Mass Effect: Andromeda — Nexus Uprising

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Na’to’s finally got it!”

“Well, sing a goddamn chorus of whatever,” Arvex growled in comms. His voice had gotten surlier and surlier, and swapping out with his other two meatheads hadn’t softened it any. Now he was back out on deck watch, one krogan—Wratch, Andria had learned—perched just by the hatch.

All of them had taken a turn for the irritated.

As the hours clocked in, and Na’to only occasionally muttered to himself, the krogan had run out of ways to taunt him, and Reggie, and even Andria. They’d also run out of ways to bait each other.

Now Arvex sounded like he was ready to wring salarian neck to get out of the warzone the Nexus’s steady drift had placed them in.

The palp of the Scourge had spread. Somehow, as if pushed by an unseen force, the past few hours had seen it increase in length.

Worrisome.

“The good news,” she said, tapping her comm feed, “is that we’re just about done consolidating power through this auxiliary.”

“What’s the bad news?” Reg asked behind her.

She was very much aware of three krogan heads all focused on her. Even if two of them remained outside an airlock. “Well,” she said slowly. “The bad news is that once we’re done here, you, me and Na’to get to go have dinner.”

A beat.

“Why is that bad?” Reg asked.

“You clearly don’t pay attention to what you eat,” Kaje said. He’d taken up position near Reg, taking a break between shifts playing Shoot the Trash.

Andria hid a smile. “Basically.”

“Hey, if it means I can have dinner with Emory, I’m all for,” Reg replied defensively.

“Oh, right. The sweet couple.” Andria made a gagging sound.

“Don’t be jealous.”

“You know I am.”

“What are you humans babbling about now?” Na’to’s voice finally cracked the comm, sounding tired but triumphant. “I look away for just a minute and you’re already engaging in verbal showdowns?”

“A minute?” This from Wratch. Sheer disbelief. “What kind of salarian loses track of time?”

“A brilliant one,” Na’to said primly. Andria watched the camera feed bounce as he pulled himself out of the hatch. The wires, fuses and platelets attaching it all securely whizzed by in a streaming blur.

“Uh…”

“Shut it, Wratch. Like you never lost time in the varren pits,” Kaje laughed.

“No, that—”

A clatter drew Andria’s attention. Then another. She looked around, saw Reg doing the same.

Then Kaje surged to his feet. He pointed out over the emergency bulkhead. “It’s moving!”

“Shit,” Andria hissed, already reaching for the next frequency in her omni-tool. “Shit, shit—Engineering to bridge, I’m looking at a tangle of Scourge just outside Warehouse 7B.”

“Copy that, engineering,” someone said. She didn’t know anyone in bridge, had no idea who was talking, what rank. “Approximate depth?”

“The hell if I know!” She scanned the black, trusting Reg to keep a close hand on their friend’s gear. “It’s all over the place up here, one wrong move and—”

A large shadow loomed slowly into view. Brilliant lines of gold and red energy laced across them, through them, as if something superheated had dragged through the plates.

Her mouth dropped open.

Kaje reached out, caught her by the arm and dragged it closer to his face. “Those explorers sucked out of Dock 11? Yeah,” he growled into the mic, “they’re coming back!”

Addison met Sloane coming out of central commons, synthetic feathers in her hair and a puzzled sort of amusement twisting her usual broody expression.

“Hey,” she said by way of greeting. Her eyebrows knotted. “Did you shoot a giant chicken?”

Sloane looked down at her Avenger, then up again with the same odd look. As if she’d stumbled into an alternate dimension and wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Hey, Addison.” A pause. She offered a hand. “Pinch me, would you?”

Addison blinked. Then, when Sloane didn’t drop her hand, she took a fold of the security director’s skin and pinched.

Hard.

“Son of a—thank you,” she said sharply, jerking her hand back. She looked back at the commons door, and for the first time, Addison heard what sounded like screaming.

Her eyes widened. “Sloane, you didn’t.”

Sloane, shaking out her hand, moved away from the door. “Please. One, there’s no chickens to shoot here, unless you’re counting turians—”

Addison cleared her throat.

“Two,” Sloane added, “I didn’t shoot anyway. They’re…” A pause.

Addison splayed her hands, eyebrows raising even higher. “What? Because from here, it kind of sounds like someone’s getting cannibalized. And you have a gun.”

To her surprise, a half-smile curved Sloane’s mouth. She gestured, with the hand she’d pinched and not the firearm. “You can look, but maybe you shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a mess.”

“Sloane.”

This time, when the security director started laughing, Addison threw her hands up. She marched around the woman, waved frantically when the sound of screaming intensified. The door slid open and Addison saw…

Synthetic feathers. Specifically, feathers covering two people, and a round of drinks being poured for five more. A larger crowd surrounded them, fist-pumping and throwing bets.

“A drinking contest?” Where the losers were feathered by synthetic stuffing. And the winners just kept drinking.

And the bets just kept climbing.

Addison very slowly backed away, and let the door ease shut again.

Sloane’s laughter bordered on the hysterical. “And you… you know what?” she gasped.

Addison turned, still trying to wrap her head around the sight. “There had to be at least fifty people in there.”

Sloane’s nod sent her off-balance. She fell back against the corridor wall, cradling the Avenger.

“Drinking.”

Another nod. Tears began to leak out of her eyes, rolling down red cheeks as she struggled to breathe.

Addison’s hands lifted to her face, covering her mouth as it dropped open in horror. “And you just rolled right in with your rifle, didn’t you?”

This had Sloane howling with mirth, sitting down hard on one of the empty decorative tiers stationed at various intervals.

Unbidden, laughter began trickling up through Addison’s mingled horror and exasperation. “Sloane,” she said, trying for curt. But her humor betrayed her.

“I know,” Sloane panted.

“An assault rifle!”

The woman held it up, barely able to hold onto it. “I know!”

“You could have used the cameras!”

But Addison had started laughing too, and as Sloane just shrugged in elaborate, breathless hysteria, she gave up all pretense and just let it all fly. Addison hadn’t seen that much smiling or heard laughter like that since the drunken reverie of the departure celebration.

That had been months… make that years—make that centuries—ago. The last time she’d seen her fellow directors.

Inappropriate, yes. Untoward. Overreactionary. But as the doors slid wide and two humans stumbled out, a barrage of shouting, howls of the losing betters, and wild cheers followed them out.

Peals of laughter filled the corridor. “What, hey, Directors!” said a cheerful human.

Sloane could only wave them aside. “Let them drink,” she told Addison, still chuckling. “Blow off steam. If it gets rowdy, I’ll send in a few krogan to glare.”

Addison winced. “Maybe less krogan, more coffee?”

“I sup—”

The comms crackled to life all around them. “Warning! Brace for impact,” came the order, and all amusement abruptly died. Sloane caught Addison’s arm, who swept another around the most unsteady of the humans staggering by.

Just in time. The station shuddered.

Then it rocked.

Na’to yelped as a large fist grasped him by the front of the suit, jerked him bodily out of the hatch. He felt the sole of his boot catch on something, heard it clatter. “Watch it,” he exclaimed, already attempting to twist around to check for damage.

“No time!” Arvex’s voice, never quiet, now practically buried him in its intensity. “Get back to the hatch, go, go!”

Na’to flailed as the krogan slammed him feet-first onto the deckplates. For a moment, he forgot that he’d switched the magnetization of his boots off to work within the delicate interior of the power conduit. When the hand in his suit let go, Na’to felt his feet lift again. “Emergency,” he said, then louder, “Emergency!”

“Rock-dumb salarian, turn your boots on!” That hand grabbed his faceplate this time, spun him around and slammed him back to the plate. Arvex waited until Na’to’s boots sealed to the deck. Once assured Na’to wouldn’t go careening off into space, he pushed him toward the other krogan—Wratch, he thought dumbly.

“Nacho, don’t just stare!” Reg’s voice, slack tight at the gear securing him to the station.

A spray of bullets erupted just behind him.

His brain, deeply invested in fuses and synaptic power cores and the unfortunate mess of wires he’d corrected along the way, struggled to catch up. At least until the first bit of debris clipped his shoulder.

It didn’t hurt. Not really. It was too small for that. Na’to flapped a hand at it, forcing his magnetized boots to unlatch and make for the airlock. It spun away, a rotating disc of something or other. Out of my field, he thought. He didn’t do structural.

“Na’to,” Andria warned, her voice high and even younger in consequence. “Focus!”

He shook his head, pulling his attention back to the deck he walked across.

And to the virtual landmine of debris ahead.

Some small. Some medium.

Some very, very large.

All of it caught in ephemeral tendrils of black and orange and yellow and—

“It moved!” he exclaimed, so fascinated by the concept for a moment that he stopped trying to run.

Behind him, a loud clang jerked his attention back to the hatch. Nakmor Arvex knelt over it, grunting with effort as he secured the bolts back into place. Overhead, debris spun and gathered, whipped into frenzy. Whether it was the energy fringe turning large debris into smaller, the collisions of each as they magnified, or the bullets peppered by the krogan as they attempted to target debris out of their path, it only served to make it worse.

Action and reaction.

Calculating the rate of motion plus the additional force caused by the krogan’s efforts at firepower control, eyeballing the distance to the airlock—

None of it mattered.

“Oh, shit,” Andria whispered. “Ohshitohshit—”

“Get your slimy carcass inside,” roared Arvex.

Na’to tried. Panting, struggling to coordinate his slim build and the heavy magnetized grip of the boots, he struggled to take strides that would eat up the hull. Get him closer to the airlock. To safety.

Behind him, Arvex swore—or yelled or encouraged. Na’to couldn’t be sure; it was all krogan to him.

What he did know is that at the rate of force between the remains of a spinning rover and his own feeble momentum, he wouldn’t make it in time.

The comms filled with too many voices, yelling and shouting, pleading and encouraging.

Na’to looked up, saw nothing but somehow just knew. He jerked to the side, forcing his boots to unlatch. It threw him sideways, a floating kind of dodge, but it also pulled him free of the station hull.

Just as molten red furrows scored through the plate.

“Out,” Wratch bellowed on comms. “Seal the warehouse!”

“But Na’to—”

“I got him,” Reg said tightly.

Na’to’s safety went taut. He flailed, caught in a free-float that sent him careening into a large portion of a broken wing, jarring every bone in his body and ones he’d feel later, too. Black flashes turned to white behind his eyes, and as he clung to the bit of metal, he managed, “Here! Pull!”

“Don’t pull,” Arvex shouted, but too late.

Reg yanked on the cord. Na’to’s fingers ached around the rim of the torn wing, and the air jerked out of his chest with the force of it, but he felt himself move.

Felt the whole thing move with him.

“No,” he muttered. Then, forcing the membranes over his eyes open, yelled it louder. “No, no! Let go—!”

Krogan curses filled the line as Na’to stared, horrified, at the surface of the station. From this vantage, the horizon spread wider, farther than any of them could see from the hull itself. The void of space, black and blue and red and white and every beautiful color stretched out in unfathomable eternity.

Captured, it seemed, as if in a perfect sphere of tangled nebula.

“Let go,” Arvex ordered.

Numbly, Na’to obeyed. His hands spasmed, the sheared metal fragment peeled away as his whole body jerked to the side.

“Out, out!”

“Reg!”

Na’to couldn’t see what was happening inside the warehouse. Couldn’t place the edge of the hull or the deck he’d stood on. He spun, out of control, in a slow circle.

But the trajectory of the wing, that hadn’t changed.

“Brace for impact,” Arvex roared on the line.

Him? Heh. Na’to couldn’t. Not out here. He watched helplessly as the disaster unfurled in unstoppable, achingly slow motion. The slack around his waist unfurled. The sound of his own breath in his helmet thundered.

And down below, mere meters from the likely impact of debris to hull, Arvex had both hands wrapped in Na’to’s secure cord, feet braced and locked, every breath a growled echo of Na’to’s own.

The salarian splayed his hands. “Let go,” he said, calmer than he thought he’d be. His brain ran thousands of kilometers a second, no, a nanosecond. He knew what this looked like. What it’d end with.

That wing was going to do more damage than the already struggling structure could handle. The Scourge would tear through the rest. Somehow, miraculously, Na’to hadn’t floated right into the thicket rising like a terrifying black sun just past the warehouse hull breach—but no, he thought.

Not miraculously.

A krogan.

And it would kill them both.

“Let go,” he said again, louder. He wrapped the cord around his wrist, pulled. But his might was nothing compared to an angry krogan.

“Na’to,” Andria cried.

“The hell I will,” roared Arvex, yanking back with all his strength. “I said I’d keep your boots on deck and Nakmor keep our word.”

With nothing to brace against, no support, he had no way of stopping the thick-headed reptile-spawn from playing this through. Heroism, he reflected as everything drifted into one inexorable outcome. The heroism of krogan, of salarian. Of those who struggled to rebuild what was already lost.

The first sparks shot golden arcs across the hull as the giant mass of debris collided with the station. The secure rope Arvex wrapped around his arm grew thicker, the stars and sparks reflected in his tempered faceplate.

Na’to smiled. “Andria… Reg… Seal the outer antechamber. The hull will buckle at approximately fourteen points.”

“Damn it, no!”

Arvex hissed a long, hard sound as the hull cracked under his feet. Bent and rolled like metal shouldn’t. The nest of harmless-looking threads rose in Na’to’s field of vision. Tendrils brushed debris, sheared it through. Cast even more to scatter, to pepper the station.

He watched it come closer. “Krogan, unless you wish to join me, let go.”

Far too late. Far too little. The hull snapped back against the collision force and threw the krogan hard off the plating, breaking the magnetic seal holding him on. His shout was buried in the sudden chatter on comm lines, the rush of too much breath. Gasping. Yelling.

And the thought that consumed Na’to.

Just one.

“Tell them,” he said quietly as he careened away from the station. “Tell them the Scourge is aptly named.”

Poetic. To be named by a salarian and fit so well.

Whatever else he might have said, whatever other feedback he could have given as the first tendrils scraped past, it died in the sudden system failure of his electronics. The comm. The air regulators.

New tech. Old tech. It didn’t seem to matter.

The Scourge tore through it all.