I'm sorry: I know it's been ages, but I am still writing this. Just not in chronological order.
A trickle of sweat ran over the scarred tissue of his horn, flowing from the top to a full on sprint down his neck as Mordin pushed his back against the wall. Maintaining the crouch he'd been holding for the past ten minutes, Mordin brought his pistol up to his chest, getting ready to pop out of cover and fire before wondering why he wanted to do so. A light flickered on and off overhead, throwing his face alternatively from bright light into a dusty pink shadow as he considered it. It seemed to him that he was in a war with no enemy: a fire-fight with no opposing fire. In other words, as Kirrahe would have said, the enemy had gone and he was busy fighting the shadows. And yet he was certain they were fighting him back... For the briefest moment he wondered how he'd got here, and then a click from his omni-tool interrupted that train of thought.
"Hmm... interesting. Program designed to test limits of radio black out. Aha. Curious." Mordin muttered to himself, before a prickling sense that seemed to flow around him told him to be quiet. Because something was watching him, and even if only felt like the shadows were glaring out at him, some small part was more than convinced they were. Almost as if they were alive.
He glanced back at his omni-tool as it continued to feed out a mixture of raw data and processed results, showing that his earlier intuition had been correct and somebody was blacking out all radio contact in intermittent bursts, getting stronger each time. Analysis suggested it would be only one more cycle until the blackout was complete, which meant it had been running for about half a day, well before they'd arrived. And yet they'd enjoyed near perfect communication when they'd first got here. Curious.
What it was, how it had been done and who'd set it were, however, of secondary importance to getting everyone talking again, and Mordin's fingers were already flowing along his omni-tool, drawing up plans and programs to at least allow him through. A few moments revealed that the algorithms behind it were crude from the offset, though more sophisticated as they went along: as if someone had been in a hurry when they'd first set it up, and had gone back through trying to patch up a bad job. Possibly indomitable to someone who didn't know what they were doing, as to begin with only the sophisticated parts were accessible, but Mordin prided himself on always knowing what he was doing. After a few seconds, the block stopping him from hearing anything were gone, and he began to work on getting rid of the blocks preventing him from talking.
The minutes passed, and different parts of Mordin's mind split up into doing different things: parts working on cracking the program, others listening to the static, a few more dedicated towards the idea of using mass-effect fields to make himself as small as possible whilst the rest were concerned over the detail behind the programming, and what it might mean. The first one had been done by someone in a hurry who hadn't been too concerned about anyone breaking through, but the second was far, far more complex. Not impossible, no, but more thought had gone into it, and Mordin found himself dancing though hoops he'd thought he'd never see again after his STG days had ended. Whoever had set them up had obviously been more concerned that no-one heard what they were saying originally... which meant they'd been listening in during the first few minutes of radio silence. With a sinking feeling, Mordin tried to remember if he'd said anything foolish, or if anyone else would have been idiotic enough to give away vital information. Quite probably, he realised: they were the most informal crew around, and it would have been out of the ordinary if someone hadn't said something stupid. Whoever their adversary was, they either knew them well or were far, far too intelligent to live in a dump like this. Neither boded well.
His earpiece crackled, and suddenly Shepard's voice filled his ears. In the confusion of gathering his mind back into one place, Mordin missed the first part, but thankfully Shepard seemed to repeat it immediately afterwards, her voice shouting into his earpiece with her usual mix of anger and impatience:
"This is to everyone, or anyone that's out there: this is Shepard. Do you read me, over and a whole crap-load of out."
Laying a long finger on his omni-tool, Mordin made the necessary adjustments to allow his radio to respond to Shepard's, easily overriding the blocks that had been placed on it now that he'd brought his full mind to bear on the problem.
"Shepard, this is Mordin. Situation is... distressing, but I can hear you. Recommend that you try to-"
And then a shadow moved, and Mordin remembered everything.
Turning aside from studying the Nebula out a gap on her right, Shepard allowed a smile to slowly creep across her face as Mordin's voice replied to her over the radio. It had been over two hours since she'd last had any contact with her team; two hours of wandering through endless hallways and passages that never seemed to lead anywhere. It was worrying, in it's own way, that the station didn't seem to have been built with any rooms in mind, just corridors connected to corridors and the occasional hall where a run of them branched together before sprinting off into the station's depths. And each and every single one of them was broken in some way: large gaping crevices and gaps that opened out onto the nebula's light and the inky lagoon of space, and then there were the lights, whose electronics seemed fine from a distance, bathing the ground beneath it in a pale, healthy white before spluttering and dying whenever she drew near. Worst of all, though, was the nagging feeling that she'd already paced along each of the corridors before, and not because she was going in circles. Shepard began to imagine that the station was revolving itself around her, trying to keep her in the same place whilst it figured out what to do with her. Knowing it was crazy didn't help.
Her unease was dissipated when one of her team finally responded to her increasingly desperate shouts over the radio. Ignoring his sudden cut-off mid sentence, Shepard practically shouted back into the radio:
"Mordin! Where the hell have you been, no, wait: where's everyone been? Just what's going on out there?"
"Shepard." Mordin said through the radio, his voice sounding strained. "Time of conversation-" Shepard's ears pricked up here as, unmistakeably, the sound of gunshots peppered his speech. "-is most unfortunate." Sliding a hand down to her belt, Shepard began to finger but did not take out her weapon.
"Mordin, what's going on: who are you fighting?" Shepard said, before moving out into the middle of the hall, the nebula above reflecting off her helmet. "Better yet, where the hell are you so I can find out for myself."
"Location unknown, would need time to find out and don't have time!" Mordin said, his voice sounding more and more rushed. There was a series of thumps that sounded like Mordin was running, before a louder thunk indicated that he'd hit something.
"Worse to come, though: weapon malfunctioning, bullets loose all momentum upon exiting barrel, as if mass-effect fields..." Mordin's rapidly speaking voice trailed off abruptly, going from rapid-fire speech to almost complete silence.
For a few agonising moments Shepard waited for him to continue, her hand clenching round her pistol butt and her heat thumping rapidly in her chest as her eyes traced their way along a strand of nebula through a hole in the floor. After two seconds, she'd waited enough.
"Mordin!" she snapped down the radio.
"Shepard!" Mordin replied, as if she'd just startled him. "Am surprised to hear from you: did not think radio system was working."
"What?" Shepard, replied into her headset, turning in frustration and walking a little way down the corridor, her hand not letting go of the pistol. Mordin seemingly ignored her interjection and carried on speaking as if nothing was wrong.
"Appears that I have dropped my pistol: how clumsy. Wait. Strange. Slivers of metal, outside heavily oxidised indicating great temperature change. Possible extreme stress cut-offs from building, but size and shape consistent with that of standard bullets from a pistol. Hypothesis, bullets from pistol left and were rapidly decelerated upon exit. Yet no memories of-" And here there was a sharp gasp "-I see you. I remember."
"See what, remember what: Mordin, explain something or tell me where you are!" Shepard practically shouted into her handset. If it wasn't for the fact that there was definitely something wrong with the station, she'd be wondering if he was entirely all there about now.
"I forgot, Shepard: how could I forget?" Mordin said, and for the first time Mordin sounded afraid. "Impossible: conclusion impossible... describe, yes: Shepard, subject is tall, just over 2 meters, grey humanoid, appears naked... subject appears capable of creating electrical charge in hands; scientifically impossible, and yet-"
Static filled her ears before suddenly vanishing, as both Mordin and the radio were cut off completely. Fearing the worst, Shepard took off at a sprint along the corridor she was standing in, red flashes from the Nebula hitting her from both left and right as she ran, as she jumped over the small holes left from prior battles in the station's surface. Doors wheezily slid open as she ran up to the them before closing behind her with a solid clunk: lights calmly flickered on and off overhead as she passed beneath them, only switching to a steady output when she had left them far behind, and all the while as she ran Shepard heard Mordin's voice in her head "I forgot, Shepard: how could I forget?"
Either, Shepard decided after slamming open a slow-moving door in a fashion Grunt or Jack would have approved off, something was stealing the crew's memories or that everyone except her was very carefully going insane. Personally, she preferred the later reason, and yet small snatches of favour towards the first began to creep like spies into her head. She realised she couldn't remember how she'd got separated from Miranda: she could remember her being there, but after that nothing at all until she was wandering the halls. And it wasn't even as if she could remember what had happened between the two, it wasn't even blank: it was as if her memory just skipped that part of her life. The thought that something important, something which might explain everything that had occurred so far might have happened then, in the one time she couldn't remember, haunted her.
There was a rush of something behind her, as if a thousand small feet were racing up to her. Stopping she turned round, and saw that the corridor was just as she'd left it, and then turned again and saw that the one before no longer was.
She was standing in a room that had most certainly not been there before, the walls intact, which was surprising, and shaped so that it appeared to resemble a wheel with five spokes. Each of the five corridors leading off from the centre, including the one she was in, was a dead end, though their backs provided the only source of light for the room, letting out a steady, even glow. Standing in the centre was a console of some kind, and standing next to the console was a man, who turned and gave her a cheery wave as he saw her.
"Good!" he said, his happy voice seeming quite out of place for his surroundings "Transmat worked then. And your all here, no bits missing. Still got legs, so that's good. That's very good." The man clapped his hands together and rubbed them at her.
"I expect" he said solemnly "You have a lot of questions."
"Why are you wearing a bow-tie?" Shepard said, the thought being the first thing that popped into her head after looking at the man before her. He seemed quite pleased with this, grinning at her and fiddling with it before answering.
"So you know about bow-ties then, even though they were created yonks and yonks ago?" he smiled at her in what he probably thought was a charming manner "Because they're classic. Classic cool."
"No they're not." Shepard replied. "I only know about them because they're listed as things not to wear." The man frowned at her, before shrugging on a jacket that had been draped over the console.
"Look." he said, stepping towards her. "I didn't risk mortal danger to myself and you as soon as the buffer's cleared just so that I could be insulted. We need to talk about what you think you know."
"Fine." Shepard said with a smile, holding her arms out wide. "Lets talk. I don't know what the hell's going on, people I know are disappearing, I'm disappearing and then reappearing with mad people I don't know, I can't remember everything I know I should, this station is creeping me the hell out and last but not least my radio isn't working. But I'm sure that'll make for an excellent conversation: I can tell you that I don't know anything, and you can tell me that it's true."
"Well." The man said. "I can help with a few things. First of all, I'm the Doctor."
The man walked forwards, hand outstretched. Shepard reached for her rifle.
"Okay, no hand shaking then." he said. "Secondly, I got you here by Transmat." he pointed at the console behind him. "That's how you disappeared and then reappeared, though I don't know about your friends. I got you here by Transmat."
"You mean teleport." Shepard said, before adding "And how is that even possible?"
"No, I meant Transmat." The man who called himself the Doctor said. "If I'd meant teleport I'd have said teleport, and what I said was Transmat. It stands for 'matter transmitter'. Completely different from teleport."
"Okay. Don't explain how you can use it, then." Shepard said, resisting the urge to tell him to shut up and get on with it. "Anything else?"
"Yes." he said. "Your radio: here." He turned to the console and seemed to fiddle with it. There was a crack in her ear, and then Tali's voice flooded through.
"Shepard? Shepard, are you there?" The Doctor folded his arms and watched her with a smug expression, and even though she'd wanted to punch him a moment ago she wanted to hug him now.
"Tali!" Shepard cried, almost laughing with delight. "You have no idea how good it feels to hear you're voice right now. Where are you: what's going on?"
"Where am I?" Tali said with a similar laugh "That's not as important as where you are, and how the hell you managed to escape."
"I don't really know where I am Tali: somewhere on the station, I guess." Shepard looked around. "I don't think I can get out of it though. It seems closed off. What did you mean by escape."
"Hold on, EDI's triangulating your radio. And I meant escaped from your kidnapper: the one who took you from the Normandy ten days ago."
Shepard felt something inside her turn cold at these words as she realised that something, somehow, was going to happen which would make everything wrong.
"Tali." She said carefully, choosing her words carefully. "Ten days ago we'd just left the Omega 4 relay. Today we all landed on this base, and then I lost you."
"No, Shepard, you were kidnapped from us ten days ago and we've been chasing you ever since. We passed through the Omega 4 relay months ago. Why are you acting so strangely, Shepard. Wait, you did escape, didn't you."
"I'm not the one acting strangely, Tali: how the hell did you expect me to escape when I haven't been kidnapped?"
The sound of Tali's breathing intensified down the radio connection as Shepard glared at the Doctor, who raised his head and regarded her coolly.
"Tell me, Shepard. Is he still there."
"Is who still there: who are you talking about?" Shepard replied.
"Your kidnapper: the Doctor."
"Who, him." Shepard looked up at the Doctor, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "Yeah, he's here."
"Kill him." Tali replied, sounding angrier than Shepard had ever heard her.
"Kill him? Why?" Shepard said, taking her pistol out from her side. She had no intention of just shooting the man, but if Tali thought there was something strange about him then who was she to argue? Even if Tali was being a little strange herself.
"He's your kidnapper, and he's very dangerous, Shepard: far more dangerous than you realise. Every second you spend with him puts you in danger: puts us all in danger. Kill him. Now!"
"But I've only just met him, and all he's done so far is be weird." The Doctor raised a finger as if to argue before shrugging his shoulders and folding his arms across his chest. "You've got the wrong guy, Tali: you're confused, I was never kidnapped and he's no threat to anyone."
"Kill him Shepard, you bosh'tet, before he puts us all in danger!" Tali shouted down the radio.
"He's unarmed!" Shepard shouted back. "I'm not shooting an unarmed man no matter how strange he and this situation are, and truth be told you're being a whole lot stranger than he is. And that's that."
"Damn it, Shepard!" Tali said, before her language descended into a stream of curses in Quarian. Brandishing her omni-tool, Shepard switched the radio off then turned back to the Doctor, who was watching her with some caution.
"All the others are like that too." he said, quietly. "Got me worried. Go to a place I've never been before to investigate said place, and then suddenly there's radio transmissions telling me I kidnapped someone I've never met. Made me curious." Something about the way he said it told Shepard that he was lying, but for now she choose to ignore that.
"And so you brought me here." Shepard said, looking round. "You still haven't explained how you did that. Or even how you knew how to do that." The Doctor stroked his chin thoughtfully.
"Well, this is a very old station, very old indeed: much older, in fact, than it's letting on. Too much make up, you see: can't really see the face."
"I never held much with make up." Shepard replied, the subject bringing up something... wrong in her chest. "I could never see the point."
"Hmm, well: in this case, it means that your idea of what technology can and can't do isn't one hundred percent accurate." The Doctor said as Shepard struggled with the feeling. "And I knew what I was doing because... well, I'm the tool-master." he smiled, and pointed his palms at her before he realised how it sounded.
"Oh, no: forget that. I'm not the tool-master, that's a terrible name. Just keep on calling me the Doctor."
"So. Why'd you do it. Why bring me here?" Shepard said.
"I told you, I heard us being talked about on the radio. Made me curious."
"No it didn't: you're lying and I don't trust you." Shepard said bluntly, taking out her rifle but not yet pointing it at him. "Tell me one reason why I should."
"Well, I don't trust you either, to be frank: all your friends are trying to kill me. That never bodes well." The man who'd called himself the Doctor said. "But if you want a reason, here's two. First, I'm completely and utterly unarmed. Not a single weapon on me. Not even a jammy dodger this time."
"That's not a reason to trust you. If anything it's a reason to question your sanity." Shepard said, taking a step back. The Doctor smiled weakly at her, before looking her pointedly in the eyes.
"No, but it sets this reason up." He said, nodding behind her. "Why not take a look behind you."
"Oh, and don't turn round again when you do." he added as, despite herself, Shepard glanced over her shoulder, her head freezing in place before turning the rest of her completely round.
"What the hell is it." she said, her gun trained on the grey, naked figure standing in the corridor before her, it's head pressed up against the ceiling and it's hands wrapped together as if in prayer. It looked as if someone had taken a man, stretched him and then melted a grey candle over his body, and yet the figure was so alien, so... sinister that it seemed to Shepard that it could never be considered human. Nothing, not even the Hanar or Elcor, who were about as non-human as you could get, had caused this sort of reaction from her. Footsteps walked up beside her, and the Doctor appeared, his eyes focused on the thing before the two of them, it's head now angled and following his approach.
"It's a Silent." The Doctor said, quietly. "And that's about all I know, I'm afraid."
Shepard swallowed, her rifle now pointing directly at it's head. It turned and looked at her with small, beady black eyes, before opening it's mouth as if to speak, and yet only silence came out.
"Why's it here?" The Doctor's eyes turned towards her, his lips opening slightly as if he meant to speak, before he closed them and turned back to the Silent.
"I have absolutely no idea." he said, carefully, before pulling out a marker pen from one of his inside pockets. "Here." he said, giving it to her. "I don't have any weapons, but this may be the single most useful thing you've ever been given in your life."
"What!" Shepard hissed at him, her finger itching to just pull the trigger. "Are you mad."
"Yes." The Doctor said, as if offended she might not believe him. "But I'm also right: look every time you see one, mark your skin: that way you'll know when you've had an encounter." his eyes sank down to Shepard's itchy trigger finger. "Try it." he suggested.
"I don't need your permission, Doctor, to fire my own weapon." Shepard said, taking the pen in one hand before positioning it in her teeth. The rifle roared out it's volley at the Silent, and yet not a single bullet struck it. Confused, Shepard stopped firing in time to see and hear the heavy clinking of metal shards falling from her rifle's barrel like rain.
"What?" Shepard said, her voice slightly muffled by the pen, and then remembered what Mordin had said: the guns don't work. Curious, she pointed her rifle away from the Silent and fired again. More bullets dropped from her barrel.
"Clever." The Doctor said. "No idea how they're doing it, mind you, but a clever way to test it, nonetheless."
Shaking her head, Shepard confined her worries about how it was doing that to a 'questions to ask when we're not in danger' box, right along with 'why would anyone ever willing wear a bowtie?' She looked in vain for a place to keep her pen before the Doctor took it off her, promising that he'd return it later.
"Do these things actually do anything, or do they just follow you around and creep you out?" Shepard said, as the Silent just stood there. Shepard was beginning to wonder if it would do anything if she was to go up and clobber it over the head with her rifle, when a steady source of light began pouring out from it's hands. It separated them, and Shepard saw sparks flying between its palms, before they started crackling out and hitting the surfaces around them.
"I just had to ask, didn't I?" Shepard said, warily stepping back.
"While I apreciate that it was probably very badly timed, I don't think it's your fault." The Doctor said carefully, putting a hand on Shepard's back and pushing her forwards till she was level with him. "There's only ever one reason why a Silent would begin charging, and it's not dramatic irony. It's when it's prey can't escape."
"What do you-" Shepard started before the Doctor interrupted her.
"There's more behind us."
The two turned slowly, and Shepard had to contain her shock as she found the room behind her was now filled with creatures like the one before. The room was packed with them, Silents hanging from the ceiling and pressed into the corners: each and every one of their eyes focused on her and the Doctor, and each and every set of hands glowing with electricity.
"How the hell are we meant to get out of here: this rooms completely closed off!" Shepard said, panic rising as her eyes darted from grey body to grey body.
"Don't worry." The Doctor said from behind her, his back pressing into her side. "I have a plan."
"I still don't trust you!" Shepard said, before pressing her back against the Doctors as she looked around the room, staring at each and every Silent as if trying to memorise it's form.
"Good." The Doctor said, holding up a pen or stick of some kind in his hand. "Keep hold of that: trusting me has got a lot of very good people killed."
Around them more and more lightning began to arc from the surroundings to the Silent's hands, each one throwing more and more light into the room. Shepard waved her rifle at them uselessly, whilst in her head she condemned to a special circle of hell whichever idiot had decided that grenades were no longer a 'standard accessory'.
"What are you doing?" She hissed at him, the stick thrust up into the air making him look, if anything more ridiculous.
"I synchronised the sonic screwdriver into the transmat technology behind us, meaning I can create a randomised matrix transporting us to somewhere, anywhere else in this station at the click of a single button. Only one thing remains." The Doctor said, shaking one of his hands like an amateur magician who was performing his first trick.
"What?" Shepard said, more confused by his words than his final condition.
"Geronimo!" The Doctor shouted with a laugh.
The stick flashed green, lightning raced out like the branches of a tree from the Silents and the two of them vanished into thin air.
Author's notes
So, yeah: like I said at the top, it's kinda been a while. Sorry about that, but thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. If there was a way to make up for this by publishing what I have written so far, I would but I think chapters 10-12 should wait for chapters 4-9 first. Sorry about that, though it has had the interesting effect of filling nearly 90% of the first two chapters with enough Chekhov's guns to supply a small army. Except for the coffee. I could do nothing with the coffee.
This one's dedicated to everyone who's reviewed so far: besides from filling my day with a little burst of happiness (daaawww), it actually helped me in figuring out how to play this chapter: the fact that so many of you either guessed correctly or had strong leanings gave me the confidence to pretty much give the game away immediately. So, thanks for that: structure is a good thing to have. Cookies all round (I've read this a few times on fanfiction, and have even been offered cookies, and yet have received none. So I'm sorry, but the cookies are a lie :( )
Oh, and before I go, this chapter contains a couple of important things to spot for the eagle eyed reader: sort of Chekhov's cannons. And I'm not entirely done with suspense, or with keeping you guessing what monster I'm using, even after having revealed it. I'm awkward like that.