The Firefly (Mass Effect Andromeda)

Chapter 3

Lexi stared at Olivia in dismay. Before they could get any further a panicked voice came over comms, "We need help with the pods! Some of them were thrown loose! Oh god, they might all be dead."

Olivia paled, "They might just need a reboot." She said urgently, "It might not be too late for those people!"

"Go!" Harry almost shouted at her and she took off running, several other medics behind her. Her feet thundered down the corridor, into one of the vast rooms of pods stacked all the way to the vast ceiling.

Her eyes took in the disaster, the people swarming, including engineers, countless pods lying at all angles, some having landed on top of others. "Get power back to the ones with damaged power cells." She yelled, "Hurry!" She gazed at the mess. "Some can simply be rebooted. If the seals have broken then they're gone, put them aside." Her voice was so certain.

"I know him." An older woman said, staring down at one of the pods. Her face was chalky, helpless. The front of the pod had splintered.

"He's dead." Olivia felt her voice shake. "There's nothing you can do." It was like seeing Francis all over again. Tears welled in her eyes, her hands trembling. She stepped past to another pod, intact this time, and quickly showed another responder how to get it back on and functioning. She had never been so thankful for her father's constant talking about his work.

That was when she stumbled on a familiar face. "Dad!" She cried out, leaping to his pod controls. It was still functioning largely. He was alive. She had to take comfort in that. "Oh no. No, no, no." She whispered. "I have to keep working. Make sure I save as many as I can."

She kept going, kept issuing instructions until all the pods were reset or the inhabitants were already deceased, her voice raw, eyes continuously sliding back to her father's peaceful face. She needed to stop, to scream. The old version of herself, the one who had rebelled at acceding to her parent's hopes, who had run off with a man who abused her, would have. Now, she had to be better than herself.

"Doctor?" One of the engineers shook her arm, "We're moving all the injured pods into the medbay. What do you want us to do with the dead?"

"I...I don't know." Olivia stammered. "That's not my call." Her eyes followed her father being wheeled away. She staggered back to the cryobay, where Lexi was swamped with work.

"Goddess, that's..." She heard her say, her eyes flicking to Olivia.

"He got thrown." Olivia heard her voice crack. "There's a lot of fatalities. I saved as many as I could." She took a breath, "What's going on?"

"We lost power." Lexi said gravely, "The Hyperion is running on its reserves now, and they likely won't last."

"What happened?" Her voice was high, tightly strung as a piano cord.

"We're drifting." Someone else said, "My husband was on the bridge with the Pathfinder and the Captain. We lost telemetry. We've struck some kind of weird energy cloud." Apparently the Captain and Pathfinder had been butting heads over who was in charge in this situation.

Olivia wandered away to a window, seeing the barbed grey tendrils of the energy cloud, bronze light glowing and flaring where it touched the ship. Ahead was a planet, Habitat 7, the others had said. It was supposed to be a Golden World. It looked dead, polluted. "Not even SAM can get planetary readings." Lexi said, coming to stand beside her, "We're marooned. They've not told us yet, but we're stuck for now."