That’s it. I can’t listen to any more of this. Even worded well, Sloane doubted many would take Tann up on his request. Delivered like this, though, he’d be ignored at best and ridiculed at worst. Already Sloane could hear snickering from a few places across the room. She grabbed a bottle of something from their “rapidly depleting reserves” and took the straightest path she could to her room.
Showered, meds kicking in, she slipped on a cleanish uniform and pulled the omni-tool onto her forearm. Sloane had checked out and checked out hard last night, drank until she thought she’d drowned the horrifyingly awkward moment she’d witnessed.
It had only sort of worked. Now, as sixteen messages lit up her screen, she could only imagine what she’d missed.
She ignored them all and tapped in a link request to Tann. Might as well get this over with. She wondered how many had spotted the island of logic hiding in his ocean of poorly chosen words.
“Good morning,” Tann said, his voice telling her everything.
Sloane asked anyway. “That bad, huh?”
“That bad.”
“How many volunteers?”
A second of silence. “None.”
“None?”
“As you predicted, no one volunteered to return to stasis. None whatsoever.”
“Damn.”
“Well, there was one.”
“Oh?”
“She claimed to have selected the option in error, and changed it.”
Sloane could think of nothing to say.
“Go ahead and gloat,” Tann said.
“No, no,” Sloane replied. “Not going to do that. I had a feeling this would be the result, but I’m not going to hold your feet to the fire. Next time, though, you might want to get some help on your speech. That was… not great.” She took her first sip of coffee.
“Spender wrote it.”
Sloane spat out her first sip of coffee. “You’re joking.”
“Not at all. I thought it was fine.”
“Tann, that speech was… I think the technical term is ‘a turd sandwich.’ Seriously, put Spender out the airlock for that one, and then follow him out for not realizing it yourself.”
His eyes went wide. “I hardly think such a punishment—”
“I’m joking, Tann. But—gah, never mind. Next time let Addison give the speech, okay?”
“The crew seems to listen to you.”
“Yeah but I have to buy into an idea before I go asking others to swallow it.”
The salarian let out a frustrated sigh. “Well, we’re right back to where we started.”
“No,” Sloane corrected, “we’re worse than that. You’ve planted the seed now, the ‘supplies are running out’ seed.”
“Yes. Well, about that,” he said. “We need to draw up a plan for rationing.”
“That we do.”
“Are you available now?”
Sloane glanced at the clock, then felt the pang from her stomach. “Let me find breakfast first.”
A big meal, she decided. As much as she could stomach, before the belt had to be tightened.
And then she’d crack some skulls, if needed, yell some obscenities, if confronted, and all around wait for the station to explode.
Or maybe everyone would just cope.
Nah. She still didn’t feel that lucky.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sloane had been right, Addison mused. They’d gotten lucky, at first. Perhaps that’s why the security director volunteered to join Kesh’s team on their mission to clear a path to the nearest ark docking bay. Once there, they hoped to locate a backup set of sensor interfaces—one that could be brought online.
Addison couldn’t really blame her. Sloane had waited a day, to make sure there was no violence in the wake of the announcement, then left a competent team behind. She gave the security director that much credit. Had there been any backlash, Addison had no doubt Sloane would have stayed.
Really, things weren’t so bad. Some harsh words and a half-hearted punch or two thrown in the commons, then everyone had taken the announcement with a sort of “what else can go wrong” sunken attitude.
With things in shape, Sloane had taken Kesh’s offer of hard, manual labor and taken her version of a vacation.
That had been two days ago.
Maybe it had just taken a couple days to really sink in. A couple days of newly instated rations and the sudden realization that the rations they did have were already in the red.
The mood had changed in the Nexus. Drastically.
Addison walked the halls, as Tann had suggested, though it only made her feel more useless. She oversaw colonial affairs for a failed colony, an advisor to their “acting” leader. Soon, people would begin to ask what “acting” meant, exactly.
Seeing the Garson recording had an unintended consequence: It reminded them of what they’d signed up for versus what they’d actually got.
She avoided the sidelong glances people gave her as she walked. The growing hunger in their eyes, the thirst, and with those the accusation that it was her fault. It wasn’t fair, but she supposed politicians were always the ones to take the blame when a natural disaster took the population by surprise.
In every pair of accusatory eyes, she heard their unvoiced anger. How could you not have envisioned this? We trusted you. We sacrificed everything because we believed in your plan.
Fair or not, that’s what she heard in her head as they looked at her. In truth she hadn’t been much involved in the disaster-scenario planning. She’d been laser-focused on her actual job, drawing up plans and contingencies for first-contact scenarios with the species they would meet.
Oh, how she’d dreamt of those moments! Alien races unlike any they’d experienced in the Milky Way. The possibilities, and challenges. She’d pictured herself seated at a formally set table, sipping asari wine, Jien on her left and some dignitary from a benevolent and wise new species on her right.
Instead she was sleeping on the floor, boiling water to purify it as if she were on some survivalist training course.
Addison stopped in a hallway bridging two sections, expansive windows on both sides with what should have been magnificent views of space. Days earlier she’d come through here by shouldering her way past the “watchers,” a group who’d volunteered to act as lookouts until sensors were online, lest the Nexus be totally blind. They’d sat or stood, day and night for weeks now, watching for any signs that the Scourge was making a return appearance.
Or, more hopefully, scanning for the approach of a Pathfinder ship. So far they’d seen neither. Just unfamiliar stars, and with the rationing news, they’d evidently found better uses of their time. Today the hall was empty.
Addison sat in the middle of a bench and folded her hands in her lap. For a time she did not move, drinking in a whispering quiet marred only by the ever-present whir of life support, which she had to admit had been working flawlessly since that turian and his team had made emergency repairs.
They were working around the clock to keep it limping along, but still it was impressive. It must feel nice, she thought, to be useful.
Addison shook her head. That wasn’t a healthy way of thinking, and she knew it.
Her omni-tool chimed. Couldn’t be Sloane, her team was too far away for the meager comm network the crew had hobbled together. She answered and sat back as Tann’s face appeared floating in the air before her.
“Any word from Sloane?” he asked.