Sloane rushed to it, kicked the glass hard only to remember, the hard way, that her usual protective boots weren’t part of the cryostasis uniform. Her toe exploded in pain even as the quick-shatter covering broke into a clattering mess on the floor.
Broken toes? At least one. Great. Just great. Sloane ignored the pain, wrenched the extinguisher free, and set to work.
A short blast to each flame. The compressed mixture roiled out and over the fires and sparks, and the room dimmed more and more each time, but that was okay. She could live with that. All around her people coughed, cried out. Someone screamed. Another crashed to hands and knees, vomiting.
Yet with each blast from the extinguisher, Sloane heard less pain. The sounds became those of worry, of people who could assist the ones who’d taken the worst of it. Each little shift in tone gave her that much more resolve.
Somehow, amid the groaning chaos of straining metal and crackling fire, they all convened in roughly the same place. Sloane tossed her spent extinguisher aside.
“Everybody stay together,” she ordered. She forced the malfunctioning doors open, shoving her shoulder against the creaking panel until it slid wide enough to let everyone through. When the last staggering survivor passed, she let the door slam closed behind her.
Sweat plastered her hair and uniform to her skin, soot made her eyes sting. Body aching, she slumped against the door. A quick catalog confirmed her injuries—broken, throbbing toe, minor burns, bruises and scrapes—but nothing that would impede her progress. Good. She shoved herself off and surveyed the antechamber. It was quieter, as if the hell on the other side of the door had been just a bad dream.
Beyond the next door lay the way out. And likely more danger.
As she took in the char-smeared, horrified faces around her, she realized less than half had made it. So many pods.
But there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing Sloane could do except get the survivors somewhere safe and lock this shit down.
They’d have to mourn later.
Kandros dragged the torn sleeve of his uniform under his chin, leaning on his improvised lifepod hacker. The metal bar had seen better days. So had the turian. “So,” he said, pitching his voice over the shrill alarms. “What happened?”
The group looked at each other, then at Sloane.
She wished she had answers.
“Don’t know,” she said, but that wouldn’t fix anything, so she jerked a thumb toward the exit. “Let’s find the hell out.”
“Yeah.” The turian pulled the bar up onto his shoulder. “I figured you’d say that.”
CHAPTER TWO
The hall outside had fared worse.
A bundle of severed wires hung from a bent ceiling panel, the tips spitting blue-white sparks that left black pockmarks on the floor. Smoke flowed along the ceiling, growing thicker, pushing downward. As far as Sloane could see, the damage ran the length of the corridor.
“Ventilation’s offline,” Sloane noted. She struggled for matter-of-fact, barely managed curt. “Fire suppression, too. My guess is comms took a hit.”
“Thorough,” Kandros noted.
They exchanged a look. She could see her own assessment reflected in her officer’s eyes. The damage extended well beyond their sleep chamber, which meant one of two things: either a very bad accident, or an attack. Perhaps even from within.
The sheer panic that would cause…
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Sloane said, pitching it louder so they could all hear. “Kandros, take these people with you. Somewhere safe.”
“Like where?”
Sloane considered it, then lowered her voice. “Colonial Affairs. Not their offices, but the hangar where they keep the shuttles. At least you’ll be ready to bug out if it comes to that, and if not, the life-support systems on those ships might be more stable.”
“Good call. Where will you be?”
Sloane glanced to their right, in the direction of Operations. “I’ll be trying to figure out what happened. Whatever’s going on here, it’s big. Stay safe, hear me?” She eyed his hands, where a pistol should have been. Not that she had anything better to offer. They both claimed bent, battered pipes and metal beams. Just great.
He narrowed his eyes, well aware of her thoughts, and nodded briefly.
She liked that about him. Her time with turians, her friendship with one in particular, had given her a hell of a lot of insight into turian tics. Kandros appreciated that insight, and Sloane appreciated his trust.
It made for a solid team.
“I’ll head for Operations,” she added. “Find and stay near a comm. I’ll get in touch with you somehow once I know what’s going on.”
“Ma’am.”
One of the good ones. She knew better than most how invaluable that kind of dedication was. Sloane clapped him on the narrow width of his carapace, and was off.
She kept to the wall, ignoring the doors she passed. Each remained closed, and for the moment that was fine. It would keep any fires from spreading. She checked the status panels next to each, though. They all said the same thing. A single glowing red word: offline.
That bothered her as much as anything. The Nexus, engineering marvel that it was, had been designed by more committees than Sloane had thought possible. And fuck did they love redundancy. Each one of these panels should have three, maybe even four, links into the station-wide systems array. To be offline served only to confirm her growing fear—something either very bad or very surgical had happened here.
She needed information, and she needed it fast.
Sloane loped along the hallway to the next intersection. An emergency bulkhead door had attempted to seal it off, only to get blocked half-open, rotaries spitting sparks. A glance confirmed the blockage: a corpse, caught in between the doors as they opened, closed, caught on brutalized flesh, opened again. Closed. Repeat.
The body was burned beyond recognition, laying under a pile of debris—bits of machinery and cabling that had fallen from the ceiling. The smell made Sloane want to retch. Sweet and disgusting all at once, rancid flesh and charred bone.
But she’d done this before. Swallowing her bile, she knelt and checked the uniform, rolling the body slightly to see. Fire or maybe some chemical reaction had rendered the name tag illegible. A salarian, from the shape of the head. Hell of a way to go. Sloane let the body gently down. She stepped over it as best she could and squeezed herself through the gap.
She had to leave the poor bastard there. The door would seal without it, trapping her on this side—and who the hell knew what with her.
Heat warmed her cheek and forced her to squint. Opposite her, an open flame erupted from a pipe that had punched right through the wall tiles and been ignited by a sparking cable. The air reeked of gases her lungs weren’t meant to breathe.
But flames meant oxygen, and that meant this hallway had been pressurized. It wouldn’t have been that way for the long, cold flight between galaxies. So they either hadn’t made it out of the Milky Way, or they had arrived in Andromeda.
There was small comfort to be found in either of those options. At least they weren’t stranded in the vast emptiness between the two.
A figure pushed through the thickening smoky haze. Sloane, weaponless, automatically dropped into a fighter’s stance. Not that it would do much good against armed intruders—
The uniform pronounced him one of the station’s own. The man staggered forward, sweeping one arm back and forth in front of his downcast face, trying in vain to wave away the choking fumes.