Mass Effect: Andromeda — Nexus Uprising

CHAPTER FOUR

“Search party,” Sloane said. “We need to find Garson and any other survivors.”

Addison shook her head, though reluctantly. “Succession protocol. We have to assume the worst. If she’s gone…” she trailed off, her eyes settling on the temporary seal around the front half of the room.

“She could have just gone to take a leak,” Sloane said. “You did.”

Addison did not take the bait. Not this time. But it did seem to gall her into squaring up. She leveled her gaze on Sloane. “She’s missing. There are clear procedures—”

“Fuck that,” Sloane snapped, “we aren’t—” She caught herself. Checked her anger. “Look, I appreciate… Addison, no offense but we should—”

A harsh, grating sound caused Sloane’s words to die in her mouth. The noise repeated, and her first thought was that the field holding in their air was beginning to fail. She stepped back, Addison matching her twice over.

The sound came again, this time louder. Not from the barrier, she realized with relief, but the far door.

Sloane’s hand went to her hip again, grasping for that pistol that still wasn’t there. She swore, crouched slightly and pivoted, ready to run or engage depending on who or what came through.

Two hands curled short, thick fingers around the door, now half-open, and heaved it the rest of the way wide. A figure ducked through, reptilian, with broad head, bulky shoulders and wide-set eyes.

A krogan. A female krogan, with a frown so deep you could hide beneath it. A frown Sloane knew well.

She rose from her crouch, stepped forward and couldn’t hide a half-grin of sheer relief.

“Kesh. Damn it’s good to see you.” And she meant it. The sight of the superintendent gave Sloane the second glimmer of hope she’d had since waking. Nakmor Kesh knew the guts of the Nexus better than anyone else aboard, having overseen its construction. If Jien Garson was the leader of the Nexus, Kesh was the steward.

The krogan strode forward, her head swooping from one side to the other. “Director Kelly, I’d say the feeling is mutual,” she gestured to all the damage and dead, “but after all this, it’s good to see anyone at all still breathing. Where’s Jien Garson?”

“The question of the hour,” Sloane admitted.

“One of many,” Addison said, stepping forward. “Jien is missing.”

Sloane gave the krogan engineer a recap of everything that had happened. As she spoke, several other lower-level crew members wandered into Ops in the krogan’s wake. Dazed and nursing wounds, they looked like the walking dead. But they were able bodies, all of them, and Initiative pioneers. Sloane could see the glimmer in their eyes, despite everything. That spirit of wanting to help. The undying fire of survival. “We need to organize a search party,” she added for the benefit of the newcomers.

“More importantly,” Addison began, but Kesh was already nodding.

“Right now, we need to save whom we can,” the krogan said, cutting off the other woman. Not rudely, Sloane noted. Not really. Just firm. That was Kesh, though. Rational, for her kind, and dedicated.

Addison took note. “I’ll take this,” she said, shaking her head. “See what we can do. Maybe the two of you can figure out what happened.” She moved off without waiting for a reply.

Sloane watched her organize the stragglers into pairs. “She’s kind of a people person, isn’t she?”

“When allowed,” Kesh said, turning away. “Might I ask what Addison felt was more important than a search?”

“Succession protocol.”

“Ah.” Kesh looked back again, that frown carving deeper lines in. The search pairs moved off into the dark corners of the room, picking through debris with trepidation. So much death, Sloane couldn’t blame them.

“Hey, Addison?”

The woman looked up.

Sloane’s frown, crooked and grim, telegraphed more than just words. “Keep a list of who—” She paused, then managed carefully, “of the names here.”

Addison nodded, just as grim, and turned back to the grisly task.

Sloane shifted closer to the krogan woman. “We’re in a lot of trouble here, aren’t we?” Sloane asked, loud enough for only Kesh to hear.

She met Sloane’s gaze with a directness only a krogan could levy. “Welcome to Andromeda,” she muttered in graveled quiet. “The other side, indeed.” Kesh dusted off her hands as if she’d just finished diagnosing a coolant overflow. “I’d rather know facts. Do any of these terminals work?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Sloane admitted, feeling suddenly useless. A security officer in the midst of an engineering nightmare.

“Fine.” She rolled her wide shoulders. “Let’s see if we can fix one.”

She began to move through the room, a strange echo of Addison’s search party’s movements, ignoring the biological casualties as she poked and prodded at the mechanical ones. Sloane helped her for a time, but in truth was only slowing the krogan down. After a while, she left Kesh to it and joined Addison near the spot where the commander of the Nexus would normally sit, overseeing the vast station with a cup of tea in one hand.

The grand commander’s chair was overturned, pushed back several meters from its dais, the corners of its fabric charred away.

“Any sign of Garson?” Sloane asked, though she could see the answer written plain across Addison’s face. “Any survivors at all?”

The woman shook her head, too numb to even speak. She sniffed hard, ran the back of her hand across one eye, and blinked. Tears or dust, and Sloane would bet the woman would claim the latter. She didn’t ask.

Addison held out a datapad for Sloane to view. Names had been hastily entered into its flickering screen. “That’s everyone who woke for the arrival ceremony.”

Sloane’s mouth dropped open. It required a force of will to clap shut. She swallowed. Only two names were not crossed off: Addison’s, and Jien Garson.

“I feel so damned useless,” Addison said, voice far away. She wasn’t looking at Sloane anymore. Or the bodies. Sloane couldn’t tell for sure, but the woman had the thousand-light-year stare of somebody about to roll headlong into emotional shut-down.

Sloane clapped her on the shoulder, earning a jarred breath and snapped-back attention. “Don’t sweat it. There’s plenty to do. We need to find somewhere to store the bodies. Help me—”

“I mean here,” Addison cut in, emphatic. She laughed, dry and ironic. “In Andromeda. Director of Colonial Affairs. What a joke. We’ll be lucky if we can colonize the room next door.”

“Hey,” Sloane said, frowning. “That’s enough.”

“What, you’re going to tell me everything will be okay? That this is just a setback? Look around you. There’s no recovering from this. It’s over. Without Jien, without our leaders—”

“This one,” Kesh barked from across the room. She was kneeling in front of a terminal with a cracked screen and more than a few signs of charring, but otherwise the device looked intact. “I think.” Another pause. She squinted. “Maybe.”

Hell, Sloane would take a maybe at this point, gladly. She patted Addison on the same shoulder, the way she would any of her own. “We’ll discuss it later, but I wasn’t going to spew some bullshit happy-gas, okay? I was going to say that you can still help.”

“How?”

“How were you planning to colonize the worlds around us?”

“That’s the arks’ job. But we have shuttles. We—”

“Ships, exactly, and if we need to evacuate the Nexus…” she trailed off as comprehension dawned in Addison’s eyes. She knew those ships, their capabilities, their capacities, better than anyone.

“Come on, let’s see what Kesh found.”

The woman nodded, followed her back across the room. At least she seemed more focused now.

With a series of impatient grunts and snarls of frustration, the krogan performed surgery on the innards of the one computer that wasn’t totally destroyed. For all her bravado, Sloane stood aside and just watched. Numbness spread like ice through her core, overwhelmed by the extent of the disaster.

Yet if all she could do was keep the others on task, it was something, right?

There was a pop, a shower of sparks. Kesh swore.

Another failure. Another thing to fix.

“Would it help if I punched it?” Sloane asked bitterly.

Kesh glanced at her, a flat stare that had even Addison flinching. Then, wordlessly, the krogan balled one large hand and popped the terminal sharp and hard.

The screen flickered to life. Information began to pour across the surface.

“The hell that worked,” Sloane said doubtfully.

The krogan grinned, and smacked her on the shoulder. “Let’s see what we can find out!” Everyone huddled around as Nakmor Kesh manipulated the screens, impatiently shoving obvious alerts aside. “Hmm.”

“What is it?” Addison asked.

“Won’t let me in.”

“Do you know how to use it?”

Kesh made a deep, annoyed grunt. She did not turn from the screen. “Emergency protocols are in full effect.” Now the krogan did swing her massive head around, turning to face Addison and Sloane. “That requires Garson to acknowledge and clear, and that has not happened.”

“She’s missing,” Addison said, defensively.

“The system doesn’t know that.”

“What are you getting at, Kesh?” Sloane asked.

The krogan gestured at the display. When she spoke next it was as if she was quoting from the procedures manual, which Sloane guessed was exactly the case.

“In the event of station-wide emergency, if the commander does not acknowledge this state within a certain time period, a lockdown is initiated until the appropriate individual, as identified by preprogrammed succession protocols, can be summoned to stand in their place.”

“Okay,” Sloane said. “That’s Addison then, isn’t it? Let her do it.”

“Possibly.” Kesh studied the panel. “But the procedure is very specific. We need to go down the list, marking off those… incapable… of filling in until Garson is located.”

Addison passed her datapad over, a bit reluctantly Sloane thought. They waited as Kesh manipulated the interface, striking six names in rapid succession from the chain-of-command list. Well before Addison’s name was reached, however, the protocol produced a listing that wasn’t on the datapad, or part of the arrival ceremony group.

Addison squinted at the display. “Wait.” She pointed at the text. “Who the hell is Jarun Tann?”

“Jarun Tann,” the salarian said. “Deputy director of revenue management.”

“Perfect,” Sloane muttered, shaking her head. “Just fucking perfect.”

The chamber which housed his stasis pod had seen only minimal damage in the “event,” as Addison had taken to calling the disaster. Tann, along with everyone else in here, had remained asleep, and woke now only because Kesh had the maintenance override in her repertoire of tech miracles. The only one, it turned out, who did. At least still alive and accounted for.

The salarian had sat right up, almost chipper, probably assuming this was the expected revival from the long sleep and that he could get to work counting beans or whatever the hell it was his job was supposed to entail.

At Sloane’s tone his expression changed. He studied her, then Addison, and then Nakmor Kesh. The sight of the krogan looming over him made the salarian recoil involuntarily. “What’s going on here? You’re not the revival team.”

“I’m Sloane Kelly, security director.”

“We’re under attack?”

She shook her head. “There’s been a terrible accident. The station is in trouble. Which is why we’ve woken…” she could barely say the words without emitting a terrible bewildered laugh. Deep breath, deep breath. She steadied herself. “Which is why we woke you.”

“An accident? Related to revenue?” His eyes drifted in Kesh’s direction and then whipped back to Sloane. The tax wonk squirmed in his stasis pod. “If this is some kind of prank—”

“No prank,” Sloane said. “I wish it was, believe me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Addison let out a long sigh. “At the moment, you’re the most senior crew member present and accounted for.”

Silence descended among them. Tann stared at her.

Addison’s smile was brittle. “According to emergency command protocol, the Nexus is yours.”

That sunk in. “What?!”

The word hadn’t even finished echoing before Kesh said slowly, “Until, that is, we locate Jien Garson.”

A tricky situation made slippery. Jarun Tann was an unknown, a newcomer to the leadership gathered, and as acting director, they knew nothing about him. To have a salarian and a krogan in close proximity…

Sloane did not miss the thick note of menace in the krogan’s voice.

Neither, she noted as Tann’s already large eyes got larger, did he.