Samael

When a hostage is ransomed, someone always gets the worst of the exchange. Even in the most optimistic of cases, where the kidnappers have made the snatch without exposing the affair to the public eye, and the hostage is someone of great importance to a party with the means to pay, in the happy event that the exchange is made without bloodshed or betrayal, the 'customer' has been forced to pay for something that was already theirs, in all likelihood at a rate slightly higher than the commodity's true value. Treachery on the part of the vendors will result in further injury, often to both the hostage and those acting on their behalf, whilst an attempt on the part of the buyers to skew the situation into their favour could easily result in misfortune for all concerned.

Shepard had been present at such a transaction multiple times over the course of his life (twice as part of the interplay between London gangs, once as an N7 (it had been gratifying to have confirmed his suspicion that the only real organisational difference was one of scale)), and had never yet seen one in which someone didn't get screwed in some way – although admittedly that might have had something to do with the fact that he was present on the behalf of either the salespersons or the consumers in order to ensure that it was the other party that got screwed.

This time, his assessment was that the person most likely to finish this thing at a disadvantage was him.

In any given mission that he undertook, he had two key intentions: personal advancement and completion of the mission's primary objective, ranked firmly in that order. Sometimes they aligned, sometimes they were mutually exclusive, but they both invariably required quite a high degree of knowledge of the situation – which by this assignment's lamentable nature as a combined rescue and intelligence gathering venture, he lacked.

He knew the location of the exchange. The coordinates corresponded to a point near the magnetic north pole of a planet designated 42-518P-111, in the Horsehead Nebula, whose distant nature in relation to the Citadel allowed Shepard to use the lengthy solitude associated with interstellar travel to think. The planet was a remote, cold garden world whose volatile magnetic field (caused by turbulence in its molten core) when combined with radiation from the nearest star produced a massive field of interference through which electromagnetic signals could not travel. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of physics would thus be able to mark it as a poor option for colonisation, particularly given the lack of valuable mineral wealth to incentivise ignoring the primary difficulty. A more enterprising mind would also be able to see it as an ideal location for those operating outside the law to conduct their dealings undetected. Of course, the level of competence implied by the choice was already rendered a certainty by the nature of their business with the Black Ops organisation.

He knew that he carried the payment in the form of a credit chit coded to his biometrics and requiring an authorisation code, after which it could be used in much the same way as the now long-defunct cheque. This payment system, whilst conveniently working around the restrictions imposed by the interference field, would also prevent Hogan from discovering the account receiving the not inconsiderable sum without resorting to an implausible amount of data trawling. All of the information given by the kidnappers had arrived through a labyrinthine web of proxies, and by the time the Alliance reached the end of the correct trail anything useful there would probably have been erased.

He didn't know who he was dealing with.

He had been given Samael's biometric data in order to confirm his identity, but that didn't equate to knowing who he was saving – he had never met the man, which made deception on the part of his opponents that much easier, and since all the data he did have was under the control of a man whose behaviour was becoming increasingly hostile and suspicious, even the notion that it corresponded to a real person was suspect. The only information he could trust was what he had collected personally.

The leader of the hijackers had known Rawne's name – so he was almost certainly associated either with Hogan or with those who had taken the N7. If he was with the Irishman his appearance at Ross' assassination couldn't have been a coincidence, but his actions had made it clear that he hadn't initially been aware of the presence of either the journalist or the marine, or he would have struck at them sooner and been better prepared for the contest. Besides, the only reason to have two assets competing for the same prize would be to discover which was stronger, in which case it made no sense for only one to be restricting itself to nonlethal measures.

No, the hacker had to be associated with the kidnappers, and judging by the way their brief meeting had played out he was in all likelihood the man who had acquired the Operative, doubtless in exchange for the military grade equipment he'd had on display. He'd claimed some of it had been stolen from the STG, which gave Thaddaeus a far better means of judging how dangerous these people were, even if he didn't like the answer. His guess at the time had been the Shadow Broker, who could well want highly ranked Alliance personnel alive for the purposes of interrogation, but the Broker's usual modus operandi was to make trades, not snatch from a specific target in a way that was bound to make enemies...

In any case, those facts all but confirmed Rawne's existence – without him none of it made sense. Moreover, the way Hogan had lost his patience entirely without warning over the Pragia affair didn't make much sense on the basis of previous analysis of his character, unless he had already been stressed by other setbacks.

So, Rawne probably existed, and Hogan probably wasn't setting him up despite having sent him alone to deal with people who had managed to capture an agent purportedly as dangerous as he was, as well as having potentially stolen some of the most advanced weaponry in the galaxy from the Special Tasks Group.

The "probably" wasn't the only part of that sentence that was worrying, and it was sufficiently removed from one hundred percent certainty that Shepard wasn't willing to involve Hogan or his pawns in any precautions he might take – which rather limited his capacity to prepare, although he had done all that he could.

He didn't know if it would be enough.

Shepard finished decelerating from FTL and several minutes later guided the shuttle down through the turbulent, albeit slightly less hostile atmosphere over the equator, far to the south of his destination. He nearly lost control of the engines several times over the course of the journey before he finally settled the ship down at the rendezvous, which turned out to be out in the middle of a vast, iced over inland sea. An ultrasound reading indicated that the frozen surface ought to be able to support the craft, but the assassin kept the mass effect core running to mitigate the risk of breakage in any case. Scans confirmed that he was alone within the limited radius that they could penetrate, for the time being at least, and he settled in to wait. If it were possible to set up an early warning system he might have laid some snares, but the only time he'd be made aware of his adversary's arrival was the moment that it happened, and Thaddaeus had no intention of failing the negotiation stage before it had even begun.

He heard the shriek of engines before he saw the blip appear on his screen, and initially mistook it for the onset of another of the blizzards that so often swept the polar regions of the planet's desolate landscape, before the almost identical shuttle banked around on the far horizon and settled slowly into a landing about fifty metres away, the pilot's wariness personifying the vehicle's flight. After a moment, its main door opened expectantly although no-one appeared from within.

The N7 quickly relinquished the sheltering armour plate of his own transport, immediately feeling the chill despite his well insulated hardsuit and the black reconnaissance hood he wore out of concern for his anonymity. Arctic camouflage would have been a more practical colour choice, but would also have suggested an unhelpful level of combat readiness that might have impeded proceedings – the trophy from Torfan, on the other hand, had been of particular utility in this case, serving to conceal the knives and pistols he carried on the surface of his armour.

As he strode across the snow-covered ice, automatically renewing his search for signs of ambush and treachery, though through more conventional means this time, his eyes picked out two figures moving out into the open in response to his own appearance. Their shapes were rendered dark silhouettes by heavy contrast with the glare of reflected photons that assaulted his gaze, one hunched and staggering, arms pinned out of view, the other walking smoothly as he guided his captive. There was an obvious discrepancy in stature between the two men that soon seemed easy to explain when they were close enough to see that the hostage hadn't been given a hardsuit, and had his body temperature maintained by a couple of layers of clothing that, judging by the way he shook, were not especially effective. Clearly they wanted Shepard to feel rushed by the prospect of hypothermia, and hesitant to open fire due to the vulnerability of his objective. Which he would be, up until the moment that he deemed it necessary to do so.

The prisoner's face was covered by a hood, along with a scarf drawn up to his eyes, which were themselves covered by a pair of tinted glasses, but what little skin Shepard became able to see as the gap between them closed further still, was as pale as the white crystals that blanketed the ground for miles in every direction. At the very least, then, they'd managed to find an albino for their doppelganger – and they might even be about to make an honest exchange. He suppressed a dark chuckle at the very thought. Honesty had been out of place in everything he did for decades...

Words seemed superfluous as the gap narrowed to one metre and Thaddaeus delved into his coat, watching his opposite's free arm tense and go to the gun at his thigh. The marine allowed the inner pocket to become visible – along with his other, more usual tools – and produced the chit with a hidden, transient smirk. The datapad was temporarily exchanged for access to the hostage's exposed hands, whereupon each man examined the trinkets in play. Shepard drew blood and compared fingerprints and DNA to the biometric profile on his omnitool, overload and incineration subroutines poised in the certainty that this was the logical time for things to fall apart and yet his foe's only move was to perform scans of his own.

The identifiers in the database came up a perfect match to the samples he had taken. This was no impostor – and yet, he became warier still, sure that something wasn't right and that the more difficult it was to see, the more dangerous it would be to him. Another glance at the horizon, so discreet as to be unnoticeable and all too brief as a result, revealed nothing. The chit was returned to him, and the offer of a painless success outweighed every reason he had to think that this was a trap: whatever he did was sure to spring it, but this at least would keep one of his objectives within his reach...

He entered the code and allowed the biometric scan, unlocking the datapad and all the credits stored on it, and then came the inevitable hesitant transaction, each party careful to ensure that symmetry and synchronicity were observed throughout. Until, that is, Shepard's counterpart span on his heel and walked briskly back towards his own transport, hands empty but for the chit. The N7 spun to his shuttle, but could still see nothing amiss, and so felt limited to backing slowly towards the spacecraft whilst watching the other man get in and fly off towards the horizon without a second glance, Rawne mutely keeping pace all the while.

Still not allowing himself to relax, Thaddaeus turned to face his charge, who it seemed had stopped shaking – not a good sign since it wasn't the temperature of the surroundings that had changed. He raised his omnitool to run a thermal scan of his fellow Operative;

"We need to-"

The blow was lightning fast, equally sudden and for all of Shepard's wariness, by this point almost completely unexpected. Only the fact that he was already looking in the general direction of his attacker gave him the time to see it and twist away far enough to keep it from knocking him unconscious before he had a chance to retaliate at all. Even lurching back to reduce the trauma from the strike, he saw stars and struggled to shake a dazed state of mind that hindered his ability to analyse the situation.

Rawne-

-was already pressing his advantage, sending his free hand all but lunging for Shepard's throat in a motion that was reversed almost before he managed to raise an arm to counter it, now serving as a feint for a sweeping motion targeting his legs, and the only thing the assassin could do besides fall was to throw himself backwards again and buy himself an instant's breathing room, mind consumed as much with an effort to focus on dealing with this sudden situational shift as with pondering what it meant-

And it was already pretty clear which was more deserving of his attention. If he'd had any doubts beforehand about the man he had been supposed to rescue, they were now all but erased. Samael moved faster than human anatomy ought to allow, and had he time for such things Thanatos might actually have been surprised that he was still standing. Thinking himself ready, he stood in the face of the next flurry, still going through the motion of drawing one of his knives when he was forced to slip around a kick that gracefully flicked up towards his chin with the same confident dexterity the N7 carried when throwing a jab from sure footing, less than a hair's breadth between him and concussion.

The manoeuvre had left him with an opening, and he didn't hesitate to continue to push forwards after he straightened, the point of his blade leading a tight, controlled lunge into space his opponent no longer occupied, a foreign left hand landing on his wrist even as his other arm was compelled to cede victory in its own campaign – but the knee he threw up to ruin its unprotected opposite connected. Capitalising on the window the pain of the injury would give him, the marine reversed his grip on his weapon with practised ease and stabbed at the joint just below his adversary's hip – even as something in the back of his head snarled and got ready for everything to go wrong again.

Because the way the joint gave way before his knee could only really have been deliberate, somehow within its mechanical capabilities, and because for all the wind's indifferent volume he knew that his efforts hadn't drawn so much as a sigh from the creature that was on the receiving end. The grip on his wrist twisted his intentions, in spite of his resistance, as inexorably as if Samael were inside his mind, influencing the route of the electrical impulses travelling through his nerves, and the monomolecular edge was curving around on a path that would rend armour, skin and flesh alike in order to sever the taller man's femoral artery. Shepard made the one move he could to avert that disastrous outcome in time, and dropped the knife. It glanced off of his leg on its course into the snow, leaving a nick in the plate despite a lack of significant driving force behind it.

A shift of the other man's weight, a slight drop in his centre of gravity gave Thaddaeus notice of Rawne's intentions – not enough time to counter them, but instead to plot slightly further into the future. As the world shifted around him and he tumbled towards the snow a beckoning gesture accompanied a flash of blue, yanking his foe forwards after him, off balance for the first time in this confrontation and in all likelihood the last-

Because Shepard had caught himself, landing into a compressed handstand before immediately expanding to put his full body weight behind his feet which collided viciously with the underside of Rawne's chin, whipping his head back with an audible snap and sending him tumbling backwards into the snow. Shepard didn't let himself mimic Samael's sudden stillness and rolled to his feet, sourly noting his own heavy breathing but unwilling to disadvantage himself for even a moment by suppressing it. The shuttle would be back soon no doubt, both to recover its operative and destroy the other shuttle, and Shepard would be ready and waiting with questions and a few civil requests...

And then his eyes homed in on the traitor's body where it lay in the snow – or more specifically; his hand, and the way it had come to rest on the hilt of the N7's monomolecular blade. Thaddaeus halted mid-step, already calculating a probability estimate on reflex as his fingers, erring on the side of caution, gripped the handle of his pistol. He should have drawn and shot immediately, yet at that moment he was pulled into morbidly fascinated spectatorship as the man who ought to be dead wrenched his head out of the unnatural angle it had been forced into and turned to stare at him again, with no indication of pain or effort of any kind. As if unfamiliar with the notion of paralysis or spinal damage, the should-be quadriplegic's fingers curled around the discarded blade's handle.

A moment of stillness as each killer contemplated the other, their speed, their stance, calculating whether it was better to act or react. That calm was shattered as each made his decision, Shepard snapping off a shot quite literally on the fly as he evaded Rawne's own projectile before drawing his second Karpov and rolling to his feet to meet his adversary's renewed assault. Before he could bring either sidearm to bear, or even fully regain his feet, he took a kick that swept his right arm aside and threatened to lay him out with its reversal, but forced the offending limb withdraw abruptly under the threat of being perforated by a round from his other pistol. It would be the work of less than a second to lower his aim and pull the trigger, but in that time a hand made to ensnare his wrist, in actuality providing cover for Rawne to drop his foot and pivot on it, scything a powerful spinning kick at his neck that Shepard was forced to block with both armoured forearms.

Now it was the traitor whose one-footed posture was vulnerable – and Thaddaeus tried to exploit it with a stamp at the load-bearing knee and a levelling of the weapon in his left hand, only for Samael to allow himself to fall, simultaneously disrupting the pistol's line of fire and using his own weight to pull the N7 after him, prompting the marine to throw himself over his opponent, using the forward momentum to roll to his feet and whirl back towards his foe. He parried one jab even as he directed the muzzle of a gun towards un-armoured flesh and bone, already pulling the trigger, heedless of the fact that Rawne was no longer quite where he had been a millisecond ago. Gone was what little restraint he'd been using, out of a desire for a neat, clean kill, out of a desire to see and understand what was under the skin of a thing that looked like a human but could move as faster than a drell and endure punishment fit for a krogan.

And yet, despite the increase in volume of wasted shots, the assassin had reached a new peak – he was at his very swiftest, his most deadly, every movement smooth and sure and shrouded in a subtle blue nimbus of subconscious biotics, not once overextended or mistargeted. He was also, he noted with a bitter mental spasm of amusement, at his most desperate. Rawne wasn't landing any more hits, admittedly, but neither was he, each of them trading blows and shots that were either nudged onto a different course or else had their destination twist around them mid-journey, leaving them to sail off into the snow. Their approaches to the martial arts were eerily similar, combining pragmatic opportunism with a desire not to commit to a position, grapple or blow in a way that would hinder their ability to adapt to a sudden shift in circumstances.

It was this similarity that allowed Shepard to keep Rawne at bay.

It was this similarity that told him that Rawne was holding back.

It wasn't just that Samael hadn't accepted the two false invitations for a killing stroke that he had fabricated. It was the fact that, for all his finesse, there had been real openings as well – cracks in his guard within reach to be exploited, but only if you were happy to accept an even chance that your attack would kill your opponent. They couldn't have been missed, and yet they had been ignored totally, not even spared a second's consideration. The traitor wanted to take him alive – like the hijackers had.

Thaddaeus knew that the current equilibrium was unsustainable. He was putting everything he had into holding his ground, but in the short term it was draining and in the long term it would be impossible to maintain – and if Rawne was even capable of tiring, he was showing no hint of it. Any conclusion that entailed an avoidance of defeat for the N7 would have to depend heavily on the use of technology – it offered an effectiveness at range that his opponent clearly lacked, if his apparently single-minded preference for close quarters was any indication, but to bring that into play he actually needed his opponent to be at range. The obvious solution was to use biotics, but for that he needed a free hand...

Easily flicking a switch that began to activate its safety protocols, Shepard threw the weapon in his left hand squarely at the traitor's face, at the same time sending yet another round in the general direction of the man's torso, and didn't wait to marvel as Samael flowed into a backwards somersaulting catch and kick with such natural grace that one could almost have believed that it had been a component of a pre-choreographed routine. Instead, he was focussing his attention on intensifying the radiance that played around his now freed fingers, and then commanding it to surge from him to the still airborne albino, the resultant field sending its occupant hurtling away – along with the newly rebooting pistol he had managed to snatch out of the air. Along with, in a more metaphorical sense, Shepard's hope that he would be able to retain his long-distance advantage without having to shoot himself in the foot and expose himself to a danger that wasn't going to deliberately refrain from killing him, unlike some.

Not bothering to wait until he'd hit the ground and could take up a stable firing position, Rawne was levelling the Karpov – and Shepard felt a cold, not altogether rational certainty that those disadvantages, his armour, and his kinetic barriers would act as minimal obstacles to him. His hand moved, once again encased in light, and with a speed that the other Operative couldn't match, pointed-

At the shuttle less than ten metres away from the albino, which immediately responded to the command sent by the assassin's omnitool and executed the one failsafe he'd been able to put in place without alerting Hogan or anyone else to what he was doing.

It exploded.

Not with the full thermonuclear force of the eraser – Shepard had quietly removed that addition to his transport's armoury years ago, concealing the modification from routine inspections with a diligent combination of bribery and blackmail. This was not to say that the device that served as the explosive's replacement was in any way anaemic, however. The blast ripped the vehicle apart, peppering the marine with shrapnel that was plucked out of the air by his shields, even as he made a dive, lengthened by the force of the detonation, away into a prone position that would minimise the profile he presented to any debris. The traitor was far closer, but that wasn't true for long, a vicious shockwave hurling him aside, all his grace and skill rendered irrelevant in the face of one of the deadliest physical phenomena sentients had harnessed for their own purposes. He hit the ice hard, Karpov skittering from his grasp, and then there was a pause, as the air rushed back into the space the shuttle had occupied, smoke laced with element zero and dozens of other carcinogens diffusing into the atmosphere.

Thaddaeus scrambled to his feet and started running just as another undercurrent of noise signalled an end to the respite, seawater surging up from the hole gouged out by the ordnance as the cracks it created spread and grew, quickly giving chase. It wasn't long before they were joined by the other human, having picked himself up from a battering that should have left him unconscious and in need of intensive medical care. It would be unreasonable for either of them to hope that they might entirely outrun the consequences of the sudden release of energy, but Shepard was gambling everything on the notion that he would be able to let it dissipate behind him to the point that stable icebergs of a practical size would be able to survive and support him.

One foot in front of the other in great leaping strides, running at full tilt, it was a matter of seconds before the snaking fragmentations were overtaking him, crystal falling away almost as soon as his feet left it behind, succumbing to the arctic turbulence of the onrushing water. It was at this moment that he chose to look back, remembering Samael's impossible resilience and scorning a quiet hope that the explosion had done his work for him. The traitor was gaining on him despite the difficult nature of the terrain he was navigating, executing leap after incredible leap, landing flawlessly on the floating fragments of ice sheet that sank and melted even as he launched off of them and onto the next.

Still fleeing, Shepard fired another volley with his remaining pistol – which was about as lethal as all his previous efforts with the weapon, but fulfilled its intended purpose of slowing Rawne slightly and keeping him distracted whilst Shepard focussed on snatching a large, disintegrating raft from the water behind his pursuer and propelling it at him with as much force as his heavily divided attention could muster. Except that said pursuer had clearly noticed that the mass accelerator rounds streaming around him weren't the only source of blue light, because as the wall of ice reached him, still streaming water, he made his next leap into a rapid, three hundred and sixty degree twist highlighted by the twin glowing blades that seemed to extend from his wrist before carving the massive projectile into pieces that divided around him harmlessly as he landed on the next miniature floe with nothing more than a stumble whilst he compensated for his angular momentum.

In spite of the fact that he hadn't been equipped with any armour or obvious external technology, Samael had a twin set of omniblades – devastating close quarters weapons that could have shorn Thaddaeus into pieces with relative ease at any time over the course of their duel, yet had not appeared once. If he'd needed any further evidence that this was a fight for his freedom rather than his life; that would have been more than sufficient.

It had already occurred to him that a simple throw field could drop Rawne in the epicentre of the explosion, plunging him into freezing water far from anything solid to get under himself. But the traitor was so nimble that any field likely to be successful would have to be wide – which meant it would pick up other things as well, which meant Shepard would be forced either to put in more work and do more damage to his nervous system, or allow the effort to become too anaemic to be useful. Moreover, when it came down to it there was no guarantee that extreme cold was much of an obstacle to this opponent – it was grounded in an assumption of basic internal similarities between Samael and other humans – and some of those assumptions had already been proven to be obviously wrong.

No, Shepard mused as he launched a payload of plasma back at Rawne's next float – forcing him to change direction and race the additional heat spread or be cut off from more stable ice – the solution was going to have to involve something still more extreme...

The word triggered an association in his mind that raised a possible solution, and his eyes narrowed.

By this point, the destruction he had set in motion had overtaken him and like Rawne, now arcing back in from his detour, the N7 was forced to throw himself from one drifting island to the next, all too aware that the addition of his weight could render the system top heavy and flip him into the hypothermia-inducing depths. Fortunately he'd managed to cover a reasonable distance such that the platforms around him were all a few metres in diameter and sufficiently thick that any thawing was occurring at a safe enough rate for his purposes. Choosing one of the smaller platforms, he stowed his pistol as he carefully brought himself to a halt and turned to greet the traitor's arrival-

Impeding it with the broad slab of ice, now hurtling through the air towards Rawne and prompting the appearance of his omniblades-

Only for them to become totally redundant as a second projectile, this one composed of superheated plasma, was deployed by Shepard and disintegrated the first into a searing cloud of boiling water, steam and traces of the incendiary that engulfed the albino for the second or two it took for him to land into a crouch just across from Shepard, his added weight making the white plane tilt more than the N7 had anticipated, with only his volume hinting, apparently deceptively, at his mass. Beneath his feet, pools were already forming, and his clothes were smoking, softened threads clinging to his skin as he responded to Thaddaeus' immediate offensive.

Samael caught Thanatos' wrist, twisting it into an arm bar that simultaneously put pressure on his shoulder and blocked the impending strike from his left arm, giving his own spare limb free access to the assassin's neck. But his intended victim was still moving, spinning with the pressure on his arm until it was behind his back, sweeping out with a leg at the same time and disrupting Rawne's balance before flinging all of his weight backwards, pitching both of them off of the ice and into the water below.

Shepard felt the impact, the sudden temperature drop, even through his insulated hardsuit, though it kept him from experiencing the full extent of it let alone the more extreme change that Rawne was put through, causing his muscles to spasm enough for the N7 to wrench himself from his grasp. Of course, said armour also had the rather more disadvantageous effect of making him rather more dense than the water around him, despite its lightweight nature, which meant that he was sinking – and each gram of liquid his coat absorbed only served to accelerate the process. Oddly enough, this led to him sinking at roughly the same rate as his adversary for the first couple of instants, but Shepard had planned on that (admittedly pathetically optimistic and improbable) basis, and ended that similarity after a moment's manoeuvring by kicking off of his torso, reversing the descent and lunging for the surface, even as the force that he had exerted on Rawne pushed him down faster.

He surfaced arms first, releasing a breath he hadn't consciously been holding, and scrabbled for a decent grip on the edge of the miniature iceberg he had fallen from, which wasn't easy given that it was large enough that he was barely able to get his fingertips over the top with his arms entirely out of the water. On the other hand, this did mean that the inertia of his salvation was large enough that when he pulled himself up onto it, his weight didn't tip it to the point that his hands would have simply fallen away again, unable to find adequate purchase.

In his exhaustion he lay still for a moment, staring blankly into the sky as the air froze the water that had clung to him for the duration of his ascent. Before long, however, that ever-wary part of him compelled him to regain his feet with whispers of hypothermia, enemies come looking for their operative, and a need to make sure that said operative had indeed been killed this time.

A quick glance over the edge gave him that answer, as well as an even greater desire to pick apart what had been done beneath his foe's skin that allowed him to perform to such incredible standards under such difficult conditions, and a vindictive fantasy that it would be him personally performing the investigation whilst the uncooperative bastard was still conscious. An idea surfaced in his mind that would allow at least some gratification, assuming it worked, but at this point Shepard had no other cards to play. He was already aching when the energy started to flow within him, so he barely noticed the new flavour it took as he reached out towards the man struggling towards the surface, and as carefully and delicately as he could, increased his mass.

He watched Rawne flounder ceaselessly, just a metre or two below the surface, for minutes on end, his posture mirroring the drowning, freezing man's movements as they became more and more feeble, the hand he held to bear on the traitor developing a tremor, his knees locked to keep them from shaking and betraying his balance. Finally, the albino was still, and by now the N7 was actually trying to support him just enough to keep him from sinking into the depths, and still Thaddaeus waited, until a film of ice had begun to form over the surface and he reasoned that if Rawne wasn't dead by now, nothing else he could do would keep him from being beaten. Then he pulled the man from the water and deposited him on the ice, immediately collapsing into a seating position beside him and pouring the remainder of his will into retaining his tenuous grip on consciousness.

He didn't even notice when he failed.