Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  Sloane let Reg take point. He seemed to know the way. Perhaps he’d scouted this room for Calix, helped map its secrets and exits. Or maybe he was just as blind as the rest of them.

  A thunderous explosion came from somewhere across the way. For an instant the far wall became lit with the silhouette of battle.

  Ahead lay a door. Reg turned and leaned toward it and knocked a shelving unit full of spare parts out of his path. Sloane skirted sideways around the mess and heard someone behind her slip and go down. Or maybe the sniper had got them. Too hard to tell now.

  Reg was five meters from the door when it exploded inward. Shrapnel splattered across his body. He dropped, a lifeless sack, and skidded across the final few meters into a cloud of smoke and debris.

  Sloane tried to stop, but those behind her pressed. They’d rather face the unknown than the krogan at their backs. She saw Nnebron at her side now, others behind him. All eyes were on the door as they continued to rush toward it, rifles coming back around to the front.

  “Enough!” a voice shouted.

  The one voice in the entire station that could make everyone in the room stop and take notice. Nakmor Kesh pushed through the smoke. Behind her, Sloane saw familiar faces. Her security team, or some of them at least. And she saw the accusation in their eyes, the disbelief, the growing hatred.

  “Enough,” Kesh repeated, this time for Sloane specifically, all bile and disappointment. In response she held up her hands, letting her rifle clatter to the floor. Those around her were less willing, but somehow she’d become their leader and, after a tense few seconds, they did as she did.

  Nnebron was last, and he stared at her as he let his weapon slip from his fingers. His gaze held equal parts accusation and resentment, as if to say, This is all your fault.

  Sloane Kelly laughed, then, though no one else seemed to get the joke. Somehow she’d become both the reason for their rebellion, and its de facto leader. A failed one.

  Isn’t that just perfect.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  All the fire drained out of their hundreds the moment their leader fell. Even if they hadn’t stopped fighting, even if they’d pushed harder, desperate to the end, it wouldn’t matter. Calix was the heart of them. And the opponent, well, few could be more terrifying.

  Hope had turned to fear, and that fear had fueled a revolution they thought they couldn’t lose. Sloane recognized that. She understood it. Felt the twist in her chest when Calix’s brain and blood had sprayed.

  That didn’t mean she was going to be anyone’s punching bag.

  Lawrence Nnebron was a man on the edge—wiry, angry, and unwilling to let anything go. The moment Sloane entered the crowded cell, he came at her like a man with nothing left to lose, his lips peeled back in a twisted snarl and murder in his eyes.

  As she sidestepped his swing, caught his wrist and spun him around, that look turned to something much younger. Much less sure.

  Soul-deep loss. Of friends. Of self.

  Of his place in the universe.

  The paneling clanged loudly as she rammed him against it, pinning his head to the wall and tucking his wrist high enough up his back that he’d regret moving. He cried out, echoed by the other seven rebels in the cell. Just one cell of many, and all down the hall Sloane heard the arguments, the blame, and the anguish of loss.

  “Stay put,” Sloane demanded.

  Talini watched from the door, one hand hovering. “Will you be okay?”

  As long as the sergeant was there, the others probably wouldn’t attack—but they wouldn’t talk, either. Never mind that Talini wasn’t there to help Sloane at all. She was there to lock her supervisor up for mutiny.

  Ironic as hell, isn’t it?

  Still, the fact she waited long enough to watch Sloane’s back meant something. Sloane shot her a grim smile, intended as thanks, and a silent acknowledgement of everything she couldn’t say.

  The asari didn’t smile back. With a hard set to her mouth, she turned around and shut the cell door behind her.

  For a long moment, the only sounds in the crowded room were Nnebron’s labored breathing and the shuffling of people who couldn’t figure out what the next step would be. They were tired, bruised, bleeding where the hasty bandages hadn’t held. Like Sloane, they were hurt.

  Unlike her, they didn’t have the sheer pride that kept them from showing it. Sloane let out a short sigh.

  “Let’s get this over with. I’m not here to fight.”

  Nnebron jerked, but his arm strained and he froze again.

  “Then get off me,” he snarled.

  “Not until you settle down.”

  “Fuck you,” he gritted out. “Pig!”

  Quaint. Sloane kept a wary eye on the indistinct shapes just in her peripheral, but they seemed content to hover. Without a strong leader, they’d lost their direction.

  Without Calix, they’d lost their heart.

  She was careful not to push the engineer’s arm any farther, not wanting to break it, but she didn’t let up, either.

  “I’m not here as security,” she said tightly. “I’m in trouble just like you. Just like all of you,” she added, turning her head to nod at the others. At the flurry of suspicion and disbelief sent her way, she turned one way, then the other, so that they could see her sides. “Here for the same reasons you are. Calix believed in you. Will you let that go to waste?”

  Sweat beaded her captive’s brow. His eyes screwed shut and he tugged at her grip, only to groan in mingled pain and anger when she didn’t ease up on his arm.

  “Come on, Nnebron.” She spoke to them all. “You guys took up arms against an injustice and your side lost. There’s no getting out of that, for any of us.”

  “But—”

  “I helped as best I could to save your lives from the krogan,” Sloane cut in quietly. A knife’s edge. “I couldn’t save Calix, and for that I’m sorry. I really am. But he’s gone now, and you’re alive. I want to make sure you stay that way, you get me?”

  “What about the rest of our crew?” For a man at a disadvantage, Nnebron managed fierce and determined admirably well. Sloane admired that much, at least. “What about Reg? He died. Ulrich, Calix…” He visibly flailed. “Reg’s husband is still out there, we can’t—”

  “These are the choices we made.” Anger lifted her voice. Dragged audible claws through the crowd, and a grunt of surprise from Nnebron. “Get this through your head! I can’t do much for anyone else while locked in here, does this make fucking sense to you? We have to play the system now. Any opportunity out of this cell will be an opportunity to make new choices.”

  Sloane had done nothing but trust the system since the moment the Scourge caused her crash-wake. She’d done her duty, followed the Initiative’s protocols. Tried to do right by everyone. And this is what it had gotten her.

  Locked up and out of options. Even her fellow captives saw her as the enemy.

  No more.

  “Those who were too injured to be locked up here are under surveillance in the med-lab. Where they will get the care they need,” she added firmly. She had Talini’s promise on that. “Right now, what we have is us. You and me, Nnebron. The people in these cells. That is it. So what are you going to do?”

  His wrist flexed in her hand, as if he intended to make a break for it, but when she braced, he didn’t move. He just scowled.

  Maybe he got it. Time to find out. Taking a gamble, she eased her grip. Drew away just enough that he could peel himself off the wall, but she held onto his wrist. Pointedly.

  “I’m not above kicking your ass until you drop,” she said flatly, “but I don’t want to. It’d defeat the point.”

  The kid snatched his arm away, but only rolled his strained shoulder and glared at her feet. Sheepish, maybe. Or embarrassed.

  Or just… lost.

  Sloane backed away to give him space, but there wasn’t much room to go. She settled for leaving her back against the door, where she could watch the kid and the
others. All of them looked anywhere but at her. Most at the ground.

  The tension in the air wasn’t tight so much as it was heavy—a deeply rooted sense of despair. They’d given up. All of them, even scrappy Nnebron with his last flail for something that felt like victory.

  Shit.

  Sloane wanted to turn around and punch the door. Wanted to yell at the people who’d made the decisions that led them here. Waking Morda, that had been the worst of them all. The nuclear option when the opponent had only sticks. She wanted to wrap her hands around Tann’s skinny little pencil-neck and squeeze until he felt all the pain the krogan and her warriors had caused in that goddamned room.

  Mostly, she wanted to stop replaying Calix’s death, the way his eyes widened, life abruptly snuffed out behind them.

  She wanted a lot of things. What she had was the remains of a ragtag crew and the certainty, the bitter knowledge, that the leadership she’d worked for, advised, had betrayed her. Betrayed them all. She needed to make inroads somewhere. Calix had believed in this group.

  Now Sloane needed them to believe in her. Like it or not.

  She started from a footing she understood. “Here’s how it works. Contrary to popular rumor, there is no way that anyone will be okay with spacing us.” She regretted the time she had suggested exactly that. A moment of pure frustration, and the desire to actually solve one of the Nexus’s problems rather than kick it down the road. Now they were the problem. “At worst, they’ll want to make examples of us through some kind of public circus.”

  A woman wrapped her singed arms around her waist, hugging herself with rounded shoulders. “Will we be executed?”

  “No.” The woman flinched. Sloane gritted her teeth. “No,” she said again, firm but with less bite. She forced herself to remember who these people were. Technicians, engineers, laborers. Hard working and tough as nails, but not fighters. Seen combat, sure, of the worst possible kind. But they weren’t trained soldiers, not as far as she knew. Sloane wondered briefly how many of them were of the sort that left behind checkered pasts. Secrets left back home, scrubbed from official records. And then there were the sympathizers. Last-minute converts she knew next to nothing about. She set that aside for another time. “This mission is too precious for us to lose more lives. Even they know that. But there will be consequences. The question is, are you willing to deal with them?”

  Feet shuffled. Eyes shifted.

  Nnebron lifted his chin. “Are you?” he asked, a challenge in his stare. Accusation flickering somewhere behind. Just like before. You aren’t one of us.

  Maybe that was true. Once. Sloane clasped her hands behind her back, met his gaze with unflinching resolve. “What do you want to hear, engineer? That nobody’ll care that you and yours sparked a mutiny that killed dozens of Nexus citizens and crew?” The kid grimaced. “That you’ll get off with a slap on the wrist and a wag of the finger? What about Reg’s husband?”

  That one earned a full-on flinch.

  She drove it home. “You want to assume he’ll just pat you on the back and say you tried your best?”

  When he blinked rapidly, she took it as a win.

  She shook her head once. “Won’t happen. There will be consequences, and if you want to have any sort of life in this galaxy, you’re going to have to grit your teeth and deal with them. Starting now.”

  “What about the krogan?” somebody asked.

  Nnebron’s eyes sparked with renewed fury. “Yeah, what about them?” he demanded. “They didn’t even stop to negotiate, they just started killing!”

  Sloane had no answer. It was true—they’d done just that. Ordered or not, it was a perfect example of just how much a “workforce” could stand in for an army. Especially a krogan workforce. To admit they’d been deliberately unleashed felt like a perfect way to get these people back on the mutiny train.

  She knew exactly what Tann had hoped to accomplish by releasing Morda. The fact any of them were still alive was a fucking miracle. Surrender or no. But he’d failed at killing them off. Now he had to deal with them.

  Another shake of her head drew Nnebron’s heavy eyebrows together. “The krogan put down an insurgency,” Sloane said. No salt. Just candor. It was all she had. “They won’t be reprimanded. They’ll be praised. Like it or not,” she continued while the rest shuffled and muttered, “the mutiny failed.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Others threw out thoughts, suggestions, but it didn’t matter. Without Calix, they didn’t have a singular goal. An end point for which to strive. They’d stormed the barricade, and got brutalized for their efforts.

  She was all that stood between them and Tann’s twisted sense of logic.

  The decision was made. She read it in the slump of Nnebron’s shoulders. The hang of his head.

  “Fine,” he muttered.

  On that word, the others went still. Slowly, painfully, Sloane watched them try to come to grips with the universe they hadn’t expected. The one where they’d lost. No caring leadership. No fair shake. Just consequences and shame.

  Sloane nodded. “Fine,” she repeated.

  It was all they had.

  In the end, it was all she had, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “This is a nightmare,” Addison declared. It was her opening salvo within seconds of striding through the office door. Caught mid-sentence with a small group of aides, Tann looked up from his informal briefing and frowned.

  “I believe I specifically requested not to be distu—”

  “I know what you requested.” She glared at the aides and jerked her thumb at the door in silent demand. They didn’t even look to Tann to confirm—an oversight he’d have to address sooner rather than later. They hurried out, avoiding her eyes entirely as they went.

  Tann sat back in his chair—a salvaged thing from a conference room, for now—and studied the obviously ruffled director.

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” she replied flatly. Rather than sit, she grabbed the back of a chair and leaned over it. It was a typical Sloane move, but Foster Addison seemed to have adapted it well. He could appreciate a fine fury when it wasn’t lobbing punches at him or aides. “We have wounded in the medi-labs, dead to tend to, a few hundred insurgents to deal with in rooms never meant to be jail cells,” she continued, more loudly with each word, “and our fucking security director—one of us, Tann—is among them!”

  Tann’s eyelids tightened. He laced his fingers delicately, elbows resting on the arms of the chair. “There is nothing to get worked up about,” he said coolly. “The dead will wait until we can handle them properly, and the medics are doing all they can for those who still live.”

  He’d swear one of her flared nostrils twitched. Fascinating.

  “That is an extremely cavalier view of our own dead,” she said, a hiss somewhere under the tightness of her words.

  He shrugged. He was right and he knew it.

  “Of everything we need to address, the dead can wait,” he pointed out. “They are hardly going to come knocking on anybody’s door, unlike the very much alive men and women we must take care of immediately.”

  “What are we going to do about the insurgents?” she demanded.

  “An easy solution.”

  “The hell—”

  “Director, please.” Tann held up one hand, as placating as he could. “At least hear me out.” He gestured at the seat on which she leaned. “Sit.”

  Addison frowned. “I’m good,” she said, “and I’m listening.”

  Well, it was better than Sloane, most days. The salarian allowed the woman her small rebellion, saying nothing more about it.

  “Let’s discuss this like rational creatures,” he said instead. “What has been our primary consideration since waking?”

  “Survival.”

  “True enough. And what else?”

  Addison considered this. “The mission.”

  “Exactly.” He smile
d at her, pleased that despite the horrors of the last few hours, her wits remained. Of course, he’d expect nothing less from the director of colonial affairs. In a strange way, it was nice to see her standing up to him, finally. Showing a little passion and intensity, a trait her file noted but he feared the Scourge had knocked out of her.

  “The moment those people refused to go back into stasis, we started losing ground. With too many mouths to feed, too few resources, and the time and energy of balancing everything, they cost us more than we could afford.”

  “Those people are still part of the Nexus ecosystem.”

  “Exactly,” Tann said. “Exactly.”

  “So?” Addison folded her arms on the back of the chair, leaning in a way that looked less menacing.

  “So,” he repeated, drawing the word out, “to handle the insurgents, all we must do is offer them two choices.”

  “Two?”

  “For the sake of simplification.”

  “Fine.” She raised her eyebrows. “Please don’t say we’re going to space them.”

  Tann chuckled. He couldn’t help it. “Actually space them, as our erstwhile security director had suggested? That would be especially ironic, now that she is one of them, but no, of course not. However, it may be worth pulling a page from Sloane’s own peculiar way of handling situations.”

  “What, like, give them a terrible choice and then a reasonable one?”

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding approvingly. “Option one, we offer them shuttles—”

  “We can’t afford—”

  “Director, please. Allow me?”

  Addison sighed. “Fine, go on.”

  “We offer them shuttles,” he repeated firmly, “and supplies to last a reasonable—but not unreasonably reasonable—amount of time. Wish them well on their journey to find a world more to their liking.”

  “Exile.”

  “Precisely.”

  “In a corner of Andromeda plagued by a death nebula from hell, where all our scouts either failed to find anything useful or disappeared trying? Shit, Tann, just space them, it would be less cruel.”

  “Yes.” Tann’s smile just widened. “And they know it. Sloane does, at least. Which is why option two will sound so much more appealing.”