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“Yes, sorry. So, the problem is, all systems read each and every one of the four hundred and sixty-three deceased as alive and well. I can assure you they are the opposite. Even when we removed one of the bodies from its pod, the ship’s medical scan reported that they were completely healthy, ready to jump up and run a couple of laps around the physio-maintenance deck. The scans are useless.”
“This one inquires into the status of the other VI on board,” hummed the hanar. “There are several independent virtual intelligence systems on the Keelah Si’yah: the diagnostic VI in medbay, the navigational VI on the bridge, the calibration VI in engineering, the educational VI in the children’s areas. This one also presents a subject no one else wishes to discuss: what its family on the homeworld would call ‘the unenlightened heathen in the room’—the SAMs. This one would feel great peace if this team were simply to awaken the Pathfinders and allow them to resolve the dilemma.”
“Now that’s a good idea,” said the batarian, clapping her hands. “That jelly’s the only one of you with a brain. Problem solved.”
“Problem not solved,” Senna insisted.
The night he took her offer to serve as second in command, Senna and the captain had sworn to each other over plates of nutrient paste that they’d treat every species aboard equally, no matter what bad experiences they might have had with their people in the past. They were a one-ship Migrant Fleet now. They were all quarians. So why, when he meant to be open-minded, did batarians always have to be so terrible? Presumably one or two existed who were not slavers, dealers, pirates, or worse, but Senna had never met or heard of one. “The other VIs are just as bricked as the Si’yah’s internals. They’re hardwired into the ship’s array in the first place; their scans use the same mechanisms. If the well is poisoned, so are the villagers, so to speak. Convenience of language or not, the Keelah Si’yah is blind. As for the SAMs, I thought of that. Pathfinders aren’t assigned to Sleepwalker teams for a reason. They’re just plain more imp
ortant than us. We’re interchangeable. They’re not. They have one job—find us homeworlds. This is pretty far off their duty roster. And right now, we could just be looking at a technical glitch—a tragic one, Anax, I’m not trying to downplay it. But it’s probably a glitch we can repair in a few hours. In which case, I’m not willing to break Pathfinder protocol because it’s annoying to have to be the one to fix it. And if it’s not… Ferank, if it’s not, if we’re talking about a disease here, we can’t risk exposing the Pathfinders to it, or the SAMs to whatever is infecting the ships’ computer systems. If these deaths are intentional—”
“Intentional?” interrupted Borbala Ferank. Her tone had a vicious edge. “Am I to understand that we are under attack?”
“We?” Anax said icily. “The drell have lost over four hundred. If there is an attack, it was clearly targeted at my people. Sit down, merchant.”
Hate boiled in Borbala’s three good eyes. You could not insult a batarian by disparaging her looks or her parentage or even her intelligence. But to imply a lower socio-economic class was fighting talk. Senna would have thought Anax had a cooler temper than that. At least she hadn’t called her a beggar.
“If it is intentional,” Senna shouted over them, trying to keep it calm and professional and utterly failing, “we must know before we arrive. With the ship’s internals doing whatever it is they’re doing, or not doing, our investigative legs have been cut out from under us. The only reason we even know about it now is that the Si’yah found a slight chemical discrepancy between an environmental report and a medical report. We are here because those ‘sides of drell beef,’ as you so diplomatically put it, turned up a bad case of freezer burn. Otherwise we might have docked at the Nexus as a ghost ship. Now, Anax, Yorrik, and myself have drawn up a plan of action. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of work for everyone.”
The hanar’s soft voice slid through the Radial’s audio. “This one wonders why we must be awakened. You are fully capable of performing funerary rites and retaining a statistically relevant number of the deceased for diagnostic purposes. Allow the dead their peace in the embrace of the Enkindlers. This one humbly suggests that if a mechanical accident has occurred, nothing can be done about it now. If a murderer has done his work within our sanctuary, that vicious sin is accomplished, and no others are in danger. This one is certain that the Nexus will have many experts and devices to separate the wicked from the good. What is this one expected to do?”
Senna sighed and spoke to his ship directly.
“K, since we have been discussing this, how many more pods have shown necrotic freezer burn?”
Two drell and one hanar.
“It’s not over,” Senna said grimly. “It’s spreading.”
“This one would inquire as to the nature of this it you speak of with such certainty,” the hanar thrummed. Pale bioluminescence slid up and down its tentacles.
“No certainty at all,” Anax Therion spoke up, and Senna found himself relieved to let her take the helm. He had accepted Qetsi’Olam’s request that he serve as second-in-command because he’d accept her request to shove himself out an airlock if she made one, but at heart, Senna had been and always would be a tech. Telling machines what to do was so much more straightforward than telling people what to do. Machines did exactly as instructed. People always thought they knew better.
The drell detective stood in her alcove with military-grade posture. “As of right now, the probabilities are fairly evenly split between accidental poison, such as a toxic malfunction or leak in the pod itself, deliberate poison, which would obviously require a poisoner, whether on board or back at the station, or a communicable disease, again, acquired on board or on Hephaestus. Soval was a member of Sleepwalker Team Yellow-9, so we cannot rule out her encountering something else on the Keelah Si’yah and carrying it into the cryopod system when she resumed her hibernation some fifty years ago.”
“But the cryopods are not linked,” protested Irit Non with a strangled wheeze. “They’re designed as self-contained systems, precisely to avoid this kind of cascade effect in case of a malfunction. Someone would have to interfere with every pod individually in order to kill the occupants. That seems incredibly unlikely.”
“Why?” answered Therion. “Be careful of ruling out possibilities just because they seem improbable. People are improbable. Technology is improbable. We are riding in a bullet fired six hundred years into the future. That is improbable. At this stage, it is criminal to dismiss any theory. Consider: Whatever happened began after the last Yellow-9 cycle. Is it impossible that someone programmed a single pod to revive after they completed their shift and spent the last fifty years at liberty on the Keelah Si’yah, working on pod after pod? Some of us are very long-lived. Fifty years would be nothing to an elcor—”
Yorrik’s broken-trombone voice blared over Therion’s. “Offended protestation: No elcor would do such a thing. Proudly quoting in expectation of warm mutual recognition and acknowledgement of source material: ‘In form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.’”
“I’m sorry, are you quoting Hamlet right now?” Senna’Nir cut in, laughing despite himself.
“Defensively masking wounded self-esteem: Elcor Hamlet.”
“You know that bit’s about humans, don’t you?” Borbala Ferank barked laughter. “And it’s a load of dung either way. I’ve always known you elcor weren’t so big and cuddly and innocent as everyone thinks.”
Anax Therion went on calmly. “You’re all thinking of this far too simply. This is one possibility. There are many others. We are trying to determine causality from a desert of data. Think of the possibilities like a forking river. The largest fork is this: on purpose or by accident? From there, infinite possibilities split off. If: then. If by accident, then we need fear nothing, and must only control the damage. If we are dealing with a single point of failure, an individual saboteur, then fifty years is not an entirely unreasonable commitment for a hanar, either. If they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the work, any drell, quarian, volus, or batarian could be our man, if a single person, or any person, is responsible at all. It would be a simple thing for us to miss one empty cryopod among the thousands. It could even be one of us. Who were the last people we can be absolutely certain were awake before everything went wrong? I’m looking at them.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” the batarian Borbala Ferank snarled. “I will not be accused by some eyeball-licking lizard who thinks it’s people.”
Anax took a deep, calming breath. “I am but a simple servant of the god Amonkira, Lord of Hunters. But I do not hunt for meat. I hunt for data. And I am not accusing anyone. I’m trying to show you that we don’t even know what we don’t know. For example, none of what I just said takes into account the possibility of an asari or krogan stowaway, for whom fifty years would be a hilarious joke. If it was an asari or krogan, it’s as easy to imagine they did their work a hundred years ago or more. What matters a century to a krogan? And naturally, a percentage must always be set aside for something I have not yet thought of, something I have missed. But it could be more than one person. It could have been an accident. And knowing who did it, if there even is a who, is less useful to us than curtains on a salarian dreadnought if we do not know what they did, or how it happened without the ship shutting it down.”
“The pods have more sophisticated scrubber systems than a quarian suit,” Irit rasped through her own air filter. “There is just no possibility that poison or a disease would not be discovered and immediately purged. It has never happened before in the history of cryotech!”
Ysses’s tentacles rippled. “This one regretfully interjects that no being has departed their mortal form in a cryopod in the history of cryotech, and yet, it seems to have occurred. Nearly five hundred times. This one additionally humbly begs to understand why the quarians do not remove their suits when they e
nter stasis if the pods are proof against all infection.”
