* * *
Sloane lifted her finger from the screen.
“Calix has things under control here,” Kesh said. She had been standing just behind her while she spoke to Tann. “I’m going to check on the rest of the krogan, make sure their stasis pods weren’t damaged.”
Sloane sighed. She understood the desire. Wanted to do the same for her team, more than anything. “Power is still unstable. Sensors are hosed. Shields, too. Who knows how many fucking rads we’re absorbing just standing here.”
Nakmor Kesh inclined her head in agreement. “All true. And like life support, all things that will require trained teams to repair. That means krogan, in many cases. I need to make sure they’re safe.”
“There may be another way,” she said, still working through the idea. “Hang on a second.”
Kesh waited as Sloane identified herself to the comms panel. The system recognized her, but this failed to result in what she’d hoped for. The system that allowed her to locate crew, no matter where within the Nexus they were, was dark. Still, she could communicate. Open broadcasts only, but it was a start.
“Sloane Kelly to Kandros. Please respond.” When no answer came, she repeated it.
This time, his reply came a few seconds later.
“Kandros here, along with Talini and six other survivors.” Aside from the obvious good news, his unasked for sit-rep told her that she had an audience and should guard her words. He wouldn’t know that the comms weren’t closed. Not yet.
She’d tell him later. “Report.”
“We went looking for ships, but you’re not going to like the result.”
She winced. “Tell me.”
“The explorers are destroyed. Or at least, most of them are destroyed. Something tore through docking like a thresher maw through sand. The Pathfinders’ ships took the brunt.”
“Shit.” Sloane rubbed at her forehead. In the back of her thoughts, a free-floating bit of station floated across the memory of Operations. Kesh made a low, thoughtful sound. “You said ‘most’?”
“Yeah. There’s no trace of the others.” A beat. “Just a damned big hole.”
Just great.
Kandros followed up with, “But it’s not all bleak. We took shelter inside one of the shuttles in hangar two. Situation cramped, but stable.”
Kesh grunted in approval. “Smart thinking. Self-contained, provisioned, life support, even a medical bay. Very smart.”
Sloane nodded agreement, but filed away the data for later use. She hadn’t quite reached the point of ordering everyone to retreat to safe ground.
“Leave Talini in charge there,” she said to Kandros. “I have a task for you.”
“Name it.”
Sloane grinned, bolstered by his attitude. “Make your way to stasis chambers…” She glanced at Kesh, an eyebrow raised.
The krogan rattled off a series of designators, assuredly where the bulk of the krogan population had been placed. Sloane repeated them, just in case he hadn’t caught them all.
“Got it?”
“Copy that,” he replied. “What’s the mission?”
“I want a status report. How many made it, how many… well, you get the idea.”
“Understood. Anything else?”
“Be safe.”
She could practically hear his long-suffered smirk. “Always. Kandros out.”
Sloane dropped her hand from the screen. “There, now I know the status of the other half of my team, and soon you’ll have the info you’re looking for. Everybody wins.”
“Thank you, Sloane Kelly.” A grave thing, given the seriousness of her tone.
Sloane waved the krogan’s gratitude off. “We each got something we needed. No need for thanks.”
Kesh regarded her. “But you need something else.” Not a question. Observant, Sloane thought. By far.
And right. “I do,” she confirmed.
“Which is?”
“Nothing much.” She just couldn’t help but yank the krogan’s chain. Just a little. “Only a power core in the first stage of meltdown. Noticed the alert when we left Operations, decided it best not to panic everyone just yet.”
Kesh growled, and if krogan could have hackles, Sloane had no doubt they’d be bristling. “And you wait until now to tell me?”
Sloane made no excuses. Darkly amusing as it was, her choices weren’t great then. They were better now, thanks to Calix’s team. “Now that I know we’re not going to suffocate? Yeah.”
The krogan stood there, immovable as a wall. Staring at her.
Goading krogan, Sloane understood, was the subject of a violent betting pool for a reason. “I’m hoping this is where you tell me how we’re going to fix it,” she suggested.
Kesh shook her head. “You can’t fix a core in stage one of meltdown,” she bit out. “You jettison it and move very far away.”
Sloane opened her mouth. Paused. Cast her future to fate and said helpfully, “But engines aren’t—”
“One thing at a time!” Kesh roared, hands thrown to the ceiling in frustration.
* * *
Sloane worked side by side with Kesh for twenty-six hours.
Through sweat and blood and the power of multicultural profanity, the failed core was manually jettisoned and, in a moment of inspired genius on Addison’s part, tugged out to a safe distance by a semi-functional cargo drone. Everyone now awake had to hunker as deep as possible in the bowels of the mangled space station in order to weather the resulting blast, but it worked.
Three times during the already insane day, she was contacted by Tann, or Addison, or both, each requesting that she find her way to Operations so they could have a meeting. A damn meeting, while the Nexus went up in flames all around them.
Not likely.
One emergency fixed only led to the next, and all the while life support remained stuck at 10%. No capacity for waking additional help. Sloane and Kesh rushed from one section to another, until Sloane finally collapsed, exhausted, on a half-burned couch in the lobby of an embassy that now seemed so comically unnecessary that she snorted in laughter before drifting into restless sleep.
The fourth comm blast came just as sleep had fully embraced Sloane Kelly. She’d curled up, one folded arm serving as pillow, when the annoying chime yanked her back to consciousness. She bolted upright, ready to tell that salarian where he could stuff his “discussion.”
Before she could, his words stopped her cold.
“You’re needed in hydroponics,” Tann said. “I’m afraid there’s more bad news.”
“Is it Garson? You’ve found her?”
“Would that we had,” he said, a grim note to his voice. “This is something else. I’m sorry, Director. But you need to see this.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Kesh and I will be there as soon as we can.”
Jarun Tann glanced at his companion. Addison’s features betrayed nothing. Well, then. “No need to pull Nakmor Kesh away from her tasks,” Tann said. “It’s not a, er, technical problem.”
As expected, the Security Director did not take well to subtlety. “I’ll take that under advisement.” As usual when dealing with Sloane Kelly, the link abruptly ended.
Tann stood silently for a moment, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Then, thoughtfully, “I should have been more emphatic.”
“It’ll be fine,” Addison said. She sat on a bench, knees together, hands clasped in her lap. The bench itself sat askew, the bolts that held it in place having been sheared in the disaster. It straddled the common area and the area of spongy, synthetic soil it was supposed to face. A fine patch of bright green grass should have been growing there by the time Tann awoke, had everything gone as planned.
“If Kesh is with her, we’ll manage. It may even be a good thing. Her knowledge of this station is—”
“Unrivaled,” Tann finished, locking the hint of acid welling up behind a determined smile. “Yes, I know. But the protocol was clear. You and Director Kelly are to advise—”
Perhaps. In part. He began to pace. Rubble skipped away from his feet, clattering across the floor. The hydroponics section, like everything else, resembled some ancient abandoned place, a shadow of the idealized and perfectly engineered marvel it should have been. Quieter, maybe, but no less devastated.
That made this moment so important.
No. He was right about this. “I disagree,” he said. “A lot of very intelligent people spent vast amounts of time working through every situation we might face, planning for every contingency. We’d be making a huge mistake if we threw all that out and started relying on snap decisions made by whomever happened to be standing around.”
He reached the wall, turned.
“That is no way to govern,” he added, before proceeding on another circuit of his route.
Addison remained silent.
So much so that he paused mid-circuit, stopped in front of her. “You agree, surely?”
“I suppose…”
It trailed off, leaving Tann humming. Not quite the fervor he’d been hoping for, but at least she was listening. He continued to pace. Each step brought a new line of thinking, another possibility to account for. Yet it all came back to the same thing.
Jien Garson, truly a brilliant mind, had overseen the protocol encoded into the Nexus’s systems, which had led to his awakening. His presence here, his role, was essentially due to her direct order, and he intended to respect that by fulfilling that role to the best of his ability. Director Addison may feel bitterness that she was not chosen for the role, but that was not Tann’s fault. Nor his responsibility. Only Jien Garson would be able to explain the reasoning there. If she turned up.
Another turn, more walking, more thought.
Jien Garson could never have guessed that a calamity on this kind of scale would befall her mission. In truth, the leadership protocol could have just as easily wound up with two human janitors and a krogan dental hygienist—easily the worst job in the known universe—as its new leadership, had they happened to be the three most senior surviving crew. More power to them, had that been the case!
Turn. Walk.
Think.
That worst-case scenario had not happened, of course. The protocol had whittled down the list and found him, a full seven rungs below Administrator Garson on the leadership ladder. Addison and Sloane would advise him just as they would have advised her. He hadn’t asked for this. He’d staged no coup. Jarun Tann was here to do a job, whatever was required of him, and if this was it, then he would do his duty. The mission mattered, above all else.
Turn. Step.
Freeze.
Boots before him. How long had they been there? He glanced up, met the tired, bleary eyes of Sloane Kelly.
“Make this quick,” she said, without even a courteous attempt at preamble. “I’m busy.”
“And hello to you.” Abruptly, he realized he’d walked right in front of the door and blocked her path. “Come in, come in.” He swept an arm toward the innards of Hydroponics and followed the security director inside.
She greeted Foster Addison, then sat on one of the benches, looking on the verge of collapse. With the two women occupying the only two benches, Tann moved to stand nearby. He had nothing to lean on, so he clasped his hands behind his back and waited.
Addison said nothing, forcing Sloane to break the silence.
“What’s the goddamn emergency?” she demanded. “There’s nothing on fire here. No dead bodies. So… what?”
“No fires,” Tann agreed. “No bodies, true. Notice anything else missing, Director Kelly?”
“I don’t have the energy for puzzles, Acting Director Tann. Spit it out.”
The impact of the revelation, he reasoned, would serve enough to take the spite from her use of title. “Very well.” He pointed at the closest bay. “No crops,” he explained, enunciating each syllable.
Sloane merely sat there, looking exhausted. Maybe he was being too obtuse?
Then, with a shrug, she said, “Okay. So? We just got here. Plants take time to grow.”
“There should be buds,” Addison volunteered. Ruining his grand reveal, of course. These humans. No respect for finesse. “Several weeks before our arrival the first seeds should have been placed by automated systems, so that a crop would already be started as the crew was revived.”
Tann walked to one of the auto-gardeners, removing a bag he’d placed there thirty minutes earlier. He took it to Sloane and laid it at her feet. Inside were the remains of a few hundred small plants, shriveled and burned.
“Radiated,” he said. “Every last one.”
The security director studied the plants. She spread her hands. “So we start another batch. Right? When necessary. We have supplies. I’m not a botanist but—”
“Exactly,” Tann cut in, seizing the opportunity. “Not a botanist. Nor am I, nor is Director Addison. And a botanist, a whole team of them, is what we need.”
“Tann,” Sloane said, frowning, “we talked about this. You even argued against the concept. With everything going on, the last thing we need is more people running around. We’ve barely got things working as it is. More strain on the systems is a bad idea.”
“More data,” he said flatly, “means decisions must be revisited. In this case, I disagree with your assessment.” He raised his hands in defense, staving off her no doubt profanity-laced retort. “Please, let me explain.”
Perhaps it was the please that did it. Sloane deflated a bit. She glanced at Foster Addison, perhaps looking for support. The other woman simply waited in silence.
“Fine,” she sighed. “What’s the reasoning?”
Tann tipped his head. “Our situation is still critical,” he said, “but the immediate threat is over.”
“You can’t know that,” she said hastily. So much for that. “Hell, we don’t even know what this threat is, and implying that you do is dangerous.”
“All I mean,” Tann said in slow emphasis, “is that the fires have been put out. The hull breaches are sealed. I agree there could still be aftershocks, or new attacks, whatever we want to call them, but there may not be, either. Can we at least agree on that?”
Addison gave a single nod.
Sloane shrugged.
“There. Progress. Given that assumption, I think it’s time that we turn our attention to the mission.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Sloane stared at his face, which Tann hoped projected calm confidence. “Holy shit, you’re not. You’re actually serious. Save this shit for Garson, there’s no need to be—”
Tann lifted his hands once again. “Please, Director, let me finish. I hope, as we all do, that our guiding visionary will be found alive and well, very soon. I remind you that I did not ask for this.”
Sloane shook her head. She did not believe his sincerity or motivation, that was plain, but lacked some way to combat it. Or perhaps she couldn’t decide on which vulgarity to use next. He pushed on before she could.
“We need to adjust our immediate goals. Change our focus. From survival to recovery. I believe our ultimate goal, to support the mission of the Pathfinders, is still possible. Indeed, not just possible, but critical. We can’t have them arrive here only to find the Nexus…” he swept a hand across the devastated hydroponics bay, “like this.”
“And you have a plan to accomplish this?”
He did, but he fully intended to fold it in under the guise of inclusion. “We all do, consciously or otherwise. Let us discuss the options, and decide.”
“Decide,” Sloane said with a sardonic laugh. “So that’s why you wanted Kesh away.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he replied.
“Don’t be so offended,” she snorted. “It’s exactly like that.”
“Okay, yes,” he replied, exasperated by the woman’s distrust. And observations. “It
is like that, but not for the reasons you no doubt are thinking.”
Now Sloane really did laugh, loud and energetically. “We’re in Andromeda now, Tann. Don’t you remember Garson’s words? Check all that old bullshit at the door.”
“I don’t recall her saying anything quite so vulgar.”
“I’m paraphrasing. It’s what she meant, though. None of our old scores, our stupid and unjustified prejudices, apply here.”
“As I said, this is not the reason for my concern. I simply feel that the protocol—”
Sloane waved her hands in overdone acquiescence. “Right, right. The protocol that so neatly made you boss.” She blew out a sigh that undercut any humor with sheer frustration. “Let’s finish here. I’ve got a station teetering on the brink, and you’ve got a proposal in mind. I can see it all over your aerodynamic face.”
Tann cocked his head. “Hydrodynamic. We are not a species suited to—”
“Whatever.”
He wondered if he would ever get on Sloane Kelly’s good side. So far, it didn’t seem possible. In the end, of course, it didn’t matter. He had the power to make decisions. As long as he had a sympathetic ear with Foster Addison, such decisions could be ratified. Not unanimously, perhaps, but still a majority, and that was all they truly required.
“Very well. I suggest we wake a more significant part of the population,” he explained. “Experts in all the various systems. Life support is already taken care of.” No accusation here. “Hydroponics, power, medical, communications, sanitation, sensors, astronavigation, and a dozen other areas, however, are offline or at best critical, and will remain so unless we wake the people necessary to begin correcting the problems.”
The problematic human was already shaking her head. “No can do,” Sloane said. “Not enough air. Or food. Or water. You said you wanted to shift from survival to recovery, but your recovery team will make survival impossible.”
It was an echo of the argument he’d fed her. He was savvy enough to recognize it—and also how to navigate it. That’s where Addison would come in.
And on cue, she did. “Supplies can be augmented.”
“How so?” Sloane asked.
Andromeda Page 9
