Mass Effect

“Feel that?”

“Not a thing,” Anax answered.

“Good. Unlike mass-produced ensembles, Irit suits all come standard with a patented pain-response dampening matrix. Your nervous system is shaped like an idiot child’s drawing compared to mine, but it seems to work.” The volus sucked in a long, bubbling swallow of air. “Your display will record impacts or breaches, but if you start feeling anything, you’re probably already dying.” The stain was fading as the matrix did its work, but slowly.

Therion inclined her head. “You are an artist, Irit Non. I am grateful.”

“Gah. Don’t say that word. You sound like my father.”

“Grateful?”

The volus shook her head. “Artist.”

Therion smoothed the long white flaps that hung down slightly past her shoulders. “My people are reptilian,” she explained. “Our skin secretes a toxic compound that I am sure you know other species find highly intoxicating and even hallucinogenic. Normally, our sweat evaporates harmlessly. I estimate I can wear this suit for approximately thirty-five to forty-eight hours before my bloodstream has absorbed enough of my own venom to have degenerative cognitive effects. We could never live inside such suits for long periods, as you do. We would go quite, quite mad and suffocate in our own subcutaneous oils. For the next two days or so, however, it is an acceptable alternative to dying of your mutant volus pox.”

Non scowled. Anax could tell, even in the suit. “It is not our pox, I told you. But your body makes it, how can it harm you?”

“Your body makes many things,” Therion said with some amusement. “I doubt you would enjoy ingesting them.” A soft chime sounded in her ear. The suit was wired into all her personal devices. “The captain has transmitted directions to my shiny new quarters and interrogation room. Shall we?”

“Right. Shall we discuss what you hope to beat out of this dumb quarian?” Irit wheezed as she moved about, re-securing the mess she had made of her cargo.

Anax Therion placed her gloved palm against the wall of the crate. Her visual display immediately scrolled a metallurgic analysis, structural weak points, factory origin, and installation date across her peripheral field. Touching without touching. It was positively addictive. “Of the six members of Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9,” she mused, “two are dead and one is looking extremely poorly. Malak’Rafa is not.”

“But only drell and hanar can get sick. So wake them all up. We’ll have a party. Why this one?”

“Of the three remaining members of Yellow-9, he is the only one I can be certain poses no danger to us, nor we to him, because, even in cryostasis, he was wearing his own personal quarantine zone. And I suspect whatever happened on board our little ark happened first to Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9. The quarian on the other side of that door could be behind everything that’s happened. Or he could be the unluckiest bosh’tet this side of Rannoch.”

“Him? A quarian? I know you’re meant to be some kind of detective, but only a brainless oddskull would think a quarian would voluntarily come within a thousand kilometers of a weaponized infection. It’s the batarian, Jolly Doll or whatever he calls himself. Why am I the only one with any sense?”

Therion spread her fingers out over the metal of the crate, feeling everything about it. “Perhaps. Did it never once occur to you tha

t he might have been telling the truth? That his pod malfunctioned and woke him up? We are awake. Many systems have glitched. Is it so far from plausibility?” Irit Non’s muscles were so tense and tight Therion knew the unspoken answer was yes. “Well. However you feel about it, Non, if that poor, stupid batarian dies back there, we are in a world of problems far beyond the drell and the hanar. Our species have cohabited for eight centuries. It is at least plausible that we have developed some kind of immuno-exchange, much as humans and their livestock were able to pass smallpox between them. To then pass it to a batarian would be like an Earth cow suddenly infecting a sniper rifle with the ability to shoot milk.” Plausible, she thought. But also a terrible coincidence that it should affect the drell and the hanar only, when there were worshippers of entropy and decay on board. “But perhaps he is only cryosick, as Yorrik says.” Anax would eat her new volus suit if Jalosk Dal’Virra outlived a half-charged battery. But panic would not serve either of them now.

Suddenly, Therion thought she heard a soft sound in the silence of the cargo hold. She whipped her head around. Nothing. All quiet.

“Did you hear that?”

“What? No. I hear you breathing like a damn nathak, is that what you mean?”

It was not. But the suit had not registered anything. Perhaps the dark and the cold were getting to her. At least the suit helped with the latter.

“Anax Therion,” Irit said, with uncharacteristic shyness. But Therion was too alert, listening for more of that hushing, sighing, almost inaudible sound, to pay the volus much attention.

“Yes?”

“Why did you come?” Irit Non asked. “Why are you here? I came for my father; my father came in exile. Kholai and Ysses came for its gods. Yorrik came to become someone else. The quarians came for a homeworld, the same as always, if not quite the exact same. Why are you going to Andromeda?”

The drell snapped back to the moment before her. She trained her new mustard-colored lenses on the volus. She almost wanted to tell the truth. There was an intimacy to tailoring, one she supposed Irit had had many chances to exploit. It put you off guard. Perhaps Anax should consider taking up sewing herself. But the truth would not endear her to a volus. She chose something else. A guess. “I was once bonded to a hanar named Oleon, a smuggler wanted in twenty-one systems. My father sold me to Oleon when I was a child. I suppose I disappointed him.” Non’s hands balled into fists at her side. “But I never disappointed Oleon. I made it rich. I made it feared. I was a high-end weapon strapped to its tentacles. It cut my eyes just so that I could more easily understand the bioluminescent language of my masters. It performed the surgery itself, on a ship screaming out of the Skyllian Verge with a batarian cruiser on its tail. I was lucky it did not leave me blind. I was the first drell to receive a hanar soul name of my own. It was a strange life, a violent one. I was unhappy. But who is not?”

“What happened to this Oleon? Is it on board?”

“It is not.”

“Why would you abandon your patron? I know of no drell who has left the Compact. Your people are so consistently servile. If an addiction to predictability is our weakness, that is yours.”

Anax’s mind adjusted, clicked into place, pivoted. There, thought Anax. There you are, Irit Non. There is a freedom fighter inside that merchant’s body. “Oleon sent me on a mission to Earth, to assassinate a competitor named Laslow Marston. Marston was a diplomat, from a long line of ambassadors and statesmen and, naturally, spies. Ambassador is always another word for spy. But it seemed this particular Marston had taken up selling what he learned in the halls, offices, and beds of the powerful to the highest bidder, and that cut into my master’s margins. It took me a year to get close enough to Laslow to strike. A year is a long time. Long enough to think. Long enough to question. And afterward… afterward I took what I knew and ran. All the way here, where the drell Pathfinder will find us a world without a Compact, and if I want to spend a year killing a man, it will be only because he offended me. As far as I know, Oleon is still rich, still feared, and probably training some new child to be its knife in the dark. Although, I suppose, not anymore. Nearly six hundred years have passed. I keep forgetting. But I am free of it. Oleon, and the six hundred years.”

The volus reached up and adjusted something on the suit that almost certainly needed no adjusting. “Disgusting, the way your people accept servitude to those revolting jellyfish. But I am… I am sympathetic.”