Mass Effect

“Something has been bothering me since I first saw it. Commander, it is always a shadow. We never saw so much as the back of a heel or the top of a head. It’s as though whoever it was knew exactly how to move and where to stand so the camera sweep would miss them every time. And we went through centuries of cams. They never made a mistake. They never had a chance to practice.” The drell’s breath fogged in the icy air. “Someone knew. They knew when they came on board. There was a plan.”

Senna began to pace back and forth in front of the sealed door to medbay. “Where is this shadow now?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” answered the batarian. “We didn’t have time to start a real security sweep before this one hit the apocalypse button.”

“Are you still thinking it could be one of us?” he said, half not wanting to know the answer.

Anax shook her head slowly. “A hundred and fifty years is a long time. And even if they slept through some of that, bringing yourself in and out of cryostasis would be brutal. They’d be in terrible shape by now.”

“So asari or krogan,” the volus said eagerly.

The drell rubbed her longest finger over her index finger. That curious gesture again. She said nothing for a long moment.

“Most likely,” she said finally. “To survive long enough to see it through.” Her large black eyes fixed on something far down the darkened hallway. “Most likely,” she repeated. “What did you find in the datacore?” Therion asked suddenly. She leaned back against the glass, still pulsing red with the lockdown alarm.

“Nothing,” Senna said, straightening up. He rubbed the mesh of his skullcap with one hand. He was going to have to wake up the captain. This was so far above his pay grade. She would know what to do. Qetsi’Olam was born knowing what to do. Her contingency plans had contingency plans, and those contingency plans had fallback positions. This ark was her baby. She would nurse it back to health. He could fix the code; she could fix the people. Proper division of labor was what defined a team. Relief settled over him as he made the decision. Now he could focus. The beautiful soup of the Keelah Si’yah’s base code decompiled and recompiled in his mind all over again. It had been flawless. All systems go.

“Nothing?” Borbala snapped. “You had almost seven hours and you found nothing.”

“Nothing,” repeated the volus, still obviously furious. “No bugs, no bad command lines, no fragged drives, no invasive programs, no unscheduled reboots, no spaghetti code, no run errors, nothing. The hardware is fine. The software is perfect. Except that things keep breaking and the ship keeps insisting they’re not.”

A network of fine frost crept slowly over the red, pulsing quarantine glass.

Perfect, Senna’Nir thought. Perfect. But nothing is perfect. Even if everything is running at optimum, no code is that perfect at the baseline. There is always something buggy in there, something left over from previous versions, something inelegant in the guts of the program.

“We see what is there by seeing what is not there,” he said to himself.

“What? Speak up, homeless,” the batarian sneered.

“I have an idea,” Senna said. He couldn’t help the excitement creeping into his voice. Everything was just horrifying at the moment, but it was a horrifying puzzle, and he might be able to solve it. That was part of why he loved machines so dearly—they were an endless supply of puzzles for his mind to devour like meat. And after nearly six hundred years asleep, he was starving. “I have an idea of where to start, anyway.” He needed to talk to his grandmother. Liat’Nir had been a tech genius in her day. She had fought against the geth. She had programmed some of the geth trying to kill her and everyone she loved. When he talked to Liat, he never had to slow down or explain anything, he could just run out his mind. The old lady might be a relic, but she could still keep up. His greatest breakthroughs had come from bouncing contingencies off of her. He turned back to his team. “I need to go to my quarters and get some things.” Command staff had assigned quarters on the Keelah Si’yah before departure. Their belongings were stowed there, not in the main cargo hold. “I won’t be long. Borbala and Anax, start your security sweep. Yorrik and Ysses, continue your analysis, try to get an idea of how much time we have, and whether or not this is a natural mutation.” Wishful thinking, he thought to himself. He did not believe in accidents, not really. Not big ones. Not like this. “Irit?”

“What?” the volus breathed gutturally. “It’s not fucking Yoqtan,” she finished weakly.

“Help them get Horatio optimized for the next phase. You can direct them from this side of the glass. Turn him into the next best thing to a mobile virological lab. And, Irit…” Senna resisted the urge to pat the short alien on the head. “I presume you brought the tools of your trade along with you?”

“Don’t be stupid,” the volus snapped. Of course, Irit Non would never leave it all behind without grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down so that she could set up shop again wherever they landed.

He gestured at Anax Therion. “Make her a suit. We can’t have you dying on us, Anax.” She was the only one of them who was vulnerable. The only one with no protection from the invisible killer that could be anywhere, all around them. “And somebody grab a terminal port and see if there’s anyone we can reviv

e who would be more useful than the six of us poor bosh’tets. A geneticist, a scientist, a xenobiologist, anything.” He took a deep, rattled breath. “K, initiate revival sequence for Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, authorization passkey indigo-9-9-white-architect-4-1-1-6-nedas.”

Passkey accepted. Revival sequence initiated, Commander.

Yorrik butted his knee lightly against the medbay wall to get the commander’s attention. “Warning,” the elcor said. “The more people you revive, the more chance the infection has to spread to fully thawed and active hosts. We are keeping the bodies as near cryo-temperature as possible. But there is still a risk. We do not yet know how it spreads, and several hours passed before we took any countermeasures at all. Simplistic explanation: It may be on the walls or in the air or in the water supply. There is no way to tell.”

“Commander,” whispered Anax Therion suddenly. “We are not alone.”

The batarian checked the thermal clip in her shotgun and dropped into cover behind one of the terminal nodes across the corridor from medbay. The drell took up a flanking position, rifle already up on one shoulder. Senna saw the blue crackle of biotic implants sizzle along her arms. She tossed him an M-3 Predator. Borbala Ferank seemed to at least consider giving her sidearm to the volus to protect herself.

Senna’Nir heard footsteps. Footsteps far off in the dark. He strained to hear. Heavy? Light? Krogan or asari? Wounded? Malevolent?

“Identify yourself!” Borbala roared into the shadows.

“Oh, good work, you fool,” sneered Non. “They’ll run now. You’ve warned them off. Maybe it is one of us after all. Is that your friend creeping around down there? Give me that pistol, you yellow bitch!”

Borbala ignored her. Anax was silent. Senna could feel his heart hammering in his eardrums. The footsteps were getting closer. Closer.

A shape lunged toward them out of the blue-lit passage to the lower decks.