Qetsi'Olam vas Keelah Si'yah: captain of the quarian ark

Captain Qetsi'Olam vas Keelah Si'yah was the quarian commander of the ark Keelah Si'yah, one of the colonization vessels of the Andromeda Initiative, carrying a contingent of several species across some six hundred years of dark space toward a new home in the Heleus Cluster. She was hyperopic and severely serious about nearly everything, from nutrient paste to the destiny of the quarian race, yet she carried a magnetic personality and the drive to charm others into following her dreams. Behind that vision lay a secret that would nearly destroy her ship.

Early life#

Qetsi was born aboard the liveship Chayym and lost her mother when she was a child. During the Battle of the Citadel in 2183, the Chayym was attacked by the geth, and afterward she and her childhood friend Malak were thought to be its only survivors. The two spent their Pilgrimage together at a salarian biodiversity station, where a cruel prank compromised her suit and left her lungs infected with a hostile algae. She and Malak devised a remedy and carried it back to the Migrant Fleet, where they were assigned to the same freighter.

Aboard that vessel she entered a relationship with Senna'Nir, which became a brief love triangle before she chose another officer; she and Senna parted as amicable exes. In their younger years she, Senna, and Malak had all radicalized and joined the Nedas Movement, branding its motto onto their arms. Senna drifted away from politics, but Qetsi and Malak rose to lead the movement, and its dream of a fresh beginning for the quarians became the engine of her ambition.

Command of the Keelah Si'yah#

When Qetsi learned of the Andromeda Initiative she saw a chance to turn Nedas ideals into reality. Given command of the ark Keelah Si'yah, she persuaded Senna'Nir to serve as her second in command, the two promising one another to set aside racial bias for the good of the multispecies passengers. Her progressivism had limits, however. Distrustful of artificial intelligence, she refused to let an unshackled ship intelligence run the vessel and allowed a staunchly anti-geth officer to take the role of quarian Pathfinder. As captain she wore a black suit with gray mesh beneath a violet hood.

The Fortinbras Plague#

Thirty years before the ark's projected arrival in Andromeda, a shipwide emergency forced Senna'Nir to revive Qetsi early. She found the Keelah Si'yah crippled by failing systems and a spreading pathogen, soon named the Fortinbras Plague by the elcor doctor Yorrik. With internal communications down, Qetsi worked to reach scattered crew, rallied the passengers who had woken in their thousands, and used a patched public address system to keep them informed and to broadcast a distress call she doubted the other arks would answer. Throughout the crisis her composure and force of personality held the frightened survivors together, even as her own suit was breached and she was assaulted by the delirious and the desperate.

In truth the plague was her own doing. Qetsi had designed the bioweapon while Malak wrote a worm to incubate it quietly and cover its tracks. She had meant only to depopulate the dominant Milky Way races and give the quarians their chance to lead in a new galaxy, infecting the most sociable of the drell contingent through scented perfumes fitted to their cryopods. Malak's flawed handling of the temperature controls let the agent mutate across the decades until it turned lethal and contagious to every species aboard, a catastrophe she had never sought. The hatred behind the scheme had been born in the prank that nearly killed her on her Pilgrimage and the long convalescence that followed, during which she taught herself to build such a weapon and hardened her belief in an extragalactic home.

Exposure and death#

The drell investigator Anax Therion came to distrust the captain after recalling a murder she had witnessed that bore Qetsi's figure and voice, and with Senna'Nir she followed her until the two overheard Qetsi and Malak speak openly of their plot. Confronted, Qetsi admitted everything. She insisted she was no genocidal maniac, pointing out that she had never loosed the plague in the Milky Way, and begged that her part be kept secret, fearing the backlash her people would suffer, preferring death to being exposed.

Her judges chose not to wake the ship's full council but to decide among themselves, and Qetsi agreed to mend what she had done. Learning from Yorrik that she was immune to the plague and therefore essential to the cure, she allowed herself to be injected with the only sample of the retrovirus. She then stripped off her suit and walked nearly bare through all six of the ark's environmental zones, touching the passengers to spread the cure among them, enduring the high gravity of one zone and the hostility of the batarians she passed. She at last expired in the ammonia-saturated volus zone, weeping and singing a quarian lullaby, her final thoughts turning to her lost parents and to Senna and Malak. Decades later her distress signal was received in the Heleus Cluster, though its source proved difficult to trace, leaving the fate and position of the Keelah Si'yah uncertain.