Two medical personnel flanked a stretcher in the hallway. It held a salarian security tech. Green blood stained the emergency bandaging wrapped around his neck, shoulder, and chest. He gave her a weak grin and an even weaker salute, cringing with the effort.
“Be still, Jorgat,” one of the medical crew said crisply. “Ma’am,” he added to Sloane.
“How is he?”
“Lucky,” he replied with a bluntness that told her more about her teammate’s condition than anything else.
“I’ll be fine,” Jorgat wheezed. Behind the words came a gurgle Sloane didn’t like. She put a hand on the stretcher to stop it, halfway onto the lift. The doors binged unhappily at the interference.
The medics frowned at her.
“Who did this?” she asked, ignoring them in favor of the watery-eyed salarian. She bent over the stretcher to keep him from having to speak up. “What happened?”
He coughed, and flecks of green speckled her uniform. He managed, at least, a brittle laugh, even if it bubbled.
“Was a fool,” he wheezed. “Let myself get distracted.”
“An accident?” Sloane asked, her voice low to keep the rumors from spreading. She needed to put a lid on this, whatever this was, and fast.
Jorgat shook his head weakly. She understood.
Sabotage.
One of the technicians tugged at her arm. “Ma’am—”
“Go ahead.” Sloane let the stretcher continue, stepping entirely out of the way. The salarian’s large eyes closed in pain. “Take care of him,” she added.
“We will,” the woman at the front said.
The doors closed on Jorgat’s coughing fit.
Did salarian lungs collapse like humans’ did? If so, it would explain the sounds. Nothing time and care and proper medical technology couldn’t fix, but as a spike of anger jammed into the back of her brain, Sloane’s fists clenched. That didn’t matter.
He shouldn’t even have to be in this position.
Sabotage. Someone had hurt one of her crew.
Someone had hurt more than just Jorgat, Sloane realized as she strode down the corridor. The hollow feeling in her gut grew with each step. Bodies hunkered against the plating in the uncertain light, cradling various wounded limbs and digits. Burns, mostly. Electrical? Chemical?
Talini waited by a large door, a datapad in her hand. She used it to emphatically wave Sloane down. A deep furrow creased her brow, but a once-over told Sloane the asari hadn’t been part of whatever had gone down. No wounds, unbloodied uniform.
Sloane dragged a hand over her face, pushing strands of hair from her eyes. “Speak to me,” she said. The asari gestured at the knot of uniformed technicians filing in and out of the half-open doors.
“A pipe carrying coolant to one of the server rooms burst. It burst about fifteen minutes ago.”
Sloane looked back at the array of injured crew. “That’s a lot of damage for a busted pipe.”
“High pressure,” Talini replied. She flipped the datapad in her hands and pulled up the information she’d been busily recording. “This is one of the main processor hubs. Kept cooler than others for obvious reasons, but high-pressure conduits were used because they’re—”
“Cost effective,” Sloane finished dryly. “Yeah, I’ve heard the pitch.” The asari handed her the data. It didn’t mean much to her, but she got the gist—at the critical moment in the timeline, the pressure sensors went off the chart.
“There were some concerns about the amount of pressure it’d take to keep the coolant flowing, but eventually it was cleared.”
“Except?”
“Except,” Talini replied with a sigh, “in case of manual override.”
Sloane’s half-smile felt brittle. “Right. Jorgat says he was distracted?”
She nodded. “He says that the shift change for server maintenance had just begun. He knows almost all of them by face, at least, since he’s been stationed down here for a while.”
Sloane looked down the corridor, where lights peppered on and off in mimicry of the ones behind her. “Did he see an unfamiliar face then?”
“No.” Talini gestured back, moved toward the server room, and beckoned Sloane to follow. “In the middle of the shift-change, while a few of the techs were swapping the usual greetings, Jorgat says he heard something strange from inside. He came in to look—”
Sloane gasped when she stepped inside. Her breath immediately fogged, and ice crystals shuddered precariously from panels, plating, and dashboards. Although the physical damage looked minimal, Sloane picked out immediately where the worst of it had occurred. A solid spread of scratched, bent, scarred material.
“As you can see,” Talini continued grimly, “the paneling didn’t stand a chance.”
“Neither did that pipe.” Sloane frowned, tracing the signs of damage back to the wall that had buckled under the coolant pressure. It had been shut off already, which she imagined would strain the servers for now, but that wasn’t her immediate problem. The fact that ice still clung to every surface, and the number of coolant-burned limbs in the corridor behind them, made it obvious how cold it really had been.
She raised a hand to the hole in the wall, testing the edge of the metal. It was still bitterly cold. The edges of the rift peeled outward like a blooming flower. The busted pipe and various other innards had launched shrapnel out into the room.
Sloane looked back over her shoulder, mentally mapping the spread. Jorgat would have been standing right where Talini stood now. Dead on in that path.
Damn, the medic had been right. Jorgat had been very lucky. Sloane frowned, angry and frustrated in a tidy bundle called pissed off.
“What was the sound he heard?” she asked over her shoulder.
The asari tilted her head, then scanned her data again. “He said, and I quote, ‘Something like a reverse explosion, a kind of whoomp, but backward.’ End quote.”
“Mm-hm.” She leveled a look on the asari that she hoped didn’t reveal the seething anger roiling up in her chest. “Do me a favor, Sergeant. Pop up one of those circular vortex things of yours.” She gestured. “Toward the ceiling.”
Talini wasn’t anybody’s idea of a dumb broad. Sloane’s smile showed teeth as comprehension dawned on the asari’s pale blue features.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, and gathered her biotic energy, however biotics did it. Sloane didn’t know. She’d gratefully never been a biotic. The humans who were, in her experience, had some killer side effects—at least back in the day. Time and technology had apparently gotten better, but Sloane was old school.
Asari, on the other hand, all seemed naturally inclined. Talini pulled a singularity out from, well, wherever, forcing a rift in reality that sort of… reverse-popped.
Sloane nodded.
“That sound like a backward explosion to you?”
The purple and blue strains of biotic energy whirled, and even from this distance Sloane could feel strands of her hair lifting. They were too far away to succumb to the wonked-up gravity, but it disoriented her all the same.
“That could do it.” Talini turned her frown on the rift. “Given the pressure and the chemicals inside, mixing it up via biotics could produce a bottleneck large enough to cause this.”
“A biotic, then. Asari?”
“It could be an implanted human,” Talini murmured.
“I don’t remember anyone cleared on the wake-up roster, do you?”
“No. At least not anyone with that strong a grasp on the ability,” she admitted.
“We should go over crew logs,” Sloane said. “Just to be sure.”
“But you think it was an asari.”
“Any krogan throwing biotics around you know?” Sloane asked dryly.