Mass Effect

“Warm affection: Say it, Senna,” he rasped. “It is time. Say it. Wry rejoinder: Also it is clear how this happened. I have been breathing Fortinbras in for days. I did not want you to know.”

“Say what?” The quarian tried to shift his weight, to get the whole of Yorrik’s gigantic head into his lap, lifted up off the floor of the clinic. “Oh, no, no, Yorrik, no you don’t. You just had a fall. You’re not going to die, don’t be stupid. You’ve got to get up and save us. You found our needle. She’s just there, near the iso-chamber. Now we just need to thread it. And look—Yorrik, look up!” The elcor tried, he really did, but the room was a blur. There were figures there, splotches of gray and purple. Nice splotches. “Anax and Borbala brought your eezo. It’s all here for you, old man. We’re all here for you.”

“‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?’” Yorrik whispered. He realized he had forgotten to preface it with emotion. Now they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t know what he meant. The elcor struggled to speak again but his throat, his throat hurt him so.

“Ysses…” he managed.

“Is in custody,” Anax Therion said, and the sharp green of her voice cut through his fogged mind.

Yorrik struggled to his feet. The madness would come soon. He knew it would. He had seen it, heard it, and no doctor suffers from the usual delusion that he will be any different than another patient. The progression of a disease is the progression of a disease. He would soon be nothing but a rampaging hulk of tonnage aimed at all these people. It was clever, really, as far as a virus can be clever. The spores that shot out of the abscesses at the point of rupture spread the infection one way, but once the victim was possessed by the rage of the final phases, their lust for destruction and death would spread it, too, fluid to fluid, a classic if ever there was one.

“Angry: You took my microscope. That krogan was going to talk me through it,” he growled, and felt resentment rising like blood in him.

Senna’Nir stood back a little, ready to try, very vainly, to catch the enormous heft of a falling elcor, if he fell again. Good Senna. Always so good.

“Grandmother,” the quarian said, a tinge of pride in his voice, “How do you engineer an active retrovirus?”

Hello, Grandson. Well, first you pour yourself a very tall drink, ’cause this is going to take a while. Then, you’ve got to isolate the immuno-cells and treat your eezo source to leach impurities—

“Overjoyed: You got the ship working again.”

“Not at all, but we’ve got a few systems back online. Enough?”

“Satisfaction: Enough. Warning: You should not be near me, Senna. I am extremely contagious at the moment. Go. I will alert you when I have finished.”

“Can’t I help? I want to stay with you. Like that night when we drank ryncol and watched the stars down by the river. Do you remember that night?”

“With great love: Say it for me, Senna. You may not get another chance.”

Senna’Nir was crying. The elcor could smell the salt of his tears through his helmet.

“No,” Senna snapped. “You say it. I won’t. You’re so close. You’re not going to die before you save us all.”

“Coaxing: Say it.”

“No!” roared the quarian.

The captain interrupted, her voice cool and calm, as it always had been from those first days on Hephaestus.

“How can we distribute the retrovirus once you have it, Yorrik? In case the worst should happen, I need to know.”

Yorrik had dreaded this part of the discussion. This was not a laboratory and supplies were not infinite. In the end, if he was lucky, and he lived long enough, and the ship’s computer really was fixed, Yorrik would end up with a very small sample to work with. Infinite space bound in a walnut shell.

“Reluctant response: The most efficient method, given how little material is in our possession, would be to inject a person with it, and allow them to infect others as they would with the original Fortinbras virus. It could be a sick person or a well one, but they would have to move throughout the ship, coming into physical contact with everyone who has been exposed to the virus. I doubt I will have enough to treat more than one person. We could wait for the virus to replicate under laboratory conditions, but how many more deaths would occur? So many. So many deaths. And each of them bright violet, as violet as a river in the night…”

Yorrik could feel the tension that kept a mind slipping from him. He stared numbly at Qetsi’Olam through his haze. Hatred surged in his heart. Unnameable, unreasoned hatred. If he could only rip her to pieces and feast on her blood, everything would go back to the way it was before. He knew it, somehow, in his bones. But the ancient elcor bit back on his fury. It was not his at all. It was Fortinbras, doing what he always did, coming in at the end to ruin and rend. He would not give in to it. Not yet. This was his final stage. His soliloquy. His swan song. Fortinbras would not ruin that for him.

“Urgent: Go. Leave me alone with my work,” Yorrik pleaded.

The comms crackled to life suddenly. No—not the comms. It was the public address system. The only way Anax Therion knew to contact them.

Good evening, fellow doomed passengers. Would Captain Qetsi’Olam and First Officer Senna’Nir kindly make their way to my cabin 788B in the drell zone? I have some things I wish to say. And I believe my hanar friend does, as well.

18. CELL SUICIDE

Anax Therion watched her come in. Watched her sit down across from the sullen hanar, coming down off its red sand high, hanging like a coat in the corner of her quarters, its levitation packs at half power to keep it immobile. She watched Senna’Nir hover over her. Protective, overly so. Guilt, perhaps. She still hadn’t decided on the commander. They had hardly had a chance to speak. Or, more importantly, for Anax to hear him speak. The drell took a deep breath, finally free of that suit, her green skin shining in the dim lights of her quarters that flickered pinkish-violet every so often. She would be grateful to see normal, steady lights again, if she ever did. The kind you could read a book by.

“Borbala, the door, if you don’t mind?” Therion said carefully. These were her favorite moments, when she had almost all the answers, and needed only to fit the last piece in. Unfortunately, the last piece rather often tried to make a run for it. The batarian nodded and moved to prevent that from happening.