Mass Effect

“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?

* * *

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