Mass Effect

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.