Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  Synthetic feathers. Specifically, feathers covering two people, and a round of drinks being poured for five more. A larger crowd surrounded them, fist-pumping and throwing bets.

  “A drinking contest?” Where the losers were feathered by synthetic stuffing. And the winners just kept drinking.

  And the bets just kept climbing.

  Addison very slowly backed away, and let the door ease shut again.

  Sloane’s laughter bordered on the hysterical. “And you… you know what?” she gasped.

  Addison turned, still trying to wrap her head around the sight. “There had to be at least fifty people in there.”

  Sloane’s nod sent her off-balance. She fell back against the corridor wall, cradling the Avenger.

  “Drinking.”

  Another nod. Tears began to leak out of her eyes, rolling down red cheeks as she struggled to breathe.

  Addison’s hands lifted to her face, covering her mouth as it dropped open in horror. “And you just rolled right in with your rifle, didn’t you?”

  This had Sloane howling with mirth, sitting down hard on one of the empty decorative tiers stationed at various intervals.

  Unbidden, laughter began trickling up through Addison’s mingled horror and exasperation. “Sloane,” she said, trying for curt. But her humor betrayed her.

  “I know,” Sloane panted.

  “An assault rifle!”

  The woman held it up, barely able to hold onto it. “I know!”

  “You could have used the cameras!”

  But Addison had started laughing too, and as Sloane just shrugged in elaborate, breathless hysteria, she gave up all pretense and just let it all fly. Addison hadn’t seen that much smiling or heard laughter like that since the drunken reverie of the departure celebration.

  That had been months… make that years—make that centuries—ago. The last time she’d seen her fellow directors.

  Inappropriate, yes. Untoward. Overreactionary. But as the doors slid wide and two humans stumbled out, a barrage of shouting, howls of the losing betters, and wild cheers followed them out.

  Peals of laughter filled the corridor. “What, hey, Directors!” said a cheerful human.

  Sloane could only wave them aside. “Let them drink,” she told Addison, still chuckling. “Blow off steam. If it gets rowdy, I’ll send in a few krogan to glare.”

  Addison winced. “Maybe less krogan, more coffee?”

  “I sup—”

  The comms crackled to life all around them. “Warning! Brace for impact,” came the order, and all amusement abruptly died. Sloane caught Addison’s arm, who swept another around the most unsteady of the humans staggering by.

  Just in time. The station shuddered.

  Then it rocked.

  * * *

  Na’to yelped as a large fist grasped him by the front of the suit, jerked him bodily out of the hatch. He felt the sole of his boot catch on something, heard it clatter. “Watch it,” he exclaimed, already attempting to twist around to check for damage.

  “No time!” Arvex’s voice, never quiet, now practically buried him in its intensity. “Get back to the hatch, go, go!”

  Na’to flailed as the krogan slammed him feet-first onto the deckplates. For a moment, he forgot that he’d switched the magnetization of his boots off to work within the delicate interior of the power conduit. When the hand in his suit let go, Na’to felt his feet lift again. “Emergency,” he said, then louder, “Emergency!”

  “Rock-dumb salarian, turn your boots on!” That hand grabbed his faceplate this time, spun him around and slammed him back to the plate. Arvex waited until Na’to’s boots sealed to the deck. Once assured Na’to wouldn’t go careening off into space, he pushed him toward the other krogan—Wratch, he thought dumbly.

  “Nacho, don’t just stare!” Reg’s voice, slack tight at the gear securing him to the station.

  A spray of bullets erupted just behind him.

  His brain, deeply invested in fuses and synaptic power cores and the unfortunate mess of wires he’d corrected along the way, struggled to catch up. At least until the first bit of debris clipped his shoulder.

  It didn’t hurt. Not really. It was too small for that. Na’to flapped a hand at it, forcing his magnetized boots to unlatch and make for the airlock. It spun away, a rotating disc of something or other. Out of my field, he thought. He didn’t do structural.

  “Na’to,” Andria warned, her voice high and even younger in consequence. “Focus!”

  He shook his head, pulling his attention back to the deck he walked across.

  And to the virtual landmine of debris ahead.

  Some small. Some medium.

  Some very, very large.

  All of it caught in ephemeral tendrils of black and orange and yellow and—

  “It moved!” he exclaimed, so fascinated by the concept for a moment that he stopped trying to run.

  Behind him, a loud clang jerked his attention back to the hatch. Nakmor Arvex knelt over it, grunting with effort as he secured the bolts back into place. Overhead, debris spun and gathered, whipped into frenzy. Whether it was the energy fringe turning large debris into smaller, the collisions of each as they magnified, or the bullets peppered by the krogan as they attempted to target debris out of their path, it only served to make it worse.

  Action and reaction.

  Calculating the rate of motion plus the additional force caused by the krogan’s efforts at firepower control, eyeballing the distance to the airlock—

  None of it mattered.

  “Oh, shit,” Andria whispered. “Ohshitohshit—”

  “Get your slimy carcass inside,” roared Arvex.

  Na’to tried. Panting, struggling to coordinate his slim build and the heavy magnetized grip of the boots, he struggled to take strides that would eat up the hull. Get him closer to the airlock. To safety.

  Behind him, Arvex swore—or yelled or encouraged. Na’to couldn’t be sure; it was all krogan to him.

  What he did know is that at the rate of force between the remains of a spinning rover and his own feeble momentum, he wouldn’t make it in time.

  The comms filled with too many voices, yelling and shouting, pleading and encouraging.

  Na’to looked up, saw nothing but somehow just knew. He jerked to the side, forcing his boots to unlatch. It threw him sideways, a floating kind of dodge, but it also pulled him free of the station hull.

  Just as molten red furrows scored through the plate.

  “Out,” Wratch bellowed on comms. “Seal the warehouse!”

  “But Na’to—”

  “I got him,” Reg said tightly.

  Na’to’s safety went taut. He flailed, caught in a free-float that sent him careening into a large portion of a broken wing, jarring every bone in his body and ones he’d feel later, too. Black flashes turned to white behind his eyes, and as he clung to the bit of metal, he managed, “Here! Pull!”

  “Don’t pull,” Arvex shouted, but too late.

  Reg yanked on the cord. Na’to’s fingers ached around the rim of the torn wing, and the air jerked out of his chest with the force of it, but he felt himself move.

  Felt the whole thing move with him.

  “No,” he muttered. Then, forcing the membranes over his eyes open, yelled it louder. “No, no! Let go—!”

  Krogan curses filled the line as Na’to stared, horrified, at the surface of the station. From this vantage, the horizon spread wider, farther than any of them could see from the hull itself. The void of space, black and blue and red and white and every beautiful color stretched out in unfathomable eternity.

  Captured, it seemed, as if in a perfect sphere of tangled nebula.

  “Let go,” Arvex ordered.

  Numbly, Na’to obeyed. His hands spasmed, the sheared metal fragment peeled away as his whole body jerked to the side.

  “Out, out!”

  “Reg!”

  Na’to couldn’t see what was happening inside the warehouse. Could
n’t place the edge of the hull or the deck he’d stood on. He spun, out of control, in a slow circle.

  But the trajectory of the wing, that hadn’t changed.

  “Brace for impact,” Arvex roared on the line.

  Him? Heh. Na’to couldn’t. Not out here. He watched helplessly as the disaster unfurled in unstoppable, achingly slow motion. The slack around his waist unfurled. The sound of his own breath in his helmet thundered.

  And down below, mere meters from the likely impact of debris to hull, Arvex had both hands wrapped in Na’to’s secure cord, feet braced and locked, every breath a growled echo of Na’to’s own.

  The salarian splayed his hands. “Let go,” he said, calmer than he thought he’d be. His brain ran thousands of kilometers a second, no, a nanosecond. He knew what this looked like. What it’d end with.

  That wing was going to do more damage than the already struggling structure could handle. The Scourge would tear through the rest. Somehow, miraculously, Na’to hadn’t floated right into the thicket rising like a terrifying black sun just past the warehouse hull breach—but no, he thought.

  Not miraculously.

  A krogan.

  And it would kill them both.

  “Let go,” he said again, louder. He wrapped the cord around his wrist, pulled. But his might was nothing compared to an angry krogan.

  “Na’to,” Andria cried.

  “The hell I will,” roared Arvex, yanking back with all his strength. “I said I’d keep your boots on deck and Nakmor keep our word.”

  With nothing to brace against, no support, he had no way of stopping the thick-headed reptile-spawn from playing this through. Heroism, he reflected as everything drifted into one inexorable outcome. The heroism of krogan, of salarian. Of those who struggled to rebuild what was already lost.

  The first sparks shot golden arcs across the hull as the giant mass of debris collided with the station. The secure rope Arvex wrapped around his arm grew thicker, the stars and sparks reflected in his tempered faceplate.

  Na’to smiled. “Andria… Reg… Seal the outer antechamber. The hull will buckle at approximately fourteen points.”

  “Damn it, no!”

  Arvex hissed a long, hard sound as the hull cracked under his feet. Bent and rolled like metal shouldn’t. The nest of harmless-looking threads rose in Na’to’s field of vision. Tendrils brushed debris, sheared it through. Cast even more to scatter, to pepper the station.

  He watched it come closer. “Krogan, unless you wish to join me, let go.”

  Far too late. Far too little. The hull snapped back against the collision force and threw the krogan hard off the plating, breaking the magnetic seal holding him on. His shout was buried in the sudden chatter on comm lines, the rush of too much breath. Gasping. Yelling.

  And the thought that consumed Na’to.

  Just one.

  “Tell them,” he said quietly as he careened away from the station. “Tell them the Scourge is aptly named.”

  Poetic. To be named by a salarian and fit so well.

  Whatever else he might have said, whatever other feedback he could have given as the first tendrils scraped past, it died in the sudden system failure of his electronics. The comm. The air regulators.

  New tech. Old tech. It didn’t seem to matter.

  The Scourge tore through it all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Where one emergency ended, another took its place. The progress made before the loss of life was buried beneath the weight of the knowledge derived, and Kesh could offer nothing but the steadfast words of a krogan to Calix for them.

  He stood in one of the few places Kesh preferred to have such meetings, an out-of-the-way office rarely found or sought after. He stared out over what should have been a courtyard of some kind, but remained dark and closed. Silent.

  Kesh put a large, heavy hand on his shoulder. Squeezed. “He died well, Calix. With honor even my krogan salute.”

  “Yeah.” The turian’s voice fell flat. “I’m sure he did.”

  The lack of respect for her words didn’t bother her. Kesh knew something of what he was feeling. Krogan were no stranger to loss, but to lose to something so vicious, so unpredictable as this Scourge…

  She let out a gusty sigh. “At the very least,” she said, letting him go, “he confirmed for us what we’d suspected. The energy that drifts around us is not harmless.”

  “Worse,” he muttered. “It’s hungry.”

  “Maybe.” She turned away, lumbered for the door. “More like we are hungry, and in our haste to rebuild, we neglected the real priorities. Return to your unit, Calix.” She paused at the door, braced one large hand on the frame, and looked back at the forlorn turian, his head bowed. “The power conduit they’d intended to fix held, Calix. The hull damage didn’t rupture the core. There’s something in that worth holding onto.”

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t say anything. He simply nodded, slowly. Wearily.

  Sympathy and determination made for difficult friends. Lacking anything better, Kesh sharpened her voice. “Let’s make sure we lose no one else.”

  Calix said nothing.

  She left him in silence and shadow, hoping that he was as strong as he needed to be. That he’d gather up his sorrows and his grief and press on. His team needed him.

  This station needed him.

  And they all needed the lives he and his crew kept alive.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sloane expected something of a rollercoaster ride, but the highs and lows of the recent weeks were wearing on her.

  On the upside, work got done. Progress was made, and quite a lot of it. Kesh’s krogan were efficient and basically tireless. If they grumbled, it was indiscernible from the usual krogan surliness, and so didn’t require security to monitor. Not even the loss of one of their grunts put a dent in their work ethic.

  Cold, maybe. Sloane couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the krogan way. Krogan died. That was kind of what they did, right? Lived big, full, bloody lives and invariably bit the big one.

  So they kept working.

  In the interim since the collision with the Scourge, no one had tried to steal another ship, or take more hostages, or go on a murderous rampage. Even if they had, the hidden cameras she’d ordered info-sec to install were in place and functional. Had they been needed, they existed.

  And if they were never used? Even better.

  Tann hadn’t asked for specifics, and Sloane didn’t offer them. Somehow, she didn’t think the salarian would go for what he’d call spying, but which Sloane called common-freaking-sense.

  On the downside…

  Calix.

  The set of his features when she’d sat through a painful meeting about power draws and energy reserves made her chest hurt. She had seen turians pull through more than their fair share of pain and loss. Kaetus had once explained to her, in his usual surly way, that turians learned to process loss like factors in one’s life. Every victory was achieved on the back of those who didn’t make it.

  It made the victory somehow better. Mean more.

  Sloane understood. You didn’t strive for success without losing something along the way. But it was her job to keep that to a minimum, dammit.

  Not that she could do much against this Scourge. She’d had her hands full with the mass panic inside the commons, and more than a few injuries thanks to that. The Scourge hadn’t rolled all the way through, thank whatever god still hung out on this floating wreck, but the aftershocks had left the whole populace looking panicked for days.

  Calix, he didn’t do panic. Weeks after he’d lost Rantan Na’to, his face still bore the sign of his mourning. His whole team felt it. Shock, mostly. Two of his crew had been given temporary leave—she didn’t know where they’d gone off to, but if it was her, she’d guess somewhere the booze still flowed.

  But he pressed on. So did she.

  They all did. And according to Calix, life support was that much safer. Thanks to his salarian team
mate.

  And the krogan who’d tried to protect him. Nakmor Arvex.

  A salarian and a krogan step out for repairs…

  The joke wasn’t supposed to end in death. How was anyone supposed to guess that they’d blindsided right into a Scourge patch? Without sensors, they were all blind.

  But the damned things refused to work. And there was only so much she could do.

  The only thing they had going for them was confirmation. The Scourge blew. Also, it blew things up. Namely, the Nexus. And anything that got in its path. How, why, was a mystery for scientists to unravel.

  Her job was to make sure nobody panicked. This was getting to be something of a crapshoot.

  With some semblance of routine came time to think, and with time to think came a sudden abundance of opinions. Everyone she talked to lately seemed to know exactly what the crew’s priorities should be. Who just had to be woken.

  They should abandon the station and set up a colony on one of the planets. All in or bust.

  They should disperse everyone to the farthest corners of the station, in case the core experienced another catastrophe.

  They should test weaponry on the Scourge.

  They had to turn around and go back to the Milky Way.

  They needed to put a billiards table in Commons 4.

  Sloane agreed with that one. The rest, though… not so much.

  She sat in one of the intended parks, borrowing a little peace and quiet while everyone else busied themselves with, well, staying busy. The days had proven one thing for sure: No matter the to-do list on everybody’s plate, any effort at relaxation seemed to turn into panic. The Scourge, the lack of the Pathfinders, the loss of life, the next collision…

  And when the opinions turned to panic, to fear, to anger, it seemed as if people sought her out specifically. To yell. To plead. To demand.

  She’d wanted to lead. To make a difference. Here on the Nexus, people looked at her, spoke to her, with certain expectations. She could see fear in their faces if she had a scowl on her own, whether it might be due to a reactor failure, or gastrointestinal issues. One wrong twitch on her part and the effects rolled out like ripples.