Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “That’s hundreds of thousands of people. You were going to kill hundreds of thousands on the Nexus, just for political advantage?” Senna stood back from her. He felt sick with recognition. This was Qetsi’Olam, love of his life, the big-picture girl. The big-picture girl who sometimes just… couldn’t see the little brushstrokes. All that vulnerability she’d shown in his quarters was gone. Maybe it had never been there. Maybe she’d just needed him to trust her as he’d always done.

  “Not all of them. Some of them would always be immune; in any population some people are just… lucky. But… but most. Enough. Enough that it would only make sense to let the quarians step up and administer the survivors. We would comfort them in their grief. And only I and Malak would bear the guilt. No one would ever know. When a truly just galaxy arose, it would all be worth it. There would only be a history of unexplainable tragedy, and the light that was birthed from it. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

  The captain sunk to her knees.

  Anax Therion felt a terrible suspicion in her stomach.

  “How did you choose?”

  “What?”

  “How did you choose which drell to infect? It wasn’t all of us, or I would have it.”

  Qetsi did not raise her face to meet Anax’s eyes. “I watched you, all of you, on Hephaestus. We chose the most outgoing ones, the social butterflies, the happy drell who talked to everyone. Like Soval. The ones most likely to make… new friends on the Nexus.”

  Stony, venomous silence met that reply.

  “You’re insane,” hissed Senna. “They say that in vids but you are really and actually insane. Something is broken in you. How did you get past the screening? The Initiative rejected people far less bent on genocide than you.”

  Qetsi laughed. “Oh, Senna, you really are simple. I was always so good at taking tests, you know. Even if I didn’t study. There’s a reasoning, a certain logic, to all tests, and as soon as you know it, you can pass anything. It’s not like they asked if I planned to rewrite the whole history of the quarian species. That is not a question on the psychological exam. And if it was, my love, I am surely capable of answering no. Besides, they were looking for someone a little insane! The ancestors know you’ll never find a sane quarian who would abandon the quest for Rannoch. Anyone on this side of normal wouldn’t even consider it. They needed someone just the perfect amount of insane to dump their entire lives and families and all of recorded history and light out for Andromeda on the promise of… of what? A planet? Maybe? If there’s one out there for us? That the bureaucracy there would somehow provide for us when it never did back home? They wanted insane. Insane and inspiring and reckless. Only on their forms they spelled it ‘visionary.’ Well, they got me. I see the great pageant, just like the Initiative does. I see the new galaxy, writ large in stardust and blood. I just… see it a little differently arranged than they do. And that difference just looks like eagerness on a psych screen.”

  “But the people,” Anax said. “My people. You used us. Why couldn’t you just wait until we got to the Nexus? Or spread your disease in the Milky Way? Why come all this way for so much death? Why did the drell have to be the bullets you fired?”

  Qetsi stared at them, genuinely dumbfounded. “I’m not a monster. Killing a few thousand on the Nexus in exchange for a pristine society is an easy bargain. Killing trillions back home—and for what, there’s far too many of them on too many worlds to really change the balance of power—is horrific. What kind of person do you think I am?”

  “One who will be easily convicted,” Senna said grimly.

  “You can’t tell them,” the captain whispered. “The people on the Nexus. They will only persecute the quarians more brutally when we arrive. No one will ever trust us. You cannot tell anyone. Let Yorrik’s cure do its work. Airlock me if you have to—say I contracted it and died. I will accept that. But you cannot tell. You own this now, just as I do.”

  For a long moment, there was only silence.

  “Grandmother, open a comm channel to medbay,” Senna barked.

  Comm channel open, ke’sed. By the way, I know you haven’t asked because you’ve got the manners the gods gave a black hole, but I am nearly ready to begin my final patch. You’ll want to be in your cryopod when I do. Things could get as rocky as a glass of good ryncol around here.

  “Yorrik, is the retrovirus ready?”

  No response. Qetsi wept. Anax watched her with curiosity. I will remember this so well, she thought.

  “In overwhelming agony: Yes, Senna. It is ready,” Yorrik’s voice stuttered over the line. “Begging: P… p… please, my friend. Please say it.”

  But Senna said nothing. He grabbed the captain roughly by one arm. She did not resist. He dragged her toward medbay without a single word, his anger so black and total that Anax didn’t even try to tell him a story of Kahje to pass the time on their long, dead woman’s walk.

  * * *

  Yorrik crouched in the corner, blue sores blossoming all over his enormous, noble body. The elcor nodded weakly toward the autopsy table where a loaded hypospray waited.

  Senna’Nir turned to his captain. “I am not going to wake the Quorum. The three of us here should suffice for a tribunal. You did this, you’re going to undo it. Generating more of the retrovirus will take time. People will die in the gap. Maybe thousands. But you’re not going to let that happen, are you?”

  He picked up the hypospray and looked to Anax. She nodded solemnly. Then to Yorrik, whose red, crusted eyes widened in comprehension, if not of the why or wherefore, at least of the fact of what they meant to do. The elcor struggled to his massive feet and seemed to allow that final rage of Fortinbras to reign free. He charged her with a broken bellow, slamming Qetsi’Olam against the glass medbay wall. It cracked horribly. The captain moaned in helpless pain. But she nodded.

  She did nod. Years later, when Senna’Nir remembered this, he would try to hold on to the fact that, in the end, she agreed to mend what she had done. She had some speck of who he’d loved in her still.

  But that charge was all Yorrik had in him. He slumped to the ground.

  “With deep love and need: Say it, Senna. It is time,” he begged.

  Senna’Nir knelt next to his old friend. He put his hands on the ancient elcor’s gray head. He leaned down and whispered, “With infinite grief and friendship: ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’”

  The elcor sighed no more.

  The quarian rose, seized the captain by the throat, released the clamps on her helmet, ripped it off, and injected the retrovirus directly into her jugular.

  19. RELEASE

  Qetsi’Olam walked naked, or near enough to it, down the halls of her ship.

  Down every hall, in every zone. They watched her come, her crew, her passengers. The old woman’s voice that had taken the place of the ship’s interface had told them what to do, if not why. They watched her come, singing as she walked, and one by one, they approached.

  Sing me to sleep on the starry sea

  And I’ll dream through the night of my suit and me

  I won’t fear the heat of a desert breeze

  Or contaminants high in the jungle trees

  Even in space I shall never freeze

  Because I’ve got my suit and my suit’s got me.

  Most had never seen a quarian outside her suit before. The drell came to her and stood near, hesitantly, like wary dogs around a new pup. They breathed the air she breathed. They reached out, gingerly, and one by one she held their hands and squeezed them, flesh-to-flesh contact, every cell of her body containing the possibility of grace. They stood so close, close enough to contract her healing infection. Tears coursed down her cheeks and the hanar touched them, wiped them away, and Qetsi’Olam tried to pretend that meant they forgave her. Child elcor smelled her scent and let her fingers trail through their slats. Batarians were rougher, they swore at her as they crowded in, snarling, a
nd she could not pretend then. One spat at her. She had never in all her life felt anything like it. It felt like being struck in the heart by a rifle.

  And all the while she trembled, and shook, and gooseflesh rose on her pale flesh as she entered zones not meant for her, for her anatomy, for her respiration, for her comfort. All the while she wept and sang.

  Oh, I love my mother who holds me tight

  And I love my father taught me right

  Oh, I love my ship sailing strong through the night

  And I love the homeworld for which we fight

  But what do I love like a lock loves a key?

  What holds fast my heart, head, shoulders and knees?

  I love my suit and my suit loves me.

  Qetsi’Olam thought of her parents burning away into ash on their home ship. She thought of the feeling of the algae on Erinle crawling into her lungs, creeping inside her, taking her prisoner. She thought of Senna’Nir, his joy and warmth when they were young. She thought of Malak’Rafa, his fire, and what they would do to him when she was gone. She did what she could on her walk of penance. Touched them all though it turned her stomach, this intimacy of skin on skin, flesh on flesh, no suit, no protection.

  It would have been beautiful, she thought. My Andromeda would have been beautiful.

  She finally collapsed in the volus zone, the last of them, the ammonia raising boils on her skin, the pressure making her eyeballs bulge. She fell to the ground and they stood around her in clumps, breathing in loudly, roughly, needing the medicine her body offered so badly.

  Qetsi’Olam, for all that she had done, tried to hold on as long as she could for them. She sang as loud as she could in the fumes, clinging to the last of life, the last lyric of her long journey into the black.

  When I grow up I shall have a house in the sun

  On my true homeworld where the wild rivers run

  I’ll plant flowers in soil where now there are none

  And there’ll be plenty of room for everyone

  But till I see Rannoch with my very own eyes

  And kiss the sweet ground where my ancestors lie

  We’ll sleep safe as engines as forward we fly

  My self and my suit

  My suit and I.

  When it was over the Keelah Si’yah streamed on like a sailing ship through the night, a silver wake behind it. Frozen, glittering, beloved corpses, laid to rest in the bosom of space, and among them, one without sores or blood—Malak’Rafa, his crystallized eyes turned backward toward the Milky Way.

  EPILOGUE

  Borbala Ferank lay down inside her cryopod.

  “I’ll see you on the other side,” Anax Therion said, perched on the lip of the pod.

  “Will you?” said the batarian with some amusement. “Tell me a truth, Anax. I listened to all those lies. Tell me one truth about yourself and I’ll see you there, I’ll even keep a house for you, waiting on whatever homeworld the Pathfinders find for the batarians. Somewhere nice and dry.”

  Anax gazed down with her dark eyes.

  “They were all true.”

  “Tell me another one.”

  “All right. I was never bonded to a hanar. I have been alone all my life. I watched other drell be chosen, but I had to carve my own way. I was not wanted. Except by the Shadow Broker, who only wanted the secrets I could send. The stories are true, but the names are false. It has always only been me, occasionally in company, mostly alone.”

  “Is that true?” said Borbala Ferank.

  “Perhaps,” smiled Anax Therion, and leaned down to kiss the batarian on her gouged-out, withered eye, and then, almost afraid to do it, on her lips. “Sleep well. Do not dream. Find me in Andromeda.”

  Batarian skin looks almost white in cryostasis. Drell skin, too.

  * * *

  “Systems report, Grandmother,” said Senna’Nir as he activated the stasis cascade on his own pod. He immediately began to feel the drowsiness overcome him.

  Call me Keelah Si’yah. Never thought of myself as old enough for grrrrrr—all systems optimal, Commander.

  There. It had begun. She had lost her name. By the time someone from the Nexus found them, his ancestor would be completely subsumed into the ship’s databanks. A tiny fish in a great sea. Not dead, not gone, but not Liat, either. But perhaps… Perhaps he could visit her, still, from time to time. In his old quarters, where she, so briefly, came very nearly alive.

  The cryostasis came on fast. He tried not to think of Qetsi, to fear dreaming of her, a dream in which he had to decide whether to tell the others what had happened, or simply deny them boarding rights until full decontamination procedures were followed and report the usual plague story—unexplainable, devastating, over now. Done. The rest was a decision for the warmth of arrival, not the cold forgiveness of sleep.

  If there was any forgiveness to be had.

  “Goodbye, Grandmother,” he whispered.

  Goodbye, ke’sed. May flights of angels sing thee… sing thee… thee sing…

  Incoming message, Commander.

  But no one was awake to receive it. The Keelah Si’yah flew on in silence, a glimmer of light in the dark, toward a home that was already calling to them.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Let’s just jump right in at the deep end: Thank you to everyone who has been involved with the creation of Mass Effect over the years. It is and remains my favorite video game series of all time, and I was honored to be allowed to play in such a glorious sandbox. Thanks particularly to the team that guided me through this process: Steve Saffel, Cat Camacho, Mac Walters, Cathleen Rootsaert, Derek Watts, Joanna Berry, my agent Howard Morhaim, and anyone I’ve missed.

  Thank you also to the Mass Effect fan community, whose tireless enthusiasm, interest, and eye for the smallest detail of the universe keeps this universe alive.

  Thanks to Connor Goldsmith, who got so sick of my evangelizing about the wonder of Mass Effect that he stopped me mid-sentence to introduce me to Steve Saffel and quite deliberately started this whole crazy ball rolling. And thank you to my Patreon patrons, especially Sean Elliott, who kept me afloat while I worked on this project, all the while not getting to see a bit of it.

  Now, about four years ago, I was moping around the house whingeing: “I wish I was playing a game that I could get obsessed with like I used to get obsessed with the old Final Fantasy games…”

  And my partner answered: “Haaaave you met Mass Effect?”

  I played the series through in about a month of ignoring the entire rest of my life, and so much came from that procrastination it beggars the mind. So thank you, Heath, soon to be my husband, for making sure I didn’t let Mordin die in the suicide mission and that I waited to make any romance decisions until I met Thane, and for listening to me complain about my blue boo Liara being so mean to me after everything we went through together, and then, a couple of years later, listening to me hash out a space thriller with no blue boos in it at all. Mostly green boos, really.

  Finally, a small note to my son, who will join us here on planet earth just around the same time this novel does. You were very small and quiet while I wrote this, a mere glimmer on the character selection screen. But you were there, with me in the space between galaxies, in and around and throughout this book technically written by a two-in-one creature, the most science fictional beast you can find in this mad world. Keelah Se’lai, my child.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of more than two dozen works of fantasy, science fiction, short fiction, and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance and Space Opera. She’s the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards, and a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives off the coast of Maine.

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