Smoke on the Water
by P.H. Wise
A Mass Effect/XCOM crossover fanfic

Chapter 06: Illium, Part II

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows) nor Terror from the Deep. Some dialogue in this chapter is taken from Mass Effect 2.

The airlock cycled open to reveal an Eclipse sister, and things got worse.

Shepard and her team were a split-second too slow to stop the lone asari from sounding the alarm; they'd been taken off guard, and while their reaction time was good, it wasn't that good. A barrage of lightning from the squad's arc throwers took her down, but not before she hit her panic button. Alarms began to blare loudly.

"Damn it," Shepard hissed.

The door to the skybridge behind them was flung open.

"Into the airlock," Shepard ordered. "Move." Her squad obeyed; Tali, Jacob, Turnbow and Jones all rushed into the airlock even as it began to cycle closed, with Shepard herself just barely squeezing through before it shut.

"Decontamination in progress," said a pleasant female voice. A bar of white light began to sweep back and forth through the room, burning away any potential contaminants but leaving the squad unharmed. It took about thirty seconds to finish. Then the far airlock door spun open.

Beyond the airlock, a large, spotless medical laboratory waited. It had three main stations and a dozen secondary stations, each equipped with tools and instruments that Shepard didn't immediately recognize and one - an autoclave - that she did. A central holographic display showed vital statistics for some thirty quarians labeled as part of a control group. The lab was empty, and the exit was on the far side of the lab, and beyond that airlock, assuming the building hadn't been changed even more radically than they'd already found, was a stairwell that went up to Ms. Dantius's office.

Shepard's team crossed the lab at a good clip, and it only took a second for her to realize that Tali had paused at the holo-display. Meanwhile, Turnbow and Jones took up positions to be able to cover both airlocks if they needed to, and Jacob hit the button to start the far airlock cycling open.

Thirty seconds. Shepard could all but feel them ticking by in her head as Tali stared at the display. "Tali," she began, "We don't have time for…"

Tali manipulated the haptic controls, and opened thirty different subwindows on her display, each showing a different hospital room. Each showing a naked quarian - some male, some female, some old, some young - exposed to the open air, each bound to their hospital beds with metal restraints, and each one visibly sick; two were dead; another six were close to it; the rest were on their way.

Shepard's words died on her lips.

Into the otherwise total silence of the room came Tali's horrified whisper: "... control group."

The airlock door spun open. "Shepard," Jacob called. "The other one's going to open any second. I recommend we not be here when it does."

"I hear you," Shepard said.

Tali copied as much of the experimental data as she could onto her omnitool. The progress bar for the data transfer began to climb. Then Shepard took her by the arm and dragged her toward the far airlock. They were about halfway there when the near airlock opened, and the Eclipse troops poured into the lab.

Her squad was already in cover.

'Throwing grenade!' came Turnbow's telepathic warning just before the man lobbed a plasma grenade into the airlock full of Eclipse troopers. The lead asari commando was already glowing with the distinctive blue light of biotics. The grenade halted for a split-second just in front of the airlock; then it shot back the way it had come at hypersonic speed.

Jane's eyes widened. She was not a particularly powerful telekinetic, but she was strong enough to catch as grenade, at least, and had nothing else to lose; her hand snapped out, palm forward as she tried to bat the grenade back into the airlock. Human reaction time - even enhanced as it was by MELD - just wasn't up to the task. There was a sharp crack as the grenade broke the sound barrier. She heard something like a large, angry bee zip past her helmet, missing by scant inches.

The plasma grenade exploded in the air two meters behind her, and despite her powered armor, she was thrown from her feet. She landed on Tali. By the time the two of them got back to their feet, Jane and her squad were under heavy concentrated fire, and their defensive barriers, already dangerously depleted by the grenade, went down in short order. By this time, the rest of the team had made the airlock and were laying down suppressing fire to cover their approach.

They ran for it. A few Eclipse soldiers fell to Turnbow's heavy laser. While they knew to stay out of his line of fire, line of fire didn't matter much when you could slag the whole damn lab with sustained fire, and he was. Jones was less effective with his laser rifle, if only because he lacked Turnbow's sheer volume of fire. Fresh alarms sounded as the laboratory lost containment.

Jane's suit registered damage as focused burst fire hit her in the back while she ran. Through Turnbow's eyes she saw a pair of asari fling grenades set to land in the airlock her squad was sheltering in. She gestured over her shoulder, and while she wasn't able to duplicate the lead asari commando's trick, her telekinetic ability was more than sufficient to swat them out of the air; they exploded in the middle of the lab, and bits of superheated shrapnel bounced off her armor.

Then they made the airlock, and Jacob hit the button to spin the door shut, and the battle was over.

"Decontamination in progress," a woman's synthetic voice reported as a bar of light once more passed over them. "Decontamination in progress," it repeated.

"Okay," Jane said. "Knowing our luck, there's going to be another squad on the other side of the airlock when the door opens." She looked to Turnbow. "Turnbow," she said. "Boost us up."

He did, a very faint purple glow forming around his body as he did so. Turnbow wasn't a powerful psion; most times he couldn't even get a mindfray off reliably, but bolstering the wills of others he could definitely do. A sense of power and clearheaded confidence settled over the group, and that rattled, discordant feeling that had been there since the grenade toss had gone wrong faded into the background.

"Garrus, if you can draw some of the attention away from us, it would make our job a lot easier."

"We're on it," Garrus replied through the commlink.

"Okay," Shepard said. "When that door opens, we hit them fast and hard. Leave by twos. Tali and I first. Then Jacob and Jones. Then Turnbow. Lady Grey, Eyes, we're gonna need that fire support. Prioritize asari targets because I am tired of dealing with this space magic bullshit."

Lady Grey replied via telepathic network, "Destroy all space magic bullshit," she said. "Yes, sir."

Shepard didn't dignify that with a response, instead moving to join the rest of her squad out of the direct line of fire from the airlock door.

The decontamination sequence concluded. The door spun open. There was a squad waiting for them. Six asari, a salarian and two turians. And they greeted Shepard and her team with the traditional gift given to unwanted guests in an asari building: the gift of bullets.

A veritable storm of gunfire peppered the interior of the airlock accompanied by four grenades; Shepard managed to deflect three of them out of the airlock before they could detonate, but one got through and went off at their feet. In most circumstances, a conventional grenade of the type operated by citadel forces would do little more than cause some minor damage to the kinetic barriers of a suit of Alliance powered armor. This was a blast in a confined space; the damage was vastly amplified. All of their barriers went down, and Shepard muttered another curse as she was flung against the back wall of the airlock, damage alarms ringing shrilly in her ears for all of a second before she cut them off with a mental command.

Then a bolt of plasma ripped through the wall and hit the kinetic barrier of an Eclipse maiden. There was a bright orange flash as her barrier collapsed, and she immediately dove for cover; it saved her life. A second and third plasma bolt came through wall an instant later and hit a second asari armed with an assault rifle; the first took down her barrier, the second burned through her hardsuit and lost magnetic containment inside her chest cavity. She didn't have time to scream.

Barriers down, Shepard's team advanced nonetheless, adapting the plan on the fly to the changed circumstances; Jacob and Tali went first, Tali sending a massive electric pulse out into her enemies to overload their barriers and rendering them temporarily unable to fire their weapons as Jacob opened fire with his laser rifle. He put a shot through the salarian's chest and took off on asari's left arm before the Eclipse squad got out of his line of fire. Another two-shot burst from the snipers outside killed an Asari. Then Turnbow and Jones came out, laying down fire of their own to force the Eclipse squad to continue its retreat.

Shepard came out last, and by the time she did, the firefight had ended. All of their powered armor suits were damaged - hers and Tali's more than the rest - but they were alive, three members of the Eclipse squad were dead, one was mission-killed, and Nassana Dantius's office was just ahead.

"Shepard," Lady Grey said over their telepathic tacnet, "Be advised we are unable to maintain our firing position. Enemy drones incoming. Will inform you when overwatch is available once more."

"Just one last set of stairs," Jones said. "I don't like our chances going up."

Shepard approached the door that opened into the stairwell that went to Nassana's office - it wasn't the only way up, or even the main way up - there was an elevator, too, but the elevator seemed more than a little suicidal given the circumstances. She held up her hand and focused on her telepathic senses. Nothing immediately near the door. It was locked, but that barely slowed her down. "Tali," she said, gesturing with her thumb to the now doorless door-frame.

Tali's omnitool lit up. A moment later, her combat drone was speeding up the stairwell. The drone was shot down about halfway up, but it had done what they needed it to do; Tali sent the telemetry to Turnbow.

Kenneth Turnbow, heavy weapons specialist, unclipped the blaster launcher from the back of his armor, settled it into place over his shoulder, fed it Tali's targeting telemetry, and fired.

Nassana Dantius's office was a bare, open place. Boring, even. It had grey faux-stone floors and bare walls. An overlarge desk was positioned three quarters of the way back in the room, and the back wall was dominated by a large video screen that would be easily mistaken for a window: it showed fog-shrouded Illium, albeit partially obscured by blinds.

There had been an explosion about a minute ago. It had left a huge, gaping hole in the wall where both her elevator door and the entrance to the emergency stairs had been. There were only two guards in the room with her. That was all that was left of her personal security detachment after she had sent them to reinforce the labs: two Eclipse sisters. One was missing an arm, and the other had been doing her best to treat the first's injuries. Nassana couldn't bring herself to look at the stump that was left of the maiden's right arm. Her stomach roiled. "Come on, Lanaya," the second Eclipse sister said, "Stay with me. Don't you die on me."

"I…" the first Eclipse sister - Lanaya - began. "... I feel cold. I'm sorry, my love, I don't think I can..."

"Just let her die already," Nassana snapped. The second Eclipse sister glared hatefully at her, but it was beneath her notice. Everything was falling apart. It was happening so quickly! First the alarms, intruders in the lab, the explosion, and suddenly the Shadow Broker's agents weren't taking her calls all in the course of five minutes. It should take more than five minutes for everything to fall apart, shouldn't it? She had reinforcements incoming, but now there was a second team engaging her security. This wasn't an accident. Someone had set her up for this. She just didn't know who, or why.

Then something out of a nightmare came through the broken wall that had been the door to the emergency stairs. The office became dark. The lights were still on, but they didn't matter; they were muddled points of brightness that barely penetrated more than a few centimeters of dark around them. Off to the side, Lanaya made a pathetic mewling sound, and Nassana felt her heart trying to climb into her throat.

It could barely be seen in the gloom, a suggestively lizard-like shifting in the darkness. The chemical smell of its breath. Its head held a vague suggestion of an asari's crest, but there were no eyes, and its skin was black as pitch. Worse than that was the fear which seemed to roll off of the creature in rotting waves - a quivering, helpless panic somehow not centered in her own body, but resting inside the monster. And a voice she could scarcely distinguish from her own thoughts whispered, "You are all going to die."

Nassana screamed and didn't stop screaming. The thing swept towards her, its snake-like, blade-tipped tail coiling to strike. "KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT!" she shrieked over and over even as the thing, some bizarre combination of asari, cat, lizard and snake, pounced on her, bore her down with terrible strength, and ripped into her flesh. There was pain. Ripping, tearing, its jaws clamping down on her mouth and sending a wave of agony through her as it bit into and then ripped off her jawbone.

Then, just as she was absolutely certain she was going to die, the creature dissolved into smoke shot through with motes of purple light. She was alive. The pain was gone. And a figure in battered powered armor stood over her with a Terran laser-rifle pointed at her head, and a woman's voice said, "Nassana Dantius, you're coming with us."

"Wh… what?" she asked, staring up at the woman in utter uncomprehension. "Where's… no. The creature! It could still be here!"

"Hard way it is," the woman said. She drew a strange, stubby weapon from her belt, pointed it at Nassana and fired.

Pain swept the world away into darkness and silence.

Getting out was easier than getting in With access to Nassana's personal terminal, Tali was able to shut down the building's AA defenses in short order. She copied the contents of Nassana's computer while she was at it. The crystal EDI had asked them to take along had never needed to be used. They made their escape via the rooftop, taking Nassana with them on the shuttle as they went. Garrus's team disengaged, and Lady Grey and Eyes did likewise.

The shuttle ride was a quiet one, with long silences punctuated only by the sounds of breathing, and Nassana's occasional unconscious whimper. After two vehicle changes, they at last made their way back to the Normandy. It was surprisingly easy to kidnap an influential corporate leader in Nos Astra, all things considered. Power armor got a little banged up, but they hadn't lost anyone, though it had been touch and go for a while there.

It was only after the debriefings, after the mission analysis, and after Nassana Dantius had been secured in Alien Containment that Shepard finally allowed herself to relax. She sank down into the leather chair in her office and let out a long, slow breath. Fatigue had sunk into her bones, and her everything still hurt after that blast in a confined space, but there wasn't time to sleep yet. Here, only a few miles away, with the bond renewed, she could just barely sense Liara's thoughts at the edges of her awareness. She reached out, brushing against the Asari's mind with a lover's touch. Then she whispered, 'It's done.'

Warmth. The impression of a smile. A flash of brilliant blue eyes. 'When was the last time you slept?' Liara asked.

'I'll sleep when I'm dead,' Jane replied. She released the connection; Liara's thoughts returned to an indistinct murmur in another room. She hit the start button on her automatic coffee maker and opened up her datapad to get her post-mission paperwork done.

She was asleep in minutes.

April 13, 2015.

That was the day it started.

There had been stories of aliens and alien abductions for generations, of course. But once upon a time, those had only been stories. There had never been any credible evidence of alien visitation, and the resemblance of many abduction accounts to sleep paralysis episodes provided an easy explanation. The pattern of the stories became quickly familiar: after the encounter, there was a period of amnesia. Then, during a session of hypnosis or psychotherapy, the victim remembered having been abducted and experimented on. Some claimed to have implants put in them. A few women claimed to have been impregnated during their abductions. Many claimed to have scars and marks put there by the aliens. All described the aliens in the same way. But not at first.

In the 1950s, there was no common thread in the aliens reported by abductees. One alleged abductee encountered otherworldly beings bathed in light, but basically human in appearance. The Flatwoods Monster was described as a being with a black body and a black face that glowed from within, inhumanly shaped with a dark pleated exoskeleton, and a head shaped like a sideways diamond. In 1954, reports of "hairy dwarfs" became common. 1956 marked the first appearance of the archetype of the Nordic Aliens, which would come to be called Pleiadians in popular lore. There were others. The 1960s saw the introduction of a few new alien types, among them assorted robots, some small, some large; a race of hairless ape-like giants with pinkish skin, green eyes, and a breathing apparatus; a being seemingly made of living black slime; the Mothman; a race of tall, bald grey-to-green-skinned humanoids with mouths that opened vertically; and, of course, the iconic Alien Greys, though at the time the Greys were only one out of hundreds of beings described, and certainly didn't constitute anything like a majority of the reports. More still were introduced in the 70s, including tiny elf-like beings, three meter tall three-eyed giants, strange, insectoids, still more robots, and the Reptilians.

It wasn't until the 80s that people began to consistently describe abduction by the Alien Greys. A few of the older types endured; stories about the Nordics and the Reptilians never really went away, but the Greys became the standard. People began to agree on what they looked like. Artists depictions began to match.

There were other reported activities: cattle mutilations, crop circles, that sort of thing. The stories had grown more elaborate over time. Some seemed ominous, some seemed silly. Annette had never believed any of it. Why, after all, would beings with the intelligence and power to travel billions of kilometers to reach our planet spend their time once they got here mutilating cows, experimenting on otherwise unremarkable people, or carving up wheat fields?

When UFO reports started spiking a few years ago accompanied now by faint radar signatures, few people outside the UFO Believer community paid it any mind. And if Annette herself had seen a few strange lights in the sky, well, everyone who wasn't an expert in nighttime aircraft identification saw lights in the sky that they didn't recognize from time to time, didn't they? That didn't mean they were alien spaceships full of little grey men.

Things got a little stranger in 2014. UFO sightings had been more and more common. It got to the point that it was all people could talk about. Abduction reports became more and more common. Farmers in some places actually had their livelihood threatened by the cattle mutilations. But it wasn't until Japan publicly established an anti-alien combat force - the Kiryu-Kai - that Annette had begun to think that maybe there was something to this. In the months that followed, other nations began to follow suit, each creating their own task force to deal with the alien threat, though few met anything more than limited success.

Then came 2015. The mass abductions began in February, and people absolutely went mad with fear.

April 13, 2015 wasn't the day it started for the world, but that was the day it started for Annette Durand.

It was evening. Lyon was splendid by night; all the lights of the city were ablaze, and in some parts of town, you would hardly know it was night without looking up at the sky. The sounds of city life were thick in the evening air; boats yet glided on the Rhône, their brilliant lights and the lights of the buildings on the riverfront turning the river opalescent as color mingled with color. Outside of her sister's home, a mixture of all the sounds of a living city could be heard: car horns, engines rumbling, the muted buzz of distant voices, the occasional siren, and much more besides. The news was still full of reports of San Francisco in the United States, but it lacked the immediacy of context. She felt bad as she watched the news at her sister's house, but even then, even knowing that abductions had happened as nearby as Valence, even with the news full of images of San Francisco burning, it didn't feel real to her; it felt like terrible things happening to people in faraway places. It wasn't real life. Couldn't be. Such a thing was impossible.

"Annette," her younger sister said, her voice fearful, "What are we going to do?"

Annette swallowed, and with that act she forced down her own fear until it was just a distant bubbling in the pit of her stomach. She looked Claire in the eye. "I'm going to find something less distressing to watch. You are going to make sure my nephew is asleep." Her tone was calm and matter-of-fact. "Tomorrow morning, we will go to the cafe on the corner for breakfast, then we'll drop Lucas off at mom and dad's house and spend the day out shopping. I will treat myself to that pair of blue satin shoes I've been eyeing for the last month and a half - the ones with the gold lace trim? And I will buy you whatever you want. Then we'll come home and watch terrible movies until mom and dad stop by for dinner."

"You and your shoes," Claire said with a long-suffering look. But her tone was a fond one, and she smiled as she said it.

Annette made a shooing motion, and Claire Durand rolled her eyes and walked down the hall to her son's room. Sometimes, Annette envied her sister. That generally lasted right up until she saw her changing diapers, but Claire had a good life. Claire was an extremely physically fit twenty three year old woman. She excelled at sports: she always had. She made a living as a professional footballer, though her pregnancy had put that on hold. Still, she'd worked hard to get back into shape, and she expected to be back on the field next month. She didn't make enough to be able to support herself and her son without their parents' money, but they were proud of her, and that was all that mattered.

Annette, four years older than her sister, had always been the girly girl of their tomboy and girly girl pair. They had fought almost constantly as children, but now - now that they were both grown women - they were finally able to be friends. It was nice. Weird, but nice.

"... fires burn out of control in the worst disaster since the Earthquake of 1906, and the death toll is expected to be in the tens of thousands at least…"

Annette changed the channel.

The French military team kicked in the door half an hour later.

Lucas was instantly awake, instantly wailing in his crib. Annette and Claire both screamed as half a dozen soldiers entered by twos, each fanning out to clear the house, securing it as quickly as possible.

One of the soldiers - a man in his mid-thirties with a jagged scar that bisected his eyebrow, skipped his eye, and then picked up again on his cheek for an inch or two approached the sisters, his gun carefully not pointed at them, but still held at ready. "Annette Durand?" he asked.

Annette's stomach sank. Her body was flush with adrenaline, and she wanted nothing more than to flee; the only thing that kept her from it was the knowledge that if she did, she would be leaving her sister and nephew to face this without her. "Yes?" she asked. She stuttered three times before she got the word out.

"Your father sent us, ma'am. I'm afraid you have to come with us. We have reason to believe an alien strike force is on its way to this location."

Annette stared at the man. "Why would an alien… an alien strike force want anything to do with me?"

The man's lips thinned. "That's what we intend to find out. But you have to come with us. Now. The longer you stay here and talk, the less time your sister has to escape with her son."

Annette stood up. "Of, of course," she said.

"Annette," Claire said warningly, "This is a trick. Or a mistake. It has to be."

Annette met her sister's gaze. "... I don't think it is," she whispered.

Another soldier took Annette by the arm and began to guide her out of the house, and Claire glared hatefully at him. He made it clear that if Annette resisted, he would remove her from the house by main strength. "Wait," she said, "Wait, I must pack a few things, I don't have any of what I would need to leave on such short notice! How long am I to be gone?"

"We can get you whatever you need, ma'am," the soldier guiding her said. "We can't resurrect you from the dead."

"But, I couldn't possibly…" she began, and continued. The soldiers half-dragged the protesting and terrified Annette Durand out the front door and into the waiting APC.

The door slamming shut cut off the sound of her nephew's terrified crying.

Annette stared about at the soldiers with her inside the cramped interior of the APC as the vehicle began to move. She sat on one of two benches in the rear of the vehicle. The hatch above her head was shut, cutting off any view of the sky, and it didn't seem real. Couldn't possibly be real. Young women didn't get dragged out of their sisters' houses by squads of soldiers and driven off in APCs in real life, did they? No. It was impossible.

It was cold outside, and the streets were still wet with yesterday's rain. It was marginally warmer in the APC, but still cold enough to be uncomfortable. She hadn't had time to put on the khaki cashmere sweater that she knew was draped over the arm of her chair in Claire's living room. Hadn't had time to put on a scarf. Hadn't had time to take her purse, even, and that was the worst part; her purse had a hundred useful things in it, and she missed all of them: her wallet and keys, a makeup compact, hand sanitizer, hair clips, a bobby pin, chapstick, the notebook and pen that she never used, a dozen other things. She felt naked without it; the only thing that she did have with her was the phone in her pocket. She produced it almost by reflex, her fingers sliding across its surface in well-practiced movements to bring up her twitter page. She was halfway through the process of tweeting about what had happened when the soldiers in the APC with her noticed what she was doing.

"Your phone," the scarred soldier said. "Give it to me."

Annette stared at him, holding her phone protectively. "What? No!"

He snapped it out of her hand. There was a moment of contested strength; he won. "This can be tracked," he snapped. Then he glanced down at the screen and saw her unfinished tweet, and his expression hardened into a furious glare. "You. Fucking. Idiot," he snapped, shut the phone off, opened the door, and flung it out onto the street with all his strength. Annette flinched at the sound of the phone hitting pavement. Another soldier shut the door. "If I die tonight," the scarred soldier said, "It will not be because General Durand's daughter just had to tell everyone where she was on Twitter."

Feeling angry and ashamed, Annette still had the wherewithal to glare at the man. "Who are you?" she asked. "Where are you taking me?"

"I am Lieutenant Lahaye," the man replied. "We will be meeting up with the rest of our convoy shortly. We are taking you to a secure facility for your own protection. More than that, you don't need to know."

That kept her quiet for about ten minutes. She couldn't see the windows from where she sat, and the only light available was the . The Véhicule de l'avant blindé slowed, and the door opened, and one of the soldiers got out. There was the sound of voices. Then the woman driving the vehicle announced that they were falling into position in the convoy.

"You said you work for my father?" Annette asked hopefully.

Lahaye snorted. "We work for France, mademoiselle," he replied. "But your father is our commanding officer."

"But he retired years ago…" she began.

"Things change. Particularly when the Earth is being invaded by an enemy from beyond the stars."

"An enemy from beyond the stars," Annette echoed half-wonderingly.

Lahaye smiled. "It's strange, isn't it? Some of us still hope that we'll wake up any moment now safe in our homes, and all of this will have been nothing but a bad dream."

Annette smiled, but it had little to do with happiness. "... All I'm hoping for is that Claire got away safely," she said.

None of the soldiers said anything; another cold dagger of fear sank in and made itself at home close to Annette's heart. "She did get away safely?" she asked.

As if in answer, there was an intense flash of light from the APC's cabin; she reflexively blinked, and the world went mad. There was a roaring sound, and heat, and a terrible pressure. The next thing Annette knew, she was lying on the wall, and down was sideways. There was a ringing in her ears that drowned out all else, and her face felt sunburned. Even more disturbing was the way she felt vaguely drunk. She tried to get up six times before she finally managed it, and it took her the better part of a minute to regain her senses. The ringing faded slightly, replaced by the distinctive staccato sound of gunfire and a strange, irregular discharge she didn't recognize.

Annette's heart began to race, her hands to shake as terror made itself known. "Oh God, oh God, oh God," she whispered over and over. She tried to think. Tried to clear her thoughts. This could not be happening. This wasn't happening. There… there were soldiers fighting outside the APC. She should stay put. Stay put. Yes. Once they drove off whoever had attacked them, she would be safe. In the meantime, leaving the APC would just put her in more danger. She would be fine if she waited for the soldiers to come for her.

It seemed to take an eternity before the last sounds of gunfire trailed into silence. Then she heard the sound of heavy footsteps outside the APC, and the terror which had gripped her finally began to subside. "I'm in here!" she called. "Help!"

The top hatch opened, and her heart lifted at the sight of Lieutenant Lahaye looking down at her. He smiled unkindly. "Still alive? Good."

"Thank God," she said, reaching out to him. He took her hand. "Thank God you fought them off." He helped her to exit the vehicle.

There were bodies, and shell casings, and strange burns all around the APC. A group of dark-haired men in business suits, all wearing sunglasses, were standing guard.

Wait. That seemed wrong.

She didn't want to look at the bodies. Didn't want to know who had died. She looked anyways; Lahaye's entire squad lay dead at her feet. Half a dozen other military vehicles were burning in the street around her.

The nearest business-suited man turned towards her, and she noticed the patches of mottled green skin around his wrists and neck. He approached, and way he moved was wrong. Fundamentally wrong, as if he were trying to add 2+2 to reach 5; human beings didn't move like that.

Annette looked at Lieutenant Lahaye, dread growing in the pit of her stomach, and asked, "Why?"

Lahaye's face might as well have been carved from stone. "What I do," he said, "I do to Exalt us all."

"Please," she said. "Please, don't do this."

"She's all yours," Lahaye told the Thin Men.

Fear like billowing smoke sought to choke her thoughts. Her heart raced. The monsters were going to get her. Nothing but eucatastrophe could change that, and she wasn't holding out hope for a miracle. No eagles were coming. She made a low whimpering noise in the back of her throat. She needed to get away. She had to get AWAY. The first thin man reached out and took her by the arm.

Touch has a power to it. There is a connection that is made when a human being touches another. It is there in the mother holding her newborn baby in her arms; is there in the handshake, the hug, the kiss, in the more intimate embrace of lovers. The laying on of hands has been practiced by many throughout human history, and not without reason; though it doesn't actually heal, it creates a sense of connection. Sometimes, just being touched by people who want to help can be enough. There a darker side, too; the unwanted or painful touch can affect a person in profoundly negative ways.

But this… this was something else. It didn't feel like being touched by a human. There was no connection to be made; it felt like the opposite, though Annette couldn't have said what the opposite was until that moment. When the Thin Man's hand fell upon her, her skin crawled with disgust, but it was more than that, more elemental; its touch repelled her the way magnetic fields with like poles repelled each other.

The bone-deep revulsion sparked something within her, and in that moment, when it was already too late, when it no longer mattered, Annette Durand found her courage at last. She balled her hands up into fists. The first Thin Man reached out for her; quick as lightning, she punched the creature in the jaw with all her strength.

The alien staggered. Its sunglasses clattered noisily to the ground, and it looked at her; it had eyes like a snake: green and vertically slitted. The Thin Man recovered from the blow, green blood leaking from its split lip, and the corner of its lips curled into a sneer.

Then there was an explosion of light and of pain behind her eyes as something struck her on the back of the head; she collapsed bonelessly to the ground. Lahaye stood over her, gun in hand. Her head throbbed. Some distant part of her recognized that he'd just hit her with his gun. Pistol-whip. That's what that was called. The thought made her want to giggle; he'd just pistol-whipped her. That was funny, wasn't it?

The world lost focus; the monsters got her.

And on the Normandy, many, many years later, Jane Shepard woke in her chair with a start. Nausea bubbled up in her belly, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat. An awful sense of unreality swept over her; the whole universe seemed to tilt. Everything was wrong. She stared down at her hands and did not recognize them, and she shuddered.

Like a diver swimming up to the surface of the water, Nassana rose from a dreamless slumber into wakefulness. Light, color, and sound bled into her the comfortable oblivion. She saw light through her closed eyelids. It was cold, and her skin pebbled in it. There were sounds. Water dripping. A faint, insistent beeping. A smell like fermentation. There was something. Something she couldn't quite recall.

Tearing jaws and rending claws.

Her eyes blinked open. She was in an empty store room, and tied to a chair. Her clothes had been changed. Her business suit was gone; she was dressed now in an ugly green jumpsuit that clashed with the color of her skin. There was a sink set into the wall. Its faucet dripped slowly. The beeping continued at regular intervals, but she couldn't see what was making the noise. Above the faucet was written a number. It was carved into the tile of the wall as if with a jagged knife. 101. Only that. Nothing more.

She remembered. The monster. The monster had killed her. Hadn't it? She tried to move her hands to check that she still had a jaw. She could not. In a rush of frustrated fear, she drew upon the biotic power that was her birthright as an asari, intending to destroy the chair and bindings alike.

Nothing happened. An awful, sinking weight settled into her stomach. "... Hello?" she called. She had a jaw. She had a tongue. She could speak normally. That was something.

Silence. Drip. Beep.

"Is someone there?" she asked.

Drip. Beep.

"Whoever you are, you're going to regret kidnapping me. I have allies!"

Drip. Beep. Silence. She shivered in the cold room. Nothing. No one. She was alone. And that terrified her beyond words. "Do you even know who I am?" she screamed.

Drip. Beep.

"I'M NASSANA DANTIUS! YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME!"

The echoes of her own voice faded into silence. There was nothing. There was no one.

Drip. Beep.

She couldn't stop shivering, now. It wasn't THAT cold, but she couldn't stop. There was nothing. There was no one. "... you can't do this to me," she whispered.

Drip. Beep.

Time passed. She wasn't sure how much. Minutes? Surely not more than an hour. Hard to be sure. She tried to keep count with her heartbeats, but she kept losing the count. She made it as high as 453, once.

Then change. Then something new. A deep, grinding clunk. A thunking clack. "Who's there?" she asked.

Silence.

Frustration and terror rose up in her, and she screamed, "ANSWER ME!"

Her body felt full of hot blood, waving curves of sinews and skin. Her body wasn't her own. She could feel the eezo nodules within her flesh. She knew how to activate them. How to wield them. But her rebellious body would not obey her will. No matter how hard she tried, the eezo nodules beneath her skin remained dormant. She could feel her blood roaring through arteries, surging through veins, through capillaries, a thousand threads of head within her; she could feel each individual one. She thought of Dahlia.

Dahlia. A thousand images flashed through her mind with that name. A thousand different emotions. Bitterness and resentment and hate peeled away to reveal love and nostalgia and sorrow. Oh, dear sweet Athame, what had she done? What had she done? Dahlia was dead. Her sister was dead, and it was her fault, and she realized only now, in this moment of Seeing the entirety of her life that Dahlia had touched, that she realized just what she had destroyed. How they had played together in the park in the Citadel. How Dahlia had been born only eight years after Nassana, how they had been closer than any of their other sisters. How Dahlia had started to argue with their mother when they'd both been maidens. The last fight. The screaming match. The walls of their home echoing. Dahlia storming out and meeting Nassana in front of their home.

"Come with me, Nassana. It'll be just you and me."

She hadn't moved. She'd just stared at the ground, paralyzed with indecision. She tried to speak. Tried to say something, but the hurt in Dahlia's eyes had stolen her breath.

Dahlia never looked back. Never heard Nassana's call of, "Wait, I'm coming with you!" Never saw her try to follow. Boarded the shuttle and flew away.

Someone was crying. Tears rolled down wet cheeks. "Why are you doing this to me?" someone asked, her voice filled with pain, with anguish, with despair. It took several seconds before Nassana realized it was her voice. That the person crying was her.

Drip. Beep.

More of her life flashed before her eyes. The experiments on those suit-rats. The opportunity. Learning of the quarian arrangement with the humans. Every single thing she had done that was connected to that.

The help she had received. The STG team, the Spectre, all helping her to create a trail to misdirect anyone who might investigate. It was flawless. The Citadel would be blamed, but not those within its structure who actually were to blame.

How she had overstepped her bounds. Acted without permission. Acted without the Shadow Broker's knowledge. Hadn't she? Had she? A thousand pieces of information flashed before her eyes, questioning that assumption. But that was absurd. Why would she question that? … Was it even her that was questioning it? That was a silly thought. Why would she think that? "No," she said, "Please don't…"

It pressed. Pressure. An awful pressure. Something cracked. Something dark and purple.

Cracks. Cracks spread through her vision, cracks filled with brilliant purple darkness.

Her field of vision shattered. Her mind shattered. Fragments of her awareness sprayed out like shards of glass.

She broke. Teeth biting through something soft. Pain. An awful hot warmth filling her mouth. The sound of screaming. The universe spiralling into darkness.

Her last thought, echoing across the dissolving fragments of her conscious mind was, 'I'm sorry, Dahlia.'

"Anything?" Jane asked. She was in the infirmary, now, seated on one of the cots and dressed in her uniform pants and boots with a navy blue tank top over a sleeveless grey undershirt. The sense of unreality

Doctor Chakwas shook her head, looking thoroughly irritated. "It would help if I knew what I was looking for, Commander," she said crossly. Between the two of them floated a holographic projection of the results of Shepard's brain scan.

Jane went through the variables in her head. While she knew she could trust Chakwas, she wasn't sure she could trust XCOM to respect doctor/patient confidentiality. … in fact, she was pretty sure she couldn't. "Just, anything abnormal," she said.

"Between being a telepath and having multiple beacons plus the experience of being Prothean uploaded into your brain, your brain patterns are abnormal to begin with," Doctor Chakwas replied. "Unless you're prepared to give me specifics, I'm afraid there's not much I can do. What I can say without knowing more is that I can't see anything obviously wrong with you."

Jane sighed. "Thanks, Karin," she said. "Can I take a copy of this with me?" she asked, indicating the hologram.

"They're your medical records," Chakwas replied. Her tone was tart, but there was a certain note of fondness mixed in. "Though what Liara will be able to tell you about your very human brain that I can't is beyond me," she said.

Jane would have answered, but at that moment, there was a sound. A telepathic chime. The distinctive note of a living mind being shattered, and the thing doing it felt… familiar. She frowned. Then a light on Chakwas' desk began to flash urgently. Chakwas glanced at it, mentally accessing whatever message waited for her.

"Damn," Chakwas said, but she was already in motion. "Nurse!" she called. "Prep for surgery on an asari patient." She glanced Shepard's way. "It seems our new prisoner bit off her own tongue during telepathic interrogation. Anything else will have to wait, Commander."

"I'll get out of your way," Jane said, and walked out of the infirmary even as it erupted into a flurry of frantic activity.

Shepard returned to her quarters and put on her full uniform before making her way to the CIC. The world looked strange. She barely recognized the pattern of her own breathing or the movements of her own body. Lawson was there to greet her. "Sir," Miranda said, and followed her into the ready room..

She nodded in acknowledgment as the door shut behind them. "Miranda. I hear the interrogation hit a snag."

Miranda nodded. She was frustrated, but very little showed in her bearing. "Yes, sir. Someone booby-trapped Ms. Dantius's mind."

"I felt it when it happened," Shepard said. "We lose anyone?"

"Rawlings. He was in her mind. We may be able to reconstruct him, but…"

"But he won't be the same," Jane finished. "Right. So we're dealing with a telepath."

"Which means human," Miranda said.

"A traitor," Shepard confirmed. The word tasted sour. Human traitors were very, very few and far between. It was hard to hide treachery when every member of your species was psionic, even if only a large minority had powers strong enough to be useful. "We get a name?" she asked.

Miranda shook her head. "No. But we have a place to start."

"Oh?"

"A few officials in the Citadel government. Probably the Shadow Broker as well."

Jane's expression was not a smile, but it did part her lips, widen her eyes, and show her teeth. "New alien races, widespread abductions, mysterious conspiracies, and a possible traitor." She blew out a breath through her nose. It wasn't quite a snort, but it served the same purpose. "Just like old times."

Miranda looked at her, then, and the expression on the woman's face was utterly unreadable. "Right," she echoed.

"Well, let's get to work," Jane said.

The office of Nassana Dantius was empty, now, except for the blood stains. Eclipse had abandoned the building, and Nassana's workers had fled. The local police had yet to arrive - corporate extraterritoriality made such investigations difficult at best.

The halls were silent, though they still echoed with the memory of violence. The building was no longer a living place. No longer a place where people lived and worked; it was an enormous, monolithic concrete corpse.

The drell stood in Nassana's office, examining the evidence of violence. He was like a statue, eyes taking in every detail, barely seeming even to breathe. He blinked occasionally, nictitating membranes closing over his eyes and opening again. Computer logs wiped. But the distinctive burns and scorches gashed into the building spoke of human weapons.

Humans.

Laser dot on a tan human face. The smell of sewage. Omega. The human male never sees him, never hears him. His thoughts are disciplined, silent. He breathes in. The air is cold and damp. He fires on the exhale. The shot is perfect. A neat hole through the human male's forehead. A spray of blood and brain matter out the larger hole in the back of his skull. A prayer offered for the wicked.

Without expression, without expectation, Thane Krios turned and left the office to the memory of violence.

END CHAPTER 06

Codex: Terran Shield Technology
Unlike the Citadel Races, the Terrans do not use kinetic barriers to shield their ships. This is in part due to the rarity and expense of eezo in Terran space, in which very few naturally occurring deposits can be found, and also due to their technology base, which allows for the direct manipulation of gravity rather than the generation of mass effect fields. Terran shields are barriers of gravitic distortion which protect the ship from harm, deflecting kinetic attacks and attenuating beam weapons. This degree of protection is not invulnerability, but it is undeniably powerful: there is no such thing as a glancing hit against a Terran warship. While disruptor torpedoes have proven effective against Terran vessels, the close range at which these torpedoes must be launched in order to be effective makes this a daunting prospect at best.

In modern times, because this technology requires Elerium in order to function, because the sale of Elerium to non-humans is a major offense under Terran law, and because no Citadel race has yet cracked the problem of how to manufacture Elerium, use of Terran style barriers among the Citadel Races is both extremely limited and extremely expensive.