Thank you for reading!
Shepard closed her eyes, wishing very much that she could take her helmet off and scratch her nose, which itched abominably from the sweat rolling down her face. It was hot inside the Collector base, and they had been running and fighting from almost the first minute their boots had touched the ground. This was the first real chance they'd had for a breather.
Remembering that she was, after all, in charge here, she forced her eyes open and looked around at the others. "Everyone, check your suits. Make sure there are no breaches, ventilation systems working well, everything in working order. We don't want to have to stop in the middle of the fight to fix anything if we can avoid it."
There were weary murmurs around her as everyone did as she suggested. She checked herself over briefly, but was distracted by a vibration in the wall she was leaning against. Turning, she frowned at it. Yes, it appeared to be moving.
The surface of the wall was covered by some sort of film. Experimentally, she moved her hand up to swipe at it—and then recoiled in horror when she saw a face looking back at her. The face was distorted in terror, screaming and clawing the walls. It was surreal not to be able to hear the screams, which clearly were coming at the top of the person's lungs.
As Shepard watched, the body began to melt. There was no other word for it. It became some kind of a gray sludge and ebbed away out of sight. Looking around her, she saw that the walls were a series of bulges, slight swellings in the wall each about the size of a human. "Open the walls!" she called to the others. "There are people in there!"
Seeing her frantically digging away at the next bulge with the knife she carried in her belt, the others began to do the same. Shepard redoubled her efforts when she cleared away the scum covering the wall in front of her enough to recognize Gabby Daniels, the Normandy's engineer, inside. "Daniels!" she shouted. "Daniels!" But either the walls were soundproofed or Daniels was drugged, or both, because she didn't move.
Even as she got the compartment open and began to pull Daniels from it, Shepard tried to determine if the face she had seen melting was someone she recognized. She didn't think so. But she knew she would see it again, in her nightmares, and wonder if she could have saved the woman if she had moved faster. As it was, she didn't know how long the people currently trapped in the walls might have, and she couldn't afford to stop. Laying Daniels, now beginning to come to, on the ground, she moved to the next compartment that wasn't already being opened.
In the end, that room turned out to contain all the missing crew from the Normandy plus about two dozen colonists. Six had been lost, either suffocated or died of terror, in Mordin's judgment, but most began to revive once they were out of the walls.
They contacted the Normandy and sent Mordin and Jacob back with the crew and the colonists to a rendezvous point.
Shepard watched them go, trying to take the moment as a win, trying not to think of the thousands of other colonists who must already be gray sludge moving toward … some hideous fate, and failing entirely.
Garrus touched her arm gently. "Maybe there are more up ahead."
She shook herself out of the reverie. "You're right. Let's keep moving." After all, she had known coming into this that she couldn't save everyone. Let tomorrow be for mourning those lost, and for the guilt of knowing the people she cared for were safe when so many others were gone. Today was for finishing the Collectors so no one else could be taken.