A/N: Sorry for yet another delay for such a short chapter; I've been doing some research, i.e. playing Mass Effect for the first time, as I only got it a couple of days ago. Updates will probably continue to be fairly infrequent, I'm sorry to say, as I intend to play all the way through the trilogy before I look at ME3's extended cut, and although I am prepared to be disappointed, I want to see it with eyes untainted by spoilers.

Hades

Charon swallowed his shock as he watched his rival topple over the edge, stepped forwards to look down after him and watch him plummet out of sight, but instead found that Shepard had already disappeared.

The nihilist was no fool; Shepard was almost certainly still alive; the assassin was as capable as he was, and the terrorist had no intention of underestimating such a challenging foe by assuming his death unless he'd seen a body and had a genetics test come back a match.

However, he wasn't about to follow his foe on the assumption that he'd achieve the same feat that he was sure Thanatos had and, continue a confrontation that could end in his premature demise.

No, he had a bio weapon to release...

Aloysius Walker was right to be sceptical; Thaddaeus Shepard was not dead. Not yet. He was, however, rather upset at having lost to someone in what had been, to all intents and purposes, a fairly equal conflict. Escape and survival moderated the defeat, yet a defeat it remained, and that was something he couldn't allow to stand except in extreme circumstances; Shepard was fundamentally self centred and opportunistic, but he was not without pride.

He wiped his face cautiously, conscious of the pain in the limbs that had partially broken his fall, clearing the blood that had flowed from his eyes and nose and dislodging the headache's hold with painkillers, rueing the use of his biotics, however, it had been necessary; brain damage (which would have essentially meant the death of who he was now) hadn't been certain, whilst the irretrievable damage done to his body as a result of an impact with unforgiving concrete at his terminal velocity had been.

So he had managed to devise a minimalist solution that reduced the risks of his overstretching himself to a number that was acceptably close to zero; altered his trajectory and decelerated his fall by grabbing a biotic handhold on the building he was plummeting on a parallel course to, sending himself crashing painfully onto a balcony that was, thankfully, concealed from prying eyes peering from the rooftop by a clone directly above it.

However, considering the risks that could potentially be associated not just with calling on too much of his biotic power, but using it too frequently, Shepard resolved never to attempt anything of the sort unless there was no other viable alternative and the consequences of inaction were akin to death; no fate made him more uncomfortable than the prospect of his body living out it's days as a dribbling husk, absent of a reasonable level of sentience. That would be death, for the current him at least, but there would be a lesser version that would share his DNA and his experiences, and Shepard could empathise with a hypothetical version of himself (if not with others) enough not to want anything of the sort to happen.

Speaking of death... The assassin brought up the map on his omnitool and rapidly concluded that they was no way he'd be able to catch Charon before he released his bio weapon, which was unfortunate, for reasons beyond the deaths of all those irrelevant civilians; Shepard had left his gas mask back in the transport hub, and without it, he'd be just as vulnerable to the pathogen as everyone else.

That rather made up his mind for him about what to do next; retrieve his equipment as quickly as feasibly possible. The issue was how to do that, being in a different building entirely at that moment; from the looks of it a hotel profiting from being directly adjacent to the city's main transport hub, he thought as he moved off of the balcony and into an empty suite of rooms furnished with cases and civilians accessories strewn about the place. His lip curled in contempt. Military discipline disinterested Shepard, even if it was undeniably necessary in most cases, but he preferred to keep his effects organised.

He left the room, not having time to sift through belongings and liberate the occupants of any credit chits they might have left lying around (he had begun as a thief after leaving the orphanage, and looting on Alliance wages was mere common sense, after all), and jogged down a corridor, burst through a door into the stairwell, and ascended as rapidly as his aching body would allow, intending to return to the roof as there would be no time to descend all that way to the ground and thence return to the hub.

Shepard slid through the still opening door onto the roof, and heard something that gave him pause, before sending him into overdrive-something he'd prefer not to have heard for at least another ten minutes, if at all. An English accented voice, blasting out across the city from every speaker at full volume, the voice itself soft and low but clearly enunciated and audible from absolutely everywhere within the settlement.

"Good citizens of Terra Nova. Doubtless many of you will have heard of the recent disease outbreaks on other human colonies across Alliance space. Doubtless most of those will have believed the tales fed to you by your politicians, bureaucrats and the media that these incidents are entirely unrelated in nature. That is a fiction."

Shepard knew what was coming, knew the speech had a purpose and could guess what it was. He pushed through the wind to retrace his steps across the rooftops, his teeth bared as he raggedly inhaled air into his lungs to fuel his exertions.

"In actuality, the outbreaks were due to the actions of a malignant party entirely ruthless and remorseless in nature, a party that is about to commit a similar offence here. That party is myself. And all of this could have been prevented if those entrusted with your protection had been less self-interested and concerned with preserving order and more concerned with your wellbeing."

Something was wrong, out of place, the N7 noticed, without being certain as to what, even as he hurled himself through the air in a jump that was thankfully easier than it had been in the opposite direction, before clambering up onto the roof of the transport hub and making his way back to the stairwell that would leave him closest to his abandoned equipment-if it was still there, and hadn't been removed by security, Shepard thought pessimistically, but realised that were that the case, he would have been unlikely to find viable alternatives in time, so there was little point dwelling on it unless it happened.

"Instead, they allowed me to slip through the cracks in their security and are no longer in a position to stop me. In fact, all they can and will do is ensure that more of you die by trapping you here. This is what is really meant by quarantine, what they like to think of as the 'safe' approach, although in actuality all they're doing is playing God and sacrificing your lives as a cost-cutting measure."

It was the voice, Shepard realised as he vaulted the rail guard and dropped a level, landing heavily and staggering slightly before repeating the action. He couldn't have been certain as to the authenticity of Charon's accent and therefore his tale about his origins in their earlier conversation, due to the muffling and distorting effects of the gas mask the terrorist had already been wearing, somewhat unnecessarily.

Even now, he was uncertain as to whether what he was hearing wasn't simply the result of a glitch in the broadcasting process, yet there was something... wrong with the man's accent. A foreign undercurrent that sounded like an undercurrent of, well, just about every accent commonly used on Earth.

He was being played, Thaddaeus decided with a fair amount of certainty, but the question was, had the original pose been a deception to make him more amenable to an alliance, or was this new development one designed to distract him now that he was a foe? Either was plausible, perhaps even both in combination.

"Now you know who's truly responsible for your immanent demises, besides me. On with the show."

Shepard reached the level of his destination even as his nihilistic counterpart's speech ended. He smashed the door's control panel impatiently and squeezed through the very moment the opening was large enough to allow him to pass-

And stumble (metaphorically speaking) into a group of three security officials, one of whom had his back turned, and, Shepard realised, was examining the contents of his case. The other two, after a moment's hesitation, were training their guns on him, accompanied by the traditional demands to put his hands on display above his head. Needless to say, the assassin elected not to comply, several sharp detonations of varying volume and therefore proximity impressing upon him the necessity of haste.

A quick pulse from his omnitool overloaded their weapons for a moment while they were distracted with the noises, allowing him the time to knock aside the nearer officer's weapon with a kick, continuing the spinning motion to draw one of his remaining knives from within his coat and open the disarmed human's throat, then send the knife whirling past the man's horrified comrade to gore the third official through the eye even as he turned and raised his fully functional weapon.

Shepard made to walk past the shell-shocked survivor and retrieve his kit; the man wouldn't be alive much longer, and was no longer a threat in his traumatised condition.

Shepard bent over the fresher of the two corpses to pull it off of his case, considering retrieving the man's sidearm, a fairly basic Kessler pistol, but better than nothing at all, but instead prioritised donning his gas mask, which mirrored Charon's own rebreather, yet allowed the option of eye protection, which Shepard deemed unnecessary due to Walker's lack of similar measures. He didn't want to have anything interfere with the functionality of his visor.

He was apparently just in time; behind him, through his whimpering, the final security official was starting to cough. Then, his whimpering took on a far more desperate tone, and he could hear the man shuffling around, possibly even clawing at himself. Shepard finished assembling his sniper rifle, and attached it to the electromagnet on the back of his armour, through his trenchcoat, before checking the Kessler with a professional, if mildly disdainful, air, then turned to check on the man, curious about the terrorists bio weapon.

Shepard was by no means a squeamish man, however, what he saw did perturb him, even if only slightly. The man was indeed clawing at himself, or rather, at fairly specific points on his body; the main lymph nodes, which were already swollen to grotesque proportions, clearly visible even through the man's garments.

Buboes, the swellings were called; the key symptom of the disease that, even after decades of brilliant modern medicine, was dreaded by every human that had even a basic familiarity with their species' history: bubonic plague, one of two diseases involved in the infamous pandemic in the mid-1300s known as the Black Death which wiped out tens of millions of humans, about twenty percent of Earth's population, a disaster of proportions that hadn't been seen since, outside of the two world wars.

The thing was, it couldn't be bubonic plague; the disease was dead, had been wiped out, and modern vaccinations would have prevented a reoccurrence. On top of which, bubonic plague, unlike its companion pneumonic plague, killed you slowly and painfully, and would never have produced visible symptoms within scant seconds; it's incubation period was measured in days, not moments.

Shepard had a dreadful suspicion that this attack had a purpose beyond drawing him in and killing people. This attack, as suggested by Charon's little speech before the pathogen's release, was geared towards spreading panic, and producing anarchy. The terrorist had been right about the quarantine, and knew perfectly well that once it started, the city of Scott would begin to tear itself apart, with riots, looting, and mass attempts both to keep the infected away and escape the quarantine zone; attempts that would in the latter case have to be defeated by the relevant authorities, though both would inevitably involve use of lethal force, which would only serve to escalate the violence further.

Shepard put the official out of his misery with his scavenged pistol, not out of any real pity or mercy, but because the man's thrashings were distracting and off-putting when the assassin was trying to think. He had failed to prevent the release of the pathogen, however, that had never been the primary objective of his assignment, and what happened to the city as a whole was now out of his hands.

His purpose was now to prevent Walker's escape, which could potentially be the reason for the chaos that the pathogen would cause; if Walker broke the quarantine's safety net and brought enough people through with him, there was a very good chance he'd be able to slip away and get off-planet.

Now he had to find out where that was likely to be, which meant analysing weaknesses in the city boundaries that the terrorist would attempt to exploit, and then prioritising them on the basis of proximity with the terrorist's last known location, which would have to be wherever he had hacked into the city's broadcasting system from to deliver his speech.

Shepard shot the control panels on the doors to the area to prevent the arrival of unwanted company, then brought up the city schematics on his omnitool and got to work...