Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  Sloane braced a hand against a tilted column and studied the bulkhead above them, half expecting it to suddenly crack and fall. What a way to go. “Because it didn’t feel like one,” she said flatly. “Whatever this is, it’s affecting the whole ship, like… like an earthquake.”

  “An earthquake in space?”

  “Now who’s being sarcastic?” Sloane retorted.

  “I figured I’d meet you at your level,” Addison muttered, more than a little superiority in the curt jibe. That earned her a hard glare.

  “All I’m saying,” Sloane said, dredging up her failing reserve of patience, “is that none of my ‘under attack’ bones are twitching. And that jives with what a technician postulated on my way here.” Much to Sloane’s dismay. In some ways, an attack was easier to handle. Protect the station, kill the intruders.

  “Who?”

  “T’vaan, I think. Asari.”

  Addison’s eyes widened. “She’s all right?” The hope in that sentence, the fact it ended on a question, was enough to kick an ache in Sloane’s conscience.

  Wordlessly, she shook her head.

  Crestfallen, Addison seemed to deflate, withdrawing a little more from Sloane. “She was one of the science team.”

  Yeah. Sloane figured. She nodded, focused her attention again on the empty chamber. The ceiling held. “Well, she echoed what you said. Something weird on the sensors. So which way to Ops from here? Let’s figure this out.”

  “Past the Cultural Exchange and along the spoke arm.” Then, in a somber tone, “Unless the path is blocked.”

  “Then let’s move,” Sloane said, “before anything else collapses.”

  On that, they could both agree. Even so, she eased her pace. Her toe ached mightily, and she didn’t like the way Addison’s wound had already begun to purple under the medi-gel. Concussion, definitely. She kept a wary eye on her, trying to figure her out. Leaving the bridge? And to find Garson, no less. She’d failed in one, but maybe that was just coincidental. Maybe she’d gone looking just as Garson returned to the bridge.

  If she’d stayed, would Addison now have the answers to this mess?

  Maybe.

  If what she said checked out, Sloane wouldn’t want to be in those shoes when that report hit somebody’s desk. Leaving one’s station when shit hit the fan? Looked bad. Even for a director.

  No, not just somebody’s desk. Jien Garson’s. Addison reported directly to her, just as Sloane did. Although knowing the Initiative’s ideals, they’d figure out a way to have a committee review Addison’s misstep.

  Despite her personal aversion to bureaucracy, and her own occasional run-ins with disciplinary boards, she had faith in the Nexus leadership. Garson would do the right thing, however committee-happy she and her team might be.

  Assuming, the suspicious little voice in Sloane’s investigative nature piped up, the woman was telling the truth.

  A fact she’d let sit for now. All things considered, she’d suspected just about everyone of potential sabotage at this point. Evidence first, conjecture later.

  A sudden clatter tore through her reverie, made Sloane jump back, her pulse racing. She’d never missed her weapons so badly as now. Ahead, a panel split from the wrong side and spilled its guts all over the corridor. Tubes hissed and writhed, releasing a hot blast of steam.

  So much for less destruction. Beyond the thrashing mass of tubing, more sparks lit the dark. The devastations that flickered in shadow looked so damn odd compared to the section of clean corridor they stood in now.

  At least she hadn’t yelped.

  Sloane made Addison wait, leaving the other director fighting to steady her breath. Sloane sniffed the air gingerly. No noxious fumes, at least. Small favors. No flames, either. Just broken ship. Broken wires.

  Broken plans.

  “Shit,” Addison breathed. “Hope that was nothing important.”

  “One more busted pipe,” Sloane observed, “out of thousands. Let’s keep focused.” She wiped steam and adrenaline-induced sweat from her brow. Later, maybe, when the worst of this was behind them, she could worry about a single broken pipe. Or thousands.

  Stepping gingerly over the writhing tentacles, she winced when a few jumped and sputtered. Droplets of cooling fluid arced up onto the wall.

  “Not too hot,” she said over her shoulder. “Just stay away from the active ones.”

  Addison wrinkled her nose as she followed. She was starting to look a little bit glassy around the edges, despite her attitude. “It’s like something rolled through and just…” She flailed with a grimy hand. “Ripped out bits here and there.”

  “Stay focused,” Sloane repeated hastily. “It’ll get sorted, eventually.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t share your optimism, but eventually isn’t going to cut it. We had enough to do already to begin our mission. But this…” A silence descended, broken only by the hiss and sway of the cords as they left them behind.

  A tinge of guilt poked Sloane’s conscience. “Garson will have a plan,” she said without looking back. “We’re in Andromeda, after all. The other side. We made it.”

  Maybe that surprised her reluctant companion. Maybe she just needed to hear it. “Yeah.” A slow agreement. But at least it was that.

  For a time neither spoke. Even when Sloane had to step around four more bodies, Addison remained quiet. Numb, more like. It was a hell of a lot to take in.

  “Let me know if you need to rest,” Sloane tried.

  “We’re about two sections away,” Addison said instead. She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Jien had intended to hold a briefing before…” Again, a wave of vibration, though mild compared to before, rippled around them. She winced, held her stance and waited it out. When it died, she smiled a grim little slash. “Before all this.”

  Sloane set her jaw and proceeded at a pace too quick to be strictly safe, but at this rate, they’d at least get answers faster. The whiplash of hope to fear to nerves would get her before anything else did.

  She hoped they would be answers they wanted.

  Damn. There was that word again. Hope.

  It was what fueled them all. Every last one of the people still in stasis, every man, woman and child who had registered with the Andromeda Initiative—every species, human to turian to salarian to asari. Hell, even the krogan had signed on looking for a way off their wasteland homeworld, all because of hope.

  Now on the brink of going up in flames with every step closer to Operations, every push past destroyed paneling and hanging tubes and wires. The debris scattered around the corridor had flaked off the paneling that had been so warm and gleaming when Sloane had first walked it.

  Now all she could see and smell was char. Ruin.

  We go to paint our masterpiece.

  If anyone could get things back on track, it was Garson.

  “Oh, no…” Addison’s voice. Breathless from strain—or concussion—and shattered down to a whisper. She froze mid-step, a hand to her mouth.

  Sloane tore her thoughts away from the ephemeral threads of the future, automatically reaching out an arm to steady the woman. But it wasn’t needed. Addison stood on her own fine, but her eyes bulged, shock or horror or something worse.

  “The door…”

  Two tiny words, and somehow, Sloane just knew.

  Hope wouldn’t cut it.

  The reinforced door Addison stared at hung ajar from its mooring, which should have been impossible, given the mechanics of it. As if something had sheared right through it, pushing the metal paneling outward in a jagged bloom.

  By habit, Sloane reached for her weapon—a firearm she didn’t have. Damn. Old habits didn’t help when everything else had gone to hell.

  Squaring her shoulders, Sloane approached the door—what was left of it, anyway. Addison followed close behind her, and as darkness gave way to eerie light, they both sucked in a ragged breath.

  Sloane’s came out on a low, “Holy mother of—”

&n
bsp; This time, Addison did sway.

  Sloane’s instinct was to jerk back, to hold her breath, every last bit of her exposed skin prickling in bone-deep fear. Part of Operation’s vast front wall, and the hull plating beyond, had sheared away, replaced at some point with a translucent inflatable bulkhead by automatic emergency systems. It looked, at first glance, as if there was no wall at all, but worse was what lay beyond. Outside.

  Against the cold spray of stars, twisting tendrils of black and ash-gray splayed wide, curled and drifting threads flecked with orange and yellow light. A bizarre anti-nebula that unfurled like a frayed ribbon stretching into the distance, like synaptic pathways spreading in eerily visceral threads.

  “What is that?” Addison whispered.

  Sloane had to force her brain into gear, to unfreeze her limbs. They weren’t going to float off into space. They wouldn’t suffocate.

  Even better, perhaps, was the fact that the Nexus’s emergency protocols had worked. The barrier had saved Operations.

  Or… tried.

  “I… don’t know,” was all Sloane could say. She’d never seen anything like it. Beyond the bulkhead, the ephemeral strands of whatever seemed to float in the void of space like something separate from it. There, but not in it. Like… Her mind flailed for the right thought.

  “Like tangled hair in a swimming pool,” she said aloud.

  “Gross,” Addison murmured.

  Sloane agreed. But even so, she visually traced a long tendril, captivated in some small way by the points of orange and yellow winking within it.

  Until it ended, lost in the blank canvas of space.

  Or hidden by the sudden rotation of a hunk of metal, drifting into view.

  Sloane’s eyes widened. “Is that…?”

  “Part of the Nexus,” Addison confirmed, breathless. She raised a hand to her mouth. “But how?”

  Question of a lifetime.

  If she’d meant to say more, it died on an abrupt sound of distress. “Oh. Oh, no.” Addison took a step forward, limbs stiff. “No, no…” She wasn’t looking at the same incredible view anymore. Sloane’s focus shifted from the dark, nebulous ribbons, the hunk of pocked and cold metal, and instead to the room.

  Bodies.

  A half-dozen, at least, just inside the room. More amid the overturned desks and furniture that littered the space beyond.

  The Nexus’s senior leadership.

  “Oh, fuck,” Sloane whispered. She scanned those nearby, hoping against hope that none was Jien Garson. But they were too far away to recognize. Too battered to readily find out.

  The closest had an asari’s fringe. Nuara. The last time Sloane had seen her, she’d hugged Garson in farewell. Laid in her pod like it really was just a nap and they’d all be happy and free and get to work upon waking.

  Not even close.

  She’d crumpled against the shorn edge of the outer hull, just this side of the emergency bulkhead, but it wasn’t enough. Based on placement, on the fact there were no bodies floating just beyond the seal, Sloane could guess what had happened.

  The Matriarch had shielded the room as best she could until the emergency bulkhead could deploy. It wouldn’t seal in the air, and in the end, it hadn’t worked. But she’d tried to hold it off, to keep the staff on the right side of the bulkhead.

  The bloody damage told Sloane a torn hull had not been the worst problem on the bridge.

  Fires. Chaos. Emergency efforts. Nothing had saved them.

  “Shit,” Sloane whispered.

  Addison took a deep breath. Visually forcing herself into gear. “There’s nothing we can do for them.” She turned from the view and moved to search the room, gingerly stepping over debris. Outstretched hands. People, shipmates, charred and broken.

  Sloane knew, grudgingly, that she had the right idea. If there were survivors, they’d be deeper inside.

  She turned her attention to the part of the huge room that hadn’t been torn away, her heart already sinking. The spacious chamber, perhaps the grandest of all those inside the station, was barely recognizable.

  A giant viewscreen suspended from the ceiling had split in half, falling on a series of control consoles that ringed the forward-facing portion of the chamber. The consoles, smashed and dark, were beyond repair, but it was the chairs on which Sloane focused. They were crushed. Utterly flattened. Debris littered the floor. A grand, sweeping stairwell that led up to an observation deck above them had collapsed. Or maybe it had been smashed by something falling. No way to tell. All of it had been jumbled, shaken, and thrown about many times.

  It was too much to process. Sloane moved without thinking, to the nearest hunk of debris. A section of railing from the deck above, twisted and splayed across a bench. She lifted the broken mass and heaved it aside, then dropped to her hands and knees and looked under the bench. Dead eyes stared back at her. A dark-skinned man, mouth hanging open in a silenced scream. Marnell Phelps, senior bridge technician, Sloane recalled. A good man. Dried blood traced a line from the corner of his mouth to a small pool on the floor. His eyes were glassy and still.

  “Jien?” Addison called out. She began walking around the room, repeating her call, a little more fear in her voice with each cry. “Jien!”

  Sloane threw a smashed chair aside. Pushed a desk upright, ignoring the pain as a broken viewscreen fell and landed on the toes of her uninjured foot. At least the pain, she noted as she swore, wasn’t nearly so bad as breaking it. “Just fucking great,” she hissed on the end of her diatribe, making a note to find more medi-gel.

  But when she peered over the desk, another body lay behind it, dampening all else.

  “Found someone,” she called. “A human.” Unrecognizable at first glance. The body had been brutally crushed. Sloane checked the name on the left breast of the uniform. Bloodstained, but legible. “Parker,” she added, looking up.

  Addison had stopped her efforts, waiting. Now her eyes fell closed. “Miles Parker, Assistant Director of Hydroponics.”

  With care, Sloane laid aside the heavy desk that had crushed the poor man. Thinking about his terrible fate twisted her gut, but it was the mention of hydroponics that hit her like a mallet. If the seed vault had been breached…

  Focus. Sloane couldn’t allow herself to worry about that. Not now.

  The search went on. Body after body, each a blow to Sloane’s morale, but none were Garson. It felt like an hour before there was nothing left to search.

  “She’s not here,” Addison said. Her voice seemed steady, but a glance at her face proved otherwise. “Now what?”

  A good question. Nobody had prepped for this.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Search party,” Sloane said. “We need to find Garson and any other survivors.”

  Addison shook her head, though reluctantly. “Succession protocol. We have to assume the worst. If she’s gone…” she trailed off, her eyes settling on the temporary seal around the front half of the room.

  “She could have just gone to take a leak,” Sloane said. “You did.”

  Addison did not take the bait. Not this time. But it did seem to gall her into squaring up. She leveled her gaze on Sloane. “She’s missing. There are clear procedures—”

  “Fuck that,” Sloane snapped, “we aren’t—” She caught herself. Checked her anger. “Look, I appreciate… Addison, no offense but we should—”

  A harsh, grating sound caused Sloane’s words to die in her mouth. The noise repeated, and her first thought was that the field holding in their air was beginning to fail. She stepped back, Addison matching her twice over.

  The sound came again, this time louder. Not from the barrier, she realized with relief, but the far door.

  Sloane’s hand went to her hip again, grasping for that pistol that still wasn’t there. She swore, crouched slightly and pivoted, ready to run or engage depending on who or what came through.

  Two hands curled short, thick fingers around the door, now half-open, and heaved it the rest of the w
ay wide. A figure ducked through, reptilian, with broad head, bulky shoulders and wide-set eyes.

  A krogan. A female krogan, with a frown so deep you could hide beneath it. A frown Sloane knew well.

  She rose from her crouch, stepped forward and couldn’t hide a half-grin of sheer relief.

  “Kesh. Damn it’s good to see you.” And she meant it. The sight of the superintendent gave Sloane the second glimmer of hope she’d had since waking. Nakmor Kesh knew the guts of the Nexus better than anyone else aboard, having overseen its construction. If Jien Garson was the leader of the Nexus, Kesh was the steward.

  The krogan strode forward, her head swooping from one side to the other. “Director Kelly, I’d say the feeling is mutual,” she gestured to all the damage and dead, “but after all this, it’s good to see anyone at all still breathing. Where’s Jien Garson?”

  “The question of the hour,” Sloane admitted.

  “One of many,” Addison said, stepping forward. “Jien is missing.”

  Sloane gave the krogan engineer a recap of everything that had happened. As she spoke, several other lower-level crew members wandered into Ops in the krogan’s wake. Dazed and nursing wounds, they looked like the walking dead. But they were able bodies, all of them, and Initiative pioneers. Sloane could see the glimmer in their eyes, despite everything. That spirit of wanting to help. The undying fire of survival. “We need to organize a search party,” she added for the benefit of the newcomers.

  “More importantly,” Addison began, but Kesh was already nodding.

  “Right now, we need to save whom we can,” the krogan said, cutting off the other woman. Not rudely, Sloane noted. Not really. Just firm. That was Kesh, though. Rational, for her kind, and dedicated.

  Addison took note. “I’ll take this,” she said, shaking her head. “See what we can do. Maybe the two of you can figure out what happened.” She moved off without waiting for a reply.

  Sloane watched her organize the stragglers into pairs. “She’s kind of a people person, isn’t she?”

  “When allowed,” Kesh said, turning away. “Might I ask what Addison felt was more important than a search?”