Mass Effect Read online

  What wouldn’t you do for family? What wouldn’t you do just to make them smile?

  Oliver Barthes couldn’t go to Andromeda, no matter what his dreams told him. But he could do this. He could do this for those who would go out beyond the beyond, out into the wild unknown to forge a new civilization out of raw starstuff. He could make them smile in their sleep. Maybe that wasn’t much to tell the grandkids about, but it was something.

  Oliver wiggled his toes inside his suit to kill the pins and needles. He instructed Helen to upload the subroutine to the cryopod maintenance matrix and erased his footsteps. It was easy, for someone like him. As easy as remembering to turn off the lights and lock the door behind you.

  “Godspeed,” Oliver whispered to that big, dumb, insane, beautiful ship. “Sleep tight.”

  All flexors in safety mode. You are cleared for Hephaestus Station re-entry, Specialist Barthes. Have a pleasant rest.

  “You too, Helen. You too. Wherever well-behaved little truncated VI programs go to snooze, tuck yourself in nice and snug.”

  Oliver slowly climbed back down to his access platform and disengaged the gravity flexors. His feet found metal once more. He took out his datapad and sent confirmation of delivery to the address he’d been given. Then, he pulled up his account manager and watched like a kid outside a cake shop. He waited. And waited. And finally, the familiar, modest numbers of his precious savings blinked out. New numbers blinked on. Astonishing new numbers. Gorgeous new numbers. Oliver Barthes was going to a new world, all right, just like the rest of them. A world of safety and love and family. A world where what happened on Eden Prime barely mattered at all.

  * * *

  Oliver walked along the main gangplank with something very like a spring in his step. He took off his helmet and ran one hand through his short brown hair. His stubble itched; time to shave. But it was done. It was done and you know what? It really was something that twenty thousand people were going to sail through the cold space between galaxies listening to Radio Free Barthes. He’d never thought he’d amount to anything special, but maybe he had, after all. Not enormously special, but a little. Just a little. He put his palm against the security panel. He imagined his mother’s face when he told her, the quiet little sparkle of delight he remembered in her brown eyes. The elevator arrived; the door didn’t open. Oliver rolled his eyes and banged on it a couple of times with his fist. Stupid things. It wouldn’t take more than a day of scrubbing that almost-certainly decrepit code to fix, but no one ever bothered. He’d put in a work request in the morning. His goodbye present to old Heph. From me to you, buddy.

  Oliver punched the slider again. It wheezed open. The elevator car was empty; he stepped inside. He wouldn’t tell his mother right away, of course. He’d take them to the Citadel. Dazzle them with the green trees in the Presidium and the lights of the docking ships and the steak sandwiches at Apollo’s. Then he’d show them the apartment in Zakera Ward he’d bought for them. He could practically hear his mother’s voice in that dingy elevator. Oh, Ollie, it’s too much! They’d be so happy. They’d probably cry. He’d cry, too. And then, when they were all sitting around the dinner table, stuffed senseless and drunk on the future, he’d tell them about the time he played rock-a-bye baby to a ship of aliens for six hundred years. I wonder if you dream in cryostasis? Maybe someday we’ll find out. Together.

  Tech Specialist Second Class Oliver Barthes stepped out of the elevator into the long hallway that connected the main column of Hephaestus Station to the industrial living quarters. He picked up his pace, eager to get to sleep, to get one day closer to Zakera Ward and green trees and grease shining on his father’s calloused fingers from a real steak sandwich.

  Oliver was still picturing his mother’s laughing face when a figure in a deep gray hood stepped out from an alcove and shot him twice in the head.

  The figure looked down at the techie’s body for a moment, prodded it with one boot to make sure, then walked on, humming a little lullaby under its breath:

  Sing me to sleep on the starry sea

  And I’ll dream through the night of my suit and me…

  The filthy, featureless metal ceiling of Hephaestus Station reflected mutely in the dull surface of a powerless omni-tool.

  I won’t fear the heat of a desert breeze

  Or contaminants high in the jungle trees

  Even in space I shall never freeze

  Because I’ve got my suit and my suit’s got me…

  PART 1

  KEELAH SI’YAH

  1. SURFACE RECEPTORS

  Sleepwalker Team Leader Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, your attention is required.

  Senna groaned. A bright cascade of revival drugs sizzled through his system. The quarian second-in-command tried to roll over on his side and turn down the optics on his suit as he always did when he overslept. Nothing was ever so important it couldn’t survive another five minutes’ sleep. His suit did not respond. Senna’s elbow hit hard iso-glass. He tried to sit up, smacked the brow ridge of his mask against the same stuff, and fell back onto a narrow bed. Pinpricks of harsh light stabbed his eyes. Readouts exploded onto his helmet display in bursts of glowing ultraviolet text.

  Ship Status: Initiative ship Keelah Si’yah performing within normal parameters

  Navigational Positioning: 1.26% behind projected itinerary

  Cardiovascular Condition: good

  Deviations from Endocrinal and Neurological Norms: within standard conformations

  Pharmaceutical Activity: intravenous stimulants, muscular density restoratives, painkiller #4 (double dose)

  Holistic Suit Feedback: all systems functional, no exterior breaches

  Sleepwalker Team Sitrep: nothing significant to report

  Engine Chatter: eezo conversion performing at 0.7% in excess of expected efficiency

  Short-Range Scan: due to pass by binary brown dwarf star 44N81/44N82 in two weeks, two days

  Communications: receiver array intact and clear, home relay communications packet download completed successfully without information loss, next scheduled packet in nineteen months, sixteen days.

  Self-diagnostics from Onboard Virtual Intelligences: all performing at optimum

  There was also a helpful chart showing his current rate of bone-density loss (4%) along with recommended corrective supplements. A message from his grandmother, Liat’Nir vas Achaz, blinked unread in the corner of his vision. Recorded before they left and programmed to deliver itself on arrival. It was the little things that made up a family.

  Arrival.

  They must be there. Here. Home.

  Senna’Nir’s heart raced a little whenever he thought of his grandmother. His pulse picked up now, crushingly anxious, as he had been since he was a boy, for her safety. She was so small and fragile. But then again, weren’t they all? He took a deep breath, sucking in more super-saturated air from his suit to energize his lungs. Liat was fine. No harm could come to her, fast asleep with the rest of the quarians, hibernating, safe. He subvocalized to archive her message, whatever it was, recorded whenever it had been, long ago. Later. Senna would never be sorry he brought her along to Andromeda, but he couldn’t take her voice just now. It was, and always had been, piercing.

  All’s well, he thought. Strong wind and a following tide for all the ships at sea. Senna could see his breath fog blurrily in front of his face. Good. Fine. Back to sleep now. Sleep warm and good. Awake cold and bad. He blinked away the onslaught of interstellar and anatomical trivia and tried to shut down his optics again. Another few minutes couldn’t harm anything. All the real work was behind them. They’d be docking with the Nexus very soon, if they hadn’t already. And once the captain gave the command to link airlocks and that beautiful hiss of atmosphere exchange sounded off, his responsibility for this voyage would be mercifully over.

  That prim, clipped, genderless voice piped up once more.

  I’m sorry, Team Leader Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, I cannot allow you to red
uce your sensory input. Your attention is required.

  “Unf,” grunted Sleepwalker Team Leader Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah as his cryopod flooded with brilliant white light. “Ow. No! What? You said all’s well!”

  * * *

  Drell Sleepwalker Anax Therion, your attention is required.

  Anax came awake instantly, her translucent reptilian lids blinking quickly over huge black eyes. Her mind raced ahead of the narcotic foam coursing through her body, organizing itself into alertness with the practice of someone who had never in their lives enjoyed the luxury of waking up in their own good time. She looked up at a note in her own handwriting, glowing on a personal display a few inches above the green blur of her nose.

  Hello, Anax! You are in a cryopod on the quarian ship Keelah Si’yah bound for the Andromeda galaxy. You are thirty-one years old, 1.84 meters tall, 77.1 kilograms, and left-handed. You are a member of Sleepwalker Team Blue-7. Your favorite food is the Ataulfo mango, native to the human homeworld. The last movie you enjoyed was Blasto 8: The Jellyfish Always Stings Twice. Think about these things. Remember them. Feel them to be true. Congratulations, you are not dead! The voice in your ear is the ship’s interface program. Everyone calls it K, for Keelah Si’yah, but it is not a real person, or even a real VI, so you do not have to be too bothered with keeping up niceties. You can swear at it, if you want. Insult its mother. It will still call you in the morning. Your past self has written this note in order to save us both the excruciating inefficiency of an estimated two hours and thirty-two point five minutes of post-stasis disorientation and identity confusion. You’re welcome. Happy Transit Day 219,706. Welcome to Andromeda.

  Anax glanced at the local time/date signature in the left corner of her note. It read: 0200 hrs Transit Day 207,113.

  “I am awake, K,” Anax Therion said calmly. “Have we arrived early?”

  Negative, Systems Analyst Anax Therion. Current position: 110,804.77 light years from destination. Estimated time to arrival assuming no change in speed or course: thirty years, five months, twelve days, sixteen hours and four minutes.

  Anax stretched her long olive-and-black fingers and tented them over her chest. “Then why have I been revived?”

  Your attention is required.

  The drell took a long breath. The inside of her mouth tasted stale, medicinal, silvery. She ran her fingers over the orange frills along her jaw the way a human might slap her cheeks to wake herself up. Her mind raced to pick up its pieces and get them into some kind of useful order. But even half-thawed, that mind was faster than most—and more pessimistic.

  “Just how fucked are we, K?” she sighed.

  * * *

  Elcor Sleepwalker Yorrik, your attention is required.

  Bluish interior lighting clicked on inside a structure on Deck 8. It couldn’t really be called a cryopod. Pods were small, snug, ergonomic, modular. This was more like a cryo-garage. There were thousands of them packed into the repurposed cargo bay—3,311 to be exact. Something massive and gray moved sluggishly within the layers of iso-glass, metal, and frost. It shook its colossal head mournfully from side to side. The nasal voice that emerged was completely flat and monotone.

  “With great resentment,” it droned, “go away.”

  I cannot go away, Medical Specialist Yorrik. I am installed in the ship’s memory core. Please enter command-level password to uninstall.

  Yorrik slammed his elephant-like foreleg into the wall of his enormous cryopod. He didn’t remember that it was a cryopod, and he didn’t remember that his name was Yorrik, and most of all, he didn’t remember what a memory core was, or what uninstall meant, though it sounded excellent. There was an ache in his head… between… between his smelling bones and his thinking meat. Yes, that sounded right. Yorrik’s thinking meat was angry and thick just now. His plodding, ancient metabolism barely noticed the whitewater rush of stimulants pummeling his nervous system.

  Yorrik activated the locking plate on his massive cryopod with his huge knee. There was a hiss of depressurization. The massive creature stumbled out of the pod, tripped over the raised ledge of the thing, and crashed noisily to the deck floor. No one noticed. The other pods blinked away into oblivion. It was a nearly perfect pratfall, Yorrik thought woozily to himself, and not one person had seen it. His low, buzzing voice cut off the cheerful chirping of the ship’s interface.

  “With dry sarcasm: And a good morning to you, too.”

  Sleepwalker Yorrik, I am increasing the dosages of your revival cocktail. I have added supplementary acuity enzymes, sensory enhancements, and anti-depressants, and accelerated your metabolic rate to compensate. I apologize in advance. This will be a very unpleasant but highly addictive experience for you. I have determined that the time necessary for standard elcor revival protocols will materially worsen the developing situation. Please report to the Radial immediately. Your medical expertise is needed. Please report to the Radial immediately. Your medical expertise is needed. Please report—

  Yorrik groaned, a loud, low trombone blast in the dim lighting. All his thinking meat wanted was to stomp something, preferably that damned voice. But his smelling bones were always ready for action. Yorrik scrunched up his long gray face and took a powerful whiff of his surroundings. Information flooded in. He felt immediately sharper, more grounded. Stale air, antibacterial mist, thawing frost. Plasteel, tart and tannic. His own grassy, dank sweat, hot and sour. The perfume of deep space: a cold forest lit up with the prickling, caustic smoke of a hundred million campfires burning in the dark. But underneath it all, there was something else. Far away. Not on this deck or the one above it, but on board, certainly. Something sweet and meaty and swollen, like milk just about to turn.

  Death.

  2. PENETRATION

  They say no one dreams in cryostasis. You aren’t really sleeping in cryo at all. People just call it sleep because no one would do it if they called it what it is, which is technically, though ideally temporary, death. And the dead don’t dream. Anax Therion knew that. She knew exactly how the cryopods worked, down to the icicle. What kind of person would trust their body to a machine without reading the manual back to front two or three times? All the same, when she lay down in that glass coffin back on Hephaestus Station, just before the last cool gust of atomized deep-freeze turned her green skin blue, she’d been convinced that she would. Maybe it would be different for a drell. Many things were, medically speaking. Few enough of Therion’s people ever made real long-haul voyages, and if they did, they were usually one-way tickets. Like hers. Or maybe there would be a malfunction, and she alone would feel it all, all six hundred years between home and away, trapped in her body, in her memories.

  The long, dark hallway between the cryodeck and the Radial stretched out before her, bending slightly with the curvature of the ship. It was all sleek, graceful glass, white metal, and bright lighting—or at least it would be. Just now, the Keelah Si’yah was running dark to save energy while her cargo slept the centuries away. Soft blue directional lighting ran helpfully along the floor toward her destination, but nothing else. It was as dark and unfamiliar as an alley in a strange city. Anax Therion slumped against one unlit wall. A flood of unwelcome memory washed over her. Her milky interior eyelids slid shut. Clouds like gunsmoke over the glass domes of Cnidaria City. Streets littered with bioluminescence. Panting, my breath like footprints running ahead in the dark. He thinks he has escaped. The krill see no pattern in their frantic swimming. But the whale sees. I am the whale. Laser targets brush the mark’s shoulder blades like a swarm of summer fireflies.

  Anax wrenched herself out of her own past, the past she’d stowed safely on the other side of two and a half million light years. The drell memory was perfect and dangerous. It was as real as life. When Anax remembered, she lived it again, just as vivid, just as clear, just as pulse-poundingly immediate as the first time. She was there. A million miles away, on Kahje, a young data-dealer who had never given one single thought to the Andromeda galaxy
, chasing an assassin through the back alleys of a hanar city, her only goal: to secure the information in his brain for the Shadow Broker. But that was long past now. Another life, another time. Yet, if Anax didn’t keep her mind strapped down tight, it could come over her again without warning, without mercy. It could drown her. Her post-cryosleep mind was anything but strapped down.

  And drell dreams? No vid in the galaxy could compete.

  But she hadn’t dreamed. Her eyes closed on Hephaestus Station and opened again on her assigned Sleepwalker cycles and it was like blinking; that fast, that seamless. Except that her joints ached and her head hurt and it tasted like a vorcha had shit in her mouth. But the Sleepwalker cycles were over now. Team Blue-7, her team, had run the last shift, coming out of stasis to perform maintenance and systems checks one final time before docking with the Nexus in Andromeda. No more wakies till the big one. Anax Therion, and everyone else on the Keelah Si’yah, were supposed to be peacefully temporarily dead right now. This had better be good, the drell thought. But of course, it couldn’t be good. The ship wouldn’t wake her up off schedule for a glass of Noverian rum and a fruit salad.

  “Dragging your feet won’t un-fuck whatever’s fucked itself,” Therion said to herself. Her voice echoed in the empty deck. She put on a quick jog down the quiet corridor toward the Radial as a strange, disorienting thought popped in her mind like a bubble in wine.

  The Shadow Broker was dead now. Her best client, the only one she’d never met, whose voice she’d never heard. Whoever they’d really been, wherever they’d really lived, whoever they’d really loved, whatever they liked to do on long, lonely nights, they were half a millennium in the ground. And she, she, little scrawny nervy Anax Therion who couldn’t put two meals back to back most of the days of her youth, was still alive. Who would ever have thought it would shake out that way, all those years ago, when the rain and the neon in Cnidaria City mixed like paint in the street?