Mass Effect

Senna started to answer, but he didn’t get a chance.

“I don’t think you understand what I’m talking about,” protested the volus. “You are not an engineer, you’re an apothecary, which we all know means booze smuggler, not scientist. You don’t understand how things work. Even if you entered stasis sick, and somehow the initial medical scan didn’t find the problem and patch you up, even if you somehow got injected with a tube full of the goddamned genophage in transit, cryostasis stores the body at a temperature far, far too low for any viral or bacterial replication. Nothing happens when tissue gets that cold. That’s why we don’t age. There simply are no physical processes taking place. If you fall asleep with a sniffle, you’ll wake up with one. It can’t be an infection, because people are dead, and you only die when a pathogen can get its trousers on in the morning! No harm can come to a person in cryostasis. That’s the whole point.”

“Regretfully: Any disease that would kill a drell would have a very hard time jumping to a hanar. Your anatomy is not compatible. Helpfully sharing: Viruses and bacteria are fine-tuned to the species they infect. Only an extremely small percentage is even capable of cross-species contamination. Brightly: For example, while drell live in close proximity to the hanar on Kahje, Kepral’s Syndrome cannot infect the hanar, because it is a degenerative lung disease, and the hanar do not have lungs.”

“Maybe we got a bad batch of pods at the outset,” Senna said doubtfully. The Initiative wouldn’t skimp on something like that. “The sores could have been chemical burns, or mass effect field runoff, like you said.”

Irit Non had gotten herself so worked up she was pacing in her alcove like a trapped animal. She seemed somehow offended on the pods’ behalf. “Senna, you’re a code man. I respect that, but expecting you to know the first thing about the hardware is like expecting a psychiatrist to cure the Blood Plague. If it was a problem on the fabrication end, they’d all have failed at the same time, and you’d see failures all over the ship, not just Rakhana-clan and a few Khar’shan-clan.”

Anax Therion’s green browline lifted in amusement. “Well, congratulations, Sleepwalker Team Blue-7! In less than ten minutes, you seem to have ruled out poison, disease, or equipment malfunction, as well as sabotage, and accident. You’re about as helpful as the Si’yah’s scans. It must not have happened, then! What a relief for all those drell. Back to your pod, then, volus. Back to your 100% safe, completely uncompromised, flawlessly functioning pod. We won’t even check it over, since you’re so sure. And obviously, since it’s perfectly capable of adjusting pressurization and gravity, and no harm can come to a person in cryostasis, you won’t need your environmental suit, either. In you go, naked as a newborn yahg.”

“You do love to hear yourself talk, don’t you?” chuckled the batarian. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you figure it out for us and we’ll see you at the Nexus.”

Senna could see the drell beginning to lose her patience. “I told you, we need more data.”

Irit Non wheezed and coughed. She stopped pacing. She curled her chubby shoulders in, as if to defend herself from their reaction before she said whatever was about to come out. “I’m not drell. Or hanar. And nothing can get past my suit’s filters. So it’s… not my problem.”

Anax Therion and Borbala Ferank stared at the volus with five black reptilian eyes between them.

“Sorry,” the volus mumbled. “Sorry.”

“This is what’s going to happen,” Senna announced, a little too loudly. But it did the trick. Not a person on this ship hadn’t served aboard another one at some point. They came to attention eventually, if you sounded like you were giving a command, not asking for an opinion. “Suit up for common environmental conditions. We’re going to split into three teams. Yorrik and Ysses will be Team What. You’ll take three of the corpses into medbay and perform autopsies, figure out a real, solid cause of death we can build a theory on. Anax and Borbala, you’ll be Team Who. Scour the ship for your theoretical stowaway—”

The volus Irit Non wheezed and sucked at the air through her filter. “You want them to secure the ship on foot? This ship? The Keelah Si’yah? We’re a kilometer and a half long and weigh seventeen million tons. Surely the ship’s computer isn’t a complete paperweight.”

Senna’Nir was grateful that his helmet made it impossible for anyone else to see the sarcastic curl his lips always took on when someone blathered on at him about a totally simple solution he must not have thought of.

“K, please run a scan for any life signs on board. Exclude the six of us and all entities currently in cryostasis.”

The voice of the ship’s interface came back cool and calm as ever.

No life signs detected, Commander.

“Any empty pods in the cryobays?” The quarian continued.

Negative, Commander.

“See? A lot of work saved,” said Irit with a modest cough. The yellow-green lights of her eyes even seemed to shine a little brighter with self-satisfaction.

“Yes, and we’ll definitely believe her, because she was so right about everything else. She literally can’t tell the difference between a corpse and a living person at the moment. What makes you think she can see a living person if they don’t want to be seen?”

The tall, lithe drell blinked both sets of eyelids at him with a slow sensuality he always found unsettling among her kind. They never meant to look at anyone like that. It was just how they were built. “She?” said Anax curiously.

A helmet covered a multitude of sins, and this time it covered his flush of shame. Shame, and very slight pride. Of course the ship’s computer interface had no gender. The voice he’d selected from the audiobank was slightly more on the female side of the slider than male, but no more than slightly. But he was the quarian he was, and he’d worked so closely with K. He thought of her as her. This is why you’re not Pathfinder, he told himself ruefully. Telem’Yered didn’t teach the ship interface to use the pronoun I because he thought it sounded friendlier. Telem’Yered never installed three separate conversational matrices so that the ship could talk to him at night. Telem’Yered never talked to the ship at all if he could help it. That’s what a real quarian is. You’re just a freak.

“It. Whatever you like. The point is, Analyst Therion, access the small arms locker on the bridge, and check the Sleepwalker logs for anything unusual that might have fallen through the cracks in the Si’yah’s diagnostics, as they are obviously taking a very long lunch break. And if there’s time, sweep the ship as best you can, at least the cryodecks.”

“Six hundred years of Sleepwalker logs,” the batarian repeated sourly. “With her. Lieutenant I’m Smarter Than You.”

“I’ll be gentle,” said Anax Therion.

Senna ignored them. “Irit Non and I will be Team How. Hardware and software. We’ll take the pods and the scans, pinpoint the blockage, and fix up any damage. With a little luck, we’ll have this locked down within forty-eight hours. Just another Sleepwalker shift. Yorrik, how long will it take to run the autopsies?”

“Anxious distress: Normally, three autopsies would take no more than an hour, but—”

“That’s fine, let’s meet in medbay in three hours to report findings,” said Senna, in the tone of voice his mother used to use when she wanted to move to a vote in the Conclave.

The metal rings on the elcor’s blue-and-purple head covering jangled as the creature shook his head violently. “With stubborn but necessary resistance: It will not take an hour. It will not take three hours. Without medical scans or a diagnostic VI, there is no useable equipment in medbay. All medbay devices are networked with the ship’s computer. If we cannot use the Keelah’s datacore, medbay is functionally empty. What we need is there, but, to use the vernacular, it is all bricked. Resentful rhetorical question: What do you expect me to do an autopsy with, a shotgun and some omni-gel?”