“Oh, it’s to be stereotypes, is it? I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to overcome my inherent batarian nature and not shoot you in the back if you promise to keep the spoken-word poetry fugue-state stuff to a minimum. Metaphors give me a headache. And maybe don’t sigh too hard and keel over and die when those lacy lungs of yours give out, you fancy, fainting princess from a race of fainting princesses.”
Any other time, Anax would have laughed. She knew she should laugh. It was the most advisable response to incite feelings of camaraderie in the target. Batarians were criminals; drell died young. It was all in a good day’s space prejudice. But there were four hundred drell down there in the hold, and they had fainted dead away. And if you were already smuggling fish across galaxies, what else might you sneak on board? She wouldn’t ask, of course. Borbala would just say she had nothing to do with it, and the batarian would have gained a reason to be on guard, while Anax gained nothing. Asking was pointless. It was blunt-force trauma. Real, usable information rarely came from a direct hit.
“Too far,” the drell said quietly.
“No such thing,” Borbala answered, but, in the interests of an efficient working relationship, the grizzled batarian softened her voice. Very slightly.
Borbala Ferank cleared her throat and walked up the ramp to the navigator’s station, frowning. “You know, I don’t think we need to walk all the way back to the security hub. I think I can port the vid footage to the bridge. Put it up on the big screen. Save us some time.”
Anax shrugged. It made no difference to her where they worked. Soval’s dead eyes flashed before her. Her eyes, her bursting tongue, her throat choked by that necklace of blisters. She shook her head to clear it and settled into Captain Qetsi’Olam’s chair. The leather squeaked, it was so new. Borbala lounged next to her in First Officer Senna’s seat. The viewscreen flickered and filled with slowly cycling images of the cryodecks, date-stamped in glowing numbers.
“Do you know what those sores on Soval Raxios’s neck are?” Anax said after they had watched a century of nothing happening to a lot of frozen aliens. “Little dark-blue lumps all over her frills? Have you seen that before?” What do you know about the ways drell can die?
“I can’t say I have. There’s a poison or two on Khar’shan that will give you a nice suppurating scarf, but not a blue one. Mother’s Milk is so caustic the victim’s throat dissolves mid-swallow. So that would be red. Pauper’s Pleasure makes you break out in purple hives before your saliva boils and you slowly braise in your own fluids. There’s one called the Final Jest that basically turns your blood to lighter fluid and uses your own brain’s electro-chemical pain response as ignition to set you on fire on the inside, so those poor bastards definitely end up with sores all over the place, big fat orange heat blisters, and they can be blue if the venom sacs weren’t too fresh, but… uh… they explode pretty quickly, so it’s probably not that.” Borbala leaned over, chuckling. “Hey, one time I shorted my niece Gyula on a shipment of red sand and geth scrap so she dipped my paintbrushes in Pauper’s Pleasure—such a clever girl. I imagine she thought that when I licked my brush tip to give it a nice, defined point, I’d know what she thought of me. Of course, I’ve been poisoned so many times by so many people no little girl’s snit could so much as dent my auto-immune response. Poor, dumb Gyula. She’s at the bottom of a swamp now.” Borbala suddenly seemed to notice that Anax had stopped looking at the vidscreen and was staring at her. “What? I didn’t put her there. That was Ignac. Oh, but I did put Ignac at the bottom of a swamp. Different swamp. And he got out eventually. Never liked girls, Ignac. Ignac liked knives. Where did I go wrong? By my eyes, woman, why are you gawping at me?”
Anax shook her head. She tried to imagine a batarian in an artist’s smock, holding a palette full of watercolors and painting lilies in a pond. She had spent her life imagining the very worst and very best that people were capable of. But she couldn’t picture it. “Nothing.”
“What? I like to paint. I’m a complex individual, Anax Therion. You should try expressing yourself artistically. It might loosen that steel pylon from your spine.”
Anax smiled, a precise smile, the prelude to a swaggering boast. “I was the first drell to win a hanar poetry duel on Nyahir and see my name inscribed in fire on Mount Vassla. I am sufficiently expressed, Borbala Ferank.”
“Gods, that sounds terrible. Please don’t recite it. This morning is bad enough as it is.”
“Still not morning,” Anax corrected her.
Therion glanced back at the viewscreen. Sleepwalker Team Green-5 was going about their rounds, one hundred and sixty years after launch. She saw her friend Osyat checking instrument panels. Osyat Raxios. Would she have to be the one to tell him about Soval? They watched as the team finished their work four hundred and seven years ago and returned to their cryopods.
“Are you hot? It’s getting really hot in here,” Borbala complained, loosening the leather straps on her chestpiece. “I’m sweating like a beast.”
“I feel fine.” Anax shrugged. She liked the heat. She was meant to live in a scorching desert. The universe had just… never arranged one for her. But it did seem much warmer on the bridge than it had been when they arrived.
The datestamp in the corner of the footage began to speed up again now that there was no motion on camera, moving through decades at a quick clip.
“Have you seen those sores before?” Ferank asked after a few minutes. “They looked… they looked sort of dusty, didn’t they? It was strange. You would expect frozen blisters to be shiny. Strange.”
The images of the Keelah Si’yah sleeping through time and space reflected in Anax’s reptilian eyes like second screens. “I may have.”
“Then why don’t you haul your pretty green ass up to the lab and tell them?”
“Because I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong. I long for nothing in this universe but to be wrong. Because if I am not wrong, something extraordinarily bad must have happened to put that boil on a drell throat. If I am not wrong, this may be the last pleasant night of my life. Or at least the last uneventful one. And I am spending it in front of a holomonitor with a batarian pensioner.”
“We really should have a bowl of vacuum-popped Kharlak eggs. Doesn’t feel right watching vids without Kharlak eggs.” The batarian raised one bony yellow-green brow muscle. “Oh, am I being too cheerful again? I’ll try to keep an eye on that.” She tapped the horrible scar tissue where her lower-right eye used to be with one finger. “Get it?” Borbala Ferank barked laughter. She laughed like a biotic misfire: short, messy, and devastating.
“Did your own sons really do that to you?”
“Erno, Kelemen, Tiborc, and Muz. Four children turned against you out of seventeen is not a bad score for one lifetime. Afterward, they dumped me in a crate of nutrient paste and traded me, and the paste, to the quarians for a couple of old terminals and a shoe, just to add insult to injury. One shoe, mind you. Not even a pair. Because I am worthless, you see. They are very subtle, my boys. Don’t feel bad if it takes some time to grasp the complexity of their attempt at humor.”
Anax handed Borbala one of the Horosk bottles. Turian liquor went down like plasma fire, but both of them had led lives to steel the digestive tract. She was getting somewhere. Anax pushed slightly against the new data.
“But why? And why didn’t you have it replaced with a synthetic one?”
The batarian spun the first officer’s chair toward Anax. The shadows on the bridge looked ghoulish on her skull ridges. “That’s personal, day laborer. I know those frozen fish back there better than I know you. Mutilation is between a son and his mother. Unless you have children yourself you can’t possibly understand. Do you have offspring, drell?”
“I do not.”
“Then shut up.”
Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 woke up on the screen before them. Three hundred years post-launch. The two of them sat back and watched themselves go about a happier Sleepwalker cycle in which nothing out of
the ordinary occurred. Fifteen minutes of stony, unpleasant silence later, the halfway point in the Keelah Si’yah’s journey arrived. The Quorum and all the Sleepwalker teams revived briefly for a mission update, status updates sent ahead to the Nexus and back to the Initiative, and a historically excellent drinking binge in the mess hall. Anax leaned forward, observing everyone she could in the cheaply recorded image. She saw herself, meditating on a food crate. But she didn’t need to see herself. She could run through that night in her mind as perfectly as the vidscreen could show it to her. But she could only remember what she actually witnessed. She needed to see now what she hadn’t seen then.
“I am roasting alive,” Borbala groaned. “Can you not feel that? It’s like a jungle in here!” The batarian pulled more of the black straps from her chest to give her room to breathe. Therion couldn’t waste time paying attention to something as irrelevant as ambient temperature.
Anax watched the footage in real time. She saw the volus political radical called Gaffno Yap, who had somehow been elected to the Quorum to the surprise of all, jump up onto a table and insist that everyone praise his singing voice. Irit Non begged her shipmate to come down, seething with anger. Anax watched Threnno and Nebbu, the elcor Quorum members, discussing something angrily in a corner of the room, but the footage had no sound, and certainly no smell. A batarian Sleepwalker, a male Anax did not know, drank bottle after bottle of shard wine and started trying to balance one on top of the other. The drell Quorum representatives, Kral Thauma and Glamys Azios, and the hanar representative Chabod watched on, impressed. Evidently, Borbala did know him. She hooted derisively at the screen.
“Ha! Zoli Haj’nalka, you old fraud! That’s Zoli. He thinks he is a philosopher, but he is a drunk. It’s a common mistake among the upper middle class. Do you know what his most famous koan is? I kill, therefore I am. Ha! I piss deeper than the great Zoli Haj’nalka! Kiss up to them all you like, Haj, they’ll never let us on the Quorum. As in the Milky Way, so in Andromeda. No representation, no consideration. Someone’s always gotta be on top, whether they call it a council or a quorum or a gaggle of geese. And it’s not gonna be us. Stick that in your ethical framework and light it on fire.”
Anax said nothing. She took it all in. Borbala’s ranting beside her and the images in front of her. She could review everything later in her memory if she needed to. In the upper-left corner of the screen, Senna’Nir took the captain’s hand and disappeared out the hatch to the mess hall. Interesting. Several hanar congregated near the food dispensers, including Ysses. The one called Kholai, the one dead in medbay upstairs, gesticulated at them with his tentacles, more animated than Therion had ever seen a jelly. Yorrik took the volus’s place at the center of attention. She couldn’t hear him on the soundless footage, but she remembered. He’d done them a bit of his elcor Macbeth and then passed out with a thunderous crash to the mess hall floor halfway through “Murderous frenzy: Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry, ‘Hold, hold!’” Soval and Osyat sat in a circle, playing some sort of drinking game with the other Sleepwalkers. Soval put her head on her husband’s shoulder. The party was winding down.
One by one, the midpoint crew dispersed silently. The datestamp began to pick up speed once more.
To get data, it is sometimes necessary to bait it out, Anax thought, and data loves nothing so well as more data. The batarian has shared a history, you have shared nothing. There is a conversational debt. She’ll give nothing else until it is paid.
“After my parents died,” she began.
“Lungs too fancy for this world?” Borbala said.
Anax clenched her green jaw. “Indeed. After they died, I lived alone under the dome of Cnidaria City on Kahje. It is the only place drell can live without immediately succumbing to Kepral’s Syndrome. We were crowded there, packed in like cords of firewood. I was a child. I begged and stole so that I could eat. I brawled with other children, with grown beggars, with dogs for a place to sleep. I became one of the drala’fa, the ignored. I was eleven before a hanar called Oleon found me, hiding in an alley with a man rich enough to buy and sell me and the street we both stood on, an arms dealer who had been places I could never dream of. I was selling him my prize possession, the only thing I owned with any value at all. He paid me practically nothing for it. But it seemed like riches to me then. Oleon watched the deal transpire, and saw talent in me. I had spent months tracking the arms dealer, memorizing his contacts, his prices, his suppliers’ names and their contacts. I held it all in my head as easily as a coin in the hand. I could have exposed him and put him on a prison colony for the natural life of a krogan. But more importantly, I had seen, in all my spying, where his wife went one night a week with his business partner. Not bad for my first job as a freelance data-dealer. I knew that information was more valuable than any weapon or drug when I was eleven years old. What I did not know was that the giant hanar that suddenly towered above me was Oleon, a chief member of the Illuminated Primacy, the hanar government. It saw my talent. It saw my potential. It offered to take me into the Compact, make me a part of its household, pay for my biotic implants, to educate and employ me to do whatever work it asked of me without question.”
“Sounds like slavery.”
“I suppose it would, to you. But a ranking member of the Illuminated Primacy does not need its floors scrubbed. It needs secrets. Everyone’s secrets. That was what the hanar trained me to find, to erase if it could harm them, to bring it home if it had value. And years later, when I was older, Oleon sent me on a mission.”
The century turned over onscreen. Only a hundred and fifty years from the present day, now. Click, click, click, the security cameras cycled through the ship.
“‘Go to Talis Fia in the Shrike Abyssal,’ it ordered me. ‘It is a volus world, and like many volus worlds, the little fools banker-ed themselves into a depression there. It is overrun with criminals, brothels, assassins, and advantage-seekers. You will feel right at home. There is a volus there called Pinda Kem who has stolen from this one. Discover this Kem’s worst deed and bring it back to Kahje, where this one will use it to teach a virtuous lesson on the subject of respect, and revenge.’ And there, on Talis Fia, was where I saw blue sores like the ones on Soval Raxios’s neck—”
Anax Therion sat bolt upright in the captain’s chair. “What was that?” she snapped. “Run the footage back. I saw something.”
“What? I didn’t see anything. I was listening to you talk about yourself.”
“Run it back two years, I’m sure it was there.”
Ferank frowned. She ran a hand around the fine black hairs that bristled all over her skin. “Wait, but what were the blue sores? On Talis Fia. Where did you see them?”
“Run it back.”
Borbala keyed the command into the console that curved around Senna’Nir’s station. The footage blacked out and came on again. The volus cryobay. Click. The elcor cryobay. Click. The batarian cryobay. Click. The drell cryobay.
“Stop!” yelled Anax, far too loudly on the empty bridge. “I saw it. I know I saw it.”
“There’s nothing there. Everyone’s frozen. You’re imagining things.”
“Run it back again.”
“Remember when we made a deal concerning whether or not I can shoot you? I might like to revisit that.”
Anax walked up to the enormous viewscreen. The image of the empty cryobay dwarfed her, washed out her skin to almost black. It went dark, and then flashed on again, an identically boring, nearly motionless image, somewhat further in the past.
“There,” Anax said suddenly. Borbala froze the image.
“What, you mad serf?”
Anax Therion turned back to the batarian. She lifted one arm and pointed at a space in the cryobay, too far to the left for the first camera to see, too far to the right for the second camera. Perfectly placed in the blind spot between the shi
p’s eyes. But not completely invisible.
“A shadow,” the drell whispered. “Something moving when all the house is fast asleep.”
Ferank saw it then. Flickering across the cryobay floor, caught in the blue running lights for half a second before it was gone. The datestamp crawled forward while they stared until their eyes ached, watching for that flicker, that motion in the blind spot. They found it twice more, three times more. They ran the film backward and forward again, from its first appearance to the present day, searching for any appearance they’d missed. Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9 revived onscreen, one hundred years ago. Soval was on that cycle. She walked by the camera on her way to her station at the communications array, stopping to speak briefly to a hanar. She smiled, untroubled. Her eyes very nearly met the camera. Anax watched her as she spoke and held up one green hand as if to touch the dead woman’s holographic face.
“I saw those sores on a volus child,” Anax said, slinging the Lancer rifle over one shoulder. They had what they needed. Time to become a search party. Time to hunt. “The favorite son of Pinda Kem.”
Borbala checked her sidearm and rubbed her three good eyes. “Did he die?”
“Not in the least. As far as I know, after I ruined his father, he went on to live a long and happy life. Happy for a volus, anyway.”
“If the little brat didn’t die, why are you so afraid they’re the same sores?”
“Because Soval Raxios did, and she shouldn’t have. And I do not yet know why Irit Non had nothing to say on the subject herself. Until I do, I palm the card until it is my play.”
The drell balanced the Reeger Carbine in one hand and looked appraisingly at the batarian. An Arc Pistol was one thing. Could she risk the two of them being equally armed?
“Whatever happened to your hanar friend?” Borbala asked. “Did it come with you? Pay your fare? Off to the great unknown together to spy on new and interesting people?”
“Oleon was assassinated. I was a freelancer before I met it. I was a freelancer after it died.” Anax allowed a certain percentage of the grief she carried with her to show in her posture. “I worked for the Shadow Broker for a long time afterward.”
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