Mass Effect Read online

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  The Radial was beautiful in its own way. An industrial zen garden deep in the core of the ship, a spacious blue-black hexagon bounded on each side by thick walls of clear glass bolted into metal frames. Here, the six environmental zones of the Keelah Si’yah converged. Any member of any species on board could meet and communicate with any other without having to go through the time-consuming and annoying procedures necessary to keep a hanar from liquefying in the ammonia reek of the volus areas, or a drell’s lungs from collapsing in the dank, moist batarian halls, or a quarian from being crushed to death by the elcor’s preferred artificial-gravity settings. The six glass panels functioned as airlocks, too. From the Radial, with preparation and permission, you could freely enter or leave any zone. All the material necessary for such preparations—hyposprays, grav-bracelets, air filters, painkillers, suits and masks—were packed into a wide, low cylinder in the center of the hexagon.

  None of the other Initiative ships had such meticulous arrangements. None of them had to bother, since they carried only one species each. It was one thing to vaccinate, pressurize, and suit up to suffer the mutually agreed-upon conditions of the Citadel for a year or two. But the quarians steadfastly refused to entertain the notion of forcing six species into a composite environment that wouldn’t be particularly comfortable for any of them for the duration of their centuries-long voyage to a new galaxy. Andromeda was a dream they hoped to wake to. The Si’yah was home from the moment her main thrusters burst into life outside Hephaestus Station. Practical, solid, reliable. And home shouldn’t give you gravity migraines or blood poisoning or Kepral’s Syndrome. At home, you should be able to put up your tentacles and relax. Besides, if something went wrong, this great gorgeous heap of bolts might be the whole of their new colony.

  The quarians always bet on something going wrong, and they rarely lost.

  When they arrived at the Nexus, the full Quorum would convene here. Five of the six alcoves would contain two representatives of each species aboard the Keelah Si’yah, one male, one female (unless otherwise gendered), chosen by their own in a formal pre-flight election to make any decisions that would affect the ship as a whole. The Pathfinders, specialized homeworld hunters implanted with powerful new AIs called SAMs, or Simulated Adaptive Matrices, would find planets for them. The Quorum would keep these twenty thousand souls from tearing each other apart while the search was on. There were only a few hundred batarians on board, so they reluctantly shared representation—and a Pathfinder—with the quarians. The drell and the hanar, two species linked by a long history, also shared a single Pathfinder. The Quorum had been revived once at the halfway point of their journey to review operational status, and would not wake again until Andromeda, unless an emergency arose that the SAMs and ship’s maintenance drones could not handle on their own.

  But the glass alcoves stood empty and quiet now, washed in dim blue standby lights running up and down the deck floor. No Pathfinders, no Quorum, no eager colonists, no bustle of activity. No protocol called for the Pathfinders or the colonists to be wakened without the Quorum. Nothing moved in the Radial but time.

  The Radial’s only decoration was a large hydroponic flower arrangement sitting on top of the supply cylinder. Each species had lovingly carried plants from their homeworld onto the Si’yah, where a young volus named Irit Non had arranged them into a stunningly artful whole. Over five centuries and change the ship’s botanical maintenance program had misted and clipped the bouquet as it grew. And grew. And grew. Pale bioluminescent lerian, sea ferns from the hanar world of Kahje, surrounded scarlet usharet flowers from the war-torn drell planet Rakhana. Thick purple bulbs of onuffri blossoms from the savannas of Dekuuna, where the elcor roam, wound around spiky batarian spice cones called ignac, culled from the harsh batarian plains of Khar’shan. Pungent silver kympna lobes peeked out toothily between carnivorous plants from the chemical forests of Irune, home of the volus. But the quarians had lost their homeworld to their own creations, the rogue mechanical intelligences called the geth. Only they could not contribute.

  The captain, Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, had called the bouquet silly and sentimental.

  “We made the ship,” Qetsi’Olam had said. “Surely that’s flower enough!”

  Kholai, a hanar priest, had called the whole business ridiculous. The only people who would get to enjoy it would be the Sleepwalker teams, skeleton crews containing one skilled member of each onboard species, revived in regular rotations for equipment calibration, navigational adjustments, medical surveys of the cryopods, communications monitoring, and now, apparently, rose-pruning. Kholai had inclined its magenta head in the dim lights of Aphrodite, the only place on Hephaestus Station that could be reasonably called a bar, and proclaimed: “This one accepts that all things in the universe trend toward corruption and wishes to note that the flowers will all most probably die before the first Sleepwalker cycle, just as entropy will one day take all beings.”

  The hanar’s followers intoned their agreement, but half the crew took deep cultural offense at the idea of not having a giant topiary in the middle of the ship. Osyat Raxios, a drell political refugee, informed Kholai that if he did not immediately shut the fuck up, he would stuff every one of his jellied orifices, if he could find any, with the ancient and undeniable beauty of the usharet blossom. Borbala Ferank, the retired matriarch of the Ferank crime family, claimed the only reason anyone objected was because they thought ignac cones, and by extension, batarians, were ugly and unworthy of sharing space in the “snob garden.”

  “With explosive fury: You can take my pretty flowers over my dead body,” droned Threnno, an elcor psychiatrist.

  “We need this,” bellowed Irit Non, right before punching an anti-bouquet batarian in the groin. “We need something the whole ship can point to and say: We can grow together in peace!”

  Soon enough, half of Hephaestus Station had broiled and fumed and brawled over flowers. In the end, Commander Senna’Nir, the quarian second-in-command, had presented Irit Non with six stalks of keleven, a breed of blooming high-protein celery developed and grown in the biovaults of his birth ship.

  Thus was the first cross-species decision of the crew of the Keelah Si’yah made. Few subsequent ones would prove much different.

  Anax Therion saw two other figures drift sleepily toward the glass airlocks. Their Sleepwalker team leader, Commander Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, stumbled forward on his birdlike, backward-kneed legs, his violet-and-gray suit reflecting in the minimal lighting. Yorrik, their medical specialist, pounded the metal deck toward the glass on four huge feet, bouncing along like the universe’s clumsiest child on his triple dose of amped-up revival drugs. Anax stared. She had never seen an elcor bounce. She suspected she never would again. Her head throbbed in agony, but she ignored it. The pain was of no use to her, so she put it aside.

  Yorrik curled and uncurled his outermost pair of lip slats. Another elcor would have understood him instantly. One twitch of his soft gray mouth would be enough to communicate an ocean of drug-induced mania, intellectual excitement, nausea, terror, and wry amusement at his own stimulant-addled behavior. An elcor’s natural communication was nothing so crude as the spoken word. They used scent, infra-vocalizations, and microgestures to express a vast array of subtle meaning that was completely lost on aliens. Nothing on their homeworld of Dekuuna, or even on the Citadel, was much of a secret to the elcor. The hanar were similar. Therion had had her eyes genetically modified in order to see the bioluminescent display of the hanar language. But she had not had the foresight to get a good enough nose job to speak elcor. Elcor could communicate a symphony with a sneeze, but they could not modulate their voices to convey meaning the way the rest of the crude, chattering, squawking galaxy did, and so carefully prefaced each thought with appropriate emotional context. Yorrik intoned, “Enthusiastically: Greetings. Greetings. It is a beautiful morning. Don’t you think it is a beautiful morning? With overwhelming joy: What horribl
e thing do you think has happened?”

  Anax rubbed her long second finger against the black nail of her first, as she always did when she was trying to calculate the world around her. Back on Kahje, men fled from that quiet little gesture. It meant she had them. It meant they were finished already.

  “It’s not morning,” the drell answered dryly.

  “Hello, Yorrik,” the first officer said fondly.

  “Overflowing with enthusiastic camaraderie: Hello, Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah.”

  Therion rubbed her fingers together, but nothing came. She needed more information. The three of them revived—but no one else. Not the Quorum, not the colonists, not the Pathfinders. Not even all of Sleepwalker Team Blue-7. Just the three of them. A detective, a doctor, and a tech. Why? A ridiculous thought bubbled up in her groggy mind. An elcor, a quarian, and a drell walk into a bar… Anax Therion giggled, then was horrified. She did not giggle. Any more than an elcor bounced. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep any other dreadful thing from coming out.

  Senna’Nir spoke first. He patched his suit mic into the Radial’s public audio system so the rest of them could hear him. This was a quarian ship, and the quarians ran the show.

  “Situation rep—urk.” Senna was clearly fighting back a bout of vomiting. His environmental suit would feed him anti-nausea meds, and not for the first time, the drell thought that maybe the quarians had the right idea with those things. “Maybe we should wait. For the rest of the team. Also for the room to stop spinning,” he continued weakly.

  The ship’s vocal interface echoed through the empty spaces of the Radial.

  The remainder of Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 are still in stasis, Commander. There may or may not have been an emergency. Due to the nature of this emergency, if it has occurred, protocol specifies limiting personnel to essential only. Please enter command-level password key to initialize additional revival sequences.

  Anax Therion narrowed her huge reptilian eyes. There was an old human folktale involving a feline owned by someone by the unlikely name of Schrödinger. This feline was locked inside a sealed box with no entrance or exit. In the folktale, an impossible riddle was asked of the hero: Can you tell whether this feline is alive or dead without breaking the box? Anax had always liked humans. They thought everything was impossible. But the riddle was only a riddle for organics. For a computer, it was as easy as activating internal sensors. The ship should know damn well whether or not there was an emergency. And it really shouldn’t be using personal pronouns. A drell ship’s interface might, or a human ship, or an asari one. But no quarian wanted their ship talking to them like a person. It would be like genetically modifying a rabid dog so that it could tell you just how much it hated you before it ripped off your leg.

  “That’s fine for the moment,” Senna said, shifting his weight on his slender, jack-knifed legs. “What’s the potential emergency?”

  The acceptable mortality threshold for cryosuspension may have been exceeded. As of 1700 hours, I think that 10.1% of the drell on board this ship are deceased.

  Anax Therion’s head snapped up.

  Until that moment, the drell had been leaning in a rather artfully casual pose against the airlock glass. Even while her memory battered her brain, she had barely moved. She often found it advantageous to appear as though she cared about very little in the world, and paid attention to even less. That way, others could parade their cares and attentions around the room and hardly even notice the tall green woman in the corner, listening for all she was worth. When you made it your business to observe people and steal their secrets, it paid to be able to hide your own. A moment ago, Anax looked for all the world like a young punk being forced at gunpoint to attend her parents’ excruciatingly boring party: long green arms crossed over her lithe chest, pointed chin sunk sullenly into her neck-frills, left hip in a posture of vaguely suggestive belligerence. But not anymore. Her heart had begun to race horribly. Her gut twisted. She stood up straight and slammed her hand against the alcove glass.

  “What do you mean you think?” she barked. “They’re either dead or they aren’t!”

  Your attention is required.

  Senna’s voice remained calm. “Give me the data from the cryopods. Port to display.”

  The glass alcoves in front of Anax Therion and the elcor Yorrik lit up with information, scrolling through line after line of glowing blue text as it updated.

  All cryopod scans show strong life signs. I have already run three diagnostics on the pods themselves. No detectable malfunctions. No interruptions in service or connection.

  “Then what’s the problem?” Senna frowned.

  Yorrik butted the glass wall with his head. Even a drell and a quarian could interpret that gesture. “Furious irritation: If all life signs are good and all pods are functioning you are wasting our time.”

  I have detected a thin layer of sublimated water vapor which has crystallized on the interior shell of 10.1% of the drell cryopods. It has been growing at the rate of approximately one nanometer a year for the last forty-four years. Very slow, but observable to my environmental scans.

  “Some frost is to be expected,” Senna said uncertainly, studying the illuminated readouts on the inside of his helmet. Suddenly, they changed, showing a stream of chemical symbols.

  This frost contains faint traces of butanediamine, pentamethylenediamine, and herpetocrose.

  Yorrik thumped the thick gray knuckles of his left foot against the deck to get their attention. “Helpfully: Butanediamine and pentamethylenediamine are also known as putrescine and cadaverine. Both are gases produced by autolysis, the initial breakdown of amino acids in fresh cadavers. Herpetocrose is a blood sugar specific to the drell. With growing understanding: 10% of the drell show signs of freezer burn, and the ice is rotting.”

  Affirmative.

  “But the pods show all occupants alive and well?” Anax said. Who were they? Who were the 10.1%? Those were her friends sleeping away centuries in their pods. She’d gotten to know them well over the long months of waiting at Hephaestus Station. Even loved a few. Had Osyat Raxios died? Cawdor Thauma? Prokhor Rhabdo?

  Affirmative.

  Anax Therion’s mind filled up with every corpse she’d ever seen in the streets and slums of Cnidaria City, slumped over in alleys, blown apart on docks, frozen stiff at their terminals in dingy data sweatshops, overdosed and poisoned and shot and worse. Rotting dolls all in a row. Old blood flakes apart, flying up into the night like the ashes of a single fire. Black eyes under an eyelid of red mold. She shoved the memories aside savagely.

  “Kepral’s Syndrome?” Senna’Nir asked delicately.

  The poor quarian was trying to be polite. Oh yes, if it was Kepral’s, then everyone could make sympathetic faces and go back to sleep with a deep sense of relief and satisfaction, the way you feel when you’re resting cozy in your own quarters and hear security rushing by outside. Toward someone else. Someone who had nothing to do with you. Only the drell got Kepral’s Syndrome. They were a strong enough species, but their lungs were their weakness. They had evolved on a desert world. When the hanar made first contact and evacuated the drell from poor resource-starved Rakhana, the great pink jellyfish had taken them to their own homeworld, Kahje, an ocean planet. The moist air killed drell slowly; over decades, but it killed them. Any moisture in the air was a slow poisonous rot filling them up until they finally stopped breathing. It was called Kepral’s Syndrome, and Anax’s parents had died of it when she was six. Green fingers like bare tree branches, skeletal, brittle, hot with death. Coughing in the dark like gunfire. Be good, Anax. Be a good girl. But don’t stay here. Find a way offworld. Find a place with no oceans. Their last breaths rise to join the sea air. They become their murderer.

  No. Anax’s mind clamped down harder. The last thing she needed was to be swept away into the memory of that tiny six-year-old’s misery, and everything that followed because of it.

  A lot of people’s parents had died of
Kepral’s Syndrome. But everyone who booked passage on the ark had tested clean. On the other end, they’d find a world that didn’t quietly drown them. That was how it was supposed to happen. And they were so close.

  “Have you run a self-diagnostic?” she snapped at the disembodied voice of the Keelah Si’yah’s systems. “You said the traces were very faint. Maybe you’re getting some phantom readings. A bug in the code.”

  Yes. I am performing at optimum.

  “We didn’t notice crystallized decomposition fogging up the glass on the last cycle?” Senna asked. “That sort of thing is the whole point of Sleepwalkers.”

  You would have had no reason to notice. The sublimation began after the previous Sleepwalker cycle, fifty years ago. I have revived you in order to visually inspect the affected pods. You were the last Sleepwalker team rostered for duty before Andromeda. I am not authorized to awaken the next team on the list as the list has concluded. If there is a simple scan malfunction or pod contamination, you can repair it. If the drell are indeed dead, you must decide upon a course of action. I am not authorized to make command-level decisions. You are, Commander.

  Yorrik’s mouth, little more than a series of triangular flaps cut deep into his gray flesh, wriggled with worry. “Suspiciously: Do you expect me to perform medical exams?”

  You are the only member of this Sleepwalker team with formal medical training, Specialist Yorrik.

  “Wry self-deprecation: I am a pediatric allergist. Auditory, olfactory, esophageal.” Anax Therion and Senna stared at him. “In sheepish explanation: Ear, nose, and throat. I do sniffles.”

  Nevertheless. You are essential personnel.

  “Helpless laughter: I have not touched a corpse since the battle of Viluuna. With increasing panic: You can pump me full of stims or euphoriants or children’s candy, but it won’t make me a drell coroner.”