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One by one, the midpoint crew dispersed silently. The datestamp began to pick up speed once more.
To get data, it is sometimes necessary to bait it out, Anax thought, and data loves nothing so well as more data. The batarian has shared a history, you have shared nothing. There is a conversational debt. She’ll give nothing else until it is paid.
“After my parents died,” she began.
“Lungs too fancy for this world?” Borbala said.
Anax clenched her green jaw. “Indeed. After they died, I lived alone under the dome of Cnidaria City on Kahje. It is the only place drell can live without immediately succumbing to Kepral’s Syndrome. We were crowded there, packed in like cords of firewood. I was a child. I begged and stole so that I could eat. I brawled with other children, with grown beggars, with dogs for a place to sleep. I became one of the drala’fa, the ignored. I was eleven before a hanar called Oleon found me, hiding in an alley with a man rich enough to buy and sell me and the street we both stood on, an arms dealer who had been places I could never dream of. I was selling him my prize possession, the only thing I owned with any value at all. He paid me practically nothing for it. But it seemed like riches to me then. Oleon watched the deal transpire, and saw talent in me. I had spent months tracking the arms dealer, memorizing his contacts, his prices, his suppliers’ names and their contacts. I held it all in my head as easily as a coin in the hand. I could have exposed him and put him on a prison colony for the natural life of a krogan. But more importantly, I had seen, in all my spying, where his wife went one night a week with his business partner. Not bad for my first job as a freelance data-dealer. I knew that information was more valuable than any weapon or drug when I was eleven years old. What I did not know was that the giant hanar that suddenly towered above me was Oleon, a chief member of the Illuminated Primacy, the hanar government. It saw my talent. It saw my potential. It offered to take me into the Compact, make me a part of its household, pay for my biotic implants, to educate and employ me to do whatever work it asked of me without question.”
“Sounds like slavery.”
“I suppose it would, to you. But a ranking member of the Illuminated Primacy does not need its floors scrubbed. It needs secrets. Everyone’s secrets. That was what the hanar trained me to find, to erase if it could harm them, to bring it home if it had value. And years later, when I was older, Oleon sent me on a mission.”
The century turned over onscreen. Only a hundred and fifty years from the present day, now. Click, click, click, the security cameras cycled through the ship.
“‘Go to Talis Fia in the Shrike Abyssal,’ it ordered me. ‘It is a volus world, and like many volus worlds, the little fools banker-ed themselves into a depression there. It is overrun with criminals, brothels, assassins, and advantage-seekers. You will feel right at home. There is a volus there called Pinda Kem who has stolen from this one. Discover this Kem’s worst deed and bring it back to Kahje, where this one will use it to teach a virtuous lesson on the subject of respect, and revenge.’ And there, on Talis Fia, was where I saw blue sores like the ones on Soval Raxios’s neck—”
Anax Therion sat bolt upright in the captain’s chair. “What was that?” she snapped. “Run the footage back. I saw something.”
“What? I didn’t see anything. I was listening to you talk about yourself.”
“Run it back two years, I’m sure it was there.”
Ferank frowned. She ran a hand around the fine black hairs that bristled all over her skin. “Wait, but what were the blue sores? On Talis Fia. Where did you see them?”
“Run it back.”
Borbala keyed the command into the console that curved around Senna’Nir’s station. The footage blacked out and came on again. The volus cryobay. Click. The elcor cryobay. Click. The batarian cryobay. Click. The drell cryobay.
“Stop!” yelled Anax, far too loudly on the empty bridge. “I saw it. I know I saw it.”
“There’s nothing there. Everyone’s frozen. You’re imagining things.”
“Run it back again.”
“Remember when we made a deal concerning whether or not I can shoot you? I might like to revisit that.”
Anax walked up to the enormous viewscreen. The image of the empty cryobay dwarfed her, washed out her skin to almost black. It went dark, and then flashed on again, an identically boring, nearly motionless image, somewhat further in the past.
“There,” Anax said suddenly. Borbala froze the image.
“What, you mad serf?”
Anax Therion turned back to the batarian. She lifted one arm and pointed at a space in the cryobay, too far to the left for the first camera to see, too far to the right for the second camera. Perfectly placed in the blind spot between the shi
p’s eyes. But not completely invisible.
“A shadow,” the drell whispered. “Something moving when all the house is fast asleep.”
Ferank saw it then. Flickering across the cryobay floor, caught in the blue running lights for half a second before it was gone. The datestamp crawled forward while they stared until their eyes ached, watching for that flicker, that motion in the blind spot. They found it twice more, three times more. They ran the film backward and forward again, from its first appearance to the present day, searching for any appearance they’d missed. Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9 revived onscreen, one hundred years ago. Soval was on that cycle. She walked by the camera on her way to her station at the communications array, stopping to speak briefly to a hanar. She smiled, untroubled. Her eyes very nearly met the camera. Anax watched her as she spoke and held up one green hand as if to touch the dead woman’s holographic face.
“I saw those sores on a volus child,” Anax said, slinging the Lancer rifle over one shoulder. They had what they needed. Time to become a search party. Time to hunt. “The favorite son of Pinda Kem.”
Borbala checked her sidearm and rubbed her three good eyes. “Did he die?”
“Not in the least. As far as I know, after I ruined his father, he went on to live a long and happy life. Happy for a volus, anyway.”
“If the little brat didn’t die, why are you so afraid they’re the same sores?”
