Keelah Si'yah

The Keelah Si'yah, Khelish for "by the homeworld I hope to find one day," was an Andromeda Initiative starship, part of the plan to settle the Andromeda galaxy. A quarian vessel unlike any other in the fleet, it was engineered to carry six distinct species across the six-hundred-year void between galaxies, ferrying some twenty thousand colonists in cryosleep toward a new home. Drawing on the quarians' long experience of life aboard the Migrant Fleet, its builders designed it to be lived on indefinitely should no suitable world await them.

A ship for six peoples#

Where the Initiative's other arks were derived from standard designs and adjusted to suit the majority race aboard each, the Keelah Si'yah was engineered to meet the needs of six distinct peoples. It was fundamentally a quarian ship, but the Initiative opened it to others, and elcor, drell, volus, batarian, hanar, and quarian applicants all signed on to start anew far from the Milky Way. The quarians, long accustomed to spaceborne life, wanted a vessel that could be inhabited indefinitely in case no suitable worlds were found, and reconciling the disparate environmental requirements of so many species created technical challenges that delayed the launch. A remote outpost, Hephaestus Station in the Caleston Rift, served as the ark's berth during the final stages of its construction and departure.

The known population at launch numbered roughly twenty thousand, including some 3,311 elcor, around four thousand quarians, around 4,564 drell, around three thousand volus, a few hundred batarians, and an unspecified number of hanar. Where the other arks each carried a single Pathfinder, the Keelah Si'yah carried three, each representing two of its races.

Design and systems#

The ark retained the general outline of its sister vessels, four fins arranged in an X around a central superstructure, measuring about a kilometer and a half long and weighing seventeen million tons, but little else about it matched. Multiple layers of oscillating shields protected the hull from impacts at relativistic speed, the outermost cycling to maintain the resonance of the inner layers. Internally the vessel held at least fourteen decks linked by a tram system, with a quarian residential zone, a medbay, cargo holds repurposed to house the colossal elcor cryopods, and a data hub built to keep functioning even during power failures.

At least eight cryobays held the frozen population, most of the cryosystems cut from a standard mold save for the elcor's outsized cryo-garages. The ship was run by seventeen independent virtual intelligence systems sharing a single datacore, the main interface program named K after the ship and tuned to a prim, genderless voice. In keeping with the quarians' aversion to artificial intelligence, the ark's onboard assistant was shackled and hardcoded never to become a true intelligence. At the heart of the vessel lay the Radial, a hexagonal chamber where the six environmental zones converged behind thick glass walls that doubled as airlocks, allowing members of different species to meet without lengthy environmental adjustment.

Governance and the Sleepwalker teams#

Because the voyage spanned centuries, the Keelah Si'yah relied on rotating crews known as Sleepwalker teams, each typically drawn from all six races, who were woken at intervals to perform monitoring and maintenance before returning to their cryopods. If a Sleepwalker fell ill, standard procedure was to place them back in cryostasis and revive them on the Nexus for treatment. Shipwide authority rested with the Quorum, a governing body of two representatives from each race, elected before departure, who were to be revived at the journey's midpoint to review the ship's status and again upon arrival to decide the colonists' next course.

The Fortinbras Plague#

The vessel launched for intergalactic space in 2186, escaping the Milky Way shortly after the batarian world of Camala was struck by the Reapers. Unknown to all aboard, a tech specialist had been anonymously paid before launch to install hidden software and a biological agent within the ship. Roughly three quarters of the way to Andromeda the ark's own captain triggered them, loosing a worm that masked the spread of an engineered virus. A flaw in the worm code raised cryogenic temperatures enough to let the virus replicate and mutate within its drell hosts over decades until it turned lethal and began jumping between species.

As the malware spread, the ship's systems failed: lights would not respond, queries to the virtual intelligence returned wrong answers, water and communications broke down, trams stopped, cryopods thawed prematurely, and the exterior shields began failing on a regular cycle, exposing the hull to debris at speeds far beyond what it could survive. Sleepwalker Team Blue-7 was revived to find passengers dying while the sensors reported nothing wrong. Improvising a diagnostics platform from salvaged materials, the team contended with a growing crowd of awakened and infected colonists and a ship that could no longer feed them, its food stores having been kept minimal on the assumption that the Nexus would provide.

A breakthrough came through an ancestral intelligence, a quarian forebear's recorded mind, which was uploaded into the ark to overwrite the corrupted main interface, purge the worm, and assist in synthesizing a cure for the newly named Fortinbras Plague. The captain's sabotage was exposed, and rather than wake the full Quorum the team's leader and two of his companions rendered judgement themselves. The captain atoned by becoming the sole living carrier of the vaccine, moving unsuited through each racial habitat to spread the cure as widely as possible. Once the crisis passed, the survivors ejected the dead from the ship and returned to cryosleep, taking care to isolate the Pathfinders and their equipment throughout, their task of securing new homeworlds judged too important to risk.

Aftermath#

Long after the plague had been overcome and the kett invasion of the Heleus Cluster defeated, a transmission from the Keelah Si'yah was picked up by Port Meridian, warning others to stay away despite the danger having ended decades earlier. The signal had bounced through too many relays to trace, and the ark's location remained unknown for the time being.