Mass Effect: Initiation

by N. K. Jemisin

  Somehow the idea of having more tech in her head hadn’t really appealed to Cora. Still, she’d agreed, and the installation, performed in Theia Station’s small medbay, had actually been easier than she’d expected.

  They were going to need every bit of help that they could get for this mission.

  * * *

  “The station where the tech is located is owned by an incorporated collective called the HOME Group,” Cora explained to Ygara’s team.

  They were in the Audacity’s cramped cargo hold, since the ship wasn’t large enough to have a briefing room. As the others sat or sprawled across crates and repair tables, Cora stood and used her omni-tool to project an image of the target: a large space station whose design was plainly an attempt to emulate the Citadel, though this one had several dozen small platforms around its docking ring, instead of just five large ones. The whole arrangement looked almost floral. It looked a lot less stable than the Citadel, too, but that was to be expected; no one could build like the protheans.

  “The whole thing is a joint corporate-government venture,” she continued, “operating under a limited Earth-orbit satellite license. Note that by ‘government’ I don’t mean the Alliance.” Aliens always thought of the Systems Alliance as the human government, and Earth as a unified political entity. For anyone present who didn’t know, she added, “The Alliance is only the largest nations on the planet—about ten percent of the total number, really. This station’s backers are a consortium of small non-Alliance nations.”

  “Why’s that matter?” Kih asked, frowning. “On Tuchanka, every clan does whatever it wants, with only the dominant clan driving the Tomkah. Another clan doesn’t like it, it’s up to them to conquer everybody and become dominant instead. Nice to hear you humans are just as civilized.”

  Ygara groaned. “Is it bad that non-Alliance governments are involved?” she asked before Cora could answer. “Because I think that’s bad.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Cora admitted, and it was exactly as bad as Ygara thought. The Alliance, which maintained a significant influence on space elevator and orbital airspace rights, had pressured the governments of Earth to stop granting planetary-orbit licenses decades ago. Nowadays it took serious political heft to get approval for something like a space station.

  “They’ve got a few politicians in their pocket,” Cora continued. “Nobody on the Council knows them from human, of course, but by Earth standards these are big names. It would be best if we don’t get captured, which would give them a chance to turn a case of local corporate espionage into an interstellar incident.”

  “Yeah, don’t you hate those?” drawled Octavia.

  The Initiative VI fed Cora the details, and she shared them with Ygara’s crew.

  Home Away, the station built by the group, had been billed as a safe, local, small-business alternative to the distant planetary ventures being funded by Big Colonialism. Get away from it all without going anywhere, the ads said—and for a not-at-all low price, Earth families could purchase a bungalow on one of the station’s private or semiprivate platforms. They’d get acres of landscaped lawn, a perpetual view of Earthrise, access to top-of-the-line VIs, and mechs for household management, education, and entertainment…

  Basically, all of the amenities that rich humans had once acquired by fleeing to city suburbs, back before the planet’s population had passed the ten billion mark.

  Naturally people with that kind of money could afford top-of-the-line security. “Mostly high-end mechs,” the Initiative VI said in its soft, androgynous voice, speaking into Cora’s earpiece. Four years on Thessia had taught her to assume the feminine gender in any situations of doubt, though Ryder had referred to the thing as “him” a few times, so she was trying to get used to thinking of it that way. “Plated against standard energy weapons and run by a Synthetic Insights SleepEasy Series security VI. This VI has a very fast response matrix, compared to others of its caliber, and a cyberwarfare defensive suite that is industry-standard. Additionally there are a few heavy mechs, turrets, and other anti-personnel weaponry; I’m downloading the full inventory to your omni-tool now. There is also reason to believe that a small human paramilitary force resides on Home Away, handling ship approach and onboarding/customs.”

  There was just the faintest hint of disdain in the VI’s voice as it spoke of Home Away’s VI. Or had she imagined that?

  Nevertheless, it was a formidable gauntlet to run, Cora had to admit. And all for a high-tech “retrieval” of stolen data. This wasn’t quite the career next-step Cora had imagined when she’d left the Alliance.

  Then again, it wasn’t as if every mission she’d run with Talein’s Daughters had been on the up-and-up. And at least in the Initiative, it seemed as if she would have less paperwork—provided they finished the job successfully.

  “I want this tight,” Cora said, after she’d given them as much intel as she could. “Get in, get out. Priority is acquiring the asset, but secondary priority is to minimize casualties, on either side. These people are just doing their jobs, they don’t deserve to die or be permanently injured.”

  “And I’m not getting paid well enough to have to break the news of your death to your families,” Ygara added.

  “All of the above, plus fatality-free?” Octavia whistled between her sharp teeth. Behind her, several members of the team brought up their omni-tool displays to look more closely at the schematics and armament list, some of them murmuring to each other. “I do like a challenge, but whew.”

  “I really was hoping to come back from my Pilgrimage,” said Hanon, or Shilu. He fiddled uneasily with one of the seals on his suit until his brother swatted the hand away, with an air of habit.

  “I really ought to charge you more,” Ygara muttered.

  “Too late to renegotiate,” Cora said to her, half-smiling.

  “So what is this ‘asset’ you’re after?” Ygara asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Cora sighed. She’d asked the same thing of Ryder a few hours before. “It’s proprietary code for one of our key systems,” he’d replied. “I’ll tell you more once you’ve brought it back.” She didn’t like hiding things from Ygara, but there was nothing to be gained by telling her.

  “How many targets have we hit without knowing exactly what we were taking out?” she countered.

  The asari sighed. “Plenty, but remember, I quit commando work. Shady dealings like this are part of the reason why.”

  “I understand,” Cora said. She really did. She hadn’t yet decided whether she liked Alec Ryder, and she definitely wasn’t sure how much he was keeping from her, but she knew enough to trust that he wouldn’t casually put her in harm’s way. So… for the moment she sighed and wiped the hologram from the air, moving to sit on an unoccupied crate. “We’ve still got to get through this, though. Fortunately, I think I’ve got a plan. How are your acting skills?”

  * * *

  Home Away was a lot bigger up close than it had seemed in the schematics.

  Not as flimsy-looking, either. As their shuttle banked on approach, Cora could see a webwork of carbon nanofilaments reinforcing the branching platforms of the station and its circular hub. The illusion of delicacy remained, though, and maybe that was what the station’s denizens wanted.

  Each of the platforms that she glimpsed in passing was a small green world of its own: beneath barely visible mass effect fields there were trees, expansive lawns, lakes, and even a few golf courses. The “bungalows” were sprawling, multi-leveled mansions, some bigger than the cargo freighter Cora had grown up on. One platform even seemed to have a hill built onto its hubward edge, with a tiny ski lift. How they’d get snow to stick to the topmost part of the hill, which pierced the mass effect envelope, Cora had no idea.

  “Say again?” This was Home Away flight control, speaking over the shuttle’s comm. A young man’s voice, and he sounded annoyed. “Eezo converter inspection?”

  �
�That’s what I said,” Ygara snapped. They’d all agreed that she would perform best in this role. “We’ve sent you our credentials, and I told you—this is routine and required for every Council species facility using a class-two or above drive core.”

  “I understand, but if you’d just logged your flight plan in advance—”

  “What part of ‘surprise inspection’ do you not get?” she said, interrupting him convincingly. “Honestly, if you humans can’t even be bothered to read up on safety regulations like a civilized species, that’s not my fault. No wonder Alliance ships have had so many drive core accidents!”

  “Oh, for—” The young man sighed. “Fine. Your credentials check out. Transmitting coordinates for landing.”

  Grinning, Ygara cut the comms, and Kih took them in steady for a landing.

  Everything hinged on Home Away being partially government-funded. With government funding came government oversight—and a long list of official inspections, which Suran had pointed out as providing them their way in. So now they’d chosen to play an inspection team from a small-yet-influential Council agency known best for once hitting a batarian refinery with an unprecedented nine thousand separate violation fines. The batarians had tried to bribe the inspector. He hadn’t taken it well.

  Suran, with some assistance from the quarian twins, had concocted suitable identities for them and breached the back end of the agency’s extranet site, to insert false personnel files that would disappear after the mission.

  The shuttle settled onto one of the hub’s landing pads, and Cora, Ygara, Tella, and Hanon—who had a scuff along the upper right edge of his faceplate, Cora noticed—disembarked. Kih stayed in the shuttle—“No sense scaring the crap out of ’em right off the bat,” he’d said with a hint of pride—and the others monitored the mission from the Audacity, which Home Away’s largely unsecured comms made easy. The station’s defenses were structured around protecting its residents’ assets from scammers, skim-hacks, and the like, not thieves who showed up in person.

  Nothing else about the mission would be easy, though—and worse, the whole thing would have to be done without weapons, since inspectors wouldn’t carry them. That was why Ygara had chosen her team carefully, declaring that anyone coming along for the ride needed to either be capable of fabricating weapons, like the twins’ drones, or be a weapon.

  As they stepped onto the soft, perfectly manicured grass of the disembarkation area, a door in the nearby administrative building slid open to emit a rather harried-looking older Latino man in a neat business suit. “Welcome to Home Away,” he said, not smiling. He looked all of them up and down and clearly found them wanting. They’d worn civvies for the operation—simple business-casual black shirts and pants, trying to look relatively uniform—but they still must have managed to fall short of whatever professional standard the administrator was expecting.

  The administrator’s scrutiny made Cora’s skin prickle. In the past four years she hadn’t spent more than a few days out of body armor; she felt naked and strange without it.

  “Will this take long?” he demanded.

  “That depends on you,” Tella said with such genuine friendly charm that the man blinked. “I just have a few questions. If you could answer them while my team proceeds with its inspection?” She called up the list of questions on her omni-tool. Between Octavia and the twins, they’d come up with a nice, challenging list of fifty or more. Even if the man rushed through them, it would take at least an hour. More than enough time to pull off the job.

  “Wait,” the man said, frowning and turning as Ygara, Hanon, and Cora peeled away to head off in separate directions. “We can’t have people just wandering around—”

  “We’ll stay within the administrative area, and of course your hub core,” Tella responded, smoothly stepping into his line of sight. She was playing team leader for this part of the infiltration. “My people are experienced professionals, I assure you. This shouldn’t take long. Now, Mister—oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “She appears to be doing well,” the Initiative VI commented into Cora’s earpiece, as she finally slipped into the administrative facility and out of the man’s sight. There were a few other administrators in view, sitting at workstations and desks within the open-plan room. Some looked around at her in bored curiosity, smiling with polite customer-service detachment; the rest mostly ignored her. Reassured by their lack of interest, Cora set her omni-tool to navigation mode. It flashed directions and a distance countdown to the facility’s data center—her target—so she set off in that direction, trying to project busy indifference as she passed other Home Away staff.

  “Interesting,” the VI said. Cora blinked. It wasn’t the first time the VI had made unsolicited comments; she supposed Ryder had programmed it with a better-than-average personality matrix. But this time, the VI had actually sounded interested. “Lieutenant H-H-Harper, I am monitoring your progress via sensory input data. A moment ago, when you glanced back—did you notice that man’s neck?”

  Sensory what? But Cora was distracted from this—and that weird stutter in the VI’s voice—by the question. She stopped and pretended to refasten one of her shoes, trying to make the movement casual, and looked around. It took a moment to realize the VI meant one of the men she’d just passed. He was wearing a gray business suit. The man’s suit collar obscured whatever she was supposed to see. “Uhn-uh,” Cora said, trying to make this sound like throat-clearing.

  “You may subvocalize,” the VI said. “As if you’re speaking the words in your head while reading, but without moving your lips. I’m capable of interpreting minute involuntary muscle adjustments with seventy percent accuracy. Please note that this is an experimental feature only, and may not be available in standard or commercial implementations of my codebase.”

  Well, aren’t you handy, she thought.

  “I t-t-try to be.”

  Cora blinked. She really was going to have to commend Ryder on that hint of wryness in the VI’s tone, and remember not to subvocalize her own thoughts, if she didn’t want a VI playing mind reader. The way she was doing now. Anyway—

  “So what was I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Recent micro-scarring on the back of the neck.”

  Cora frowned, thoughtful. She had some old micro-scarring on the back of her own neck from the installation of her biotic implant when she was eighteen—a smooth, unnaturally uniform patch of skin that blended well visually, but which had a slightly different texture from the surrounding skin when she touched it. Top-of-the-line microsurgical healing had left all the color variations and minute imperfections of normal skin, but not many could afford that. Amazing that the VI had seen it… somehow.

  “Biotic?”

  “While it’s certainly possible to install a basic L1 implant in a biotic who was not identified until adulthood,” the VI said into her ear, “that would be an unusually invasive procedure for results that are likely to be of limited, non-combat use.”

  Yeah, that was what Cora thought. There were other implants people could get—subdermal comms, cosmetic implants that did things like tighten the skin with small electrical charges—but most of those didn’t get installed near the brain stem. She resumed walking, lest she seem suspicious.

  “If I may suggest,” the VI continued, “the size and nature of the scarring suggests a more invasive, non-medical procedure. Perhaps a more extreme augmentation?”

  Cora’s omni-tool buzzed slightly against her skin to get her attention; preoccupied with the conversation, she’d missed a turnoff that she needed to take to reach the data center. Annoyed with herself, she turned back and headed in the right direction. “That’s very interesting, but is it relevant to the mission?”

  “No, Lieutenant. My a-a-apologies for distracting you.”

  She scowled. “What’s with the stuttering?”

  “Minor feedback interrupting my quantum text-to-speech integrative protocol. Within experimental parameter
s. N-n-nothing to worry about.”

  Experimental. Right. She let out a breath. “Well, just carry on as best you can.”

  The VI went silent.

  The data center for the colony was secured behind two layers of encryption and an airlock door, but the twins had been on it since the planning session. Government inspectors possessed override keys for any project that received public funding, though they were notoriously hard to duplicate. “But an elegant enough hack looks just like a key,” Shilu had said—so now Cora aimed her omni-tool and ran the hack they’d crafted for her. It worked like a dream, and a moment later the heavy, circular door began to iris open.

  Cora suffered a sudden flare of doubt.

  That was too easy.

  Then she immediately tried to squelch that flare because, well, that was too easy was the sort of thing people always thought in vids and holonovelas before everything went tentacles-up.

  No. The mission wasn’t over yet, and anyway, having a crack team was supposed to make things easy. That was something Nisira had drilled into Talein’s Daughters again and again: plan it to death, then plan it some more. The asari hadn’t dominated the galaxy by being impulsive.

  But these thoughts were just as distracting, and dangerous, as the VI’s nattering. Cora set her jaw and switched to team-only comm. “I’m in the data center. Shilu, any security alerts after that hack?”

  “None,” the quarian said, voice hushed as he spoke so that no one near her would overhear. “And I’ve taken the liberty of infiltrating Home Away’s few secure comms, now that we’re within the facility’s firewall. Hanon’s monitoring the chatter. So far, so good.”

  Nodding to herself unnecessarily, Cora headed into the data center. “Copy that. Sitrep?”

  “Kih has asked for and received permission to refuel the shuttle, and is proceeding to do so.” Octavia’s voice came over the comm. “The facility administrator is on question twelve of fifty-four in our survey; Tella is providing unhelpful answers to his questions. Ygara is in position near the forward operations area for Home Away’s paramilitary troops. As cover, she’s checking power flow controls. Turns out there’s a significant fluctuation. These people really ought to clean their eezo emitters more often.”