Mass Effect

His throat was dry. His suit immediately increased the humidity of his air supply, but it didn’t help at all. He took in fluid from the pipette near his mouth. The others were coming in. It would not impress anyone to have his voice cracking like a teenager.

The hanar apothecary Ysses drifted up into its alcove, its huge wedge-shaped head nodding gracefully, long pink tentacles floating above the deck. Slowly, the squat, round volus design engineer called Irit Non trundled up and leaned against the glass for support. The eyes of her brown-and-white environmental suit flashed yellow in the ammonia fog of their zone. A confused batarian female took a seat near the clear glass barrier. She was old, but wiry. Three of her enormous black eyes were unfocused and bleary with the lingering effects of cryosleep. The fourth, her lower right, had been gouged out and badly healed. Her chartreuse skin had a sour teal slick to it in the dim running lights. She looked angry. But then, batarians always looked angry, and Borbala Ferank was the most perfect specimen of her species who ever lived. The ship’s manifest listed her as a former security officer. She was not, Senna knew, but it amused her to be listed as such. The irony was as endless as the voyage to Andromeda. Borbala had once been the matriarch of the greatest crime family on Khar’shan, the Queen of Smugglers, the Knife in the Dark. She was now, theoretically, retired. Though that ruined eye made it a bit more than theoretical.

Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 was fully awake and assembled. It was no longer quiet in the Radial.

A buzz of annoyed bewilderment filled the room. The three newcomers got busy sorting through the emotions Senna, Anax, and Yorrik had already processed. They were not due to arrive for another thirty years. The viewports conspicuously failed to show the cool white docking terminals of the Nexus, the massive station already built by the Initiative and waiting for them in the Andromeda galaxy. Yet here they were. Senna found himself unreasonably irritated by their slowness. Yes, ye

s, come on, catch up. All anyone was really saying or mumbling or growling or sneering, in various ways and combinations and with varying levels of profanity, was: What the hell is going on? And Senna had no time for a repeat performance of this particular pantomime.

“Good morning, everyone,” announced Commander Senna’Nir.

“Still not morning,” Anax Therion sighed.

The quarian commander ignored her. “I hope you all slept well.”

“Wry rejoinder: It is not the sleeping but the waking up that is hard,” Yorrik droned.

On a ship of strangers, they were old friends. Senna had met the ancient, enormous Yorrik on his Pilgrimage on Ekuna, learning the elcor combat tech. Those great creatures carried sophisticated, backhump-mounted mobile VI systems into battle that ran constant simulations of every possible action-reaction-outcome triad. Before an elcor fought once, he fought a thousand times. As his final test, Senna’Nir had built one from scratch. Compared to the top-of-the-line models it was about as fast and lethal as a large hat, but it worked. Yorrik had taken him to see a live performance of their favorite play to celebrate, and afterwards, they’d gone on a bar crawl through New Elfaas City that would go down in the annals of interspecies history. He’d taken immuno-supplements and antivirals for weeks beforehand to prepare for just what exactly a shot of krogan ryncol would do to his insides. Senna had rather liked what it did to his insides in the end. Made him feel like he was made out of stained glass.

When Qetsi’Olam had told Senna about Andromeda and the Keelah Si’yah, he’d contacted Yorrik at once and made the offer. Come with me. Let’s make that crawl stretch between galaxies. Yorrik had always had a sadness about him. Senna had known this long trip into the wild was just what his elephantine friend needed.

Ysses pointed its soft triangular head toward the flower arrangement in the center of the Radial. The hanar, a massive, genderless jellyfish-like creature whose light home-zone gravity kept it floating upright without levitation packs, seemed displeased that the flowers had not died. Its long magenta tentacles quivered slightly.

“This one does not feel good,” said Ysses shakily, in the peculiar musical voice common to the hanar. No hanar would ever be so arrogant as to refer to itself as I or me. They believed that an ancient race called the Protheans had created all things, and would one day return to lead them to glory. Beside the Protheans, all species were as simple bacteria, and bacteria were not worthy of personal pronouns. “This one’s filter glands proclaim the end of all things.”

The elcor medic Yorrik intoned: “With deep sympathy: The psychological effects of cryosleep vary in severity and duration individually as well as from species to species. Rueful amusement: Some patience may be necessary.”

“I feel fine,” snorted Borbala Ferank. She crossed one black leather-wrapped leg over the other and leaned back, scratching the complex bony ridges in her long skull with greenish-yellow fingers. “Only the poor get hangovers.”

“No one asked you, Khar’shan-clan,” wheezed Irit Non. Volus always sounded like they had a bad cold. They wore protective suits, like the quarians, but not because their immune systems were compromised from centuries of living on the Flotilla. Volus were an ammonia-based species, accustomed to the intense gravity and high-pressure greenhouse atmosphere of their homeworld, Irune. Yet even in the heavy stench of their custom environmental zone aboard the Keelah Si’yah, Irit Non kept her suit on. But then again, Senna supposed, so did he, despite the safe, near-complete sterility of the quarian sector. His suit was a part of him, and he was a part of it, like the old lullaby. Sing me to sleep on the starry sea and I’ll dream through the night of my suit and me…

Maybe volus felt the same way. Who knew with aliens?

Anyway, no one ever went out to a bar determined to find out what a volus really looked like under all that. On the outside, they looked more or less like large, fat, tailless badgers walking upright. The muzzles of their masks, like old radio speakers, filtered their voices into a nasal, metallic whine. But Irit’s suit was not like other volus suits. It was sleek and stylish. It gave off an air of power, of mystery. The patterns of brown, black, gray, and white mesh were as elegant as a raloi’s feathers. Senna’Nir could not stop staring at it. There were many vastly more important matters at hand, but he had never seen a volus suit look beautiful before. He hadn’t even known they could. But, of course, it would be. That was what Irit Non was famous for. She was a tailor, in a manner of speaking. The wealthiest volus in the galaxy withered and died on her waiting list without complaint, on the mere hope of receiving one of her custom environmental suits. That wheezy volus was the closest thing to a celebrity on the Keelah Si’yah.

“Remind me why we let batarians on board again?” the volus hissed.

Senna, for whom the Battle of the Flower Arrangement had happened only a few days ago, and not nearly six hundred years in the past, rolled his eyes inside his helmet and pounded twice on the glass with his gloved fist.

“Shut up, all of you, thanks. I know you’re all confused and sick and irritable, but we have a serious problem, and you need to focus on what I’m saying, because time may be a factor here. If you need to throw up, try not to get any on the glass. Do hanar vomit? Never mind. Not important. All right. Approximately four hours ago, Yorrik, Anax Therion, and myself were revived to deal with an apparent malfunction in the hibernation systems.”

Ysses’s pink skin rippled. Irit Non came to attention. Even Borbala uncrossed her legs and sat up straight. They might come to blows over flowers and hangovers and whether or not the Andromeda galaxy really deserved to have batarians inflicted on it, but the hibernation systems were a grim equalizer. Anything that affected the cryopods affected them all. Anax Therion visibly seethed in her alcove, but said nothing. Senna went on: “What we found is considerably worse than a malfunction. As of 0530 hours, we have visual confirmation that four hundred and sixty-one drell and two hanar have died in their pods of unknown causes.”

Anax rubbed her second finger against the top of her first. Senna wondered about that. She’d done it on the cryodeck, too. He knew little about her, except that she’d been some kind of detective on the hanar homeworld, which was, presumably, why the ship had deemed her essential personnel. Would they have a problem? Detectives often took poorly to not being in charge. But for now, she seemed to be keeping her peace.

“They did not revive; they did not suffer,” Senna said, though they were not entirely sure about that. Soval Raxios’s dead, open, horrified eyes floated up into his mind. Shouldn’t they have stayed closed in deep freeze? “In fact, their pods still report their status as alive and in perfect health. Which presents us with a number of grave questions.”

Irit Non cut in. “Do you mean to say there’s still a bunch of frozen sides of dead drell beef just lying down there among all the others? No burial rites? No quarantine? Savage!”

Borbala Ferank tilted her head to the right. Senna had met a batarian or two on his Pilgrimage on the elcor homeworld. He knew this meant she considered herself far superior to the person who’d dared to speak to her. The commander saw Therion clock the gesture as well. In her line of work, Anax had probably met a lot more batarians than he had. He needed to talk to her. Alone.

“Their souls have already risen through their eyes and left their bodies,” Borbala said dismissively. “What is left is unimportant. Chuck them out an airlock like empty cargo containers. That is what they are.”

“With great delicacy and hesitation: We may need those bodies,” Yorrik answered.

The quarian commander cleared his throat. “We may indeed. And either you’re not listening or you’re still too groggy to put one logical foot in front of the other here. The Si’yah’s scans can’t actually ‘see’ any problems with the pods. Of course, they don’t see at all, strictly speaking, that’s merely a convenience of language. What we mean when we say a ship sees is a complex data relay of input, output, and throughput return—”

“Now is not the time for a technical lecture, Commander,” the drell said softly.