Mass Effect

“See?” said the volus.

The darkness in medbay continued to be absolute.

“Growing realization: The sensors also say the cryopods are full of live drell.” Yorrik looked down at the decidedly-not-live drell on his examination table.

“Shit,” said Senna. “Inventory says there are some worklights in the supply locker. Do the best you can while we figure out what the hell is going on. Meet you in medbay in four hours. Senna out,” crackled his friend’s familiar voice.

Silence returned, somehow deeper and more awkward than before.

Finally, Borbala Ferank spoke into the comm. She no longer sounded quite so amused by everything that was happening, or convinced of her own untouchable superiority.

“Listen.” The retired crime boss spoke as if each word was being dragged out of her. “I’m going to regret this, I just know it. You say we need fish? I can make fish happen. Just… sit tight. Ferank out.”

The comm went quiet. Yorrik and Ysses were left once more alone in the dark with the dead.

Yorrik waited two full minutes before trying to make friends with the hanar again. He turned to the tall pink jellyfish and droned: “Hopefully: Do you want to hear the beginning of elcor Macbeth? I can do all three witches…”

5. PERMISSIBILITY

Anax Therion stood in the dark surrounded by frozen fish.

Crate ZB3301T/V was full of them. Any kind of fish you could ask for. Illium skald fish, prejek paddle fish, koi, striped dartfish, khar’shan snapping eels, even a massive Earth bluefin tuna, which, as far as Anax knew, was profoundly extinct. Dead to the world, they all floated in, by her guess, about fifteen hundred glass globes white with frost and capped with black plasteel instrument panels. Crate ZB3301T/V looked like it was crammed full of marbles. But they weren’t marbles. They were contraband. Miniaturized cryopods. Less than a quarter of the energy required for theirs, keeping the fish special on ice for the big day. Anax Therion had never cared much about money beyond where it could get her, but she didn’t even want to try to calculate how much profit she was looking at. What people on the Nexus would pay for a taste, figuratively or literally, of home.

Borbala Ferank shrugged. Her three good eyes shone in the dark of the cargo hold. “Old habits die hard, eh? You won’t begrudge me my little nest egg, will you? My bastard sons drilled my accounts along with my fucking eye when they decided it was time for old Mama Bala to retire. Don’t you just love the young? Ah, well, that is their right. Nothing made me happier than listening to the pitter-pat of little feet as my offspring schemed behind my back to take everything I had. But they let me live! What a bunch of sniveling cowards. I should have turned them out on the street as infants. What was I supposed to do in Andromeda, take up an honest living? Ha! I am what I am. And what I am is a Ferank, and a Ferank is a smuggler and a schemer who ends up on top. And credits are credits, even in another galaxy. You gonna rat me out?”

Anax ran her hand along the top of a bright orange koi. She had seen one just like it on Earth, once, long ago. The day she heard the folktale of the cat that might or might not be dead in its box. The memory threatened to roar up inside her, but she sidestepped it. Her post-stasis disorientation was gone. She didn’t want to think about Earth, or golden fish, or what she had done there for the sake of the hanar. So she didn’t. She turned back to the batarian. She wasn’t any more thrilled to be working with this unpleasant creature than Borbala was to work with her. Batarians didn’t do data. They did guns. And Anax Therion felt quite confident that

no gun would blow a hole in this situation large enough for the truth to bleed through. But at least she could keep an eye on the old warhorse.

“I do not know what else I expected,” Anax said. “Is this it? Did you smuggle anything else on board?”

Borbala’s red chin markings looked almost as black as her clothes in this light. She grinned, her chubby chartreuse cheeks dimpling. “Absolutely not.”

The drell sighed. “Fine, pick us out a nice fat snapping eel and a couple of sunfish for our supper and let’s go. We’ve still got our own assignment ahead of us, now that we’re done supplying Ysses and Yorrik’s mad science experiment. At least we will get to stretch our legs. And who knows? Perhaps we will find ourselves a rogue asari and get some real exercise.”

“Sounds good to me,” Borbala snorted. “Shove it all in the cargo elevator and hit medbay. They’ll figure it out. Command and control is between here and the security hub, so we can load out there for a long, thrilling night of… watching vidscreens. Wanna snatch a couple of bottles of that Horosk? Because this is going to be excruciating and I don’t get the feeling you’re a very colorful conversation companion.”

The two of them carried the cryofish back across the hold to the quarian area and began boxing up the rest of the haphazard collection of items the elcor doctor needed to save them all from whatever was happening. The drell’s mind logged input and adjusted output so instinctually she hardly had to try anymore. Right now, the only available suspects were the other Sleepwalkers, and Borbala Ferank was the first to fall into Therion’s analytical crosshairs. She was a likely enough prospect. There was a saying among deep-space merchants: When something goes wrong, look for the simplest solution. When something goes really wrong, look for a batarian.

You gonna rat me out? Borbala had included her in a small, but significant, conspiracy, the conspiracy of fish. That was how a batarian indicated trust and fellowship. She had made the effort to frame smuggling as a nest egg, something any outsider could understand and sympathize with. And now an offer of alcohol. It stank of an attempt to get the drell’s guard down. Or friendship. In Anax’s life, she had learned to view friendship as a very attractively wrapped grenade. It was always a trap. The minute you met someone, the pin was half-pulled.

Colorful conversation. Anax adjusted her posture, her voice, her vocabulary to become something closer to what the target wanted. What the target expected. There was no better way to investigate than by becoming the kind of person any given suspect most wanted to encounter in that moment. Anax Therion constantly calibrated her personality and behavior to illicit intimacy from anyone who had something she needed. Intimacy was the breeding ground of data. She was good at many things. But this had always been her great gift. The drell had evolved from reptiles, but Anax was a true chameleon. Micro-expressions, gestures, vocal tone, dialect, personal anecdotes, each of them infinitely variable to the needs of the millisecond. She had only been truly herself for one person, for one day, years and years ago. It had been a deeply unpleasant experience, one which Therion had sworn never to repeat.

Colorful conversation. Comrades of the bottle in the dead of night. Data points received. Calibrating.

“I spent a decade in the service of the most powerful member of the Illuminated Primacy, traveling the diplomatic road from world to world, party to party, gala to gala. I wielded my intellect with one hand and an M-6 Carnifex with the other. Oleon always said it valued me for my conversational skills nearly as much as for my marksmanship. I can sparkle when I need to. You need have no fear of a tedious vidscreen, Borbala Ferank.”

“I didn’t ask about your intellect, you bourgeois little scamp. I said colorful. How many languages can you swear in?”

Calibrating. Anax Therion laughed, a laugh designed in a laboratory to indicate both self-awareness and a roguish rough-and-tumble past. “How many are there?”

Anax grabbed two bottles of Horosk and tucked them in beside the omni-tool nightlight. She put the stuffed volus on top of it all, the toy young Raya’Zufi vas Keelah Si’yah had not chosen to take into her cryopod with her. The toy with glowing yellow eyes, just like a real volus. When you wake up, all will be well, Raya’Zufi, she thought. You will examine every one of those sixteen slides with your krogan microscope and keep your omni-tool lamp on at night to scare away the things that move in the dark. And then you and I will have a tea party on a new world. I promise.

Something caught Therion’s eye as she was sealing crate NN1469P/R closed again for the duration of its long shipping and handling. She hadn’t noticed it before, somehow, even though she’d been up to her eyeballs in this family’s personal effects. It was folded up tight and small, but as she swung the lid over, the blue running lights flashed on its surface like a magnifying glass in the sun.

Anax activated her comm line to medbay.

“Hey, Yorrik,” she said, to show Borbala that she could speak casually if it pleased her, “would a quarian suit help?”