Jason Hough - Mass Effect - Nexus Uprising

His wrist flexed in her hand, as if he intended to make a break for it, but when she braced, he didn’t move. He just scowled.

Maybe he got it. Time to find out. Taking a gamble, she eased her grip. Drew away just enough that he could peel himself off the wall, but she held onto his wrist. Pointedly.

“I’m not above kicking your ass until you drop,” she said flatly, “but I don’t want to. It’d defeat the point.”

The kid snatched his arm away, but only rolled his strained shoulder and glared at her feet. Sheepish, maybe. Or embarrassed.

Or just… lost.

Sloane backed away to give him space, but there wasn’t much room to go. She settled for leaving her back against the door, where she could watch the kid and the others. All of them looked anywhere but at her. Most at the ground.

The tension in the air wasn’t tight so much as it was heavy—a deeply rooted sense of despair. They’d given up. All of them, even scrappy Nnebron with his last flail for something that felt like victory.

Shit.

Sloane wanted to turn around and punch the door. Wanted to yell at the people who’d made the decisions that led them here. Waking Morda, that had been the worst of them all. The nuclear option when the opponent had only sticks. She wanted to wrap her hands around Tann’s skinny little pencil-neck and squeeze until he felt all the pain the krogan and her warriors had caused in that goddamned room.

Mostly, she wanted to stop replaying Calix’s death, the way his eyes widened, life abruptly snuffed out behind them.

She wanted a lot of things. What she had was the remains of a ragtag crew and the certainty, the bitter knowledge, that the leadership she’d worked for, advised, had betrayed her. Betrayed them all. She needed to make inroads somewhere. Calix had believed in this group.

Now Sloane needed them to believe in her. Like it or not.

She started from a footing she understood. “Here’s how it works. Contrary to popular rumor, there is no way that anyone will be okay with spacing us.” She regretted the time she had suggested exactly that. A moment of pure frustration, and the desire to actually solve one of the Nexus’s problems rather than kick it down the road. Now they were the problem. “At worst, they’ll want to make examples of us through some kind of public circus.”

A woman wrapped her singed arms around her waist, hugging herself with rounded shoulders. “Will we be executed?”

“ No .” The woman flinched. Sloane gritted her teeth. “No,” she said again, firm but with less bite. She forced herself to remember who these people were. Technicians, engineers, laborers. Hard working and tough as nails, but not fighters. Seen combat, sure, of the worst possible kind. But they weren’t trained soldiers, not as far as she knew. Sloane wondered briefly how many of them were of the sort that left behind checkered pasts. Secrets left back home, scrubbed from official records. And then there were the sympathizers. Last-minute converts she knew next to nothing about. She set that aside for another time. “This mission is too precious for us to lose more lives. Even they know that. But there will be consequences. The question is, are you willing to deal with them?”

Feet shuffled. Eyes shifted.

Nnebron lifted his chin. “Are you?” he asked, a challenge in his stare. Accusation flickering somewhere behind. Just like before. You aren’t one of us.

Maybe that was true. Once. Sloane clasped her hands behind her back, met his gaze with unflinching resolve. “What do you want to hear, engineer? That nobody’ll care that you and yours sparked a mutiny that killed dozens of Nexus citizens and crew?” The kid grimaced. “That you’ll get off with a slap on the wrist and a wag of the finger? What about Reg’s husband?”

That one earned a full-on flinch.

She drove it home. “You want to assume he’ll just pat you on the back and say you tried your best?”

When he blinked rapidly, she took it as a win.

She shook her head once. “Won’t happen. There will be consequences, and if you want to have any sort of life in this galaxy, you’re going to have to grit your teeth and deal with them . Starting now.”

“What about the krogan?” somebody asked.

Nnebron’s eyes sparked with renewed fury. “Yeah, what about them?” he demanded. “They didn’t even stop to negotiate, they just started killing!”

Sloane had no answer. It was true—they’d done just that. Ordered or not, it was a perfect example of just how much a “workforce” could stand in for an army. Especially a krogan workforce. To admit they’d been deliberately unleashed felt like a perfect way to get these people back on the mutiny train.

She knew exactly what Tann had hoped to accomplish by releasing Morda. The fact any of them were still alive was a fucking miracle. Surrender or no. But he’d failed at killing them off. Now he had to deal with them.

Another shake of her head drew Nnebron’s heavy eyebrows together. “The krogan put down an insurgency,” Sloane said. No salt. Just candor. It was all she had. “They won’t be reprimanded. They’ll be praised. Like it or not,” she continued while the rest shuffled and muttered, “the mutiny failed.”

He didn’t answer right away. Others threw out thoughts, suggestions, but it didn’t matter. Without Calix, they didn’t have a singular goal. An end point for which to strive. They’d stormed the barricade, and got brutalized for their efforts.

She was all that stood between them and Tann’s twisted sense of logic.

The decision was made. She read it in the slump of Nnebron’s shoulders. The hang of his head.

“Fine,” he muttered.

On that word, the others went still. Slowly, painfully, Sloane watched them try to come to grips with the universe they hadn’t expected. The one where they’d lost. No caring leadership. No fair shake. Just consequences and shame.

Sloane nodded. “Fine,” she repeated.

It was all they had.

In the end, it was all she had, too.

“This is a nightmare,” Addison declared. It was her opening salvo within seconds of striding through the office door. Caught mid-sentence with a small group of aides, Tann looked up from his informal briefing and frowned.

“I believe I specifically requested not to be distu—”

“I know what you requested.” She glared at the aides and jerked her thumb at the door in silent demand. They didn’t even look to Tann to confirm—an oversight he’d have to address sooner rather than later. They hurried out, avoiding her eyes entirely as they went.

Tann sat back in his chair—a salvaged thing from a conference room, for now—and studied the obviously ruffled director.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” she replied flatly. Rather than sit, she grabbed the back of a chair and leaned over it. It was a typical Sloane move, but Foster Addison seemed to have adapted it well. He could appreciate a fine fury when it wasn’t lobbing punches at him or aides. “We have wounded in the medi-labs, dead to tend to, a few hundred insurgents to deal with in rooms never meant to be jail cells,” she continued, more loudly with each word, “and our fucking security director—one of us , Tann—is among them!”

Tann’s eyelids tightened. He laced his fingers delicately, elbows resting on the arms of the chair. “There is nothing to get worked up about,” he said coolly. “The dead will wait until we can handle them properly, and the medics are doing all they can for those who still live.”