a metaphor. Her mind putting meaning and beauty on his. But that wasn't what she saw. What she saw was the route she'd almost taken. What would he have become if she'd turned all this glittering sculpture into a statue?

She opened her eyes and stepped back to find Tali had already released him and was with the others, examining the psionic who'd attacked Shepard. Emotions still hot from contact with his, she rose in a fury, only to find the man was dead, brains leaking from his ears and nose, apparently liquefied, though she had no idea how that could have happened.

That the Psi-Investigator obviously was finding interesting, as was the crime scene tech who was running scans on the body. As Miranda paused, her knees and back suddenly screamed at her and it occurred to her to wonder how long she'd been kneeling there. A glance at her omni-tool told her it was almost a standard hour. It had felt like minutes.

Dropping the corpse from her attention like the trash it was, she returned to Shepard and was there when his eyes opened. He therefore only smiled and muttered that they had to stop meeting like this, it was starting to get embarrassing.

At the sound of Miranda's laughter, Tali and the others joined her. Tali because she was pleased Shepard was alive and apparently well, the others because they wanted to either snatch visions from his mind, or examine it to see what the after-effects of their treatment were.

The sentinel was not particularly eager to let anyone back into his mind at that moment, but a brief negotiation with the other psionics and everyone (except the Psi-Investigator whose frustrated scientific curiosity everyone else agreed they didn't care about) agreed to let Miranda get what they needed and give it to them, without them ever touching Shepard's mind.

With that done, the crowd began to thin out some and Shepard was able to get some answers. The Geth was believed to be one of the Geth-Enslaver, based on an analysis of its chassis. How such a creature had gotten onto the station was a problem for C-Sec, which was going to be having a real fun day. The other three were both more and less interesting. The two Batarians were there on temporary work permits and from outside Combine space (which was less unusual than it sounded, many law abiding citizens had ended up as refugees, then citizens of other Citadel worlds during the war between the Combine and the Hegemony), the last, however, was a Salarian.

It might be a Geth-Slaver plot, but, lacking any psionics, they relied on mechanical means of control of their slaves, which were extremely obvious (and would have killed the Batarians, after the sole Geth-Slaver in the area was destroyed by Shepard…unless there were more in the area, but surely they would have intervened) and extremely missing. The Geth-Slaver had been known to buy slaves from Batarians in the old days, but only psionics, and the Salarian certainly hadn't been a psionic, none of their assailants had been. It was possible they were mercenaries, but that didn't explain the presence of the Geth (though some mercenaries did take abandoned Geth chasses to refurbish as combat mechs). The combination of Geth-Slaver, Batarians and Salarian was…odd.

Almost as odd as a psionic whose brain had melted. C-Sec absconded with all the bodies (except the psionic, who was, at least nominally Combine military personnel), notably failing to share the results of the autopsies, or any other results of their investigation.

The other psionics had already been pulled away under heavy guard to report back whatever it was someone thought was worth attacking Combine guards on the Citadel to discover. Miranda herself, now that Shepard had recovered was silently wondering if there was any way that she could profit by this. After all, the beacon had been found on her land and clearly the visions it bestowed were worth something to someone.

Service Security was pulling out, carrying their dead psionic and promising to reschedule the commander's interrogation, with additional added questions. Shepard almost threw up on them at the very thought of having another stranger in his mind, but managed to control himself, barely. Miranda was less polite about it, but then again she wasn't subject to Service Security jurisdiction.

She pulled him to his feet and for the first time in a long while, neither of them flinched at the physical contact. He didn't even flinch as she put a Mind Shield (borrowed from one of her guards) against his throat. "Thanks for saving my mind. I gather it was particularly impressive."

"Yep," Miranda agreed. "Though," she forced herself to continue, "Tali helped. A lot."

"I need to remember to thank her for that too. Now, let's get out of here, this place is a dump."

"Sounds like a plan to me."

Miranda got him to his temporary quarters, mostly carrying him, grateful for her genetic and cybernetic enhancements, surrounded by a group of Combine military personnel (though not his own squad, as they'd been taken off to be re-debriefed and not be anywhere where they might drunkenly cause an interstellar incident) and by a squad of Lawson Industries security personnel who were trailing their CEO. She dumped him on the bed and resisted the urge to ask the question she wanted answered, but he was barely conscious. She could wait. A quick question and they were on for breakfast. Shepard was sound asleep before Miranda left his quarters.

He was so soundly asleep that he managed to sleep through several increasingly impressive alarms, until Ash was shaking him awake, with an announcement that the Krogan were here. Shepard managed not to punch her in the face as he woke up, mostly because his body felt like it had after the first day of boot camp and his limbs barely able to move.

"I'm going to miss breakfast, aren't I?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. There's no way I'm going to be able to stand up. Do I really need to be there for this?"

"Yes, sir."

"Help me up."

"Yes, sir."

Shepard managed to make it into the bathroom, shower, shave, brush his teeth, vomit in memory of yesterday and brush his teeth again without Ash's help, though he did need a bit of help getting his dress uniform on. Then they were away.

XXXXX

Codex: C-Sec Psionic Team:

Citadel Security Services is divided into six divisions. The discovery of psionics did not end up effecting those divisions. Instead psionics were centrally trained and assigned to each of the divisions. Almost all of the C-Sec trained psionics are assigned to either the Investigation Division or the Special Response Division.

After a series of incidents where psionics were alternately ordered to do the impossible, or do nothing, or do incredibly dangerous things by commanding officers with no reasonable idea what their new subordinates were capable of, C-Sec was reorganized slightly and psionics, though a part of individual divisions and receiving their assignments from those divisions, are commanded and disciplined by other psionics (or specially trained superiors).

This 'Psionic Team' permits the psionics to accomplish the tasks set to them without being micromanaged by people who don't know what they're doing. It has, however, also had the effect of separating them from their fellow officers. Psionic officers have a reputation for being coddled by the Psionic Team and given far more leeway than other officers, which has only exacerbated the separation.

Long term plans are in place to slowly phase out the Psionic Team and reintegrate psionics into C-Sec, however the privileges and comradery of the Psionic Team have led to the psionics within C-Sec opposing it, while the command level staff don't want the headache of dealing with a bunch of babied, telepathic mavericks. Even the rank-and-file aren't sure they want it, because they aren't sure they want to really work with the psionics.

Codex: Psionic Crimes:

Psionic crimes have historically been quite rare, both due to the prevalence of various forms of mental defenses and the fact that the majority of psionics are employed by governments and those who aren't are either employed or can subsist off the advance payment for the disassembly of their bodies after death. There are always exceptions, however.

Psionic crimes generally fall into two main categories. The first consist of stealing information out of someone's mind. This runs the gambit from snatching passwords to someone's bank account from the surface of their mind without doing any real damage to the victim (beyond stealing from them), all the way up to snatching up a senior scientist, killing her guards, ripping off her Mind Shield and shredding every neuron in her brain until every last corporate secret has been squeezed out. Various forms of psionic blackmail also fall under this category of psionic crime.

The second category of psionic crimes consist of mental domination of various sorts. From the simplest 'give me your watch' right up to 'be my slave'. These crimes are actually somewhat more common, as there's easier ways for psionics to make money then stealing information from the minds of people, while mind control can become something of an obsession, or fetish amongst some psionics, who tend towards repeat offenses.

Author's Note: This chapter came out a bit mushy, but I'm sticking with it. And Shepard even gets to sleep without the influence of a psionic, or a Prothean artifact. At long last. Reviews are always welcome.