Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  Irida shrugged, and as they led her across the floor, her bleary, watery eyes focused on the crowd.

  Her mouth twisted. “Cowards,” she spat.

  “Whoa!” Nnebron put his arm around her waist, helping her while Reg moved forward to guide—and ultimately shove—a path through the staring, muttering crowd.

  “They jus’… they jus’ sat… and watched…”

  “Oh, girl.” Nnebron’s voice wavered. “Come on. Let’s go drink this off.”

  “Gonna show them,” she said as they half-pulled, half-led her down the corridor. She turned over her shoulder, her features set in acid lines. “Gonna show you! You don’t understand… What happens when they start this!”

  “Okay, Irida,” Reg murmured, exchanging a look with Nnebron.

  “First people die,” she shouted, stumbling. Reg held her up. “Then rations! It won’t end!”

  Nnebron and Reg, they knew. They’d been there.

  Death. Starvation.

  A leadership that would do anything to save their own asses.

  “Not until we do something,” Irida said miserably.

  Nnebron and Reg both laced an arm around her waist, all but carrying her between them as they strode away from the silent, staring commons. “Okay,” Nnebron said patiently. “Okay. But first, maybe we drink to the memory of the best damn salarian we’ve ever known.”

  Reg nodded in exaggerated agreement, until Irida noticed and tipped her head in mimicry. “Sounds good, right? Let’s drink to Nacho.”

  “To Nacho,” Irida repeated.

  Nnebron’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “To Nacho.”

  “They’ll see,” the asari whispered.

  “We’ll be okay.”

  * * *

  Weeks. Goddamned weeks of watching her compatriots like a hawk, reconfiguring her security patrols and duties to cover the eight officers stolen from her, and dealing with more and more outbursts among the rationed. The reasons didn’t matter—they all varied, anyway. Tempers were short. Fears were high. Stomachs were empty. Water almost gone. One wrong word, a look, a gesture…

  Hell, Sloane had been awake for less than fifteen minutes before she had to bust up a brawl between a krogan and some idiot who didn’t understand lethal differences in weight categories.

  Her head hurt.

  All this because what? The slim hope that their scouts would find some nearby garden of bountiful delights? That the Pathfinders wouldn’t run into the Scourge themselves and wind up torn to shreds before anyone even woke to know about it?

  A grim thought, even for Sloane.

  The tension in the Nexus was palpable, a sort of stretched hope and rising desperation. She felt it in the corridors, in the galley and mess hall, in the training rooms her sec forces used to release whatever stress they could.

  Rations were getting tight. Tighter by the day. Even so, Addison’s faith in the scout ships remained unwavering—a slim beacon of hope slowly bleeding those who held onto it. Faith, determination, was strained.

  Along with everyone’s tempers.

  Definitely Sloane’s.

  She paced hydroponics because at least the budding green hope of future food felt more peaceful than the bare, stark metal and busted plating of the Nexus halls. The krogan were everywhere, handling emergencies, rebuilding hydropod frames, shoring up tattered bulkheads. Sloane hated to admit it—if only because of the prejudices they couldn’t seem to shed—but Kesh’s krogan workforce was a goddamn lifesaver.

  Literally.

  They were also big, and a unit, for all intents and purposes. So far willing to work under rationed sanctions, but for how long? They didn’t eat light.

  Yet another concern among the many Sloane had vying for top priority in her head. The krogan. Tann’s increasing willingness to ignore her advice, if he even sought it in the first place. The near constant stream of scraps, arguments, and quibbles. Those could turn big, fast—and then what?

  Sloane paused in front of one of the shattered hydroponic frames, staring blankly at it while she chewed on that question. Across from her, a krogan grunted as another brought him—her?—a panel to weld onto the frame.

  The hiss of the seared metal and the wicked orange flare of the krogan’s omni-tool lit them both to a wild hue, flickering in and out like a demented strobe light.

  Sloane frowned. She imagined what would happen if Kesh’s workforce decided enough was enough, that their labors weren’t to be taken for granted, or that their bellies needed to be full if they were going to keep up this frenetic pace. She tried to picture her security force standing up to a horde of angry krogan, and shuddered. If things tipped too far, she’d have no choice but to turn her forces on them.

  The very idea of it made her queasy.

  She tucked a fist against her sternum. Heartburn that had been simmering there for the past week, and she made a face as it gurgled.

  Addison said she stressed too much. That she needed a break. Maybe she did. Maybe she stressed just enough. Either way, it didn’t matter. This was Sloane’s job—and despite what snide data-pushers thought about her straightforward way of getting things done, Sloane Kelly didn’t enjoy using her officers as a threat mechanism.

  None of this could be blamed on the crew. They were hungry, scared people. That still couldn’t be an excuse to let them go wild. Somehow, morale needed to be raised.

  But, shit, how?

  Sloane growled under her breath as she spun and paced the distance back to the farthest hydroponics bay. This one gave off a warm glow, nurtured by the light designed to stimulate ecologically sound plant growth. All the hopes in the galaxy rested on these fragile little green blots. Well, on them, and on the scouts Addison had sent out.

  Prognosis? Not good—and for the first time in her life she couldn’t blame the leadership, because she was the goddamn leadership.

  “Shit,” she hissed, reflexively clenching her fist. She wanted to punch something. Anything. And how would that look? Who knew how people would react. Sloane didn’t want to be the flame that lit the damn fuse. No matter how good a brawl might feel right now.

  Fortunately for her unraveling temper, Talini interrupted her brooding with a well-timed comm chime.

  “What?” Sloane snapped, barely giving the asari time to register the visuals much less offer a greeting. Less fortunately for Sloane’s unraveling temper, the asari didn’t look like she had good news.

  “We need you in maintenance, deck eight.” Flat. Grim. “There’s been an accident.” Behind the digitized tension in Talini’s voice, Sloane heard shouting. Pain. Anger.

  The fucking fuse already?

  “On my way,” Sloane said abruptly as she spun on her heel. The krogan watched her go, only the briefest pause in the clanging accompaniment to their work.

  * * *

  The first indication of trouble met Sloane the moment the elevator doors hissed wide. Darkness hid half of the corridor, the other half illuminated in stuttering pulses by lights struggling to maintain connectivity to the grid. Emergency lights bloomed red where they worked, flickered weakly where they didn’t.

  Two medical personnel flanked a stretcher in the hallway. It held a salarian security tech. Green blood stained the emergency bandaging wrapped around his neck, shoulder, and chest. He gave her a weak grin and an even weaker salute, cringing with the effort.

  “Be still, Jorgat,” one of the medical crew said crisply. “Ma’am,” he added to Sloane.

  “How is he?”

  “Lucky,” he replied with a bluntness that told her more about her teammate’s condition than anything else.

  “I’ll be fine,” Jorgat wheezed. Behind the words came a gurgle Sloane didn’t like. She put a hand on the stretcher to stop it, halfway onto the lift. The doors binged unhappily at the interference.

  The medics frowned at her.

  “Who did this?” she asked, ignoring them in favor of the watery-eyed salarian. She bent over the stretcher to keep him from having
to speak up. “What happened?”

  He coughed, and flecks of green speckled her uniform. He managed, at least, a brittle laugh, even if it bubbled.

  “Was a fool,” he wheezed. “Let myself get distracted.”

  “An accident?” Sloane asked, her voice low to keep the rumors from spreading. She needed to put a lid on this, whatever this was, and fast.

  Jorgat shook his head weakly. She understood.

  Sabotage.

  One of the technicians tugged at her arm. “Ma’am—”

  “Go ahead.” Sloane let the stretcher continue, stepping entirely out of the way. The salarian’s large eyes closed in pain. “Take care of him,” she added.

  “We will,” the woman at the front said.

  The doors closed on Jorgat’s coughing fit.

  Did salarian lungs collapse like humans’ did? If so, it would explain the sounds. Nothing time and care and proper medical technology couldn’t fix, but as a spike of anger jammed into the back of her brain, Sloane’s fists clenched. That didn’t matter.

  He shouldn’t even have to be in this position.

  Sabotage. Someone had hurt one of her crew.

  Someone had hurt more than just Jorgat, Sloane realized as she strode down the corridor. The hollow feeling in her gut grew with each step. Bodies hunkered against the plating in the uncertain light, cradling various wounded limbs and digits. Burns, mostly. Electrical? Chemical?

  Talini waited by a large door, a datapad in her hand. She used it to emphatically wave Sloane down. A deep furrow creased her brow, but a once-over told Sloane the asari hadn’t been part of whatever had gone down. No wounds, unbloodied uniform.

  Sloane dragged a hand over her face, pushing strands of hair from her eyes. “Speak to me,” she said. The asari gestured at the knot of uniformed technicians filing in and out of the half-open doors.

  “A pipe carrying coolant to one of the server rooms burst. It burst about fifteen minutes ago.”

  Sloane looked back at the array of injured crew. “That’s a lot of damage for a busted pipe.”

  “High pressure,” Talini replied. She flipped the datapad in her hands and pulled up the information she’d been busily recording. “This is one of the main processor hubs. Kept cooler than others for obvious reasons, but high-pressure conduits were used because they’re—”

  “Cost effective,” Sloane finished dryly. “Yeah, I’ve heard the pitch.” The asari handed her the data. It didn’t mean much to her, but she got the gist—at the critical moment in the timeline, the pressure sensors went off the chart.

  “There were some concerns about the amount of pressure it’d take to keep the coolant flowing, but eventually it was cleared.”

  “Except?”

  “Except,” Talini replied with a sigh, “in case of manual override.”

  Sloane’s half-smile felt brittle. “Right. Jorgat says he was distracted?”

  She nodded. “He says that the shift change for server maintenance had just begun. He knows almost all of them by face, at least, since he’s been stationed down here for a while.”

  Sloane looked down the corridor, where lights peppered on and off in mimicry of the ones behind her. “Did he see an unfamiliar face then?”

  “No.” Talini gestured back, moved toward the server room, and beckoned Sloane to follow. “In the middle of the shift-change, while a few of the techs were swapping the usual greetings, Jorgat says he heard something strange from inside. He came in to look—”

  Sloane gasped when she stepped inside. Her breath immediately fogged, and ice crystals shuddered precariously from panels, plating, and dashboards. Although the physical damage looked minimal, Sloane picked out immediately where the worst of it had occurred. A solid spread of scratched, bent, scarred material.

  “As you can see,” Talini continued grimly, “the paneling didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Neither did that pipe.” Sloane frowned, tracing the signs of damage back to the wall that had buckled under the coolant pressure. It had been shut off already, which she imagined would strain the servers for now, but that wasn’t her immediate problem. The fact that ice still clung to every surface, and the number of coolant-burned limbs in the corridor behind them, made it obvious how cold it really had been.

  She raised a hand to the hole in the wall, testing the edge of the metal. It was still bitterly cold. The edges of the rift peeled outward like a blooming flower. The busted pipe and various other innards had launched shrapnel out into the room.

  Sloane looked back over her shoulder, mentally mapping the spread. Jorgat would have been standing right where Talini stood now. Dead on in that path.

  Damn, the medic had been right. Jorgat had been very lucky. Sloane frowned, angry and frustrated in a tidy bundle called pissed off.

  “What was the sound he heard?” she asked over her shoulder.

  The asari tilted her head, then scanned her data again. “He said, and I quote, ‘Something like a reverse explosion, a kind of whoomp, but backward.’ End quote.”

  “Mm-hm.” She leveled a look on the asari that she hoped didn’t reveal the seething anger roiling up in her chest. “Do me a favor, Sergeant. Pop up one of those circular vortex things of yours.” She gestured. “Toward the ceiling.”

  Talini wasn’t anybody’s idea of a dumb broad. Sloane’s smile showed teeth as comprehension dawned on the asari’s pale blue features.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and gathered her biotic energy, however biotics did it. Sloane didn’t know. She’d gratefully never been a biotic. The humans who were, in her experience, had some killer side effects—at least back in the day. Time and technology had apparently gotten better, but Sloane was old school.

  Asari, on the other hand, all seemed naturally inclined. Talini pulled a singularity out from, well, wherever, forcing a rift in reality that sort of… reverse-popped.

  Sloane nodded.

  “That sound like a backward explosion to you?”

  The purple and blue strains of biotic energy whirled, and even from this distance Sloane could feel strands of her hair lifting. They were too far away to succumb to the wonked-up gravity, but it disoriented her all the same.

  “That could do it.” Talini turned her frown on the rift. “Given the pressure and the chemicals inside, mixing it up via biotics could produce a bottleneck large enough to cause this.”

  “A biotic, then. Asari?”

  “It could be an implanted human,” Talini murmured.

  “I don’t remember anyone cleared on the wake-up roster, do you?”

  “No. At least not anyone with that strong a grasp on the ability,” she admitted.

  “We should go over crew logs,” Sloane said. “Just to be sure.”

  “But you think it was an asari.”

  “Any krogan throwing biotics around you know?” Sloane asked dryly.

  Talini thought about it. Seriously. “No battlemasters around here. Only one I ever heard of was of the Urdnot clan.”

  She was serious. Sloane stared at her, then gave up the thread entirely and said instead, “Let’s investigate the rosters anyway.”

  Talini nodded again, keying in a few items to her datapad. The screen glowed as she lowered it to study the large network room. “This begs the question—why here?”

  Sloane wondered the same thing. The answer, unfortunately, wasn’t too difficult to assume. “Server room, right? Information.” She jerked a thumb at the hole in the wall as she strode back toward the doors. “That’s a distraction. Like Jorgat said. Find some techs capable of going over entry logs. I want this place examined from every angle. You sit down with one of our info-sec crew and access the visual registries. Quietly, Talini. Rumors of espionage or sabotage are the last thing we need right now.”

  “Yes, Director,” Talini responded smartly. She turned and followed Sloane out. The door hydraulics whirred, shuddered, but couldn’t close. Jorgat’s impact had jammed one side off its track.

  Whoever did th
is, whoever put one of her own in the medical ward and put the lives of these techs in jeopardy… Sloane’s hands clenched again. Her teeth locked down on a series of words Talini didn’t deserve hearing.

  She’d find them.

  No more crew members would die on the Nexus. No more civilians, no more techs, no more. This was her station. She’d go down protecting the people in it.

  Especially from themselves.

  * * *

  Irida Fadeer might have swapped her commando leathers for an engineer’s uniform, but that didn’t mean she’d lost her touch. Breaking and entering wasn’t the hard part. A few decades ago she might have relied on brute strength to get the job done, but technical expertise plus experience made it simpler than that.

  Not without some casualties, she admitted silently as she left the engineering bunkroom. She’d done her best, but humans had this saying about breaking eggs to create meals, right? Fortunately, no one had died.

  A big plus in her ledger.

  The other plus being the database she’d acquired. Calix had told them to keep an eye on their supplies, but it wasn’t enough. Between the rations and the rising tension that filled the station, Irida knew something would break soon. They all knew. Calix was ahead of the game, at least, but worst-case scenario? They’d have supplies, but no information. Information made all the difference in situations like this. Especially the kind she’d taken. The protected stuff. The things they didn’t want anyone to have.

  The contents were too much for her to fully digest. She skimmed enough to know it was a true prize, though. Patrol routes. Camera placements. Plenty more, no doubt. Calix could do a lot with that kind of knowledge. Protect themselves, their supplies, and the people still in stasis.

  She couldn’t help her smile. It felt good to do something to ensure the safety of her unit, her crew. Calix deserved that, and so much more. He’d stood up for her, for all of them, before. He’d do it again, and this time she’d have his back, too.

  “Feeling proud of yourself?”

  Irida froze as the security director’s nonchalant voice rolled out from the corridor ahead of her. Sloane Kelly stepped around the corner, her hands empty, gaze sharp as a vorcha smile. Irida blinked. Her insides lurched, but she simply widened her grin and nodded respectfully.