Now all she could see and smell was char. Ruin.
We go to paint our masterpiece.
If anyone could get things back on track, it was Garson.
“Oh, no…” Addison’s voice. Breathless from strain—or concussion—and shattered down to a whisper. She froze mid-step, a hand to her mouth.
Sloane tore her thoughts away from the ephemeral threads of the future, automatically reaching out an arm to steady the woman. But it wasn’t needed. Addison stood on her own fine, but her eyes bulged, shock or horror or something worse.
“The door…”
Two tiny words, and somehow, Sloane just knew.
Hope wouldn’t cut it.
The reinforced door Addison stared at hung ajar from its mooring, which should have been impossible, given the mechanics of it. As if something had sheared right through it, pushing the metal paneling outward in a jagged bloom.
By habit, Sloane reached for her weapon—a firearm she didn’t have. Damn. Old habits didn’t help when everything else had gone to hell.
Squaring her shoulders, Sloane approached the door—what was left of it, anyway. Addison followed close behind her, and as darkness gave way to eerie light, they both sucked in a ragged breath.
Sloane’s came out on a low, “Holy mother of—”
This time, Addison did sway.
Sloane’s instinct was to jerk back, to hold her breath, every last bit of her exposed skin prickling in bone-deep fear. Part of Operation’s vast front wall, and the hull plating beyond, had sheared away, replaced at some point with a translucent inflatable bulkhead by automatic emergency systems. It looked, at first glance, as if there was no wall at all, but worse was what lay beyond. Outside.
Against the cold spray of stars, twisting tendrils of black and ash-gray splayed wide, curled and drifting threads flecked with orange and yellow light. A bizarre anti-nebula that unfurled like a frayed ribbon stretching into the distance, like synaptic pathways spreading in eerily visceral threads.
“What is that?” Addison whispered.
Sloane had to force her brain into gear, to unfreeze her limbs. They weren’t going to float off into space. They wouldn’t suffocate.
Even better, perhaps, was the fact that the Nexus’s emergency protocols had worked. The barrier had saved Operations.
Or… tried.
“I… don’t know,” was all Sloane could say. She’d never seen anything like it. Beyond the bulkhead, the ephemeral strands of whatever seemed to float in the void of space like something separate from it. There, but not in it. Like… Her mind flailed for the right thought.
“Like tangled hair in a swimming pool,” she said aloud.
“Gross,” Addison murmured.
Sloane agreed. But even so, she visually traced a long tendril, captivated in some small way by the points of orange and yellow winking within it.
Until it ended, lost in the blank canvas of space.
Or hidden by the sudden rotation of a hunk of metal, drifting into view.
Sloane’s eyes widened. “Is that…?”
“Part of the Nexus,” Addison confirmed, breathless. She raised a hand to her mouth. “But how?”
Question of a lifetime.
If she’d meant to say more, it died on an abrupt sound of distress. “Oh. Oh, no.” Addison took a step forward, limbs stiff. “No, no…” She wasn’t looking at the same incredible view anymore. Sloane’s focus shifted from the dark, nebulous ribbons, the hunk of pocked and cold metal, and instead to the room.
Bodies.
A half-dozen, at least, just inside the room. More amid the overturned desks and furniture that littered the space beyond.
The Nexus’s senior leadership.
“Oh, fuck,” Sloane whispered. She scanned those nearby, hoping against hope that none was Jien Garson. But they were too far away to recognize. Too battered to readily find out.
The closest had an asari’s fringe. Nuara. The last time Sloane had seen her, she’d hugged Garson in farewell. Laid in her pod like it really was just a nap and they’d all be happy and free and get to work upon waking.
Not even close.
She’d crumpled against the shorn edge of the outer hull, just this side of the emergency bulkhead, but it wasn’t enough. Based on placement, on the fact there were no bodies floating just beyond the seal, Sloane could guess what had happened.
The Matriarch had shielded the room as best she could until the emergency bulkhead could deploy. It wouldn’t seal in the air, and in the end, it hadn’t worked. But she’d tried to hold it off, to keep the staff on the right side of the bulkhead.
The bloody damage told Sloane a torn hull had not been the worst problem on the bridge.
Fires. Chaos. Emergency efforts. Nothing had saved them.
“Shit,” Sloane whispered.
Addison took a deep breath. Visually forcing herself into gear. “There’s nothing we can do for them.” She turned from the view and moved to search the room, gingerly stepping over debris. Outstretched hands. People, shipmates, charred and broken.
Sloane knew, grudgingly, that she had the right idea. If there were survivors, they’d be deeper inside.
She turned her attention to the part of the huge room that hadn’t been torn away, her heart already sinking. The spacious chamber, perhaps the grandest of all those inside the station, was barely recognizable.
A giant viewscreen suspended from the ceiling had split in half, falling on a series of control consoles that ringed the forward-facing portion of the chamber. The consoles, smashed and dark, were beyond repair, but it was the chairs on which Sloane focused. They were crushed. Utterly flattened. Debris littered the floor. A grand, sweeping stairwell that led up to an observation deck above them had collapsed. Or maybe it had been smashed by something falling. No way to tell. All of it had been jumbled, shaken, and thrown about many times.
It was too much to process. Sloane moved without thinking, to the nearest hunk of debris. A section of railing from the deck above, twisted and splayed across a bench. She lifted the broken mass and heaved it aside, then dropped to her hands and knees and looked under the bench. Dead eyes stared back at her. A dark-skinned man, mouth hanging open in a silenced scream. Marnell Phelps, senior bridge technician, Sloane recalled. A good man. Dried blood traced a line from the corner of his mouth to a small pool on the floor. His eyes were glassy and still.
“Jien?” Addison called out. She began walking around the room, repeating her call, a little more fear in her voice with each cry. “Jien!”
Sloane threw a smashed chair aside. Pushed a desk upright, ignoring the pain as a broken viewscreen fell and landed on the toes of her uninjured foot. At least the pain, she noted as she swore, wasn’t nearly so bad as breaking it. “Just fucking great,” she hissed on the end of her diatribe, making a note to find more medi-gel.
But when she peered over the desk, another body lay behind it, dampening all else.
“Found someone,” she called. “A human.” Unrecognizable at first glance. The body had been brutally crushed. Sloane checked the name on the left breast of the uniform. Bloodstained, but legible. “Parker,” she added, looking up.
Addison had stopped her efforts, waiting. Now her eyes fell closed. “Miles Parker, Assistant Director of Hydroponics.”
With care, Sloane laid aside the heavy desk that had crushed the poor man. Thinking about his terrible fate twisted her gut, but it was the mention of hydroponics that hit her like a mallet. If the seed vault had been breached…