Later, when Cora got a chance to tot up her sins for the day, she would vaguely recall hearing the protestors suddenly grow quiet and whisper to each other. Right around the time that she started to suspect the “shrimp” were actually a variety of Horizonian insects that tasted great but had a mild laxative effect—she’d eaten as many dodgy proteins growing up as any Traverse kid, but the worst of them stuck in memory—a shadow fell over Cora’s table.
“You were in that commercial for Westerlund News just now,” said a man. “The feature report they’re going to air later this week. Some kind of exposé about the Andromeda Initiative.”
Oh, of course they were advertising it already. Cora suppressed a groan and glanced up at him. The man was in his early twenties, tall but skinny, his skin an orangey tan that spoke of the supplements many planet-born took to avoid becoming unfashionably spacer-pale. He was dressed in a tourist-quality environment suit. As if that would save him if Tamayo Point’s mass effect fields ever failed!
More significantly, the man was standing too close, trying to loom over her. Deliberately, Cora took another bite of her sandwich. Then, still chewing—he didn’t deserve her manners—she said, “Maybe that was me in the commercial. I didn’t see it, I don’t know. What about it?”
“You work for the Andromeda Initiative. Humans working with aliens.”
Not at the rate she was going, but that was nobody’s business but hers.
“I repeat: What about it?”
The guy didn’t like her nonchalance. He bent suddenly and slammed his hands on Cora’s table, jostling the top layer of bread off the uneaten half of her sandwich. “You’re a traitor to the Earth!”
With exaggerated care, Cora replaced the bread and moved her plate away from the man in case he was a spitter. “Don’t you mean a traitor to humanity?”
“What?”
“Well, I’ve never called Earth home. And the Alliance has a few dozen colonies at this point, plus hundreds of space stations, trade interests along a thousand shipping lanes, and diplomatic outposts on most non-human planets. That’s not counting all the private ventures like Noveria, or the non-species-aligned places where we’ve got a foothold, like Omega and the Citadel. So if you really want to call me a traitor, you might want to remember that humanity hasn’t equalled ‘Earth’ for, what? Fifty years?” The man was staring at her in confusion and rising fury. “Of course, if you do that, you’d also have to remember that collaborative exploration helps humanity—”
She hadn’t been expecting the man to shove her. He’d seemed obnoxious, bigoted, provincial, but not quite stupid enough to try taking on a woman who was wearing full body armor. If she’d expected violence, she could’ve been mentally prepared for it, and physically braced herself to withstand the shove.
Instead, because of his height advantage, his shove pushed her chair back far enough to lift her feet off the floor and nearly knock the chair over. And instead of taking the shove, Cora’s mind flipped over from not combat to combat—because that was what Nisira had drilled her to do in situations of unexpected violence. That was what Cora and the other Daughters had done for the past four years, on fields of battle this backwater fool would never see, and through a hundred life-and-death conflicts. Survival meant reacting instantaneously. Taking time to think could get you killed.
That was the asari huntress way.
So Cora was afire with dark energy before her feet landed back on the floor, the barrier snapping into place so fiercely that the sound of it made the air crackle. The man snatched his hand back with a yelp, though the field wouldn’t have hurt him. He wasn’t a projectile, after all. As it was, however, the static electricity of his skin sparked against the shifting, shimmering aura of her field, sending minute ripple effects over the sheath of energy. She felt her hair waft a little in the electromagnetic breeze as she got to her feet. And she knew, as the man stumbled back from her with eyes wide, exactly why he was afraid.
We are living weapons, we huntresses. Nisira’s deep, night-soft voice came into her head again. Your race is only beginning to understand what eezo can do, what the mass effect truly is, the potential of dark energy, but you came to Thessia to learn as we asari learn, so I’ll tell you. We are gravity bound by will. You, Cora, are organic and synthetic power fused and honed to their pinnacle. Fight only when you must—but when you must, give your enemies warning of the nightmare they’ve awakened. That’s only polite… before you rip them apart.
Not that Cora would have done so. That was the point of all her years of training, after all; her control was iron. If she happened to smear the man over the cafe’s far wall, it would be the result of a deliberate choice, not mere reflex on her part. But before Cora could speak to the man about the virtues of courtesy toward heavily armed strangers, a hand moved into the range of her vision, gliding with enough grace to jerk her out of pre-battle tension. Another biotic field impinged gently on her own, a polite warrior-to-warrior greeting.
“Hey there, little sister,” rasped a voice so familiar and comforting that Cora instantly blinked, dissipated her barrier, and turned to stare into an open, amused, turquoise face. “This a private party, or do we all get to dance?”
Cora could’ve hugged the big asari.
“Ygara!” Ygara Menoris, to be specific: Nisira T’Kosh’s former subcaptain, also lately of Talein’s Daughters and one of the few asari that Cora had ever truly called friend. “Oh my God. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Keeping you out of trouble, what else?” Ygara let Cora go now that she’d calmed down, flashing a toothy grin. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the man who’d shoved her, and who had already backed up a step or two. It was a mild look, but the man flinched and took another few steps back. Two of his comrades came to join him, Cora noted, but they both seemed more concerned with pulling him away from danger than backing him up.
Cora didn’t blame them. Ygara was bigger than the average asari—beautiful of course, but taller, more muscular, and with a “matronly rack” that she wore like a warning even though she was still within the tail end of her maiden years. It was a warning; Ygara had been a commando for most of her life, and Cora had seen her outdo a few matriarchs at combat biotics.
But that didn’t matter. The man who’d shoved her didn’t matter. Khalisah bint Sinan al-Jilani didn’t matter. Cora was just glad to see someone civilized again. “Let’s get out of here,” she said in immense relief, and Ygara hummed in easygoing assent. They exited the cafe, leaving the belligerent man and his friends scared silent in their wake.
They walked through the crowd, Cora leading them toward the shuttle she would take to the Andromeda Initiative’s headquarters, Ygara apparently just along for the stroll. She was passing through the Sol system on her way to Illium, she explained, where she’d decided to try starting up her own mercenary band now that she’d quit Nisira’s. It wasn’t a surprise that she’d done so; everyone had been expecting Ygara to strike out on her own eventually, as maidens tended to do once they’d learned their trade. Nisira had given Ygara’s new venture her blessing and backing.
Then it was Cora’s turn to speak, and to her own surprise she found herself babbling out everything that had happened since she’d left asari space. The shuttle passenger who’d repeatedly found a reason to brush up against her ass until she’d found a reason to threaten his future reproductive capability. The customs agent who’d actually asked—and been overly interested in—whether Cora had slept with any asari during her years on Thessia. “That’s none of your business,” Cora had replied to the woman with a sharp-edged smile. The disastrous interview. And worst of all, the difficulty Cora was having with simply being around her own species again.
“We’re a mess,” she blurted. “I never thought of us as primitive before now, but we really are just…” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, then clenched her teeth as a random fellow traveler bumped into her shoulder and muttered an apology before bumping into someone els
e. Finally Cora took a deep breath. “God. Listen to me. I’m whining.”
Ygara laughed. “A little. Look, so you’re having some culture shock.” She shrugged her broad shoulders. “I mean, I’m not sure scaring the piss out of some xenophobe is the best way to handle it, but what you’re feeling is pretty normal. I spent twenty years on Palaven once.” She blushed a little. “Thought I’d found ‘the one.’ Anyway, after I came home, took me weeks to stop wondering why all the faces I saw were blue and not silver, and why nobody wanted to talk about tactics or public service. I kept feeling like Thessia was wrong. You’ll get over it.”
Cora knew it was true, but it was nice to have the external validation. She stopped as they reached the docking tube that led to her shuttle. Still twenty minutes before boarding, but maybe they’d let her on early so she could catch some shut-eye.
“Thanks,” she said, finally. Because it had been nice, and much-needed, to have someone who she could talk to about these things. “I know they say it’s a small galaxy, but I could start to believe in all those gods of yours after this kind of coincidence. You came along at just the right time.”
Ygara let out an amused snort, jabbed her companionably in the shoulder, then turned to saunter off. “Just try not to cause any interspecies incidents,” she called back over her shoulder. “Remember, we taught you better than that!”
* * *
Theia Station was old. Cora’s dossier had said that it was an ancient quarian low-orbit station, damaged and left derelict hundreds of years ago after their war against the geth. The Initiative had purchased it from a group of volus “station-flippers” some years back.
The quarians’ construction was, as always, phenomenal. The hull was unblemished despite the years it must have spent unprotected by a mass effect envelope. There was also no sign that it was a secondhand station. In its clean, airy corridors and its Citadel-standard infrastructure everything gleamed like new. Still, there was something just slightly off about the place. A peculiarity of proportion—as if its aesthetics had been chosen by minds that did not think the same way. Math was math, engineering was engineering, but it wasn’t a human thing to tilt everything slightly, or to decoratively filigree stylized plants and water motifs alongside every pipe and conduit.
As Cora gazed through one of the station’s viewports, she could not help noticing that the clear carbon-fiber “glass” was slightly convex, with an off-center focal point that subtly drew the gaze back to the station rather than out toward the spray of suns and galaxies. Humans would want to look at the stars. The ancient quarians had wanted to remind themselves that life amid the stars depended on sound hardware and competent people.
Cora turned from the view, studying again the man who was to be her new commander. Well, supervisor, since the Initiative wasn’t military; this was another thought that felt strange. At the center of the vaulted room in which they stood, he’d built a bizarre configuration of platforms and terminals and server nodes, arranged around a floor-to-ceiling frame that made Cora think of a natural beehive: efficient in its use of space, but a little disturbing to look at. He was on its uppermost platform now, tapping on an interface with one hand while he gazed through a stationary pair of powered goggles at… something.
Cora had been standing in the room since she’d called out to him—he’d said, “Just a moment,” ten minutes ago. She was beginning to suspect that he’d forgotten she was there.
Alec Ryder, she knew from the dossier. Former Alliance marine—N7-ranked, no less. Enlisted just after the Prothean ruins were found on Mars, like so many young people of the time, eagerly wanting to be on the front lines of humankind’s next quantum leap. And he’d succeeded in that; Ryder had actually shipped out with Grissom, on that famous first flight through a mass relay! Less-than-honorably discharged, though, and the records were conspicuously quiet on why.
Somewhere along the way he’d spent a few years retooling himself, earning a handful of experiential masteries in xenocybernetics, artificial linguistics, and other training in subjects Cora could barely pronounce. Two children, both adults; a recent widower. Well-preserved for a man in his fifties: graying hair, not too skinny, no noticeable gut. Still dressed like off-duty military: khakis with lots of pockets, commando sweater with the sleeves rolled up.
No visible hint of mad scientist… but it was there. Cora could almost smell it.
“Thanks for your patience,” Ryder said suddenly, surprising her. So he hadn’t forgotten her. Still hadn’t looked away from the goggles, though. “Tweaking a dynamic intuition processing matrix while it’s still running. Tricky.”
“It’s intuition,” Cora said, looking around and trying to push aside a vague feeling that she might not have made the right decision regarding her post-military occupation. “Shouldn’t it be?”
It was an attempt at small talk. She didn’t really expect Ryder to answer. Indeed, he was silent for another moment, continuing to tap on the interface and stare into the goggles. Then he stopped, sat back, and rolled his shoulders until his neck popped loudly enough that Cora could hear it from where she stood twenty feet below.
“Well, that depends. Should a virtual intelligence have good intuition or bad intuition? Bad intuition’s easy. Case in point: The complete lack of a warning instinct that tells you when you’re being railroaded by a reporter.”
Damn. Cora sighed and drew herself to a sketchy sort of attention. Best to get this over with. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “I was caught off guard. Won’t happen again.”
“I know it won’t,” Ryder said. He rubbed the back of his neck, then got up and started walking down the steps from one platform to the next. “The Initiative can’t afford that kind of press. If you can’t talk to a reporter without making yourself and anyone affiliated with you sound like the Benedict Arnold of the post-relay age, then just pull a ‘no comment’ and leave, next time.”
Cora set her jaw, but she supposed she deserved that.
“Sir. Yes, sir.”
He stopped on a middle platform, frowning directly at her for the first time. “Neither of us are marines anymore, Ms. Harper, and I never stood on rank when I was. Also, ‘sir’ makes me feel old.”
The “Ms. Harper” made her twitch, inadvertently. “And I prefer ‘Lieutenant.’ I worked hard to earn that, even if it doesn’t quite apply anymore. Or you could just use my family name.” She paused, meaningfully. “And respect isn’t the sole province of the military… sir.”
He let out a soft, unamused snort at this. “Maybe not. Still, I’d rather have the reality of respect and not just its outward trappings. I notice you didn’t salute, for example, although I outrank you.”
Cora fought the urge to frown a little. She didn’t know what to think of this man. He kept challenging her, then backing off, then attacking from another angle. Yet it didn’t feel quite hostile. More like… assessing.
“It’s mostly a human convention,” Cora said. “I fell out of the habit.”
Ryder frowned at that. “What else did you forget while you were away?”
He was definitely pushing her. Trying to draw her into a confrontation, maybe? “I forgot how frustrating it can be to have a conversation with a species that has little to no ability to intuit anything. Always dancing around topics that any asari would know just by looking at you, and all the while thinking we’re so clever as we do it.”
Ryder’s expression didn’t change, but she saw him stiffen ever so slightly.
“And…” She gathered herself and pressed on. “I forgot how sensitive people can be to the truth. How averse they are to being direct and straightforward. And that sometimes, saying nothing is better than being right.” She hadn’t handled the situation with the reporter well, and she had no problem admitting that. “But, I didn’t forget that I was a marine once. And that a superior deserves respect, even if they haven’t earned it yet, sir.”
Ryder shook his head, and to her surprise he looked bemused. Then he leaned ag
ainst the platform railing, his voice softening.
“You would’ve had trouble with al-Jilani on a good day, Lieutenant. I’ve seen her roll five-star generals, and that’s without ambushing them on their first day back in human space.”
“Maybe so, sir—maybe so.” Cora resisted the urge to set her jaw. “Nevertheless, I apologize for making the Andromeda Initiative look bad.”
“It would take more than one obviously biased news report to do that. Unfortunately, what you encountered at Tamayo Point is just the vanguard of a more sustained campaign.” Ryder sighed. “How much do you know about what we do here, Harper?”
“What’s in the dossier and on the extranet. The usual.”
“Tell me.”
Was it a test? To see if she’d done her homework? Again Cora fought the urge to tighten her jaw. There should’ve been no need for tests at this point, but fine.
“Well, the idea is to get to the Andromeda Galaxy—the closest galaxy to our own. Find some garden worlds, set up shop, maybe make contact with the local species, or if nothing else set up trade between the colonies.” She shrugged. “Originally it was championed by a human-only team, but as the project gained momentum, the other Council species got on board. So now we’re all going. Launch date’s scheduled for six months from now.”
“Okay. That’s good.” Ryder turned to head down the steps, finally descending to her level. “But I think that’s not really what I want to know. Tell me why you’ve signed on to a project that will take you six centuries and two-and-a-half million light years away from everything you know and everyone you love? And don’t tell me ‘the human love of exploration.’” He rolled his eyes. “That sounds great in the marketing, and maybe it’s even true for the young ones who have more gonads than sense. It’s a wonderful ideal. But the explorers of old generally meant to come back from wherever they were going, hopefully covered in glory or riches.