Mass Effect: Annihilation discussion thread

ANNIHILATION
 
PROLOGUE

HEPHAESTUS STATION: CALESTON RIFT

Tech Specialist Second Class Oliver Barthes looked down at the hazy, glittering sweep of the galaxy far below him. Stars and red-orange astral dust clouds reflected in the flat, polished surface of his omni-tool. It was late: 0300. He hadn’t finished his work and he would have murdered his best friend for a piece of real meat and a mug of real gin just then, if he had a best friend. Or a mug. One more round of calibrations and he could sleep. But Oliver just stood there on his tiny silver access platform, transfixed by the stars like a dumb kid breaking orbit for the first time. A chunk of the galactic arm glowed against his own very human, very un-celestial forearm like a ropy piece of muscle. Or a wound.

Of course, it was not his first time. Not even close. If he tried hard, Oliver Barthes could just barely remember a time when his life was not mainly a series of shuttles, cruisers, stations, forms, contracts, someone else’s kludgecode, and tiny viewports in endless dull walls. A time when his life was green and warm and kind. When he could smell real dirt under his fingernails as he drifted to sleep in a real bed every night. But that was then. That was Eden Prime. This was after. This was Hephaestus Station.

Even at 0300, Hephaestus’s dry-dock facilities buzzed and hummed with people. This was the techies’ witching hour. The machinists and engineers and cargo loaders and nosy passengers-to-be were all snug in their favorite bars or berths. Now the real work could get done. Not that anyone else saw it Oliver’s way. They only saw the plasteel that separated them from the vacuum of space. They saw the power of biotic blasts that could rip that space apart with the twitch of an eyelash. But they couldn’t see the code that made it all possible. Code was invisible, and therefore forgettable. And coders were more than forgettable. They were ignorable, expendable, and tragically low paid. Kids were practically born programming these days. Why pay someone a fortune for something as basic as eating and drinking?

Until something went wrong, of course.

The massive hull of the Keelah Si’yah crawled with codeslingers like barnacles on an old sailing ship. Each one clung to an open nodeport, accessing the ship’s deep banks directly for maximum security. Oliver instructed his omni-tool to dose him with a last wave of stims. His veins flooded, opened, relaxed. He forgot about the stars’ reflections in his omni-tool, about real meat and real gin and green fields ready for planting. Tech Specialist Second Class Oliver Barthes stretched up his arms toward the starboard hull of the quarian deep-space vessel as though he meant to give it a bear hug. His hands moved over the gleaming plasteel as he activated the gravity flexors on his worksuit and lifted himself up toward the ship with a practiced, almost acrobatic grace. A calm artificial voice informed his inner ear of his progress.

Palm flexors: locked. Sole flexors: locked. Knee flexors: locked and ready. You are cleared for extra-vehicular motility, Specialist Barthes.

Each point of contact thunked into place with a familiar, satisfying, sucking sound.

“Thanks, Helen,” he chuckled. Helen didn’t care what he called her. She wasn’t anything like a full VI. She wasn’t even a she. No more sentient than a frying pan, his Helen. But that cool, collected, randomly generated voice was often his only friend on these long shifts, and you didn’t ignore your only friend just because she was an omni-tool.

Oliver was lucky to have this gig and he knew it. The Initiative paid better than anyone, even the Alliance, and, more importantly, they paid on time. Oliver needed that. He needed the money, and he needed the reliability. He glanced down at the misty stars in Helen’s gleaming surface again. One of them was Sahrabarik, and somewhere near Sahrabarik was Omega Station, and somewhere on Omega Station was an asari named Aria T’Loak to whom Oliver sent every credit he earned beyond the bare minimum he needed to keep stomach and soul together. He shuddered. He remembered her cold blue eyes. Her cold blue smile. The look on his father’s face when Aria told him she’d sold his only son to a mobile work detail based out of Sigurd’s Cradle. It wasn’t a special tragedy. It wasn’t unique. Thousands of refugees from the attack on Eden Prime (and Noveria and Virmire and so on and so forth) ended up the same way—lost and broke and bought and sold. The only thing special about Oliver Barthes was that his work detail was run by a reasonably kind elcor named Lumm, and Lumm had a policy of allowing his boys to buy their freedom, if and when they could. Oliver didn’t think anyone had ever yet taken old Lumm up on it. The boys blew their meager earnings on batarian shard wine or girls or Quasar or even red sand, for the very desperate. But not him. He’d saved and scraped and starved. He didn’t look at girls, even though they looked at him sometimes, even though he wanted to look. He drank water. He only set foot in a bar when Lumm sent him to patch some glitching Quasar machine that was paying out a little too often. Oliver was good at saving and scraping and starving. He had a talent for it, just as much as he had a talent for debugging spaceships. And when Lumm offered to ring up his liberty, he paid his price and kept his receipt.

Oliver wasn’t saving or scraping or starving for himself anymore. At least, not only for himself. He was on the rent-to-own plan for his parents’ freedom nowadays, and he would never, ever miss a payment. He paid Aria to keep them off hard labor and he paid her, in installments, to one day let them go.

It wasn’t easy to keep up. Coding billets were usually viciously short-term. You never knew where the next one would take you. You never knew when there would be a next one. This was the longest contract he’d ever pulled. The other Initiative vessels had been ship-in-a-box jobs; absolutely straightforward, minimalist, nothing extra, nothing fancy. Strictly get-you-from-here-to-there action. Take your basic long-distance cruiser template, adjust for asari, human, turian, salarian. Load everyone on, put them to sleep for six hundred years, wake them up in the Andromeda galaxy where much better facilities and a healthy, balanced breakfast would be waiting for them. Quick, efficient, no mess.

But this was a quarian job, and quarians never met a boat they didn’t want to mess with. They had a list of custom alterations as long as the Rift. No quarian would trust a ship built strictly to get you from here to there. There might never materialize. Their whole species lived on a flotilla cruising from system to system waiting for the geth to abandon their homeworld, a place most of them had never even seen. Ships were their mothers and their children. Ships were home. They would not set foot aboard unless they were confident that, if push came to shove, they could live on this thing functionally forever. And that list of alterations kept getting longer and longer, now that the Initiative had asked the soft-spoken, birdlike quarians to allow other races to buy or barter passage on their six-hundred-light-year road trip. Now they needed shipboard environments friendly to the reptilian drell, elephantine elcor, aquatic hanar, ammonia-based volus, four-eyed batarian… 20,000 leftover souls packed into one tin can like an assorted-flavor pack of ramen noodles. And they called it all not Keelah Se’lai, the old quarian phrase that meant “by the homeworld I hope to see one day,” but Keelah Si’yah.

“By the homeworld I hope to find one day.”

Oliver Barthes ran his fingertips along the belly of the Si’yah. What could they be like? These quarians, among all the quarians, who had given up the one thing their whole race lived and breathed: the quest for Rannoch, the quest for home. What was a quarian who didn’t care about the homeworld? Were they even quarians anymore? It would be like finding a couple of thousand humans who didn’t care about space at all. Or salarians who had never given one single thought to science. Or a red asari. Oliver had tried to make conversation in the Hephaestus Station bars, but he’d never been very good at that, and anyway, why would any of those beautiful aliens waste their time talking to someone who was going to be dead, from their perspective, before they woke up in the morning? It was six hundred years to Andromeda. He was already a ghost to them.

But some nights… some nights he dreamed that he was going, too. That by some miracle, one of the twenty thousand snug, identical cryopods was his. That he, too, would wake up one day staring down a new world. A world no one had screwed up yet. A world he could help turn into paradise. But then he’d wake up staring down a dented Hephaestus bulkhead. It would never be him. He was too tied to this galaxy. To Eden Prime and his parents and Helen and goddamned Aria T’Loak. Oliver Barthes was not the new world kind. He was screwed up already. Screwed up from birth.

And so he’d worked his way slowly through his portion of their endless checklist, and somehow a year in the life of Oliver Barthes had gone by with hardly a whisper. He was even beginning to feel… fond of Hephaestus Station, with all her busted vents and malfunctioning doors and total lack of architectural character. It was a rough place, like any remote station. If you turned out the lights on an argument, chances were you’d turn them back on to a body. The local cuisine was wall-to-wall freeze-dried ramen wedges and soya tablets. But at 0300, if you squinted, it could look like home. Disgusting, he thought to himself. You’re like an old grandma! Next you’ll be laying out doilies in your berth.

Oliver opened a fresh nodeport in the cryodeck of the Keelah Si’yah and paired Helen with the ship’s infant systems. He sighed. Hell was other people’s code. He did his best, he really did, but anything elegant or functional he managed to compile was instantly swallowed up in the hideous kludgecode of the thousand other techies sticking their clumsy fingers in the quarian pie. Someday, Oliver thought. Someday I’ll get to build a boat from scratch. Just me, nobody else. Full VI interface, automations smooth as snow, self-calibrating, self-debugging. It’ll be perfect. It’ll be so elegant even an elcor would weep. Nobody ever made a bug-proof boat but I’ll be the first. And with this beast on my résumé, it might not even be too long before I get my shot.

Oliver looked down. You weren’t supposed to look down. Hephaestus Station was a glorified orbital platform. Her dry docks floated at the ends of long radials that extended from the main body of the station like the rays of a particularly ugly sun. Looking down meant looking into raw space. Nothing between you and the long drop but a bluish film of artificial atmosphere. You probably wouldn’t fall—the gravity flexors took care of that, but you might throw up or pass out or freak out, and none of those things would get you another job. But Oliver had never been troubled by the yawning empty darkness of the infinite void. It just didn’t bother him. He was a man, it was an infinite void; they knew each other pretty well and left it at that. His eyes slid over the black nothingness and onto the crosshatch of silver railings and ramps and mezzanines that cradled the quarian ship. Furtively, he scanned the dock for… well, for what? For someone who might see what he was about to do? Why should he care? He wasn’t doing anything wrong, not really. In fact, Oliver Barthes meant to do something quite nice. Sweet, when you thought about it. And Oliver Barthes was going to be paid very handsomely for being nice. Enough to buy his parents out from under Aria T’Loak and himself out from Lumm and set them all up for good in one mighty payoff. And maybe, just maybe, when it was all done and his family settled and he could finally dream for himself alone, enough for a one-way ticket to the future, six hundred years away.

Techies in plain worksuits ran up and down the maze of ramps and stairs. A few night owls leaned against rails, smoking or nursing a flask or just staring, staring at the enormity of the ship, at the enormity of what it meant. Anyone who set foot on this boat would never see home again, except on a long, long range scan. They’d never smell a familiar flower again.

They were an odd bunch, the Si’yah colonists. None of them were what you would call normal representatives of their species. Of course, they wouldn’t be. The idea of even one quarian leaving the Flotilla for parts unknown, never to return, was frighteningly strange. And there were four thousand of them on this boat. It was a ship of fools: vagabonds, idealists, radicals, exiles, criminals, artists, and schemers. The quarians hadn’t turned anyone away if they could pay, barter, or show their worth to a new colony. No matter who they’d been. No matter what they’d done. The Si’yah was a blank slate for everyone.

It would be madness. Oliver wished he could be there to see it.

Oliver’s gaze flicked through the meandering crowd. He saw a female drell with bright markings blow a smoke ring out of her dark-green lips into the night. Some four-eyed batarian argued with a volus who glared back at him out of the mournful badger eyes that all volus suits seemed to have. A pair of quarians solved their sleeplessness with an evening walk. The worklights of the Keelah Si’yah flashed against the face masks of their own environmental suits. The other techies were always chattering about what a quarian really looked like inside her suit, about how they could get one to strip off and show them, about how they’d definitely bag this one quarian girl before she shipped out to god knows where, no problem. But Oliver never wondered. He’d seen their ship. He’d seen their code. He knew exactly what a quarian looked like on the inside.

Oliver didn’t think anyone was watching him. He was certain they weren’t. Everyone was nose-deep in their own problems. Dammit, Barthes, it’s just an audio subroutine, stop being paranoid, he thought. Still, it didn’t sit quite right. Oliver wasn’t stupid. He was one of Lumm’s boys. He knew any job that arrived facelessly through his datapad, paid so obscenely well, and demanded no questions was probably pretty far from legit work. But he’d gone over the loopcode himself. Over and over. It really did seem to be what his contact said it was: a recording of a goofy old quarian lullaby called “My Suit and Me” to be played to the sleeping colonists in their cryopods once a century until planetfall. Harmless. Sentimental to the point of cuteness. And sentiment knew no species. Things like this happened all the time with new ships, especially deep-space sleepers like Si’yah here. Pictures stuck up on the inside of the cryopods, a little crate of real tea smuggled on to comfort somebody’s homesick uncle. One of the other techies on the same dinner cycle as Oliver had been hired by some rich fool to install a tiny perfume capsule in all the drell pods, programmed to release the scent of the usharet flower just before the big thaw. Usharet used to grow on Rakhana, their poor dead homeworld. All that effort, just so the drell could wake up on the other side of the universe to the scent of home. As if it mattered what a couple of thousand lizards sniffed first thing in the morning! Then again, Oliver supposed it was all the same. Who knew why people did the things they did, except for sentiment. When he’d asked why something so unimportant required the kind of secrecy his benefactor was paying for, Oliver had been told only that it was a kindly surprise, a gesture of unity and peace for this hodgepodge ship of fools. They were all quarians now. They were family.

What wouldn’t you do for family? What wouldn’t you do just to make them smile?

Oliver Barthes couldn’t go to Andromeda, no matter what his dreams told him. But he could do this. He could do this for those who would go out beyond the beyond, out into the wild unknown to forge a new civilization out of raw starstuff. He could make them smile in their sleep. Maybe that wasn’t much to tell the grandkids about, but it was something.

Oliver wiggled his toes inside his suit to kill the pins and needles. He instructed Helen to upload the subroutine to the cryopod maintenance matrix and erased his footsteps. It was easy, for someone like him. As easy as remembering to turn off the lights and lock the door behind you.

“Godspeed,” Oliver whispered to that big, dumb, insane, beautiful ship. “Sleep tight.”

All flexors in safety mode. You are cleared for Hephaestus Station re-entry, Specialist Barthes. Have a pleasant rest.

“You too, Helen. You too. Wherever well-behaved little truncated VI programs go to snooze, tuck yourself in nice and snug.”

Oliver slowly climbed back down to his access platform and disengaged the gravity flexors. His feet found metal once more. He took out his datapad and sent confirmation of delivery to the address he’d been given. Then, he pulled up his account manager and watched like a kid outside a cake shop. He waited. And waited. And finally, the familiar, modest numbers of his precious savings blinked out. New numbers blinked on. Astonishing new numbers. Gorgeous new numbers. Oliver Barthes was going to a new world, all right, just like the rest of them. A world of safety and love and family. A world where what happened on Eden Prime barely mattered at all.

* * *

Oliver walked along the main gangplank with something very like a spring in his step. He took off his helmet and ran one hand through his short brown hair. His stubble itched; time to shave. But it was done. It was done and you know what? It really was something that twenty thousand people were going to sail through the cold space between galaxies listening to Radio Free Barthes. He’d never thought he’d amount to anything special, but maybe he had, after all. Not enormously special, but a little. Just a little. He put his palm against the security panel. He imagined his mother’s face when he told her, the quiet little sparkle of delight he remembered in her brown eyes. The elevator arrived; the door didn’t open. Oliver rolled his eyes and banged on it a couple of times with his fist. Stupid things. It wouldn’t take more than a day of scrubbing that almost-certainly decrepit code to fix, but no one ever bothered. He’d put in a work request in the morning. His goodbye present to old Heph. From me to you, buddy.

Oliver punched the slider again. It wheezed open. The elevator car was empty; he stepped inside. He wouldn’t tell his mother right away, of course. He’d take them to the Citadel. Dazzle them with the green trees in the Presidium and the lights of the docking ships and the steak sandwiches at Apollo’s. Then he’d show them the apartment in Zakera Ward he’d bought for them. He could practically hear his mother’s voice in that dingy elevator. Oh, Ollie, it’s too much! They’d be so happy. They’d probably cry. He’d cry, too. And then, when they were all sitting around the dinner table, stuffed senseless and drunk on the future, he’d tell them about the time he played rock-a-bye baby to a ship of aliens for six hundred years. I wonder if you dream in cryostasis? Maybe someday we’ll find out. Together.

Tech Specialist Second Class Oliver Barthes stepped out of the elevator into the long hallway that connected the main column of Hephaestus Station to the industrial living quarters. He picked up his pace, eager to get to sleep, to get one day closer to Zakera Ward and green trees and grease shining on his father’s calloused fingers from a real steak sandwich.

Oliver was still picturing his mother’s laughing face when a figure in a deep gray hood stepped out from an alcove and shot him twice in the head.

The figure looked down at the techie’s body for a moment, prodded it with one boot to make sure, then walked on, humming a little lullaby under its breath:

Sing me to sleep on the starry sea

And I’ll dream through the night of my suit and me…

The filthy, featureless metal ceiling of Hephaestus Station reflected mutely in the dull surface of a powerless omni-tool.

I won’t fear the heat of a desert breeze

Or contaminants high in the jungle trees

Even in space I shall never freeze

Because I’ve got my suit and my suit’s got me…


PART 1

KEELAH SI’YAH
 
1. SURFACE RECEPTORS

Sleepwalker Team Leader Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, your attention is required.

Senna groaned. A bright cascade of revival drugs sizzled through his system. The quarian second-in-command tried to roll over on his side and turn down the optics on his suit as he always did when he overslept. Nothing was ever so important it couldn’t survive another five minutes’ sleep. His suit did not respond. Senna’s elbow hit hard iso-glass. He tried to sit up, smacked the brow ridge of his mask against the same stuff, and fell back onto a narrow bed. Pinpricks of harsh light stabbed his eyes. Readouts exploded onto his helmet display in bursts of glowing ultraviolet text.

Ship Status: Initiative ship Keelah Si’yah performing within normal parameters

Navigational Positioning: 1.26% behind projected itinerary

Cardiovascular Condition: good

Deviations from Endocrinal and Neurological Norms: within standard conformations

Pharmaceutical Activity: intravenous stimulants, muscular density restoratives, painkiller #4 (double dose)

Holistic Suit Feedback: all systems functional, no exterior breaches

Sleepwalker Team Sitrep: nothing significant to report

Engine Chatter: eezo conversion performing at 0.7% in excess of expected efficiency

Short-Range Scan: due to pass by binary brown dwarf star 44N81/44N82 in two weeks, two days

Communications: receiver array intact and clear, home relay communications packet download completed successfully without information loss, next scheduled packet in nineteen months, sixteen days.

Self-diagnostics from Onboard Virtual Intelligences: all performing at optimum

There was also a helpful chart showing his current rate of bone-density loss (4%) along with recommended corrective supplements. A message from his grandmother, Liat’Nir vas Achaz, blinked unread in the corner of his vision. Recorded before they left and programmed to deliver itself on arrival. It was the little things that made up a family.

Arrival.

They must be there. Here. Home.

Senna’Nir’s heart raced a little whenever he thought of his grandmother. His pulse picked up now, crushingly anxious, as he had been since he was a boy, for her safety. She was so small and fragile. But then again, weren’t they all? He took a deep breath, sucking in more super-saturated air from his suit to energize his lungs. Liat was fine. No harm could come to her, fast asleep with the rest of the quarians, hibernating, safe. He subvocalized to archive her message, whatever it was, recorded whenever it had been, long ago. Later. Senna would never be sorry he brought her along to Andromeda, but he couldn’t take her voice just now. It was, and always had been, piercing.

All’s well, he thought. Strong wind and a following tide for all the ships at sea. Senna could see his breath fog blurrily in front of his face. Good. Fine. Back to sleep now. Sleep warm and good. Awake cold and bad. He blinked away the onslaught of interstellar and anatomical trivia and tried to shut down his optics again. Another few minutes couldn’t harm anything. All the real work was behind them. They’d be docking with the Nexus very soon, if they hadn’t already. And once the captain gave the command to link airlocks and that beautiful hiss of atmosphere exchange sounded off, his responsibility for this voyage would be mercifully over.

That prim, clipped, genderless voice piped up once more.

I’m sorry, Team Leader Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah, I cannot allow you to reduce your sensory input. Your attention is required.

“Unf,” grunted Sleepwalker Team Leader Senna’Nir vas Keelah Si’yah as his cryopod flooded with brilliant white light. “Ow. No! What? You said all’s well!”