Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “This one does not feel good,” said Ysses shakily, in the peculiar musical voice common to the hanar. No hanar would ever be so arrogant as to refer to itself as I or me. They believed that an ancient race called the Protheans had created all things, and would one day return to lead them to glory. Beside the Protheans, all species were as simple bacteria, and bacteria were not worthy of personal pronouns. “This one’s filter glands proclaim the end of all things.”

  The elcor medic Yorrik intoned: “With deep sympathy: The psychological effects of cryosleep vary in severity and duration individually as well as from species to species. Rueful amusement: Some patience may be necessary.”

  “I feel fine,” snorted Borbala Ferank. She crossed one black leather-wrapped leg over the other and leaned back, scratching the complex bony ridges in her long skull with greenish-yellow fingers. “Only the poor get hangovers.”

  “No one asked you, Khar’shan-clan,” wheezed Irit Non. Volus always sounded like they had a bad cold. They wore protective suits, like the quarians, but not because their immune systems were compromised from centuries of living on the Flotilla. Volus were an ammonia-based species, accustomed to the intense gravity and high-pressure greenhouse atmosphere of their homeworld, Irune. Yet even in the heavy stench of their custom environmental zone aboard the Keelah Si’yah, Irit Non kept her suit on. But then again, Senna supposed, so did he, despite the safe, near-complete sterility of the quarian sector. His suit was a part of him, and he was a part of it, like the old lullaby. Sing me to sleep on the starry sea and I’ll dream through the night of my suit and me…

  Maybe volus felt the same way. Who knew with aliens?

  Anyway, no one ever went out to a bar determined to find out what a volus really looked like under all that. On the outside, they looked more or less like large, fat, tailless badgers walking upright. The muzzles of their masks, like old radio speakers, filtered their voices into a nasal, metallic whine. But Irit’s suit was not like other volus suits. It was sleek and stylish. It gave off an air of power, of mystery. The patterns of brown, black, gray, and white mesh were as elegant as a raloi’s feathers. Senna’Nir could not stop staring at it. There were many vastly more important matters at hand, but he had never seen a volus suit look beautiful before. He hadn’t even known they could. But, of course, it would be. That was what Irit Non was famous for. She was a tailor, in a manner of speaking. The wealthiest volus in the galaxy withered and died on her waiting list without complaint, on the mere hope of receiving one of her custom environmental suits. That wheezy volus was the closest thing to a celebrity on the Keelah Si’yah.

  “Remind me why we let batarians on board again?” the volus hissed.

  Senna, for whom the Battle of the Flower Arrangement had happened only a few days ago, and not nearly six hundred years in the past, rolled his eyes inside his helmet and pounded twice on the glass with his gloved fist.

  “Shut up, all of you, thanks. I know you’re all confused and sick and irritable, but we have a serious problem, and you need to focus on what I’m saying, because time may be a factor here. If you need to throw up, try not to get any on the glass. Do hanar vomit? Never mind. Not important. All right. Approximately four hours ago, Yorrik, Anax Therion, and myself were revived to deal with an apparent malfunction in the hibernation systems.”

  Ysses’s pink skin rippled. Irit Non came to attention. Even Borbala uncrossed her legs and sat up straight. They might come to blows over flowers and hangovers and whether or not the Andromeda galaxy really deserved to have batarians inflicted on it, but the hibernation systems were a grim equalizer. Anything that affected the cryopods affected them all. Anax Therion visibly seethed in her alcove, but said nothing. Senna went on: “What we found is considerably worse than a malfunction. As of 0530 hours, we have visual confirmation that four hundred and sixty-one drell and two hanar have died in their pods of unknown causes.”

  Anax rubbed her second finger against the top of her first. Senna wondered about that. She’d done it on the cryodeck, too. He knew little about her, except that she’d been some kind of detective on the hanar homeworld, which was, presumably, why the ship had deemed her essential personnel. Would they have a problem? Detectives often took poorly to not being in charge. But for now, she seemed to be keeping her peace.

  “They did not revive; they did not suffer,” Senna said, though they were not entirely sure about that. Soval Raxios’s dead, open, horrified eyes floated up into his mind. Shouldn’t they have stayed closed in deep freeze? “In fact, their pods still report their status as alive and in perfect health. Which presents us with a number of grave questions.”

  Irit Non cut in. “Do you mean to say there’s still a bunch of frozen sides of dead drell beef just lying down there among all the others? No burial rites? No quarantine? Savage!”

  Borbala Ferank tilted her head to the right. Senna had met a batarian or two on his Pilgrimage on the elcor homeworld. He knew this meant she considered herself far superior to the person who’d dared to speak to her. The commander saw Therion clock the gesture as well. In her line of work, Anax had probably met a lot more batarians than he had. He needed to talk to her. Alone.

  “Their souls have already risen through their eyes and left their bodies,” Borbala said dismissively. “What is left is unimportant. Chuck them out an airlock like empty cargo containers. That is what they are.”

  “With great delicacy and hesitation: We may need those bodies,” Yorrik answered.

  The quarian commander cleared his throat. “We may indeed. And either you’re not listening or you’re still too groggy to put one logical foot in front of the other here. The Si’yah’s scans can’t actually ‘see’ any problems with the pods. Of course, they don’t see at all, strictly speaking, that’s merely a convenience of language. What we mean when we say a ship sees is a complex data relay of input, output, and throughput return—”

  “Now is not the time for a technical lecture, Commander,” the drell said softly.

  “Yes, sorry. So, the problem is, all systems read each and every one of the four hundred and sixty-three deceased as alive and well. I can assure you they are the opposite. Even when we removed one of the bodies from its pod, the ship’s medical scan reported that they were completely healthy, ready to jump up and run a couple of laps around the physio-maintenance deck. The scans are useless.”

  “This one inquires into the status of the other VI on board,” hummed the hanar. “There are several independent virtual intelligence systems on the Keelah Si’yah: the diagnostic VI in medbay, the navigational VI on the bridge, the calibration VI in engineering, the educational VI in the children’s areas. This one also presents a subject no one else wishes to discuss: what its family on the homeworld would call ‘the unenlightened heathen in the room’—the SAMs. This one would feel great peace if this team were simply to awaken the Pathfinders and allow them to resolve the dilemma.”

  “Now that’s a good idea,” said the batarian, clapping her hands. “That jelly’s the only one of you with a brain. Problem solved.”

  “Problem not solved,” Senna insisted.

  The night he took her offer to serve as second in command, Senna and the captain had sworn to each other over plates of nutrient paste that they’d treat every species aboard equally, no matter what bad experiences they might have had with their people in the past. They were a one-ship Migrant Fleet now. They were all quarians. So why, when he meant to be open-minded, did batarians always have to be so terrible? Presumably one or two existed who were not slavers, dealers, pirates, or worse, but Senna had never met or heard of one. “The other VIs are just as bricked as the Si’yah’s internals. They’re hardwired into the ship’s array in the first place; their scans use the same mechanisms. If the well is poisoned, so are the villagers, so to speak. Convenience of language or not, the Keelah Si’yah is blind. As for the SAMs, I thought of that. Pathfinders aren’t assigned to Sleepwalker teams for a reason. They’re just plain more imp
ortant than us. We’re interchangeable. They’re not. They have one job—find us homeworlds. This is pretty far off their duty roster. And right now, we could just be looking at a technical glitch—a tragic one, Anax, I’m not trying to downplay it. But it’s probably a glitch we can repair in a few hours. In which case, I’m not willing to break Pathfinder protocol because it’s annoying to have to be the one to fix it. And if it’s not… Ferank, if it’s not, if we’re talking about a disease here, we can’t risk exposing the Pathfinders to it, or the SAMs to whatever is infecting the ships’ computer systems. If these deaths are intentional—”

  “Intentional?” interrupted Borbala Ferank. Her tone had a vicious edge. “Am I to understand that we are under attack?”

  “We?” Anax said icily. “The drell have lost over four hundred. If there is an attack, it was clearly targeted at my people. Sit down, merchant.”

  Hate boiled in Borbala’s three good eyes. You could not insult a batarian by disparaging her looks or her parentage or even her intelligence. But to imply a lower socio-economic class was fighting talk. Senna would have thought Anax had a cooler temper than that. At least she hadn’t called her a beggar.

  “If it is intentional,” Senna shouted over them, trying to keep it calm and professional and utterly failing, “we must know before we arrive. With the ship’s internals doing whatever it is they’re doing, or not doing, our investigative legs have been cut out from under us. The only reason we even know about it now is that the Si’yah found a slight chemical discrepancy between an environmental report and a medical report. We are here because those ‘sides of drell beef,’ as you so diplomatically put it, turned up a bad case of freezer burn. Otherwise we might have docked at the Nexus as a ghost ship. Now, Anax, Yorrik, and myself have drawn up a plan of action. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of work for everyone.”

  The hanar’s soft voice slid through the Radial’s audio. “This one wonders why we must be awakened. You are fully capable of performing funerary rites and retaining a statistically relevant number of the deceased for diagnostic purposes. Allow the dead their peace in the embrace of the Enkindlers. This one humbly suggests that if a mechanical accident has occurred, nothing can be done about it now. If a murderer has done his work within our sanctuary, that vicious sin is accomplished, and no others are in danger. This one is certain that the Nexus will have many experts and devices to separate the wicked from the good. What is this one expected to do?”

  Senna sighed and spoke to his ship directly.

  “K, since we have been discussing this, how many more pods have shown necrotic freezer burn?”

  Two drell and one hanar.

  “It’s not over,” Senna said grimly. “It’s spreading.”

  “This one would inquire as to the nature of this it you speak of with such certainty,” the hanar thrummed. Pale bioluminescence slid up and down its tentacles.

  “No certainty at all,” Anax Therion spoke up, and Senna found himself relieved to let her take the helm. He had accepted Qetsi’Olam’s request that he serve as second-in-command because he’d accept her request to shove himself out an airlock if she made one, but at heart, Senna had been and always would be a tech. Telling machines what to do was so much more straightforward than telling people what to do. Machines did exactly as instructed. People always thought they knew better.

  The drell detective stood in her alcove with military-grade posture. “As of right now, the probabilities are fairly evenly split between accidental poison, such as a toxic malfunction or leak in the pod itself, deliberate poison, which would obviously require a poisoner, whether on board or back at the station, or a communicable disease, again, acquired on board or on Hephaestus. Soval was a member of Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9, so we cannot rule out her encountering something else on the Keelah Si’yah and carrying it into the cryopod system when she resumed her hibernation some fifty years ago.”

  “But the cryopods are not linked,” protested Irit Non with a strangled wheeze. “They’re designed as self-contained systems, precisely to avoid this kind of cascade effect in case of a malfunction. Someone would have to interfere with every pod individually in order to kill the occupants. That seems incredibly unlikely.”

  “Why?” answered Therion. “Be careful of ruling out possibilities just because they seem improbable. People are improbable. Technology is improbable. We are riding in a bullet fired six hundred years into the future. That is improbable. At this stage, it is criminal to dismiss any theory. Consider: Whatever happened began after the last Yellow-9 cycle. Is it impossible that someone programmed a single pod to revive after they completed their shift and spent the last fifty years at liberty on the Keelah Si’yah, working on pod after pod? Some of us are very long-lived. Fifty years would be nothing to an elcor—”

  Yorrik’s broken-trombone voice blared over Therion’s. “Offended protestation: No elcor would do such a thing. Proudly quoting in expectation of warm mutual recognition and acknowledgement of source material: ‘In form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.’”

  “I’m sorry, are you quoting Hamlet right now?” Senna’Nir cut in, laughing despite himself.

  “Defensively masking wounded self-esteem: Elcor Hamlet.”

  “You know that bit’s about humans, don’t you?” Borbala Ferank barked laughter. “And it’s a load of dung either way. I’ve always known you elcor weren’t so big and cuddly and innocent as everyone thinks.”

  Anax Therion went on calmly. “You’re all thinking of this far too simply. This is one possibility. There are many others. We are trying to determine causality from a desert of data. Think of the possibilities like a forking river. The largest fork is this: on purpose or by accident? From there, infinite possibilities split off. If: then. If by accident, then we need fear nothing, and must only control the damage. If we are dealing with a single point of failure, an individual saboteur, then fifty years is not an entirely unreasonable commitment for a hanar, either. If they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the work, any drell, quarian, volus, or batarian could be our man, if a single person, or any person, is responsible at all. It would be a simple thing for us to miss one empty cryopod among the thousands. It could even be one of us. Who were the last people we can be absolutely certain were awake before everything went wrong? I’m looking at them.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” the batarian Borbala Ferank snarled. “I will not be accused by some eyeball-licking lizard who thinks it’s people.”

  Anax took a deep, calming breath. “I am but a simple servant of the god Amonkira, Lord of Hunters. But I do not hunt for meat. I hunt for data. And I am not accusing anyone. I’m trying to show you that we don’t even know what we don’t know. For example, none of what I just said takes into account the possibility of an asari or krogan stowaway, for whom fifty years would be a hilarious joke. If it was an asari or krogan, it’s as easy to imagine they did their work a hundred years ago or more. What matters a century to a krogan? And naturally, a percentage must always be set aside for something I have not yet thought of, something I have missed. But it could be more than one person. It could have been an accident. And knowing who did it, if there even is a who, is less useful to us than curtains on a salarian dreadnought if we do not know what they did, or how it happened without the ship shutting it down.”

  “The pods have more sophisticated scrubber systems than a quarian suit,” Irit rasped through her own air filter. “There is just no possibility that poison or a disease would not be discovered and immediately purged. It has never happened before in the history of cryotech!”

  Ysses’s tentacles rippled. “This one regretfully interjects that no being has departed their mortal form in a cryopod in the history of cryotech, and yet, it seems to have occurred. Nearly five hundred times. This one additionally humbly begs to understand why the quarians do not remove their suits when they e
nter stasis if the pods are proof against all infection.”

  Senna started to answer, but he didn’t get a chance.

  “I don’t think you understand what I’m talking about,” protested the volus. “You are not an engineer, you’re an apothecary, which we all know means booze smuggler, not scientist. You don’t understand how things work. Even if you entered stasis sick, and somehow the initial medical scan didn’t find the problem and patch you up, even if you somehow got injected with a tube full of the goddamned genophage in transit, cryostasis stores the body at a temperature far, far too low for any viral or bacterial replication. Nothing happens when tissue gets that cold. That’s why we don’t age. There simply are no physical processes taking place. If you fall asleep with a sniffle, you’ll wake up with one. It can’t be an infection, because people are dead, and you only die when a pathogen can get its trousers on in the morning! No harm can come to a person in cryostasis. That’s the whole point.”

  “Regretfully: Any disease that would kill a drell would have a very hard time jumping to a hanar. Your anatomy is not compatible. Helpfully sharing: Viruses and bacteria are fine-tuned to the species they infect. Only an extremely small percentage is even capable of cross-species contamination. Brightly: For example, while drell live in close proximity to the hanar on Kahje, Kepral’s Syndrome cannot infect the hanar, because it is a degenerative lung disease, and the hanar do not have lungs.”

  “Maybe we got a bad batch of pods at the outset,” Senna said doubtfully. The Initiative wouldn’t skimp on something like that. “The sores could have been chemical burns, or mass effect field runoff, like you said.”

  Irit Non had gotten herself so worked up she was pacing in her alcove like a trapped animal. She seemed somehow offended on the pods’ behalf. “Senna, you’re a code man. I respect that, but expecting you to know the first thing about the hardware is like expecting a psychiatrist to cure the Blood Plague. If it was a problem on the fabrication end, they’d all have failed at the same time, and you’d see failures all over the ship, not just Rakhana-clan and a few Khar’shan-clan.”