Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Say what?” The quarian tried to shift his weight, to get the whole of Yorrik’s gigantic head into his lap, lifted up off the floor of the clinic. “Oh, no, no, Yorrik, no you don’t. You just had a fall. You’re not going to die, don’t be stupid. You’ve got to get up and save us. You found our needle. She’s just there, near the iso-chamber. Now we just need to thread it. And look—Yorrik, look up!” The elcor tried, he really did, but the room was a blur. There were figures there, splotches of gray and purple. Nice splotches. “Anax and Borbala brought your eezo. It’s all here for you, old man. We’re all here for you.”

  “‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?’” Yorrik whispered. He realized he had forgotten to preface it with emotion. Now they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t know what he meant. The elcor struggled to speak again but his throat, his throat hurt him so.

  “Ysses…” he managed.

  “Is in custody,” Anax Therion said, and the sharp green of her voice cut through his fogged mind.

  Yorrik struggled to his feet. The madness would come soon. He knew it would. He had seen it, heard it, and no doctor suffers from the usual delusion that he will be any different than another patient. The progression of a disease is the progression of a disease. He would soon be nothing but a rampaging hulk of tonnage aimed at all these people. It was clever, really, as far as a virus can be clever. The spores that shot out of the abscesses at the point of rupture spread the infection one way, but once the victim was possessed by the rage of the final phases, their lust for destruction and death would spread it, too, fluid to fluid, a classic if ever there was one.

  “Angry: You took my microscope. That krogan was going to talk me through it,” he growled, and felt resentment rising like blood in him.

  Senna’Nir stood back a little, ready to try, very vainly, to catch the enormous heft of a falling elcor, if he fell again. Good Senna. Always so good.

  “Grandmother,” the quarian said, a tinge of pride in his voice, “How do you engineer an active retrovirus?”

  Hello, Grandson. Well, first you pour yourself a very tall drink, ’cause this is going to take a while. Then, you’ve got to isolate the immuno-cells and treat your eezo source to leach impurities—

  “Overjoyed: You got the ship working again.”

  “Not at all, but we’ve got a few systems back online. Enough?”

  “Satisfaction: Enough. Warning: You should not be near me, Senna. I am extremely contagious at the moment. Go. I will alert you when I have finished.”

  “Can’t I help? I want to stay with you. Like that night when we drank ryncol and watched the stars down by the river. Do you remember that night?”

  “With great love: Say it for me, Senna. You may not get another chance.”

  Senna’Nir was crying. The elcor could smell the salt of his tears through his helmet.

  “No,” Senna snapped. “You say it. I won’t. You’re so close. You’re not going to die before you save us all.”

  “Coaxing: Say it.”

  “No!” roared the quarian.

  The captain interrupted, her voice cool and calm, as it always had been from those first days on Hephaestus.

  “How can we distribute the retrovirus once you have it, Yorrik? In case the worst should happen, I need to know.”

  Yorrik had dreaded this part of the discussion. This was not a laboratory and supplies were not infinite. In the end, if he was lucky, and he lived long enough, and the ship’s computer really was fixed, Yorrik would end up with a very small sample to work with. Infinite space bound in a walnut shell.

  “Reluctant response: The most efficient method, given how little material is in our possession, would be to inject a person with it, and allow them to infect others as they would with the original Fortinbras virus. It could be a sick person or a well one, but they would have to move throughout the ship, coming into physical contact with everyone who has been exposed to the virus. I doubt I will have enough to treat more than one person. We could wait for the virus to replicate under laboratory conditions, but how many more deaths would occur? So many. So many deaths. And each of them bright violet, as violet as a river in the night…”

  Yorrik could feel the tension that kept a mind slipping from him. He stared numbly at Qetsi’Olam through his haze. Hatred surged in his heart. Unnameable, unreasoned hatred. If he could only rip her to pieces and feast on her blood, everything would go back to the way it was before. He knew it, somehow, in his bones. But the ancient elcor bit back on his fury. It was not his at all. It was Fortinbras, doing what he always did, coming in at the end to ruin and rend. He would not give in to it. Not yet. This was his final stage. His soliloquy. His swan song. Fortinbras would not ruin that for him.

  “Urgent: Go. Leave me alone with my work,” Yorrik pleaded.

  The comms crackled to life suddenly. No—not the comms. It was the public address system. The only way Anax Therion knew to contact them.

  Good evening, fellow doomed passengers. Would Captain Qetsi’Olam and First Officer Senna’Nir kindly make their way to my cabin 788B in the drell zone? I have some things I wish to say. And I believe my hanar friend does, as well.

  18. CELL SUICIDE

  Anax Therion watched her come in. Watched her sit down across from the sullen hanar, coming down off its red sand high, hanging like a coat in the corner of her quarters, its levitation packs at half power to keep it immobile. She watched Senna’Nir hover over her. Protective, overly so. Guilt, perhaps. She still hadn’t decided on the commander. They had hardly had a chance to speak. Or, more importantly, for Anax to hear him speak. The drell took a deep breath, finally free of that suit, her green skin shining in the dim lights of her quarters that flickered pinkish-violet every so often. She would be grateful to see normal, steady lights again, if she ever did. The kind you could read a book by.

  “Borbala, the door, if you don’t mind?” Therion said carefully. These were her favorite moments, when she had almost all the answers, and needed only to fit the last piece in. Unfortunately, the last piece rather often tried to make a run for it. The batarian nodded and moved to prevent that from happening.

  “Is this the bosh’tet who tried to kill us all?” said the captain stonily, gesturing at Ysses.

  “It is, indeed,” answered Therion, without taking her gaze from the quarians.

  “It is a strange thing,” Qetsi’Olam said softly, “to worship death so fervently.”

  The lights flickered again.

  “This one knows the truth. The Day of Extinguishment is the day of freedom. This one rejoices in the chaos around it, that is all. This one has no need to explain itself.”

  “I thought Kholai’s followers didn’t believe in taking action to bring about the end of the world,” said Senna uncertainly.

  The lights flickered: rose, violet.

  Borbala Ferank shrugged. “There are heretics everywhere,” she grunted. “Even among heretics.”

  Anax Therion did not get up from her sofa. Her muscles ached from the oils they had absorbed. She wanted only to rest. To rest and to eat. But another part of her had never been so alert.

  “What will you do with him, Captain?” the drell asked. “What is the name of justice in our new world?”

  Qetsi crossed her arms and leaned back on her heels, thinking. “We must revive the Quorum,” she said finally. “All of us must pass judgment on this one who has brought such horror upon our beautiful ship. It cannot be my decision alone. Perhaps there is a mercy to be divined here… Perhaps he only followed his master. Perhaps he is not so bad as all that. There must be a trial. Keep him confined. We revive any members of the Quorum who were lucky enough to sleep through this in a clean zone to limit their exposure. With some luck, Yorrik’s retrovirus will make such contingencies irrelevant. No one has entered Engineering since the onset of this crisis, it should be safe. I will go and make arrangements. Is this acceptable?”

  They nodded. It seemed fair. The
captain nodded back and slipped past Borbala into the open hall.

  “Senna’Nir,” said Anax, standing up and brushing her palms off on her thighs, “come with me?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Why? To follow the captain and see where she goes, of course.”

  “She’s going to the cryobay, to start moving the Quorum’s pods to Engineering,” the quarian male insisted.

  “Is she?” Borbala Ferank mused. “Fascinating.”

  Anax Therion let her translucent inner eyelids slide shut. “The night before,” she whispered. “Stars like grains of wheat outside. Inside, music, light, movement. Soval Raxios, dancing like a heart on fire. A quarian dances with her, laughing, a heron on the surface of clean water. I alone am unhappy. So many people. So much sound. I walk alone through the station as on the banks of a river, watching, listening. I look up; a young man crawls across the belly of the ship, a lamprey against a silver shark, taking sustenance, injecting… something else. He sees me, I withdraw. I consider my own life, a book of secrets. I remember all my sins. Then—a shot in the shadows. The lamprey is dead. A figure disappearing in the distance, singing, humming, a voice I know, a voice I do not hear again for almost three hundred years, the same heron whose feet made no mark on the clean water.” Her eyelids withdrew. “A drell’s memory is perfect, but we must choose to remember. I thought I kept recalling Soval because so much of this seemed to return to her somehow. But it was not Soval my mind wished me to see again.”

  It had always amazed Anax how easy it was to turn love to distrust, if you really tried to do it. Senna followed her out of her quarters in silence, leaving the batarian to play prison guard, a role she seemed to enjoy. The darkness of the corridors helped them; the quiet of the drell zone made it easy to hear the captain’s footsteps.

  She was not going to Engineering.

  They kept their distance. The running lights outlined Qetsi in the dark. An arm snaked out from an alcove outside Mess Hall 2 and grabbed her, dragged her into an alcove. Voices hissed up out of the dark.

  “What are you doing? I told you to meet me. This has gone too far. We have to do something,” a male voice snarled.

  “Please, Malak’Rafa, do not fear. It is all resolving better than we could imagine. They have the hanar immobilized. They have no doubt it and its people are to blame. If the elcor’s cure works, we have nothing at all between us and innocence.”

  “That… is a relief. But, Qetsi… if the retrovirus works… all our plans…” Malak said mournfully.

  “There will be time for more plans. A new life in Andromeda. Where there is life there is always hope. We are lucky, Malak. Lucky to have any path free of this.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this…”

  The captain put her finger on Malak’Rafa’s faceplate. “I know. Go back to the quarian zone. I am going to the cargo hold. I will find something usable, and I will dispatch Ysses tonight so that it cannot tell the truth—not that it seems inclined to, it truly is happy that all this has happened. I will never understand hanar. Or religion. Soon, all will be well.”

  Senna’Nir and Anax Therion watched the quarian male disappear down the long curving hallway.

  “Oh, Qetsi,” Senna sighed with a horrible choke in his voice. “What have you done?”

  The captain whirled on them, drawing a small Arc Pistol from her hip.

  “Senna!” she cried. “You frightened me! What are you doing sneaking around like that?”

  Anax had always found people to be most themselves when they were afraid they had been caught doing something they oughtn’t. Would they admit it right away? Obfuscate? Everything a person was could be revealed in that red-handed moment.

  “I think I’ve gotten turned around,” the captain laughed nervously.

  “On your own ship?” asked the drell.

  “It’s a big ship, Analyst Therion. Shouldn’t you be guarding our hanar friend?”

  “Ah,” said Anax, clasping her hands behind her back. “I believe Ysses is the literal embodiment of the old human folktale of the red herring. That one rejoices in death and annihilation, but it did nothing to bring it about.”

  The captain’s hand began to tremble on her gun. “Malak,” she called out, but he did not come.

  “But you. I saw you dance with Soval Raxios. I saw you gun down that human boy in cold blood. You did something, if not everything. Means, motive, and opportunity,” Therion went on. By the Lord of Hunters the fresh air felt good on her skin. “They are classics, but useful. You would have had all the opportunities you could carry; after all, this is your ship. And as for means, they can be purchased at any port. It is only the motive that has perplexed me. Why would you hate the drell so intensely that you would seek to destroy us? What have we done to you to deserve this? If you wanted Andromeda to be rid of drell, you had only to forbid us to board.”

  “Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah,” Senna’Nir whispered. “What have you done?”

  It was not as satisfying as Anax had hoped. You couldn’t see a quarian’s face drain of color, or her pupils dilate in terror, or her perspiration response. You could only see the same shadowed faceplate you always saw, even in that most intimate of moments, when the hunter catches her prey, and the detective pins her criminal to the deed.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Qetsi whispered. “I don’t hate the drell. You were never supposed to be harmed, please believe that.”

  “I do not, but go on,” Therion snorted.

  “I did it for us, Senna. For our beautiful new world,” she said to her first officer. She wasn’t speaking to Anax at all. Just pleading with her former lover to understand.

  But the first officer did not understand. He pointed at the mess hall door and spoke in cold fury. “There are bodies stacked up in there like old shoes. How is that beautiful? Or even new?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Qetsi screamed in frustration. “I was so careful. I designed the virus myself. It was perfect. It was so perfect. A carrier virus. It would never have shown any symptoms. The drell would contract it three-quarters of the way through the journey, and they would never even know they had it. I paid a kid to install dispensers in their pods. Told him it was perfume, to remind them of home. Everything was supposed to be fine. But the computer side of it all, the worm, that was Malak’Rafa’s baby. His darling. He spent months on the thing, and in the end, in the end, Senna, he fucked up, not me. I did my job flawlessly. He choked at the finish somehow. All it was ever supposed to do was raise the temperature slightly, the very barest minimum, to let the virus get a foothold and then cover its tracks. That’s it. That’s all. But the worm raised the temperature a little too high, just a little, maybe half a degree too far, just far enough to allow the beginnings of a very slow continuous replication without waking anyone up.”

  “And that gave Fortinbras a hundred and fifty years to mutate,” Therion said. “I suspect it found no good purchase in our lungs and was forced to progress to the brain. And once a virus has learned a new trick, it doesn’t forget. Fifty years of replication with no predators is enough to create the mother of all infections. It’s billions of generations.”

  “To fulfill fitness parameters,” Senna mumbled. Therion pursed her lips. “But then we have the problem of Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9. We always seemed to come back to Soval Raxios. Patient Zero, of a sort. She wasn’t, of course, you infected hundreds of drell. But her Sleepwalker team revived shortly after infection, and she had contact with all those other people. They went back into their pods covered in the droplets of her breath, her sweat, maybe even more. And Fortinbras had more time to work, and more species to adapt to. And all the while, you revived yourself, here and there, flitting just beyond the cameras, checking the progress, monitoring the worm in the computers, making sure all was proceeding according to plan.”

  “It was a carrier virus,” Qetsi hissed through clenched teeth.

  “Carried to wh
at?” Senna’Nir said numbly.

  The captain looked up at him with a misery that was clear even through dark glass.

  “To the Nexus,” she said. “Senna, remember what I said. Remember it. New world, new rules. Why should it always, always be them? The Council races, lording it over us all. What does the Council matter in Andromeda? Why should turians, asari, humans, and fucking salarians always come out on top? Humans! Who barely puked themselves into a spacefaring culture half a second ago? Salarians? You know what they did to me, Senna. You know.”

  The quarian glanced at Anax. “When she was on her Pilgrimage on Erinle, they stripped her suit off and left her outside the habitat bubble without it. Only for a few minutes. A prank, they said. But her lungs became infected with algae. It took months to recover.”

  “Months during which I learned. I learned about Ayalon B and artificial viral technology. I learned how to build my own like a child’s blocks. And I learned that people hate us. The quarians. They hate us for all the reasons one species hates another. We could never really be safe in the Milky Way, even if we retook Rannoch. We could only be safe somewhere new. So…” She swallowed hard. “The drell would carry the virus onto the Nexus. The only people it would harm would be humans, turians, asari, and salarians. Quarians would be safe in our suits, everyone else… Oh, Senna, if only you could understand, you’d be proud of me. It’s so clever. No one else could have thought of it. As long as the infection stayed within a drell—or even an elcor or batarian; I did consider spillover, I’m not an idiot—it would be inert. Safe. But once it infected species whose bodies it recognized, its parts recognized, it would come into its own. It would run wild through them. The Council races are native to the diseases I used, the rest of us would have been safe. Once it found its home, the disease would clear out the Nexus of almost everyone but us. Not just us. Not just quarians!” She turned to Anax. “Drell, too, and elcor, and hanar, and batarians, and volus. The species denied our places in the Milky Way. We would finally have our chance to shine. To become great. To create something better than the corruption of the old galaxy, the seething schemes of Cerberus and the geth and all the rest of the horrors of home. A new life, a completely new life, with us at the top.”