“Is this the bosh’tet who tried to kill us all?” said the captain stonily, gesturing at Ysses.
“It is, indeed,” answered Therion, without taking her gaze from the quarians.
“It is a strange thing,” Qetsi’Olam said softly, “to worship death so fervently.”
The lights flickered again.
“This one knows the truth. The Day of Extinguishment is the day of freedom. This one rejoices in the chaos around it, that is all. This one has no need to explain itself.”
“I thought Kholai’s followers didn’t believe in taking action to bring about the end of the world,” said Senna uncertainly.
The lights flickered: rose, violet.
Borbala Ferank shrugged. “There are heretics everywhere,” she grunted. “Even among heretics.”
Anax Therion did not get up from her sofa. Her muscles ached from the oils they had absorbed. She wanted only to rest. To rest and to eat. But another part of her had never been so alert.
“What will you do with him, Captain?” the drell asked. “What is the name of justice in our new world?”
Qetsi crossed her arms and leaned back on her heels, thinking. “We must revive the Quorum,” she said finally. “All of us must pass judgment on this one who has brought such horror upon our beautiful ship. It cannot be my decision alone. Perhaps there is a mercy to be divined here… Perhaps he only followed his master. Perhaps he is not so bad as all that. There must be a trial. Keep him confined. We revive any members of the Quorum who were lucky enough to sleep through this in a clean zone to limit their exposure. With some luck, Yorrik’s retrovirus will make such contingencies irrelevant. No one has entered Engineering since the onset of this crisis, it should be safe. I will go and make arrangements. Is this acceptable?”
They nodded. It seemed fair. The
captain nodded back and slipped past Borbala into the open hall.
“Senna’Nir,” said Anax, standing up and brushing her palms off on her thighs, “come with me?”
“What? Why?”
“Why? To follow the captain and see where she goes, of course.”
“She’s going to the cryobay, to start moving the Quorum’s pods to Engineering,” the quarian male insisted.
“Is she?” Borbala Ferank mused. “Fascinating.”
Anax Therion let her translucent inner eyelids slide shut. “The night before,” she whispered. “Stars like grains of wheat outside. Inside, music, light, movement. Soval Raxios, dancing like a heart on fire. A quarian dances with her, laughing, a heron on the surface of clean water. I alone am unhappy. So many people. So much sound. I walk alone through the station as on the banks of a river, watching, listening. I look up; a young man crawls across the belly of the ship, a lamprey against a silver shark, taking sustenance, injecting… something else. He sees me, I withdraw. I consider my own life, a book of secrets. I remember all my sins. Then—a shot in the shadows. The lamprey is dead. A figure disappearing in the distance, singing, humming, a voice I know, a voice I do not hear again for almost three hundred years, the same heron whose feet made no mark on the clean water.” Her eyelids withdrew. “A drell’s memory is perfect, but we must choose to remember. I thought I kept recalling Soval because so much of this seemed to return to her somehow. But it was not Soval my mind wished me to see again.”
It had always amazed Anax how easy it was to turn love to distrust, if you really tried to do it. Senna followed her out of her quarters in silence, leaving the batarian to play prison guard, a role she seemed to enjoy. The darkness of the corridors helped them; the quiet of the drell zone made it easy to hear the captain’s footsteps.
She was not going to Engineering.
They kept their distance. The running lights outlined Qetsi in the dark. An arm snaked out from an alcove outside Mess Hall 2 and grabbed her, dragged her into an alcove. Voices hissed up out of the dark.
“What are you doing? I told you to meet me. This has gone too far. We have to do something,” a male voice snarled.
“Please, Malak’Rafa, do not fear. It is all resolving better than we could imagine. They have the hanar immobilized. They have no doubt it and its people are to blame. If the elcor’s cure works, we have nothing at all between us and innocence.”
“That… is a relief. But, Qetsi… if the retrovirus works… all our plans…” Malak said mournfully.
“There will be time for more plans. A new life in Andromeda. Where there is life there is always hope. We are lucky, Malak. Lucky to have any path free of this.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this…”
The captain put her finger on Malak’Rafa’s faceplate. “I know. Go back to the quarian zone. I am going to the cargo hold. I will find something usable, and I will dispatch Ysses tonight so that it cannot tell the truth—not that it seems inclined to, it truly is happy that all this has happened. I will never understand hanar. Or religion. Soon, all will be well.”
Senna’Nir and Anax Therion watched the quarian male disappear down the long curving hallway.
“Oh, Qetsi,” Senna sighed with a horrible choke in his voice. “What have you done?”