His shuttle was as good as blind. The data couldn’t be trusted. Yet they could all see the planet, growing ever larger.
He had to make a decision, and soon. It took only one glance at his haggard crew to know what they’d vote for: Head for home. Enough’s enough.
Marco had no intention of doing that. Not yet. The Nexus couldn’t afford for them to return empty-handed, and his crew knew it. They were just scared, and who could blame them?
“Captain?” his navigator called out. “In sixteen seconds we won’t be able to escape the planet’s gravity. If we burn now we can slingshot around and make for the Nexus. Let them know our—”
“Negative,” he said. “We’re not going back empty-handed.”
No one spoke.
An eerie howling began somewhere at the nose of the ship and worked its way down her hull. Joints in the hull, grinding as the weird tendrils of the Scourge continued to toy with them.
“Nav, we’re going to burn, but not to pass the planet by.”
“You can’t actually intend to land without sensors?”
“No,” he admitted, “not land. But we’re going to dip into that atmosphere and see what we can see.”
Eos had a thick layer of high clouds, preventing a view of what bounty the surface might hold. Scans made, hell, centuries ago now, indicated plant life and plenty of water. A prime settlement candidate. Now, though, the sensors returned only gibberish. So they’d do it the old-fashioned way and take a look with their own eyes.
Again, no argument from his crew. They all knew what they were signing up for coming on this mission, but that didn’t take the sting out of it. This was a hell of a dangerous maneuver, especially relying on visuals alone, and perhaps the anguished groans of the hull plating.
The engines roared, right on cue. Ahead, Eos began to swivel as the small craft angled its thermally shielded side toward the green-gray clouds.
Marco didn’t need to order everyone to strap in. They hadn’t left their flight chairs since the first friendly love tap from the Scourge, about a million klicks out from the Nexus. By then the battered station had been too far behind them to hail, and the turbulence quieted down, as if daring them to go a little farther.
The planet blotted out the stars now, and the ropy blurred limbs of the Scourge. Sensors hadn’t learned anything new about the phenomenon, either. Readings were garbage, totally useless, not to be trusted.
“Comms,” Captain Marco said.
“Here,” the engineer replied. Not a trained comms officer, but the woman had handled the task admirably.
“Keep trying to raise the Nexus, and the arks. All bands, all frequencies.”
“I know,” she said, not impatiently. He’d given the order before, twice, and she’d always been on top of the task.
“Transmit everything we see, understood? I don’t care if it’s scrambled. Maybe they’ll figure out a way to decipher it. We have to try.”
“Understood,” she replied, a catch in her voice this time. There was more finality in his words than he’d intended, but nothing to be done about it now.
The shuttle began to rattle, and not from the Scourge this time. Eos’s atmosphere had begun to scrape their hull.
His view became a maelstrom as flames began to lick and curl around the bottom of the craft. The hull shuddered under the stresses. The black of space began to transform into the high, dusty brown clouds.
In seconds they were enveloped, visibility obliterated. Marco gripped the armrests until his knuckles went white.
All at once the violence ended. The clouds lifted. They were below it, and in danger now of dropping too far.
“Engines!” he shouted. “And roll us!”
The craft punched forward and, in the same instant, began to overturn.
Marco leaned forward, breath held tight in his chest.
Eos should have been a garden world. Lush, with long winding rivers and two shallow seas. So the scans had said, long before the Nexus even reached Andromeda.
He couldn’t see well enough. Against his better judgment, Marco unlatched his harness and leaned as far as he could to press his face to the window.
The captain did not see gardens. Or forests. No jungles or vast canopies of giant trees.
He saw barren desert. Desolation. Dust.
And something else, too. A massive monolith that towered over all around, punching upward like a crystal shard. “What… is… that?” he asked aloud, each word a struggle.
“A wasteland,” someone whispered, and Marco wondered if they meant Eos, or Andromeda itself.
Movement caught his eye, above. A snaking black tendril roiling with thousands of tiny explosions. It tore through the atmosphere, twisting and bending as if searching for something. As if—
The long finger of the Scourge bent and then slammed into the shuttle with the force of a hurricane. The ship heaved violently. Someone screamed. Marco thought maybe it was him. There came a smack as his skull slammed into the frame of the window, and everything went black.
Marco remembered falling, and pain, and words that sounded incredibly distant.
“Get us out of here,” someone was saying. “Get us out!”
“She’s ready for questioning.”
Sloane took the tablet Talini gave her, scanned it briefly. All the usual red tape was in order. After her brief and annoying conversation with Tann, she at least had that going for her.
Tann had demanded that she “handle it,” which Sloane had every intention of doing, but she’d do it her way, not his. He thought throwing Fadeer into stasis would suffice. After all, it had made for a tidy end to the hostage-takers. A punishment that required no trial. Sloane had other ideas. Ones that included questions about Fadeer’s motives. Her intentions. Her support.
The asari had a good record, she noted. Excellent references. Calix himself had vouched for her, including a sterling letter of reference for her service in his previous deployment on the Warsaw. Sloane pondered that. All of his team, at least the core group, had served with him there. And they’d all followed him here.
Interesting.
Whatever caused Irida to sabotage the Nexus and injure personnel along the way, it couldn’t be anything as simple as Tann clearly hoped. Sloane needed to know for certain, though. She handed the datapad back.
“Has she said anything?”
“She asked for water. I got the sense it was meant to be ironic.”
“How very clever.” Sloane shook her head. “Anything else?”
“She says she’ll be pressing charges for the assault.”
Sloane snorted.
The asari took that as the answer it was. “I should also warn you that we’re getting heat from the network techs injured in the sabotage.”
“What do they want?”
“Answers, I’d suspect.” She spread her long blue fingers in the universal gesture of who knows. “Retribution for some, compensation for others.”
Sloane’s lip curled. “Tough. We’re not Omega.” She rolled her shoulders, heard both of them pop from the tension. “Give them the usual line. If I hear of a single outburst, I’ll lock them up, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The asari would deal with the administrative bullshit, so Sloane’s full focus was on Irida Fadeer. She’d walked the corridors until most of her anger burned off, yet plenty still simmered in her gut. The guard outside Fadeer’s cell saw her coming, and opened it.
“Ma’am,” he murmured.
The prisoner sat primly on the narrow bunk, her hands in her lap—and still in the biotic-proof full-hand shackles. Fadeer looked cool and calm. Blood was still smeared on her cheek, ruining the impression a touch. Just enough to make Sloane grimace. Okay, so maybe she’d get some censure for that one. Wouldn’t be the first time.