Mass Effect

“Tentative overture: You know, my grandfather Verlaam believed that other species could greatly benefit from using the elcor speech technique in times of great stress,” he said flatly. “Many veterans of many wars came to him to learn it in his later days, for great trauma blunts emotions in all organic beings. Perhaps you should try it.”

Irit Non turned her yellow eyes up to him. “Total fucking despair: Everyone has it. None of us are safe. How was that?”

“Encouraging: Very good. With great confidence: But that quarian cannot have died of the Fortinbras virus. Their suits are excellent. It should have kept her perfectly safe. I am sure she died in some other way. Let us focus on the volus victim.”

Irit shrugged. “Do you know where I found her? In Mess Hall 4. They turned it into a makeshift mausoleum. All the dead are there. All the dead anyone has time to collect. It’s cold enough for storage there. They’re piled in there like rations. Environmental zones hardly matter for them anymore. No one means any disrespect… they just have to go somewhere. I saw her while I was interring my father’s body under a cafeteria table. One quarian arm under all those hanar tentacles. And while I was carrying her through the decks, I thought about how it could possibly happen. The volus suits are one thing, not much in the way of disease filtration. But the quarians should be fine. They should have been fine. And I am not… a large person. It is hard for me to carry a dead body.” Irit Non’s voice grew thick. “Miserably: She was so heavy,” the volus whispered. “So much heavier than you’d think, for a child. It took a long time. So I tried to imagine how a quarian suit could be breached without the suit responding or the quarian inside knowing.”

Yorrik saw the captain arrive out of the corner of his eye. She saw him notice her and raised a hand—no need to interrupt. Qetsi’Olam leaned against the far wall of the corridor and listened.

“Do you know what Clanless suits are made of?” the volus went on, staring at the dead girl. “It sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? Well, the answer sounds like a punchline: anything they can find. They’re made of whatever they can scavenge on the Fleet, from other ships, on planets where they make planetfall. It’s strictly patchwork crap, the strongest materials, but all pieced together like a quilt. It’s really a wonder they work as well as they do. Clanless engineering, I suppose. But… I can’t imagine they put ‘whatever can plausibly be interpreted as fabric’ through serious stress tests, can you? What I am trying to say is: I know the exact duration my suit can survive without structural failure in a vacuum. Exactly the pressures it can withstand, internal and external. At exactly what point it will breach if it comes into contact with dozens of known caustic substances. And precisely what temperatures it can take, high and… high and low. Do you see? Do you see, elcor? Perhaps the Clanless know all those things, too. They are a careful people. I’ve always admired that about them. But those numbers, those precious, life-supporting numbers, cannot possibly be the same for every square inch of their suit. Because it’s all patched together from the-gods-know-what.”

“We do,” said the captain, softly but with the authority that all captains have the moment they take the rank. “Of course we stress-test them.”

Irit turned to Qetsi. “Captain, I didn’t see you.”

“It’s perfectly all right, Specialist Non. I rather enjoy listening to you speak. You have such a way. It’s comforting. I came to check on you, Yorrik. I have… I have seen your friend.”

“Vain hope: Ysses?” Yorrik said. Where could that blasted hanar have gone? Why would it have gone? The elcor had wakened to Irit Non screaming at him, and his head felt so heavy, so heavy.

“Yes. That one cornered me near the bridge. It grabbed me. Have you ever been grabbed by a hanar? I don’t recommend it. It wrapped me up in all of its tentacles and giggled and giggled and told me to let it happen, to let it all happen. Someone ripped it off me, and it floated away. And then that someone tried to stab me because I didn’t have any food. But I think… I think I am all right. The ship is lost, I’m afraid. There is no control anywhere.”

The volus opened a panel in her thigh and drew out a small black device. “Captain, would you mind if I examined your suit? It could put all our minds at ease.”

“My suit? I said I am all right. But… of course,” Qetsi’Olam demurred.

The volus beckoned her closer and ran her device over the expanse of patchwork mesh that comprised the captain’s suit. A dim ultraviolet-colored light emanated from it. She ran it all over Qetsi’s body, and only at the end did a tiny ultraviolet-colored mark appear on the small of her back—and then a few more, and a few more, like cracks in ice.

“Micro-tears,” sighed Irit Non. “No material can be stress-tested for six hundred years in a cryopod, at temperatures far below organic tolerance. I don’t believe the makers of those pods ever imagined that people like you and me would keep our suits on when we went to sleep for centuries at a time. You might have been all right if you hadn’t.”

The captain might have looked horrified. You could never tell with quarians. But her posture looked as though you could knock her over with a breath. “We’ll sleep safe as engines as forward we fly, my self and my suit, my suit and I,” she whispered.

“Yes, well, maybe just you next time,” the volus grunted.

“I’ve been exposed,” Qetsi said faintly.

“Wry humor: Join the club,” Yorrik droned. His limbs felt so thick. Like he was standing in a swamp. He could hardly think. He tried to focus his thoughts. “To be or not to be, that is the question, whether ’tis nobler in the minds of men to suffer the… suffer the…” What was it the old Dane was so worried about suffering?

“How long is the incubation period?” Qetsi asked. “I don’t feel well. Do I? I don’t. I can’t tell.” She coughed experimentally.

“Regretfully: I have not been able to observe a patient from the point of first contact, so I cannot provide that information,” Yorrik sighed. Who knew how long it had been since Jalosk was exposed?

Anax Therion and Borbala Ferank made hardly a sound coming up the hall, despite carrying rather a large crate of electronic supplies between them.

“Hullo, Yorrik, you great lump,” said the batarian. “How are you? We… eh. We’re going to need the microscope. And… And the fish tank, too. Whatever’s left of the CPU from the one we brought up to you. You don’t need them anymore, do you?”

Anax took it all in and Yorrik watched her do it. What could possibly be said? The open door, the absence of Ysses, people wandering in and out of the medbay as though quarantine protocols had never been invented. She sighed. Yorrik sighed. It was a world of sighs and no solutions. How could he tell them? How could they not know? How could they not smell him? The smell of his own organs devouring themselves hung thick in the air, sweeter than flowers, almost like candy, sickening. But they did not seem to notice. He was so tired. So very tired.

“Am I an unforgivable optimist if I ask about a cure, Yorrik?” ventured the captain.

“Hopeless: I will forgive you. But I do not know what you think I can do without a working virology lab. You can identify a virus with toy parts. You can’t cure one.”

The elcor stared down at the shredded, half-exploded volus. He tried again to focus on

something good, something solid, something that felt like love and life. “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right…”

“Defeated: The trouble is the mutation. Fortinbras has had so long to evolve. Hundreds of years. And I am to murder it in a day? It is impossible, unless I could have as much time to evolve as it did.” Yorrik could not be sure his words had come out as well as they sounded in his head. But the others seemed to understand. He did not want to panic them. The patient could panic. The doctor, never.

Anax Therion stopped him. “What do you mean, it had so much time?”