"Tann knew himself, his limitations. All his life he'd battled an inability to filter out distractions. When he needed to think, really think, he required absolute silence."
-Nexus Uprising
When the salarian named Jarun Tann had been revived from cryo-sleep as the new Director of the Andromeda Initiative, he had awoken to a disaster that extinguished the seven directors that came before him. A space anomaly called the Scourge, with its snake-like storm of tendrils holding the Andromeda galaxy in a tight grasp, had decided to devour the expedition as soon as they arrived.
But, even bestowed by such chaos, the title of Director had conjured expectations within his mind of drinking champagne in a toast to the eventual success of the colonial mission, and tailored uniforms that fit him like a glove. It had promised respect and admiration, with his entire name etched into a galactic history book.
And Tann rather liked the idea of that. He hadn't experienced any of those things back in the Milky Way.
However, as time passed, his new title brought with it none of those things. Instead, he was given a star cluster where new disasters waited around every corner, and a colonial space station called the Nexus that was just barely scraping by. And, in this particular moment that he found himself in, he had inherited a colony ship called the Ark Hyperion. It was full of humans who were ignoring his existence in their medical bay.
He tugged on the sleeves of his blue and white uniform, which never seemed quite long enough, and stood towering among the humans beneath sterile flourescent lights. They were all rushing around like the insects from Eos that Professor Herik kept in a jar with a spot of sugar water, but no one was volunteering to tell him why.
And that was very vexing.
"Out of my way," a nurse exclaimed as he hurtled by. He was carrying a red clipboard and his mouth hung open like a fish.
Tann stepped aside, watched everything with black eyes. The possible reasons for the staff's agitation expanded within him like a fractal until it collapsed into the simplest explanation. "Is there an emergency of some sort?" he asked another human with blonde hair who moved past him. She was an aide, judging from her uniform.
She stopped as if a ghost had appeared in front of her and let out a squeak. "Tann," she said, clutching her data-pad. "Um, no. Everything is fine. Just totally fine."
Tann heard a loud thump as someone upended a storage container behind her. "It doesn't look fine at all," he said. "And you've missed your hourly status report. I'd like to know what's happening."
Another aide stopped, apparently to rescue the first. He smiled tightly. "Nothing's happening. We just decided to send a hard copy of our report to your office, that's all. It's probably waiting for you right on your desk."
"Are you aware that the intra-net is functioning?" Tann asked the man curiously. "I assumed you were capable of using the technology provided to you instead of wasting paper." He attempted to smile back in a friendly way. "Perhaps I'm mistaken."
The aides exchanged glances and the man shook his head. "There just isn't much going on," he explained. "It's boring down here so we have to entertain ourselves."
Tann's smile faded. He gestured at the chaos. "And so situations like this are... Entertaining to humans?"
The aides nodded their heads in unison, smiled widely at him. Behind them people were panicking, sweeping in and out of examination rooms and searching supply closets. One of the nurses stuck her head under a medical bed, with her face surfacing as a frown before disappearing beneath another chrome-colored mattress.
Tann felt his patience waning. "You've lost something, haven't you?"
"No," the aides both squeaked.
He narrowed his eyes, then turned around and left without saying anything further. They weren't going to be helpful. More importantly, they obviously weren't going to give him his hourly report. He doubted that it was on his desk.
He sighed as he left. Not knowing what was going on in one of his departments was going to gnaw at him all day. The dream of the Andromeda Initiative was fragile and, in his mind, the Nexus required constant, meticulous tending to achieve it. He didn't believe in fully entrusting an inch of it, or its colony ships, to other people.
And if something was happening, even just a misplaced pencil, he wanted to know about it.
Once he was in the quieter atmosphere of the Hyperion's hallways he scanned through his memory of the scene, quibbling over details while the ship's engine hummed beneath his feet. All of the equipment had been intact and functioning. No one was bleeding. The head doctor, Harry Carlyle, hadn't been there, but that wasn't particularly unusual. Humans held schedules that they didn't often stick to.
Still, he decided the best chance for the hourly report would be Doctor Carlyle, wherever the man was. Tann headed toward the cabins assigned to essential personnel. He walked past Captain Dunn's personal quarters and then beyond the neighboring AI computer core, with his toes padding lightly on the steel floor and his arms hooked behind his back.
But when he turned a corner he stopped. The ship's cryogenic entrance was open. A draft was creeping out of the doorway in a cold, slow cloud of fog.
Tann blinked, confronted by how unexpected that was. There was no reason for the door to be open; the Hyperion's wake protocols had been halted until further notice. The asari colony ship, the Ark Leusinia, held emergency priority due to the damage running along its outer hull.
As Tann approached the entrance, he could see an IV needle and a stray length of translucent medical tubing triggering the door's sensor. The door attempted to close, then opened again with a cautious snap when it encountered the tubing on the floor. A chill slipped against his ankles as the fog crept further into the hall.
The sound of the door echoed throughout the hallway. A few drops of human blood glistened next to the needle.
And, staring down at the scattered red droplets, Tann's surprise evaporated. He realized exactly what he'd missed in the medical bay. He used his toe to push aside the tubing and entered cryogenics, felt the chill rush upward over his horns and slip down his spine. The door shut behind him.
Unlike the rest of the ark, the ceilings inside cryogenics were high enough to give the space a cathedral-like quality. And there was no staff assigned to this place; it was far too cold. Metal pods full of humans stacked upward all around him, silver and frosted while small windows revealed their sleeping faces.
A sense of dread crept over him while his gaze drifted along so many alien faces. Tann usually enjoyed quiet places, but the cold weighed him down here and the silence was too omnipresent with the possibility of death to be comforting. He looked away from the pods and found a discarded medical bandage strewn along the floor. He followed the length of it, frowning.
And he now understood why the medical staff had avoided their hourly report. In his memory, there was an empty bed in the corner of their bay, topped by a halo of machinery that was missing its occupant. The Pathfinder's sister, Sara Ryder, must have woken up from her coma. She had woken up and they had lost her somehow.
It was the only possibility. No one had wanted to tell Tann or, even worse, put the information into the Hyperion's computer and risk Scott Ryder himself finding out through his connection to the ship's artificial intelligence, SAM. Tann tried to imagine telling Ryder that his sister had gone missing or been injured, just as the staff must have imagined, and he went through several possible scenarios that all ended very badly.
If she had been injured, he corrected himself, setting the scenarios aside. It all came down to mathematical possibilities, just like everything else. Numbers and white noise.
If, if, if.
Tann walked faster, every cold breath shocking his amphibious lungs. He found another bandage.
And he had never met Sara before, only witnessed her pale form sleeping in the metal halo and once, later on, conjured a picture of her smiling profile on a holo-screen. The two images weren't congruent at all. And they didn't match up with the third image, which occurred right as he reached the end of the last bandage and looked up.
Sara, now awake, was using one of the free-standing computer podiums at the end of the walkway. And she was having a terrible time by the sound of it. She was pleading with the holo-screen, very faintly. She wore a medical gown that fully exposed her backside.
Her brown hair shifted over her shoulders and bare skin while she tapped the side of the console. "Please open," she kept saying as she tapped. "Please, please, please. Open sesame?"
The computer beeped at her, unsympathetic. Sara sighed and leaned over, shutting the power off and then back on again. The light green gown drifted away from the asari-esque curves of her body.
Tann watched all of this while his brow slowly rose, felt a ripple of nervousness. He cycled through ideas on how to approach the situation with a minimum of distress on both sides. But before he had a chance to try anything at all Sara looked back over her shoulder, sensing his presence.
For a moment they stared at one another in the silence, both wide-eyed.
Sara spoke first. "Oh," she breathed, exhaling a small cloud and turning around. She pulled the medical gown as far down over her thighs as she could, which wasn't very far at all. "Oh," she said again, embarrassed. She backed up against the console and looked down at her bare feet.
Thankfully, she didn't scream.
Tann remained frozen for a moment. Then he blinked back to life and cleared his throat in a way that he hoped sounded very apologetic. He dipped his horns forward to show a lack of ill intention and said in his most professional voice, "Do you require assistance with the technology provided to you?"
"No, I..." She trailed off, gathered her courage, and then tried again. "The nurses wouldn't let me use their computer. They said I had to wait."
Tann's earlier theory that the medical staff couldn't operate their intra-net was gaining ground. But Sara wasn't injured, and he was deeply relieved. He said, "So you've come here by yourself to operate one unassisted?"
"Yes. Everyone keeps saying my dad died," she replied quietly.
"That's correct," he told her. "Alec Ryder passed in an incident on one of the colony worlds."
She shook her head, clutching the fabric at her thighs tighter. "I remember talking to Scott. He said everything was fine."
Tann's brow dropped down at the impossibility of her statement. Scott Ryder had been in a different star system for weeks. And now that Tann had a chance to observe her, Sara looked as if she was still disoriented from waking up. She didn't question how he knew exactly who her father was, or who she was. On the contrary, her eyes were distant and a little dreamy.
He asked, "Sara, are you aware that you've been in a coma?"
"Yes, I know," she answered, looking up at him. "Scott told me when we talked through SAM. He told me about everything that happened so far." She hesitated, looking confused for a moment. "I don't remember exactly when it was," she admitted with a small frown.
"I suppose it would be very difficult to tell," Tann said carefully, playing along for the moment. "What else did he say to you?"
She looked down again. "That the golden worlds were beautiful. He said Andromeda was a paradise."
Tann nodded, let any other questions go. That sounded right. He wouldn't have even needed to ask, not if her story about speaking to her brother was somehow true. Scott Ryder had been approaching the Andromeda galaxy with an optimism that bordered on manic, and one that was enforced on everything around him whether it was warranted or not.
Publicly, it was an incredible boon to the struggling Andromeda Initiative.
Tann approached Sara, then leaned over to meet her eyes. She was still clutching her gown against her body, but she didn't seem afraid of him. And his stomach sank as he appraised her condition. She must have woken up no more than an hour ago, full of questions about the new galaxy. But it would be better to tell her the truth right away, and privately. He had learned that through bitter experience.
"Your brother was incorrect," he said as gently as he could. "We've encountered an energy cloud called the Scourge that damaged the Nexus and your ark. Most of the golden worlds have been affected by it. Many people are dead or unaccounted for."
"Oh," she murmured, losing interest in him and turning away. "You're just like everyone else."
The comment held an unexpectedly sharp sting. "You can't stay in the cold like this," he told her. "We'll sort everything out once you've received medical attention."
"No," she said forcefully. "If you're not going to help me, go away."
Tann straightened up again, exhaled a cloudy puff of air and growing frustration. He needed to do something to get her back into the medical bay. He ran through his options, none of which were ideal, and picked the one that didn't involve giving up and leaving her to freeze to death or dragging her down a hallway while she fought with him.
He stepped up to the podium, reset the computer, and logged into its databases. A quick search revealed a personal log detailing that communication with Sara had been attempted six weeks ago through the SAM. But there was no update about its success or failure.
Tann shook his horns. So her story might actually be true. The implications were interesting, but he didn't have time for any of them right now. He opened the historical database. "You may look at the files," he explained to her, gesturing. "Anything you'd like, everything you might want to know."
She watched him suspiciously. "Really?"
"Yes." He stepped politely behind the console so her clothed side would remain facing him. "But please move quickly," he added. "I'll freeze to death before you do, even with more clothes on."
Sara nodded with a glance up at his horns, as if they were a surprise that she hadn't noticed before. Then she began typing at the console. Tann waited as patiently as he could.
And, as she queried the database, she looked so much like her brother that it was startling. But where Scott was broad-shouldered and held the confidence of a young man who was succeeding at everything he attempted, Sara was petite and looked as if the galaxy had begun to crash down around her. She had gray eyes that perfectly matched the Nexus.
"He lied to me," she said softly after a few minutes had passed.
"Scott has taken up the position of The Pathfinder as a successor to your father," Tann explained to her over the translucent orange light of the holo-screen. "He's currently in the Nol system working with the inhabitants there. Most of the lifeforms we've encountered have been hostile."
"So it's pretty much a nightmare," she said, still reading. She opened a few more files and then abandoned the computer, as if even touching it bothered her. "Thank you for telling me," she said unsteadily.
Tann began to say something in response but she had already turned away from him, seemed to forget that he was there or that her gown was still just covering her front. She sat down on a nearby bench with a small thump and covered her face with her hands.
Tann followed and crouched down in front of her. "Sara," he said. "You need medical attention."
"Why wouldn't he tell me something like that?" she said through her hands. Her voice was fragile.
Tann felt his stomach sink further, and he thought of the database that he had opened for her. There were ghosts residing within the files, ghosts he had kept the truth from until it was too late. Each one had their own lengthy report of disaster and failure, with marks left behind. Each one might have echoed Sara's words.
And Tann, who wanted his name etched into a history book, knew that it might be etched there above a list of his mistakes.
He said to Sara, "Perhaps your brother didn't know how to tell you what was really happening." He moved her hands away from her face, set them in her lap. They were freezing. "I'm sorry about your father," he continued. "I'm sure he would have wanted us to do our best."
She looked down at their hands. "Did you lose anyone?"
"I came here by myself," he told her. "But I lost more people than I should have."
She frowned at that, lifted her eyes to the silver pods all around them. "It's really cold in here," she murmured, as if she had just noticed it for the first time.
Tann nodded in agreement. He unclasped the buttons of his shirt, took it off, and placed it over her shoulders. It was too big for her and he had to fold the collar down, but it covered her up well enough. It would have to do. Sara watched him move her hair out of the way but didn't stop him. He moved a few strands out of her face.
"You don't have to do that," she said.
"I'm taking you back to the medical bay now," he said.
Then he stood up. She sighed, and after a moment she held up her hands with her fingers covered by long sleeves. She let him pick her up. "Okay," she said as he did so. She took a breath and held onto him. "Okay," she said again. "Please don't leave me by myself in there."
He held her tightly as he headed back down the corridor. Sara's legs dangled and her arms were wrapped around his shoulders. And, just as the bare skin on his back began to pinch painfully against the chill, they reached the entrance of cryogenics. The medical staff had moved their search to the hallway and he walked by a few of them with a calm, professional expression, as if he wasn't shirtless at all and wasn't carrying the patient they had lost.
"Tann?" someone said in surprise as he walked past.
"Wait, is that Sara?" someone else said.
He ignored them. Now that he finally had their attention, he didn't want it. Humans could be uncharitable and loud about the hollow nature of salarian chests, among the many things they were uncharitable and loud about. So he walked through the crowd with as much dignity as he could and returned to the medical bay.
Sara grabbed him tightly and buried her face in the space between his shoulder and his neck. "Please don't leave me by myself," she said again.
Tann blinked at the sensation, surprised for a moment as bright white light drenched him. "It's all right," he told her. "I'm going to stay with you."
And Doctor Carlyle was furious. Tann could hear the human man's voice before he even saw him. "You need to call me if something like this happens. I don't care if I'm on lunch," he was saying to a nurse. "We need to alert security and begin a full search of every pressurized area. Christ, someone needs to tell..." Carlyle trailed off when he saw who was walking toward him with Sara. "Tann," he finished.
The relief in Carlyle's eyes didn't match his voice. Everyone else in the medical bay turned and looked as if they had never seen Tann before and never, ever wanted to see him again. The fish-mouthed man had opened his mouth so wide he resembled a deep-sea creature from Sur'Kesh.
"This is exactly why reports are required hourly," Tann declared to them all through chattering teeth.