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“Because Soval Raxios did, and she shouldn’t have. And I do not yet know why Irit Non had nothing to say on the subject herself. Until I do, I palm the card until it is my play.”
The drell balanced the Reeger Carbine in one hand and looked appraisingly at the batarian. An Arc Pistol was one thing. Could she risk the two of them being equally armed?
“Whatever happened to your hanar friend?” Borbala asked. “Did it come with you? Pay your fare? Off to the great unknown together to spy on new and interesting people?”
“Oleon was assassinated. I was a freelancer before I met it. I was a freelancer after it died.” Anax allowed a certain percentage of the grief she carried with her to show in her posture. “I worked for the Shadow Broker for a long time afterward.”
“Never heard of him.”
Anax didn’t believe that for a second. The Shadow Broker was well known to the entire criminal element of the Milky Way. “Nevertheless, now I am here. Alone.”
“Sad. Who got the old jellyfish?”
Anax Therion locked eyes with the batarian. Her eyelids slicked shut, but she kept to her word and did not speak the memory that rushed over her. The color of roses. The smell of the sea. Trusting. Gentle. That one’s head rests heavy in the grotto of sleep. Blood follows. Blood everywhere like a world of oceans.
“Some things are between a drell and their hanar,” she said evenly, knowing the implication in her words, using it to her advantage. “Unless you have made the Compact yourself you can’t possibly understand. Do you know one single hanar’s soul name, batarian?”
“I do not.”
Anax smiled softly. “Then shut up.”
As they headed toward the hatch at the rear of the bridge, the voice of the Keelah Si’yah’s interface filled the room. The blue running lights along the floor turned an ugly yellow.
Emergency lockdown procedures initiated. Safe zones are indicated in yellow. Prohibited areas are indicated in red. Please proceed to the nearest safe zone. Emergency lockdown procedures initiated. Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest yellow zone.
Yorrik’s heavy, monotonous voice came through on their comm lines.
“Barely controlled panic: Senna, I am afraid the rendezvous at medbay at 0330 hours will not be possible. Formal announcement: By my authority as the medical specialist on Sleepwalker Team Blue-7, I have triggered lockdown. You may approach the observation glass, but you will not be able to come inside.”
“Nor will the elcor or this one be able to depart,” Ysses’s musical voice added.
“Pervasive dread: I am so sorry. Medbay is now under quarantine. Please come as soon as you can. Futile advice: Try not to touch anything.”
The drell handed the shotgun to Borbala Ferank. A calculated risk. She hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
“I guess our stowaway sweep will have to wait,” said Ferank. “I was looking forward to the chase. At least we can get the hell out of this sauna.”
“You may get your wish. Take point,” Therion said grimly. “And be careful. Whatever is happening in medbay, one thing is certain: There’s someone else awake on this ship.”
6. FUSION
Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah turned a corner toward medbay and stopped dead in his tracks.
“Wait,” wheezed Irit Non, running up the hall behind him on her short, stout legs. She was no match for a long-legged quarian with bad news.
There was a quarian girl in there. Behind the glass. Sealed up inside the quarantine zone with Yorrik and Ysses. He could see the top of her purple hood through the glass walls. It was impossible. No one else should be awake. Who the hell was that? He couldn’t see clearly. It was still dark in there, except in the pool of ghostly white-and-orange mobile worklights around the operating station, and the great gray bulk of the elcor was in the way.
The volus and the quarian approached the clear glass medbay walls, tinged red for quarantine. Every thirty seconds, a soft alarm tone chimed throughout the ship. Loud enough to remind you of an emergency, but not so loud that it burned out your ability to think. Senna pounded on the glass. Yorrik turned toward him, revealing a scene of wanton and nonsensical destruction. Both the elcor and the hanar were wearing sterilizing collars, large metal torques that projected a thin sanitizing forcefield in front of their mucus membranes like ancient doctors’ masks.
The frozen drell and hanar corpses were surrounded by piles of smashed, gouged out, torn apart, shattered, oozing garbage. Punctured glass globes, a cracked nightlight shaped like an omni-tool, a large anti-synthetic rifle with the scope snapped off and the gauges pried loose, bottles of booze, peeled-apart battery packs, a huge black microscope that looked about as advanced as a stone wheel. Some kind of stuffed child’s toy lay next to the dead hanar’s frozen skull, its glowing eyes punched out and drained dry, its stuffing pulled free of what looked like a cute, fat version of a volus. The autopsy slabs were splattered with glowing fluid and a slurry of liquefied fish guts. Yorrik and Ysses were covered in the stuff, half-dried, half-dripping. It looked like a murder scene in an Afterlife dumpster in there.
The quarian girl looked down on it all, her spine bent at an awkward angle, her faceplate ripped out of the helmet and fastened on backwards with surgical staples so that the heads-up display faced outward. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth were drawn crudely on the glass in fluorescent green paint. It was an empty suit, hung up on the swinging arm of a laser scalpel, arms and legs swinging limp at its sides. Senna felt sick. It was just an empty environmental suit, but it looked for all the world like someone had flayed a child alive and hung their skin up to dry.
“What the fuck is going on in here?” Irit Non wheezed. “Where did you get that… that thing? Those dolls are offensive, you know. They’re exaggerated, bigoted representations of my people—”
“Non, that is hardly the most important issue right now,” Senna protested, but the soft bonging quarantine alarm seemed to be the last thing on the enraged volus’s mind.
A guilty ultraviolet aura ran up and down Ysses’s tentacles. “The doll does not belong to this one. Only the eyes were needed. This one does not even know where such a doll may be purchased.”
