A mixed response, but more in agreement than not. Good enough.
“Bad decisions,” he continued. “Constantly shifting positions and priorities. Outright deception. And behind it all, the possibility we’ll be hit again by this Scourge. Despite all that, their solution is for us to return to cryo. Just take a little nap and all our problems will go away.” More were nodding now. He had momentum. “That’s their plan? That we’re supposed to go to sleep and place our trust in them?
“Well, I won’t,” he said, his voice rising. “My team won’t participate. We’ve refused to operate the stasis pods. We want an election, leaders who can be fair and decisive. Most importantly, leaders who are willing to consider all possible solutions—including abandoning the mission for the sake of our survival.”
A calculated risk, and Calix paused to see what would happen. His own team might turn on him, though that wasn’t likely. The crowd might tear him limb from limb for opposing Garson’s vision.
His team held their ground, and waited.
The crowd split like a cleaved log, and erupted into violence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She heard the sounds of riot and raced toward it. Fifty officers at her back, their boots like thunder on the tiled passageway floor. Sloane clenched her jaw and ran scenarios through her mind. Surround the…
The what? What had Calix and his team become? This was no simple protest. His speech had implied as much. To resist the order to return to cryo-sleep, by definition it made these people a resistance. Some of them, anyway. That meant mutiny then, didn’t it? A rebellion? Did the fucking semantics really matter?
She supposed they did, when it came to meting out punishment. Disobeying orders could be handled with as little as a warning, maybe some time in the brig. Mutiny, though, that meant death. That meant a short trip out the airlock and a long spiral into the nearest star.
The resistance, Sloane decided. For now. Some part of her still wanted to give Calix the benefit of the doubt. After all he’d said in that interview, and how much work he’d put into keeping them all alive, she owed him that much.
She reached the common area first. A few hundred people were jostling, arguing. Some were engaged in brawls. An asari chopped a human in the neck with the flat of her hand, sending the man to the floor in a choking gag. A turian threw punches at another of his species, who returned them blow for blow.
In the center of it all huddled a cluster that moved as one. A circle, all the participants facing outward to protect whoever or whatever was in the center. Maybe someone was down, trampled, and those who’d managed to hold onto a sense of decency were trying to protect them from further damage.
No, Sloane knew better. She saw their uniforms—those of the life-support crew. But even without that, she could see their faces. Expressions she knew well, from a thousand sec-cam recordings and, less often, in person. Thugs and common criminals wore that expression while doing their deeds.
Then she saw Calix, right there in the center of them. They weren’t protecting a fallen comrade. They were protecting their leader.
For a split second Sloane’s eyes locked with the turian. She knew her gaze asked why? And his seemed to say, Because you forced me to. No remorse in that fleeting glimpse, nor any hint that this might end here, peacefully. He and his group weren’t just going to lay down arms.
“Too many civvies around!” one of her officers shouted over the crowd. Sloane refocused on her immediate surroundings. Someone—a human male amped up on adrenaline—whirled toward her and threw a punch without realizing who faced him. He tried to pull the fist back, too late, and caught Sloane on the chin. The bastard was big, and even with his effort to stop himself there remained enough force behind that fist to send her staggering a step back.
She tasted warm rust in her mouth, and spat.
One of her officers, Martinez, stepped in and coiled to strike. Sloane tried to shout no, but only blood came out in an ugly cough. Martinez struck the man in his gut with the butt of an assault rifle. Sloane heard the air woosh from the man as he crumpled to the floor.
Not like this, she wanted to shout. Someone in the crowd saw the attack, hadn’t seen Sloane get hit, and jumped to conclusions.
“Security’s against us!” they shouted. “Resist!”
Sloane tried to grab Martinez by the arm, to hold him back, to appeal for cooler heads. But her fingers missed his bicep. She felt the brush of sleeve against her fingertips, and he barreled into the fray. Her officer slammed into the protester who’d shouted, leading with his shoulder, and the pair went down in a tangle of limbs. The crowd closed in around them, and just like that, Martinez was gone.
The melee changed, then. It took on a life of its own, transforming into an all-out brawl. Sloane knew this moment, too, from past experience. There would be no miraculous return to common sense. No, this would end only when one side was beaten into submission, or retreated. All they could do was push toward that moment, as fast as they could, and hope in the seconds between now and then that no weapons were discharged.
Calix and his circle were making their way toward a bulkhead opposite the one Sloane had entered. She kicked an asari out of her way and moved closer, ducking a punch in the process, returning it with one of her own that landed. A nose splintered under her fist. She didn’t stop, dimly aware that she shouldn’t get too far from her team. For the thousandth time she wished Kandros were here. He’d recognize this and know to stay at her side.
“They’re going for the bulkhead!” a woman shouted. One of hers. Sloane realized the cry had been meant for her.
“I know,” she called. “We’ve got to cut them off.”
And then the woman stood next to her, with her, like Kandros would have. Another officer appeared to Sloane’s left.
“Use your omni,” she said. “Seal it.”
Of course. Sloane knelt and tried to forget the combat swirling all around her now. A knee jostled her. Someone almost stepped on her hand as she struggled not to fall. Finally there was a precious second of calm. Sloane attacked her omni-tool, found the menu, accessed her location marker on the map. Then she found the door, and set it to closed.
She glanced up. The door didn’t budge.
Calix and his group were almost to it.
“What the…” she said to herself. Her eyes narrowed. In her glimpse of Calix she’d seen the omni on his arm, and she remembered. The database Irida had stolen. Among the litany of items it contained, one was bulkhead maintenance codes. Calix had claimed ignorance of the stolen data, but he’d had it after all. That’s how he got into the weapons storage. That was why all of the doors had opened. Everyone had unfettered access to everything—and she’d only left guards at the armory. She’d deliberately kept her forces out of sight, as a way to inspire calm.
“I’m such an idiot,” she muttered. A list of all the vulnerable places ran through her mind. Operations. Security’s offices. The Colonial Affairs hangar. The spare hangar appropriated for supply storage. The water tanks and reclimators. The still-sealed cryo pods.
The vast, unvisited, silent portions of the Nexus. Down a tunnel she herself had helped Kesh clear. Calix wasn’t on the verge of being cornered. He was about to trap her and the rest of the waking crew in a tiny portion of the vast station.
Oh, fuck.
Sloane watched as Calix, his cohorts, and a small army of sudden converts to his cause all entered the access tunnel. She could see a whole fleet of lev-carts in there, and people waiting with them. Piled with rations and water and who-knows-what-else.
Now the door closed, at Calix’s command via a wall panel.
Sloane Kelly called for a retreat.
* * *
She headed toward Operations, sending frantic messages to Kesh as she went. So far the krogan had not replied. Sloane wondered how the Nakmor clan was reacting to all this. They hadn’t exactly jumped willingly back into their cryo pods either.
On the other hand, they wer
e near the end of the list. And besides, Kesh could always threaten them with the wrath of Nakmor Morda, should they complain.
They should consider themselves lucky Morda’s not awake, she mused. Then again, we’re all lucky Morda’s not awake.
Calix had betrayed Kesh, too. Technically he worked for her, one of the few non-krogan teams to report to Kesh. Had he discussed any of this with her? Were they collaborating? Sloane let out a worried sigh. She doubted it. Refused to believe it. Kesh was loyal to the mission, despite her differences with the leadership, Tann in particular.
But damn… if the krogan were part of this. If this turned out to be some kind of coup designed to re-cast the political landscape of Andromeda before old biases became entrenched once again…
“We’d be doomed,” Sloane said to herself. Her team, no matter how well trained, no matter how much help they received from civilians, were no match for an organized krogan opposition.
She glanced at her omni-tool again.
“C’mon, Kesh. Respond.”
Her team passed clustered groups of the Nexus’s crew. Some were gathered around wide-open doors, presumably defending what lay behind. Their work or their own possessions, Sloane hoped—though from what she saw in some of their eyes, their intentions might be decidedly less honorable.
“What’s wrong with the doors?” someone shouted at her. “Why won’t they close?”
“We’re working on it,” Sloane shouted back without stopping. She couldn’t spare the staff to help defend the contents of those rooms. Calix knew this, too, the clever bastard.
She reached a promenade that ran parallel to one of the Nexus’s long arms. The view should have been glorious. Verdant gardens. Personal vehicles streaking along, citizens strolling as they shopped or sought a meal and the company of their fellow crew.
But the wide space had been heavily damaged in the Scourge. Part of the deck above had collapsed along its edge, obstructing the exterior view. The net effect was a wide avenue lined with shops on one side, still packed with their wares, and a mess of debris on the other.
Shots rang out.
Sloane hit the ground even before the noise really registered. An instinct honed over years. She crawled forward to take cover behind a long low decorative planter as rapid bursts from an assault rifle hissed through the air and sparked against the walkway beside her.
There was a pause in the gunfire, and she chanced a look over the wall. All she saw were dark storefronts. Her team had become spread out as they’d made their way here. Only a few of them were with her, the rest still just silhouettes down the long hallway she’d just come through.
“Anyone see them?” she asked.
No one had.
“Spread out,” Sloane ordered. She motioned toward the rest of her officers, now at the mouth of the tunnel, advising them to stay back. Of the four out here with her, three shuffled or crawled farther away from her, taking positions as best they could.
One hadn’t moved since she’d given the order. Sloane felt an all-too-familiar knot of dread in her gut at the motionless, curled body.
A burst of fire clattered against the wall around the tunnel opening, sending her team there scrambling back into the shadows.
“In ten seconds I want covering fire,” she said, just loud enough for the three near her to understand. “Disruptor rounds, for effect, understand? Overhead. Pin them.”
On her belly she crawled to the other end of the planter and brought her own weapon around. Careful to keep her back low—the planter wall stood only a half-meter high or so—Sloane brought one foot up and under her, readying herself to spring.
Exactly ten seconds after her order the three officers began to fire on the row of storefronts. Sloane turned and shouted back at the hallway.
“Medic! Come now! One down, immobile!”
Without waiting for a reply, she pushed to her feet and ran, eyes on the ground to avoid the dazzling flashes that flickered all across the signage above the row of stores. She angled herself for the nearest shop and shouldered her way through the entrance, into shadow.
With any luck the enemy had not seen her cross. The gunplay continued, and it yielded one benefit—intel. She’d counted four of them. One in an adjacent business, three more farther down the row.
Moving through the empty aisles of the dark store, keeping her light off so her eyes could adjust, she swung her weapon at each corner. No one inside. No reason anyone would be, though. The place was empty.
No one at the back of the store, either. In fact the whole row was empty, as far as she knew.
So why were there armed thugs stationed there?
A maintenance door at the back let her into a labyrinthine tunnel system that allowed shop workers to come and go, deliveries to be made without bothering the flow of customers. Activity ahead gave her pause. Low voices and the sounds of gear being moved or assembled.
“You got too greedy,” someone said.
“Shut up and help,” another replied.
She glanced behind her, only to confirm what she already knew. She was alone here. Sloane crept forward in the darkness. The gunfire behind her dwindled into the background, sounding more like distant thunder. Ahead someone swore, then the sound of something crashing to the ground. Sensing her chance, Sloane rushed forward. She entered a small storeroom, empty save for a pair of human men in the uniforms of life support. Together they were trying to load a sack of something onto a lev-cart.
“Step away, hands where I can see them,” Sloane said.
They dropped the bag. Tens of thousands of tiny pale objects skittered and bounced across the floor.
Seeds, Sloane realized.
Neither of the men surrendered. As their loot showered the floor, both turned and ran for the door opposite the one through which Sloane had entered. She stepped forward and let off a few rounds in their direction, aiming low in the hopes of hitting a thigh or knee, and ending their escape. But her foot landed on the carpet of small hard shells and she slipped. Not much, but enough.
Her aim went high and her first shot slapped into the back of the nearest of the two. The man went down, limp before he hit the ground. His companion rounded the next corner and vanished into the store beyond.
Sloane ignored the spilled seeds, aware of their value to the Nexus’s survival but unable to do anything about it now. She paid them only enough attention to keep from losing her footing again. In seconds she crossed the room and stepped over the dead body.
More bloodshed. Sloane feared this was only the beginning.
The hallway split. She could go forward, or up a flight of narrow stairs, probably to some kind of office. Surprise no longer on her side, she flicked on her tactical light and studied the floor. There, on the steps, were the remnants of crushed seeds. She went up, two steps at a time, using only her toes to minimize sound.
When she was two steps from the top the space before her erupted in light and deafening sound. A flash round. She staggered back, blinded, deaf. Almost fell, somehow managed to keep her feet. She could see nothing, hear nothing, but the narrow space made the direction obvious.
Sloane fired blind toward the room at the top of the stairs, full auto now, her weapon set to alternate between armor-piercing and incendiary rounds. Her ears withered under the continued assault of noise, but her vision returned. Not much, but enough. She kept climbing, firing all the way, offering no gap through which the enemy could regain their footing and return fire.
At the top of the stairs she pushed on into the office, still shooting. Tables and chairs erupted into chunks of metal and splintered faux wood. A window at the far end, overlooking the promenade where her team had first come under fire, was suddenly riddled with a line of bullet holes, every other one ringed with black charring.
The window farthest to her right, though, was open, and Sloane just barely caught a glimpse of her prey’s leg as he climbed out onto the signage and disappeared behind the wall.
She leane
d into a full sprint, ready to pursue, but some instinct told her no, danger. She pulled up. Too late. A blow to her shins sent her sprawling. Her gun clattered away to vanish under one of the ruined tables. She twisted, ignoring the searing pain across her legs as she leapt back to her feet.
A fist. Sloane ducked, the blow grazing the top her head. She threw a punch of her own. Solid contact with the man’s stomach. He grunted, doubled over in time to become acquainted with her knee to his jaw.
Her vision began to return in time to watch blood fountain from his mouth. He backpedaled. Sloane went after him, then paused when she saw his hand. He’d been fumbling for a pistol, had it now. She turned and dove toward the table that had claimed her own weapon. Rolling over it, she landed hard on her back as his shots slammed into the metal surface.
“It’s over for you,” the man said, only somewhat intelligible with a mouth full of blood. “Calix has a plan, and he’s ten steps ahead of you. Give up now and you can live—”
A terrible shriek cut his words short.
Sloane heard him crumple to the ground, and behind that, the low crackling of dissipating biotic power. She took a tentative glance over the top of the table. Talini stood there, her blue skin almost iridescent in the dim light.
“You okay?” the asari asked.
“Yeah,” Sloane said. “Yeah, though if you’d been a second later… What did you do to him?”
“Reave,” she answered.
“Not fooling around,” Sloane observed.
Talini raised her chin slightly. “I think we’re past that stage now, don’t you?”
* * *
Ten minutes later Sloane Kelly reached the door to Operations. It was sealed, a good sign. The one barrier that even Calix couldn’t override. She pinged Tann and Addison on their private channel and announced herself. A few seconds later the door opened from within.
She almost collided with Spender coming through. He must have been waiting right inside.
“So?” he asked in an oddly hushed tone. “Did you catch them?”
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