Mass Effect: Andromeda — Nexus Uprising

CHAPTER ONE

Thawing from stasis was meant to take time. A gentle process. Warmth gradually applied to cells dormant for centuries, neurons carefully coaxed back into firing.

Synthetic fluids mixed with precise amounts of the sleeper’s blood, a ratio changing by the smallest of fractions over several days until, finally, the body crossed a threshold, becoming whole again. Vitals checked, and then, only then, would the final mixture of drugs be injected under expert supervision.

Or something like that. Sloane Kelly didn’t really remember the specifics. How much time, when the process was supposed to begin—these were things left up to the techs who built the stasis pods. They knew better.

At least they were supposed to.

Whatever the instructions had been, Sloane was damn sure that abruptly launching from deep stasis into six shades of hell wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

Alarms.

Lights.

Everything heaved. A deafening noise, an aggressive shriek like rending metal, assaulted her ears, physically squeezed her entire body.

She opened her eyes.

Disjointed wires cast sparks over the pod’s view-port, forcing her eyelids closed again as her spinning brain popped aftershocks across them. Everything crashed together in a disjointed cacophony of light and thunder and motion and adrenaline. The small pod whirled around her, momentum shifted side to nauseating side as she flattened both hands on the pane, elbowed out in reflex and hit solid metal.

Pain ricocheted up her arm and helped jerk her foggy brain back into alignment. Out. She needed out. Her pod was failing. Torn free of its moorings maybe, rolling around in the chamber. Had to be. The air stung her nose and lungs, the wrong mixture and far too warm. It stank of chemicals and old sweat.

She slammed a tingling foot against the front of the stasis pod.

“Failsafe,” she shouted into the cramped space, as if the word might crawl back in time and remind the engineers of this stupid metal coffin to include an eject latch.

As if on cue, a calm mechanized tone sounded, at odds with the world into which she’d awoken. The pane sealing her within protective transport unlocked with a hiss of air almost as loud as the klaxons that shrieked through the open seam. She felt the breath being sucked from her lungs, replaced by the cold bite and stale taste of the outside.

Then a new smell. Ash.

Double vision slowly gelled into horrifying truth: smoke. That was smoke pouring in from the outside. Fire flickered somewhere to her left.

Shit. It’s not just me. Which means—

Slam-dropped out of stasis meant the rest of her body needed time to remember how to function. Her brain couldn’t process it all. Every cell screamed to fight, to respond to the skull-rattling alarms of the Nexus under fire, but the adrenaline surge to her limbs only made her twitch violently as feeling came back into them.

Sloane gasped for breath, pounded at the viewport. Red lights flashed.

The Nexus is under attack. No other explanation made sense. The thought finally pushed through her overwhelmed mind. Served to focus her.

That was the only reason she’d be woken up in this manner from the centuries-spanning sleep the Nexus had been programmed to take. Or maybe it had only been a few years. Hell, it could have been hours. No way to know, not yet.

As head of security for thousands of pioneers, Security Director of the goddamn Nexus itself, she needed to pull herself together and find out.

Her body got the message. It just didn’t react very well to the command. Sloane fell out of the stasis pod before it had completely opened, her limbs a twitching mass of hypersensitive pins and needles. Her lungs expanded, took in air laced with sparks and smoke.

It seared all the way down.

Sloane coughed. Her eyes burned, streaming already from ash and the acrid sting of burning chemicals, but she didn’t have the time to waste choking on it. She staggered to her feet, forced her leaden body to move.

It may have felt claustrophobic in the small pod, but it was a thousand times worse out here. Half of the room remained hidden in shadow, dimly lit up by emergency lights that winked and flickered. Emergency lights aren’t supposed to do that.

Fire and smoke roiled amid shattered debris.

Sloane cursed, half staggering toward and half falling against the stasis chamber beside hers. The interior was miraculously clear, which left plenty of room for a hardened turian fist to pound against it in mirrored panic. Kandros, one of her best officers.

“Hang on!” Sloane shouted, her voice guttural from smoke. She slapped the viewing pane twice, and furious pounding from inside ceased. A muted voice barely broke through the barrier, but she got enough to catch the drift.

Hurry up.

Possibly with more profanity.

These pods were supposed to be opened by timer, not manually. At least not by her. Sloane didn’t have the first clue about how to operate this tech, but she didn’t have much choice here. The closest terminal lay somewhere beyond the shower of sparks, and based on the backlit wreckage, she didn’t think it’d be much help, anyhow.

She didn’t have her omni-tool, either. She’d stored it, as per procedure. Personal belongings weren’t supposed to be returned to their owners until revival had been certified and they’d been briefed by their supervisors.

“Damn it,” she hissed through clenched teeth. She pushed herself fully upright, casting around her for something, anything that would get this oversized coffin open.

The fires painted the chamber in hellish orange, black, and gold. Through the stinging smoke, silhouettes struggled—personnel caught inside pods and trying frantically to get out. Some of the pods had already cracked, but whether their occupants had survived, Sloane couldn’t tell.

Every second mattered.

Which meant screw the soft touch.

Sloane sprinted to a pile of bent metal bars and shattered bits of things she didn’t recognize. Soot and oily residue coated most of it, but some had been torn free by pure shearing force. Something big had hit them.

As sweat poured in rivulets down her face, she grabbed a heavy girder and dragged it back to the lifepod.

“Hang on,” she croaked again, jamming the shattered, sheared end under the opening seam. Somewhere behind her, someone screamed. Raw. Brutal. She flinched, even as she threw her weight against the improvised pry bar.

The metal groaned.

Hairline fissures spread like frost across the viewport, but it didn’t budge.

“Damn it, come on,” she snarled, curling her bare hands around the scarred metal and shoving with everything she had.

From inside the pod, three-fingered claw-tipped hands splayed against the dusted pane. Another unintelligible shout, but Sloane got the idea. Amazing, she reflected in a grimly amused little corner of her mind, what an emergency can do for language barriers.

“Now,” she shouted, for her own sake if nothing else. She threw everything against the bar just as the turian forced his weight up against the lid.

When the seal cracked, it did so suddenly, sending Sloane to her knees amid the debris and forcing the lid to crack in half. The broken end whirled out into the chaos as Kandros all but fell out of the pod and landed beside her in a clatter of narrow limbs. He gasped for breath, looking rattled but no worse than she felt, at least.

No real improvement, she’d bet.

“No time for celebration,” she said to him, her voice barely more than a croak. Sloane grabbed the edge of the broken pod and gestured with the bar. “Save who you can.” It was an order, flat and simple. Tenderness wasn’t her way. The security team knew that, were used to it.

Smoke whirled as Kandros managed, “Yes, ma’am,” and staggered to his feet. Like Sloane, all he had going for him was the Nexus uniform. Protective and comfortable for a centuries-long nap, but not much good against serious threats.

By unspoken agreement they took opposite sides.

Every step filled Sloane with more and more concern. Had they been attacked? Boarded? Had they even made it out of the galaxy?

Had Cerberus attacked them? Pirates?

And if so, what had happened to their Milky Way escort?

Desperate as that thought was, she had to put it aside for now.

She took her impromptu can-opener to every pod in sight, working them over with furious intensity. Metal groaned, accompanied by the gasps of surprise, of effort, the swearing and questions she couldn’t take the time to answer.

“Get ’em out first,” she told Talini, one of her more experienced officers. The asari stumbled away, swaying wildly on still-numb feet.

Save who you can.

It became a silent mantra, a thing Sloane said to herself with every face pulled from crackling wreckage. Beyond the small chamber, a larger one held civilians and other random staff. Whether or not it was safe, she couldn’t tell. Everything was chaos. Across the way, sparks rained down on the asari as she helped a hobbling human away from the worst, two personnel following. One nursed an arm bent at an unnatural angle.

Sloane couldn’t keep track of it all. Trusting her team, she focused on the pods she could reach. Fourteen stasis pods gave way under her efforts in as many minutes.

Only eight occupants crawled out.

She let the lid close on the mangled remains of Cillian, one of her own unit. Whatever had taken out the Nexus like this, it’d thrown a massive energy surge back into the systems. Burst wires and smoking, charred power converters were everywhere. Many of the stasis pods had fried the poor souls inside of them.

Fury jammed a pounding tic in Sloane’s jaw. Soot-smeared, hands blistered from searing metal; none of it even came close to the horror and rage welling inside her. She clambered over Cillian’s grim coffin to reach whoever else she could, choking on the unfairness—the fucking tragedy of it all.

There weren’t many left. Kandros passed her with a slumped human braced against his shoulder. A grim-faced salarian she didn’t recognize shepherded two terrified teenagers away from the chaos.

A group of frightened civilians huddled away from the billowing smoke, covering their mouths, noses and breathing orifices with whatever they could. Hands, arms. Strips of their uniforms.

Enough. She shifted focus, eyes scanning ruined walls obscured by smoke, looking for the switch she needed. Manual fire-suppression switch. She saw it, saw the occasional burst of sparks trickling out like water from behind the panel, but below it, in a cabinet she’d forgotten they’d put here, a fire extinguisher sat gleaming behind tinted glass.

Sloane rushed to it, kicked the glass hard only to remember, the hard way, that her usual protective boots weren’t part of the cryostasis uniform. Her toe exploded in pain even as the quick-shatter covering broke into a clattering mess on the floor.

Broken toes? At least one. Great. Just great. Sloane ignored the pain, wrenched the extinguisher free, and set to work.

A short blast to each flame. The compressed mixture roiled out and over the fires and sparks, and the room dimmed more and more each time, but that was okay. She could live with that. All around her people coughed, cried out. Someone screamed. Another crashed to hands and knees, vomiting.

Yet with each blast from the extinguisher, Sloane heard less pain. The sounds became those of worry, of people who could assist the ones who’d taken the worst of it. Each little shift in tone gave her that much more resolve.

Somehow, amid the groaning chaos of straining metal and crackling fire, they all convened in roughly the same place. Sloane tossed her spent extinguisher aside.

“Everybody stay together,” she ordered. She forced the malfunctioning doors open, shoving her shoulder against the creaking panel until it slid wide enough to let everyone through. When the last staggering survivor passed, she let the door slam closed behind her.

Sweat plastered her hair and uniform to her skin, soot made her eyes sting. Body aching, she slumped against the door. A quick catalog confirmed her injuries—broken, throbbing toe, minor burns, bruises and scrapes—but nothing that would impede her progress. Good. She shoved herself off and surveyed the antechamber. It was quieter, as if the hell on the other side of the door had been just a bad dream.

Beyond the next door lay the way out. And likely more danger.

As she took in the char-smeared, horrified faces around her, she realized less than half had made it. So many pods.

But there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing Sloane could do except get the survivors somewhere safe and lock this shit down.

They’d have to mourn later.

Kandros dragged the torn sleeve of his uniform under his chin, leaning on his improvised lifepod hacker. The metal bar had seen better days. So had the turian. “So,” he said, pitching his voice over the shrill alarms. “What happened?”

The group looked at each other, then at Sloane.

She wished she had answers.

“Don’t know,” she said, but that wouldn’t fix anything, so she jerked a thumb toward the exit. “Let’s find the hell out.”

“Yeah.” The turian pulled the bar up onto his shoulder. “I figured you’d say that.”