Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “With full knowledge that the answer will not satisfy: two.”

  Senna rested one long arm against the glass and buried his face in his elbow. Everything hurt. He hadn’t known eyelashes could hurt. The universe was truly full of wonders. He shut his eyes and frowned beneath his mask. He happened to know, because he had told K to pin the information to his display, that in the seven hours since the Radial, six more hanar and thirty-four more drell had expired in their pods. Keelah Se’lai, will there be any drell left by the time we reach the Nexus?

  “Yorrik, if what you’re saying is true, this is a fatal virus—”

  “It isn’t,” insisted Non.

  “—an apparently very fatal virus and you are trapped in a confined space with it.” All elcor hated confined spaces. It was the reason so few of them took to interstellar travel. But Yorrik was an exception, as he was to many things elcor. “Why aren’t you panicking?”

  The elcor droned emotionlessly: “Panic: I am panicking.”

  “There is no need for panic. This one is serene, despite the knowledge that the elcor is safe, while this one will almost certainly die in this very room,” crooned Ysses soothingly.

  “That’s quite enough out of you, you overgrown flashlight,” Borbala cut in, fingering the firing mechanism on her shotgun thoughtfully. “Keep talking sweet to that superbug and I’m going to start thinking you had something to do with it.”

  “This one respires and excretes innocence. This one would rather both galaxies burned from end to end than see the slightest harm done to the one called Kholai, who lies rotting before you. This one merely admires the tools the Enkindlers use to achieve their holy purpose.”

  The batarian grimaced. “Right,” she said slowly. “Well, that’s just spectacular, Ysses, thank you so much for opening up to us and sharing your insight and unique point of view. Please never do it again.” She blew into her hands and rubbed them together to stay warm. “Listen up, you filthy farmers. Team Who makes it two for two on results.”

  The drell stirred and snapped into an authoritative tone and posture. Senna had never seen anyone listen more vibrantly than she did. Anax explained about the shadow they had found on the cryobay footage. “It appears first about one hundred and fifty years ago. Whatever is happening has been happening much longer than we initially theorized. Similar shadows turned up on other parts of the ship: the mess hall, briefly, once on the bridge, a few times in engineering, twice on the residential decks. Never more than a shadow. A flicker. We almost missed it. We did miss it. We had to run back through years of recordings to find the other shadows once we saw the first one.” Her green brow furrowed.

  “What is it, Therion?” Senna coaxed.

  “Something has been bothering me since I first saw it. Commander, it is always a shadow. We never saw so much as the back of a heel or the top of a head. It’s as though whoever it was knew exactly how to move and where to stand so the camera sweep would miss them every time. And we went through centuries of cams. They never made a mistake. They never had a chance to practice.” The drell’s breath fogged in the icy air. “Someone knew. They knew when they came on board. There was a plan.”

  Senna began to pace back and forth in front of the sealed door to medbay. “Where is this shadow now?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” answered the batarian. “We didn’t have time to start a real security sweep before this one hit the apocalypse button.”

  “Are you still thinking it could be one of us?” he said, half not wanting to know the answer.

  Anax shook her head slowly. “A hundred and fifty years is a long time. And even if they slept through some of that, bringing yourself in and out of cryostasis would be brutal. They’d be in terrible shape by now.”

  “So asari or krogan,” the volus said eagerly.

  The drell rubbed her longest finger over her index finger. That curious gesture again. She said nothing for a long moment.

  “Most likely,” she said finally. “To survive long enough to see it through.” Her large black eyes fixed on something far down the darkened hallway. “Most likely,” she repeated. “What did you find in the datacore?” Therion asked suddenly. She leaned back against the glass, still pulsing red with the lockdown alarm.

  “Nothing,” Senna said, straightening up. He rubbed the mesh of his skullcap with one hand. He was going to have to wake up the captain. This was so far above his pay grade. She would know what to do. Qetsi’Olam was born knowing what to do. Her contingency plans had contingency plans, and those contingency plans had fallback positions. This ark was her baby. She would nurse it back to health. He could fix the code; she could fix the people. Proper division of labor was what defined a team. Relief settled over him as he made the decision. Now he could focus. The beautiful soup of the Keelah Si’yah’s base code decompiled and recompiled in his mind all over again. It had been flawless. All systems go.

  “Nothing?” Borbala snapped. “You had almost seven hours and you found nothing.”

  “Nothing,” repeated the volus, still obviously furious. “No bugs, no bad command lines, no fragged drives, no invasive programs, no unscheduled reboots, no spaghetti code, no run errors, nothing. The hardware is fine. The software is perfect. Except that things keep breaking and the ship keeps insisting they’re not.”

  A network of fine frost crept slowly over the red, pulsing quarantine glass.

  Perfect, Senna’Nir thought. Perfect. But nothing is perfect. Even if everything is running at optimum, no code is that perfect at the baseline. There is always something buggy in there, something left over from previous versions, something inelegant in the guts of the program.

  “We see what is there by seeing what is not there,” he said to himself.

  “What? Speak up, homeless,” the batarian sneered.

  “I have an idea,” Senna said. He couldn’t help the excitement creeping into his voice. Everything was just horrifying at the moment, but it was a horrifying puzzle, and he might be able to solve it. That was part of why he loved machines so dearly—they were an endless supply of puzzles for his mind to devour like meat. And after nearly six hundred years asleep, he was starving. “I have an idea of where to start, anyway.” He needed to talk to his grandmother. Liat’Nir had been a tech genius in her day. She had fought against the geth. She had programmed some of the geth trying to kill her and everyone she loved. When he talked to Liat, he never had to slow down or explain anything, he could just run out his mind. The old lady might be a relic, but she could still keep up. His greatest breakthroughs had come from bouncing contingencies off of her. He turned back to his team. “I need to go to my quarters and get some things.” Command staff had assigned quarters on the Keelah Si’yah before departure. Their belongings were stowed there, not in the main cargo hold. “I won’t be long. Borbala and Anax, start your security sweep. Yorrik and Ysses, continue your analysis, try to get an idea of how much time we have, and whether or not this is a natural mutation.” Wishful thinking, he thought to himself. He did not believe in accidents, not really. Not big ones. Not like this. “Irit?”

  “What?” the volus breathed gutturally. “It’s not fucking Yoqtan,” she finished weakly.

  “Help them get Horatio optimized for the next phase. You can direct them from this side of the glass. Turn him into the next best thing to a mobile virological lab. And, Irit…” Senna resisted the urge to pat the short alien on the head. “I presume you brought the tools of your trade along with you?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the volus snapped. Of course, Irit Non would never leave it all behind without grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down so that she could set up shop again wherever they landed.

  He gestured at Anax Therion. “Make her a suit. We can’t have you dying on us, Anax.” She was the only one of them who was vulnerable. The only one with no protection from the invisible killer that could be anywhere, all around them. “And somebody grab a terminal port and see if there’s anyone we can reviv
e who would be more useful than the six of us poor bosh’tets. A geneticist, a scientist, a xenobiologist, anything.” He took a deep, rattled breath. “K, initiate revival sequence for Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, authorization passkey indigo-9-9-white-architect-4-1-1-6-nedas.”

  Passkey accepted. Revival sequence initiated, Commander.

  Yorrik butted his knee lightly against the medbay wall to get the commander’s attention. “Warning,” the elcor said. “The more people you revive, the more chance the infection has to spread to fully thawed and active hosts. We are keeping the bodies as near cryo-temperature as possible. But there is still a risk. We do not yet know how it spreads, and several hours passed before we took any countermeasures at all. Simplistic explanation: It may be on the walls or in the air or in the water supply. There is no way to tell.”

  “Commander,” whispered Anax Therion suddenly. “We are not alone.”

  The batarian checked the thermal clip in her shotgun and dropped into cover behind one of the terminal nodes across the corridor from medbay. The drell took up a flanking position, rifle already up on one shoulder. Senna saw the blue crackle of biotic implants sizzle along her arms. She tossed him an M-3 Predator. Borbala Ferank seemed to at least consider giving her sidearm to the volus to protect herself.

  Senna’Nir heard footsteps. Footsteps far off in the dark. He strained to hear. Heavy? Light? Krogan or asari? Wounded? Malevolent?

  “Identify yourself!” Borbala roared into the shadows.

  “Oh, good work, you fool,” sneered Non. “They’ll run now. You’ve warned them off. Maybe it is one of us after all. Is that your friend creeping around down there? Give me that pistol, you yellow bitch!”

  Borbala ignored her. Anax was silent. Senna could feel his heart hammering in his eardrums. The footsteps were getting closer. Closer.

  A shape lunged toward them out of the blue-lit passage to the lower decks.

  “Are we there?” it panted. “Is this Andromeda?”

  A batarian male stumbled directly into their line of fire. He looked around at the weapons trained on him. The man smelled strange. Sweet, soft, like perfume. It wasn’t right. Nobody sweating like that could smell so good.

  “Jalosk?” Borbala Ferank whispered, lowering her weapon. “Jalosk Dal’Virra?”

  His eyes seemed to focus when he heard his name. Jalosk rolled his head blearily toward her voice, then took in the whole of Sleepwalker Team Blue-7. The batarian went ashen, turned, and explosively vomited reeking bile, blood, and the blackened remains of his own intestinal lining against the clean medbay glass like a river of hell.

  7. CONTROL

  Yorrik watched them all helplessly through the quarantine glass. It was painful. For a creature whose language was mostly scent and microgesture, watching a mob of aliens turn on each other while pungent vomit slid down the wall in front of him was like being bombarded with a deafening crash of sound. The newcomer had collapsed in a trembling heap against the sealed door of the medbay.

  “I knew it. I knew it was a batarian!” Irit Non seethed.

  “Dal’Virra. Don’t listen to them,” barked Borbala Ferank, not lowering her pistol. No one, in fact, had lowered their weapon. They’d only leapt backward to avoid the splatter of his insides against the glass. “Don’t say anything. You know how they are.” She turned on the rest of them, the scar tissue in her ruined eye socket throbbing. “Can’t you stow your provincial pitchforks for half a second? Can’t you see he’s sick?”

  “Increasing concern: Perhaps it is unwise to get too close,” Yorrik said. No cryopod hangover was this bad. No matter how many times you froze and thawed, you didn’t sick up anything that color. And so much of it.

  No one listened to him.

  The man glared malevolently at her out of all four eyes. “Stay away from me, mother of worms,” he snarled. Saliva pooled on one side of his mouth and spilled out. One side of his face wasn’t moving quite right.

  “K, identify the batarian bosh’tet on the med deck!” shouted Senna’Nir.

  There are no batarian males currently present on the med deck.

  “God dammit,” the commander said. He leveled his weapon at the man’s head. “What’s your cryopod number, sir?” The batarian groaned and stared listlessly out of his four eyes. “Sir!” Senna barked.

  “BT566,” he moaned.

  “I told you, that’s Jalosk Dal’Virra,” insisted Borbala Ferank.

  “K, what is the status of cryopod BT566?”

  Cryopod BT566 contains the batarian male Jalosk Dal’Virra, forty-six years of age. Homeworld: Camala. Berth type: Family. Guardian of Zofi Dal’Virra, age nine, and Grozik Dal’Virra, age four.

  “What did I say?” Borbala rolled her eyes.

  Senna waved his hand at her. “Forget about that part, K. Who authorized a revival cascade for cryopod BT566? Are any other pods open?”

  Cryopod BT566 has not undergone a revival cascade since transit day 164,250. It is currently in active stasis mode, temperature seventy-seven degrees Kelvin. Occupant’s life signs are optimal. No cryopod breaches reported. All passengers in stasis with the exception of Commander Senna’Nir nar—

  “Enough!” Senna cut the ship’s interface off. Yorrik had never seen him so upset, even on the day he’d left Ekuna to end his Pilgrimage. Even when Yorrik had told him what happened to New Elfaas all those years ago. He wanted to comfort his friend. But quarantine made no exception for emotion. On the other hand, Yorrik thought, looking down at the putrid slime that covered the hallway, was there any use left for quarantine protocols now?

  The former occupant of cryopod BT566 dry heaved onto the floor of the corridor. He clawed at his neck, grunting. In the shadows cast by the worklights inside medbay, the dark circles under all four of his eyes looked ghostly.

  “Thank you, K, that’s just… just fantastic.” Senna’Nir shook his head.

  The volus was livid. “All that talk about damned Yoqtan, trying to pin this on us, and it’s the same old monsters it always is. There’s your stowaway, Anax. Not some fanciful asari or krogan. Didn’t you say they’d be in terrible shape by now? Just look at him!”

  “Look at him?” Senna’Nir bellowed. “I’m looking right at him, and he’s obviously got whatever the others had!”

  “Probably,” Anax said calmly, adjusting the scope of her weapon. “I said probably.”

  Jalosk had begun to scratch his arms viciously. His fingernails were useless against his black leather sleeves, so he tried to tear them off. This would normally be no trouble for a batarian. Yorrik himself had seen one tear a Quasar machine apart with his bare hands. Jalosk must be very weak indeed to be sitting there clumsily pulling at the fabric of his clothes like a child. The medbay glass was thick by design. Scent particles would not pass through. But his slats flared anyway, trying to catch the smell of the man, of the horrifying fluids that had burst out of him.

  “It’s your right to dispose of him as you wish, Anax Therion,” Non wheezed solemnly. “His crime was against Rakhana-clan. Rakhana-clan should determine his punishment.”

  “What an astonishing number of assumptions,” Anax answered softly.

  “Dispose of me? What do you mean dispose of me? Where the fuck am I? Have we docked? Why is everything dark?” The presumed Jalosk Dal’Virra had teal markings all over his face. The skin on the concave sides of his skull ridges was starting to peel. “I demand to be taken to the chief security officer of the Nexus,” he said.

  At least, he tried to say I demand to be taken to the chief security officer of the Nexus. A bout of coughing so intense he nearly passed out choked off most of it. He had the decency to put his yellowish-green hands over his mouth. The sad little useless gesture touched Yorrik, somehow. More than touched him. Why would a saboteur bent on infecting the poor drell of the Keelah Si’yah with that Yoqtan monstrosity care about keeping his germs to himself? He turned to ask the hanar, but Ysses merely hung in the air beside him, watching with interest,
as if concerned only with what might happen next.

  “Authoritative interjection: I do not think it is him,” the elcor droned.

  “What do you mean it’s not him?” Non snapped. “Why else would this Khar’shan-clan toad be skulking around the ship? Why else would he be awake at all? Airlock that thing and be done with it!”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” sneered Borbala. “You see a batarian and all of a sudden it’s just so simple, isn’t it? Put him in an airlock, no trial, no interrogation, just a bit of laughter and a champagne toast to the universe being exactly as your tiny little brain always thought it was. He’s clearly sick, you fucking peasant.”

  The volus’s air filter made that sucking, gulping sound they always did. “You know him,” she rasped.

  “Oh, so we all know each other now, is that it?” roared Borbala. “Do we all look alike, too?”

  “Yes, obviously you do!” shouted Irit Non. “The two of you were in on it together, admit it! And you meant to frame the volus for your crimes!”

  “You did say his name,” said Anax gently, slinging her rifle over one shoulder, finally. “You recognized him.”

  “Yes, well, I only met him on Hephaestus. Dal’Virra is scum. His family is only half a generation out of the slave caste. He is a small-time weapons dealer, on the run from his debt and his third wife with two of his offspring, he is judgmental, rude, unpleasant, conservative, and he cannot hold his shard wine.”

  “Die prostrate on a burning pyre of all you hold dear, mother of worms,” Dal’Virra said matter-of-factly, and sunk his head in his hands.

  “He doesn’t seem to care much for you, either,” observed Senna’Nir.

  “And in that, he has much company and always will. But despite—”

  “You are a traitor to our people,” Dal’Virra hissed.

  “But despite being unworthy to pick up the leavings of my least virile war beast, he is not half smart enough to do something like this. I drank with him for three nights on the station before he realized who he was talking to and started in with that charming patter.”