Mass Effect

So did the captain.

Small, hard, dark blue, all over the batarian’s throat and jawline, rising up from the rash like toxic islands in a river of pus. Yorrik’s scent glands released a musk of relief and joy as Captain Qetsi’Olam stumbled into the medbay though a small access panel near the floor, breathing heavily through her facemask. Her black-and-purple suit was stained with oil and other, unmentionable industrial filth.

“Concerned query: Where is Senna’Nir?”

The captain collected herself quickly. “As you may have noticed, we are having issues with the networked systems. The trams stopped. We split up somewhere back there in the maintenance tunnels. He went to lock down the cargo bay. I came here. Unless you’d prefer I go to assist my colleague?”

“Overenthusiastic interruption: No, no, please stay. I have results. You are interested in results. You want results. You will not leave us here alone while there are results to be had.”

“I gotta scratch, Doc,” Jalosk Dal’Virra wheezed, clawing desperately at his sores.

“Do not scratch,” Yorrik said for the hundredth time.

His four black eyes bulged with the effort, but he stopped.

“Kindly suggestion: If you depress the button on the wall next to you, a medi-gel mist will dispense from the ceiling. It may offer some relief.”

The batarian jammed his fingers against the wall, moaning loudly as the mist hit his swelling neck.

The captain looked over the afflicted colonist dispassionately. “You should kill him,” she said softly. “Now, while he is still himself and has a little dignity left. It’s only kindness. You have your results. Surely you know all you need to.”

Yorrik sighed through his olfactory slats. “With ethical ambivalence: It would be better to see it through. Besides, I might yet heal him.”

Qetsi put her hand on the medbay glass. “Heal him? Is that even possible? Have you found a cure already?”

“With deep self-loathing: No. But I might.” He shifted his gray bulk miserably. “He has children. I have to try.”

Dal’Virra coughed. “Ungrateful shits, children. No greater debt than the one owed to the fools who gave them life. Yet they refuse to pay it. They just refuse. It’s extraordinary. Everything else you make in this life, you own outright. Yet I am expected to allow my children to do as they please, and if they leave that debt unpaid all their lives, I have no recourse to collect what I am owed.”

“And what are you owed?” asked the captain with what seemed like genuine curiosity. She turned her whole body toward him, every microgesture seeming to communicate that there was nothing in the world so important as what this one batarian scratching himself to death on a lonely ship was going to say next. It was quite extraordinary. Yorrik could not help wanting her to pay so much attention to him. No wonder Senna couldn’t let her go.

A large tear welled up in the corner of Dal’Virra’s lower left eye. “Love, I suppose. Unconditional love.”

“That’s not the answer I expected from a batarian,” Qetsi said. “I like that answer very much. There were so many who told me I should not even consider letting your kind aboard my ship. But, Jalosk, I believe very strongly that all people should be given a chance to become great. It is everything, I believe. That chance is the most important thing in the universe. My people were denied that chance so often, by so many. I couldn’t deny it to you, just because you are not like me. I could not carry that into the new galaxy.” This was the old Qetsi’Olam. The one who could inspire a speck of dust if she got it alone for long enough. When she spoke again, her voice was thick and melodious with sincerity. “Thank you for proving me right.”

Jalosk grunted. “Yes, love. And affection. And undying loyalty. And a ten-to-fifteen-percent share of their profits, no less than a brokering agent would receive. I brokered them into existence, after all. And they should… they should stay where I put them. They should stay nearby. Generous terms, by any bank’s measure. But of course love. Did you really think batarians don’t love their children? No race can evolve without that trait. Otherwise, we would all eat our young alive for the trouble they cause us. Would it surprise you to know I nursed my little son Grozik back to health when he fell from our habitat roof? Always going where he shouldn’t, my little warrior. And Zofi, when she cried because the other children were cruel to her, would it shock you to know I—yes, I! A batarian!—wiped her tears and kissed her wounds? And why do you think we’re monsters? Because we keep slaves? Because we sell things?”

“With deep disgust: You sell weapons, narcotics, and people. That is what your species did with your chance.”

Jalosk shrugged. “Someone buys them. If rainbows, smiles, and cuddles brought the highest prices, we’d be selling those instead. Back home, I had asari customers, salarian, turian, even human. Yet you do not hate their entire races for purchasing and using what the batarians sell. Yes, yes, slavery. It is so terrible. I have heard it all. Yet my father was a slave. He bought our freedom. He bought us a future. You can buy your freedom from a batarian slaver. Good luck trying that with anyone else. On Khar’shan, slave is a position. Everywhere else, it is a condition. And again, I must point out, we do sell slaves to someone, and those someones are only sometimes other batarians. You had it so easy on your garden worlds, with your fruits and your vegetables and your fresh summer rains and nice, tidy Prothean artifacts tied up in a bow for you to find. We clawed our way to the stars. We made an economy out of slime, muck, thirty-year dry spells, and an alien slagheap that made no more sense than a moron’s scream in the dark. So we had to do it selling all your worst instincts back to you at a steep markup. That says more about you than us. I lifted my entire family out of the laborer caste and into the merchant caste—what greater love can there be than that?”

“With cautious curiosity: And their mother? Is she not also owed a debt? Borbala said you took your children from her.”

Jalosk grimaced. Another large, heavy tear welled up in his eye, this time the lower right. “Their mother was an imbecile. What the mother of worms says of me is actually true of Ukiro Dal’Virra. She left me and married a male of the military class.”

“Embarrassment: I am sorry.”

Jalosk knuckled a tear away. “No, no, you misunderstand! I am proud of her! It was a daring match, and allowed our offspring a path into the elite, perhaps even the Khar’shan ruling classes. I never loved her more than the day she succeeded in seducing him. I could have burst with admiration and personal satisfaction. She was an imbecile because, even with the access her new rank afforded her, she insisted on staying on Camala, even after… even after. They struck the eezo refineries first, those things, gigantic and black as nothing you can imagine. Like insects… but made of space itself. They turned people into… husks. Into withered, dried-meat shadows of themselves. Hungry shadows. Ukiro though

t she could keep them safe. But something like that… doesn’t care about caste. I took my children to keep them safe. They still haven’t forgiven me. I guess they never will, now. But at least… At least whatever was happening to Camala, even if it happened everywhere else in the galaxy, at least it is six hundred years over now and Grozik and Zofi are far beyond it. There. That is the idiot dolt that scion of Ferank told you could never do anything worth doing. Well, I did something. I did something. My father was a slave, and his father was a red sand addict suckling at the teat of whoever would get him his next fix, and now my children will be among the founding families of a new galaxy, a caste beyond castes. Her father was an oligarch, and she is an oligarch. Who scored better, between the two of us?” Jalosk coughed viciously, and for some time. Tears trickled down his cheeks, darkening the teal spots there. “Dammit, this is intolerable. It is humiliating to weep in front of an alien. I do not even know why I’m crying.”

“Regretfully: That is because you are not crying. Those are not tears. You are weeping cerebral spinal fluid. Most likely one of the abscesses on your neck has collapsed into a fistula, forming a passageway between your spinal column and your mucus membranes.”

“Oh,” said Jalosk Dal’Virra. Another tear splashed onto the floor. “So I am going to cry myself to death. I can’t imagine a more un-batarian way to go.”

“Comforting bedside manner: No, no, do not worry, other things will kill you first.”

“Perhaps it’s time you gave me that report, Yorrik,” said the captain. And then her attention was on him fully, like the light of a red giant, like no one else existed, and she had never spoken to anyone else in all her life. It was uncanny that she could do that. Yorrik wondered if it could be taught. A wonderful skill for the greatest actor in the Andromeda galaxy, if he could get hold of it.