Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Amonkira walks by my side on this morning,” said the drell with a raspy, rather pretty laugh. She corrected herself. “Still not morning. Once more unto the hunting grounds, K?”

  Ruthenium dichloride is most often used together in commercial canning, preserving, bottling, and labeling, though it is toxic to asari, humans, and salarians.

  “Quarian nutrient paste doesn’t require much in the way of preservation,” Anax said doubtfully. “I don’t think we’re going to find any jars of jam in here. Most of our food stores were meant to be supplied by the Nexus and the Pathfinder worlds. Maybe in the other cargo holds. I did not want to go through the luggage records if we did not have to. There are twenty thousand of us. We’ll be in the Andromeda galaxy before we finish paging through every copy of Fornix someone just had to bring along.”

  They heard Borbala Ferank’s phlegmy chuckle coming through loud and clear. “Yeah, we don’t need to. My favorite mummy brought herself that crate of Horosk, even though she’s a naughty little war beast who knew it wasn’t allowed. I’ve bought and sold more Horosk bottles than you want to know about. You can see the cork from space. Try something harder next time, you great hulking boat.”

  Veridium tricupridase, or Drell Belly Green no. 15, is widely used in toy and jewelry fabrication.

  “Taken care of. The easiest one yet. Rhodamine is the last, yes? Honestly, my dear Yorrik, when you said fluorescent dyes, I thought there was no hope. Perhaps there is a rough luck in this universe, after all. Where can we scavenge our rhodamine, K?”

  Yorrik marveled at how expressive the drell’s voice was. He had no trouble understanding her, as he often did with aliens who insisted on speaking to communicate. The elcor could hear her smile through six decks between them.

  Rhodamine was once a popular choice for laser etching and engraving, but is no longer favored by contemporary artists, due to its rarity. I am not aware of any mercantile exchange that advertises rhodamine in its inventory. It cannot be “commonly found.”

  Yorrik fumed. He’d known at least half of those. He’d have remembered in another minute or two. Of course the computer could come up with the answer. But the Keelah Si’yah didn’t need an audience to thrive. A computer didn’t need applause. And it didn’t matter in the end. The ship didn’t have the final answer any more than he did.

  “And where,” came the rough, velvet, unbothered voice of the drell detective, “might it be uncommonly found?”

  Rhodamine can be found in mineral deposits on the moons of Xathorron in the Attican Beta system, in several outdated salarian vaccines, and was briefly popular as a lip stain among the asari. It can also be extracted from some species of bioluminescent deep-sea fish, such as the belan jellyfish, khar’shan snapping eel, and thessian sunfish, Analyst Therion.

  “Wounded sarcasm: Good thing the Initiative built an ark for all those Thessian Sunfish who longed to leave it all behind and start their lives over again. I imagine it’s right behind us.”

  The hanar chimed in. “This one knows you are all aware that all pets were classified as contraband by the Quorum.”

  “Disgruntled response: What kind of fool takes pet fish to space? They’d be dead before the first week was out. Dismissive pessimism: I assure you, there are no little cryo fishbowls full of iced eels on board. With insincere warmth: Unless you want to show us how the ship’s computer can make tropical fish appear out of nothing, Ysses.”

  There was a long uncomfortable silence. The hanar glimmered. The elcor loomed.

  Then the lights came on.

  Medbay was flooded with blinding white light as Senna’Nir and Irit Non shut down the energy-saving program and fired up the power of the Keelah Si’yah.

  The light flickered. Medbay went completely black. No calming blue running lights. Utter darkness.

  The commander’s voice joined the already crowded comm channel.

  “How’s that, Yorrik, better?” Senna said warmly.

  “Weary sarcasm: Perfect.”

  Irit Non’s phlegmy voice came through the comm. “Command node reports all power restored to medbay.”

  “This antechamber is as dark as the end of hope,” mused Ysses.

  Non growled. “I’m looking right at the sensors. It says full power restored. K, status report: lighting and temperature control, Deck Nine.”

  Hibernation-setting power protocols revoked for Deck 14. Temperature increasing. Full habitat lighting in use.

  “See?” said the volus.

  The darkness in medbay continued to be absolute.

  “Growing realization: The sensors also say the cryopods are full of live drell.” Yorrik looked down at the decidedly-not-live drell on his examination table.

  “Shit,” said Senna. “Inventory says there are some worklights in the supply locker. Do the best you can while we figure out what the hell is going on. Meet you in medbay in four hours. Senna out,” crackled his friend’s familiar voice.

  Silence returned, somehow deeper and more awkward than before.

  Finally, Borbala Ferank spoke into the comm. She no longer sounded quite so amused by everything that was happening, or convinced of her own untouchable superiority.

  “Listen.” The retired crime boss spoke as if each word was being dragged out of her. “I’m going to regret this, I just know it. You say we need fish? I can make fish happen. Just… sit tight. Ferank out.”

  The comm went quiet. Yorrik and Ysses were left once more alone in the dark with the dead.

  Yorrik waited two full minutes before trying to make friends with the hanar again. He turned to the tall pink jellyfish and droned: “Hopefully: Do you want to hear the beginning of elcor Macbeth? I can do all three witches…”

  5. PERMISSIBILITY

  Anax Therion stood in the dark surrounded by frozen fish.

  Crate ZB3301T/V was full of them. Any kind of fish you could ask for. Illium skald fish, prejek paddle fish, koi, striped dartfish, khar’shan snapping eels, even a massive Earth bluefin tuna, which, as far as Anax knew, was profoundly extinct. Dead to the world, they all floated in, by her guess, about fifteen hundred glass globes white with frost and capped with black plasteel instrument panels. Crate ZB3301T/V looked like it was crammed full of marbles. But they weren’t marbles. They were contraband. Miniaturized cryopods. Less than a quarter of the energy required for theirs, keeping the fish special on ice for the big day. Anax Therion had never cared much about money beyond where it could get her, but she didn’t even want to try to calculate how much profit she was looking at. What people on the Nexus would pay for a taste, figuratively or literally, of home.

  Borbala Ferank shrugged. Her three good eyes shone in the dark of the cargo hold. “Old habits die hard, eh? You won’t begrudge me my little nest egg, will you? My bastard sons drilled my accounts along with my fucking eye when they decided it was time for old Mama Bala to retire. Don’t you just love the young? Ah, well, that is their right. Nothing made me happier than listening to the pitter-pat of little feet as my offspring schemed behind my back to take everything I had. But they let me live! What a bunch of sniveling cowards. I should have turned them out on the street as infants. What was I supposed to do in Andromeda, take up an honest living? Ha! I am what I am. And what I am is a Ferank, and a Ferank is a smuggler and a schemer who ends up on top. And credits are credits, even in another galaxy. You gonna rat me out?”

  Anax ran her hand along the top of a bright orange koi. She had seen one just like it on Earth, once, long ago. The day she heard the folktale of the cat that might or might not be dead in its box. The memory threatened to roar up inside her, but she sidestepped it. Her post-stasis disorientation was gone. She didn’t want to think about Earth, or golden fish, or what she had done there for the sake of the hanar. So she didn’t. She turned back to the batarian. She wasn’t any more thrilled to be working with this unpleasant creature than Borbala was to work with her. Batarians didn’t do data. They did guns. And Anax Therion felt quite confident that
no gun would blow a hole in this situation large enough for the truth to bleed through. But at least she could keep an eye on the old warhorse.

  “I do not know what else I expected,” Anax said. “Is this it? Did you smuggle anything else on board?”

  Borbala’s red chin markings looked almost as black as her clothes in this light. She grinned, her chubby chartreuse cheeks dimpling. “Absolutely not.”

  The drell sighed. “Fine, pick us out a nice fat snapping eel and a couple of sunfish for our supper and let’s go. We’ve still got our own assignment ahead of us, now that we’re done supplying Ysses and Yorrik’s mad science experiment. At least we will get to stretch our legs. And who knows? Perhaps we will find ourselves a rogue asari and get some real exercise.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Borbala snorted. “Shove it all in the cargo elevator and hit medbay. They’ll figure it out. Command and control is between here and the security hub, so we can load out there for a long, thrilling night of… watching vidscreens. Wanna snatch a couple of bottles of that Horosk? Because this is going to be excruciating and I don’t get the feeling you’re a very colorful conversation companion.”

  The two of them carried the cryofish back across the hold to the quarian area and began boxing up the rest of the haphazard collection of items the elcor doctor needed to save them all from whatever was happening. The drell’s mind logged input and adjusted output so instinctually she hardly had to try anymore. Right now, the only available suspects were the other Sleepwalkers, and Borbala Ferank was the first to fall into Therion’s analytical crosshairs. She was a likely enough prospect. There was a saying among deep-space merchants: When something goes wrong, look for the simplest solution. When something goes really wrong, look for a batarian.

  You gonna rat me out? Borbala had included her in a small, but significant, conspiracy, the conspiracy of fish. That was how a batarian indicated trust and fellowship. She had made the effort to frame smuggling as a nest egg, something any outsider could understand and sympathize with. And now an offer of alcohol. It stank of an attempt to get the drell’s guard down. Or friendship. In Anax’s life, she had learned to view friendship as a very attractively wrapped grenade. It was always a trap. The minute you met someone, the pin was half-pulled.

  Colorful conversation. Anax adjusted her posture, her voice, her vocabulary to become something closer to what the target wanted. What the target expected. There was no better way to investigate than by becoming the kind of person any given suspect most wanted to encounter in that moment. Anax Therion constantly calibrated her personality and behavior to illicit intimacy from anyone who had something she needed. Intimacy was the breeding ground of data. She was good at many things. But this had always been her great gift. The drell had evolved from reptiles, but Anax was a true chameleon. Micro-expressions, gestures, vocal tone, dialect, personal anecdotes, each of them infinitely variable to the needs of the millisecond. She had only been truly herself for one person, for one day, years and years ago. It had been a deeply unpleasant experience, one which Therion had sworn never to repeat.

  Colorful conversation. Comrades of the bottle in the dead of night. Data points received. Calibrating.

  “I spent a decade in the service of the most powerful member of the Illuminated Primacy, traveling the diplomatic road from world to world, party to party, gala to gala. I wielded my intellect with one hand and an M-6 Carnifex with the other. Oleon always said it valued me for my conversational skills nearly as much as for my marksmanship. I can sparkle when I need to. You need have no fear of a tedious vidscreen, Borbala Ferank.”

  “I didn’t ask about your intellect, you bourgeois little scamp. I said colorful. How many languages can you swear in?”

  Calibrating. Anax Therion laughed, a laugh designed in a laboratory to indicate both self-awareness and a roguish rough-and-tumble past. “How many are there?”

  Anax grabbed two bottles of Horosk and tucked them in beside the omni-tool nightlight. She put the stuffed volus on top of it all, the toy young Raya’Zufi vas Keelah Si’yah had not chosen to take into her cryopod with her. The toy with glowing yellow eyes, just like a real volus. When you wake up, all will be well, Raya’Zufi, she thought. You will examine every one of those sixteen slides with your krogan microscope and keep your omni-tool lamp on at night to scare away the things that move in the dark. And then you and I will have a tea party on a new world. I promise.

  Something caught Therion’s eye as she was sealing crate NN1469P/R closed again for the duration of its long shipping and handling. She hadn’t noticed it before, somehow, even though she’d been up to her eyeballs in this family’s personal effects. It was folded up tight and small, but as she swung the lid over, the blue running lights flashed on its surface like a magnifying glass in the sun.

  Anax activated her comm line to medbay.

  “Hey, Yorrik,” she said, to show Borbala that she could speak casually if it pleased her, “would a quarian suit help?”

  A pause, and then: “Overwhelming relief: Yes, yes, absolutely. Enthusiastic cultural reference: A suit, a suit, my kingdom for an immuno-environmental suit. Uncertainty: But not if there is a quarian in it.”

  “No, it is an adolescent suit, most likely waiting for our young friend Raya to grow into it while suit fabrication spins up in Andromeda. I don’t think she would mind if we borrowed it.”

  “With sincere gratitude: I will replace all of her things that I am about to break.”

  “Standby, medbay,” the drell said as they pushed their box of hope and backdoor science into the cargo elevator. Anax ran her hand over the young girl’s environmental suit. They did love their suits. More like a friend than a piece of clothing to a quarian. Therion’s eyelids slicked closed and she was back in the hold on packing day, surrounded by twenty thousand souls stowing their entire lives in chest-high crates, hoping to open them again on new lives.

  She whispered: “Little bird hops along the steel, her mother’s gray fingers like fog in one hand, her plush toy keeper green as new life in the other. The song of the little bird drifts through the cavern like snow falling into shadow:

  Oh, I love my mother who holds me tight

  And I love my father taught me right

  Oh, I love my ship sailing strong through the night

  And I love the homeworld for which we fight

  But what do I love like a lock loves a key?

  What holds fast my heart, head, shoulders and knees?

  I love my suit and my suit loves me.

  “May Amonkira walk beside you in your quest and secure your prey with swiftness, friend elcor,” Anax said, and opened an access pad on the wall to return the elevator to medbay, key the directional lighting toward command and control, and make damn sure the infamous Queen of Smugglers didn’t see her command code as she entered it.

  * * *

  “Now we’re getting to the good stuff,” Borbala said, rubbing her arms to keep warm outside the bridge hatch. “Small arms locker. Whaddaya think they got in there? Reegar Carbine? Terminator Assault Rifle? Maybe a Banshee or Hurricane IV?”

  “Those are hardly small,” Anax answered evenly, turning her body to shield her command code again as she opened the hatch for them. She didn’t trust batarians and she certainly didn’t trust this one. Yes, they were in this together, but that was no reason to get sloppy. “How can you be so cheerful?”

  “Should I not be?”

  “People have died. Many people. My people. The hanar. Maybe yours next. And I will tell you that while the commander says he believes the crisis will turn out to be minor, he does not really believe that at all. Neither do I.”

  “Many people always die. All the time. Every day. Do you know how many times I have personally witnessed the souls leaving the eyes of my own offspring? How many of those I helped along myself? I have no phobia of death, and anyone in my household who did I would invite to cure it by the only effective means: exposure therapy. If Borbala Ferank meets her en
d out here in the black, so be it. I will have no regrets, except that I did not drown my youngest nephew Ignac at birth. Death is the greatest pirate of us all. He will raid even our best ships, drag us off by the hair, and he will ransom not a single one of us. The only defeat is to let him enslave you before his cannons even begin to fire on your starboard flank. So I will not tremble like the hanar up there. I will not exhaust myself tracking the mystery of the thing like that old elcor war beast put out to pasture. I will drink old Mummy Quarian’s turian Horosk on the bridge of the most magnificent ship I’ve ever met, and tell a dirty joke about that time a vorcha and a pyjak walked into a bar. You can do as you like.”

  The hatch irised open. The sleek, almost untouched bridge spread out before them, gleaming black and blue, and the whole of space outside the observation window, stretching on into nothing and everything. The drell headed straight for the small arms locker. Her fingers flew over the security panel. Calibrating. More casual. More contractions. Flattery. She wouldn’t make a speech like that if she didn’t think it made her look good.

  “That was a really excellent bit of bravado, Bala. I imagine I’ll be quoting it in the future.” She pulled an Arc Pistol, an M-3 Predator pistol, a Reegar Carbine shotgun, and a Lancer III rifle out of the canister, along with a modest bandolier of ammunition. She held one pistol out reluctantly to the batarian, strapping on the rest.

  “You did say you were retired, didn’t you?” Therion said.

  “Oh, just give me the weapon, you great racist iguana.” Borbala snatched the Arc Pistol out of Anax’s hand.

  “All I ask is that you try not to shoot me in the back. I know it’ll be hard to resist the temptation, but just… see how it feels.”