Andromeda

by Jason M. Hough

  “Hence the raid on the armory,” he replied. “There was one armed group on the Nexus, now there’s two, and evenly matched. If history has told us anything, it’s that the real talking can’t begin until the odds are even.”

  “So let’s talk. Come up with something and I’ll take it to Tann.”

  He was shaking his head before she’d even spoken the name. “That’s the problem now.”

  “Tann will listen to me. He trusts me.” Maybe.

  Calix drummed one finger on the table, staring at her. “Did you know Tann came to me, and tried to get me to give him life-support override privileges?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “True story,” he said. “This was months ago. Well before Irida’s arrest. Not due to the recent… concerns. He just wanted it. No reason given. Just in case he needed to do whatever Tann thought needed doing. To make things ‘better,’ no doubt.” The word better dripped from his mouth like a poisonous slug.

  Sloane remembered Tann raising this idea in one of their meetings. He claimed to be concerned that the information might disappear if something were to happen to Calix, or Kesh.

  “Why didn’t he go to Kesh?”

  “He did,” Calix replied. “Kesh said no.”

  And that hadn’t been enough to stop him. Fuck. Try as she might, Sloane couldn’t chalk that up to the usual salarian–krogan tensions. This was something different. This was straight-up deceit. She looked at Calix.

  “I said no, too.” She processed all this, or tried to. “I didn’t know he’d come directly to you.”

  “Makes me wonder what else you don’t know.”

  That made both of them.

  “Sometimes I think I should have stuck to my first instinct,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leadership,” she said, and felt a weight lift from her shoulders for the admission. “When we learned Tann was, what, eighth in line to stand in for Garson? Maybe I should have declared a state of emergency right then and there. I almost did.”

  He said nothing. Just looked sad; not an expression she often saw on a turian face, she realized.

  “I should have refused to wake him,” Sloane went on. “Protocol be damned. I never imagined anyone but Garson in charge. Never dreamed it could happen.”

  “Who could have?”

  “Hell, we should have given the job to Kesh. She would have been perfect. At least made her an advisor. She would have held Tann in check, that’s for sure. Hell, I should have put you in charge.”

  “Me?”

  He seemed genuinely surprised by the suggestion. Sloane had made it without really thinking it through, but the more it hung there between them, the more it seemed right.

  “Yeah,” Sloane said. “Why not. Look at the way your people have flocked to you. Look, there’s still time. I’ll talk to Addison and Kesh if Tann won’t listen. Maybe that’s the path out of this. You become an advisor. Represent your crew.”

  “And Kesh? She deserves that more than I do.”

  “Tann would never allow that.”

  Calix shook his head, borderline angry. “You think he’d consider me, a turian who has committed treason and caused death and damage, but not a loyal and competent krogan? That’s exactly the kind of thing we should have left behind, Sloane, and you know it. There’s no place for it here. No point.”

  “I agree with you.” The vehemence in the words surprised her as much as him.

  He sat there for a long moment, thinking.

  A knock at the door. Three hard pounding beats. Calix opened it with his omni-tool.

  “They’ve come,” Reg said.

  Sloane stood, not caring that the chair came with her. “I’ll talk to them. They’re security, they’ll listen to me. I’ll explain—”

  “Not security. Too many for that.”

  “Who then?” Calix asked.

  “No idea, but they ain’t here to talk.”

  Sloane Kelly’s thoughts went from the possibility of peace to a dark, dark place in an instant. “Calix. You said there are two armed groups on the Nexus now. Equals. But that’s not true, is it?”

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s a third, Calix.”

  And she saw the understanding dawn in his eyes, an expression quickly replaced with… not fear, but stubborn resignation. “Nakmor,” he said, in a low, terrible tone.

  Sloane, her back to the giant, thrust out her hands, the chair dangling painfully. “Cut me loose and get me my omni-tool. Kesh will listen to me.”

  “Kesh ain’t with them,” Reg said.

  Sloane turned slowly toward him. “Who then?”

  “No idea.”

  “Get everyone on the barricades,” Calix said, already moving toward the door.

  “Cut me loose!” Sloane shouted at his back.

  One foot out the door, Calix paused. He slipped a tool from his belt and tossed it in her direction. A compact foldable blade. She couldn’t catch it, of course, so she let it bounce off her midsection and clatter to the floor. “Wait,” she said urgently. “Wait! What are you going to do?”

  Calix met her eyes. “I’m going to defend my crew. That’s all I’ve ever done.” A hard statement, for all the passion around it.

  “Don’t. Don’t fight. The moment you do—”

  “They sent the krogan, Sloane.” He shook his head. “You don’t get much more direct than that. The time for talking is over.”

  “It’s not the right way,” she argued. “Calix, if you surrender now…”

  The turian’s laugh was bitter. “What, you think Tann will just accept our apologies—and clean up his act, too?” Another shake of his head, hard. “We tried, Sloane. It’s time to do what’s right.” A shrug, halfhearted at best. “Whatever the cost.”

  She stared at him, stunned.

  He left without another word.

  The door remained open behind him.

  Hell.

  Sloane dropped to her knees, rolled over to get her hands on the tool, then rolled again onto her side. She fumbled with the handle, worked her numb fingers around the sides of it, and pulled until the short, sharp blade clicked into the open position.

  Outside an eruption of gunfire. Hundreds of voices shouting to take cover, to return fire, to flee. The very definition of a disorganized rabble.

  Biotic force shook the walls.

  “No, no!” Sloane shouted. She’d been so close. A solution could have been found. No one else needed to die.

  She slipped and cut her own arm, ignored the pain and kept sawing at the stupid little nylon strap. She sawed and sawed. Damn the little thing was tough. Sloane roared in frustrated anger and a growing pain as she slid the blade back and forth across the strap.

  A tiny sound, barely audible with all the thunder pouring in through the doorway, signaled success. The strap fell away. Sloane came to her feet at a dead run, pushed out the door. Blood from the cut flowed into her palm. With each step she squeezed her hands into fists and then let them open. It hurt like hell, but the pain meant sensation returning and she welcomed it. It focused her thoughts.

  In the space outside she skidded to a stop. Sloane had seen a lot of combat in her days. She’d put an end to brawls, started even more. She’d defended a research station until no one remained but herself when the dropship took her from the roof. She’d seen massacres, and been party to some of them. Those were doors in her mind she didn’t open anymore.

  She’d never seen anything like this.

  Calix’s rebels were entrenched, well-armed, and they had idealism on their side. They had numbers, they had ammo, and they’d already crossed that Rubicon known as violence.

  They had a powerful desire to win.

  But they weren’t krogan. The krogan didn’t have idealism. Didn’t need it.

  They had joy. The joy of combat.

  The assembly plant had exploded into the ugliest, meanest, largest brawl Sloane Kelly had ever seen.

  “Ta
nn, you shit, what have you unleashed?” she whispered. Not really a question, for the answer was painfully obvious.

  The krogan had powered in like a battering ram, and they hadn’t come to talk. Some of Calix’s rebels lay strewn around the barricade they’d erected, and not all of them were whole.

  Sloane’s brain kicked into tactical mode. The big picture was out of control, but here, in front of her…

  A krogan warrior kicked a severed arm across the floor, then rushed into the shuddering barrel of an assault rifle. One meaty fist knocked the weapon aside, while the other took the asari rebel on the chin and sent her sprawling backward to slam against a dormant machine.

  The krogan stepped forward again, ready to crush her under his massive foot. Sloane rushed in with her knife—her crappy little utility knife—and drove it into the eye of the krogan before she’d even realized what she’d done.

  This only made him angry.

  She knew better than to stop, to apologize, to plead for calm. The situation had gone well beyond that point. There would be no jogging up to them and appealing to reason. No, this was a battle now, and the krogan had the taste of sport in their mouths. Soon they would reach a state of blood rage. If that happened the massacre would be ruthless and utterly complete.

  She watched herself, as if from a distance, as that punched-aside-rifle found its way into her hands and swiveled around to bark its magnificent bark at the krogan she’d wounded. The hulking worker, mad with rage, walked in even as the bullets tore through him.

  Finally he fell at Sloane’s feet, and behind him she saw the faces of a dozen more. The one in the middle caught her eye. Their leader.

  Not Kesh.

  A moment of disbelief settled like the blood that seeped into the crevices of the floor.

  “Morda,” Sloane whispered.

  Tann had woken Morda. It had to have been him. Kesh would have known better, would have come here and tried to salvage the situation herself.

  Morda.

  Fuck. This wasn’t going to end well, and Sloane—without thinking, acting on her first instinct—had sided with the enemy.

  Nakmor Morda stood at the center of this fresh line of combatants, coming in from the breach they’d made in the barricade. If she recognized Sloane Kelly, or cared, she made no sign.

  It wasn’t just Morda, either. Her elite soldiers had been woken, too, and surged in beside her. Morda flicked her arm toward the battle and her guard surged into the fray without a second thought. Didn’t matter who was involved, or why. The game was afoot.

  “Nakmor Morda!” Sloane shouted over the fray.

  The clan leader glanced in her direction.

  “Stop this now! There’s no reason to—”

  But Morda only shook her head. “You’re on the wrong side of the barricade, Kelly!”

  “There is no right side,” Sloane growled, and did not move.

  Morda glared at her and there came the strange sort of quiet that can occasionally fall over a crowded place. Despite all the combat, the chatter of gunfire and the roar of the krogan flood, a silence stretched, if only for a second. And nothing was said. Morda’s eyes did the talking; they said, Time to choose, Sloane. With us, or with them.

  Sloane Kelly could feel the eyes of the rebels on her. Some of them, anyway. And half the krogan force, too. Waiting, if only for that fraction of a second, to know her decision.

  She shook her head at Morda and raised her weapon.

  The leader of the Nakmor clan grinned.

  All at once the cacophony of violence folded back in and with it the chaos. Hundreds of combatants on both sides, all killing or dying.

  “Fall back!” someone shouted. Calix, maybe. The cry was quickly taken up by the other rebels, though, and Sloane would never know who’d given the original order. Someone who didn’t know the krogan, that’s for sure.

  She danced backward, shooting, never turning to flee. That would only further incite them into a truly cataclysmic bloodlust. But her effort made no difference. The rest of the rebels had broken and run. If she didn’t do the same she’d be out here all alone, in no-man’s-land, against several hundred of them. They’d tear her limb from limb, and she knew it.

  So Sloane ran, soon overtaking some of the slower of Calix’s rabble. The wave of krogan hit the stragglers from behind. She heard the screams, the crunching of bones, and the orgasmic howls of delight only meters behind her. A symphony of violence.

  Vaulting a long shelving unit, she rolled over the top just a split second before a krogan slammed into the thing and sent it smashing into her back. She rolled to get out from under it, and the krogan loomed over her, fists raised.

  An incendiary round took it in the head. Blood and gore splattered across her face. She turned to one side and tried to blink it away as the body above her shuddered, twisted, and finally came apart under the explosive hail of gunfire.

  All across the vast room the rebels shifted to this new plan. Whatever concerns had kept them from it before, they were no longer relevant. Explosive rounds washed over the krogan front line. That entire side of the room became one long, roiling, thunderously loud wall of death and destruction. Krogan and rebel alike were consumed in shockwaves and diced by the sprays of shrapnel.

  The tactic worked, at least. It kept the enemy back.

  Keeping low, Sloane staggered back to the rebel line and heaved herself over a blood-smeared crate. No one batted an eye at this. She was one of them now. They might not be able to say how they knew that, or when it had happened, but they knew. Morda had demanded she choose. The side of rebels fighting for the right to be equals? To make their own choices?

  Or the side of the machinations that unleashed a krogan clan on its own people.

  Fine. She fucking well chose.

  In the temporary reprieve Sloane cast about for a weapon. She’d lost the rifle at some point, and the knife. She thought of all those dead behind her, and the weapons they’d dropped. The krogan hadn’t come armed—not all of them, at least. Perhaps because there hadn’t been the supply, or the time, or maybe just because they wanted a challenge. She wondered if Tann knew what he’d ordered here, and whether Addison had been party to it. Kesh would never have agreed to this, though it would be just like Tann to go around her. Straight to the clan leader, waking her from her slumber and telling her just enough to get the desired result.

  Salarian or not, it had worked.

  There was a shoulder against hers. Calix. Their eyes met.

  “Why’d you give me the knife?” she asked.

  “To see what you’d do.” He forced a smile on to his face. “Enlightening how we act when we have no time to think, isn’t it? I guessed right, Sloane. I thought you might—”

  A sharp report thundered across the barricades. Calix’s brains left his body in a small gray eruption to the left. His eyes went unnaturally wide. He dropped to his knees and slumped against her.

  Sloane turned, dumbstruck. The krogan were coming again. A wave of them, bearing down on the exhausted rebel line. But they did not carry rifles. She saw others, then, at the smashed barricade where it had all begun. Newcomers in uniforms like hers. One of them was lowering a sniper rifle from her shoulder, having seen Sloane in her sight, the target she would have shot next after Calix. One of her officers. Their eyes met, for an instant, and then the woman was gone, rushing back to report what she’d seen.

  Sloane is with them, she’d say. Gone over. Or maybe she’s been working against us all along.

  As the enraged horde of krogan fell upon the rebels Sloane sank to her knees. She turned Calix over and looked into his clever eyes one last time. It was all she could take. The last straw.

  This wasn’t what she came here for.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

  “What do we do?” someone asked.

  After a second Sloane realized that the question had been directed at her. She glanced up and saw the brute, Reg. The one who’d savagely bound her w
rists, the one whose “approval rating” of her had been rock bottom, according to Calix.

  “What?” she asked, numbly.

  “What do we do?” he repeated. He was asking her. Just like that. With Calix gone, this rabble was leaderless, and they knew it.

  “We die,” Sloane said, simply. “They won’t stop until we’re all dead.”

  The brute offered her a hand. “Then we die fighting,” he said.

  Sloane took his hand. A rifle was thrust toward her. She looked at it as if it was a foreign thing, despite the fact she could take it apart and reassemble it while blindfolded. She took it.

  “Some other time,” Sloane said. “Let’s die on our terms. For now I say we retreat, deeper into the Nexus. Go underground.”

  He puffed up. A wall of a person. “I’m willing to die here.”

  “Are you willing to let your cause die here, as well?”

  That gave him pause.

  “What about family?” she demanded. “Friends? What about making a fucking choice that matters?”

  Reg looked up. His eyes closed. Then, with a grunt, he nodded. “Emory’d never forgive me if I lost my head here.”

  The battle closed in around them. Sloane clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. Then let’s make this one matter, okay? For Calix.”

  A single, grudging nod.

  “Retreat!” Sloane shouted, and she was off, moving away from Morda, deeper into the idle machines of the assembly floor. She repeated the call over and over, and Reg did the same. They joined up with a group of rebels near the back, armed with longer-range rifles, led by someone named Nnebron. He took aim at Sloane as she rushed up, but Reg stepped between.

  “She’s with us now,” Reg said. Something in his voice convinced the others. Trust. In him, not her.

  They backed across the room, covering one another, firing indiscriminately into the horde that followed. Sloane tried to ignore the screams, those who hadn’t managed to back out fast enough and found themselves inside the storm of krogan wrath.