Mission failed.
The other side didn’t seem to be at all what they’d expected.
A single, wet cough broke the silence. Sloane’s focus slammed back to the asari as her body heaved, and a trickle of fresh blood scored rivulets down her chin. Some semblance of life returned to her pale violet eyes. “M-Mayday…”
Sloane wrapped an arm under her shoulders, kept her from thrashing. “You’re going to be okay. We may be under attack, so save your energy and—”
“I’m not,” the woman wheezed, pink foam frothing at her lips, “dead… soon e-enough.” Her faded eyes rolled toward the offline terminal. “Initial…” Sloane held her as still as possible as the asari’s filling lungs ground her words to rattling coughs. Gritting her teeth, the alien gripped Sloane’s tunic in a bloodied fist and managed, “Not attack.” Every word bubbled. “Damage is compre… hensive….”
Sloane sat hard on the floor. Tried her best to keep the woman steady. But it wasn’t easy. Her mind struggled to wrap around the situation. “We hit something, then.”
“No.” Bloody teeth bared as the asari fought another wracking fit. “Too even. Too… ugh…”
“Easy,” Sloane cut in, covering her hand and gripping it tight. “Stay with me. I need your intel. Sabotage?”
Somewhere in the depths of the asari’s pain and struggle, humor found its way out in a graveled, burbling laugh. “You… didn’t—” Blood and flecks of foam sprayed in an uneven pattern. Her eyes closed, a tear sliding down one bruised cheek. Even as she still smiled. Sloane frowned. “Physics,” the woman managed. “Sensors. D-data…”
Sloane considered what to do next. She needed answers. And leadership. “My priority now is the safety of Jien Garson. The council.”
“Chamber 00,” the asari said, confirming what Sloane already knew. It was a choking whisper.
This was it. Soldiers without a doctor present didn’t make it off the field with symptoms like hers, and Sloane wasn’t that. Her frown twisted. “Your name?”
The fist in her uniform weakened.
Nobody left forgotten. “Your name,” she demanded, bending over the asari. Her uniform said only T’vaan.
It was all Sloane would get. The gurgling rasp of the asari’s last breath ended in nothing—silence, stillness. The hand dropped, and didn’t so much as twitch again. Sloane bowed her head for a moment, all she could afford as the station shuddered around her. Gently, she set T’vaan’s—no, the body back onto the floor, her fist hard against the surface as she pushed herself back up to her feet.
It was a mistake to think of everyone here as friends. There were thousands of crew in those stasis pods, and some of them, a great many of them perhaps, had to have gladly left their pasts behind. Garson had said it herself: a one-way ticket.
They’d all been naïve to assume it’d be one without loss.
“Stasis chamber 00,” Sloane repeated, drawing strength from the words. “Thank you.”
Her injuries cracked and throbbed, burned and—in the case of that broken toe—screamed at her as she jogged across the debris-strewn chamber. But it was all nothing to the thought that drove her: what was the status of the council?
All else considered, they—Garson—had to have made it through alive.
Please, Sloane chanted silently, each syllable in time with her aching steps. Please.
The halls blurred together. One darkened, damaged tunnel after another. Every stasis chamber she passed was still sealed, the state of the inhabitants unknown. She had no choice to leave them that way. Saving one room of Nexus crew members mattered little if the entire ship was at risk, and the more she saw, the more she came to believe it.
In one narrow hall a change in the light gave her pause. Power coming back on? No, she realized. In her rush Sloane hadn’t even noticed the floor-to-ceiling window beside her.
Only then did the view beyond truly register.
For a moment she just stood there, speechless. Bits of the scene spattered her spinning mind, coalescing fitfully into a whirl of light and dark and pinpricks of color. The viewing pane looked out onto a plaza, one of the larger installations that left room for wards to fold into for traveling. A place people were meant to stroll and discuss the important details of colonizing a new galaxy.
It was a ruin.
The window offered an unimpeded view all the way down the length of one of the Nexus’s great arms. Several kilometers of meticulously designed and constructed habitat. Factories, hydroponic farms, hospitals—everything they would need. Everything that would sustain them.
All she could see was the flames, the gouts of venting gas, the walls sheared in jagged lines, the exposed girders. Devastation on a massive scale, and beyond it all, an unfamiliar sea of motionless stars.
It wasn’t the Milky Way. Sloane would know. Spending a lot of time staring out ship windows made for a strange sort of familiarity. Palaven, Thessia, hell, she’d have been happy to be looking out at Omega’s starscape.
This was disorienting, with its glittering net of blue, red, and white stars and trailing web of eerily colored threads of gas and stardust. They were definitely not home.
But what about their new home?
Impossible to tell.
Sloane Kelly ran now. Feet pounding in an all-out sprint despite the fresh howls of agony from her broken toe, the fog of her stasis hangover pushed to a distant corner of her being. She knew she’d pay for this later—if there was a later.
She hoped to hell there was a later. One she and the council could talk about, maybe over drinks. Lots and lots of drinks.
Hallways flew by in a blur, until finally she reached the door she’d been looking for, marked by a simple ‘00’.
It was wide open.
Sloane pulled to a stop just before the threshold, caught her breath. A moment, just one to steel her resolve, and then she slipped inside.
The stasis chamber resembled any other chamber. A perfect clone of the one Sloane herself had struggled to secure and exit. The only difference was the scope of damage. The tragedy of bodies.
There was neither.
Every pod here was wide open. No sign of death, of damage, of fire or physical malfunctions.
One glance and she determined that the room was empty. Utterly silent. At least there weren’t any corpses. She’d take any victory she could at this point, no matter how small. But relief stubbornly waited. She needed to find Garson, to hear her orders. To bring good news to the survivors.
At least that would be normal.
She turned on her heel, her mind already shifting to a backup plan, when a weak cough broke the silence.
Sloane paused, scanned the room again. “Hello?”
Nothing.
Then another cough, and a wan, “Hello? Someone there?”
“I’m here,” she confirmed, taking swift steps into the room and scanning its darkened pods. “Where are you?”
“Here.” A raised hand, just visible beyond a metal table. Sloane slid across the table and dropped into a kneel beside the woman lying flat on her back. Blood from a gash on her forehead ran down her nose and cheek, and her eyes weren’t quite focusing in the same direction.
“How bad is it?” Sloane asked, her eyes snapping from the injury to the name printed across the left breast of her bloodied suit. Addison. Foster Addison, another senior-level crew member, like Sloane. Colonial Affairs, if memory served.
Addison brought up one hand and tentatively probed the cut. The blood had already started to dry around the edges, though a fresh line welled from the middle when she touched it.