Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Dal’Virra scratched his neck furiously, his face a rictus of pain. But he still had energy for Borbala, it seemed. “No wonder you tucked your pyjak tail between your legs and ran away to Andromeda like a coward. Like a slave.”

  The batarian matriarch sighed and tilted her head to the right, a sign of how far above Jalosk she considered herself. She chuckled. “Given that I am the only one on your side, you landless craven pustule, I would say you are not half smart enough to wash yourself in the morning, let alone sabotage an Initiative cruiser.”

  The drell took a step to approach what Yorrik already found himself thinking of as his patient. The elcor had not often found it frustrating that he could not make his voice carry all the panic, desperation, and fear of their situation. He could not bellow a command at them like Senna could. Like he badly needed to. But he felt it now. He had to make them understand.

  “Urgent scream: Do not go near him. Do not touch him. Do not allow his fluids to come in contact with you. Especially you, Anax Therion.”

  But for once, that deep monotone was frightening enough. All four of them stopped in their tracks. They retreated slowly. Anax understood instantly. Her arm flared blue as she threw a biotic barrier toward Jalosk. It hissed where it touched the wet, black, sour mess on the floor of the hall. The batarian groaned miserably and vomited again; the barrier held. Yorrik found himself wondering how many biotics were on the ship. A simple barrier would not stop a virus, but it could stop almost anything or anyone else.

  “Stern admonishment: What is wrong with you? There is an infection on this ship and you want to go splashing around in the vomit of a sick man? Imperative: He must be isolated immediately. There is an iso-chamber in the medbay, Senna’Nir. It is accessible through the cleanlock vestibule at the end of the hall.” However poorly supplied, the medbay was logically constructed. The iso-chamber was segregated from both the main deck and the rest of medbay by a series of disinfecting fields. A patient could enter from the outside without air exchange between the corridor and the rest of the clinic.

  The elcor glanced meaningfully at the blast pattern of the batarian’s bodily fluids. Black globules dripped from the ceiling. Quarantine protocol might well be a sad joke now. But it was all he had.

  The quarian commander keyed something into his portable node and released the locks separating the Keelah Si’yah’s sole iso-chamber from the vestibule connecting it to the main deck. The first glass door slid aside. “Sir, would you mind escorting yourself in there?” he said, politely enough.

  “Please tell me what’s going on,” the batarian begged, bile crusting on his lips. “I haven’t done anything. I don’t want to go in there. I won’t put myself in your prison cell, son of scavengers. I’ll never leave it. Not when the volus wants my head. Wants my head for nothing. For the vicious crime of waking up. That’s all I did. I woke up. My pod released its seal. I thought I was the first one revived. But I felt terrible, just… just terrible. And it’s so dark. What happened to the lights? I tried to go down to the cargo hold but—” Another bout of nausea hit Anax’s barrier. This time it was full of bright, oxygenated blood. “I was just looking for medbay, you bootlickers. To find some medi-gel for my… my everything. I found you instead. And her. And I’m not going to be locked up for it!”

  “If one word of that is true I’m a turian beauty queen,” scoffed Irit Non. “Why didn’t you go check on your precious babies before sneaking around six decks above them? What was so important that you went straight for the cargo hold on an empty ship? What did you do to the datacore, you piece of varren shit?”

  Borbala snorted. “Oh please,” she said. “He can’t even spell it. Show that man a datacore and at best he’ll just start looking for a place to stick his meat into it.”

  Jalosk Dal’Virra was soaked in sweat and shaking. But not from fear, Yorrik thought. At least, not only from fear. What batarian before this very second would let a volus see him tremble? He started babbling hysterically. “Shut up, you vile bitch! Mother of worms! Mother of dung!” He turned his head toward Senna, pleading. “You can’t force me in there! Quarians have ethics. I’ve heard. So do drell and elcor and hanar. You won’t force me. You won’t. That fat space elephant said not to touch me! He said! He said!”

  Anax rolled her eyes and dropped her barrier. Dal’Virra gave a ragged sigh of relief. Then, without a word or even so much as shifting her stance, the drell’s elbow went rigid and she snapped him up in the turquoise bubble of a biotic throw, lifting the miserable weapons dealer off the deck floor and depositing him roughly inside the cleanlock. The door slid closed again. A forcefield inside vanished, allowing him to shuffle into the iso-chamber and collapse on the cot.

  Yorrik thumped his head against the glass to get her attention. “Fierce emphasis: Anax Therion, get out of here. You are susceptible. You cannot risk exposure.”

  “Who is going to interrogate him if not me?” The drell raised her hand to her mouth, but did not move to leave. Nor did she step through the liquid biohazard between her and the iso-chamber. “What do you know of criminality that you did not learn from a human playwright, Yorrik? He is not a terminal node for Senna’Nir to hack. Non already assumes his guilt. Any information achieved through Borbala’s… methods… cannot be relied upon. And a hanar would always prefer a drell to do such work.”

  “This one does not know what the servant of Kahje implies with her barbed words,” Ysses hummed.

  “My words have no barb unless you bring your own to bear upon them,” Anax said with stiff formality. “And besides, it would be illogical to assume that because he is sick, he must be sick with the same thing that killed the others. He has no Yoqtan sores. No one else left their cryopods alive. More importantly, Jalosk Dal’Virra is unmistakably batarian, not drell or hanar. If you look closely, you can tell by the number of eyes.”

  “With great distress and need to be obeyed: Anax, you must leave this deck until we can know for certain.”

  “Surely if I have been exposed the damage is done,” Therion ventured.

  “Strained patience: That is not how any of this works. Not everyone exposed to a virus will contract it. Not everyone who contracts it will die from it. There are always variations in susceptibility across a population. We do not even know its main transmission vector. If it requires direct bloodstream-to-bloodstream contact, such as the human disease known as HIV or the Asari Cyanophage, you are perfectly safe. Wry sarcasm: If it is airborne, I suggest at least putting something over your mouth and nose. And prayer. Imploring: Take the volus and do as Senna asked. Assemble a protective suit so you do not die.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Irit Non whined. “I am staying here, with that murderer, until you all admit the volus had nothing to do with this.”

  “Pleading: We have only the six of us to discover what has happened here. We cannot afford to lose you. Soft reflection: ‘On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.’”

  There was silence for a moment. No one moved.

  “Seven, I should think,” came a lilting, rather lovely accent from the shadows down the left-hand corridor. Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah emerged, her violet hood almost black in the harsh working lights. Senna’Nir reached out and squeezed her shoulder, overcome with relief at her presence.

  Yorrik knew they had a history. A long one. I met her before I knew how not to fall in love with a woman like that, Senna had told him that last night, both drunk, stumbling down Dekaano Street toward the lights on the river. I was a child, and what do children do when they find something that fascinates them? Humorous jest: Put it in their mouth? Yorrik had suggested. Never let it go, Senna had answered, and he hadn’t been joking at all. Poor quarian, the elcor thought. They live such short lives, and with so much regret. You can’t really call anything love that hasn’t lasted two hundred years. As Yorrik thought these thoughts, his eyes met those of the terribly sick batarian through two barriers, one of glass and one of mass effect fields.
The man’s eyes looked already empty. Yorrik made a mental note to revise the contextualization of Lady Macbeth’s final monologue so that, in some small way, his elcor Macbeth would recall all this when it was finally performed. His friend on the riverbank years ago, his friend in and out of love now, the mortality of that yellow beast in his shimmering cell. “Wishing it were otherwise: ‘Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.’”

  Qetsi’Olam pressed one three-fingered hand, encased in the gray mesh of her suit, to her visor. “Keelah se’lai, my head,” she moaned.

  “Allow me to ask one question, and I will go,” said Therion quickly, rubbing her longest finger against her index. She stared down at the miserable Jalosk, those dark, enormous eyes as empty of emotion as Yorrik’s own voice. “Jalosk, were you assigned to a Sleepwalker team?”

  “What the hell is going on on my ship?” said the captain sharply. Anax ignored her.

  “Yes,” the sick man mumbled into his trembling hands.

  “Which one?”

  “Yellow-9,” he coughed.

  Anax looked over at Senna’Nir and tilted her head to one side.

  “K,” she addressed the ship interface, “who else was assigned to Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9 besides Soval Raxios, Kholai, and Jalosk Dal’Virra?”

  Elcor team member: Analyst Threnno. Quarian team member: Medical Specialist Malak’Rafa vas Keelah Si’yah. Volus team member: Security Specialist Goz Kympna.

  “Please revive Specialist Malak’Rafa and instruct him that he is to be confined to my quarters. You’ll need to light us both a path through the quarantine,” the drell said. She nodded to the volus. “I will meet him there after I… dress for dinner.”

  “Permission granted,” said Qetsi’Olam archly. “And what quarters would those be?”

  “Designate something, Captain,” Therion said over her shoulder as she walked away. “I need a place to work.”

  Qetsi’s three thick fingers curled into a fist. She was not accustomed to being spoken to that way. But she said nothing.

  After a moment, Irit Non let out something between a grunt and a shout in their general direction and followed the drell down the hall, back toward the cargo hold.

  Captain Qetsi’Olam looked around at everything. All of it. The dead drell and hanar on the autopsy slabs, the torn-apart objects leaking fluorescent dye, Horatio, the empty quarian suit hanging there with its grotesque smiling face painted on the faceplate, the ropes of batarian bodily fluids staining the deck and the gently flashing medbay glass like sprays of horrible paint, the very awake Sleepwalker Team Blue-7, the drawn weapons, the quarantine lights, the prisoner-patient in the iso-chamber.

  She shook her head. And then she laughed. What else, Yorrik supposed, could anyone possibly do?

  “Will someone please explain to me what is happening before I lose my mind?” Qetsi said, calmly and sweetly.

  “Certainly,” Borbala Ferank sighed. “This ship is well and truly fucked. That is what is happening.”

  “With grim determination: No,” Yorrik said. His low, buzzing voice echoed in the quiet. “What is happening now is that everyone not wearing a containment suit is going to leave. Then you, Mr. Dal’Virra, are going to stand against the rear wall of the iso-chamber and allow the remote diagnostic array to collect samples from you and put them in the hazmat capsule on your side.” The elcor indicated a circle cut out of the medbay wall, sealed with a glass bubble, that terminated in a shallow, empty drawer where whatever was being passed between the safe zone and the unsafe zone could be collected. “Or I will instruct the iso-chamber to release the mother of all sedatives and take what I need anyway.”

  “And what is it you need, Specialist?” the captain said grimly.

  “Vomit, blood, tissue, saliva, lacrimal fluid, hair, fingernails, everything. Grim determination: Then, what is ‘happening’ is that I am going to watch over a batarian weapons dealer with three ex-wives, financial trouble, and two young children. I am going to watch him while he either recovers from the worst cryosickness in recorded medical history, or, more likely, while he slowly dies behind that forcefield. I am going to take copious notes. And I am going to try to think of a way to save us.” If Dal’Virra had Yoqtan, the virus had achieved spillover: crossing between species. And it had done it twice. If he could record the progression of the disease, they would at least have somewhere to begin. He would at least be able to tell if any of the others started to show symptoms. “Fond yet trepidatious quotation: ‘Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.’”

  “That’s barbaric,” said Senna’Nir. “It’s completely unethical.”

  “Guilty rejoinder: So is dying alone in space, Senna. You have a suit. We do not. Do not lecture us on the ethics of a pathogen.”

  “This one is filled with fascination, but will not be able to bear witness. This one must prepare the body of Kholai for its eternal rest among the stars,” Ysses sang. “This one cannot allow the corporeal form of the Enkindled to be ‘airlocked’ with those who did not serve it.”

  “That sounds spectacular,” said Borbala, checking the charge on her pistol. “It really does. And you should definitely do that, after you call the janitorial drones to clean up… let us call it the last failure of Jalosk Dal’Virra. But we have another problem.”

  “You mean other than that we’ve all been running for almost twenty-four hours without food or sleep, we’re all exhausted, the ship’s systems are as useful and responsive as a krogan with a head injury, and there are almost six hundred infectious corpses on ice in the lower hold?” asked Senna’Nir. “Other than that, what care could we have in the world, Borbala Ferank?”

  The batarian matriarch lifted one long green-yellow finger into the air. “Listen,” she said.

  Yorrik strained to hear what she meant. He could hear the unsettling, bubbling respiration of Ysses beside him. The hum of the laser scalpels on standby. The ragged, tortured breathing of Jalosk Dal’Virra in his makeshift specimen cage.

  But the rest was silence.

  Then.

  Plink. Plink. Thunk. Thunk-SLAM.

  Borbala’s three good eyes blinked at them in succession. “That’s debris,” she said. “Just the normal little tiny bits of dust and dead rock floating around in space. You know, the kind of junk we have a huge array of biotic shields to keep from slamming into us at faster-than-light speeds.”

  Plink. Plink. Knock. CLUNK.

  “That’s the sound of it hitting the ship, new friends,” Ferank said. “It’s been happening every nine minutes and forty-one seconds. That is not a good sound.”

  Plink. Plink. Plink.

  8. INCUBATION

  Anax Therion stood on an overturned trunk, her arms held out to the side like an aristocrat’s wife being fitted for a ballgown.

  “It is not my best work,” Irit Non muttered as she strained to seal two slabs of flexible, elegant chocolate-brown and bone-white nano-mesh fibers around the drell’s long green thigh.

  It was quiet in the cargo hold. Quiet and cold. Their voices echoed against the high concave ceiling. Irit had already decided it was “creepy down here” and wanted to be done with this whole business as quickly as possible. But Therion found it oddly comforting. She had been here before. They had solved problems in the cargo hold, she and Borbala Ferank, whom she had rather begun to miss. The two of them had been given puzzles with gaps in the picture, and they’d filled them in here. She had been successful with Borbala, and that was the same as liking her. The cargo hold was a place of solutions. Being surrounded by all those tens of thousands of people’s futures packed into shipping crates was almost like being surrounded by the people themselves. To Anax Therion, the shadowy, cavernous cargo bay was as crowded as a party.

  Irit’s personal crate was massive, roomy enough for them both to stand up comfortably inside—though that was far easier for the short, r
ound volus than the lanky drell. Far bigger than the quarian family’s allotment; sweet, useful little Raya’Zufi with her ancient krogan microscope and her stuffed dolls. Anax wondered what the volus had paid for the excess.

  “You are too thin,” the volus designer complained. “It is extremely unattractive.”

  There were probably comedy vids in the archives that involved drell in volus suits, Anax thought, without embarrassment. Anax Therion had never seen the purpose of embarrassment. Or comedy. Both seemed inconvenient afflictions. Though useful enough to incite in others. She had not yet been able to get much of anything out of the volus, even during the long fitting. She had some sort of resentment toward males, and the usual volus paranoia of being the most hated species in any given room, even one with a batarian in it. But Therion could not yet decide what the creature wanted, other than for them to stop using the word Yoqtan. She had always found the time between meeting a person and understanding fully what role was most advantageous to play for them highly uncomfortable. She could take a guess, but it would only be a guess. And a risk. Therion despised risk.

  The suit was a patchwork job, sewn together with astonishing skill from pieces of a thousand other suits that Irit Non had packed away in the cargo hold to stock her new shop on the Nexus, modified for a body that bore no resemblance to a volus whatsoever. The long pale flaps that hung on either side of a volus’s muzzle to protect the air-exchange mechanism instead hung down on either side of Anax’s small, muzzleless head like white hair. The famous glowing eye gaskets shone against the brown ridged skullcap. To her surprise, the tinted glass did not color the world yellow. She could see normally, and with the benefit of a visual display not unlike a quarian’s, it was able to show her the status of the various suit seals, filters, pressurization zones, hygienic sieves, and exterior conditions, as well as her own vital signs.