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Something called for Suvi from that womb.
Without so much as a glance she reached out for Sara’s hand and met it. She tugged it repeatedly with a childlike urgency. Her partner glanced up to her in gentle surprise but relented immediately; they took their leave from beside the Nomad, the yawning others futzing yet with their loadouts in its cabin. Her heart followed that hand from the engineering bay and down the ramp, through the chilly shade of the valley’s darkness and upon the brown lakebed, and then into the sunless aquamarine morn. But what Suvi chased had already fled behind the shaded montane frame, her Name still throttled in His maw.
In its place, an anonymous dawn announced its first self from behind the silhouette of the nearby monolith. It unsuspended her disbelief for good.
Suvi dropped her knees to the dry red clay and wrung and clasped her hands. A gloved grasp reached for her right shoulder and hesitantly squeezed it in an uncertain apology. Suvi looked up to the sharp sword, her polished arrow; but Sara’s gaze was fixed instead on the ruins up ahead. First light reflected from the N7 logo on her breast, her quiver, the brightest star in her sea.
Suvi’s gaze fell back to the ground. It carried with it her vise on her lucidity of the Pursuit. She lazily traced her fingers on the angular contours of mudcracks in her reach, eroding their edges in her absent mind’s pass. They were soft and frail to the touch but their edges upcurled as a dog’s lip in sneering mid-snarl. The bowls were encrusted within by singular bathtub rings of dry saline froth.
Sara knelt next to her, angling to set herself within Suvi’s mind. She opened her eyes with a sense of surprise.
“It must have just rained here.”
She looked back up pensively to the monolith on the horizon.
“The first time in God knows how long. I guess our reputations precede us.”
Suvi grimaced. Yes, God indeed knows how long. Sara hadn’t noticed; she was preoccupying herself with her scanner, commanding SAM in an indistinct whisper to send his analysis to Lucan at his leisure.
Its orange glow subsided a few seconds later. Sara extended a hand to Suvi to help her back to her feet. She pulled her gently into an embrace but Suvi stiffened. Sara stepped back, releasing her hold on her partner, and eyed her with a soft concern.
“What’s on your mind?”
Suvi broke gaze with her partner. For reasons swimming behind the mind’s eye she could manage little more than a stammer. She hopelessly shook her head.
Sara looked to her with a consternation before her brow relaxed.
“You look a little cold out here. Can I make you a hot chocolate back inside?”
Sara extended her hand to her with a smile. After a moment, Suvi accepted her offering in her trembling and frail relief.
Suvi closed her eyes and fixed herself on the long and lazy wavelength of her breath. Every rise of her chest doubled as the expurgation of something a little darker, a little piece of the mind from a little piece of its soul, and then a silence, snow angels before a luminous solitary self. Warm vapors from her mug wafted before her and then up and through and through her. Between their quick and little kisses she found her thawed self again.
Suvi looked up and watched the sunrise pour raw spirit over the playa, illuminating the ephemeral streambed that hugged the far side of the tilted valley. The dawn bathed Sara’s quarters in rose-blushed gold. She watched Cora take point in Sara’s place as Jaal and Scott loaded the last of their stores into the Nomad; it cast itself into the distance like a bird over some gleaming sea. After a moment, her friends vanished behind a shutter ridge in the distance.
Her fixation was broken by a gentle knock at the door.
“Come in,” she managed, hoarsely.
A hydraulic drawdown; the doors slid apart. Sara walked in with a tentative smile and a quiet hesitation in her step. She walked over to her computer and leaned against the desk. Suvi smiled sadly.
“I’m sorry.”
Suvi closed their distance, setting her drink on the table, and offered her partner a hug and a peck on her cheek. Sara held her close, her grip a touch more anxious than she had meant to let on.
She pulled away after a little while, keeping Suvi’s hands in her own, looking into her eyes with a hopeful beckoning.
“How are you feeling?”
Suvi cleared her throat nervously and doted on the question for a bit.
“Marked.”
Her voice was taut and strained. Frowning, Sara placed her black helmet on the desk. “By what? A shemrys spit on you? I’ll kick its ass.”
Suvi’s scoff eased into a small and fading smirk. Sara smiled somewhat at her modest victory.
“Sara…I don’t think I belong here.”
“If you are worried about your competence, I’ll be the latest in a long line to tell you that your record stands for itself.”
Suvi shook her head. “No. I don’t think any of us belong here. Definitely not me, and definitely not you.”
“Well, I feel like we are doing the best we can.” A crimson edge crept into Sara’s voice even as Suvi’s expression remained fogged and glassy. “A lot of people are counting on us not to fail.”
“So? A lot of people counted on us for a lot of things.”
“I have a duty to everyone – to you, for Christ’s sake – to make a livable home here in Heleus. I thought we were all on the same page about this.”
“And who do we trample to make that home? Don’t you ever feel like you are trespassing?”
“Trespassing? Trampling? Is that what we did to the angara on Havarl?”
“Every time we do this again, we bury alive the stories of a whole world beneath new geographies, new ecologies, all shifted like a switch with SAM and you and Scott at the touch of a finger.” Suvi shook her head. “We consign whole biospheres to stratigraphic memory. Entire realms of experience to windy whispers. Extinction. A brand-new Anthropocene in the span of a few standard weeks.”
“Suvi, you understand this stuff better than I do, but I was under the impression that the Remnant network interacts with each biosphere at every scale and in every niche. That the suffering you describe is only caused when that network malfunctions.”
Sara shook her head. “But this is not Havarl. The monoliths are clearly not malfunctioning here.” She frowned, clearly thrown off balance by her partner’s sudden onslaught. “So what are you even getting at?”
“Who gets to speak for the dead, Sara?”
“The Jardaan, Suvi. We didn’t put the levers there, and we sure as hell weren’t the first to touch them.”
“We don’t have to use them.”
“We don’t have a choice!”
“So is that it, then? Us or them? Who will you throw aside in the name of your self-actualization?”
“Is that what you are upset about? I’m not a fucking conquistador! On the contrary, the only thing I know is that there will be blood on my hands if this Pathfinder doesn’t pathfind!”
Sara pulled away from Suvi and put distance between them, settling in on the far side of the room. She sighed deeply in frustration.
“Look, I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I don’t know why you would say any of these things.” Sara’s voice had grown hoarse. “The survival of everything we are depends on our work, Suvi. More than you could possibly know. Who are you to speak for the dead?”
“I’m nobody, Sara. I’ll never be able to speak for anyone.” She sighed. “And I should have never come here.”
Sara’s expression softened. She paused for a moment, realizing that her fingers had been instinctually tracing the logo on her chestplate. A moment of insight dawned on her.
“Suvi, I don’t think I ever told you why I came to Andromeda.”
“You told me you were compelled by your sense of wonder. Your excitement for the unknown.”
“We fill ourselves with lots of sappy bullshit to make it all go down easier, don’t we?”
At Sara’s request, SAM produced a vid Sara had recently pulled from her father’s records aboard the Hyperion. As Suvi sat in Sara’s office chair, her eyes were fixed on the screen; the window hovered with an ominous weight over the desktop background. Sara leaned against the desk nearby, her foot tapping anxiously on the floor.
“I haven’t told Scott yet.”
She leaned over and tapped the holoscreen; Alec Ryder appeared. He was in an unfamiliar room, maybe on an Alliance space station; his eyes were ringed with bags and his voice was roughened by a passing flu or coronavirus. It was jarring for Suvi to see him, the poster child of human Initiative recruitment, undoctored and in such poor form.
“Monday, October 25, 2184. I have been monitoring Scott’s and Sara’s statuses since activating their implants after initial emplacement. It has been fourteen days since they returned home for Thanksgiving.”
Suvi looked up at Sara in confusion but she didn’t elaborate, her attention still fixed to the screen.
“Some irregularities have contributed to an arrhythmia during Scott’s October 23 08:25 EVA sortie which I believe to have rectified after the upload of the following hotfix update…”
Alec sluggishly looked down at notes off the screen on his omnitool. He barely seemed coordinated.
“Biotic Profile, version 1.4.03. No abnormal health indications for Sara, who remains stable at this time with Tech Profile version 1.7.80. I had SAM trigger a mild hemolytic episode in Scott. Nothing serious; just to worry him enough to push him to see a doctor pronto. I want someone here on Arcturus to examine him immediately for any complications SAM and I might have missed.”
The man pressed his fingers into his temples and cradled his face in his hands. He heaved a sigh.
“This better not be for nothing. They are the only hope Ellen has of ever walking tall again.”
Alec reached for his holoscreen. The recording froze as the vid terminated.
Suvi shook her head, aghast. “Sara, I’m so sorry.”
“The doctor noticed something was up and talked to Scott’s CO. They thought it was red sand at first. A few months later, my brother was court-martialed for using an illegal AI to bolster his biotic performance. The kicker was that neither of us had known that Dad had given us those implants in the first place.”
Sara grinned darkly. “Not that anybody believed us. Honestly, I was the lucky one. When the Alliance investigators found out about me, all I got was fired and then expelled from university.”
The mask had slipped a little. Suvi didn’t enjoy seeing Sara in anguish. “That’s just the way he was, and not just to us. Leave it to Dad to send my dying mom to Andromeda in cryostasis without her consent, and in spite of her explicit last wishes. You know how it goes. Asking for forgiveness instead of permission, and all of that.”
“You followed your dad to Andromeda even after what he did?”
“Well, there weren’t many options after Scott’s trial. And we didn’t know many of the more offensive details, such as this little episode here. But it turns out there are hundreds of files just like it. We never knew how intimately he experimented on us in the years before we left the Milky Way. He only just unlocked these records from SAM’s memory array now that we’ve learned about Mom.”
Sara shook her head with a scoff. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“It’s like we’re living on his rails. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing or what I wanted. He pushed Scott towards the military, and me towards frontier field science. He got me in with Silva on Mars. And he alone chose when it all ended, when he convinced us to go to Andromeda…when he backed each of us into a corner after he made the Alliance crush us. And he chose me, a goddamn bumbling child, to be his successor over his own trained second. Even as a Pathfinder I only ever had a fighting chance because he had synchronized me so completely with his SAM.”
Sara looked morosely over the lakebed. It shimmered inhospitably in the rising heat of the waking light.
“And now he is gone. And, as it always goes, we are left picking up after him. ‘Living’ his shitty romantic dream. So Suvi, I do think I can speak for the dead. I think each and every one of us here can. I think we are always speaking for them, in every little and every big thing we do.”
Sara fell silent for a moment. She took a few deep breaths in an attempt to recompose herself.
“None of us belongs here, Suvi. Least of all myself.”
Suvi’s mind raced after Sara took her leave from her quarters.
What was this all about, anyway? A price was paid, but at what cost? What did I surrender to blaze my own trail beyond these barest heights? To drive on towards this galaxy of scorching winds and suns? His mountains, always His mountains, but never His raised roads. I’m just a little girl who hyperfixated on amoebae and topologies and the way that amoebae crawl over topologies. A little girl who was too distracted to remember what actually kept her warm all these years.
She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut.
I guess this is my desolate heritage, now: a galaxy where everything is different but is also exactly the same, and yet at the same time is so much less than I ever thought I'd have. It was cruel of me to lay all this on her. It isn’t her fault.
The door opened again. Sara didn’t bother to knock this time. But she seemed anxious rather than angry. Her thoughts were desperate to burst forth into words, yet her voice was uneven and shy.
“Hey, can I ask you to take care of something for me?”
Suvi nodded, meekly inviting Sara’s approach. She was holding something in her hand. When she unfurled her fingers she revealed an angular fragment of a white-weathered carbonate that was smoothly worn on one of its sides. She placed it in Suvi’s palm.
Suvi inspected the sample gingerly. She looked up to Sara with some confusion. “We have never traveled to a place in Heleus that’s had a dolostone that looked like this.”
“That’s right.”
“Where did you find this?”
“Dunn may have saved the Hyperion from the Archon, but she couldn’t save our ready room.”
Suvi nodded slowly. “I see.”
“I still have most of his stuff, but it feels like this is the only fragment of him I have left.” Sara sighed. “The rock that saved him on Rundle wasn’t around to catch him again. But maybe somehow I still can.”
“Sara…I can’t take this.”
“You misunderstand. You’ve always had it.”
Sara pulled Suvi into an embrace and gently planted a kiss on her forehead.
“If you want to step away from all of this, I’ll completely understand. And I’ll follow you, in time.”
Suvi nodded sadly.
“Thank you, Sara.”
She took her leave, planting one last kiss on Sara’s cheek on the way out. An affirmation, she hoped. As she ambled slowly through the empty hallways back to her station, Suvi held firmly onto her beloved. She resolved not to let go, never again.