Mass Effect

The captain whirled on them, drawing a small Arc Pistol from her hip.

“Senna!” she cried. “You frightened me! What are you doing sneaking around like that?”

Anax had always found people to be most themselves when they were afraid they had been caught doing something they oughtn’t. Would they admit it right away? Obfuscate? Everything a person was could be revealed in that red-handed moment.

“I think I’ve gotten turned around,” the captain laughed nervously.

“On your own ship?” asked the drell.

“It’s a big ship, Analyst Therion. Shouldn’t you be guarding our hanar friend?”

“Ah,” said Anax, clasping her hands behind her back. “I believe Ysses is the literal embodiment of the old human folktale of the red herring. That one rejoices in death and annihilation, but it did nothing to bring it about.”

The captain’s hand began to tremble on her gun. “Malak,” she called out, but he did not come.

“But you. I saw you dance with Soval Raxios. I saw you gun down that human boy in cold blood. You did something, if not everything. Means, motive, and opportunity,” Therion went on. By the Lord of Hunters the fresh air felt good on her skin. “They are classics, but useful. You would have had all the opportunities you could carry; after all, this is your ship. And as for means, they can be purchased at any port. It is only the motive that has perplexed me. Why would you hate the drell so intensely that you would seek to destroy us? What have we done to you to deserve this? If you wanted Andromeda to be rid of drell, you had only to forbid us to board.”

“Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah,” Senna’Nir whispered. “What have you done?”

It was not as satisfying as Anax had hoped. You couldn’t see a quarian’s face drain of color, or her pupils dilate in terror, or her perspiration response. You could only see the same shadowed faceplate you always saw, even in that most intimate of moments, when the hunter catches her prey, and the detective pins her criminal to the deed.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Qetsi whispered. “I don’t hate the drell. You were never supposed to be harmed, please believe that.”

“I do not, but go on,” Therion snorted.

“I did it for us, Senna. For our beautiful new world,” she said to her first officer. She wasn’t speaking to Anax at all. Just pleading with her former lover to understand.

But the first officer did not understand. He pointed at the mess hall door and spoke in cold fury. “There are bodies stacked up in there like old shoes. How is that beautiful? Or even new?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Qetsi screamed in frustration. “I was so careful. I designed the virus myself. It was perfect. It was so perfect. A carrier virus. It would never have shown any symptoms. The drell would contract it three-quarters of the way through the journey, and they would never even know they had it. I paid a kid to install dispensers in their pods. Told him it was perfume, to remind them of home. Everything was supposed to be fine. But the computer side of it all, the worm, that was Malak’Rafa’s baby. His darling. He spent months on the thing, and in the end, in the end, Senna, he fucked up, not me. I did my job flawlessly. He choked at the finish somehow. All it was ever supposed to do was raise the temperature slightly, the very barest minimum, to let the virus get a foothold and then cover its tracks. That’s it. That’s all. But the worm raised the temperature a little too high, just a little, maybe half a degree too far, just far enough to allow the beginnings of a very slow continuous replication without waking anyone up.”

“And that gave Fortinbras a hundred and fifty years to mutate,” Therion said. “I suspect it found no good purchase in our lungs and was forced to progress to the brain. And once a virus has learned a new trick, it doesn’t forget. Fifty years of replication with no predators is enough to create the mother of all infections. It’s billions of generations.”

“To fulfill fitness parameters,” Senna mumbled. Therion pursed her lips. “But then we have the problem of Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9. We always seemed to come back to Soval Raxios. Patient Zero, of a sort. She wasn’t, of course, you infected hundreds of drell. But her Sleepwalker team revived shortly after infection, and she had contact with all those other people. They went back into their pods covered in the droplets of her breath, her sweat, maybe even more. And Fortinbras had more time to work, and more species to adapt to. And all the while, you revived yourself, here and there, flitting just beyond the cameras, checking the progress, monitoring the worm in the computers, making sure all was proceeding according to plan.”

“It was a carrier virus,” Qetsi hissed through clenched teeth.

“Carried to wh

at?” Senna’Nir said numbly.

The captain looked up at him with a misery that was clear even through dark glass.

“To the Nexus,” she said. “Senna, remember what I said. Remember it. New world, new rules. Why should it always, always be them? The Council races, lording it over us all. What does the Council matter in Andromeda? Why should turians, asari, humans, and fucking salarians always come out on top? Humans! Who barely puked themselves into a spacefaring culture half a second ago? Salarians? You know what they did to me, Senna. You know.”

The quarian glanced at Anax. “When she was on her Pilgrimage on Erinle, they stripped her suit off and left her outside the habitat bubble without it. Only for a few minutes. A prank, they said. But her lungs became infected with algae. It took months to recover.”

“Months during which I learned. I learned about Ayalon B and artificial viral technology. I learned how to build my own like a child’s blocks. And I learned that people hate us. The quarians. They hate us for all the reasons one species hates another. We could never really be safe in the Milky Way, even if we retook Rannoch. We could only be safe somewhere new. So…” She swallowed hard. “The drell would carry the virus onto the Nexus. The only people it would harm would be humans, turians, asari, and salarians. Quarians would be safe in our suits, everyone else… Oh, Senna, if only you could understand, you’d be proud of me. It’s so clever. No one else could have thought of it. As long as the infection stayed within a drell—or even an elcor or batarian; I did consider spillover, I’m not an idiot—it would be inert. Safe. But once it infected species whose bodies it recognized, its parts recognized, it would come into its own. It would run wild through them. The Council races are native to the diseases I used, the rest of us would have been safe. Once it found its home, the disease would clear out the Nexus of almost everyone but us. Not just us. Not just quarians!” She turned to Anax. “Drell, too, and elcor, and hanar, and batarians, and volus. The species denied our places in the Milky Way. We would finally have our chance to shine. To become great. To create something better than the corruption of the old galaxy, the seething schemes of Cerberus and the geth and all the rest of the horrors of home. A new life, a completely new life, with us at the top.”

“That’s hundreds of thousands of people. You were going to kill hundreds of thousands on the Nexus, just for political advantage?” Senna stood back from her. He felt sick with recognition. This was Qetsi’Olam, love of his life, the big-picture girl. The big-picture girl who sometimes just… couldn’t see the little brushstrokes. All that vulnerability she’d shown in his quarters was gone. Maybe it had never been there. Maybe she’d just needed him to trust her as he’d always done.

“Not all of them. Some of them would always be immune; in any population some people are just… lucky. But… but most. Enough. Enough that it would only make sense to let the quarians step up and administer the survivors. We would comfort them in their grief. And only I and Malak would bear the guilt. No one would ever know. When a truly just galaxy arose, it would all be worth it. There would only be a history of unexplainable tragedy, and the light that was birthed from it. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

The captain sunk to her knees.

Anax Therion felt a terrible suspicion in her stomach.

“How did you choose?”