“Very well, Lieutenant Harper.” But she could practically imagine the AI shaking his virtual head.
SAM-E guided her through the motions of bringing the engines back online and initiating the landing sequence. Cora saw that this brought them in on a slow, wide, oblique arc, giving the facility plenty of time to notice and hail them—or at least to take any security features offline. Cora herself was half braced for the crackle of the comm, trying to think of what story she would give when they were challenged.
But the comm remained silent.
No alarms registered as they passed within the facility’s mass effect envelope, nor as the shuttle glided through the substantial hangar bay. Then again, no lights came up either. The bay was so dark that after a moment, SAM-E activated the shuttle’s external lights and spotlight, panning the latter around to search for an open landing pad. Cora frowned as she watched the circle of light play along the hangar floor, passing over crates, hazard markers, and what looked like a launcher for short-range fighters. Then—
“Wait,” she gasped, and leaned forward. “Back the spotlight up!”
SAM-E brought the shuttle to a hover, then moved the spotlight back along the path it had followed.
“Stop,” Cora said, and the circle of light went still.
Illuminated at the center of this circle was a body.
“Human,” SAM-E said softly, analyzing the sensor data as Cora stared down at it, her eyes taking in the reality of the words. “Male, approximately twenty years of age. Based on temperature, dead twenty-two hours plus or minus two. Alliance marine uniform… unable to scan rank markings or identity tags due to facedown positioning. Apparent cause of death is repeated blunt force trauma to the head and body. He might have survived any one of the blows, but not all of them, and certainly not without medical treatment.”
Cora swallowed. She was no stranger to battlefield horrors, but this… She was glad for SAM-E’s analysis, too, because until he had said so, she hadn’t been sure that what she was looking at was human. All she could see was a roughly bipedal shape—twisted and broken in the wrong places—and a bloodied, flattened ruin of a head. Only twenty years old. She shook her head a little, to focus.
“So somebody beat him to death.”
“Someone or something. Contusion depth suggests that each blow had a force averaging two thousand pounds. Humans don’t have that kind of strength.”
“Implants? High-end bone weaves or muscle meshes—”
“Possible. And several non-human species are capable of exerting that degree of strength naturally. Other possible culprits include Atlas-class mechs and heavy equipment. An accident, perhaps.” SAM-E paused. “Oh. Thermal imaging of the hangar suggests there are other bodies here. There are a dozen fading heat signatures, at least.”
Not an accident, then. But even pirates wouldn’t do this—raid a facility and leave it dark and full of corpses. If they weren’t slave raiding, they would still be here, enjoying a vacation in someone else’s life support, eating someone else’s food and spending someone else’s credits on extranet shopping. If nothing else, they would’ve spray-painted their names all over the walls and maybe set off the distress beacons, the better to boast about their conquest.
And then there was what Cora wasn’t seeing. The body below her didn’t seem to have a sidearm on it, or even a holster. No armor, no helmet. Standard procedure in the event of a raid was for even off-duty personnel to gear up. This dead boy had been caught by surprise in a place that was supposed to be safe. That suggested allied or internal attackers, not an invading force.
When Cora had no more to say, SAM-E wordlessly shifted the spotlight away from the corpse and resumed the shuttle’s forward track, searching for an open landing pad. Most of the pads had shuttles or crates and equipment on them, though much of the latter had been smashed and scattered about. Finally, though, SAM-E located an open pad from which crates had been knocked away, leaving the pad clear. Cora, following the sequence that SAM-E dictated, brought the shuttle down safely.
“Automated refueling equipment appears to be working,” SAM-E said quietly. The shuttle hummed faintly as it began to recharge its batteries and fuel cells. “Emergency life support and artificial gravity are functional, as well, per the sensors.”
“Get the shuttle prepped to leave again as quickly as we need,” Cora said. She turned and picked up her helmet, taking a moment to check that her armor seals were still intact.
“An extravehicular foray seems unwise, Lieutenant.”
Cora shook her head. Sometimes there was no choice. “Which one of those shuttles did our thief use?”
“I’ll illuminate it on your in-helmet display. But its door is open and all passengers appear to have disembarked.”
“Still a good place to pick up the trail.” Cora’s helmet signaled a perfect seal. Armor checked out. She inspected her pistol for signs of damage, a fresh heat sink; all clear. Any maiden who would be a matriarch checks her gear, Sarissa Theris once said, and Cora had never found a good reason to disregard this advice. She might not make it to a thousand years old, but she meant to see a hundred. “I need to access this hangar’s sensors, they’ll be more extensive than what the shuttle’s got available. Maybe I can even find a terminal and access the network for this facility—” She moved toward the shuttle door.
“A moment,” SAM-E said, and something about the terseness of the words made Cora tense. The AI actually sounded concerned. “Our shuttle is being contacted by the Quiet Eddy VI.” Abruptly, SAM-E fell silent.
A second passed, and then another. Cora’s skin began to prickle. “Yes? And? What’s it saying?”
“Nothing. It isn’t communicating in words, precisely, just—Hmm.”
Cora frowned. “Talk to me.”
“As I said, I am not designed for cyberwarfare, but…” Abruptly, the shuttle stopped humming. “Life support in the hangar has just been cut, Lieutenant. As well as power to the automated refueling equipment.”
“Cut? By whom?”
“The VI identified itself to the shuttle as Medea. I believe—” Abruptly SAM-E raised its voice. “I have cut the VI’s access to shuttle systems. All access attempts will now be treated as hostile.”
“What?” They might need that VI. “What the hell, SAM-E?”
“Medea attempted to access more than just flight and sensor data,” SAM-E explained. “It attempted to access shuttle flight controls. If it had succeeded, it could have taken control of the shuttle and crashed us into the hangar wall, or worse. And it tried to take biometric data. About you, Lieutenant.”
All at once, Cora’s breath caught. “Yeah, that’s not good.”
“No. When I demanded to know what it was doing, it did not respond.”
Really not good. “VI malfunction. That’s what could kill everyone in this place.” It was an unusual circumstance, but not unheard of; complicated software didn’t always work the way it was supposed to. It was something she’d actually suspected of her parents’ disappearance; the VI on their old cargo vessel hadn’t exactly been up to code…
Now might not be the time to think about it.
“I don’t believe this is a malfunction, Lieutenant—or at least, not a typical one. Medea did not behave like a malfunctioning VI. I believe what I perceived of it was… intent. Malice.”
Cora, about to hit the switch to open the shuttle’s door, paused. “Shit. Is this another rogue AI?”
“Unknown, Lieutenant,” SAM-E said quickly. “What I do know is that the VI is functional and aware of us, and that it tried to take over this shuttle. When you leave this shuttle, you will be walking through environments that it controls, past sensor arrays that are its eyes and ears. Just as you will be my sensory receptors.”
Cora closed her eyes for a moment.
She was about to enter the domain of what might very well be a murderously buggy AI… with another buggy AI lodged in her head. At least SAM-E was helpful, though. She hoped he s
tayed helpful.
“It seems as if my attempt to bolster you for this mission has failed,” SAM-E said softly, sounding so unhappy that Cora immediately regretted her doubt. “You are disappointed in me.”
“No, I—” Cora blinked. “What? How do you know that?”
“I am an adaptive AI, Lieutenant Harper. I am built to integrate with you—to complement your strengths, make up for your weaknesses, and overall provide you with an advantage in comparison with unintegrated beings. I cannot do that if I don’t study you on every level—right down to the genetic—in order to understand you.” To Cora’s surprise, it uttered a sigh. “But I have repeatedly failed to understand you well.”
Cora frowned. It wasn’t unusual for a VI to read biometric feedback as a means of grasping emotions; humanity had been making synthetic hardware and software with that ability for nearly two hundred years. What SAM-E talked about sounded like more than that, though.
They had no time for this. Cora shook her head. “We can talk about it, if I live through this,” she said, and hit the “door open” control. “Let’s go.”
With her pistol drawn, she hurried down the ramp and into cover behind one of the landing pad’s walls, listening carefully. The hangar was as silent as—well, as a tomb. The temptation to take off her helmet was powerful, to rely on scents and sounds and instincts instead of equipment and sensors. Everything about this mess had her lizard-brain in overdrive. SAM-E’s warning about a hostile intent in the system, controlling life support and even the hangar bay doors, kept her from obeying that instinct.
After a moment’s thought, Cora activated her boots’ magnetic locks, too. It would make her a little slower in reaching the thief’s shuttle, being half glued to the floor, but getting spaced twice in a week was a personal best that she really didn’t want to achieve.
Following her in-helmet display, she reached the shuttle’s landing pad and crouched behind cover to survey it visually before approaching—and then she blinked. What the hell?
She’d forgotten that SAM-E could hear her subvocalizations. “You’re correct, Lieutenant. Something is very wrong with that shuttle. I believe it crashed, instead of landing properly.”
The shuttle wasn’t smoking, but there were scorch-marks along its base, as if thrusters had been fully engaged when it settled to the floor. And there was something oddly off-kilter about the craft, which Cora didn’t understand until she noticed how its ramp door hadn’t fully closed. The door was out of alignment because the shuttle’s midaxle had broken. That made it easier to spot the crack in its chassis, running from the floor nearly up to the shuttle’s roof.
The thing sagged in the middle, broken almost in two.
“Mass effect drive core failure?” Cora asked.
“Likely. A Kodiak-series shuttle cannot sustain its own weight with thrusters alone. It fell, instead.”
“Lucky, then, if the drive core didn’t fail ’til they got here.”
“That would be a very unlikely coincidence, Lieutenant.”
Cora sighed. “Yeah. I was thinking that, too.”
Trotting with some effort up to the shuttle, Cora peered through the sliver of space between the misaligned door and its frame. Emergency lights were on inside the shuttle; it looked empty. Taking a deep breath and raising a barrier around herself just in case, Cora struggled with the door panel.
It groaned as it cranked open, servomotors loudly protesting the misuse. But it did open, although at an awkward angle that caused the ramp to tilt a little more. After a quick darting scan of the interior to confirm that it was empty, she slipped inside.
Here it was even clearer that the ship had crashed; the crack was actually all the way through the hull, and not just the outer chassis. She could see the striped hazard-markings of the landing pad through a three-inch gap in the shuttle’s floor.
“No bodies,” she murmured to herself. It was so quiet here that the urge to talk and fill the silence was almost overwhelming. “No sign of struggle or injury inside.” She went to the shuttle’s control panel, raising her hand to activate her omni-tool and establish a soft link as SAM-E had taught her to do. “Can you access the shuttle’s onboard systems through this?”
“Yes. A moment.” After a second’s pause, “The shuttle crashed because a shutdown order was sent to its drive core in the middle of the landing sequence. It would seem the Medea VI succeeded in doing to this shuttle what it attempted to do to ours.” His voice sharpened. “By the way, the shuttle’s drive core is cracked and venting trace amounts of eezo into the atmosphere. Please be sure to follow level-three decontamination procedures at the next possible opportunity.”
“Noted.” Great.
“I have additional information. It appears that Ygara Menoris’ killer is a Captain Vlassia Ariokis, service number 6732-IC-1917, lately assigned to Alliance Intelligence under a classified status,” SAM-E continued. “The shuttle is temporarily registered to her as the pilot. She was listed as an active service member as of three months ago, when last I scanned and updated my files on the Alliance. That suggests this is an Alliance facility.”
“And this Ariokis was under orders to kill an asari merc?” Cora inhaled, appalled. “In order to get hold of an AI kernel? How the hell does that serve the interests of the Alliance?”
“Unknown, but Captain Ariokis began uploading the stolen code package to this facility’s network as soon as the shuttle was in range. It was no longer onboard by the time this shuttle attempted to land.”
“Oh, are you kidding me?” Cora pounded a fist on the shuttle’s control panel, then took a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll have to go get it from the servers again, same as on Home Away. Any ideas on where it would be?”
“No, but if you can soft-link me to a terminal outside the hangar bay, I might be able to access the facility schematics or a map.”
“That’s next up, then.”
Slipping through the hangar bay was a fraught exercise, because she found more bodies away from the landing pads, beyond the emergency lights. After stumbling over the first—it was just as gory as the boy she’d seen from the shuttle, though this one was clad in loose, shattered combat armor—Cora took the risk of activating her helmet lights, narrowing and lowering the beam as much as she could until it illuminated only the floor a few feet ahead of her.
The lift that led out of the hangar bay still had power, too, and invitingly. Cora didn’t like that one bit, not in a facility whose VI might be malfunctioning. Switching off the mag-lock on her boots, she opted instead to take the nearest stairs, which meant climbing six flights up before she found a door marked with stark military-font letters: ADMIN. The door wasn’t powered, but she managed to push it open just enough that she could slide through. As soon as she did, it slid back shut immediately. Standard emergency protocol for hostile-environment facilities, but that didn’t make it feel any less ominous.
Things were worse here, though, than they had been in the hangar bay. Most noticeably more bodies: Alliance uniforms, but civvies too, and a few people in white lab coats. A smattering of the soldiers were armored and armed, though most of the victims were not. There was more destruction, here, too: scattered papers, datapads that looked as if they’d been stomped to pieces, wall plates yanked open to reveal torn-out cables and smashed control panels, dents and scorches on the intact walls.
As Cora eased through the corridor, with shattered coffee cups and bits of wire crunching under her boots, she listened as well as she could through the helmet’s speakers, and tensed whenever she thought she caught a hint of movement. Half the time the movement was her imagination; the eerie silence and obvious danger of the place had her on a hair-trigger. The rest of the time it was swinging wires or papers blowing in the ventilation draft.
No living movement, though. No enemies, but no survivors, either. That was the worst part. Cora had been trained by and alongside asari huntresses; danger did not trouble her. Danger without a target—a threat, but with nothi
ng to kill—troubled her lots.
“Terminal, terminal,” she murmured aloud before cutting herself off. Best not to make unnecessary noise here. She eased into an office with a torn-off door that had a placard next to it: WARRANT OFFICER. The room beyond had been barely touched, though that could have been because the woman who once inhabited it had been partially pulled out through a hole in the glass window. Her corpse was still draped over the hole’s rim. No need for attackers to come in after her, and disturb the room’s decor.
Sitting gingerly in the chair that the woman must have vacated just before dying, Cora set her omni-tool in place where the haptic interface would’ve been. “Non-essential power’s out here.”
Her omni-tool glowed for a moment, then the terminal’s display appeared. “I’m using some of your armor’s power, Lieutenant, forgive me. It should only reduce your life support by a few minutes.”
“Oh, only that,” Cora replied.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Can you get into the network?”
“I’m already in. I have a map of the Quiet Eddy facility…” After a moment, a loud snap sounded throughout the empty halls, making Cora jump. An instant later, however, ugly yellow-orange sodium lights began to glow along the edges of the floor. “And I signaled an emergency, which curiously none of the denizens of this facility seem to have done. That activated the emergency power system.”
“Good. Now I just need you to—”
Then SAM-E spoke sharply, interrupting Cora. “I now believe I know what killed most of the people in this facility, Lieutenant. Please take cover immediately.”
Cora was already ducking behind the desk, pistol in hand, even as she subvocalized, “What?”
But she could hear it herself now: slow, even, leaden footsteps. Something heavy. The floor shook just a little as it trod closer. Closer. Right outside the office, in fact, near the hole in the window.
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