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“Anax Theeeeerion!” it gurgled. “This one has missed you! Look what this one found! It is wonderful, it is a miracle, it is this one’s Day of Extinguishment present!”
The hanar’s nostrils and eating orifice were caked with red sand.
“Oh, Bala,” Anax sighed. “You didn’t.”
Borbala Ferank, former master of the greatest crime family in her quadrant, sang softly:
For I am batarian!
And it is, it is a call clarion
To be batarian!
“Don’t you want to try some?” the hanar bubbled. “There’s more than enough to share! Come, drell, this one will tell you its soul name and we will watch the cosmos perish together!”
Anax Therion sighed in disgust. She extended her arm and activated a stasis field, snatching the hanar up into the air like a sack of salt.
“Your soul name is ‘Shit for Brains,’” she snapped. “And you’re coming with me.”
The drell looked down again at the red sand, washed black by the blue biotic light, her disappointment in the batarian mingled with gratitude. “Well?” she said to the most feared woman on Khar’shan. “Are you coming?”
“Yes, darling,” whispered Borbala, in something very like self-loathing.
16. ACTIVATION
It was quiet in the quarian zone. There was an orderly line proceeding up the hall, with an older lady taking blood samples at one end of it, patting heads and reassuring everyone with those soothing sounds. It looked nothing like the rest of the ship. Quarians knew how to conduct themselves in a deep-space crisis. Even though they were terrified. Even though one male dropped to the ground in the sampling line and had to be carried away. Quarians understood that the ship that sustained you could always turn against you, and the least you could do was refrain from helping it along.
“What in the name of Rannoch and the homeworld to come is this?” Captain Qetsi’Olam breathed.
She was standing in Senna’Nir’s doorway, gaping at the technological wreckage within.
“Don’t look. It’s not so bad if you don’t look,” Senna said, trying to keep his hands from shaking. Don’t ever tell anyone. You mustn’t tell anyone. But it was time, and she was his captain, and she was his Qetsi—surely if anyone was ever to break this promise, it would be him and it would be now. Qetsi had broken rules all her life. She would understand. And she wou
ld understand because his secret was going to save them.
Cables and disassembled parts covered both chambers of the first officer’s quarters. Processing orbs, memory wafers, imaging pipettes, code cores, all ripped out of the dozens of unconnected VIs Anax and Borbala had dredged up out of the corners of the Keelah Si’yah. A cairn of deconstructed cryo fish tanks were piled up on top of his dining table, the guts ripped out of every one of them. A heap of hollowed-out early childhood education VIs was stacked up on his bed, eviscerated celebrity simulator VIs scattered the floor, gaming VIs filled up the sink. And toward the center of the bedroom was Senna’s old elcor combat VI that he’d built himself on his Pilgrimage, hanging off of the krogan microscope like a metallic octopus, clutching in its silicon tentacles the cold, dull disk that was the body of Liat’Nir, inasmuch as she had one. Yet she was not entirely Liat’Nir anymore. Or at least, not just Liat’Nir. He’d been augmenting her, increasing her capacity, her speed, everything he could before… before the end. He needed her to be able to do more, and faster, that was all that mattered, because his diagnostic tools were as blind to the worm as the ship was blind to everything else. Senna could not do it. No human could. He needed her to have access to more than the millions of responses of her descendants, no matter how varied and interesting her combinations of those lost and ghostly words might be.
“I have something to show you, Qetsi. You’re not going to like it, but we are very, very far from home, and if you do not decide to punish me, there is no one who will. New world, new rules, that’s what you’ve always said to me. We have come so far for new rules.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Senna. Of course I’m not going to punish you. We’ve lost so many already… so many.” She looked at him intently—he could see the shadows of her eyelashes beneath her faceplate glass. “You know it was the hanar, don’t you? Not all of them, of course, but… the religious ones. The cult. With their Day of Extinguishment nonsense, bleating all day and night. They made it happen. They’re going to annihilate us. We are a sacrifice. That baby girl in Yorrik’s lab. She’s a sacrifice. Senna, what am I supposed to do with a crime that enormous? Convene a tribunal, as we would on the Flotilla? Try them? Or push them out an airlock? I am not ready to be that kind of captain. I just wanted to be the kind that flew.”
“There can’t be that many of them left. Perhaps justice will take care of itself,” Senna said. He remembered the frenetic glow of Ysses’s tentacles as it surveyed the dead. If only they’d known. “In a moment, Captain, I’m going to press a button, and if I’ve done it all right, we’ll have our ship back. I think that’s worth trading a bit of sin for, don’t you?”
She squeezed his arm through the mesh of his suit. “I’ll forgive your sins if you forgive mine,” she said softly. “Now, just tell me what you’re so afraid of, you great stuttering processing orb.”
Senna’Nir took a deep breath and activated the conglomerate program. Liat flickered to life on the disk, smoking her hand-rolled cigarette, lounging on her rocking chair.
“Qetsi’Olam vas Keelah Si’yah, this is my grandmother, Liat’Nir.”
The captain froze. Her shoulders went tense and stiff. Her knees locked. Senna wished, and not for the first time, that he could see her face.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“It depends on what you think it is.”
“An ancestor VI.”
“Hello, Grandmother,” Senna’Nir said softly. His heart was racing. He had never shared this with anyone. It was more intimate than sharing suit environments.
