“I don’t know. People… brought a lot of things with them. I’m not a steward, I haven’t looked at the manifests. Why?” I’ve got you, he thought but didn’t say. He’d never indicated to her that she was anything but a living, breathing quarian, either.
“What you have to know about ryncol, son, is you can’t just dig it out of the ground like a wine grape. It’s nothing so simple. A real spirit requires a huge distilling contraption, so many chambers and barrels and sterilized condensers. It’s a carefully timed process, and the end result is a brain smashed open with a small, angry meteor.”
Senna sighed heavily. It didn’t always work. Those fitness algorithms were as likely to turn up a lecture on ryncol as anything useful. But he had hoped. He really had. “Grandmother, thank you for trying. I love you, even when I need your help so badly and all you can give me is go fish.”
Liat’Nir swigged from the bottle. “If my hypothesis is correct, your best-case scenario is that communications will fail next, followed by either environmental zone controls or the tram system. In your worst case, the cryopods will go first. Come back and tell me which, ke’sed. I need a nap.”
“Wait, what hypothesis?”
“Working!” she yelled at him, and smashed her glass against nothing.
“Senna?” came a voice, and a knock, at the door.
Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, who always knocked because she was polite, but rarely waited for an answer because she was a small, furious fuel cell powered by enthusiasm and her command lock override code, stepped into his quarters. Senna’Nir shoved his grandmother’s mobile projection unit under his sleeping bunk and pulled a small crate of personal items in front of it with the practiced panic of someone very accustomed to hiding the evidence.
“K, end conversational protocol Senna4,” he whispered. “Resume standard interpersonal routines.”
Qetsi appeared in the doorway to his sleeping area, her violet hood crowning her head, not unlike Liat’s cowl.
“Captain,” he said, standing up quickly.
“Don’t be stupid, Senna. How many times have I told you you don’t have to call me that? Keelah, it’s so dark in here.”
“Many, Qetsi,” he said, with affection. Even now, in this mess, with affection. “You have told me many times.”
“Yorrik brought me up to speed,” the captain said, her voice thin with worry. “It’s not… It’s not good, is it?”
“It is not.”
“We almost made it. We were so close. Another thirty years.” She paced the room, not even glancing at the puddle of coolant in the water dispenser basin. “It’s my fault,” she whispered finally. Keelah, she was so young, really. So was he. They’d never have been given their own command on the Fleet at thirty-five. Perhaps not at forty-five. He caught her mid-pace and held her in his arms. Their faceplates touched briefly, like a kiss.
“It’s not your fault, Qetsi. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“I tried so hard. To be prepared. For anything. For everything. Not like those empty husks the Initiative fired off before us. I tried to build us a good ship. I did build us a good ship! A quarian ship. I just did such an excellent job that the most quarian of all fates befell it: our technology betrayed us. The basic fact is, we don’t have what we need. Whatever else is happening, that’s the real problem. We don’t have what we need. I can’t decide if my mother would laugh or scold me.” She sniffed. “I should have bought more medi-gel. I could have at least done that.”
“Your mother has been dead since you were a kid. Since you were a kid plus six hundred years, actually.” Senna realized this sounded rather harsh. “She’d be proud,” he added quickly.
She buried her face in his shoulder. “I just want to go home,” she whispered. Senna was surprised. Qetsi did not show vulnerability. She was as allergic to it as to a gust of foreign air. The situation must be so much worse than he thought. “Who is doing this to us?”
“I don’t know,” Senna sighed. “But I suspect they’re a lot smarter than I am.”
“Do you have any good news for me, Senna’Nir?” the captain said, disentangling herself, all business once more.
“I’m sorry, I don’t. I wish I—” Something in the corner of his faceplate display caught Senna’s attention. He’d been so absorbed with Liat he hadn’t noticed. “Wait. That’s… odd.”
“What? What is odd? Odd in a good way? Odd in a ‘suddenly everything fixed itself with minimal effort’ way?”
“No, not exactly, but…” He checked the timestamp. “It stopped.”
“What stopped?”
“I set my suit to keep me updated on the number of cryopods that showed the necrotic freezer burn that first alerted the ship. It’s been a pretty grim thumbnail in my peripheral vision for the last thirty hours, just ticking up and up and up. And it stopped. It stopped two hours ago. I didn’t notice. No drell have died in the last two hours. No hanar either.”
The captain did disentangle herself then. She leaned back against the dining table, her shoulders relaxing. “That’s good. That’s a good thing. Thank the ancestors! Maybe if we can just get a little breathing room we can get a handle on what’s happening to us. Find a way to stop it.”
“I’ll go see Yorrik,” Senna’Nir said, grabbing his omni-tool from the seating area where he’d left it.
“No, I’ll go,” Qetsi insisted. “You’ve had longer to get your head around it all. I need to get there. I’m the captain. I need to be the first point of contact