Ethereal Effect. Chapter 18. (Patreon)

The Aroons turned out to be an amusing species. Small—between one meter ten and one meter forty tall—with large, proportionate heads and two little antenna-like horns on their foreheads. The classic little green men so beloved by American films of the 1950s. Back on Earth, those images had been born from fear of the unknown and the Cold War. Now they stood before me—alive, real, terrified half to death, yet trying to preserve their dignity.

I looked at them and thought: there it was, a greeting from my past life. Only now I was the alien stepping out of the flying saucer. The irony was almost too perfect.

Small and physically weak—even the strongest Aroon would lose a fistfight to a Mortal Aiterri, never mind a Blessed under reinforcement. Yet they had still developed to roughly the level of Earth in the 1950s and 1960s. Radio, television, nuclear weapons, the first orbital stations. And, most impressive of all, they were successfully repelling attacks by aliens from space.

I reviewed the intelligence reports while the shuttle descended. The Aroons had been fighting for several months. The first invasion wave—fifty ships—had destroyed one of their largest cities, but the Aroons managed to regroup and drive the bugs off the planet at the cost of catastrophic losses. The second wave—one hundred ships—acted more intelligently, dispersing across every continent, but the Aroons kept fighting. I was certain that, given a year or two, they would have crushed every hive the cockroaches had managed to establish through sheer numbers. Yes, it would have required putting the entire planetary economy on a war footing, and the losses might have reached hundreds of millions of lives. But they would have done it. Those tiny creatures with horns on their foreheads were astonishingly stubborn.

That was assuming another wave did not arrive later, of course. And it would have. According to the relay data, the bugs had activated two more systems. How many ships they had there was unknown. But if every wave was twice the size of the last, the third would bring two hundred ships. The fourth, four hundred. The Aroons would not survive.

And they really were rachni. I confirmed it after watching recordings of the ground battles provided by the Aroons. Some of the specimens had those unmistakable shrimp-like bodies—the same ones I remembered from the game. Classic rachni soldiers: chitinous carapaces, multi-jointed limbs, the characteristic shape of the head. There could be no mistake.

But that was where the resemblance to the game ended, because Mass Effect canon had never shown the other kinds of bugs. I did not remember those dangerous two-meter-at-the-shoulder brutes whose back-mounted guns could punch through any military vehicle. They had appeared in neither the codex nor the cutscenes nor the descriptions of the Rachni Wars. Yet they existed. The surveillance footage from Tedros left no room for doubt. One such creature had burned through an entire tank column in a minute.

Nor did I remember enormous ten-meter crablike monsters whose portable shields could withstand bombing runs by fighters. Yet those existed too. The Aroons had lost three squadrons trying to destroy a single specimen.

It did not fit the picture. I remembered what rachni soldiers looked like—shrimp-like creatures, dangerous but predictable. Yet the game had contained nothing resembling what I was seeing now. Two-meter brutes with guns on their backs. Ten-meter crabs with shields capable of surviving fighter bombardment. The variety of forms, the tactical division of roles, the adaptation to different combat conditions—all of it pointed to a species that had evolved specifically for war.

Either that, or the game I had once played on Earth had been heavily simplified. Which was entirely possible. The creators of Mass Effect could not have described every detail of the universe. Engine limitations, budgets, deadlines—all of that had reduced the rachni in the game to one or two unit types. Reality, as usual, was far more complicated. Thinking about it, that explained why the Rachni Wars had lasted three hundred years. The krogan could hardly have spent three centuries fighting a handful of identical shrimp. An army with dozens of specialized combat forms, however, was another matter entirely.

A detailed examination of the wrecked ships produced an unexpected result. What we had taken for warships turned out to be civilian colony vessels. They had not been designed for war at all—at least, not in the sense we gave the word. Their primary purpose was simple and efficient: land on a planet, establish a foothold, and then be broken down into resources for the hives. The hull served simultaneously as transport, construction material, and the first line of defense. The chitinous armor that had impressed us with its durability was not military armor at all, but structural material. The bugs simply built their ships from the same substance their own bodies were made of.

That explained a great deal. The absence of spinal guns. The poor rate of fire. The low projectile velocity. They were not meant to fight in space. They only needed to ward off possible threats during approach. Their weapons were defensive, not offensive. The true strength of the rachni lay not in their ships, but in what happened after they landed.

Once firmly established on a planet—especially one with life—they built catacombs that were impossible to clear without a bloody assault. Even with orbital support. Beneath Tedros, the city where the first wave had landed and where part of the second later came down, a tunnel network had formed that rivaled a multilayered subway system, and it was still expanding. Our sensors could not penetrate far enough. Signals vanished amid the interwoven chitin walls. The Aroons, who had spent months assaulting those catacombs, knew more than we did, but even their data was fragmentary. Every tunnel could lead into an ambush. Every chamber could contain a nest of hundreds. Every meter had to be paid for in blood.

At the center of every disabled ship was also a gigantic insectoid creature. It could be nothing other than a rachni queen. Preliminary estimates placed the weight of her brain alone at several tons, and it was not a distributed neural node like those of the soldiers, but a concentrated organ protected by several layers of chitin. The queen controlled the ship. She controlled the soldiers. She probably controlled the entire colony. And she remained alive even after the vessel had been reduced to a perforated hulk.

We decided to capture one queen alive. Extracting her required my personal involvement, given the enormous danger posed even by a damaged ship with a surviving queen inside. We had to fight through dozens of soldiers, heaps of chitinous wreckage, and traps the bugs had managed to arrange despite decompression and total power loss. Sensing the threat, the queen mobilized every remaining defender. Even so, we succeeded. I personally burned a path to the central chamber. The battle lasted four hours. We lost two powerful Blessed and had another dozen wounded. The queen was subdued with a directed lightning discharge—we had to strike with precision to avoid killing her.

That carcass, along with many still-living captured rachni, was loaded aboard a separate frigate and taken beyond the system. We had yet to decide what to do with the creatures or how to keep them imprisoned. When Emberlis learned about it, she would undoubtedly suggest a dozen possibilities, from experimentation to interrogation. The rachni had killed hundreds of millions of sapient beings. They had attacked without warning or negotiation. Apparently, they did not regard other species as anything but resources. Nothing good awaited them.

Nor did anything good await Aroon civilization. At one of our first diplomatic meetings, I laid out the situation without diplomatic ornament. They had not even been fighting soldiers, but ordinary colonists. The rachni regarded them not as an enemy, but as local pests—termites to be exterminated before settlement. Even if the Aroons repelled this wave, what would happen when the rachni came to see how their colonists were doing? When not forty or one hundred ships arrived, but three hundred? When the fleet included not civilian vessels, but actual warships? The Aroons would simply be destroyed, like an anthill obstructing a construction site.

The protectorate treaty was simple and unambiguous. We would leave the Aroons the right to make their own laws, provided those laws did not contradict the laws of the Aiterri Dominion, and we would assume responsibility for their defense. In return, they would lose the right to conduct any foreign policy, and all their citizens would become Dominion citizens with the status of Mortals. In crude terms, the species became a single Great House—one without any Gifted representatives and therefore without the right to take part in the Assembly of Great Houses, but one that possessed an entire planet of its own. Did that sound unfair? Perhaps. But the alternative was complete extermination.

Why did the Aiterri need this? It was the question I expected from the Council, and the question they did indeed ask. If the rachni had civilian vessels, then they would also have military ones. And those would certainly be far harder for us to defeat. So why involve ourselves in someone else's war?

The answer was simple: we were already involved. If we refused to fight now, the rachni would first seize the Aroon system, process its resources, increase their numbers, and then attack the Eos system—the lizards' home—through the relay. We would have to fight them anyway, only the enemy would be stronger.

Of course, we could destroy the local relay. That would eradicate all life in the system, but it would sever the route to us. Yet what if the rachni opened another relay? Destroy that one too? And the next? Would we keep detonating relays one after another in the hope that the bugs could not travel without them, losing with every explosion a system that might otherwise have become ours?

If, on the other hand, we entered a war that could no longer be avoided, we would gain a loyal planet populated by ten billion xenos. That was more than the total population of all sapient beings in the Dominion combined. A little over eight billion Aiterri currently lived and worked on Aetris itself. Eirena held ten million Aiterri and roughly fifty million lizards. The remaining colonies together held just over twenty-five million Aiterri. Altogether, less than nine billion. Here, on a single planet, there were ten.

Naturally, our plans for the next century called for doubling our population through ectogenesis and colonization. Even then, however, the Aroon system would remain the second-greatest economic power in the Dominion. A single Great House without Gifted members, but with a planet inhabited by stubborn, industrious beings grateful for their salvation. They would make excellent citizens.

Only a month after our arrival in the system, the protectorate treaty was signed. The Council's decision took most of that time. They discussed many aspects, from the moral necessity of saving another species to the exact terms of the agreement. In the end, however, the decision passed without serious opposition. The Council was now an exceptionally cohesive institution. Every member cared about the welfare of the species and had assumed responsibility for one direction of its development. Silvana merely had to keep a close watch over them, frequently putting the younger Eternals in their place through strength, wealth, and authority when they forgot who was in charge.

***

The moment the treaty was signed, we began to act. Diplomacy was diplomacy, but real power meant a fleet in orbit and an army on the ground. Everything else was words.

In fact, real armies had begun arriving in the system a month earlier, immediately after the first diplomatic meeting between the Aroons and me, the representative of the Aiterri Dominion. More than half of all our warships and all three cruisers entered the Aroon system to prepare for a possible rachni attack. If the bugs decided to send a third wave, they would not encounter a handful of defenders armed with primitive weapons, but an armada capable of erasing a small civilization from the face of the galaxy.

Cargo ships that had previously carried goods between worlds connected by active relays now transported soldiers and military equipment to the relay in the system. One should not forget that, in addition to serving as interstellar catapults, the relays possessed extensive living quarters capable of housing as many as ten thousand permanent residents. That was where we transferred our Mortal armies.

Once the treaty was signed, we began establishing military bases on the planet itself. In addition to bringing tens of thousands of Mortal Aiterri trained for war and several thousand lizards, we also recruited local Aroons into the newly formed armed forces. That was where the problems I had expected, but hoped to avoid, emerged. They were very weak. Not in spirit—their spirit was perfectly sound. Physically. A standard personal resonance shield weighed only ten kilograms and was carried on a soldier's back like a backpack, yet for the Aroons it was effectively too heavy. They could lift it and even move comfortably with it during a short skirmish, but an assault while carrying such protection was out of the question. A ten-kilogram shield on the back of a creature weighing thirty or forty kilograms made it slow, clumsy, and quick to exhaust.

At the same time, every soldier assaulting an ant nest had to wear a respirator constantly, and in some sections of a hive, a fully enclosed breathing system. The air was saturated with spores and toxins released by the bugs as part of their biological processes. The total weight of the equipment—the shield, weapons, ammunition, breathing system, and enough water and food for a prolonged battle—came to roughly forty kilograms. Forty kilograms. The average weight of an adult Aroon.

The result was that, if we wanted to avoid the monstrous losses the Aroons had suffered while repelling the first wave, we would have to assault the ant nests ourselves. Mortal Aiterri in reinforced armor, equipped with full shields and weapons capable of piercing chitin. Lizards—tough, powerful, and willing to enter the worst of the fighting. And Blessed, deployed selectively to the most dangerous sectors where magical support was required. The Aroons were assigned an auxiliary role: reconnaissance, logistics, flank security, and clearing tunnels after the main defenses had been breached. They grumbled. They wanted to fight for their planet as equals beside us. But General Growl, to his credit, understood that grumbling was preferable to graves.

It proved a very difficult task. Unpleasant as it was to admit, a single enemy combat unit was stronger than one of our ordinary Mortal soldiers. Even the weakest worker—the "shrimp-like" type—could lift around a hundred kilograms, twice its own body weight, without any sign of reinforcement. That was why their shields were five times stronger than our personal barriers, while their shots could drain one of ours in only ten seconds of continuous fire. Ten seconds, and a soldier was left unprotected. After that, it was merely a matter of technique. Or, more accurately, claws.

Our Mortals took casualties. Not losses as catastrophic as those suffered by the Aroons during the first wave, but enough to make command nervous. Every fallen soldier was a trained professional who had been transported across half the galaxy, and there was no one on-site to replace them. The Aroons were desperate to fight, but their physical limitations had not vanished.

The Blessed performed better. With their bodies reinforced, they could wear the heaviest armor, carry more weapons, and alternate mass-rifle fire with magical attacks, holding an entire tunnel almost alone. One Blessed in a narrow passage was worth a platoon of Mortals. They raised a barrier, absorbed the incoming fire, and when the enemy came too close, answered with lightning and flame.

But they died too. Even the most powerful and expensive shields overloaded under the concentrated fire the rachni brought down on our forces. When three of the two-meter specimens with back-mounted guns engaged a single Blessed and focused on the same point, the barrier collapsed within seconds. Without it, even a reinforced body could not withstand direct hits. We lost two hundred Blessed in the first month of the assault.

Most of the military vehicles fielded by the Council's army were poorly suited to cave warfare. Thunder-4 tanks had been built for open fields, armored spearheads, and mass breakthroughs, not narrow tunnels with low ceilings. Where we could deploy them, however, they performed superbly. Their immensely strong frontal armor was nearly impervious to the weapons carried by the two-meter specimens. The enemy had almost none of its slow but heavily protected ten-meter units left. The few that had attempted to break out of the encirclement at the beginning of the fighting had been destroyed by our aircraft.

The forces of the Great Houses provided invaluable assistance during the assaults. They eagerly sent their merchant ships loaded with combat suits to aid the army, and those machines proved magnificent. Some models, resembling enormous humanoid tanks on massive legs, could conduct a breakthrough alone. A three-meter machine equipped with an ether core, a shield, and heavy weapons would charge into a tunnel, absorb the fire of an entire nest, and methodically burn out everything alive as it advanced meter by meter. Where a squad of Mortals would have spent an hour and lost half its number, a combat suit finished the task in ten minutes and emerged with a battered shield but an intact pilot.

The Council's army had no such machines of its own. A combat suit cost as much as three tanks, and an ordinary tank was far better in many circumstances—faster on the march, easier to maintain, more stable on open ground. We had regarded the machines as expensive toys of the Great Houses, built solely to bypass strict limits on troop numbers. We could never have imagined that those toys would prove not useless financial anchors on House balance sheets, but a key element of underground warfare.

In that fashion, with mixed success, we dealt with every ant nest over the course of a month and a half. It would be an exaggeration to say the campaign demanded titanic effort—we had begun with superiority in both numbers and technology—but we took pains to study the enemy because we were certain this would not be our last encounter with them. The rachni had activated two neighboring relays. Somewhere beyond them, there were almost certainly more systems. And when they came again, we needed to know everything about them.

There had been an idea to smoke the creatures out of the catacombs with chemical agents. Cheap, efficient, and requiring no assault. But those creatures could survive even in space, sealing breaches and switching to anaerobic respiration. Their resistance to toxins proved comparable to their resistance to radiation—which meant almost absolute. Even if we discovered a substance toxic enough to penetrate their defenses, the creatures would simply collapse several ceilings, isolate the contaminated sector, and dig a new one elsewhere. So we had to proceed with extreme caution, clearing the tunnels one by one.

Only the very first ant nest remained—the one formed where the first ships had fallen before our arrival. And that presented a severe problem. The radiation levels in the area were lethal. While repelling the first wave, the Aroons had detonated dozens of nuclear warheads in the sky above Tedros, and all that fallout had settled over the city. The bugs did not care. We did. Even soldiers in combat suits accumulated a fatal dose by the end of a single day's fighting. Even the bodies of the Blessed, capable of enduring what would kill a Mortal in minutes, could not cope with such exposure. We could send neither tanks, suits, nor mages into the area. No one could remain long enough to conduct a complete purge.

That was where the units recruited from the lizards distinguished themselves. In fully enclosed suits with enhanced radiation shielding, the lizards could remain in the contaminated zone for more than three days, then withdraw calmly to recover from radiation poisoning. Physicians predicted full recovery within six months—and that was without magic or ether support, purely through their own biology. Astonishingly durable creatures. Especially considering that Eirena had never presented conditions that would have forced the lizards to evolve such defenses. It was simply a genetic lottery that had gifted them bodies capable of recovering from doses lethal to most species known to us.

I did not take part in the battles myself. First, I was a diplomatic figure and the representative of the entire Dominion. My presence on the planet was largely symbolic, and risking that symbol in the tunnels would have been foolish. Second, the situation did not particularly require me. The troops were successfully destroying one hive after another, and powerful though my Gift was, it would not have changed the course of the war. Third, in the hardest fighting inside those mines, I faced a genuine chance of death. I could not leave my species alone with an interstellar war that was only beginning. I had no right.

***

Six months later. Bridge of the heavy cruiser Enterprise. Captain Kirk.

What can be accomplished in six months of active preparation for a space battle? At once, a great deal—and very little. Paradoxically, time passed both quickly and slowly. Every day brought new ships, new faces, new intelligence reports, yet the sense of an approaching storm never faded. We waited. And prepared.

Because transit through a relay took only seconds, the defensive fleet continued to grow throughout our entire stay in the system. Ships arrived one after another—frigates from Eos, frigates from other colonies, transports converted into temporary combat platforms. Everything capable of firing a weapon and maintaining a shield was drawn toward the relay. For the first time in its history, the Dominion was conducting a full-scale mobilization beyond its home system, and the scale impressed even me.

Unfortunately, there was no way to create meaningful fortifications in space. Minefields were ineffective because of the enormous distances and ships' defensive systems. An enemy vessel would not blindly approach an unidentified object. It would simply fire at it, and the mine would evaporate without harming anyone. Defense in space was not trenches and bunkers. It was firepower and coordination. Our preparations therefore centered on maintaining a defensive formation in which a ship whose shields had reached critical levels could take cover behind fresher vessels, giving its barriers time to recover. We practiced the tactic for months—first in simulations, then during exercises. Frigates learned to exchange positions within seconds, cruisers covered withdrawing ships, and the formation rearranged itself without gaps or pauses. Spock called it a ballet. I called it "our only chance not to die in the first ten minutes of battle."

Even so, the defensive fleet was formidable. Three state-of-the-art cruisers and more than fifty frigates—an armada greater than any the Dominion had ever assembled. According to the analysts, if every rachni ship resembled those we had encountered in the first clashes, our fleet could grind down wave after wave without losing momentum. If they deployed five or six hundred ships against us at once—well, we would defeat them. At the cost of the entire fleet, but we would defeat them. Fifty frigates, each capable of destroying two or three enemy vessels alone, plus three cruisers, each worth an entire squadron—that was a force no one could ignore.

The Aiterri had already claimed this system as their own, and we had no intention of surrendering it to anyone else.

Both enemy systems accessible from the relay in the Aroon system had been activated. That meant the rachni were firmly established on the far side and possessed at least operational ships there. They could arrive in our system at any moment.

It was astonishing how easy the activation codes for a relay were to find. Like a lock with the key left beneath the doormat. Deactivating a relay, however, was impossible. No shutdown codes existed. No emergency protocols. The station had been designed to operate forever—or until someone destroyed it along with the entire system.

And that raised the question: how did one defend a system that already had a fine road leading straight into it? The enemy could appear at any moment, without warning, directly beside the relay, and would not need to spend months in FTL transit. They needed seconds. Enter the code, and they were here. We maintained a permanent cordon at the relay, of course, but what if the enemy committed everything it possessed to a breakthrough? What if there were not fifty or one hundred of them, but a thousand? We would not hold.

That strategic vulnerability was precisely why the Aiterri continued developing their own methods of interstellar travel independent of the network. Frigates equipped with Unified Cores could reach any colony without relays—slowly, but surely. Cruisers like my Enterprise, unfortunately, lacked that capability. And if the network collapsed, we would collapse with it.

"Sir, the relay is activating. We are not expecting any new arrivals. The nearest transport is not due for another three hours."

Spock delivered the report in her usual impassive tone, but I had known her too long not to notice the faint tension around her eyes. The relay had activated outside the scheduled window. That could mean only one thing.

"Fleet-wide alert. All ships prepare to repel an attack."

We did not have long to wait. Within a minute, ships began arriving in the system. I prepared myself to see something new—the warships we had discussed so often—but praise Aellarin, they were merely colony vessels. The same seven-hundred-meter chitinous hulks. A familiar and well-understood enemy.

"One hundred and fifty targets, Captain. Targets assigned."

"Open fire when ready. Destroy every vessel."

Before we had managed to bring down the shields of even ten ships, however, the rest began moving toward the relay. That was unexpected. The colonizers were not known for tactical flexibility, yet now they acted with surprising coordination—covering one another, maneuvering, evading fire. Most importantly, they had no intention of accepting battle.

"Captain, the ships are attempting to use the relay again."

"They're trying to escape. Don't let them get away!"

Unfortunately, there were too many enemies. Even with our overwhelming firepower, our fleet required at least several hours to destroy an armada of that size. Bringing down a shield was not enough. A ship still had to be targeted and, quite simply, reached. Space battles occurred across enormous distances, and our weapons could fire effectively only out to forty or fifty thousand kilometers. Beyond that, projectile flight time increased to as much as two minutes—more than enough for an enemy vessel to maneuver significantly and keep slipping away from our salvos.

As a result, more than eighty enemy ships escaped through the relay. We inflicted horrific losses on the alien fleet. Seventy vessels remained in the system as wreckage and lifeless drifting hulks. If those had been our ships, the entire Dominion would have spent decades replacing them. But, as we had already learned, the loss of one hundred and fifty ships in the first two fleets had been insignificant to this species, given that they had sent assistance after so much time. Even if they did not know the colonization had failed—which appeared to be the case—their confidence in their own strength was a dreadful confirmation that gigantic seven-hundred-meter ships were normal for them. A civilization like that had to possess thousands.

"Fleet order: continue finishing off the damaged vessels. I want no living rachni left in this system within half an hour."

"Frigate Kaina Thorn and frigate Darius Vell, prepare to transit through the relay into systems AR-R-02 and AR-R-03."

There was no longer any point concealing our presence in the system. The eighty escaped ships would spread word of us through all their hives before we could even complete the battle assessment. I therefore dispatched reconnaissance into the enemy systems immediately. Contingency plans for a variety of situations had been ready for six months, and I did not need to consult Lord Norris. He had given me authority, and I intended to use it.

Within half an hour, I could observe two very different situations. The rachni fleet that had escaped from us had just entered the system assigned to Darius Vell. The frigate emerged directly amid the enemy ships and immediately came under fire. Under heavy attack, with almost all its shields gone, it managed to break beyond weapon range and flee deeper into the system. For some reason, the rachni did not pursue it—perhaps they were conserving fuel, or perhaps they had other orders.

For two days, the ship traveled toward the system's only terrestrial planet before unmistakable rachni warships came out to meet it. They were roughly the same size as the colony vessels, but everything about their appearance said these were creatures best left unchallenged. Their lines were more predatory. Their guns were longer. Most importantly, there were many of them. Ten such ships were moving to intercept Darius Vell.

The first shot erased the frigate's shields completely. The second damaged the propulsion system in the stern. Then one of the enemy vessels began to approach—slowly, inexorably, like a predator certain of its prey.

"Sir, they are closing on the ship." Spock stared at the transmission with widened eyes. Even her composure had cracked.

"They want our technology," said Astaroth Kryptman, one of the Inquisitors who had arrived with Lord Norris and had shown little activity until that moment. "Judging by what we have seen, their technology is poorly developed. They have no independent faster-than-light travel, only a crude imitation sufficient for relay transit. Nor do they possess the laser systems our ships use against guided missiles and small craft. And they lack any proper means of communication between systems, otherwise they would not have sent a third wave of colonists without knowing the first two had failed. Order the ship to self-destruct, Captain. The enemy cannot be allowed to obtain our technology."

He did not finish. The connection vanished. Darius Vell had destroyed itself. The crew made the decision a fraction of a second before the order could reach them. I stared in silence at the frigate's extinguished marker on the tactical display. One hundred and thirty-six Aiterri. The best of the best. They had not died in battle. They had chosen death to deny the enemy the key to our technology.

"May Aellarin guard their souls," the Inquisitor said calmly.

The situation with the second frigate, Kaina Thorn, was the exact opposite. No one was waiting for them on the other side. The relay stood empty—not a single ship. After landing on the station and reaching the activation chamber, the assault team discovered that the system was connected to only two other relays: the one in the Aroon system, and the one Darius Vell had entered and never returned from.

Only three days later, when Kaina Thorn approached the sole planet within the habitable zone, did it become clear why the system had seemed empty. Five rachni vessels hung in orbit above a beautiful blue-green world—ordinary colony ships, the same kind we had already destroyed by the dozen here and near Aroon. They hovered over the planet like a sentry post and opened fire the instant they spotted the frigate. Kaina Thorn destroyed them without much difficulty. But the orbital images taken before the battle turned my blood cold.

More than three hundred rachni colony ships had already descended to the planet's surface. Three hundred. On the visible hemisphere alone, there were around twenty major ant nests. Twenty hives, each of which had probably already expanded hundreds of meters underground. What existed on the far side, beneath the ground, deep inside the crust, was horrifying even to imagine.

I remembered the Aroon system. Here, fifty ships from the first wave had excavated an immense cave network in two months, reaching depths of three hundred meters in some places. And that had been under constant Aroon attack, with strategic nuclear weapons detonating overhead and desperate assaults in which soldiers advanced wave after wave. In AR-R-03, no one had interfered with them. No one bombarded them from orbit. No one detonated nuclear warheads above their hives. No one descended into the tunnels with flamethrowers and grenades. They had simply established themselves and grown. For months. Perhaps for years.

After destroying the orbital defenders, Kaina Thorn returned safely to the Aroon system with a complete data package. I reviewed it and passed it to Lord Norris. The Council would have to make the next decisions. Defending a protectorate from colonists was one thing. Assaulting a planet where the rachni had already built a true fortress was another. That was not war. It was an invasion. And decisions of that kind were not made on the bridge of a cruiser. Not even one like the Enterprise.

***

News of the battle reached me the moment the relay activation signal arrived. At the time, I was attending a meeting of the local equivalent of the United Nations as an observer from the Aiterri Dominion. The entire Aroon species was discussing the results of unification into a single political structure and the pace of construction on factories for precision electronics that would eventually be used to build spacecraft.

Yes, we intended to raise the species' technological level to our own. Not out of altruism, naturally, but cold calculation. Billions of workers capable of producing nearly the entire range of spacecraft parts—from hull components and electronics to engine assemblies—were a resource comparable in value to ether. Within five years, we even planned to establish an orbital shipyard that would build new spacecraft, primarily merchant vessels. And the Aroons would build them. Under our supervision, from our designs, but with their own hands.

Was it foolish to uplift an entire civilization and simply hand them technology? Some members of the Council had asked that question. The answer was simple: it would be foolish not to use economic resources of that scale. But it had to be done intelligently.

I had enough examples from Earth's history before my eyes to avoid repeating other people's mistakes. We could have behaved like the British colonizers in India—extracting resources, selling technology at inflated prices, swallowing the species' entire economy, and leaving the Aroons only the appearance of independence. We could have gone further and acted like the British colonizers in America—squeezing out everything we could while giving nothing in return until the locals began throwing tea into the harbor. In the short term, that would have produced colossal profits. The Aiterri would have become the principal owners of every new factory, shipyard, and industrial complex, while the Aroons received only scraps—perhaps twenty percent, perhaps forty percent of the economy. They would even have been grateful for that, given that the alternative had been total extermination.

In the long term, however, such a policy would create tension that sooner or later erupted into unpleasant revolts. The Aroons were not lizards worshiping gods. They had industry, science, and nuclear weapons. They were stubborn and organized. If they felt they were being turned into a colony, they would eventually resist. Then we would either have to suppress an uprising on a planet with ten billion inhabitants or withdraw and lose every investment we had made.

It was enough that they could never stand equal not merely to the Eternals, but even to the Blessed. The Gift was not a social construct. It was biology. It could neither be granted nor taken away. The Aroons would forever remain Mortals within the Dominion's hierarchy, and that ceiling would press down on them generation after generation. Add economic oppression on top of it, and an explosion would be inevitable.

So I insisted on a different approach. We would raise the Aroon economy while making them full partners rather than a colony. Fifty percent ownership in joint enterprises. Access to technology not for payment, but in exchange for loyalty and obedience to Dominion law. Voting rights at the planetary level. We would demonstrate that the new authority was strong—strong enough not to fear giving its subjects rights. And merciful—merciful enough not to bleed them dry.

Things had unfolded differently with the lizards. When we first landed on Eirena, they were primitive tribes armed with stone spears and belief in spirits. One hundred and fifty years had passed, and many of them no longer even knew how to hunt in the forest, though that had been routine for their grandparents. They studied, worked in factories, served in the army, or labored for one House or another. In other words, they did the same things as ordinary Mortal Aiterri. There were nuances, naturally. Our species differed in their efficiency at certain tasks: lizards, for example, excelled in endurance, while Aiterri were better at fine motor work. But from the outside, Eirena might appear to enjoy perfect equality. Except for the Blessed, of course. They still looked down on everyone—Mortals and lizards alike—as second-class persons.

The only thing forbidden by our laws was interspecies marriage. In fairness, the Aiterri themselves had no desire to form relationships with such ugly aliens. There were too many differences. The ordinary process of a lizard's molt looked alien and revolting to an Aiterri—the shedding scales, the damp skin beneath, the distinctive odor. To say nothing of the lizards' natural scent: musky and heavy, soaking into clothing and lingering for hours. For their part, the lizards considered our sweat quite foul and felt not the slightest sexual attraction toward their allies. Mutual physiological repulsion was the best guarantee that no interspecies conflicts would arise over relationships. Nature itself had ensured that we would not mix.

Now, to ease the new species into the Dominion, numerous scientists and instructors from Aetris had already arrived in the Aroon system. A university had been established to train specialists for industry. To their credit, the Aroons devoured knowledge greedily. They understood that knowledge was the one thing we could not simply hand to them, that they would have to earn it through work. And they were willing to work.

I was advising the governments of the local states on Dominion law when the signal arrived. Within two minutes, I was watching the space battle in real time. Kirk was tearing apart the colonizers, Spock was reporting target counts, and the relay display flashed with markers from the escaping ships. I watched in silence. The outcome disturbed me.

No, I had not expected the bugs to forget about us. Nor had I hoped they would send only small flotillas that we could grind down without difficulty. But I had hoped for exactly that arrangement—that the enemy would underestimate us, that it would throw colonizers rather than warships into battle, and that we would have time to strengthen ourselves. Bluntly speaking, if the rachni took us seriously, we would die. Not now. Not in this system. But when their military fleet—the same kind we had seen in Darius Vell's recordings—came through the relay, our three cruisers and fifty frigates might not hold. Beyond that relay lay Eos. Beyond Eos, Aetris. There was nowhere to retreat.

So the moment Kaina Thorn returned with better news—if one could call a planet where three hundred rachni ships had built twenty hives "better news"—I gave the order.

Exterminatus of system AR-R-02.

The equipment needed to destroy a relay had actually been created a century earlier, when we prepared a weapon of last resort in case of conflict with an alien civilization. The Council had considered it wise to possess a means of severing an enemy's road at any cost. The project was mothballed, the suicide ship placed in permanent storage in the asteroid belt of the Eos system, and the plans classified. Fortunately, we had only now been forced to use it. Better now than when the enemy already stood at the gates of Aetris.

Destroying a relay was a profoundly nontrivial task. The stations were protected by a quantum field that preserved their integrity even if the system's star became a supernova. We had no idea how the field worked, but its results were impressive. The relays had survived billions of years, hundreds of thousands of harvest cycles, stellar explosions and supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and catastrophes that erased entire star systems from the cosmos. No weapon we possessed could so much as scratch their hulls while the field remained active. Their only vulnerability came during a ship's transit through the network. At that moment, while the gigantic mass core somehow accumulated a catastrophic amount of energy to pierce spacetime, the field opened for a fraction of a second. If the processes inside the core were distorted significantly during that instant, it might be destabilized. In theory, it should work. In practice, no one had ever tested it.

That was why a special five-hundred-meter suicide ship had been built. After entering the target system, it was to begin an immediate return jump through the relay. At the exact moment the mass relay's ether field seized the vessel for transit, the ship would detonate an immensely powerful directed thermonuclear charge. The bomb occupied nearly the entire interior. According to our calculations, its yield was equivalent to three thousand Soviet Tsar Bombas. And our scientists still feared it might not be enough.

The ship entered system AR-R-02. We waited. Then one of the possible destinations on our relay simply disappeared. The marker for AR-R-02 went dark. The connection had been severed forever.