Mass Effect: Andromeda — Nexus Uprising

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

All the fire drained out of their hundreds the moment their leader fell. Even if they hadn’t stopped fighting, even if they’d pushed harder, desperate to the end, it wouldn’t matter. Calix was the heart of them. And the opponent, well, few could be more terrifying.

Hope had turned to fear, and that fear had fueled a revolution they thought they couldn’t lose. Sloane recognized that. She understood it. Felt the twist in her chest when Calix’s brain and blood had sprayed.

That didn’t mean she was going to be anyone’s punching bag.

Lawrence Nnebron was a man on the edge—wiry, angry, and unwilling to let anything go. The moment Sloane entered the crowded cell, he came at her like a man with nothing left to lose, his lips peeled back in a twisted snarl and murder in his eyes.

As she sidestepped his swing, caught his wrist and spun him around, that look turned to something much younger. Much less sure.

Soul-deep loss. Of friends. Of self.

Of his place in the universe.

The paneling clanged loudly as she rammed him against it, pinning his head to the wall and tucking his wrist high enough up his back that he’d regret moving. He cried out, echoed by the other seven rebels in the cell. Just one cell of many, and all down the hall Sloane heard the arguments, the blame, and the anguish of loss.

“Stay put,” Sloane demanded.

Talini watched from the door, one hand hovering. “Will you be okay?”

As long as the sergeant was there, the others probably wouldn’t attack—but they wouldn’t talk, either. Never mind that Talini wasn’t there to help Sloane at all. She was there to lock her supervisor up for mutiny.

Ironic as hell, isn’t it?

Still, the fact she waited long enough to watch Sloane’s back meant something. Sloane shot her a grim smile, intended as thanks, and a silent acknowledgement of everything she couldn’t say.

The asari didn’t smile back. With a hard set to her mouth, she turned around and shut the cell door behind her.

For a long moment, the only sounds in the crowded room were Nnebron’s labored breathing and the shuffling of people who couldn’t figure out what the next step would be. They were tired, bruised, bleeding where the hasty bandages hadn’t held. Like Sloane, they were hurt.

Unlike her, they didn’t have the sheer pride that kept them from showing it. Sloane let out a short sigh.

“Let’s get this over with. I’m not here to fight.”

Nnebron jerked, but his arm strained and he froze again.

“Then get off me,” he snarled.

“Not until you settle down.”

“Fuck you,” he gritted out. “Pig!”

Quaint. Sloane kept a wary eye on the indistinct shapes just in her peripheral, but they seemed content to hover. Without a strong leader, they’d lost their direction.

Without Calix, they’d lost their heart.

She was careful not to push the engineer’s arm any farther, not wanting to break it, but she didn’t let up, either.

“I’m not here as security,” she said tightly. “I’m in trouble just like you. Just like all of you,” she added, turning her head to nod at the others. At the flurry of suspicion and disbelief sent her way, she turned one way, then the other, so that they could see her sides. “Here for the same reasons you are. Calix believed in you. Will you let that go to waste?”

Sweat beaded her captive’s brow. His eyes screwed shut and he tugged at her grip, only to groan in mingled pain and anger when she didn’t ease up on his arm.

“Come on, Nnebron.” She spoke to them all. “You guys took up arms against an injustice and your side lost. There’s no getting out of that, for any of us.”

“But—”

“I helped as best I could to save your lives from the krogan,” Sloane cut in quietly. A knife’s edge. “I couldn’t save Calix, and for that I’m sorry. I really am. But he’s gone now, and you’re alive. I want to make sure you stay that way, you get me?”

“What about the rest of our crew?” For a man at a disadvantage, Nnebron managed fierce and determined admirably well. Sloane admired that much, at least. “What about Reg? He died. Ulrich, Calix…” He visibly flailed. “Reg’s husband is still out there, we can’t—”

“These are the choices we made.” Anger lifted her voice. Dragged audible claws through the crowd, and a grunt of surprise from Nnebron. “Get this through your head! I can’t do much for anyone else while locked in here, does this make fucking sense to you? We have to play the system now. Any opportunity out of this cell will be an opportunity to make new choices.”

Sloane had done nothing but trust the system since the moment the Scourge caused her crash-wake. She’d done her duty, followed the Initiative’s protocols. Tried to do right by everyone. And this is what it had gotten her.

Locked up and out of options. Even her fellow captives saw her as the enemy.

No more.

“Those who were too injured to be locked up here are under surveillance in the med-lab. Where they will get the care they need,” she added firmly. She had Talini’s promise on that. “Right now, what we have is us. You and me, Nnebron. The people in these cells. That is it. So what are you going to do?”

His wrist flexed in her hand, as if he intended to make a break for it, but when she braced, he didn’t move. He just scowled.

Maybe he got it. Time to find out. Taking a gamble, she eased her grip. Drew away just enough that he could peel himself off the wall, but she held onto his wrist. Pointedly.

“I’m not above kicking your ass until you drop,” she said flatly, “but I don’t want to. It’d defeat the point.”

The kid snatched his arm away, but only rolled his strained shoulder and glared at her feet. Sheepish, maybe. Or embarrassed.

Or just… lost.

Sloane backed away to give him space, but there wasn’t much room to go. She settled for leaving her back against the door, where she could watch the kid and the others. All of them looked anywhere but at her. Most at the ground.

The tension in the air wasn’t tight so much as it was heavy—a deeply rooted sense of despair. They’d given up. All of them, even scrappy Nnebron with his last flail for something that felt like victory.

Shit.

Sloane wanted to turn around and punch the door. Wanted to yell at the people who’d made the decisions that led them here. Waking Morda, that had been the worst of them all. The nuclear option when the opponent had only sticks. She wanted to wrap her hands around Tann’s skinny little pencil-neck and squeeze until he felt all the pain the krogan and her warriors had caused in that goddamned room.

Mostly, she wanted to stop replaying Calix’s death, the way his eyes widened, life abruptly snuffed out behind them.

She wanted a lot of things. What she had was the remains of a ragtag crew and the certainty, the bitter knowledge, that the leadership she’d worked for, advised, had betrayed her. Betrayed them all. She needed to make inroads somewhere. Calix had believed in this group.

Now Sloane needed them to believe in her. Like it or not.

She started from a footing she understood. “Here’s how it works. Contrary to popular rumor, there is no way that anyone will be okay with spacing us.” She regretted the time she had suggested exactly that. A moment of pure frustration, and the desire to actually solve one of the Nexus’s problems rather than kick it down the road. Now they were the problem. “At worst, they’ll want to make examples of us through some kind of public circus.”

A woman wrapped her singed arms around her waist, hugging herself with rounded shoulders. “Will we be executed?”

“No.” The woman flinched. Sloane gritted her teeth. “No,” she said again, firm but with less bite. She forced herself to remember who these people were. Technicians, engineers, laborers. Hard working and tough as nails, but not fighters. Seen combat, sure, of the worst possible kind. But they weren’t trained soldiers, not as far as she knew. Sloane wondered briefly how many of them were of the sort that left behind checkered pasts. Secrets left back home, scrubbed from official records. And then there were the sympathizers. Last-minute converts she knew next to nothing about. She set that aside for another time. “This mission is too precious for us to lose more lives. Even they know that. But there will be consequences. The question is, are you willing to deal with them?”

Feet shuffled. Eyes shifted.

Nnebron lifted his chin. “Are you?” he asked, a challenge in his stare. Accusation flickering somewhere behind. Just like before. You aren’t one of us.

Maybe that was true. Once. Sloane clasped her hands behind her back, met his gaze with unflinching resolve. “What do you want to hear, engineer? That nobody’ll care that you and yours sparked a mutiny that killed dozens of Nexus citizens and crew?” The kid grimaced. “That you’ll get off with a slap on the wrist and a wag of the finger? What about Reg’s husband?”

That one earned a full-on flinch.

She drove it home. “You want to assume he’ll just pat you on the back and say you tried your best?”

When he blinked rapidly, she took it as a win.

She shook her head once. “Won’t happen. There will be consequences, and if you want to have any sort of life in this galaxy, you’re going to have to grit your teeth and deal with them. Starting now.”

“What about the krogan?” somebody asked.

Nnebron’s eyes sparked with renewed fury. “Yeah, what about them?” he demanded. “They didn’t even stop to negotiate, they just started killing!”

Sloane had no answer. It was true—they’d done just that. Ordered or not, it was a perfect example of just how much a “workforce” could stand in for an army. Especially a krogan workforce. To admit they’d been deliberately unleashed felt like a perfect way to get these people back on the mutiny train.

She knew exactly what Tann had hoped to accomplish by releasing Morda. The fact any of them were still alive was a fucking miracle. Surrender or no. But he’d failed at killing them off. Now he had to deal with them.

Another shake of her head drew Nnebron’s heavy eyebrows together. “The krogan put down an insurgency,” Sloane said. No salt. Just candor. It was all she had. “They won’t be reprimanded. They’ll be praised. Like it or not,” she continued while the rest shuffled and muttered, “the mutiny failed.”

He didn’t answer right away. Others threw out thoughts, suggestions, but it didn’t matter. Without Calix, they didn’t have a singular goal. An end point for which to strive. They’d stormed the barricade, and got brutalized for their efforts.

She was all that stood between them and Tann’s twisted sense of logic.

The decision was made. She read it in the slump of Nnebron’s shoulders. The hang of his head.

“Fine,” he muttered.

On that word, the others went still. Slowly, painfully, Sloane watched them try to come to grips with the universe they hadn’t expected. The one where they’d lost. No caring leadership. No fair shake. Just consequences and shame.

Sloane nodded. “Fine,” she repeated.

It was all they had.

In the end, it was all she had, too.