Mass Effect

“Borbala,” she half-wheezed through her air filters. “We get the eezo and then we go to my quarters.”

“My my, Miss Therion, I had no idea!” trilled the batarian with an amused lilt. “You’ve quite swept me off my feet. Do you even have quarters? I suppose we’ll make the best of it…”

“You are a fool with your mouth open or closed,” sighed the drell. “There are few enough drell both awake and alive that I can take any room in the Rakhana zone without issue. But not because I desire you. Because if I do not get this suit off, in an hour or two, I will be seeing three of you, as well as goblins climbing the walls, and undead cats taking blood samples from Ataulfo mangoes. I will, to put it gracefully, be out of my mind. This is why the drell do not wear suits, generally.”

“All right, all right, calm down, my little romantic, you don’t have to make it sound quite so enticing. Straight shot to my eezo and then off to the bedroom. My head is spinning!”

“Maybe you’re dying,” Anax said dryly. “Now, are you going to tell me why the hell you have eezo or am I meant to guess?”

“You wouldn’t begrudge me my little nest egg, would you, darling?” said Borbala Ferank, as she had in front of that wall of fish, what seemed like a lifetime ago. But this time her voice was not so merry or arch. It was quiet and perhaps even a little ashamed. Anax Therion had no idea what to do with this batarian. She was nothing like the others. Nothing like the one that had called her mother of worms. The one who was dead in a stack in the mess hall now. Amonkira, Lord of Hunters, protect and defend me. All I wanted was a new life. I would settle to retain any life at all when this is done. “I… I am not so different as they took me for, my poor, stupid sons. What was I supposed to do in Andromeda, take up an honest living?” She repeated as she had before, but hollow now, and tired. “I am what I am. And what I am is a batarian, and a batarian is a smuggler and a schemer who ends up on top. I am, my dear, the Pirate King.” Borbala Ferank sang softly under her breath, a tune Anax did not know, but one that sounded somehow familiar.

Oh, better far to live and die

Under the Khar’shan flag I fly,

Than choose to play the paragon’s part,

With a pirate head and a pirate heart.

Away to the Citadel go you,

Where pirates all are well-to-do;

But I’ll stay true to the life contrarian,

And live and die batarian.

“Ah well. A new life in Andromeda, they said. And so now you will hate me because of what I brought into that new life. Because of what I could not resist. Because of what I was afraid to leave behind. The old ways, the old world. I smuggled the old life into the new, and now I will have neither it nor the profit, which is, perhaps, what I deserve. But I cannot… Anax, I cannot escape what I was born, any more than you can escape your useless lungs. That is the whole meaning of caste. If you could escape it, it would not be much of a caste.” She tried to smirk. “Don’t say our date’s off.”

“If you are such a perfect batarian, why did your sons blind you? Why does Jalosk call you the mother of worms?” Anax hoped she had laid enough groundwork for this question to pass.

Borbala smirked a little. “Because I quit. I left the family business. I tried to convince my people that our ships and manpower could be better used spreading batarian culture—and that in order to do that, we had to create some. Art, music, theater, novels. I wanted a batarian renaissance. Fewer guns, more songs. They wanted my eye for that.”

The drell and the batarian edged along the north wall. The noise in the cargo bay was deafening. Moans and cries and splashes of unspeakable liquid. An occasional firing of biotic or rifle. Footsteps. Running. Running where? There was hardly a crate left fully assembled now. We are all so very inventive when we need to be, Anax thought. This is why we knew we could rebuild in Andromeda. Give an organic the smallest space, and they will put a civilization in it.

A hanar rose up from behind a cargo container with a shrill, bleating scream of a laugh. It was covered in pustulating sores, not quite the same blue as the ones on Soval or Jalosk or even Kholai; these were almost turquoise, suppurating blood and pus clotted with dry blue dust, its tentacles swollen to the thickness of tree trunks, its inflated flesh digging into its levitation packs painfully. Any face it might have had, inasmuch as hanar had faces, was obliterated by dried vomit, tears, and a horrendous rash like a fisherman’s net thrown over the miserable jellyfish.

“Do not be sad!” it shrieked. “Everything is all right now! Rejoice! Make merry! The Day of Extinguishment is even more glorious than prophesied!” It floated down toward Borbala and Anax, who stumbled backward to get away from the flying, tentacled infection. “Kholai was wrong,” it chortled thickly, through a ruined throat. “Kholai the Enkindled One was wise, but it was wrong. It preached that only the pure hanar would see the final days and reap their pleasures—but look! All species, together as one! Dancing, dancing so beautifully, in the ballroom of heaven! This is unity! All the creatures of the Enkindlers feasting upon the dregs of time together! Together!” The hanar fanned out its oozing tentacles like a carnival barker revealing the splendor of the midway.

Gun smoke drifted down the stacks of crates. Screams of agony echoed. Quiet, snickering laughter cut through the din, food changing hands like money, money changing hands like food, deals in the dark. A drell boy, hardly a man yet, vomited his innards onto the wedding linens his mother had packed for him, and collapsed into the sinkhole of his own liquefying body. The sick hanar giggled again. “This one is happy! This one is euphoric!” It tried to lean into them again, confidentially, like old friends, and once again the two green women struggled to get away. “I am happy!” whispered the hanar.

A blast of plasma fire shot out of the corner of the hold. It caught the hanar between two sores on its magenta skull and blew out its brains onto the floor. An enormous elcor trumpeted a scream of incandescent, incoherent rage, and thundered toward another hanar down the piles of ruined luggage, one who had swollen out of its levitation packs and was crawling pitifully along the floor, trying in vain to stand tall again. The elcor in the grips of madness trampled it underfoot, bellowing, “Furious hate: You did this to us, you did this!”

The elcor disappeared in the maze of cases.

“I think we had better run,” Borbala said.

The captain’s voice rang out over the belly of the ship. Those who had the presence of mind to hear it lurched toward the exits in a river of broken, leaking flesh.

Please remain calm. Form an orderly group and proceed to medbay for treatment. I repeat: Please remain calm, form an orderly group, and proceed to medbay for treatment. Be patient, my friends, and we will see our new worlds yet.

They ran. They ran as though Borbala Ferank was not long past her prime and Anax Therion was not drowning in her own sweat. They ran as though this one thing could matter, in the end of it all. They ran as though the room was not pink with laughing, singing hanar spinning like dervishes of joy. They ran as though they knew they would be able to run out of this place again.

Be patient, my friends, and we will see our new worlds yet.

“Here,” panted the batarian. “It’s here. It’s somewhere… oh, you must be joking. This must be an amusing jest, yes? The universe is having it on at old Borbala’s expense. Hilarious, truly the height of comedy in the known universe. Get the fuck off my nest egg you disgusting blob,” she roared.

Ysses had wrapped itself around a comparatively small crate and was suckling at its innards lustily. It looked up, its wedge-shaped head blistered with sores, as though it had stood too close to the sun.