Mass Effect

“This is all highly unnecessary,” Anax Therion called out. They were coming up on forty-eight hours since Sleepwalker Team Blue-7’s attention had been required. Forty since she and the batarian had taken their leave of the cargo hold. How long had these people been down here, alone, confused, hungry, unable to use comms or the ship’s interface or even half the doors, all of them cryosick, some of them perhaps sick of something much worse? She could hear screams, and they were not screams of pain, but of an incredible, rationality-shredding rage. “Let us come out and we’ll explain everything.”

“Enraged desperation: Unlock the fucking doors and let us out of here,” droned an elcor who then, Anax was nearly certain from the sound, threw his or her slagged weapon in the drell’s general direction.

This is a Code White situation. I repeat, ship security is currently set to Code White. There is an active pathogen aboard the Keelah Si’yah.

The most extraordinary wail of hopelessness and terror went up around the cargo hold, from every cluster of containers and fortress of belongings. Not one of them moved toward their respective environmental zones.

“Hello, stranger,” came a voice too close to Anax’s ear. She whipped her head around to see Borbala Ferank crouching next to her, shotgun in hand, peering up over the lip of the overturned crate, the only thing between them and a shot between the eyes.

“Where did you come from?” asked Anax. It was the first time anyone had successfully snuck up on her in years.

“Oh, I’ve been here. It doesn’t take very long to count up very little, multiply by however long this takes, and divide by all of us. I came back here to check on my nest egg and what do you know—our intrepid colonists have colonized the place. They wanted food. I could make food happen.” She gestured toward one of the container corridors. Borbala Ferank’s precious frozen fish bowls lay everywhere shattered, rolling around the floor like a child’s marbles. Most of the fish were still half frozen, with bites gouged out of the bellies. “They might have asked more politely.”

Please remain calm and return to your respective environmental control zones. This will help to slow the spread of the disease. Right now, drell, hanar, batarian, and elcor are all susceptible. The earliest symptom is an overwhelming sweet scent, followed by a distinctive rash, extreme fatigue, and small blue abscesses around the throat, chest, and under the arms. We believe it is most contagious during this phase. These symptoms may be accompanied by uncontrollable weeping, fever, and excessive hunger. The final stages are characterized by euphoria, hallucinations, severe edema, or a swelling of the limbs, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a very scientific way of saying violent, all-consuming madness as the brain swells in the skull. Unfortunately, all cases so far have been fatal.

Please remain calm.

“Really wish she wouldn’t do that,” Anax Therion grimaced. “They’re not going to stay calm now.”

“Shall we make a run for it?” Borbala suggested.

The drell glanced over at Irit Non. She was pinned down far worse on her end of the row.

“You go!” the volus snarled. “Go, go, go!”

* * *

Your first officer is attempting to repair several malfunctions in the ship’s datacore. Until he does so, the following systems are offline: temperature control, lighting control, person-to-person communications, water dispensation, hull shielding, trams A–D, short-range sensors, and locking mechanisms, including those on small arms containers. Revival cascades have commenced and continue to trigger in cryobays 1, 4, and 8, which is why so many of you are listening to me right now.

Senna’Nir spliced another pair of wires together on a panel in the empty tramway tunnel. The captain’s voice sharpened on the intercom. Their tram car had shut down, stuck halfway between the quarian zone and the Radial. They’d split up, the captain heading for medbay, the commander after his crew, walking toward the cargo hold, trying to meet up with the drell and the volus there. But there was a mainframe access panel down here, Senna remembered from the blueprints back on Hephaestus. They stood near it now, in the dark, while Senna made it possible for Qetsi to tal

k to her ship. She looked at him with hope and misery. He could see her expression, even through the shadowed glass of her faceplate. Senna felt for her. He was horrifically glad all he had to do was hotwire a microphone. She had to hotwire the morale of half a starship.

“Am I doing okay?” she whispered.

“You’re doing fine.” He squeezed her hand.

“I’ve spliced the tram malfunction,” crackled his grandmother’s voice in his ear. “If you’re interested. You forgot to turn me off, so I had to do something with my time. You know how I feel about idle hands around the house. I’m porting you the codepatch now. Upload it and get back here. I suspect it’ll only work temporarily.”

“Not now,” Senna hissed as cool, clean, elegant, machine-generated code flowed down the curve of his faceplate. “You fixed something? You really did? And… you couldn’t have fixed the shields first?”

“What?” Qetsi said in the shadows of the transport tube, her voice frightened, sounding so much younger than she was.

“Nothing,” he said as he transferred the patch through his omni-tool and into the access hub. “Keep going.”

Deep in the bowels of the ship, Senna heard a tram car begin to move toward them with a grinding, reluctant sound.

If you detect symptoms in yourself or others, do not report to medbay. Isolate and confine symptomatic individuals to designated residential quarters on your species’ environmental control decks and await further communication. Food distribution will commence at 0600 hours beginning with the drell in Mess Hall 2. We have limited supplies on hand. We are at least three weeks’ travel from the nearest planet, which is, I should mention, a lifeless rock with nothing to eat on it but dust and a very calorie-inefficient lichen, so we must make what we have last as long as possible.

Yorrik had, at long last, pushed beyond all endurance, fallen asleep. The iso-shield still shimmered between the dreaming elcor and the wracked corpse of Jalosk Dal’Virra leaning against the almost-invisible barrier. The stars still blinked by outside, too fast to count.

The hanar Ysses stood above him, tall and rosy and gleaming. The captain’s voice echoed in the empty lab as Ysses raised itself on its tentacles and released the iso-field. The body inside toppled out with a wet sound as it hit the floor. Yorrik did not wake.

Ysses giggled. It turned around and glided past the tables stained with dried dye, past the krogan microscope, past the ruins of the stuffed volus, past Horatio, past the dormant laser scalpels, to the quarantined medbay door. It giggled again as it pressed its gelatinous limb against the security pad and undulated slowly, hacking the correct code out of the interface never meant for its species.

The persistent quarantine tone ceased to chime. The soft red light stopped flashing through the glass walls. The medbay doors glided open.

Ysses giggled again.