Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  Maybe all salarians tended to look snide. Maybe it was just him.

  Sloane shook her head, her goodwill fading. It left her as cold as his calculus. “So you’re saying I should trust you twice over,” she said slowly. Her incredulity mounted with every word. “Once that your math is rock solid, and the other that you’ll come through with better options?” She barked a short laugh. “You’re right, Tann. It is a difference between us. So let me give you another piece of data to analyze.” She shoved a finger in his direction, only narrowly missing his bony chest. “Acting Director or not, if your math says to do X for some potential future benefit, and my gut says save someone’s life right-fucking-now, my gut is going to win, every time. That clear?”

  He studied her for a moment, once more tucking his hands into his sleeves. Then, with a slight nod, he murmured, “Abundantly.”

  The door to Operations hissed open, and Nakmor Kesh came lumbering out. Unprepared for the sudden company, Tann almost fell over his own feet leaping out of her way.

  Sloane didn’t even bother hiding her snort. At least until the krogan’s gaze met hers. “Oh, shit. What now?”

  Kesh’s large head swung around to pin on Tann, who busily attempted to right his dignity. At the weight of her silence, however, he stopped fussing with his apparel and frowned. “What happened?”

  The krogan’s voice graveled low. “Jien Garson.” Before either could leap to questions, she shook her head. “They found her.”

  * * *

  The temporary morgue had been set up in one of the Biology labs, several decks away. Kesh led the way, with Sloane beside her and a very silent Tann trailing behind.

  “They’re up to almost a hundred dead now,” Kesh was saying. “With biometrics offline, and the bodies… well, you saw a lot of them. You know what it’s like.”

  “They didn’t know they’d found her,” Sloane said anyway. A hollow explanation, an ugly one, but it made sense.

  “Exactly.”

  Kesh pushed into the frigid room and went straight to a desk where two life-support techs were standing by. On the table was a sight Sloane had seen many times in her career: one body. One body bag. She’d never thought, not ever, that Garson would ever be inside one.

  “Where was she found?” Sloane asked Kesh.

  “In one of the apartments near Operations,” came the answer, but not from the krogan. The tech had answered. A gaunt man, with tired eyes. “We were doing a room to room, clearing bodies.”

  The other of the pair added, “Wounds are consistent with all the rest. Environmental damage. Significant burns. It’s… not a pretty sight.”

  The door swung open and Foster Addison rushed into the room. One look at Sloane’s face and the last glimmer of hope bled out from her eyes.

  Sloane waited for the woman to join her at the table, and pulled back the bag. At first, Sloane couldn’t piece together any evidence of identity. Much of her face hid under charred skin. The smell was terrible, burnt and swollen flesh left to rot for untold hours in open air, but Sloane forced herself to stand strong. Don’t gag.

  A somber silence fell over those gathered.

  A million thoughts raced through Sloane’s head. Too many to grasp. To shape. She covered the body back up.

  Addison gripped the edge of the table with white-knuckled fingers. “We’ll have to organize a burial,” she said, voice ragged.

  “Negative,” Sloane replied, cutting the idea before it could grow into something bigger than they could handle. Too harsh, but nothing to be done about it.

  “I agree with the security director,” Tann volunteered.

  “I didn’t ask,” Sloane snapped, but checked her anger. It wasn’t really aimed at him, calculus or not. Besides, his role as acting director just became a bit more solid. There would be no more avoiding him in hope that Garson would turn up and save the day. “Addison, no offense, but a burial is the least of our worries. We don’t have the time or the manpower.”

  “Or,” Kesh rumbled, “the facilities.”

  “We should keep her here,” Sloane continued, grateful for the krogan’s support, “along with everyone else, until—”

  “Until we can do it right,” Tann interjected, surprisingly firm. “She deserves as much.”

  “They all do,” Sloane corrected. She couldn’t help herself. There were nearly a hundred bodies in the room, and they all deserved the respect of a proper farewell.

  Nobody argued. Nobody moved or spoke. Not for a while, save for Kesh who laid one huge hand on Garson’s covered brow. A tender gesture, but not surprising. Garson had moved mountains to bring the Nakmor clan along on this journey.

  It was Tann, in the end, who broke the silence. “We all wish to mourn, but there is a lot of work to do. If I may be so bold, our brilliant founder would have wanted us to do everything we could to save this mission before anything else.”

  It was the kind of thing you couldn’t argue with, delivered with absolute perfect tone and understanding. Sloane gave him a nod of respect for that, which he returned in kind.

  With nothing left to say, to do here at Jien Garson’s side, she left.

  There really was a lot of work to do. The mission depended on them, now.

  And only them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The trio stood in a half-circle, surrounding the oversized stasis pod. The room had a chill to it, and it wasn’t from the air.

  Couldn’t be, Sloane thought. The ventilation systems are barely working. No, the frigid mood came from Nakmor Kesh, who stood facing the pod. She hadn’t moved or said anything for several minutes.

  Best to wait, Sloane decided. Let the krogan mull this over, for it was her decision to make. Sloane glanced at the third person in the room, Calix, who leaned against a table across from her, arms folded across his chest, chin lowered. The turian appeared to be asleep on his feet, and who could blame him? His team had been fighting against the life-support systems for days, and as of yet couldn’t claim any kind of victory other than “it’s not completely broken,” which considering how much damage the station had suffered, was a hell of an accomplishment.

  And then there was the news of Garson’s death, weighing on everyone. The Nexus had a shadow cast across it now, and Sloane wondered if it would ever lift.

  Finally, the krogan stirred, swinging her large body around to weigh the gathering. “Let her sleep,” Kesh said.

  Sloane studied her. “You sure?”

  Kesh nodded, once. Decision made.

  Clan leader Nakmor Morda would, for the time being, remain asleep. Sloane had never met the krogan clan leader, but she’d heard plenty. Bar stories. War stories. Stories of the kind of surly brutality you’d expect from a krogan who’d reached her level of rank and fame. Though Morda led the clan, she had deferred authority to Kesh in matters of station maintenance and care. That left Kesh the de facto leader while Morda slept.

  Morda, it seemed, preferred not to deal with other races unless it was a combat scenario.

  Well, maybe that was an unfair assumption. But Sloane could read between the lines when she had to. Officially Morda had designated Kesh as the Nakmor Clan’s ambassador to the rest of the Nexus. You didn’t delegate that sort of thing unless you wanted to stay far away from it.

  Yet matters within the clan, as Kesh had explained, remained Morda’s to make.

  As long as she was awake to do so.

  “I am sure,” Kesh replied, but on a heavy gust of air. “She would not want to be bothered with all this. Too much collaboration required.”

  Calix grunted a laugh, then tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a cough. Kesh didn’t seem to notice.

  “If it turns out we face some new enemy out there,” she added, “well, that will be a different story. And one no doubt she will relish.”

  “Okay then,” Sloane said, pushing up from the desk against which she’d been leaning. “I’m fine with it if you are. Let’s wake the others.”

  The second c
hamber lay empty, its occupant already disgorged. The unit had failed due to a ruptured casing, resulting in the death of the krogan inside. One of several, and each one handled grimly by Kesh.

  They all moved to the third, and Calix began the revival process. Since the biometrics database was offline, a special maintenance code was required; one Sloane did not know. For the time being, at least, only Calix and his supervisor, Kesh, could initiate a manual waking.

  She liked it that way.

  Calix tapped in the last few characters. He stepped back. “It takes several minutes.”

  The pod began to warm as fluids pumped through the thousands of pipes and tubes hidden within its casing. Soon the crystals of frost on the inside of the window began to vibrate, then all at once they turned to water droplets.

  More time passed.

  “Vitals look good,” Calix said. Déjà vu.

  “I will proceed to the next one,” Kesh said. She didn’t wait for confirmation, simply went about it in the same grim manner.

  Calix glanced at Sloane. “That smart?”

  Sloane lifted her shoulders. “According to the list we’ve got hundreds of crew to wake. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got better things I could be doing.”

  “Don’t we all.” He moved to the next pod and began to manipulate the controls. “At least they get a gentler waking. Comparatively.”

  Sloane glowered at the back of his spiky fringe. “Which reminds me, why the hell didn’t any of you brainiacs put an emergency eject on the inside?”

  “We did.” He didn’t spare her a glance, but his tone brimmed with humor as he carefully tweaked the controls he worked on. “You just didn’t pay attention in class.”

  “That’s—” She hesitated mid-protest. Thought about it. “Okay, that’s fair,” she admitted. She’d preferred training simulations and security logistics to what she’d figured would be a class on insignificant details for a device she’d only be sleeping in.

  Showed what she knew.

  Sloane refocused on the pod in front of her. The process neared completion. Inside, the krogan began to stir. Her hand went reflexively to the pistol at her hip.

  Kesh’s heavy step fell behind her. “Maybe I should handle this part,” she said. “The krogan part, I mean.”

  “That smart?” Sloane asked. Her deliberate echo of Calix’s words earned another amused grunt from the turian.

  Kesh waved her off. “No offense, Sloane, but if any of my clan wake up in a foul mood, it would only be worse if a human were the one to subdue them.”

  Sloane affected wide eyes. “Oh. Then we should give Tann the code and let him do it.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I would pay good money to see that,” Calix called out.

  This time Kesh really did laugh. A deep rumbling that shook her whole body. Sloane grinned, stepping away at the same time. It was good, she figured, to find the moments of levity in the slog.

  “Fair enough, Kesh. Just make sure you explain to them our situation before, during or after your whole krogan thing.”

  “Of course.”

  “If any of them are suffering from—”

  “I can handle it,” she said firmly. “Go wake your team, and get started on the rest.”

  The pod cracked its seal, foul-smelling steam hissing out in a line around the door. It flew open with a whoosh, and a very wet and angry-looking krogan all but surged out, muscles engaged. “Who dares—” the male began.

  Kesh slammed her forehead into his face, sending the krogan sprawling back into his stasis pod.

  Sloane blinked.

  “I have this,” Kesh said as the other krogan roared. Shock or pain or—

  Sloane didn’t even want to consider what else.

  “Yeah,” she said, backing up to the door. “Yeah, I guess you do.” Calix joined her, having initiated the warming sequence on the other four designated pods in this chamber.

  Roughly half of the list consisted of krogan workers, all members of the Nakmor clan. The rest, Sloane hoped, would be easier to manage. She led Calix through the labyrinth of corridors to their next group, and with each step she felt a bit more confident. Having a krogan force on the brink of up and running meant lots more work to get done.

  Security came next. That had been non-negotiable, despite Tann’s protests that the rest of the crew would be less likely to panic if they weren’t waking up to the barrel of a gun.

  “No guns,” Sloane had assured him. “Just a reassurance that things are under control. Remember what these people sacrificed to join this mission, and what they went to sleep dreaming of finding when they arrived. We’re going to crush those dreams, Tann, so we need to be ready for any reaction.”

  The salarian seemed utterly baffled by this, but Addison’s agreement ultimately swung the argument in Sloane’s favor.

  She and Calix worked methodically. Eight veteran members of her team were woken. One’s vitals were suspect, so his warming was paused until a doctor could assess. While the security team acclimated, Sloane and Calix moved on, preparing to wake another group from his staff. Life-support technicians, who doubled as field medical staff. This time there were no malfunctions. Sloane gathered both groups and explained the predicament they were in and the plan, with some technical backup from Calix.

  After that, the process took on a life of its own. Calix became less the technical expert and more of a runner, moving from pod to pod and entering his maintenance override. Sloane debated asking for that ability when they’d started. Things would go a lot quicker if more people had it.

  And another part of her didn’t like the knowledge being held by just two people. It was risky, given the danger they were all in. Those concerns, however, lost out to the down side—if the override privs were disseminated, and people started waking whomever they wanted to without oversight, they could wind up with catastrophic overpopulation.

  The list was already massive enough.

  Eight teams followed Calix, a security officer and a life-support tech in each, to handle the health assessments and brief those who awakened. Doctors and nurses first, then the engineering teams responsible for all of the Nexus’s complex machinery and technology, then various assistants and other random crew either Tann or Addison had insisted be part of the effort.

  By the end of it all, the operation had become self-sustaining. At least until the end of the list.

  Then it was time to put them all to work.

  * * *

  That evening, dead on her feet, Sloane left the security duty in Kandros’s capable hands and found a couch to collapse on in one of the less-devastated common areas. Just as her eyes were sliding shut, Tann and Addison appeared.

  Oh, come on…

  “Ah, here she is,” Tann said, approaching.

  Sloane sat up and propped herself against the cushion. “Now what?”

  “Nothing, we just wanted an update.” Tann grinned. It was probably supposed to be sympathetic, perhaps even encouraging, but to Sloane he just looked smug. “But we can let you sleep.”

  And risk getting called out on that, too? “No, it’s fine.” Sloane ran a hand over her face and blinked. She was too tired to point out that they couldn’t “let” her do anything. A cup of water appeared in her hand and she gulped it down. Only after did she realize Addison had handed it to her. Sloane muttered thanks.

  Now, the summary. “Team leaders from every critical systems group are up, plus some of their crews,” she said. “About a hundred and fifty in all. Sadly, fourteen from the list were dead in their pods, which had failed because of… well, you know. We left them that way, no need to add more to the morgue if they’re already contained.”

  “How awful.”

  “Terrible,” Tann agreed. “Still, it is a better ratio than I’d expected.”

  Sloane could only nod. With some sleep and a meal, she might rip into him for how callous he sounded, but right now she just wanted to get this over with and lay down. “Kesh
woke a similar number of krogan, so we’re about halfway through the list.”

  “Any casualties from their ranks?” Tann asked.

  “A few. They fared a little better.”

  “That’s… good,” Addison said, but awkwardly.

  “Yes,” Tann agreed. “Excellent news, indeed. However, I thought you’d be through the entire list by now.”

  Right. Like he could do better. Sloane eyed him. “Each person we awaken needs some handling, diagnosis, and a briefing.”

  “Still, our capability to do that should multiply, yes?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Only Kesh and her chief life-support tech, Calix, have the maintenance override code needed to open the pods.” She held up a hand. “And before you ask, we’re not handing that code out, because we don’t want mistakes, or more people up than we can handle. Even I don’t have it.”

  He didn’t seem impressed. By the lack of sharing or the numbers, she couldn’t tell. “Fair enough,” Tann said, though his tone carried a lot of skepticism.

  She changed the subject, trading her successes for his. “Any news about what caused all this?”

  Tann folded his hands, looked at Addison.

  She shook her head, frustration evident. “We’re still blind. Sensor logs are a mess of garbage and false alarms.”

  “The sensors were, in fact, damaged during flight, but not to the level the logs seem to indicate,” Tann added. Sloane didn’t fail to note that he left the admission of failure to someone else, while swooping in with his own version of silver lining.

  Bureaucrats. They were all the same, weren’t they?

  Sloane barely even cared enough to nod, then yawned. “Okay. Let me know what you learn. Can I sleep now?”

  “Of course,” Tann said hurriedly, just as Addison patted her shoulder and said, “Rest while you can.”

  She fell onto the cushions, closed her eyes, and was asleep in seconds.

  * * *

  Her dreams were of Elysium, horrors witnessed and committed during the Skyllian Blitz. Pirate assaults had never been a joyride, but the Blitz was something else entirely. The tiny contingent of Alliance uniforms in the far-flung outpost had no reason to assume they’d end up braced against a whole fleet, much less one with a cause.