Mass Effect

Yorrik spared a glance for the spectacle of a sleeping hanar. But not for the stars, and not for anything else. His world had shrunk to the view through the slowly, gently flashing medbay glass edged with frost, across the dim, bile-streaked corridor, past the shimmer of a decontaminant forcefield, and into the iso-chamber, where a lone batarian sat on a thin cot, weeping softly. He had developed a rash. It snaked over half his face and down his throat, disappearing into his stained leather collar, a silver-pink spiderweb of angry lines pinpricked with tiny, hard pustules.

No vocal contact with the others in fifty-one minutes. And counting.

“Barely controlled panic: Commander?” the great elcor actor droned into his comm. No answer came. “Insistent: Senna’Nir? This is medbay, please respond.” Nothing. “Deep despair: My friend, please. Where are you? Uneasy plea: ‘’Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.’”

The only answer was the total quiet of the darkened med deck. Even the hanar had found its way into a sleep beyond snoring.

“No one is coming,” the batarian muttered. He pawed at his cheeks, wiping away the tears that welled up in the corners of his lower pair of eyes before they could fall. The upper pair were dry. “I don’t know why you keep trying. Comms are down. They’re clearly down. All the way down. If you want your friends so badly, you’re going to have to go and get them.”

Yorrik glanced over at Horatio, the child quarian’s suit, hanging on its hook, stuffed full of Dal’Virra’s samples, blinking away at a full-spectrum tissue analysis. “With acceptance of fate: Neither Ysses nor I can leave the quarantine area. We have been exposed longer than anyone. Either of us would carry particulates with us anywhere we went. We would potentially contaminate anything we touched, anyone we spoke to. I am as dangerous as you are. Irrepressible hope: K, locate all members of Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 and the captain.”

Analyst Anax Therion and Specialist Irit Non are currently on Deck 11, cargo bay north quadrant. Specialist Borbala Ferank is on Deck 2, Mess Hall 3. Medical Specialist Yorrik and Hydraulic Chemical Specialist Ysses are on Deck 4, medbay. Commander Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah and Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah are on Deck 6, on inter-habitat tram line 1, car B2, between the quarian residential zone and common assembly zone 5.

Yorrik gave a shaky exhalation as, “Relieved: They are alive at least.”

Dal’Virra arched one hairless greenish-yellow eyebrow. “You think? K, locate Munitions Specialist Jalosk Dal’Virra.”

Munitions Specialist Jalosk Dal’Virra is currently in cryopod BT566 in the batarian hibernation bay on Deck 11.

Jalosk leaned back against the real wall of his cell, stretching his jaw. Dried black vomit flaked away. The nausea had stopped and the crying had started forty-two minutes ago. Tears still trickled down his haggard yellow face, over the teal markings on his cheeks, and dripped onto the floor. “Don’t get your hopes up. Our ship is a good-looking wench, but she has shit for brains. Alas, poor Yorrik, it’s just you and me and a crazy jellyfish.”

A rush of good feeling suffused Yorrik’s body for the first time in many hours. “Surprised delight: You know Hamlet?”

The batarian blinked. “What now? Who? Is he a passenger?”

Yorrik slumped slightly. He wiped away a smear of

fluorescent dye from the dormant krogan microscope and rearranged a few bits of nothing on the now-empty autopsy table. He had not known it was possible to feel nostalgic for his life only twenty hours ago. But those had been good times, comparatively. Reverse engineering a coroner’s lab from junk and children’s toys. Practically a game. “Confusion: You said, ‘Alas, poor Yorrik.’ That is a line from Hamlet. Hamlet is a play. Correction: Hamlet is also a man. But he is not on board the Keelah Si’yah.”

“Yeah, poor Yorrik, because I feel sorry for you,” Jalosk grunted. “All the excitement is somewhere else and you’re just standing there staring at me like a sad loner at happy hour in purgatory. Are you not called Yorrik?”

“Disappointed: I am. Curious: How do you know there is excitement?”

Jalosk shrugged. “If there wasn’t, they’d have come back to check on us as soon as the comms went out. Horrible virus loose on a ship? No place more important than the medbay. And yet.” He indicated the empty halls. He tried to vomit again, but there was nothing left. He gagged and spat. There was bright blood in the gob that hit the floor.

“I’m not cryosick,” Dal’Virra said flatly.

Yorrik turned to Horatio, the faceplate beneath its smiley face full of data, data that scrolled down past the softly blinking “positive” icon that said the only thing worth saying. “Apologetic: No. You have what the drell Soval Raxios and Tyomar Lukad and the hanar Kholai had. Yoqtan, or something like Yoqtan, but much worse.”

“You said viruses don’t jump from species to species like this.”

“Helplessly: And yet.”

The batarian sunk his head into his hands. “I was telling the truth,” he mumbled bitterly. “I just woke up like this. I don’t know anything. This isn’t my fault. Not… Not for the reasons she told you. I’m not stupid. Shrik vai, the arrogance of the ruling caste! They look at a merchant and automatically assume he doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together to keep him warm at night. It takes more intellect to scrape and strive through your whole misfiring disruptor charge of a life, knowing that whether or not you sell this weapon or that one is the difference between dying and another day, than it does to be born into a family that runs everything and still shit it all away. I could have done it, I swear I could have. I’ve raided more medical vessels than you can possibly imagine. I know how people die, it’s not magic. I could engineer a superbug. Or at least hire the right people to do it for me. I could’ve. I just didn’t. There’s a big difference.” A vicious cough wracked his chest. “It’s important to me that you know that. I won’t be disrespected. I won’t.”

Yorrik glanced at the hanar, still floating, still sleeping. “Dejected: I am not sure it matters whose fault it is now. And it certainly will not change what is happening to you. Delicate request: Please… tell me how you feel, as often as you can. It will help. Correction: It will help other people.”

“I feel like I just got fired out of the back end of a Hensa cruiser, that’s how I feel. I’m boiling hot, my head is pounding, and I’m just so… I’m so fucking hungry, elcor. Is there something to eat in there? Anything?”

Yorrik glanced at the creeping frost at the corners of the medbay glass. The ship’s temperature controls had not improved. “Gentle tone: Unfortunately, the Si’yah has limited food supplies on board. It was presumed that the Nexus would feed us when we arrived, having already begun cultivation on several habitable planets. Statement of sympathy: I am also hungry.”

“You may be hungry, but I need to eat, you fat cretin. I’m starving.”

“Genuine regret: I am sorry.”

The quarantine chime sounded softly every minute on the minute.

The first sores appeared three hours later.