This was the primary reason he’d left his omni-tool in the antechamber. Its incessant communications were usually welcome—Tann preferred to be informed over the alternative—but not when he needed the space to think.
Much had happened in a week. The Nexus was stable now, and the Scourge seemed, after the last brush with whatever spreading tendril, to be a phenomenon they’d passed through and left in their wake. No one would really know until sensors were repaired; a project that had met with delays and a borderline farcical amount of calamity.
Sensors, sensors, Tann thought. They may all be floating blind, but the shuttles in the Colonial Affairs hangar surely should have some capability in this regard. Perhaps Addison was right. Perhaps a few should be launched, if only to give us readings from our immediate vicinity.
It might even be that they could make contact with the Pathfinders, and solicit help. Yes, he thought, about-facing to pace a new path. The Pathfinders. Certainly they could—
No, no, a terrible idea. He stopped that line of thought. Each and every one of those shuttles would be needed if another system failed, or worse, if the Nexus hit another vein of this mysterious Scourge. Evacuation would require every last square centimeter of space they offered, thanks to the large population now awake.
They represented less than a fifth of the overall total personnel, of course, but everyone remained confined to a fraction of the Nexus’s total living space, too. Most of the station, like most of her crew, remained frozen.
Everything, in his view, hinged on the matter of population. Each crew member who woke became a “bag of needs,” as he’d heard a turian describe them. Easy for them to say, of course, with their highly unique dependency on dextro-amino acids. Human, krogan, asari and salarian personnel had to worry about four times the emergency supplies.
Then again, he supposed the overall stock for turian biology was less, too.
A bag of needs, eh? Each member a mouth to feed, an air-breather, a mind that had opinions on the wisdom of their interim leader’s decisions.
Weight. And a lot of it.
He’d known that this population surge would stabilize the Nexus. He also knew that, once awake, few if any of the crew would entertain the idea of returning to sleep. They saw revival from stasis as like being born again. A kind of metaphysical hatching.
Every possible outcome played out in his mind, save for the positive ones. If everything went well, he’d be right there with the others, raising a toast to all the hard work and team effort that had saved the mission. He doubted anyone would lift a glass and praise all the thought and planning, but that was an acceptable loss. He was used to that.
And yet there were the problem scenarios to consider. They were legion, to put it mildly. It all came back to supplies. Mouths to feed, thirsts to quench, waste products of which to dispose. Life was many things, but chief among its traits was its incredible efficiency at turning food into feces, and that simple process lay at the core of all his concerns.
Supplies. They would dwindle far too quickly for comfort.
He’d already predicted the first reports of theft. A simple question asked in a hallway about where a crate had been placed. “I thought I’d left it there,” met with “I didn’t see it, are you sure?”
Somewhere, out there, in this vast yet tiny corner of the Nexus, were the clever ones. Those who also saw the potential problems looming, and consciously or not, they’d begun to plan.
This wasn’t necessarily malicious behavior, Tann understood, but merely a survival instinct. When one foresees trouble on the horizon, one prepares.
So what to do?
He paced and paced, aware dimly that his omni-tool languished beyond the lab, chirping away for his attention. Spender, no doubt, or perhaps Addison. They sought his opinions, and relayed news.
Sloane Kelly and Nakmor Kesh, on the other hand, had yet to fully admit to his position as director, even after the discovery of Garson’s body. He always had to seek them out when the situation required. Always had to be the one to ask.
But he accepted this, as well. Early days, these were.
Kelly was slowly extracting herself from the emergency-responder mindset. Kesh, well. She was krogan, wasn’t she? She would operate in ways ceded by her genetic predisposition for violence and aggression. This was what krogan did.
This was why he did not argue when Sloane Kelly demanded more of her security team be awakened.
More mouths to feed, certainly, but there were no krogan among them. When push came to shove—and it always did with the violent species—he could count on Sloane’s security team to put down the trouble.
For that, he required Sloane Kelly’s trust. Or at least her effort.
For better or worse, he viewed the leadership arrangement as a triumvirate. Him, Addison, Sloane. If he began to make unilateral decisions now, he had no doubt they would find a way to remove him from his place here and doubted anyone would argue. They would begin to make decisions based on their own myopic view of things. Problematic, and he felt sure Jien Garson understood that.
Almost certainly, this was why his name had come up. A level head, a broad perspective. They needed him, and yet he needed them.
So be it.
Addison often adopted the role, reluctantly, of tiebreaker. It was the “reluctantly” part of that equation that troubled Tann. She was taking this disaster worse than the others. She wandered, said the bare minimum, with a curtness that rivaled Sloane’s on a good day. In the rare cases where the leadership met to discuss something, she let the conversation be led, following whomever she felt was the closest to the right call, but with no enthusiasm.
There had been a spark, briefly, when she’d advocated for exploring the nearby worlds, perhaps finding an alternative location for the mission of the Nexus if the station itself could not support it. He could have done more to nurture that, he thought now, but instead he’d sided with Sloane.
The mission came first, and the shuttles were needed here.
But perhaps he’d failed to consider the full ramifications of that moment. He could have ceded that argument, and in return won a more reliable ally. Instead, the moment had left the erstwhile Colonial Affairs Director feeling as if her entire purpose for being on this ship had been relegated to “if we ever get around to it.”
Problematic. Very problematic.
It seemed to have the unforeseen consequence of tapping Addison’s motivation. Her deciding votes had become essentially random and that, in turn, made all of Tann’s thoughtful deliberation rather a waste of time. Which meant—
A pause. A stop, mid-step, as the idea unfurled like a Sur’Kesh nightbloom. “Ah!”
Aborting his pacing path, he turned toward the door, strode for it. He knew exactly what to do.
In the hall he picked up his omni-tool from the floor and fixed it to his wrist. There were several messages from William Spender—status updates on various recovery efforts. Tann had not asked for them, but appreciated them all the same.
Spender, it seemed, had also failed to unravel Addison’s sour mood. Instead of waiting for improvement, he’d taken it upon himself to find other ways to help. Initiative like that should not be discouraged. Tann would use what was made available to him.
Later. For now, he ignored the messages.
Grateful for the combined efforts of his prior genius and the systems technicians who had strengthened the signal, he took the opportunity to contact Sloane on single point-to-point communications.