Mass Effect: Initiation

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Glad we’re actually helping,” Cora replied, amused. It still meant that Ygara was in prime position to immediately attack the station’s most dangerous defenders, if their ruse was discovered.

  “Hanon’Milah actually is inspecting the eezo converters, and logging a report in our cover organization’s spoofed personnel files that paints quite the damning picture of scheduled maintenance for the station. Station comms indicate that the facility administrator’s assistants are reading the report. Frequency of emails and texts between key budget-approvers and decision-makers has increased by thirty percent, and two shareholders just logged in.”

  “Hanon was right, then; that was the perfect distraction.” Cora grinned as she walked through the data center.

  The room was quiet and dim, populated only by towering stacks of quantum servers whose blue lights gleamed as they processed the constant flow of data and adjustments that allowed a station like Home Away to function. In token of its infrequent usage, the room’s floor lighting activated only a few feet ahead of Cora’s path, illuminating what was necessary and no more.

  The particular server stack she wanted was at the back of the chamber, a little separated from the other stacks. The intel they’d been able to obtain had shown that it was on a different power grid from the rest, which was a surprise. They must have ascertained how dangerous the data might be, for them to keep it isolated this way.

  “Tell Ygara I’m about to start the download,” she subvocalized to the VI. The code package Ryder wanted was too big to be stored on an omni-tool. He’d given her a script necessary to acquire it, which would tightbeam it directly to the shuttle’s storage systems and simultaneously erase it from the Home Away servers. In the simulations she’d run, this was the most dangerous point of the mission—the point where the Home Away VI was most likely to detect an unauthorized intrusion, if Ryder’s script wasn’t deft or adaptive enough.

  Hunkering down beside the server stack so that she wouldn’t be immediately visible if anyone should happen to come into the data center, Cora began running Ryder’s retrieval script. A faint hum rose from the stack as the servers responded.

  “No alarms,” said the Initiative VI. It was actually speaking in a hushed voice into her earpiece. She would have laughed if not for the moment’s tension.

  The Home Away VI hadn’t noticed, then. Cora let herself fractionally relax. “Tella needs to wrap it up with the questions,” she murmured. As she spoke, she watched the readout on her omni-tool as it scrolled by in… whoa. Those were yottabytes, not zettabytes. What the hell was this code package? It was enormous.

  Then, finally—though it really hadn’t taken long—the download was done, and Cora let out a little breath of relief as she stood and shut down her omni-tool.

  “Lieutenant.” The VI’s soft voice was suddenly brisk and sharp. “I think there’s a problem.”

  “An alert?”

  “No. However—” Her omni-tool display changed from a download readout to an extranet browser. On screen was Cora’s most recent military ID headshot. The image had been captured four years ago, just before she’d gone off to Thessia with the Valkyrie Program. As she watched, however, this image morphed into a more recent shot of her face, slightly blurry because of a too-zoomed camera, with—oh, hell—the bustling crowds and shopfaces of Tamayo Point in the background.

  The interview with al-Jilani. Beside her face, a lurid headline: ONCE THE ALLIANCE’S FINEST, NOW CORPORATE GUN FOR HIRE?

  “Now?” Cora muttered. “She runs the story now? Great.” She turned and started following her own still-lit path out of the data center. Then her steps slowed as a new and horrible thought occurred to her. “Oh. Oh, no. Initiative VI, does the Home Away VI have extranet-integrated facial recognition?”

  Klaxons blared suddenly from every PA in the room, and the floor lighting abruptly turned red. “Unauthorized personnel in Data Center Two,” announced the Home Away VI.

  “Yes,” the Initiative VI replied. “You, you, you—” It paused, and she probably imagined an audible click as it mastered the stutter.

  “You should probably run.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cora broke into a sprint—but already the door was irising shut. Visualize, she thought, setting her teeth. Imagine your skin, ballooning outward—

  Asari huntresses trained to project a wide-range, spheroid barrier used to shore up defenses and slow down enemies. Cora had learned it quickly enough—though according to Nisira it was pretty standard for asari children in their twenties. Still, if Cora could keep at it for another century or so, she might actually master it.

  Fortunately, she didn’t need to be a master for what she was about to do.

  The energy materialized around her as a shimmering translucent sphere in the middle of the doorway just as she leapt through it. Instead of closing on her, which wouldn’t have been pretty, the door clashed against the sphere and groaned for an instant as its motors tried to force the closure. Then Cora was through, rolling to her feet and releasing the barrier as the door hissed shut in her wake.

  “VI, navigation,” she panted as she ran. The panting was bad. That barrier had taken a lot out of her, short-lived as it had been. With more time to prepare, focus, she could’ve done it more efficiently, but doing it in a rush had made it wild and energy-sapping. Successful use of biotics was all about focus. She slapped at her pockets and fumbled out an energy bar, eating on the run. “Access the recon maps and tell me the shortest route back to the shuttle. Also access Suran’s comm patch. Route me around possible resistance.”

  “Done. Take a right turn into the upcoming stairwell, quickly,” the VI said. Cora saw the door and ducked into it, making sure it shut behind her.

  “Now what?”

  “Hold.”

  “Ho—”

  “Quietly.”

  Frustrated, Cora clenched her teeth shut on the words. Three breaths later she heard shouts in the corridor she’d just left, and then the sound of heavy boots running in the direction from which she’d just come. Six or seven pairs, military-issue, she guessed. One of the paramilitary patrols. A moment later they were gone.

  “You may resume your former route,” the VI said. “I will attempt to minimize hostile encounters to the degree that I am able.”

  Well, well. “Thanks,” Cora said. It was habit. The thing was just a VI; it—well, Ryder had called it “he”—cared about thanks as much as her omni-tool did. But as she resumed trotting down the corridor, it was hard not to feel a little gratitude. “Suran! Are the others all right?”

  “All but Tella and Ygara are back aboard the shuttle,” Octavia Suran replied. “Tella is being questioned by the facility administrator and security staff on whether she was aware that your team harbored a corporate spy from a rival colonial venture. No weapons have been drawn on her… yet.”

  Ouch.

  She started to speak again, but the VI interrupted, sharply. “Hostile mechs approaching via the junction of corridors ahead, nine o’clock. Take care, Lieutenant.”

  Cora skidded to a halt and flung herself against the wall of the junction, darting a look around the corner to check her targets. A troop of four mechs, fast-walking, armed with heavy pistols. No nonlethal option on that make and model; Home Away wasn’t interested in capturing her alive. Not good.

  It took a moment’s concentration for Cora to draw the singularity from herself—center above my palm, spin, compress—but then she had it. She sent it down the corridor in a deliberately slow glide, grinning as it landed amid the mechs and abruptly pulled them in, tossing them through the air in a jumble of metal limbs and chittering cybernetic protests.

  But as she ducked out of cover to propel the weapon, something moved at the corner of Cora’s vision. Above! Startled, she jerked back and stared at the corridor’s vaulted ceiling, where—

  Oh, shit.

  A woman in a lab coat ran toward her.

  Across...

  ...the ceilin
g.

  She galloped rather than ran, really, on hands and toes, but despite this she could clearly move quickly. Gravity boots didn’t work that way, especially not in station-standard gravity. Cora had met asari biotics who could glide or float, but this was something entirely different.

  “F-f-focused magnetism,” the VI stuttered into her ear as she boggled. “The iron in her red blood cells has been electrostatically charged.”

  The woman stopped and drew a pistol, arching awkwardly to aim at Cora. Never mind how she’d gotten up there. Cora cursed and made a biotic grab for her, hoping she wasn’t so securely stuck to the ceiling that it would take more energy than she possessed to do this. But it worked, the woman yelping as Cora snatched her off the ceiling and flung her against a nearby wall with bone-crushing force. The woman slumped to the ground—groaning, much to Cora’s relief.

  “Lieutenant.” The VI sounded almost surprised. “She exhibits the same scarring on her neck.” As the woman lay there, Cora could hear what sounded like servos struggling to move her limbs. “I am not certain she is human.”

  “Yeah, I’m not so certain either,” Cora agreed as she heard the sound of the mechs disentangling the woman’s limbs.

  Time to go. She ran.

  “What the hell was that?” she subvocalized as she sprinted. Convenient, this way of communicating; saved breath, when she was already winded after three major biotic exertions in quick succession. Anyway, the klaxon would’ve drowned her out if she’d tried to make herself heard. In the glass-walled rooms that she passed, she could see administrators staring at her, standing up from their desks and pointing, but they clearly weren’t combatants. Then too she could hear the sounds of biotic combat, explosions, and shouting from up ahead, near the shuttle landing pad.

  Apparently Tella had gotten tired of playing nice.

  And where the hell was Ygara?

  “I believe my initial assumption was wrong.”

  Great. “Wrong how?”

  “That organism was not organic. Or more correctly, it was not wholly organic. I detect a synthetic exoskeleton wrapped in a mix of organic and synthetic materials. An augmented cybernetic simulacrum.”

  “Are you certain?” Cora’s mind raced as she digested that last bit. What the hell would Home Away be doing with cybernetics?

  “Without a full analysis, I cannot be certain, but given the available evidence it seems a likely scenario.”

  “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would be great.”

  “Noted.”

  The dry tone of the VI was curious, but Cora didn’t have time to think about it, picking up the pace as she got her wind back. When she emerged from the admin building, she finally saw Ygara, flinging shockwave pulses at a group of humans in body armor—Home Away’s paramilitary troops. Excellent. Ygara was tearing them apart, and thankfully drawing plenty of heat off Cora.

  Then Cora nearly stumbled as she realized the unspoken implication of what the Initiative VI had said.

  “Wait… Who’s controlling that cyborg? Are you saying that woman—cyborg—that thing was acting on its own?”

  “Doubtful. More than likely it was being controlled remotely. Potentially through the station VI.”

  “So those strange implants we noticed before—they’re linked to the station VI, somehow? All the time? Then it’s running some kind of background process to control these things.”

  “Yes. Sh-Sh-Shilu’Milah has been monitoring transmissions within the station. Anomalous carrier signals have been noted, though he was unable to determine their purpose. I would conjecture based on this that several dozen personnel have been, and are, in near-constant networking communication with the VI.” Her own VI paused in a way that felt meaningful to Cora. “I don’t believe the VI is actually a Virtual Intelligence, Lieutenant.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” That… didn’t sound good. Because there was only one other thing it could be, if it was capable of running the station and executing the complex calculations needed to control several cyborgs. “These people are playing around with artificial intelligence? And cybernetics? Are they out of their minds?”

  After a faint and noticeable pause, the Initiative VI replied. “Unclear on the state of their minds, Lieutenant.”

  Not only did she have a glitchy VI in her head, it had Alec Ryder’s sarcasm. She decided not to dignify the obvious with a response. Then the VI added, “The Home Away VI has just managed to successfully block all communications beyond the station. Unfortunately I am not designed for cybersecurity. A-a-attempting to reconfigure to the degree possible.”

  And me without my armor, Cora thought bitterly. If they were truly dealing with an AI, there was no way that a mere VI would be able to contend with it. We have to get out of here.

  Running full-out, Cora pelted across the landing pad. She and Tella reached the shuttle at the same time. Cora waved Tella aboard, then stood in the open doorway, craning her neck for Ygara.

  “We need to go,” Kih yelled from the cockpit. “More paramilitaries on the way, this time with heavy weapons!”

  “Ygara’s coming,” Cora called back. She could see the big asari running now. No pursuit—oh shit, no. Cora cursed, spotting a mechanized drone zooming after her, audibly powering up to unleash some kind of volley.

  “Only reason they haven’t blown us up already is they weren’t expecting this,” Tella panted, falling onto a crash couch. One of the twins handed her an energy bar, which she took gratefully.

  Cora had to focus. Ygara was inconveniently between her and the target. With a soft hiss of effort, she concentrated on the drone, her body shimmering as she narrowed her focus to its mechanisms.

  Power flowing in lines. Divert… siphon away…

  A blue blast of energy erupted down the hall and hit the drone full on. Fortunately it lacked any shielding, and exploded in a shower of sparks and metal detritus. Unfortunately, Ygara was unprepared for the blast, which knocked her hard against the wall. As she stumbled forward again Cora moved in her direction, grabbed her arm, and guided her toward the shuttle.

  Hanon’Milah hurried out and took Ygara’s other shoulder; then they were aboard the now-rising shuttle and the door’s motors groaned with the effort of pulling against gravity as Kih slammed them shut.

  The shuttle was heading rapidly toward the station’s mass effect envelope before Cora heard the bleep that indicated a vacuum-proof seal. At Cora’s urging, Ygara sank onto the couch, panting heavily.

  “Damn. Not the way I want to go out, mowed down by a bunch of rent-a-marines. Thanks, kid.”

  Cora exhaled in relief, too, then got up, looking around. Everyone accounted for, no visible wounds. Okay. “Kih, as soon as we’re out of that communications blackout area, start tightbeaming the data back to the Audacity.”

  “In a minute,” Kih said. Despite the inertial dampeners, Cora felt the shuttle lurch hard to starboard. That meant he’d just made a turn which would’ve flattened all of them, if they’d been in a fighter. Aching for her armor again, Cora stumbled up to the cockpit to see that Kih’s instruments had lit up with warnings.

  “Anti-spacecraft defenses?” There hadn’t been any on the manifest of hazards that Octavia Suran had found, but then they hadn’t known Home Away was host to a rogue AI, either, augmenting humans with supposed-to-be-theoretical abilities.

  “Nah,” Kih said as his hands flew over the interface. She saw him grin as he slapped a button that he’d somehow custom-labeled KILL ’EM ALL. “That place was a real-estate project, not a military installation. All they had for defenses were debris-clearing energy weapons, construction grade. They can damage a shuttle, but I just blew ’em up.” He sighed a little in palpable disappointment at the lack of challenge. “Engaging faster than light.”

  Cora shook her head, bemused, as the shuttle’s engines cycled up and she watched Home Away rapidly dwindle on the sensors, then vanish altogether. Then she sighed and rubbed her eyes as the adrenaline began to wash out
of her system. “Good job. Gonna go put on my armor, now.”

  “Eh?” Kih glanced up at her from under his crest. “Now? The hell for? Mission’s over.”

  “Stress relief.”

  Kih chuckled. “Oh, yeah. Might put mine on too, then.”

  Cora nodded and headed over to her locker, letting her hands automatically go through the motions of donning the integrative mesh suit and the ceramic plates. She’d spent most of the past decade in armor, and never felt quite right wearing none when she was outside of a sealed station or ship’s airlock. Ygara was putting her armor on, too, probably for the same reason. She nodded to Cora as she did so, and Cora couldn’t help thinking of a dozen other missions they’d been on together—none of which had ever gone as wrong as this.

  The whole Home Away infiltration had been a mess, and it was her fault. She should’ve considered that al-Jilani’s report might go live, and had the twins construct a facial-recognition scrambler as a contingency. She should’ve researched Home Away herself rather than relying on Suran, as the information broker had clearly missed a few things. She should’ve asked more questions of Ryder.

  Home Away had taken too many precautions with it. And artificial intelligence? Transhuman augmentation, or whatever they were creating. It was all a little much for what should have been a straightforward infiltrate-and-grab mission.

  Ygara’s hand clapped her on a shoulder plate—then jerked her hand away as Cora jumped. “Whoa, there. Relax, kid. The mission’s over, remember?”

  Cora took a deep breath. For some reason she couldn’t calm down.

  “Sorry.”

  Ygara’s expression turned compassionate. “Been a while since you ran your own operation, hasn’t it? More like those small-team ops you ran with that buddy of yours. The other kid.”