Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Well?” Senna’Nir said after a few minutes. Even as old as the VI was, she had never taken this long.

  The ancestor VI glared at him. “Working,” she said, and returned to staring. She swigged her ryncol angrily.

  “I’ve been away too long already. Can you hurry?”

  Liat’Nir stuck her finger in her drink, swirled it around, sucked it off the tip of her thick forefinger, and pointed it at her grandson. “Working,” she growled.

  After five minutes—five!—of silence and drinking and working, Liat’Nir gave up and retrieved the bottle from the invisible bar. She sat down again, hiccuped twice, pulled a small pair of scissors out of her robes, and started clipping her toenails with a murderous look on her face. Another new loading screen.

  “The reason ryncol is the best alcohol is because it hurts you,” Grandmother slurred. Tink. A purple hologram-toenail flew off and disappeared in midair.

  “Are you kidding me,” Senna’Nir said.

  “Shushup, ke’sed, I’m talking. I do a good talk, everyone says. Ryncol is better than turian brandy because ryncol tastes like lighting all your mistakes on fire in a glass barrel and then eating the barrel. Mouthfeel like a tactical nuke. I heard they let a city get fire-bombed just to capture the smoky flavor. The bouquet. And the best part is, ke’sed, the best part is, with every sip, you know someone wanted to make you feel that way. Some krogan distiller did this to you on purpose. It looks so harmless in its wee little glass—wee. Little. Glass. You look so thin, little glass. Have you been eating enough? Your growth is stunted, wee little glass. You need some gene therapy? Granny knows a guy who knows a guy, don’t you worry. But ke’sed, ke’sed, are you listening? Nothing that fucks you up this thoroughly while looking that small and innocent happens by accident. And so you and the krogan have made a long-distance agreement, where he gets to do this to you, and you get to let it happen and also you never retaliate. Wee. Little. Glass of angry krogan.” She looked up at her grandson through three hundred years of Nirs, eyes weeping from the ryncol fumes. “How many VIs you got?”

  “Seventeen of the Si’yah’s systems use a VI interface, but it’s no good, Grandmother. They’re all connected to the same compromised datacore.”

  Tink. Another toenail.

  “Well, how fortunate for you that your grandmother is not a complete and utter von. I didn’t ask how many the ship’s got, I asked how many you can put your slow, dumb baby hands on.”

  Tink.

  “I don’t know. People… brought a lot of things with them. I’m not a steward, I haven’t looked at the manifests. Why?” I’ve got you, he thought but didn’t say. He’d never indicated to her that she was anything but a living, breathing quarian, either.

  “What you have to know about ryncol, son, is you can’t just dig it out of the ground like a wine grape. It’s nothing so simple. A real spirit requires a huge distilling contraption, so many chambers and barrels and sterilized condensers. It’s a carefully timed process, and the end result is a brain smashed open with a small, angry meteor.”

  Senna sighed heavily. It didn’t always work. Those fitness algorithms were as likely to turn up a lecture on ryncol as anything useful. But he had hoped. He really had. “Grandmother, thank you for trying. I love you, even when I need your help so badly and all you can give me is go fish.”

  Liat’Nir swigged from the bottle. “If my hypothesis is correct, your best-case scenario is that communications will fail next, followed by either environmental zone controls or the tram system. In your worst case, the cryopods will go first. Come back and tell me which, ke’sed. I need a nap.”

  “Wait, what hypothesis?”

  “Working!” she yelled at him, and smashed her glass against nothing.

  “Senna?” came a voice, and a knock, at the door.

  Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, who always knocked because she was polite, but rarely waited for an answer because she was a small, furious fuel cell powered by enthusiasm and her command lock override code, stepped into his quarters. Senna’Nir shoved his grandmother’s mobile projection unit under his sleeping bunk and pulled a small crate of personal items in front of it with the practiced panic of someone very accustomed to hiding the evidence.

  “K, end conversational protocol Senna4,” he whispered. “Resume standard interpersonal routines.”

  Qetsi appeared in the doorway to his sleeping area, her violet hood crowning her head, not unlike Liat’s cowl.

  “Captain,” he said, standing up quickly.

  “Don’t be stupid, Senna. How many times have I told you you don’t have to call me that? Keelah, it’s so dark in here.”

  “Many, Qetsi,” he said, with affection. Even now, in this mess, with affection. “You have told me many times.”

  “Yorrik brought me up to speed,” the captain said, her voice thin with worry. “It’s not… It’s not good, is it?”

  “It is not.”

  “We almost made it. We were so close. Another thirty years.” She paced the room, not even glancing at the puddle of coolant in the water dispenser basin. “It’s my fault,” she whispered finally. Keelah, she was so young, really. So was he. They’d never have been given their own command on the Fleet at thirty-five. Perhaps not at forty-five. He caught her mid-pace and held her in his arms. Their faceplates touched briefly, like a kiss.

  “It’s not your fault, Qetsi. Don’t do that to yourself.”

  “I tried so hard. To be prepared. For anything. For everything. Not like those empty husks the Initiative fired off before us. I tried to build us a good ship. I did build us a good ship! A quarian ship. I just did such an excellent job that the most quarian of all fates befell it: our technology betrayed us. The basic fact is, we don’t have what we need. Whatever else is happening, that’s the real problem. We don’t have what we need. I can’t decide if my mother would laugh or scold me.” She sniffed. “I should have bought more medi-gel. I could have at least done that.”

  “Your mother has been dead since you were a kid. Since you were a kid plus six hundred years, actually.” Senna realized this sounded rather harsh. “She’d be proud,” he added quickly.

  She buried her face in his shoulder. “I just want to go home,” she whispered. Senna was surprised. Qetsi did not show vulnerability. She was as allergic to it as to a gust of foreign air. The situation must be so much worse than he thought. “Who is doing this to us?”

  “I don’t know,” Senna sighed. “But I suspect they’re a lot smarter than I am.”

  “Do you have any good news for me, Senna’Nir?” the captain said, disentangling herself, all business once more.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. I wish I—” Something in the corner of his faceplate display caught Senna’s attention. He’d been so absorbed with Liat he hadn’t noticed. “Wait. That’s… odd.”

  “What? What is odd? Odd in a good way? Odd in a ‘suddenly everything fixed itself with minimal effort’ way?”

  “No, not exactly, but…” He checked the timestamp. “It stopped.”

  “What stopped?”

  “I set my suit to keep me updated on the number of cryopods that showed the necrotic freezer burn that first alerted the ship. It’s been a pretty grim thumbnail in my peripheral vision for the last thirty hours, just ticking up and up and up. And it stopped. It stopped two hours ago. I didn’t notice. No drell have died in the last two hours. No hanar either.”

  The captain did disentangle herself then. She leaned back against the dining table, her shoulders relaxing. “That’s good. That’s a good thing. Thank the ancestors! Maybe if we can just get a little breathing room we can get a handle on what’s happening to us. Find a way to stop it.”

  “I’ll go see Yorrik,” Senna’Nir said, grabbing his omni-tool from the seating area where he’d left it.

  “No, I’ll go,” Qetsi insisted. “You’ve had longer to get your head around it all. I need to get there. I’m the captain. I need to be the first point of contact
. You focus on the datacore. We need those shields back up or we won’t be around long enough to worry about a deadly contagion.”

  “Yes, sir,” Senna acknowledged.

  Qetsi’Olam reached out her arm and took his shoulder in her hand with a strong grip. “Hey,” she said—and there it was. That old voice. The voice that had once told him to come with her and meet the future of the quarian species in a repurposed supply closet on the Pallu’Kaziel. The voice that had given a spine to the Nedas Movement, night after night, keeping them all drunk on the possibility of change. Of something, anything but that hopeless fleet drifting into nowhere. The voice he’d followed between galaxies, that he’d follow to another one if Andromeda didn’t give them what they wanted. “We’re going to make it,” said that voice. “We’re going to get out of this alive. I will buy you a drink on the Nexus, Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, I swear it.”

  Attention, Captain.

  Qetsi answered the ship’s vocal interface. “Yes, K?”

  Oh, Qetsi, thought Senna. Even you’re calling her

  K. Maybe things can be just that different in Andromeda. Maybe they really can.

  I have detected an atmospheric anomaly in the cargo hold.

  The captain groaned. “Keelah se’lai, what now? Another system malfunction? I said breathing room, K. Senna, you clearly heard me say we needed breathing room.”

  There is a significantly elevated concentration of carbon dioxide, adenosine triphosphate, ketones, water vapor, and other volatile organic compounds in the cargo hold.

  “Interpret,” Senna’Nir ordered.

  There are people in the cargo hold. They have been there for some time. These gases are byproducts of organic exhalation.

  “Yes, we know. Anax Therion and Irit Non are down there,” the captain said. “They should be finished soon, I imagine.”

  Given the size of the hold, the proportional change in air composition indicates more than two respiring individuals.

  Senna’Nir felt his heart begin to race again. He felt like he was standing on a platform over depthless, empty space, a platform in which some important bolt that held it together had already come loose, it just hadn’t collapsed yet. But it would. It was inevitable. The bolt had never been there, he just didn’t know. The commander shut his eyes.

  “How many more, K?” he asked.

  One thousand, six hundred and thirty-nine.

  The platform wobbled. The fateful bolt slid out, tumbled down, disappeared into nothingness.

  “Anax Therion, come in,” Senna barked into an open comm line. “What the hell is going on down there?” No answer. Just dead air. “Irit Non, respond,” he tried again. Still nothing. The hiss of a severed connection. It sounded different, somehow, than just silence on the other end; someone thinking, or distracted. Heavier. Senna toggled the line over to medbay. “Yorrik? Are you there?” The same heavy, empty quiet. He tried a shipwide open address. “Ferank! Jalosk! Anyone! If you can hear my voice respond on open comms immediately!”

  No reply came.

  “K, open a priority override comm channel to Anax Therion,” Qetsi tried.

  All communication channels are open and operational, Captain. You are already connected to Analyst Therion.

  They heard nothing. Not Anax, not the volus, not the supposed sixteen hundred and thirty-nine people swarming over the cargo hold. The Keelah Si’yah was no longer just blind. She was deaf, too. Comms or trams or cryopods, Senna’Nir thought. You have your answer, Grandmother. And two out of three is terrible. Now what are you going to do with it?

  Captain.

  “Yes?” answered Qetsi’Olam, staring numbly, straight ahead.

  I have detected gunfire in the cargo bay. Updated calculations available. Current population of Deck 11 is one thousand six hundred and thirty-seven.

  The platform fell away.

  10. TRANSCRIPTION

  Over the next eighteen hours, Yorrik watched Jalosk Dal’Virra die.

  Stars moved outside the wide medbay portholes, distorted by the ship’s ungodly speed. The Keelah Si’yah traveled at a rate of some eleven light years a day. One moment, a comet flared blue in the dark, its tail full of ice. The next moment, it was gone, lost to the past. The tall magenta hanar floated by the window, its back to anything that might be called work. It had been standing there motionless since Borbala Ferank had airlocked the three autopsies. Since Kholai’s body, like the comet, flared briefly in the night and then vanished far behind them. Gradually, Yorrik became aware that Ysses was asleep. He had never seen a hanar sleep before. Its tentacles drifted out around it like gelatinous petals. It snored softly, a sound like a flute trying to play a single perfect note underwater.

  Yorrik spared a glance for the spectacle of a sleeping hanar. But not for the stars, and not for anything else. His world had shrunk to the view through the slowly, gently flashing medbay glass edged with frost, across the dim, bile-streaked corridor, past the shimmer of a decontaminant forcefield, and into the iso-chamber, where a lone batarian sat on a thin cot, weeping softly. He had developed a rash. It snaked over half his face and down his throat, disappearing into his stained leather collar, a silver-pink spiderweb of angry lines pinpricked with tiny, hard pustules.

  No vocal contact with the others in fifty-one minutes. And counting.

  “Barely controlled panic: Commander?” the great elcor actor droned into his comm. No answer came. “Insistent: Senna’Nir? This is medbay, please respond.” Nothing. “Deep despair: My friend, please. Where are you? Uneasy plea: ‘’Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.’”

  The only answer was the total quiet of the darkened med deck. Even the hanar had found its way into a sleep beyond snoring.

  “No one is coming,” the batarian muttered. He pawed at his cheeks, wiping away the tears that welled up in the corners of his lower pair of eyes before they could fall. The upper pair were dry. “I don’t know why you keep trying. Comms are down. They’re clearly down. All the way down. If you want your friends so badly, you’re going to have to go and get them.”

  Yorrik glanced over at Horatio, the child quarian’s suit, hanging on its hook, stuffed full of Dal’Virra’s samples, blinking away at a full-spectrum tissue analysis. “With acceptance of fate: Neither Ysses nor I can leave the quarantine area. We have been exposed longer than anyone. Either of us would carry particulates with us anywhere we went. We would potentially contaminate anything we touched, anyone we spoke to. I am as dangerous as you are. Irrepressible hope: K, locate all members of Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 and the captain.”

  Analyst Anax Therion and Specialist Irit Non are currently on Deck 11, cargo bay north quadrant. Specialist Borbala Ferank is on Deck 2, Mess Hall 3. Medical Specialist Yorrik and Hydraulic Chemical Specialist Ysses are on Deck 4, medbay. Commander Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah and Captain Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah are on Deck 6, on inter-habitat tram line 1, car B2, between the quarian residential zone and common assembly zone 5.

  Yorrik gave a shaky exhalation as, “Relieved: They are alive at least.”

  Dal’Virra arched one hairless greenish-yellow eyebrow. “You think? K, locate Munitions Specialist Jalosk Dal’Virra.”

  Munitions Specialist Jalosk Dal’Virra is currently in cryopod BT566 in the batarian hibernation bay on Deck 11.

  Jalosk leaned back against the real wall of his cell, stretching his jaw. Dried black vomit flaked away. The nausea had stopped and the crying had started forty-two minutes ago. Tears still trickled down his haggard yellow face, over the teal markings on his cheeks, and dripped onto the floor. “Don’t get your hopes up. Our ship is a good-looking wench, but she has shit for brains. Alas, poor Yorrik, it’s just you and me and a crazy jellyfish.”

  A rush of good feeling suffused Yorrik’s body for the first time in many hours. “Surprised delight: You know Hamlet?”

  The batarian blinked. “What now? Who? Is he a passenger?”

  Yorrik slumped slightly. He wiped away a smear of
fluorescent dye from the dormant krogan microscope and rearranged a few bits of nothing on the now-empty autopsy table. He had not known it was possible to feel nostalgic for his life only twenty hours ago. But those had been good times, comparatively. Reverse engineering a coroner’s lab from junk and children’s toys. Practically a game. “Confusion: You said, ‘Alas, poor Yorrik.’ That is a line from Hamlet. Hamlet is a play. Correction: Hamlet is also a man. But he is not on board the Keelah Si’yah.”

  “Yeah, poor Yorrik, because I feel sorry for you,” Jalosk grunted. “All the excitement is somewhere else and you’re just standing there staring at me like a sad loner at happy hour in purgatory. Are you not called Yorrik?”

  “Disappointed: I am. Curious: How do you know there is excitement?”

  Jalosk shrugged. “If there wasn’t, they’d have come back to check on us as soon as the comms went out. Horrible virus loose on a ship? No place more important than the medbay. And yet.” He indicated the empty halls. He tried to vomit again, but there was nothing left. He gagged and spat. There was bright blood in the gob that hit the floor.

  “I’m not cryosick,” Dal’Virra said flatly.

  Yorrik turned to Horatio, the faceplate beneath its smiley face full of data, data that scrolled down past the softly blinking “positive” icon that said the only thing worth saying. “Apologetic: No. You have what the drell Soval Raxios and Tyomar Lukad and the hanar Kholai had. Yoqtan, or something like Yoqtan, but much worse.”

  “You said viruses don’t jump from species to species like this.”

  “Helplessly: And yet.”

  The batarian sunk his head into his hands. “I was telling the truth,” he mumbled bitterly. “I just woke up like this. I don’t know anything. This isn’t my fault. Not… Not for the reasons she told you. I’m not stupid. Shrik vai, the arrogance of the ruling caste! They look at a merchant and automatically assume he doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together to keep him warm at night. It takes more intellect to scrape and strive through your whole misfiring disruptor charge of a life, knowing that whether or not you sell this weapon or that one is the difference between dying and another day, than it does to be born into a family that runs everything and still shit it all away. I could have done it, I swear I could have. I’ve raided more medical vessels than you can possibly imagine. I know how people die, it’s not magic. I could engineer a superbug. Or at least hire the right people to do it for me. I could’ve. I just didn’t. There’s a big difference.” A vicious cough wracked his chest. “It’s important to me that you know that. I won’t be disrespected. I won’t.”