He brought up Calix’s personnel file and skimmed it. Nothing stood out. Assigned to various ships and space stations throughout his career, rising to a rank of chief only a year before the Andromeda Initiative put out its open call for volunteers. Interestingly, Calix’s application had come in late, and it wasn’t just him. He and his entire team had all applied simultaneously. In his application Calix had stated that they would join the Initiative together, or not at all.
Tann pondered this for a moment. He pulled a chair over and sat. Sipping water, he pulled up the dossiers on everyone that reported to Calix, skipping the summaries and analysis in favor of the detailed parts. He began to read.
Three levels below Operations, a group of armed civilians rushed into a common area frequented by the non-krogan members of the crew.
Calix had hoped it would be empty, that people would have decided it best to stay in their quarters until the situation settled down. He’d neglected to consider the fact that most didn’t have quarters. They’d taken to sleeping in the commons, out of necessity and perhaps for the company.
And so there they were. Clustered in little groups, engaged in hushed, urgent conversations. The room went quiet at the sight of him and his… gang? Somewhere along the line he’d begun to think of them that way, and saw the truth of it in the eyes of those who were now staring, wide-eyed.
How we must look, he thought, barreling in with assault rifles in hand and the splatter of blood on their uniforms. For an instant Calix feared they might seek to block his path. Then came the odd sense that they might instead burst into applause. Congratulate him for standing up for their rights.
What actually happened was both.
Shouts of derision, exclamations of support, all mingled together into something else. The crowd split along ideological lines and chaos quickly ensued. Fights broke out. People shouted, falling to the floor, running for safer ground. Somehow he found himself at the center of it all, surrounded in a bubble of loaded weapons wielded by his almost perversely loyal team. His gang.
Yes, Calix thought, that really was the most apt description. No getting around it. Most of them had been with him for years. A bunch of misfits he’d somehow managed to tame, one at a time. They’d said—after the Warsaw—that they would follow him anywhere. He hadn’t meant to put that to the test when he announced he was going to apply for Andromeda. In fact, he’d hoped to finally break from this life and start fresh. But they’d been good to their word, and before he even realized what was happening, they’d decided for him that the application would be for the entire team.
That had been born more of a desire to leave a horribly commanded ship en masse than anything else. He doubted back then, as he did now, that they’d really understood what they were getting into by joining the Initiative. They just wanted to be part of something.
Well, they got their wish, and then some, he thought.
Calix stopped halfway through the room. He held up his hands and called for silence as his armed escort maintained the circle around him, their guns pointed outward like spears. The crowd continued to jostle, arguments growing heated. Calix opened his mouth to appeal for quiet again, but before he could one of his techs fired off a few rounds into the ceiling.
The crowd went dead silent, all eyes on him.
Calix waited for the dust and debris to settle before addressing them.
“All of us were pulled from cryo for a reason,” he said. “To fix the Nexus. This isn’t just some ship we’ve been assigned to. It’s not a temporary post. The Nexus is our home. Our shelter. We still don’t know what damaged this place. Nobody does. Our leadership talks of the Scourge, but a name is about all they have.”
He had their full attention. Decided not to squander it.
“Now we learn this Scourge has lain waste to every planet in our vicinity. One of our scouts didn’t even return, probably another casualty. This unknown force could strike again at any time and we wouldn’t know, because sensors are still broken with little hope of repair.”
“Maybe the sensors team needs replacing!” someone shouted.
Another voice fired right back. “We can’t fix anything without the parts. It’s fabrications that can’t cope with—”
Yet another voice interrupted. “Fab is doing everything it can to keep up. But every time we start manufacturing something, we’re told to cancel it because a higher priority has come up.”
Nods of agreement.
Calls of “bullshit.”
Blame met with blame.
Calix raised his hands again. “We’ve all been working hard. If we blame anyone, it has to be our interim leadership. They were never chosen for this job, and they’re clearly not capable of it.”
A mixed response, but more in agreement than not. Good enough.
“Bad decisions,” he continued. “Constantly shifting positions and priorities. Outright deception. And behind it all, the possibility we’ll be hit again by this Scourge. Despite all that, their solution is for us to return to cryo. Just take a little nap and all our problems will go away.” More were nodding now. He had momentum. “That’s their plan? That we’re supposed to go to sleep and place our trust in them?
“Well, I won’t,” he said, his voice rising. “My team won’t participate. We’ve refused to operate the stasis pods. We want an election, leaders who can be fair and decisive. Most importantly, leaders who are willing to consider all possible solutions—including abandoning the mission for the sake of our survival.”
A calculated risk, and Calix paused to see what would happen. His own team might turn on him, though that wasn’t likely. The crowd might tear him limb from limb for opposing Garson’s vision.
His team held their ground, and waited.
The crowd split like a cleaved log, and erupted into violence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She heard the sounds of riot and raced toward it. Fifty officers at her back, their boots like thunder on the tiled passageway floor. Sloane clenched her jaw and ran scenarios through her mind. Surround the…
The what? What had Calix and his team become? This was no simple protest. His speech had implied as much. To resist the order to return to cryo-sleep, by definition it made these people a resistance. Some of them, anyway. That meant mutiny then, didn’t it? A rebellion? Did the fucking semantics really matter?
She supposed they did, when it came to meting out punishment. Disobeying orders could be handled with as little as a warning, maybe some time in the brig. Mutiny, though, that meant death. That meant a short trip out the airlock and a long spiral into the nearest star.
The resistance, Sloane decided. For now. Some part of her still wanted to give Calix the benefit of the doubt. After all he’d said in that interview, and how much work he’d put into keeping them all alive, she owed him that much.
She reached the common area first. A few hundred people were jostling, arguing. Some were engaged in brawls. An asari chopped a human in the neck with the flat of her hand, sending the man to the floor in a choking gag. A turian threw punches at another of his species, who returned them blow for blow.
In the center of it all huddled a cluster that moved as one. A circle, all the participants facing outward to protect whoever or whatever was in the center. Maybe someone was down, trampled, and those who’d managed to hold onto a sense of decency were trying to protect them from further damage.