Mass Effect: Initiation

by N. K. Jemisin

  The trip was routine, as was the approach to launch point. Then the console bleeped a proximity warning. Alec glanced back at Harper and said, “You’ll want to see this.”

  Harper obligingly moved up to take the co-pilot’s seat. “You finally going to stop being dramatic?”

  “Yes,” Alec said, “but that’s only because I’m about to be overshadowed.” Then he banked the shuttle, taking them around on an admittedly dramatic angle of approach, to reveal:

  The ark Hyperion. It never got old, seeing the thing in the flesh, as more than just design specs on a console. This ship carried his future within.

  So he watched Harper’s face as the expanse of it emerged slowly around the cloud’s obscuration. Watched her inhale, eyes widening, as she realized the four massive platforms vaning behind the vessel were engines. Watched her mouth fall open as Alec deliberately took them along a flight path that followed the sleek lines of one of the ship’s two massive arkholds. Saw the moment when she recognized elements of the ship’s design, and understood just how much it had been inspired by the Citadel—which, after all, had stood the test of time and events as they hoped the Hyperion would.

  And he could not help feel pride as he saw her take it all in, and saw the sight of it change something in her. There was wonder in her eyes, and he’d been part of making that happen.

  “Ten thousand people in each of two arkholds,” Alec explained, as they drifted into one of the holds’ shadow. It was a big shadow. “All packed in cryo and ready to go. That ring-structure—mission-critical personnel will be stored there, to be woken up in priority order. That includes the Pathfinder team. Us.” He felt her look at him, absorbing the designation, and carefully did not look back at her. Pushing wouldn’t work with her, he knew. He fell silent as he guided the shuttle into a landing trajectory, aiming for one of the docking ports along the ring. “Of course, the only people awake right now are construction and prep crews, finishing the stage-four projects and doing final flight checking.”

  Harper threw him an unreadable look, then resumed staring avidly at the Hyperion, rising from her seat and leaning forward to get a better look at the underside of beta arkhold. Her eyes narrowed. “These things look… detachable.”

  “They’re self-contained modules. The idea is that if something happens to one and we have to jettison, the other won’t be affected. The damaged module can be detached, and its resources cannibalized if possible, without compromising the rest of the ship’s integrity.”

  Harper said nothing more as the shuttle banked into the vast docking bay and settled onto a landing pad. But when Alec finished the shutdown sequence, she sat back in her chair and regarded him evenly.

  “Okay,” she said. “I get why you showed me this. You want me committed.”

  “And are you, now?”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

  Alec nodded. “We might have gotten more applicants if we’d been able to give tours of the Hyperion. It’s a magnificent ship. But with all the Homeward Sol crap…” He shook his head.

  Her gaze sharpened. “You’ve had threats?”

  “Constantly. Mostly just the usual alien-conspiracy kooks. The asari are controlling everyone’s mind, the turians are doing this to—somehow—wipe us out in vengeance for the war, the whole thing is a hoax done on an STG-run holovid stage…” He shrugged. “But a few of the threats have been credible.”

  He sobered then, growing angry as he remembered the report Wei Udensi had shown him, just before he’d gone to find Harper. So much trouble they’d gone to, protecting themselves against threats from without, and it was the threat from within that they should have worried about all this time.

  He shook it off and focused on Harper again. “Help me lead the human Pathfinder team, Harper, to find us a new home. Humanity needs you. If the ones here in the Milky Way are too stupid to get that, then the ones in Andromeda won’t be. I need you.”

  She shifted a little. He couldn’t read her expression. “I never verified that the kernel package didn’t get copied,” she said. “That mission was basically an audition. If Suran sold it—”

  Alec shook his head. “If we find her, you’ll go after her. If she’s sent the tech elsewhere, you’ll retrieve it. But you did what I asked you to do, and then some, so I know I can rely on you, Harper, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t expect perfection; I expect your best. Your best has been pretty damn good.” He took a deep breath. “And quit stalling. Will you join us?”

  Harper shifted thoughtfully. “Okay.”

  Alec felt like he’d just gone through a relay for the first time, again. He fought the urge to grin, however, and held out his hand, waiting.

  After a long, pent moment, Harper sighed and took his hand. Good firm handshake. All right, then.

  “Come on, let’s give you the nickel tour,” he suggested. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Harper.”

  They landed in a hangar bay strewn with construction equipment, cables, and storage crates. It was ablaze with spotlights, and when the shuttle doors opened, noisy with the sounds of power-ratcheting and thermal drills. Alec saw Harper take a deep breath as she walked down the ramp. “Sorry,” he said. “I know it’s kind of sensory overload.”

  “No,” she said, her gaze momentarily distant. “Better than dark and quiet.”

  There were a few members of the construction crew around as they moved through the ring, though mostly the corridors were empty. Alec pointed out offices, the location-coding system painted on the walls, and other mission-critical locations and information. Harper observed it all in near-silence, though she occasionally took notes on her omni-tool. It hadn’t yet occurred to her to use SAM-E for notes.

  Then again, that was probably just as well. Alec sighed, realizing belatedly that he was going to have to make a confession to Harper soon, and she probably wasn’t going to be very happy with him about it.

  “Verify degradation rate again,” he subvocalized as they walked. Harper’s tendency to silence made some things easy, at least.

  “The same as before, Pathfinder,” SAM said into his ear, with the faintest hint of a somber tone. “SAM-E has not yet reached the unsafe levels of integration with Lieutenant Harper, but your last run of tests confirmed the problem. Do you mean to tell her?” It paused significantly. “Soon?”

  Alec sighed. It was becoming increasingly clear that SAM disapproved of the way Alec was handling the matter. That was the problem with having an integrated artificial intelligence; they had thoughts of their own, and didn’t always agree with yours. “Let me work up to it,” he said, finally. “I’ll tell her today. I promise.”

  SAM did not reply, which was perhaps an eloquence in itself.

  That was probably why Alec made sure the next place he took Harper for the tour was the SAM-Node. As Harper looked around the vast, gleaming chamber in awe and a little confusion, Alec explained that it was, for all intents and purposes, SAM’s brain. She would need to know that, wouldn’t she, if something happened to Alec? That was how he rationalized it to himself, anyway.

  Harper listened thoughtfully, then asked the question he’d hoped she wouldn’t: “So where’s SAM-E?”

  “Also here,” Alec said, gesturing to the higher-order consciousness units embedded in the far wall. “Basically, SAM-E is a partition of my own SAM. Utilizing some of the same processors to save energy.” And if Harper knew even the first thing about artificial intelligence, she would know exactly what that meant.

  But she only nodded—then half-smiled at something SAM-E said into her earpiece. It was the warmest look he’d yet seen on her face. Then she flipped a jaunty salute at the column. “Nice to finally meet you face-to-face, too.”

  Alec’s stomach sank. “Yes,” said his SAM. “She’s bonded with SAM-E quite well, I would say.”

  Alec sighed, though he carefully plastered a smile over this so Harper wouldn’t see. Then he beckoned her away to finish the tour.
At the end of it, he resolved. He would tell her at the end of the tour.

  By the time they stopped in one of the ring’s observation lounges, Harper had begun to shake her head in disbelief.

  “The ads say you’re not leaving until later in the year,” she said. “But look at this place. You’re actually ready now.”

  Alec stifled a smile. Yes, he’d chosen well. Cora Harper might think herself just a grunt, but she had quick wit about her. “Apart from cosmetic finishes, pretty much, yes. For security reasons, we leaked a false launch timeline. There are a few systems that aren’t quite a hundred percent, but really, we could launch now if we wanted.”

  Before he could touch the lounge display to show her a list, however, a hard shudder rippled throughout the deck. The lounge display lit up instead with glaring red warning markers. Harper glimmered blue and moved at once to cover the door, as Alec swept a hand over the warnings to scroll through them. Hull breach, emergency power shunt, thermal spike…

  “SAM! What the hell happened?”

  “An explosion on the hangar deck,” SAM replied over the PA. “Your shuttle, Alec. Apparently, someone rigged it with a bomb, set to detonate when you reached the ark.” He changed the display to a camera view. Through a static-filled, flickering image, Alec saw the burning, crumpled ruins of the shuttle they’d arrived in—sitting on the deck below the hangar. It had burned through the floor.

  “Shit. Must be a plasma bomb, or…” Maybe something new. There had been a lot of weird tech showing up in the galaxy lately. Whatever it was, someone had really wanted to do as much damage as possible.

  “SAM-E apologizes, Pathfinder,” SAM said, while he called up the ark’s schematics and tried to localize the damage. “He says that he warned station security at Tamayo Point about the possibility of terrorism, but did not consider actual terrorism. I have reminded him that he couldn’t have known.”

  “Yeah. Impossible to anticipate crazy.” The schematics on this part of the ring had a glaring red region. Alec overlaid them with a power network map, then overlaid that with a critical systems map. Below the hangar deck was nothing—storage, not even completely filled yet. But below that was… “Oh, God.”

  “What?” Harper moved back up to his side, now that it was clear no attackers were likely to come through the door.

  “The Pathfinder is aware that SAM-Node—my bluebox, and that of SAM-E—is in a chamber below the burning shuttle,” SAM said to Harper, with unnerving calm. “I estimate three minutes before that deck is breached by plasma from the shuttle. The loss of those processing nodes will irreparably damage my personality matrix and a number of other critical functions. Additionally, in fifteen seconds my point-to-point quantum entanglement communicators will go offline. I will be unable to speak to you thereafter.” He switched to Alec’s private comm and added, “Thank you for creating me, Alec. I wish you luck in the mission to Andromeda.”

  Beside Alec, Harper flinched as well, no doubt as SAM-E transmitted its own farewell to her. Then the room’s lights flickered and went out. Emergency lighting came up, but the display was dead, and SAM’s voice with it, leaving Alec and Harper to stare at each other in horror.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Get the construction crews evacuated,” Ryder said, dancing back and turning from the console. “Anyone already in cryo should be fine; they don’t need to breathe. But if that plasma damages the power grid—”

  “On it,” she responded. Power loss, if it included emergency power, meant the loss of artificial gravity, life support, and the Hyperion’s mass effect envelope—and right now, its hangar was wide open. Explosive decompression in space was never good, but explosive decompression on a ship still under construction, with some of its security systems already offline for repair or testing, could only be a disaster. If any of the bulkhead doors failed to automatically seal, the damage could spread far beyond the hangar. She used her omni-tool to patch into the ship’s network, using the terminal in the obs lounge, and quickly began calling up route maps. But she frowned at the retreating Ryder. “Where are you going?”

  “To save SAM.”

  What? She kept working, but said, “Ryder, that room is going to be plasma-hot a few minutes after the shuttle burns through! You’ll roast!”

  “Not if I get in and out fast enough.” And for an instant, as Cora stared at him, his armor shimmered. It was fleeting, and for an instant she thought she’d imagined it. Not biotics, and not a shield. Something else. But what? Before she could guess, he was through the door, and before it slid shut, he took off running—fast. Much faster than any ordinary human should’ve been able to.

  “Shit,” Cora breathed. There was no time to contemplate further. The loss of main power had knocked the ship’s automated communications offline; emergency lighting was still working, but remaining power had been diverted to escape pod launch and evacuation assistance. She could see some of the systems attempting basic fire suppression in the affected hangar, but standard procedure for plasma fire was to vent the hangar, and the ship’s VI couldn’t do that while there were living people in adjacent spaces. Cora would have to get them out in order to put the fire out.

  She turned back to the display. Every location on the ship with active life-signs was illuminated. That must have been SAM’s or SAM-E’s doing, modifying the map to make it more useful even as he went silent. Cora started with the areas of the ship farthest from any escape pods or the hangar, opening comms and telling the surprised inhabitants to get out, get out now, and use the stairs up to F-deck because H-deck was unstable.

  In most cases the construction crews were already on the move, but a few times she had to direct them away from the danger zone. Presently everyone was moving, or launching escape pods, or boarding shuttles, or already pulling out of the functional hangar bays.

  With that covered, Cora finally selected the “SAM-Node” section of the schematics, and brought up a multiscreen display.

  Oh. No.

  She’d been hoping that the shuttle hadn’t yet burned through to the next level. Once it did, it would be bad, she knew: plasma burndowns usually were, since there wasn’t much matter that could stand up to superheated ionized gas. It was a surprise to see that the wall of processing units at one end of the room was still intact… in fact, because the shuttle’s twisted, smoldering bulk had melted into the chamber, narrowly missing its central column.

  Overhead lights swung wildly around the hole that it had burned through the ceiling. The very walls were warping from heat near the craft, metal panels peeling apart and some of the exposed wiring smoldering or outright aflame. Heat-waves rippled around the room’s camera array, and the white-hot gas that curled up from underneath the shuttle made shadows in the darkened, fiery chamber flicker in stark chiaroscuro.

  Amid this red-white-and-black hell, Alec Ryder dragged something huge and heavy closer to the processing units he’d pointed out. It was another metal box, bigger than the processors, and it must have weighed hundreds of pounds, though Ryder seemed to be managing it. How? Belatedly, Cora realized the box had to be some sort of data storage unit; that was the only thing that made sense. The box’s plating resembled spaceship armor, though, which meant that it was probably reinforced against radiation or heat or both.

  Ryder’s omni-tool was a steady orange glow against the flickering dark, displaying some kind of meter flashing rapid-scrolling data streams even as he struggled to get the unit into place. Downloading or uploading something… in a room whose ambient temperature readings were already at the point that usually caused human beings to slip into unconsciousness from suffocation, as their lungs burned.

  Cora turned, slapped open the door of the Obs Deck lounge, and took off running.

  What could she possibly do? She wasn’t wearing her armor either, just the workout clothes that Ryder had found her in that morning—and plasma would eat through armor polymer and shields, anyway. She slapped her omni-tool as she ran and managed to call up Ryde
r’s. “What the hell are you doing? Get out of there!”

  His voice, tinny over the fabricated speaker of her omni-tool, sounded labored. “Got to get… kernel safe-stored. Thermal shielding should be… enough. Anything else can be…” A grunt. “Rebuilt, but this…”

  That damned kernel again! Cora rounded a corner at full speed and had to push off a wall to keep from losing too much momentum. After routing so many of the construction workers through Hyperion, she had a basic idea of the layout. To get below the damaged hangar bay she needed to take the E7 stairway down three levels… She wrenched open the stairway door, then had to talk around her own jolting breath as she took the stairs three at a time.

  “You’re not going to be rebuilding anything if you die!”

  “I don’t have time to die.” Ryder sounded more distracted than annoyed, however. Cora could hear the faint bleeps of feedback as he continued to do something on his omni-tool. He sighed in frustration. “I asked for heavy shielding for SAM-Node in the first place. ‘Budget considerations.’” He made a disgruntled sound, as if he wasn’t sitting in a room that might kill him at any given moment. “We need SAM, damn it. They never understood his potential.”

  Third level down, right. Warmer here already, the air acrid-smelling from whatever gas the plasma bomb was emitting. Probably something toxic. That would be just my luck, Cora thought bitterly. Emergency lights were on in the corridor at least. For an instant she almost stumbled at the sight of shattered glass and hanging fixtures, feeling the imaginary thud of approaching feet too heavy to call human anymore. But no, just a flashback, thank God—the lights here were blue, and there were no bodies. Yet, anyway. She gritted her teeth and charged on.

  Then she rounded the corner that led to the SAM-Node and stopped, her heart clenching. Its doors hung open, one completely blown off by whatever damage the shuttle had done on its way through the ceiling, and the other warped open by the heat and hanging loose. It was so hot just in the corridor that Cora broke into a fresh sweat as she recovered herself and hurried to the opening. She couldn’t go through it—a jet of plasma wafted across the floor just beyond the doorway. The heat radiating through the doors made her skin tighten; it was already hard to breathe. The shuttle itself blocked most of her view, but she could glimpse the corner of one of the “hardcases” Ryder had been ranting about.