Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  “That can’t be good.”

  On the wall across the room, a rectangular panel caught her eye. A terminal, exposed by an open panel. The screen was on, displaying the Initiative’s logo.

  Sloane vaulted an upended couch and wove her way between a mess of overturned tables and chairs. Halfway there, a loud pop triggered the survival instinct that had seen her through too many battles to count. She dove for cover.

  A shower of sparks rained from the ceiling. The room went dark, save for emergency lights along the bases of the walls, and that single glowing screen behind the open panel on the far wall.

  A body lay beneath the display. An asari, sprawled and lifeless under the weight of a light fixture shaken loose in the calamity.

  When nothing else exploded, Sloane eased from her precarious niche and studied the body. The asari didn’t move as she approached. Didn’t breathe. Nothing.

  Sloane Kelly shifted her focus to the screen, telling herself now was the time to gain a sit-rep. Except the logo was gone now, replaced with that damned red word again: offline. Sloane wanted to scream in frustration.

  Instead, she checked the body, already aware of what she’d find doing it. The woman had become the body in Sloane’s mind.

  The chaos another battlefield.

  Fire. Ash. Destruction.

  All of it caught up to her when she touched that still neck. This woman had sacrificed everything to come here. They all had. And for what?

  Loss. Disappointment. Death.

  Sloane clenched her jaw. This stranger was a friend for the simple reason that they’d shared the same goal, given up the same things.

  What had the asari’s final thoughts been? Fear, Sloane supposed. Anger, maybe.

  Mission failed.

  The other side didn’t seem to be at all what they’d expected.

  A single, wet cough broke the silence. Sloane’s focus slammed back to the asari as her body heaved, and a trickle of fresh blood scored rivulets down her chin. Some semblance of life returned to her pale violet eyes. “M-Mayday…”

  Sloane wrapped an arm under her shoulders, kept her from thrashing. “You’re going to be okay. We may be under attack, so save your energy and—”

  “I’m not,” the woman wheezed, pink foam frothing at her lips, “dead… soon e-enough.” Her faded eyes rolled toward the offline terminal. “Initial…” Sloane held her as still as possible as the asari’s filling lungs ground her words to rattling coughs. Gritting her teeth, the alien gripped Sloane’s tunic in a bloodied fist and managed, “Not attack.” Every word bubbled. “Damage is compre… hensive….”

  Sloane sat hard on the floor. Tried her best to keep the woman steady. But it wasn’t easy. Her mind struggled to wrap around the situation. “We hit something, then.”

  “No.” Bloody teeth bared as the asari fought another wracking fit. “Too even. Too… ugh…”

  “Easy,” Sloane cut in, covering her hand and gripping it tight. “Stay with me. I need your intel. Sabotage?”

  Somewhere in the depths of the asari’s pain and struggle, humor found its way out in a graveled, burbling laugh. “You… didn’t—” Blood and flecks of foam sprayed in an uneven pattern. Her eyes closed, a tear sliding down one bruised cheek. Even as she still smiled. Sloane frowned. “Physics,” the woman managed. “Sensors. D-data…”

  Sloane considered what to do next. She needed answers. And leadership. “My priority now is the safety of Jien Garson. The council.”

  “Chamber 00,” the asari said, confirming what Sloane already knew. It was a choking whisper.

  This was it. Soldiers without a doctor present didn’t make it off the field with symptoms like hers, and Sloane wasn’t that. Her frown twisted. “Your name?”

  The fist in her uniform weakened.

  Nobody left forgotten. “Your name,” she demanded, bending over the asari. Her uniform said only T’vaan.

  It was all Sloane would get. The gurgling rasp of the asari’s last breath ended in nothing—silence, stillness. The hand dropped, and didn’t so much as twitch again. Sloane bowed her head for a moment, all she could afford as the station shuddered around her. Gently, she set T’vaan’s—no, the body back onto the floor, her fist hard against the surface as she pushed herself back up to her feet.

  It was a mistake to think of everyone here as friends. There were thousands of crew in those stasis pods, and some of them, a great many of them perhaps, had to have gladly left their pasts behind. Garson had said it herself: a one-way ticket.

  They’d all been naïve to assume it’d be one without loss.

  “Stasis chamber 00,” Sloane repeated, drawing strength from the words. “Thank you.”

  Her injuries cracked and throbbed, burned and—in the case of that broken toe—screamed at her as she jogged across the debris-strewn chamber. But it was all nothing to the thought that drove her: what was the status of the council?

  All else considered, they—Garson—had to have made it through alive.

  Please, Sloane chanted silently, each syllable in time with her aching steps. Please.

  * * *

  The halls blurred together. One darkened, damaged tunnel after another. Every stasis chamber she passed was still sealed, the state of the inhabitants unknown. She had no choice to leave them that way. Saving one room of Nexus crew members mattered little if the entire ship was at risk, and the more she saw, the more she came to believe it.

  In one narrow hall a change in the light gave her pause. Power coming back on? No, she realized. In her rush Sloane hadn’t even noticed the floor-to-ceiling window beside her.

  Only then did the view beyond truly register.

  For a moment she just stood there, speechless. Bits of the scene spattered her spinning mind, coalescing fitfully into a whirl of light and dark and pinpricks of color. The viewing pane looked out onto a plaza, one of the larger installations that left room for wards to fold into for traveling. A place people were meant to stroll and discuss the important details of colonizing a new galaxy.

  It was a ruin.

  The window offered an unimpeded view all the way down the length of one of the Nexus’s great arms. Several kilometers of meticulously designed and constructed habitat. Factories, hydroponic farms, hospitals—everything they would need. Everything that would sustain them.

  All she could see was the flames, the gouts of venting gas, the walls sheared in jagged lines, the exposed girders. Devastation on a massive scale, and beyond it all, an unfamiliar sea of motionless stars.

  It wasn’t the Milky Way. Sloane would know. Spending a lot of time staring out ship windows made for a strange sort of familiarity. Palaven, Thessia, hell, she’d have been happy to be looking out at Omega’s starscape.

  This was disorienting, with its glittering net of blue, red, and white stars and trailing web of eerily colored threads of gas and stardust. They were definitely not home.

  But what about their new home?

  Impossible to tell.

  Sloane Kelly ran now. Feet pounding in an all-out sprint despite the fresh howls of agony from her broken toe, the fog of her stasis hangover pushed to a distant corner of her being. She knew she’d pay for this later—if there was a later.

  She hoped to hell there was a later. One she and the council could talk about, maybe over drinks. Lots and lots of drinks.

  Hallways flew by in a blur, until finally she reached the door she’d been looking for, marked by a simple ‘00’.

  It was wide open.

  Sloane pulled to a stop just before the threshold, caught her breath. A moment, just one to steel her resolve, and then she slipped inside.

  The stasis chamber resembled any other chamber. A perfect clone of the one Sloane herself had struggled to secure and exit. The only difference was the scope of damage. The tragedy of bodies.

  There was neither.

  Every pod here was wide open. No sign of death, of damage, of fire or physical malfunctions.

  One glance an
d she determined that the room was empty. Utterly silent. At least there weren’t any corpses. She’d take any victory she could at this point, no matter how small. But relief stubbornly waited. She needed to find Garson, to hear her orders. To bring good news to the survivors.

  At least that would be normal.

  She turned on her heel, her mind already shifting to a backup plan, when a weak cough broke the silence.

  Sloane paused, scanned the room again. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  Then another cough, and a wan, “Hello? Someone there?”

  “I’m here,” she confirmed, taking swift steps into the room and scanning its darkened pods. “Where are you?”

  “Here.” A raised hand, just visible beyond a metal table. Sloane slid across the table and dropped into a kneel beside the woman lying flat on her back. Blood from a gash on her forehead ran down her nose and cheek, and her eyes weren’t quite focusing in the same direction.

  “How bad is it?” Sloane asked, her eyes snapping from the injury to the name printed across the left breast of her bloodied suit. Addison. Foster Addison, another senior-level crew member, like Sloane. Colonial Affairs, if memory served.

  Addison brought up one hand and tentatively probed the cut. The blood had already started to dry around the edges, though a fresh line welled from the middle when she touched it.

  The woman grimaced. “I’ll manage. A bit dazed.”

  A bit? Yeah, right.

  Sloane detoured to the first-aid panel, mercifully intact in this oddly untouched chamber, and found a kit with packets of medi-gel safely tucked inside. Once back at Addison’s side, she popped the seal and slathered the cool gel on Addison’s forehead. “This should help.”

  Addison grimaced, eyes clenched shut again. “Not one for bedside manners, I take it.”

  “No bed,” Sloane pointed out as she sat back and removed her own boot. “No doctors, no point.” She dabbed the gunk on her throbbing, swollen toe, then packed the gel all around it for extra cushion.

  “Ugh.”

  Sloane ignored the woman, waited several seconds for the pain-dampening effects to kick in. It still hurt to pull her boot back on, but not nearly as bad as before. “Okay. Niceties over.” When she looked up, Addison had managed to stand upright, though braced against a pod.

  She surveyed the room, then frowned shakily at Sloane. “Should you be in here?”

  That, Sloane decided, was probably concussion talking. It was too inane to be anything else. She ignored that, too. “Where are the others? Garson?” Sloane glanced around a second time just to be sure. Every stasis pod in the room stood empty. Contrary to her thin hopes.

  Addison squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, her gaze seemed a little less cloudy. The gel on her forehead was already turning matte, sealing the wound. “We were all up in Operations. For…” She shook her head a fraction, like she had to shake the thought loose. “For the arrival.”

  The arrival. Awakened for the arrival.

  The news felt unreal against the chaos surrounding it. “So…” Sloane stared at her. “We made it?”

  The injured woman nodded, opened her eyes. “We did.”

  “What the hell happened, then? Attack?”

  Addison went still. Then, as if suddenly putting two and two together, fixed a concerned stare on Sloane. “Who are you? You look familiar.”

  Two and two, Sloane thought in irritation, clearly added to five. “Security Director Sloane Kelly,” she said patiently. “We’ve met.”

  “Ah. Security. Of course you’d jump to that conclusion, then.” She coughed, closed her eyes once more. Two fingers pressed around the swollen flesh of her wound. The gel was probably already kicking in to numb the area. Sloane’s toe had settled to a whimper. As had her hands. “Let’s not assume an attack,” the woman continued. “We didn’t come here to war with whomever we find here.”

  “Yeah, yeah, peaceful and friendly, I know the speech. Doesn’t mean the locals heard it.” T’vaan hadn’t agreed, though. She’d died believing there was no attack, died in Sloane’s arms talking about some kind of sensor issue. Sloane frowned. “So what did happen?”

  This time, Addison’s voice cracked. “No idea. But,” she continued more forcefully, “we should go check.”

  Sloane debated leaving her behind, but decided against it. If Operations had fared as badly as cryostasis, she’d need all the help she could get. She offered the woman a supporting hand. “Can you walk?”

  Addison gave a shaky nod, and ignored Sloane’s proffered hand to take the first unsteady steps away from her support.

  She didn’t fall over, so Sloane let her offer drop. She did, however, make sure she matched the Director’s pace within steadying distance. Just in case.

  They walked in relative silence for a moment. As Sloane eyed the woman’s straight back, a thought occurred to her. “Why weren’t you in Ops?”

  Addison shot her a glance. “I’d just left it to find Jien.”

  “Find Jien?” By sheer reflex, she grabbed the woman’s arm. “She’s alive?”

  “At last check,” she replied, but frowned in bemusement at Sloane’s hand. “Before official launch of arrival protocols, the science team wanted to nail down final readings. Jien had just stepped out, so when we were ready, I went to get her.”

  “No comms?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t see the need.”

  Sloane jerked a thumb back the way they’d come. “You thought she’d be in there?”

  This time, her fellow director looked away, pulling her arm from Sloane’s grasp. “Uh, no. I stopped in there for a sec.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to use the… restroom.”

  Sloane frowned. “What, they didn’t set up facilities near Ops?”

  The woman stared straight ahead, though Sloane saw the tic in her suddenly set jaw. “Don’t be rude about it, Director,” she said tightly.

  Defensive, much? “Sorry, Director, are my questions bothering you?”

  Addison shot her another glance, this one cool. “Unless they’re leading to an epiphany or an accusation involving malevolent biological functions, maybe focus on what’s important?”

  Ugh. That’s right. Sloane remembered exactly why she hadn’t bothered making an effort with the Colonial Director. Attitude for days.

  Sloane smiled tightly. “Sure.” Her gaze turned instead to the corridors they strode through. They were much neater. Much less, well, torn apart than the ones she’d left. “So, did you find Garson?”

  Addison shook her head, though grudgingly. “I was heading back to see if she’d returned when the whole ship lurched. It was like hitting turbulence in an atmospheric flight, only far worse. The floor actually fell away from me and I think I hit my head on the way up… or maybe down. I don’t really remember.”

  The asari had said something about physics. Sloane had been in spacedrops that felt like that. Maybe that’s what she meant?

  She filed that away, too. Right now, she had too many puzzle pieces and no final image. “While in Operations, did you see anything that might explain it?”

  “You mean like, what, alien soldiers rappelling in through the windows?”

  “I’d assume you’d see that much,” Sloane replied thinly. “If you were at your post.”

  That turned Addison’s shoulders rigid. “There was nothing of the sort. No ships, no attack fleet, nothing you can shoot, Security Director Kelly. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  Sloane turned on her, irritation spiked. “We’re in a lot of trouble here, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’d appreciate straight answers, delivered instantly, and less judgment about my role on this ship.” Her tone, icy as it was, earned her a widened stare. “So what I mean by anything,” she finished curtly, “is anything. Sensor data. Unexpected debris in our path. Giant fucking space monsters. Anything.”

  Foster Addison did not tell her to fuck off. The woman held her ground, but Sloane cou
ld see that the rebuke stung.

  Good.

  Almost good. She lifted her blood-streaked chin.

  “No need for sarcasm, Director.” Punching her, Sloane reasoned, wouldn’t help anything. And would be a total overreaction.

  Lucky for her.

  Addison forged on. “We were in the right place. The stellar neighborhood matched our nav charts. There was… concern, perhaps, among the science advisors about some of their readings. They figured six hundred years might have worn down the tech a bit. Wanted some time to untangle the array and parse the data. That’s when I left to—”

  “To take a leak.”

  “To find Jien,” she corrected frostily.

  “Without the readings?”

  Addison threw up her hands. “For pity’s sake, nobody needs outward sensors to use internal facilities. Now, how about we do less interrogation of perfectly natural events, if you please, try to get some actual answers.” She gestured for Sloane to lead the way to the door, and beyond.

  Fine. It beat speculating with a concussed social worker, anyway.

  Silently venting all the things she wanted to say, Sloane made it only a few steps into the anteroom when the Nexus began to tremble.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “What the hell is that?”

  Sloane didn’t have an answer. The ship trembled and quaked all around them, heaving as if stretched in too many directions. They swayed, colliding into each other before both women found their feet. The awesome shriek of metal tearing apart echoed through the corridors. Addison half-ducked, throwing an arm over her head.

  Sloane had only just locked her stance down, preparing for a deeper roll, when the shifting stopped. Again, metal strained and groaned, rolling hollowly through the otherwise eerily hushed chamber. When it faded to nothing, they stared at each other in grim silence.

  For a long moment, nothing moved.

  Not them.

  Not the ship.

  Sloane let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “No follow up,” she said. “That’s good—or at least it isn’t bad.”

  “Another explosion?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “How can you be sure?”