Mass Effect: Annihilation discussion thread

A human boy, working on the Keelah, is asked to install perfume sprays in certain Drell pods so they get the scent of home when they wake up. He's offered a lot of money to do it and doesn't see a problem with doing it, shortly after he's finished he is killed.

The last maintenance team to be awoken from cryo is woken up again 30 years before they should be, the onboard, heavily shackled, AI has noticed that even though it's sensors don't detect a problem there seems to be one. Some of the pods are misting up, that shouldn't happen. The team investigate.

It turns out Drell have been dying in there pods, somehow, now the small team of 6 must work out what is going on. The team is an Elcor doctor, a Hanar apothecary, a Batarian security expert/smuggler, a Volus tailor, a Drell detective and a Quarian tech who is the ships second in command.

The ship is malfunctioning systems are working as they should be and the temperature seems off, everything they try seems to be already broken.

With the ship malfunctioning, they have to work out how to diagnose the problem the old fashion way, this takes up a large part of the book so I'll gloss over it, they are split into teams and the character exchanges are quite good.

The captain is woken up as the situation is getting urgent.

The Quarian second in command is secretly an AI sympathiser and has brought a very old but very sophisticated VI aboard, it is based on one of his ancestors, who happened to be one of the Geth programmers. He does not interface it with the ship but begins to explain the problem to it.

Soon people start waking up as the pod's malfunction and the sickness, now known to be a virus similar to the Volus chickenpox, is spreading through the population infecting all species, this leads the Elcor to be suspicious as viruses shouldn't be able to jump hosts. The Elcor has a Baterian patient that he is 'treating'.

Many of the Hanar that came aboard the Keelah were part of a doomsday cult, they did not want to hasten the end of life but welcomed it. Many of the awake Hanar are now preaching that the end times are here and the passengers should rejoice. This leads to some violence.

The Quarian tech discovers, with the help of his VI, there is a virus in the ship's core. He tells the captain he has an illegal VI but it can help, the captain is not happy about this and tries to destroy the VI but our Tech manages to upload the VI to the core where it will find the virus and restore the onboard systems, though will lose itself in the process.

While this has been happening the Elcor, who is now infected, has been looking for anyone aboard who is immune so he can make a retrovirus to save the ship's population.  The captain is immune so the Elcor starts using a sample of her blood to make a 'cure'.

The detective calls the captain and the second in command to her quarters where she has detained a Hanar. She tells the captain the Hanar is the culprit and the captain hurrys off the wake the 'council' so the can hold a trial.

The Drell instructs the second in command to stay quiet and the two of them follow the captain but the captain does not go where she said she would.

They listen as the captain talks to another Quarian about the computer virus he made and the biological virus she made, how it had gone too far they would have to stop and try again in Andromeda.

The Drell and the Tech confront the captain and she confesses to everything, her plan had been to make a virus that could infect the council races but would leave the lower races alone, she had thought the cryo would not let the virus get out of hand but the computer virus, which was designed to raise the temperature and hide its tracks, had raised the temperature too high and the virus had incubated and mutated in the hosts.

The Elcor finished the retrovirus but now they need to infect a host to spread the new curing virus, they choose the captain. She must walk all the halls of the ship to spread the cure. She cannot wear her suit to do this or the cure wouldn't spread. She walks the entire ship and dies as she reaches the last zone. The cure is fully spread.

The surviving colonists are put back into cryo for the remaining 30 years of travel. Just as the new captain, our hero the Tech, goes under a message comes in from the Nexus but no one is there to receive it.

That one confused me a little, but only because so few details were given. It's possible that the batarian clusters were hit a week or two before Earth, which could justify that.

When it comes to any others, I can't think of them now. There weren't many errors, mostly the raloi stuff that made me headscratch.

Does the book make any mention of the Rachni potentially making the trip. It's a long shot but it would be nice if we could preserve one of the setting's few 'alien' aliens for any new stories in Andromeda. 

Cnidaria City on Kahje, a domed place where the Drell live to avoid/reduce chances of getting kepral's sindrome or that the Elcor live quite a lot (one of the protagonists is a elcor with almost 400 years).

Re-read the passage again on chapter 2 and it does indeed imply that not only the Elcor but also the Volus had their own pathfinder. Only the batarians shared the quarian pathfinder because just a few hundreds of them were aboard and the Drell & Hanar because of their story.