Mass Effect

“Kepral’s Syndrome?” Senna’Nir asked delicately.

The poor quarian was trying to be polite. Oh yes, if it was Kepral’s, then everyone could make sympathetic faces and go back to sleep with a deep sense of relief and satisfaction, the way you feel when you’re resting cozy in your own quarters and hear security rushing by outside. Toward someone else. Someone who had nothing to do with you. Only the drell got Kepral’s Syndrome. They were a strong enough species, but their lungs were their weakness. They had evolved on a desert world. When the hanar made first contact and evacuated the drell from poor resource-starved Rakhana, the great pink jellyfish had taken them to their own homeworld, Kahje, an ocean planet. The moist air killed drell slowly; over decades, but it killed them. Any moisture in the air was a slow poisonous rot filling them up until they finally stopped breathing. It was called Kepral’s Syndrome, and Anax’s parents had died of it when she was six. Green fingers like bare tree branches, skeletal, brittle, hot with death. Coughing in the dark like gunfire. Be good, Anax. Be a good girl. But don’t stay here. Find a way offworld. Find a place with no oceans. Their last breaths rise to join the sea air. They become their murderer.

No. Anax’s mind clamped down harder. The last thing she needed was to be swept away into the memory of that tiny six-year-old’s misery, and everything that followed because of it.

A lot of people’s parents had died of

Kepral’s Syndrome. But everyone who booked passage on the ark had tested clean. On the other end, they’d find a world that didn’t quietly drown them. That was how it was supposed to happen. And they were so close.

“Have you run a self-diagnostic?” she snapped at the disembodied voice of the Keelah Si’yah’s systems. “You said the traces were very faint. Maybe you’re getting some phantom readings. A bug in the code.”

Yes. I am performing at optimum.

“We didn’t notice crystallized decomposition fogging up the glass on the last cycle?” Senna asked. “That sort of thing is the whole point of Sleepwalkers.”

You would have had no reason to notice. The sublimation began after the previous Sleepwalker cycle, fifty years ago. I have revived you in order to visually inspect the affected pods. You were the last Sleepwalker team rostered for duty before Andromeda. I am not authorized to awaken the next team on the list as the list has concluded. If there is a simple scan malfunction or pod contamination, you can repair it. If the drell are indeed dead, you must decide upon a course of action. I am not authorized to make command-level decisions. You are, Commander.

Yorrik’s mouth, little more than a series of triangular flaps cut deep into his gray flesh, wriggled with worry. “Suspiciously: Do you expect me to perform medical exams?”

You are the only member of this Sleepwalker team with formal medical training, Specialist Yorrik.

“Wry self-deprecation: I am a pediatric allergist. Auditory, olfactory, esophageal.” Anax Therion and Senna stared at him. “In sheepish explanation: Ear, nose, and throat. I do sniffles.”

Nevertheless. You are essential personnel.

“Helpless laughter: I have not touched a corpse since the battle of Viluuna. With increasing panic: You can pump me full of stims or euphoriants or children’s candy, but it won’t make me a drell coroner.”

Senna held up his three-fingered hand. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll go down to the hibernation deck, check everything out, and proceed from there. It’s just as likely that we’ll find everyone sleeping safe and sound and you won’t have to do anything.”

I calculate the likelihood of zero fatalities at less than 1%.

“You’re not helping,” Senna sighed, and disengaged from the public audio.

An hour’s worth of gravity adjustments, humidity filters, airlocks, elevators, and security bypasses later, the three of them were staring down at a fully functional cryopod displaying excellent life signs.

Inside, a female drell’s face contorted in frozen agony. Her eyes stared lifelessly at nothing. Frost coated small, hard sores on her neck frills and chest. Her tongue was swollen and black. Anax Therion clenched her jaw. She’d hoped, if they found a corpse, it would be one of the thousands of drell she didn’t know. Connections got in the way of clear analysis. Emotions were not data. They were a kind of encryption, obscuring the information, rendering it unreadable. But Anax Therion did know that frozen girl. Not well, but well enough to drink with. She was married to Osyat Raxios, a dissident Therion might actually, at a stretch, call a friend. The two of them had kept her up late so many nights on Hephaestus, talking politics like anything in the Milky Way would matter once the ark’s engines fired up in the dark.

Yorrik breathed through a humidifying mask. The air in the drell sector was so dry it would desiccate his mucus membranes in a quarter of an hour. “Deep revulsion: She smells like usharet flowers. And wet volus.”

“I don’t smell anything,” Senna said, puzzled.

“With mild inter-species prejudice: Impossible. It reeks in here. Disdainfully: How do you even get out of bed in the morning with a nose like that?”

“Well, maybe I’m clever enough not to go snuffling around dead bodies without a suit to protect me,” Senna snapped. His painkillers must be wearing off, thought Anax. Hers certainly were.

“Condescending tone: Nonsense. Cryosleep maintains the body at a temperature far too low for any harmful bacteria to replicate or spread. Appropriate solemnity: Her death is her own.”

Therion looked down at the corpse. She rubbed her second finger against the nail of her first and put their connection somewhere else in her mind where it could not contaminate her analysis. “An equipment malfunction does not present with sores and blacktongue. The most likely cause of death is poison.”

The elcor droned: “Leaping to conclusions: We have been sabotaged.”

“Or there may have been a malfunction in the cryopods, a completely accidental chemical contamination. Organic tissue does not play nicely with industrial coolants or power surges. These pods utilize modest mass-effect fields, and those sores could be a reaction to topical contamination from their waste products. Or,” Therion finished carefully, “it could be a pathogen. Which could have been acquired before stasis. Hephaestus Station was hardly a sterile environment. Of course, I’m not a doctor, but it’s far too early to assume sabotage. We have no data except the dead. I’m surprised at you, Yorrik. I thought elcor were supposed to be slow and deliberate?”

“Uncontrollably manic: These are the most stims I’ve ever taken. My brain feels like a jet-fuel milkshake. Embarrassed: I will be quiet now.”

Senna sighed unhappily. Anax sympathized. They had come so far in the dark without incident. They were so close. The quarian toggled his suit to broadcast again, to save time.

“K, can you detect any toxic compounds, mass-effect field byproducts, or a measurable viral load in the cadaver currently occupying cryopod number…” Senna bent down to read the serial number off the lower ridge of the pod.