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“With grim determination: No,” Yorrik said. His low, buzzing voice echoed in the quiet. “What is happening now is that everyone not wearing a containment suit is going to leave. Then you, Mr. Dal’Virra, are going to stand against the rear wall of the iso-chamber and allow the remote diagnostic array to collect samples from you and put them in the hazmat capsule on your side.” The elcor indicated a circle cut out of the medbay wall, sealed with a glass bubble, that terminated in a shallow, empty drawer where whatever was being passed between the safe zone and the unsafe zone could be collected. “Or I will instruct the iso-chamber to release the mother of all sedatives and take what I need anyway.”
“And what is it you need, Specialist?” the captain said grimly.
“Vomit, blood, tissue, saliva, lacrimal fluid, hair, fingernails, everything. Grim determination: Then, what is ‘happening’ is that I am going to watch over a batarian weapons dealer with three ex-wives, financial trouble, and two young children. I am going to watch him while he either recovers from the worst cryosickness in recorded medical history, or, more likely, while he slowly dies behind that forcefield. I am going to take copious notes. And I am going to try to think of a way to save us.” If Dal’Virra had Yoqtan, the virus had achieved spillover: crossing between species. And it had done it twice. If he could record the progression of the disease, they would at least have somewhere to begin. He would at least be able to tell if any of the others started to show symptoms. “Fond yet trepidatious quotation: ‘Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.’”
“That’s barbaric,” said Senna’Nir. “It’s completely unethical.”
“Guilty rejoinder: So is dying alone in space, Senna. You have a suit. We do not. Do not lecture us on the ethics of a pathogen.”
“This one is filled with fascination, but will not be able to bear witness. This one must prepare the body of Kholai for its eternal rest among the stars,” Ysses sang. “This one cannot allow the corporeal form of the Enkindled to be ‘airlocked’ with those who did not serve it.”
“That sounds spectacular,” said Borbala, checking the charge on her pistol. “It really does. And you should definitely do that, after you call the janitorial drones to clean up… let us call it the last failure of Jalosk Dal’Virra. But we have another problem.”
“You mean other than that we’ve all been running for almost twenty-four hours without food or sleep, we’re all exhausted, the ship’s systems are as useful and responsive as a krogan with a head injury, and there are almost six hundred infectious corpses on ice in the lower hold?” asked Senna’Nir. “Other than that, what care could we have in the world, Borbala Ferank?”
The batarian matriarch lifted one long green-yellow finger into the air. “Listen,” she said.
Yorrik strained to hear what she meant. He could hear the unsettling, bubbling respiration of Ysses beside him. The hum of the laser scalpels on standby. The ragged, tortured breathing of Jalosk Dal’Virra in his makeshift specimen cage.
But the rest was silence.
Then.
Plink. Plink. Thunk. Thunk-SLAM.
Borbala’s three good eyes blinked at them in succession. “That’s debris,” she said. “Just the normal little tiny bits of dust and dead rock floating around in space. You know, the kind of junk we have a huge array of biotic shields to keep from slamming into us at faster-than-light speeds.”
Plink. Plink. Knock. CLUNK.
“That’s the sound of it hitting the ship, new friends,” Ferank said. “It’s been happening every nine minutes and forty-one seconds. That is not a good sound.”
Plink. Plink. Plink.
8. INCUBATION
Anax Therion stood on an overturned trunk, her arms held out to the side like an aristocrat’s wife being fitted for a ballgown.
“It is not my best work,” Irit Non muttered as she strained to seal two slabs of flexible, elegant chocolate-brown and bone-white nano-mesh fibers around the drell’s long green thigh.
It was quiet in the cargo hold. Quiet and cold. Their voices echoed against the high concave ceiling. Irit had already decided it was “creepy down here” and wanted to be done with this whole business as quickly as possible. But Therion found it oddly comforting. She had been here before. They had solved problems in the cargo hold, she and Borbala Ferank, whom she had rather begun to miss. The two of them had been given puzzles with gaps in the picture, and they’d filled them in here. She had been successful with Borbala, and that was the same as liking her. The cargo hold was a place of solutions. Being surrounded by all those tens of thousands of people’s futures packed into shipping crates was almost like being surrounded by the people themselves. To Anax Therion, the shadowy, cavernous cargo bay was as crowded as a party.
Irit’s personal crate was massive, roomy enough for them both to stand up comfortably inside—though that was far easier for the short, r
ound volus than the lanky drell. Far bigger than the quarian family’s allotment; sweet, useful little Raya’Zufi with her ancient krogan microscope and her stuffed dolls. Anax wondered what the volus had paid for the excess.
“You are too thin,” the volus designer complained. “It is extremely unattractive.”
There were probably comedy vids in the archives that involved drell in volus suits, Anax thought, without embarrassment. Anax Therion had never seen the purpose of embarrassment. Or comedy. Both seemed inconvenient afflictions. Though useful enough to incite in others. She had not yet been able to get much of anything out of the volus, even during the long fitting. She had some sort of resentment toward males, and the usual volus paranoia of being the most hated species in any given room, even one with a batarian in it. But Therion could not yet decide what the creature wanted, other than for them to stop using the word Yoqtan. She had always found the time between meeting a person and understanding fully what role was most advantageous to play for them highly uncomfortable. She could take a guess, but it would only be a guess. And a risk. Therion despised risk.
The suit was a patchwork job, sewn together with astonishing skill from pieces of a thousand other suits that Irit Non had packed away in the cargo hold to stock her new shop on the Nexus, modified for a body that bore no resemblance to a volus whatsoever. The long pale flaps that hung on either side of a volus’s muzzle to protect the air-exchange mechanism instead hung down on either side of Anax’s small, muzzleless head like white hair. The famous glowing eye gaskets shone against the brown ridged skullcap. To her surprise, the tinted glass did not color the world yellow. She could see normally, and with the benefit of a visual display not unlike a quarian’s, it was able to show her the status of the various suit seals, filters, pressurization zones, hygienic sieves, and exterior conditions, as well as her own vital signs.
“It’ll never be as good as a Fleet-clan suit,” Non sighed. “That’s just not what we make them for. They wear suits so nothing gets in. We wear them so we don’t get out. But I can install some basic medical shields, prophylactic reservoirs, contaminant stopgaps, and… hey, look, this is the best part.” Irit snapped her short fingers in Anax’s face. She had been putting the readout display through its paces, memorizing the facial tics that controlled the various options and menus. “Pay attention. I might start offering it as a featured upgrade when I open for business. If the suit detects aggressive foreign cell structures, like a virus, a virus which is most certainly not Yoqtan, you’ll see a little icon flash in the bottom-right corner of your corneal display. Like this.” And a bright-red circle with a cross inside had appeared in the gasket glass, blinking on and off. “It might also detect cigarette smoke or amorous pheromones or eezo or an oncoming thunderstorm, as well; I don’t exactly have time to make the sensor precise.”
“Can we be sure its scans are working?” Anax asked. “Scans are proving unreliable around here.”
Irit Non made a truly revolting half-snorting, half-gargling noise in the back of her throat, opened a heretofore-invisible sluice gate the size of a fingernail under her chin, and flung a spray of coppery-blue volus spit into Anax Therion’s face. The red icon flared up right where it should have. “None of my processors were ever connected to the Si’yah’s systems, and they aren’t now. Computer problems can’t just magically hop from machine to machine like organic problems. There has to be a packet exchange of some kind.” Non paused. “Still, probably best if you test it once in a while.”
There was no ego in the statement. Neither shame nor arrogance. In everything else, Irit was proud. To an already irritating fault. But when it came to her suits, her only concern was that they did their work. Anax admired that. She felt the same. The volus opened a forearm cuff and jammed several wafer-thin discs between the layers of copper-brown mesh. She sealed it around Therion’s left wrist, which went numb for a moment as the gauntlet accessed her bloodstream.
