Ethereal Effect. Chapter 20. (Patreon)

Interlude: Guardsman Sarkhs of the Middle House Venilis.

Sometimes I find myself wondering why the young master needs bodyguards at all. He is a Blessed—not the strongest, perhaps, but his Gift is more than enough to handle a dozen ordinary Mortals or even a squad of Aroons by himself. I have seen him train. His barrier withstands hits from a mass rifle, his lightning burns through targets in seconds, and when enhanced he moves so quickly the eye cannot follow. Yet despite all that, he keeps me and four other lizards at his side, following him everywhere from the day he came of age and took charge of one of the House's divisions. Tradition, paranoia, or simply a habit of the wealthy—I do not know. But the pay is good, the work is not especially dangerous, and most importantly, my great-grandfather served this House, my grandfather served it, and now I do as well. For us, this is more than a job. It is an honor.

My great-grandfather was the first of our family to join the combat wing of House Venilis, back when many Great and Middle Houses were leaving sacred Aetris for Eirena in search of new opportunities. That was a hundred and fifty years ago, when the colony was only beginning and the chosen species needed a great deal of labor to establish its first industries. There were still too few vat-grown Mortals—full-scale ectogenesis had not yet begun—and the Houses could not rely on Aiterri alone. So they began openly recruiting entire tribes for work. My great-grandfather was among the first to agree.

Not every lizard enjoyed working in the fields, on construction sites, or in other trades completely unfamiliar to them. Many complained, some returned to the jungle, and a few even tried to rebel, though those were quickly subdued. But the Houses offered something no tribe had ever been able to provide: protection, stability, and living conditions hunter-gatherers could never have imagined. A roof that did not leak during the rainy season. Food that did not have to be obtained at the risk of one's life. Medicine capable of curing illnesses that left shamans helpless. Most importantly, a future for their children.

The Aiterri divided every adult lizard—male and female—into groups and began teaching each group a separate trade. Some performed unskilled labor, clearing land for fields, carrying loads, and digging foundations. Others, those who showed intelligence and diligence, were trusted with important machinery: tractors, drilling rigs, and assembly lines.

Today, lizards occupy entire sectors of Eirena's economy. Construction, mining, law enforcement, mechanical engineering, and many other industries are staffed primarily by lizards, leaving very different professions to the Aiterri. It developed that way historically, and no one considers it unjust. Every species has its strengths. Medicine, for instance, is almost entirely beyond us. Our fine motor control is poor, our fingers are not made for delicate manipulation, and no self-respecting Aiterri would trust their health to a creature unable to hold a scalpel without trembling. Complex electronics, jewelry, precision mechanics—all of that belongs to the Aiterri. We do the work that demands strength, endurance, and a willingness to operate under harsh conditions.

But if there was one thing lizards proved truly good at, it was warfare. Of course, we cannot be compared to the Blessed. That is an entirely different level. Yet any lizard surpasses a Mortal warrior in every physical respect. Strength, speed, agility, resilience—a trained adult lizard can pose a problem even for a weak gifted one in close combat. Against Mortals, there is hardly any contest at all.

It reached the point where the personal guards of the Houses—whose numbers were strictly limited under the postwar reforms—came to be recruited almost entirely from lizards. Why waste a precious slot on a Mortal Aiterri when a lizard is stronger and more durable?

On the battlefield, once equipped with gear designed specifically for lizards on Eirena, we become almost unstoppable. Our shields are adapted to our physiology, our armor does not restrict our movement, and our weapons are built around our reaction speed. Only Aiterri combat suits—which not every House can afford—can withstand our assault. And the Blessed, of course. But we are forbidden from acting against them. The Children of the Goddess may fight only other Children of the Goddess.

My great-grandfather began as a machine operator in one of House Venilis's engineering plants, then rose to shift supervisor. My grandfather later entered the service of our small city's government, joining the planetary defense forces. He arrested offenders, patrolled the streets, and broke up fights. Nothing heroic, but honorable work. My father then returned to House Venilis, this time to its combat wing, and eventually became a squad commander. And now I, Sarkhs, have become the personal guard of Redmon Venilis, the third son of the head of House Venilis.

He turned out to be a decent person. Yes, he considers all his servants beneath him, but that is natural. Such is the hierarchy established by nature itself. Yet it has never affected the way he treats us. In all the time I have served this House, I have not received a single humiliating look or a single order delivered as though I were nothing. Redmon Venilis speaks to his guards much as he would to junior partners of the House—perhaps a little more simply, but without the arrogance I have seen in other Blessed when they address Mortals.

After that training incident, we began to be valued in earnest. The master arranged a mock battle: himself enhanced and protected by a barrier against our squad of five fully equipped lizards. We achieved a simulated kill in four minutes. We spread out, flanked him, and caught him in a crossfire. When the exercise ended, he rose from one knee, brushed the dust from his clothes, and grinned. "A pity no one sells combat suits for lizards. With efficiency like that, you would be worth an entire platoon." I remember thinking that we already looked like armored tanks without suits. Our full kit weighed close to a hundred kilograms—an impossible burden for a Mortal, but merely standard equipment for us.

And at this very moment, I and four of my battle brothers are escorting Master Redmon and his wife, Alia Venilis, to a new planet of the Dominion—the Aroon Protectorate. We have just passed customs inspection at the relay: standard procedure, document checks, cargo scans, identity verification. In a few minutes, our ship will enter the transfer zone, and we will find ourselves in a system none of us had even heard of a year ago.

The official purpose of the journey is to explore the possibilities for trade with the new species. House Venilis manufactures a wide range of industrial equipment, and Master Redmon, as the third son of the House head, must assess the market's potential. The unofficial reason—never stated aloud, though everyone understands it—is simple tourism. The master is only thirty years old. He only recently took charge of his first division and has not yet acquired the ponderous seriousness that comes to the Blessed with age. With his Gift, he will live for all three centuries, so there is no reason to hurry. His wife, Alia, sees the journey as an adventure. I watched her studying maps of Aroon and making notes on her datapad, clearly compiling a list of places she wanted to visit.

We were traveling aboard the master's personal spacecraft, a forty-meter Arkeon-X5 space yacht. And honestly, it would have been better if he had traveled the way many other Blessed now did, aboard the recently established regular passenger services that crossed the Dominion's relay network. It would have saved five days. Besides, I do not trust this wreck.

I know little about spacecraft engineering, but even I can tell that corners were cut everywhere. Weak engines accelerate this little vessel more slowly than the clumsiest container carrier. Weak shields are designed only to stop stray space dust and would collapse instantly under any serious hit. And the bright, screaming-red paint turns the ship into a perfect target.

At least there is no such thing as space piracy in the future. The Dominion jealously guards the space within its systems, especially near the relays. And really, how incompetent would a government have to be to allow something like that?

First, it is perfectly logical that space travel will never become available to every member of a civilization. And even if it does, a ticket will be extraordinarily expensive, forcing most people to save for years. Which means that the passengers aboard such vessels are hardly ordinary citizens whose loss can be ignored.

Second, every spacecraft costs an insane amount of money. Even one as cheap as ours is beyond the reach of most Blessed. The loss of even a single ship—or worse, its capture by some criminal element—immediately becomes a matter for the state. No government simply lets something like that go.

Third, attacks of this sort would only be possible near inhabited systems, and those are fully controlled by the government. It would immediately dispatch at least a hundred-and-fifty-meter combat corvette to arrest the impossible idiots foolish enough to try.

"Sarkhs, I completely forgot about you, and you failed to remind me. But I should warn you."

Master Redmon emerged from the passenger compartment and approached me while the two hired Aiterri pilots kept the yacht on course.

"I have one meeting scheduled for the first day," the master continued, "and the rest of the month is entirely free. I intend to spend that time on the sunny beaches of the local ocean—something we are denied on Eirena because of the megafauna. Do you understand what I am saying?"

I did. Eirena's oceans were full of creatures that made a Sand Claw look like a harmless lizard. Beach holidays there were impossible in principle. According to the travel guides, Aroon was much safer in that regard.

"Yes, Master. We will wear civilian clothes," I replied. "No armor. Only light shields and concealed weapons. We will not attract attention."

"No, you misunderstand me. We are going to the beach. Even your civilian uniforms look like combat gear, and they cover far too much."

"But we are warriors, Master. Our clothing should display our status. It should show that serving you is an honor, and that we are the guard of House Venilis, not merely random traveling companions."

"It is decided. The moment we land at the port of Neyrina"—that was the name of one of the Aroons' largest cities, and our destination—"we will find you new clothes. Something light, in keeping with local fashion. You have worn those uniforms long enough."

No one heard us.

Aellarin

Fear. That was the word that best described my state after the destruction of the relay. Not panic—I had lived far too long to succumb to panic. Not terror—terror paralyzes, and I could not afford to freeze. Fear. Cold, sobering fear that forced me to calculate one possibility after another and recognize that none of them guaranteed our survival.

The Aiterri were not ready for a war like this. We were not ready for anything. The Reapers? Even if I possessed a million battle-hardened worlds and technology surpassing everything we had now, I still would not be certain of victory against them. The Reapers had destroyed civilizations beside which we were not children, but embryos. The rachni? In Mass Effect history, the war against them lasted three hundred years. Three centuries of uninterrupted conflict involving all of Citadel space—the territories of species controlling, in total, perhaps five hundred planets. Five hundred worlds contributed fleets, armies, and resources, yet the war still lasted for centuries. And what did we have? Ten colonies and a single protectorate. We simply did not possess the necessary scale.

We were not even ready for an ordinary first contact. We met the Aroons and immediately became entangled in a war because we could not simply pass them by. We met the rachni and barely held the system, even though we fought only colonists rather than a military fleet. What if the relay had held not bugs, but a turian patrol with disciplined crews and perfected tactics? Or an asari exploration flotilla backed by a thousand years of technology? Our frigates were good, but they were the product of a frantic race over the past hundred and fifty years, not a mature military doctrine. We still lacked proper faster-than-light travel for large ships, we depended on the relays, our shields were inferior to the enemy's, and our only trump card—the Gift—had limits of its own. We did not even know how our technology compared to the rest of the galaxy, because we had encountered only three species: primitive lizards, small folk only just entering the space age, and semi-sentient bugs. That was catastrophically little information on which to base any claim that we were ready for the wider game.

That was why, immediately after the relay's destruction, I ordered a complete revision of colonial policy. The old model had exhausted itself. Clinging to it would condemn the Dominion to a slow death.

How had things worked before? We prepared for every colonization effort with true Aiterri thoroughness. First, we surveyed every star within a chosen radius of Aetris—months of observation, years of flight, dozens of probes. Then the data from those systems was collected, analyzed, and compared, and we selected the planets that harbored life. The percentage of living worlds near our space had turned out to be absurdly high by cosmic standards, almost as though someone had deliberately placed them there. Then, specifically for the colonization of a single planet, we built ten or twenty new transports that spent several years moving everything required from Aetris to the new colony: equipment, specialists, ectogenesis facilities, life-support systems, weapons, food. Every colony demanded a titanic effort.

At that pace, we gained one developed colony every ten years. In cosmic terms, that was astonishingly fast. If one needed to prepare for a succession of galactic wars, it was painfully slow.

We had previously treated the presence of a relay in a system as almost irrelevant. If we found one, fine. If we did not, even better. My long-term plan had been to abandon the technology entirely. Not immediately and not within the next century, but eventually—to move wholly to our own FTL ships and forget the network like a bad dream. I had no intention of leaving an open door into the very heart of the Dominion. Anyone could walk through it at any time, and the only thing we could do was keep a permanent fleet stationed at every such doorway.

That was why we had expanded as a sphere—slowly, methodically, taking one system after another. We were building a compact, dense state in which every colony lay within reach of our own fleet rather than depending on foreign technology we did not fully understand.

Yes, the largest ship currently capable of independent interstellar travel was only three hundred meters long. But scientists and engineers were already attacking that problem from every angle. New ether cores, new reactors, new principles of mass compensation—all of it was meant to allow us to build larger FTL vessels.

And once five-hundred-meter cruisers and six-hundred-meter container carriers could move between systems without relays, we would no longer need the network. No one but us would be able to hold power over our space.

But now, with our species facing an enemy that outnumbered us many times over, we would have to expand through the network—seizing ready-made worlds connected by relays and making them ours.

So we temporarily suspended the program surveying the systems along the borders of our space. Twenty military frigates had been assigned to it at once, nearly a fifth of our entire FTL fleet. Twenty ships, each with a full crew, had spent years disappearing into the void, mapping star after star around the First Sphere. Now they were recalled, and we began systematically activating every relay available to us—those paired with systems we already controlled and not leading into enemy territory.

During this exploration, we discovered an interesting pattern we had never noticed before. The relay network was divided into clusters. All systems closest to the capital—Aetris, Eos, Arakesh, Nibus, and several others—lay within a single local grouping, where each relay was linked to several neighboring ones and no jump exceeded twenty light-years. It was convenient, safe, and allowed a dense economy to form. We called such a grouping a local cluster, and until now most of our activity had remained within it.

The relays we came to call cluster relays were something else entirely. One of them hung in the Eos system, and it was through that relay that we first reached Aroon. Outwardly, they were no different from ordinary relays. But each was linked to another cluster relay hundreds or even thousands of light-years away. These were not local roads. They were highways. A jump through a cluster relay carried a ship into an entirely different cluster, with its own network of local relays and its own planets.

Within our cluster's relay network, we discovered another twenty potentially habitable worlds. More than potentially habitable, in fact. These worlds appeared almost purpose-built for colonization. We did not delay. Colonization began immediately, without ten years of preparation and without extended preliminary surveys. If a world could support life, we settled it, and within months the first transports were carrying equipment, specialists, and ectogenesis facilities there. Then the next world followed the same pattern, and another, and another, until all twenty planets had received colonial missions. What would once have taken a century, we achieved in less than ten years.

We also discovered several more cluster relays leading into entirely different regions of the galaxy. On the far side, we left only a handful of ships—observation posts capable of warning us of danger and retreating if that danger proved too great. Fortunately, none had appeared yet. But every relay activation was supported in advance by a major force grouping, and each included a relay-killer ship. Had a dangerous xenos species appeared on the other side, the entire system would simply have been erased along with everything in it.

And while no enemies were found in the systems we activated, we prepared for war. The rachni technology captured during the first battles proved superior to ours. Not by an order of magnitude—the gap was significant, but not fatal—yet even that was enough to strengthen the fleet considerably. Within only five years, we modernized every combat ship, replacing its weapons with new systems based on principles copied from the enemy. According to our analysts, one of our cruisers should now be able to match a rachni warship one on one. The pity was that we had built only a miserable ten cruisers in those five years, rather than the hundred that might have changed the course of the war.

The most interesting discovery made while dismantling the semi-biological ships was that element zero was used absolutely everywhere. Weapons, shields, the ship's core, even the sublight engines—all of it relied exclusively on eezo. No fusion reactors, no ion drives, no compromises. The rachni had not invented alternatives. They had simply built everything around element zero, and did so with an efficiency we could not yet match.

Most interestingly, the ships did not fly because of biological technology, as we had first assumed. Yes, almost every internal structure was made of rigid chitin, as strong as steel, and the hull had literally been grown rather than assembled. But every system that allowed the ship to fly was purely technological: weapons, shields, engines, navigation. Nothing living. Nothing organic. Those components were manufactured in factories first and only then integrated into the grown hull.

All of this was confirmed by the rachni queen we had captured. It was a miracle that she proved trusting enough to let us draw her into conversation. Though I suspected the credit belonged less to the queen's naïveté than to Emberlis Veil's skill. The Inquisitor conducted the interrogation with the same cold efficiency she brought to everything else. She knew how to persuade. The fact that her methods occasionally bordered on outright manipulation mattered little. The results spoke for themselves.

The queen told us that "the Song of the Great Mother already resounds over thousands of worlds," and that she herself had been sent to direct one of the new hives on a colonized planet. Her task had been simple and deadly: first dig a hive deep underground, then lay new offspring, pass knowledge to them through song—the finest minds of the Dominion were still struggling in sealed laboratories to understand the principles behind that transmission—and then begin constructing a new fleet that would spread their influence farther, whatever that influence truly was. She spoke of it casually, as though discussing routine agricultural work rather than the enslavement of entire worlds.

Thousands of worlds. The number kept circling in my thoughts, and I disliked it intensely. If the queen was not exaggerating—and why would she, when she believed us allies—then the rachni controlled territory comparable in scale to Citadel space. Somewhere among those thousands of worlds lay their capital, the place where, in canon, the matriarch queens had hidden.

That raised the question that troubled me most. I hoped no powerful Reaper had appeared, one capable of seizing control of the rachni queens' minds. As far as I remembered, in canon their minds were strong enough to resist outside influence. Even the Reapers had never fully controlled them, which was why the rachni survived several cycles. But in canon, the queens did not personally participate in the war. They remained somewhere deep within their homeworld.

Beyond those facts, what we learned from the queen was that rachni civilization was a civilization of queens. They were at once scientists, engineers, and rulers. Every other organism under their control was merely a set of hands. The number each queen could command varied according to her age and talent. The older the queen and the stronger her Gift, the more soldiers she could control at once. There was no collective consciousness in the sense familiar to us, only a rigid hierarchy in which each queen ruled her own swarm, and something else stood above them all.

Above all of it rose the Great Mother. We knew catastrophically little about her—only that her song was beautiful and must spread throughout the galaxy. The queen spoke of her with the same reverence Aethra's priests showed the Mother Goddess. But there was no fear in the queen's voice. Only delight. Pure, unclouded, almost religious ecstasy from a creature that had found the highest purpose of its existence.

When cautiously asked whether Barbie—the name we had given the captive queen—could hear the song now, she answered regretfully that she could not. Only in their home system, Maskim Zul, would she hear it again. When our researchers politely asked her to demonstrate the song, the living puppets she controlled looked at them as though they were idiots and informed them that she had been singing it continuously throughout her stay with us. Continuously. Every second. We were simply incapable of hearing it.

After that, we had to increase the laboratories' shielding considerably. We did not know how the song affected minds. Our scientists ruled out direct influence through ether; they found no trace of it in the queen's emissions. But who could guarantee there was no other mechanism? Something slow, imperceptible, cumulative? What if the station personnel were already being influenced without realizing it? What if, after a month, two months, or a year, those who worked with the queen began hearing her voice inside their heads? Or worse, began obeying her?

So the shielding was strengthened to the maximum, and all personnel who came into contact with the queen were placed on rotating assignments with mandatory psychological testing after every shift. No symptoms had been found so far. But I preferred excessive caution. Better to spend extra resources on protection than wake one day and discover the station no longer answered to the Dominion.

After more than a year of research, the queen began expressing dissatisfaction more and more often. We had promised to carry the song into the galaxy, yet kept her locked away like an ordinary prisoner. She did not understand why her allies treated her that way, and her confusion grew each month. Barbie began refusing contact, answered questions less often, and once remained completely silent for three days, demonstratively ignoring every attempt to speak with her. It was an alarming sign. We needed the queen conscious and relatively cooperative, or the entire project would lose its purpose.

I discussed the matter with Lady Inquisitor Emberlis Veil. Over the intervening years, she had expanded her influence considerably and taken control of preparations for the coming war with the rachni. The other Lord Inquisitors were hardly idle. One closely monitored conditions on the capital world. Another oversaw the gradual integration of the Aroons and the suppression of possible heresy on their planet. A third supervised the Great Houses scattered across the worlds of the relay network. As for the many ordinary inquisitors, there was no need even to list them. In a growing Dominion, there was always work for them, and more of it every year.

"Emberlis, I have known you for more than two hundred years," I said over my own untraceable FTL communications network. "But I will ask once more. Are you certain? Your plan sounds insane."

"I can accomplish it, my lord," she replied with complete confidence. "It will not only allow us to win the coming war. It will grant us a power no other species of Citadel space will be able to oppose."

She had learned of the Citadel and the other species of this cycle during the same meeting where I first told a small circle about the Reapers. And, I had to admit, she had put that knowledge to good use. Her plan relied precisely on understanding that we were not alone in the galaxy and could not win alone.

"I can convince the Council," I answered after a brief pause. "Your plan may work, and if it succeeds, we will gain something beyond anything we dared dream of. But you will answer for it with your head, Emberlis. We cannot allow this to turn against us."

What, then, had Inquisitor Veil proposed?

To understand it, one had to remember that besides the destroyed relay in system AR-R-02, the Aroon cluster also contained system AR-R-03—the one with the rachni-held planet. Had we not seized control of the orbit immediately after our arrival, new enemy warships would have begun launching from that world within a year.

Taking control of the planet was a titanic task. It would be easier to crash several hundred suicide ships into it than attempt to storm every established hive. We had already gone through that on Aroon, and even there, with local support and complete orbital superiority, the cleansing took a month and a half. Here there were twenty entrenched hives and no support on the ground.

And we had built only three such suicide ships. One had already been used; the second and third remained in reserve. Even if we constructed another dozen, that was not a solution. Destroying entire star systems one after another would mean erasing worlds faster than we could colonize new ones.

The bugs had burrowed kilometers into the planet. Judging from Barbie's accounts, which we had obtained through careful but persistent questioning about the details of rachni expansion, the scale of their underground construction was staggering. A single hive belonging to several queens could reach depths of three kilometers and spread across tens of thousands of square kilometers. Beneath the surface, in labyrinths of tunnels and chambers, they established a complete technological chain, from processing ore and extracting element zero from the rock to manufacturing spacecraft engines. A full production cycle independent of all outside supply. A factory planet that required no orbital shipyards, cargo vessels, or trading partners.

And one such hive could produce up to a hundred spacecraft comparable to our cruisers every year. A hundred cruisers. From one hive. For comparison, the entire Dominion had built only ten in five years. Much depended on the availability of substantial element-zero reserves on the planet, since all their production relied on it. Yet even on a world like Aroon, with its pitiful eezo deposits, the queen estimated production at ten warships a year.

They did not build spacecraft alone. Over time, the rachni completely reshaped a planet's biosphere, releasing a poisonous gas required to grow food from their home system. It was almost amusing that the first species to master terraforming had been giant bugs. We had always imagined it as the domain of highly advanced civilizations, yet apparently all that was required was the right genetics and a complete absence of moral restraint. The hive foundries also produced advanced weapons for rachni troops, personal shields, and even heavy surface-to-orbit defense systems.

Those surface-to-orbit batteries were what made our cruiser captains nearly soil themselves when they approached to bombard the hives. When twenty percent of your shields vanish in a minute and you cannot even see where the fire is coming from, there is only one choice: withdraw to high orbit before it is too late. The batteries were eventually suppressed, and the planet's surface was turned into a lunar wasteland by kinetic strikes and thermonuclear explosions. But deep within the crust, kilometers underground, our enemy's factories continued to operate. No bombardment could reach that far.

And it was precisely this trait of the rachni that the Inquisitor intended to exploit. What if we forced the xenos to build a fleet for the holy Dominion? What if we created our own hive here, under our control? Somewhere on the edge of the Dominion, on a planet we had not yet colonized. Set Barbie down there, give her time, resources, and guards—and let her establish production.

The decision was approved quickly at the highest level, and an entire planet within our cluster was assigned to the project. The relay in that system had only recently been activated and proved terminal, connected to just one other system. Colonization had not yet begun. Now the entire system became a sealed facility officially described as extensive shipyards using experimental technology. In reality, that was true, though not in the way anyone imagined.

The planet, named Hivekor, had once been shaped by intense tectonic activity, leaving its crust covered in endless mountains. No plains, no oceans—only cliffs, gorges, and ridges vanishing into the clouds. Thanks to that history, however, it possessed vast deposits of iron, nickel, copper, and many other metals—everything required for production. Only element zero was entirely absent. But nothing prevented us from importing it.

Convincing Barbie proved surprisingly easy. We told her we had lost contact with every rachni system because a new enemy had attacked them, a power calling itself Citadel Space. Those treacherous murderers, defying the will of the Great Mother, had even destroyed the relay leading into our systems. So despite our greatest desire, we could no longer help the queen return home. War left us no choice.

But we could help her fulfill her purpose here. We could protect the remaining rachni from enemies who would not stop until every chosen child of the Great Mother had been destroyed. We could also help them dominate the galaxy, exactly as their patron intended. By a fortunate coincidence, we called that patron Aethra and had worshiped her for more than a thousand years. We were, of course, unable to hear her song directly, but that did not prevent us from remaining her faithful servants—and aiding those she had chosen.

What followed was not construction. It was planning. If the queen began building a hive immediately, we would have no way to control it. The rachni were accustomed to digging chaotic labyrinths in which only they could navigate, and allowing that on our planet under our supervision would have been the height of stupidity. So we made a counterproposal and, naturally, presented it as assistance.

Under the pretext that combining the technologies of two species would allow us to build the finest ships in the galaxy, we designed an entire underground industrial complex. Not a wild anthill, but a factory planned from the ground up. Straight corridors instead of tangled tunnels. Freight elevators to move cargo rapidly between levels. Clear separation into technological zones: ore extraction here, smelting there, assembly halls here, finished-goods storage there. Ventilation shafts, emergency exits, fire-suppression systems, redundant power lines—everything required for the plant to operate efficiently, and for us to control every square meter of it.

Barbie listened to the proposal and agreed. She did not seem to understand that she had just been deprived of her greatest advantage: the ability to build a hive in whatever way suited her. She saw cooperation, not control.

The queen was landed on Hivekor alongside a rotating detachment of ten of the strongest Blessed, who remained with her around the clock, and a large support staff of engineers, biologists, and communications specialists. The guards were not merely a precaution. They were a condition of the entire project's existence. Sitting in a cell was one thing. Receiving an entire planet was another. We did not know how Barbie would behave once free, so ten of the strongest Blessed remained beside her at all times. Their task was to incapacitate the queen if she attempted anything we had not authorized.

She wasted no time. The moment she reached the surface, the queen began devouring every scrap of biomass the planet could provide. The sparse local vegetation, limited by the mountainous terrain, vanished at a frightening pace. She consumed everything, converting organic matter into energy for her first clutch. Within a week, she laid the first thousand rachni worker eggs. A thousand organisms that, upon hatching, would begin excavating underground factories according to our blueprints. Factories that would create an army for her. An army that would destroy the treacherous Citadel.

All for the Great Mother. All for Aethra.