Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Never heard of him.”

  Anax didn’t believe that for a second. The Shadow Broker was well known to the entire criminal element of the Milky Way. “Nevertheless, now I am here. Alone.”

  “Sad. Who got the old jellyfish?”

  Anax Therion locked eyes with the batarian. Her eyelids slicked shut, but she kept to her word and did not speak the memory that rushed over her. The color of roses. The smell of the sea. Trusting. Gentle. That one’s head rests heavy in the grotto of sleep. Blood follows. Blood everywhere like a world of oceans.

  “Some things are between a drell and their hanar,” she said evenly, knowing the implication in her words, using it to her advantage. “Unless you have made the Compact yourself you can’t possibly understand. Do you know one single hanar’s soul name, batarian?”

  “I do not.”

  Anax smiled softly. “Then shut up.”

  As they headed toward the hatch at the rear of the bridge, the voice of the Keelah Si’yah’s interface filled the room. The blue running lights along the floor turned an ugly yellow.

  Emergency lockdown procedures initiated. Safe zones are indicated in yellow. Prohibited areas are indicated in red. Please proceed to the nearest safe zone. Emergency lockdown procedures initiated. Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest yellow zone.

  Yorrik’s heavy, monotonous voice came through on their comm lines.

  “Barely controlled panic: Senna, I am afraid the rendezvous at medbay at 0330 hours will not be possible. Formal announcement: By my authority as the medical specialist on Sleepwalker Team Blue-7, I have triggered lockdown. You may approach the observation glass, but you will not be able to come inside.”

  “Nor will the elcor or this one be able to depart,” Ysses’s musical voice added.

  “Pervasive dread: I am so sorry. Medbay is now under quarantine. Please come as soon as you can. Futile advice: Try not to touch anything.”

  The drell handed the shotgun to Borbala Ferank. A calculated risk. She hoped she wouldn’t regret it.

  “I guess our stowaway sweep will have to wait,” said Ferank. “I was looking forward to the chase. At least we can get the hell out of this sauna.”

  “You may get your wish. Take point,” Therion said grimly. “And be careful. Whatever is happening in medbay, one thing is certain: There’s someone else awake on this ship.”

  6. FUSION

  Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah turned a corner toward medbay and stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Wait,” wheezed Irit Non, running up the hall behind him on her short, stout legs. She was no match for a long-legged quarian with bad news.

  There was a quarian girl in there. Behind the glass. Sealed up inside the quarantine zone with Yorrik and Ysses. He could see the top of her purple hood through the glass walls. It was impossible. No one else should be awake. Who the hell was that? He couldn’t see clearly. It was still dark in there, except in the pool of ghostly white-and-orange mobile worklights around the operating station, and the great gray bulk of the elcor was in the way.

  The volus and the quarian approached the clear glass medbay walls, tinged red for quarantine. Every thirty seconds, a soft alarm tone chimed throughout the ship. Loud enough to remind you of an emergency, but not so loud that it burned out your ability to think. Senna pounded on the glass. Yorrik turned toward him, revealing a scene of wanton and nonsensical destruction. Both the elcor and the hanar were wearing sterilizing collars, large metal torques that projected a thin sanitizing forcefield in front of their mucus membranes like ancient doctors’ masks.

  The frozen drell and hanar corpses were surrounded by piles of smashed, gouged out, torn apart, shattered, oozing garbage. Punctured glass globes, a cracked nightlight shaped like an omni-tool, a large anti-synthetic rifle with the scope snapped off and the gauges pried loose, bottles of booze, peeled-apart battery packs, a huge black microscope that looked about as advanced as a stone wheel. Some kind of stuffed child’s toy lay next to the dead hanar’s frozen skull, its glowing eyes punched out and drained dry, its stuffing pulled free of what looked like a cute, fat version of a volus. The autopsy slabs were splattered with glowing fluid and a slurry of liquefied fish guts. Yorrik and Ysses were covered in the stuff, half-dried, half-dripping. It looked like a murder scene in an Afterlife dumpster in there.

  The quarian girl looked down on it all, her spine bent at an awkward angle, her faceplate ripped out of the helmet and fastened on backwards with surgical staples so that the heads-up display faced outward. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth were drawn crudely on the glass in fluorescent green paint. It was an empty suit, hung up on the swinging arm of a laser scalpel, arms and legs swinging limp at its sides. Senna felt sick. It was just an empty environmental suit, but it looked for all the world like someone had flayed a child alive and hung their skin up to dry.

  “What the fuck is going on in here?” Irit Non wheezed. “Where did you get that… that thing? Those dolls are offensive, you know. They’re exaggerated, bigoted representations of my people—”

  “Non, that is hardly the most important issue right now,” Senna protested, but the soft bonging quarantine alarm seemed to be the last thing on the enraged volus’s mind.

  A guilty ultraviolet aura ran up and down Ysses’s tentacles. “The doll does not belong to this one. Only the eyes were needed. This one does not even know where such a doll may be purchased.”

  “Get rid of it, get rid of it immediately!” Irit rasped.

  Senna pointed at the ghastly face drawn on the quarian helmet. “Yorrik?” he said. “Who is that?”

  “Gallows humor: Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, right now that is my best friend in the world. With growing defensiveness: It has been hours. I was lonely. Ysses does not like me. Ysses does not have a face. Ysses does not know anything about cell replication or surface proteins. Horatio knows a great deal. With growing guilt concerning the appearance of recent actions: I named him Horatio. Exhausted defiance: Do you like him? You should like him. He is the one with the answers.”

  In all the time Senna’Nir and Yorrik had spent together, apparently the elcor had never noticed that only female quarians wore those patterned lavender hoods. “Horatio” was not a he. But Senna saw no purpose in pointing that out just now. You couldn’t talk the old doctor out of anything once he had his mind made up.

  “Where the hell did you get it?” Senna hated not being able to be in there with his friend. He felt useless out here in the hall, trapped away from what mattered most in this moment. Were they safe out here? They must be. That was the function of an emergency lockdown.

  “Shifting blame: Anax found it,” Yorrik droned. “Urgent query: Is this really what you want to talk about right now?”

  The hanar bobbed up and down on its levitation pack. “This one wishes to assure the commander that the Enkindlers have provided a miracle in our hour of need. If Analyst Therion had not secured this clothing, the autopsies would have concluded poorly.”

  “You couldn’t use a microscope?” the volus grumbled. “It’s a kid’s toy. Surely the two of you intellectual giants can figure it out.”

  Ysses lifted one rosy tentacle and activated the power on the massive blocky microscope sitting on a pile of spare parts. A foot-high hologram of a krogan drill sergeant flickered to life on top of the machine.

  “Greetings, young warrior!” the krogan educational VI bellowed. “Ambush slide A and overwhelm its defenses, soldier! Go! Go! Go! Seize Slide A in your mighty fist and spill the blood of the immersion oil onto its miserable flesh! Did you hear me, young champion? I said make a mighty fist! Now puncture the staging clips with the enemy carcass of Slide A and interrogate it for information! That is the sorriest excuse for science I’ve ever seen, grunt! Do it again!”

  The hanar switched the microscope off again. “This device is extremely stressful to use,” it said. “It also lacks in-depth analytical capability. It could only reveal the presence of the problem, not its n
ature. Additionally, this one has argued many times that attempts to control the tendency of nature toward entropy are by their nature futile. This one accepts the end of days. It has no need to know the name of its killer.”

  Yorrik grunted and said to Senna: “Plea for sympathy: Do you see what I have been dealing with?”

  Anax Therion and Borbala Ferank arrived at medbay as the hanar finished speaking, loaded out with the contents of the small arms locker.

  “Senna,” Anax said, and nodded at him.

  “Anax,” Senna answered, and nodded back.

  “The guests are all here,” Ferank said in her habitual half-growl. “Let’s get the orgy started. I presume we’re all going to die?”

  The batarian looked expectantly at the commander, then into the quarantined medbay clinic. Yorrik said nothing. He shifted uncomfortably on his long toe knuckles. Ysses hung in the air with a vaguely nihilistic sheen to it. The color drained from Borbala’s face.

  “Oh, fuck, we are,” she said.

  “Half-hearted attempt to cheer: You are not going to die, Borbala.”

  Ferank breathed a sigh of relief. “Excellent news. Don’t scare an old woman like that. You had me thinking there was a real problem for a minute there. By my eyes, it’s freezing in here. You all should try the bridge. It’s hot enough to boil your spit. Turn up the heat, will you, Senna?”

  “K, increase ambient temperature on Deck Nine,” Senna said impatiently. His suit regulated his own temperature, but not everyone was so lucky.

  Ambient temperature on Deck 9 is already at maximum, Commander Senna’Nir. I cannot increase it without immediate damage to organic tissue.

  Borbala Ferank’s teeth were starting to chatter. A thin sheen of frost gleamed at the corners of the medbay glass.

  That made three, Senna thought. Three systems failing that the ship could not even tell were failing. The cryopods, the lighting, and temperature control. Something else, too, was spreading.

  “Hesitant awkwardness: I am also not going to die. Nor will you, Commander, or Irit Non.” The elcor turned his kindly face toward Anax Therion.

  “Ah,” the drell said. “But I am. And the hanar, perhaps.”

  “How are you feeling, Analyst Therion?”

  “I feel fine.”

  “Genuine relief: That is good. That means there is a possibility that not all the drell pods were compromised.”

  Therion: “It is a virus, is it not, Yorrik?”

  Senna’Nir’s stomach curdled. Any quarian’s would have. They lived in fear of infection, even in clean rooms where no virus dared to tread, even in their suits. Centuries on the Migrant Fleet had left their race with immune systems about as effective as holding an old handkerchief to your mouth. What were the chances of this happening at the same time as the ship’s systems suddenly going haywire? This was bad. This was horrendously bad. And on his watch. What had he done to deserve this? They were almost to Andromeda. Why couldn’t that lizard have waited another couple of decades to drop dead?

  “Depressed: Affirmative, Anax Therion.” Yorrik turned to the quarian suit hanging next to the male drell body and intoned flatly: “Affectionate entreaty: ‘O good Horatio, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.’”

  The painted fluorescent smiley face stared back at them. Yorrik made a small, embarrassed sound through his slats and keyed something into the arm. The flipped faceplate lit up with information, readable to all of them instead of only to the dark interior of the suit. Words and numbers scrolled up and down, framing the visual field, a crawl of data monitoring and status updates cycling along the chinline, just like Senna’s own interior display. He felt oddly naked with the others peering in at the view quarians saw every day. It felt private.

  “Report, Medical Specialist,” he said gruffly. This was getting disorganized. He needed to take command of the situation, and he was tired of waiting. “Then Team Who, then Team How. Go.”

  Yorrik inclined his elephantine head toward the mess of hollowed-out trash on the autopsy tables. “Informative address: Chemical Specialist Ysses and I took blood and tissue samples from each subject using the lab’s native equipment. This concluded our use of the lab’s native equipment. Using a broad-spectrum fluorescent dye test, we were able to determine fairly quickly that none of the three victims suffered from any appreciable blood toxicity.”

  “This one spared us the task of listening to the microscope. This one witnessed the illumination of the blood and was able to interpret the gradations of color necessary for diagnosis with its naked eye,” Ysses hummed with a tinge of pride. “As vain as all such efforts to preserve order must always be,” it added quickly.

  “Irritated: Yes, you did very well. Anxiously moving on: The krogan microscope called us miserable piles of klixen dung and ordered us to do one hundred pull-ups, but we were able to use it, barely, to rule out bacterial infection, again through visual confirmation. This left few possibilities. I affirmed the presence of a virus through a dye injection test. As I have explained to the others, viruses are too small to be seen under a normal microscope; however, they cannot absorb dye through the surface membrane, and therefore it is possible to verify the presence of viral cells when there are undyed structures in the tissue sample. Translation: To see what is there by seeing what is not there. It was at this point that I instructed the ship to initiate quarantine procedures. It was also at this point that a more efficient method of diagnosis occurred to me. I had only intended to use Horatio as a virtual test subject to synthesize possible treatments from the curative capabilities of the suit. Apologetic: I am not overly familiar with the specifications of this technology. We then injected Horatio with a blood sample from the drell female. The hydraulics were immediately overwhelmed with an antibody flood; however, it has not been effective so far. More importantly, in order to manufacture antibodies, the suit had to recognize the virus. It did. Dramatic revelation: The cause of death was a highly contagious infection called Yoqtan.”

  Irit Non coughed and spluttered. “Impossible! You are lying in order to implicate the volus. Yoqtan has never killed anyone! The treatment is a couple of soothing baths and a mother’s love!”

  Anax Therion interjected: “Yoqtan is volus chickenpox. Their species all get it when they are juveniles. It is almost a rite of passage. The symptoms match up: a rash of dark-blue sores, swollen tongue, high fever, chills, and in severe cases, persistent nausea. Only the weakest of children do not survive Yoqtan. It should not have killed a thirty-year-old drell.”

  “It should not even be possible for her to have it,” snarled Irit Non. “She doesn’t have the right glands. And anything that could thrive in our blood should turn hers into a half-frozen milkshake. This isn’t a quarian ensemble,” the volus gestured at the elegant fiber mesh covering her body. “We don’t wear them because our immune systems are too precious to withstand a strong gust of wind. Our normal body temperatures are nothing like yours. Outside of Irune’s high-pressure jungles or my suit, our bodies would blow up like a balloon, split open and whatever was left would desiccate immediately in your toxic goddamned atmosphere. And if the completely insufficient pressure didn’t get us, we are allergic to oxygen. Your blood is full of it. Yoqtan just could not survive in a drell. It needs the same things volus do to live and replicate. Why are you lying, elcor? I didn’t think elcor could lie!”

  “Insulted: We can act, can’t we? Furious indignance: Look at Horatio. You can see I am telling the truth. Or do you think I can program this damnable tuxedo to do anything it doesn’t want to do? Attempted explanation: Please look for yourself. You can see the electron analysis and RNA sequencing. It is Yoqtan.”

  Anax Therion glanced at the concave faceplate. “91% Yoqtan,” she observed.

  “Acknowledgment of mutual understanding: Correct. The rest I cannot positively identify without proper equipment, but it seems to be an assortment of junk RNA. Presumably, this is what allowed
it to infect a drell in the first place. It clearly began in the drell, and runs its course much more quickly in a drell host. Disconcerting implications: However, as I said before, drell and hanar physiology bears almost no comparison. Very few viruses mutate sufficiently to jump between species. It is rare enough that the names of those that do are well known: measles, Ebola, Marburg virus, Sangelian hemorrhagic fever, Teukrian flu. I cannot think of one that commonly afflicts both drell and hanar, and neither can the ship’s computer.” Yorrik paused. The poor man was clearly deeply disturbed. “Inevitable conclusion: Either we are witnessing the birth of a new life form, or this is a manufactured virus, deliberately engineered.”

  “Who could hate the drell so much?” Senna said softly. They didn’t conquer other races, they didn’t outbreed or outgun anyone. And thanks to Kepral’s Syndrome, fewer and fewer of them were left each generation.

  “Regretful admission: I have no explanation as to how multiple drell came to be infected to begin with, or how hanar could contract the Yoqtan pathogen when the cryopods are self-contained systems. We have no patient zero. We have no model for the progression of the disease, only its end stage, and we are unlikely to develop one, since we can only detect new infections when the victims have already died, by the telltale ‘freezer burn.’ We have only a name. Yoqtan. Hollow optimism: The good news is there is no reason to think any other species will be affected. If we follow standard quarantine procedures, we should still be able to dock with the Nexus and let them find a cure.” The elcor’s enormous shoulders relaxed. He settled back slightly on his haunches. “Authoritative command: Airlock these bodies immediately. We have all the samples we need. Do not open the remaining cryopods under any circumstances. Deep fatigue: This completes our report to date. The rest is silence.”

  Senna’Nir, first officer of the Keelah Si’yah, clenched his jaw. “How many of those sanitary collars did we stock in medbay, Yorrik?”